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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Stacy Schiff, is no stranger to deep dives into American history. She has written acclaimed books about Benjamin Franklin and the Salem witch trials. For her latest book, Stacy wanted to turn to a man who was essential to the American Revolution, but as much less revered than Benjamin Franklin. That is, unless you're a fan of beer.

In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff makes the case that Adams was in fact the driving force behind much of the unrest in Boston that led to the outbreak of the war with Britain. It was Samuel Adams who spread the word about the so-called Boston Massacre. Unafraid to bend facts to make the English look worse. It was Adams who wrote the circular letter, which proclaimed that the colony should not subject to taxation without representation.

It was Adams, most likely, who helped organized the Boston Tea Party. As his more famous cousin, John Adams put it, without the character of Samuel Adams, the true history of the American Revolution can never be written. Yet, for reasons Stacy examines in her book, the contributions of Adams to the revolution have been largely downplayed or forgotten altogether. Her biography seeks to correct the historical record. Stacy Schiff was our January Get Lit with All Of It author. Let's listen to my conversation from that event with Stacy.

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Alison Stewart: I checked this a few times to make sure this was not apocryphal. This was actually true that you grew up in Adams, Massachusetts.

Stacy Schiff: I did, I did, which made it truly mortifying when I realized I knew nothing about Samuel Adams.

Alison Stewart: Truly, in your town, how was he remembered in the town, if at all?

Stacy Schiff: It's a great question. My brother, who's older and wiser, was convinced our town was named for John, which pretty much answers your question. In the center of Adams, Massachusetts, is a very beautiful statue of a very dignified human being, whom I always assumed was Samuel Adams, but I now realized it was William McKinley.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Stacy Schiff: I think the answer to your question is not so much.

Alison Stewart: What was it? Adams was in one of your other biographies, Ben Franklin. What was the trigger that you made you think, "I want to go back and investigate this man."

Stacy Schiff: There were a couple of things. I had been writing about-- The previous book was about the Salem witch trials. I'd spent five or six years in Salem, Massachusetts, which was a very dark place. When I finally emerged from those years, I felt I needed someone who felt in some way like an inspiration and like a hero. It was also, I might add, 2016, I think we're all feeling like we needed heroes, or at least we're asking questions about American democracy and what patriotism consisted of.

I had gone back to my book on Ben Franklin for different reasons, and realized that I have written Samuel Adams about whom I knew nothing into the book, in a cameo. I just started thinking, "Who was this individual, and what do we know about him?" I thought I was researching someone else in the library. I was then working in and I meant to be going to the stacks on the right, and I kept ending up on the stacks at the other end.

By the end of the afternoon, I'd be sitting on the floor reading about Samuel Adams. At a certain point, my very wise agent, who's here tonight said, "I think you mean to be writing a book about Samuel Adams." If you go back and if you look at what is contemporary said about him, really to a man everyone points to him as the prime mover of the revolution, or of the years leading up to the revolution.

Alison Stewart: He burned his papers, he was constantly being asked when are you going to write the paper that he did write, when are you going to officially write your papers, and he just didn't. What was the purpose of him remaining so low-key? Even after the revolution, even in his old age. I can understand during the go-go years [chuckles] why he wouldn't, but as he became an older man, why never?

Stacy Schiff: Very important to cover your traces when you are fermenting revolution, indeed. There was a no fingerprint school, and there's definitely-- he's a pretty modest man. He's a team player. There really is this, A, the responsibility needs to be diffused so that no one can suffer at the hands of British soldiers, but also there's a real sense of sharing responsibility. In addition to that, there is-- and he's not vain as is John, so not interested in advertising himself.

In addition to that, he gets a little bit shunted off the stage after the revolution, in a way that when you want a settled government, you would like the revolutionaries to disappear. You don't want anyone to upset the apple cart at that point. You want to proceed with an established nation. He's not involved in any of that nation-building that happens after the war. A great deal of it is that, some of it is modesty.

