Samuel Adams and The Rights of the Colonists (1772)

Introduction to The Rights of the Colonists

The Rights of the Colonists was written by Samuel Adams at the age of 50, as part of a series of meetings in Massachusetts in 1772. This came after the Governor had dissolved the colony's Colonial Assembly. Three hundred townspeople met and voted to appoint a Committee of Correspondence, and to have this committee draft a statement of the rights of the colonists. The responsibility for preparing the first draft was assigned to Samuel Adams (Munday, 1984).

Samuel Adams: Biography and Political Career

Samuel Adams was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in September 1722. He was a leader in the fight against British colonial rule and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Adams' father, who was a deacon of the church and a successful brewer, played an important role in Boston politics. When Samuel was a young man, the royal government ruled the senior Adams' investments illegal, ruining him financially. This is thought to have been a primary cause of Samuel's deep animosity toward and opposition to colonial authority (Samuel Adams American Patriot & Politician, 2008).

Adams was a very vocal opponent of several laws passed by the British Parliament to raise revenue in the American colonies. By 1773, Adams and his Boston associates had pressured England into rescinding all of these measures except one: the Tea Act. The Tea Act granted the British East India Company a monopoly on the sale of tea to the colonies and included a tax paid to the British Crown. Opposition reached its peak on December 16, 1773, when a group of Bostonians dumped a British cargo of tea into Boston Harbor — an act of resistance now famously known as the Boston Tea Party (Samuel Adams American Patriot & Politician, 2008).

Samuel Adams graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 1743 from Harvard College. After college he entered private business, and during this period became an outspoken participant in Boston town meetings. When his business failed in 1764, Adams entered politics full-time and was elected to the Massachusetts legislature. He led an effort to establish a Committee of Correspondence that published the Declaration of Colonial Rights, a document he had written. This declaration became known as The Rights of the Colonists (Samuel Adams American Patriot & Politician, 2008).

Colonial Tensions and British Tax Policy

This document laid down all the rights that Samuel Adams believed colonists were entitled to. He believed that all people were entitled to the natural rights of life, liberty, and property. He also believed that bound up with these rights was the right to support and defend them in the best way possible (Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists, 1772). The document was written in the midst of one of the most critical periods in American history — the American Revolution. Many of its provisions were drawn upon by the Continental Congress in 1774 in a document called the Declaration of Rights, and ultimately in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (Munday, 1984).

While confrontations over taxes and reforms were very serious, the connections uniting the colonies and Britain were still strong, and peace and unity were still thought possible. In 1769, American diplomat Benjamin Franklin declared that the British ministry should repeal the offending laws and return to the old way of doing things. Later that year, under the pressure of an American economic boycott and a sharp drop in British exports, the British Parliament agreed to repeal most of the Townshend Acts. Yet the ministry did not withdraw British troops from the colonies and showed no intention of returning to the pre-1763 imperial system. Instead, Parliament reasserted its authority to legislate for and to tax the colonies, retaining the tax on tea as a symbol of its supremacy (American Revolution, 2009).