He carried the patriots with him and his resolutions were passed; thus Virginia announced that she would fight for her rights. A few weeks later the English general, Gage, attacked the people in Massachusetts and the colonies sprang to arms.
Henry served three years as governor of Virginia. After the Revolution, he took for some time an active part in public affairs and then withdrew to private life. In 1799, at the personal request of Washington, he became a candidate for office and was elected to the House of Delegates. But he did not live to take his seat, dying June 6, 1799.
Samuel Adams
A Massachusetts Patriot
Samuel Adams is often called “the father of the Revolution.” He was the great-grandson of one of the Puritan settlers who came to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and was born at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1722.
Adams was not a typical thrifty New Englander. His private life was a series of business failures and hardships that remind us of the early career of Patrick Henry. Adams, however, unlike Henry, was college bred, having been educated at Harvard. He tried law as a profession, but did not like it well enough to continue its practice. Then he became, first a clerk and then a merchant, and as both he was a failure. Next he became a brewer, and in this trade, also, he was unsuccessful. The truth is, he kept too busy attending to public business to pay proper attention to his private affairs. Perhaps his attention was first called to public matters by a private grievance. A law passed by Parliament against certain stock-companies made it necessary to close a banking company with which his father was connected and swept away his fortune.
SAMUEL ADAMS
Unsuccessful as Samuel Adams was as a business man, it was known that he was a good citizen, with wise and patriotic views about public matters. He ably voiced colonists’ objections to the arbitrary taxation of the British government. “If taxes are laid upon us,” he said, in a paper in 1764, “in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of Free Subjects to the miserable state of tributary Slaves? We claim British rights not by charter only. We are born to them!”
Adams was a member of the Massachusetts legislature in 1765 and the famous “Massachusetts Resolves” were his work. They expressed loyalty to the king, but refused to aid to execute the Stamp Act. It was not against England as yet but against the unjust laws of the despotic king and ministry that there was hostility.
Hutchinson, who was the royal governor, informed the home government that its course was unwise. “It cannot be good policy,” he said, “to tax the Americans; it will prove prejudicial to the national interests. You will lose more than you will gain. Britain reaps the profit of all their trade and of the increase of their substance.” But his warning was unheeded, and it devolved upon him to execute the unpopular acts. He suffered as the instrument of British oppression. His house was attacked and destroyed, and he and his family were driven away.