It breaks the biographer's heart when she reads that John Adams gives us this description of Samuel Adams feeding his papers to the fire so that as he explains, their Confederates will not suffer for his negligence. What he doesn't destroy is indeed a block and a half north at the New York Public Library.

Alison Stewart: I was going to say, my goodness, when you decide to write a biography about someone who doesn't have their papers, where do you start?

Stacy Schiff: I have done that before. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Where do you start?

Stacy Schiff: In this case, and almost always I do start with the original papers. You read them half blindly in a way because you don't yet know the cast of characters. The names don't necessarily come to you with any context. You don't really know what the themes of the book are going to be, but at least you know what you have. Then I usually spread out from there and read the secondary materials, the papers of the supporting cast.

Anything else in this case, there was an enormous amount of reading of the Boston Gazette, because Adams writes over these years incessantly and quite eloquently under at least 30 pseudonyms, [chuckles] which is also not very helpful. Really, when you choose biographical subjects, I was not on the winning team here. Burns his papers, writes pseudonymously, so figuring that out, and getting the temperature, and Boston is really a character in the book.

Getting a sense of pre-revolutionary Massachusetts, getting a sense of how these ideas begin to vibrate on the page and seep into the drinking water is something you could only get I think from reading those papers. A lot of time was spent at the Massachusetts Historical Society reading Boston Evening-Post, Boston Gazette for those years.

Alison Stewart: What was the piece of information that you read early on that you didn't realize was going to be as pivotal as it was until you got back to the end? We talked about this on the show. When you go back and re-read your notes, and you realized, "Oh, my gosh. This thing, which I thought perhaps was a footnote, is really very important."

Stacy Schiff: It's a tiny little thing, but I think you'll see why it matters. There's one letter in the New York Public Library collection of papers from an individual whom I know nothing more about is the only letter from him. He writes to Adams when Adams is in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, and says, "I took it upon myself to stop at your house and cart off what remained of your papers there so that those predatory British soldiers couldn't get them because they would kill for it. They'd kill to have your papers."

It was just such a telling compliment on who Adams was, and how he was seen by his fellow townsmen that someone was willing to protect him in this way. It was written with such deep respect and such deep compassion. That is indeed what you see for him over and over again, and I think has been largely lost to us.

Alison Stewart: Part of your detective work, which I found fascinating was looking at portraits, and figuring out what someone's life was like by what they were wearing. By the way that Adams' lapels looked, or by the way Hancock's coats were embroidered. Share us a little bit about what you can glean from those portraits. What you were able to glean that was useful in building your story?

Stacy Schiff: One of the stunning things about Samuel Adams is that he has no profession. Therefore, not surprisingly, is penniless for most of his life, and lives largely in the charity of friends, which also speaks to something of the respect in which he's held. I think it's a consequence of that, or perhaps as a corollary to that, he's extremely shabbily dressed. This becomes apparent when he's about to be sent to Philadelphia to represent the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

It's clearly there is some part of Boston that is uncomfortable with sending off this shabbily dressed character to represent them, and so to Adams' house anonymously are sent, a tailor and a wig maker and a boot maker, each of them take his measure, none of whom will reveal who has sent them. A week later arrives on Adams' doorstep a trunk with a brand new very spiffy wardrobe with which he travels to the Continental Congress.

I think what Alison's referring to when you mentioned lapels, in the one portrait, one beautiful oil portrait we do have of him by Singleton Copley, Adams is he's been most rumpled-looking human being. He looks like he slept in his clothes, and his lapel seemed to be flying off his suit really. I think other than Paul Revere, he is the least well dressed of all of Copley's subjects really, but it spoke to something of the purity of his principles. He's a man living on ideas, and it shows largely in the wardrobe.

Alison Stewart: The two opening lines of the biography, "Samuel Adams delivered what may count as the most remarkable second act in American life. It was all the more confounding after the first. He was a perfect failure until middle age."

Stacy Schiff: Why do I find that so appealing?

Alison Stewart: Why do you find that so appealing?

Stacy Schiff: Is there a couch somewhere near here?

