ad been debated during the Middle
Ages from the time returning Crusaders brought back with them copies
of Aristotle and other great Greek philosophers whose authority was
still reverenced at Byzantium and Bagdad when London and Paris knew
nothing of them. Out of the denial of one set of schoolmen that a
divine right to rule, greater than that derived from the people,
could exist in kings, grew the political controversy which preceded
the English revolution against the Stuarts. Our revolution grew out
of the English as the French grew out of ours, and in putting on his
seal Cromwell's motto, "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,"
Jefferson, the Virginian, illustrated the same intellectual
heredity which Samuel Adams, the New Englander, showed in asserting
the right of the people composing the Commonwealth to resist the
supreme authority when in their judgment its exercise had become
prejudicial to their rights or their interests.

From 1764 when he was chosen to present the denial made by the
people of Boston of the English Parliament's right to tax them,
until he joined Jefferson in forcing on the then unprepared mind of
the public the idea of a complete and final separation from the
"Mother Country," his aggressive denunciations of the English
government's attempts at absolutism made him so hated by the English
administration and its colonial representatives that, with John
Hancock, he was specially exempted from General Gage's amnesty
proclamation of June 1775, as "having committed offenses of too
flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than that of
condign punishment."

Joining with John Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson in forcing issues
for complete separation from England and for the formal Declaration
of Independence, Samuel Adams was himself the author of the
celebrated circular letter addressed by the assembly of
Massachusetts to the speakers of the several assemblies in other
colonies. In 1774 he was chosen a member of the Continental
Congress, where he took a prominent part in preventing the
possibility of compromise with England. In 1794 he succeeded Hancock
as governor of Massachusetts, retiring in 1797 because of "the
increasing infirmities of age."

Like many other statesmen of his time he lived the greater part of
his life in poverty, but his only son, dying before him, left him a
property which supported him in his old age.

It is said that his great oration on American Inde