Bunker Hill

extreme in recent years that he had been placed under the care of a family outside Boston. But Otis was only the most visible casualty of the tortured ambivalence that went with being a patriot. After representing the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre alongside Josiah Quincy in the fall of 1770, John Adams suffered a breakdown that required him to retreat temporarily to his ancestral home in Braintree. Two years later, he was distressed to discover that “my constitutional or habitual infirmities have not entirely forsaken me.” At a social gathering in Boston he lost control of himself when the subject turned to politics. In a violent verbal outburst he uttered the unspeakable truths that were on all their minds: “I said there was no more justice left in Britain than there was in hell—that I wished for war. . . . Such flights of passion, such starts of imagination, though they may [impress] a few of the fiery and inconsiderate, yet they lower, they sink a man.”
    They were a high-strung group of what we would call today overachievers—“ambitious beyond reason to excel,” as one of their descendants described them—and just about every leading patriot seemed to have some sort of psychosomatic complaint. The Reverend Samuel Cooper, whose dual role as a patriot and minister of the most affluent congregation in Boston led to the accusation that “silver-tongued Sam” possessed a “ductility quite Machiavellian,” suffered from what was said to be an addiction to snuff. John Hancock’s gout had a way of incapacitating him at times of greatest stress; and the lawyer Joseph Hawley, to whom John Adams deferred when it came to matters of political policy, was so racked by depression that he would one day take his own life. Even Josiah Quincy, who burned with a seemingly quenchless indignation, acknowledged, on occasion, that the loyalists might have a point.
    There was, however, one man who did not let the ambiguities upset him; who was so in sync with the great ideological engine driving the patriot movement that he transcended all the potential paradoxes and denials; and at 11:00 a.m. on May 13, the imperturbable Samuel Adams was chosen as moderator of the Boston town meeting.
    —
    He was fifty-one, but with his gray hair and trembling hands, he seemed much older. He had a resonant singing voice, a distrust of horses, and a giant Newfoundland dog named Queue that hated British soldiers. He had failed at every business venture he had ever attempted, but he had one extraordinary talent: he understood, in a deeply historical sense, the future.
    America had been founded by immigrants who, little thanks to their mother country, had made a life for themselves in a distant land. And now the mother country wanted to assert her right to control the descendants of those immigrants. But there was a blatant absurdity attached to this claim. England was a tiny island on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. America was a vast continent, with a population that doubled every twenty years and that would soon include more English people than lived in all of Britain. No matter how strong the ties between America and England, this fundamental fact could not be ignored.
    Samuel Adams lived and inhabited this truth. He invested it with the spiritual fervor of his Puritan ancestors but with an essential difference. Where the Puritans had seen God’s will lurking behind the seeming disorder of daily life, Adams, thanks to the Enlightenment, also saw a human hand. There were no unintended consequences in the eighteenth century. If something bad happened, someone had caused it to happen, and Boston was now the victim of a more-than-decade-old plot on the part of the British ministry to enslave America, to drain this bounteous land of all her resources so that England, an island lost to luxury and corruption, could sustain the fraudulent lifestyle to which it had become accustomed.
    Nothing could sway Samuel Adams from these beliefs. No personal antagonism (and there were plenty) was enough to make him lose sight of the struggle for American liberty. He’d labored for more than a decade writing articles and letters and attending meeting after meeting, but not until the fall of 1772, with the creation of the twenty-one-member Boston Committee of Correspondence, did he find a way to link the fate of Boston to the entire province and, ultimately, to all the colonies.
    Massachusetts (which then included what is