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Stacy Schiff: I don't know. It always stayed with me as one of the more endearing characteristics, and that's actually a line in the book that my editor and I fought about because he didn't think that was where it should begin. I thought that was possibly the best-- I don't know, just seem-- For me, it makes me feel so much more affectionately towards someone when I realize that they take a while to get traction in their life.

Alison Stewart: Did he have any sense of purpose, any purpose of being as a young man, something that he did want to do, something that truly motivated him?

Stacy Schiff: We have a lot of his early newspaper writings and they are utterly true to form to what he'll write later. That's, I think, one of the interesting things about those years, even his Harvard master's thesis could seem to predict if you wanted to draw a straight line his future activities as a revolutionary. The question he poses, he said Harvard in the years when people are still writing mostly about religious subjects for their master's thesis so that the master's thesis which are an x-ray of the colonial mind at this point are either about subjects which we would consider vaguely preposterous. Like is the sun habitable or do angels exist or do vegetables breathe?

Or they're subjects like is the pope the antichrist? They're really deeply religious subjects. His subject was, do people owe allegiance to a king if the sovereign tramples the rights of his subjects? You could say that 20 years later, 25 years later, that was indeed the question of the hour.

Alison Stewart: How would you describe Samuel Adams' relationship with money?

Stacy Schiff: Careless. He's interesting in that he's from the start allergic to what he calls avarice and ambition. There's a real innate sense and it's a very puritan sense of he's utterly opposed to the entrenched elite to the privileged Boston merchants. There's a real sense that you could not have principles if you also had a fortune. It's interesting because of course, the men of fortune in Boston in those years believe that you can't possibly have principles and be poor and always assume-- They always underestimate Adams because they feel he's just this disappointed desperado of no particular profession. Of course, he's eager to upend the government. He just doesn't really have a place for himself when in fact, Adams is operating, to my mind anyway, out of pure principle.

Alison Stewart: His first wife dies in childbirth. He's left a widowed father. He remarries. This is a little bit of a tangent but it made me think when there were so many references to children and women dying in childbirth about how difficult life was at this time. I'm curious if you could share with us what were some of the simple challenges of surviving in Boston and in Massachusetts at this time.

Stacy Schiff: It's a great question because I think we forget that these were years when Boston is suffering a tremendous economic decline which has something to do with what's about to happen. There's very little hard currency, first of all. It's very difficult to move. There's very little social mobility, there's very little currency, and there has been terrible smallpox. There seems to be regularly a bad smallpox epidemic but there has been a recent smallpox epidemic as well as a devastating fire in fact, which has taken out a whole neighborhood of Boston, a neighborhood where Adams, in fact, in that year was meant to be collecting taxes which he was particularly unskilled which made him very popular.

It also was a very difficult neighborhood obviously in which to extract money from people who had no homes and whose lives had been utterly obliterated by fire. Yes, the infant mortality statistics are terrifying.

Alison Stewart: What has it been like for you to go walk through Boston?

Stacy Schiff: Well, it's a little bit of a seance, I think, because I'm dreaming here's where he is walking. With a biographical subject, you have that sense of wanting to touch what they touched and breathed what they breathed. It's sometimes easier and sometimes more difficult. In Adams' case, it feels very vivid. Although you do stand in the Old South Meeting House and you think if you read the early accounts of the meetings in the Old South Meeting House before the destruction of the Tea or for any other of the meetings in those years, the newspaper accounts always say 5,000 or 7,000 people assembled. You look around and you think, it's a room smaller than this one. How is that humanly possible?

There may have been a little misrepresentation in the press.

Alison Stewart: One of Adam's strengths seems to be friendship. He seemed to be a good friend. When did they serve him and when was this a problem for him?

Stacy Schiff: I think he's always a good friend. Loyal to a fault in some ways. I think the perfect example of both of those things is the, on again, off again, relationship with John Hancock. No contempt, as much as his contemporaries, as much as Adams' contemporaries always spoke highly of him. Him as a very dignified, very gracious, very affable decorous man, not at all the firebrand I think we imagine. As much as those people said those things, the same people said really rather biting things about John Hancock. It's hard to find anyone who went on the record saying John Hancock was a fine human being.

Hancock is taken with frivolity and with all things ostentatious as Adams is given to Republican simplicity. Adams recruits Hancock, who's younger than him, brings him into the opposition cause and at several points will remind Hancock that the price of politics is that people sometimes do attack you and say nasty things about you, and he smooths the feathers. Hancock is always trying to get out from under Adams. At various junctures swears he never wants to speak to Samuel Adams again as long as he lives. Ultimately they will end up in Congress at odds with each other.

Then Hancock after the revolution will go back to Boston and malign Adams over and over, which also answers your question about why we've had such a hard time remembering him today. At various junctures, people will say to Samuel Adams, "Wouldn't you like to work out the kinks with John Hancock or wouldn't you like to try to make peace?" He basically says, "I'd be happy to but I'm not the one who has the problem here." Anyway, we've all been in that situation and that's basically where things stall. They ultimately serve as governor and lieutenant governor together and the last letter of Hancock to Adams is a very gracious letter, but the damage had already been done at that point.

Alison Stewart: I think about his signature entirely differently now, after right now it's disappointing, isn't it? Beautiful handwriting. The man [crosstalk] , do you have that? A beautiful wardrobe as well

Stacy Schiff: A beautiful home.

Alison Stewart: You've been listening to my conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Stacy Schiff from our January Get Lit with All of It Event. We'll have more of her biography of Samuel Adams as well as some performances from our musical guest Roseanne Cash. Stay with us. You are listening to All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library. 1,436 of you were able to check out a copy of our January Get Lit selection, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff, and as usual our readers and Get Lit audience members had some great questions for Stacy. We'll get to those in just a bit.

First, here's more of my conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff from our Get Lit with All of It January book club event, we read The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.

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Alison Stewart: What ignited Samuel's interest in making the cause of liberty his own?

Stacy Schiff: That's the million dollar question, isn't it? Why is someone born an idealist? Where in the family ethos did those ideas come from? Some of it falls off from his faith. He's a man of tremendous piety. You can see obviously a real transfer here. As for many people from the principles from Puran principles to Republican commitments. His father was no shrinking violet either. His father had stood up to authority at various times. Early on, Adams' family suffers a tremendous financial reversal because of a very draconian act of parliament, a very unexpected and draconian act of parliament.

It's possible that that obviously would've changed his feelings about British overreach and about parliament's intervention in the colonies. There's very little on paper that actually indicates that you know. Clearly, this is who he was. He swallowed John Locke whole and then just kept basically playing with Lockean themes for the rest of his life.

Alison Stewart: Did he change personally? Could you get a sense of whether he changed personally? We talked about it. It happened in midlife that he had this awakening. What did that do to him as a man?

Stacy Schiff: I feel as if he doesn't change easily and it's what makes him so effective during the years where it was essential that he remained resolute. At various junctures. I think for me, one of the revelations of these years is how long it takes for the revolution to get off the ground. We're really talking 15 years of opposition and fits and starts and things go sideways. Through that all, the only person at various junctures who's continuing to insist on these ideas to remind everyone that the Declaratory Act is a slumbering serpent and needs to be eliminated is Samuel Adams.

After the revolution, a French envoy, in fact, will say of him that his ideas, his commitment to perfectionism basically doesn't lend itself well to established government. There remains this idealism which is not going to be able to play out in any way in a federalist institution of some kind. I think that's partly what makes him lose his potency in those years.

Alison Stewart: The center of the pseudonyms, you said 30 pseudonyms.

Stacy Schiff: At least, and I suspect with AI you could find some more but I wasn't willing to go there. Someone could perhaps take that on.

Alison Stewart: Vindex, Candius, one-two of the synonyms. Even when he was writing under a synonym, how would one who was tuned to these things know that this was the work of Samuel Adams.

Stacy Schiff: Oh, I'm so glad you asked. How long do we have? In some ways, in some cases, I was helped by the fact that a great-grandson had identified some pseudonyms. I knew that Vindex and Candius and Alfred. Why did he write as Alfred? I would so love to know that. I knew a great number of the pseudonyms. There had also been a previous biographer, been a woman named Kay Menand, who had been working for years in the Adams papers and had herself identified other pseudonyms.

In addition to that, there was a brilliantly named hardware store owner in Boston in these years who, in 1765, realized history was being made around him in some incredibly prescient way. He, whose name was Harbottle Dorr, began a comprehensive collection of newspapers, which he annotated and often annotating them, in this crazy quill index of a way, but often sort of saying, cheers for this person.

Oh, this is the arch-villain of the piece damning this person, usually praising Samuel Adams. When he did, he would often also out Samuel Adams. He also identifies pseudonymous articles as having been the work of Adams. Then to that, I added some more because you can see where he's basically stealing from his own personal letters in various pieces. If in a piece of newspaper, a piece of journalism, there is a paragraph that comes fully from a letter that Adams had written the previous week, I thought I was pretty safe, assuming that that was Samuel Adams.

Alison Stewart: Was it?

Stacy Schiff: It's a slippery business though.

Alison Stewart: Do you consider propaganda what he was writing?

Stacy Schiff: Some of it is for sure propaganda. In 1768, troops come to Boston and Adams spends months with a team of people, not alone by any means, writing of misdeeds of the troops, writing of the poor boys whose ball hit the century box and they were hauled into court. How is that fair? The women who were assaulted by British soldiers, none of these accounts show up anywhere in the legal records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I might add. They all do seem to be invented. That I think is probably a perfect definition of propaganda.

Alison Stewart: In reading The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, it becomes very clear. It came clear to me that people around him are such a huge part of the story and a huge part of understanding him. When I was thinking about it, Hutchinson just seems-- I mean, if you had to have a foil, Jordan, one of our producers said, if Burr is to Hamilton, Hutchinson is to Adams, when you think about the way these two men interacted, how Adams seemed to outsmart this man. Is outsmart the right word?

Stacy Schiff: Outmaneuver, certainly.

Alison Stewart: Outmaneuver, manipulate? Yes.

Stacy Schiff: I have an enormous sympathy for Thomas Hutchinson so yes, and I felt almost as if I were sort of violating his privacy here at times. Hutchinson and Adams are essentially from the same background. They're both fifth-generation sons of Massachusetts. They both feel that the Stamp Act, for example, was a misstep on the part of London. Hutchinson at that age, is a little bit older than Adams, is lieutenant governor. He can't speak his mind.

He's a very dutiful, very diligent public servant. He's trying his best. He loves the Massachusetts Bay Colony with all his heart. He simultaneously, over the course of these years, in fact, writing a definitive history of the colony, in which thankfully he refers to himself in the third person because he held so many titles that if he were to have used his name, it would have been almost impossible to figure out who he was in the course of this account. It is because of that bouquet of titles that he holds, power seems to just gravitate toward him, that he is resented, not just by Samuel Adams and John Adams, but by a great portion of their friends.

John Adams will actually say that when he meets Samuel, his second cousin, for the first time, which is probably the early 1760s, from the start, they agree on the fact that no one represented a greater threat to American liberties than Thomas Hutchinson. Not London, Thomas Hutchinson, who becomes for them really the face of privilege, the face of-- the villain of the piece, really. Adams does an extremely good job over these years, turning poor, dutiful Thomas Hutchinson, and was really trying to do his best here, into the villain of the piece.

Alison Stewart: How did Samuel Adams feel about violence?

Stacy Schiff: From what we can tell, the violence is really orchestrated by the Sons of Liberty, with whom Adams is only vaguely associated. To your point, since we're on Hutchinson, Hutchinson's house, as many of you know, was destroyed in 1765 during the Stamp Act riots. Adams thoroughly fails to condone-- I mean, does not condone that in any way, and speaks out violently against that kind of street violence.

The house is utterly sacked, and things are thrown from the windows as Hutchinson appears the next day without a proper coat. On the other hand, when Thomas Hutchinson applies to the Massachusetts House of Representatives to be reimbursed for his rather significant losses, Adams stands in the way of the reimbursement. How he feels about Thomas Hutchinson is very clear, how he feels about violence is also clear, but there's a point there where the two intersect.

Alison Stewart: What was the relationship between Samuel Adams and John Adams?

Stacy Schiff: Samuel Adams recruits John Adams, just as he has recruited John Hancock. The saying was that if you gave the best address at the Harvard commencement, you could be certain that you'd be seeing Samuel Adams on your doorstep the next morning. He's a champion recruiter of talent. John is younger. Samuel brings him into the fold. John is starry-eyed in his presence, and from the start leaves us these accounts of Samuel as someone who really knows what's happening behind the scenes, someone who, as John says, is feeding the political engine with all of these pieces for the press, and someone who is, in John's words, a man of just tremendous dignity and exquisite erudition.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a few questions from the audience.

Audience Member 1: Thank you. I just love the book, and Alison Stewart, I love you. I've been doing the book club since the beginning in 2020, and it's just been-- saved me through COVID. I have a question. Your research was tremendous. I felt like I was living in those times. It was incredible the letters and all the quotes and everything. Was there something in your research that shocked you, or that you really were like, "Oh my God," or any aspect that you'd like to share that really surprised you?

Stacy Schiff: Thank you for the kind words. I think the accounts that I refer to of how gentle he was and how decorous he was took me aback because I went into this, I think most of us do, assuming he was the firebrand of the revolution, which is how, anyway, he came down to me. There's clearly a softness and a prudence to him. As much as he's pushing things along, as much as he is so much a prime mover here, he's also very often insisting on calm and insisting on patience. He knows how this game-- he can see how this game is going to play out, but he's very clear about the fact that it should happen on American terms and nothing should be rushed, in fact. In terms of surprises, I think the other surprise was how much we are able to glean about his activity.

Obviously, he never sat down and wrote. I helped dump some tea into the harbor, but what his enemies write about him is so incredibly useful, because they are actually talking-- the governors and the lieutenant governors and the customs commissioners, the whole royal administration, the whole crown administration, is writing perpetually about this nuisance, Samuel Adams, this Machiavelli of chaos, Samuel Adams, and then go on for lines. That's really where the great bulk of the material was. Sometimes they're wrong. He's often credited with things that in fact he didn't do or pieces he didn't write, but the wealth of the detail is often coming from his enemies.

Alison Stewart: We've got a question in the back.

Audience Member 2: Hi, first off, thank you. This awesome research done on an underrated founding father. My question is this, do you think the revolution would have happened when it did without Samuel Adams?

Stacy Schiff: I think the revolution would have happened regardless of any particular individual. I think it happens in the language that it happens and with the velocity that it happens in large part due to Adams. Let me add this caveat, those miles and miles of newspaper, those columns and columns of newspaper, the next article over was very often similar in its intent.

Everyone is making the same case for American liberties, for stopping any encroachment of American liberties, for the unity of the colony, something that Adams was particularly intent on from an early point. The fact that the colonies needed to hang together, that everyone had to be in the Massachusetts orbit in some way. They're very common arguments and that sense that everyone has drunk deeply from John Locke, and that's really a general thing. That's not simply Adams. It's also instructive that in the other colonies, especially closer to 1776, there was always a Samuel Adams of Georgia, someone who's called the Samuel Adams of Georgia, the Samuel Adams of North Carolina.

He has plenty of company and some of these are people with whom he has been corresponding for years and that's how they have become the Samuel Adams of North Carolina because essentially there's 10 years of correspondence here on very much these questions.

Alison Stewart: Was there ever a time when you really felt Samuel Adams was in the wrong?

Stacy Schiff: I worried about the Stamp Act riots and it's very hard to see who's really behind the Stamp Act riots. There's a very cunning request from the Sons of Liberty to John Adams at one point to do something and the Sons of Liberty basically write to John Adams saying, "Could you please do this for us?" Because John was often called on for his legal expertise. At the bottom of this note, it says, "Your cousin, Samuel, sends his regards." Clearly, and then "Please destroy upon reading," which obviously he didn't do. You do wonder there about how much intervention there may have been.

Alison Stewart: Do we have time for one or two more questions?

Audience Member 3: You talked about excluding Samuel Adam from a piece of art that's supposed to commemorate the Declaration of Independence. How do you see the role of art to help us understand or be misled about events in history?

Stacy Schiff: That's such a wonderful question. When Trumbull decides to paint the signing of the Declaration, he makes every effort to essentially paint whoever's still alive from the flesh, then to combine those into his enormous canvas, which hangs in the Capitol today, which we've all seen copies. The number of things he gets wrong are almost impossible to enumerate on a single page. It's fascinating, and by the way, the same thing could probably be said about biography.

I shouldn't really be passing any judgments here, but Adams in particular is hidden between two other people. As some people will point out, well, of course, it makes sense, he's hidden between two people. He was always in the shadows. That's where he preferred, that was his preferred address. His friends and his family will say, how dare they sneak him behind this Virginian. He's the master of the moment. How can he possibly not be first and foremost at the front of the painting? The painting is not anything we should take for history, but it is instructive, I think, in the ways that history does get written, which I think is something we might want to pay more attention to.

Alison Stewart: I think we have time for one more from the audience.

Audience Member 4: I'm curious, [unintelligible 00:31:33], in reading your book, you spend a lot of time on the committee of correspondence. Why was that so effective? It doesn't seem on the face of it that it would be, but clearly you felt that it was.

Stacy Schiff: Bless you for asking. I spent so much time on that at the New York Public Library, in case I didn't mention that. The committees of correspondence, which really needed a better name, were an invention of Adams, who felt very early on. As I said, he stresses unity from the beginning. He realizes that nothing can happen unless the colonies somehow create a common cause.

He's working for years before he manages to get it off the ground, to organize some network among the towns of New England and towns of Massachusetts, ultimately all of New England, and finally, throughout the entire colony, so that there can be an underground form of communication where everyone is essentially asserting American liberties and talking about how they are, in various cases, invalidated by British legislation.

It's the answer to the question which gets asked much later of how did the revolutionary effort take off so fast after Boston's harbor is closed by the intolerable act? The answer is the committees of correspondence. Because suddenly there's this outpouring in very uniform language that Adams has largely orchestrated. It's really like wiring in the continent for rebellion is what he's essentially done with those committees. You can read the language in a particularly rich moment after the destruction of the Tea.

In early 1774, all of the towns in Massachusetts right to Boston. Not all of them are admiring, but the ones that are admiring of what Boston has just done with this nefarious Tea use precisely the same language as if every town clerk in every Hamlet in Massachusetts has memorized the Massachusetts Charter. It's very biblical language. It's lots about oppressed peoples who are finally throwing off their shackles. Tremendous numbers of the same images over and over again. You can see how the language even is whipped into this very homogenized vocabulary that will be used later with the revolution.

Audience Member 5: You just described talking points. [laughs]

Stacy Schiff: Toward Twitter. I think I just described Twitter.

Alison Stewart: Oh my gosh.

Audience Member 5: I don't know if your editor is here, so this might be not the best question. Hi. Sorry. I'm going to ask a question. What was something I had to get edited out that was just so hard for you not to put in the book?

Stacy Schiff: I would never admit that publicly. Well, actually I can tell you because it'll be interesting to hear the reaction. I felt the book should be shorter. My devoted publisher, thank you for coming, thought it should be longer. I feel like there's a lot of bloaten books. I like my book to be fleet and swift and smaller. I think he felt there was a lot of really good material. He thought it should be longer. I won't tell you who won.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff about her new book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. It was our January Get Lit with All Of It Book Club selection.

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Alison Stewart: Up next, two special performances from our musical guest from the evening, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash. Don't miss it.

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