Advice From Sam Adams
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
“Founding Father” and beer manufacturer Samuel Adams had harsh words for anyone who supported the government kidnapping Americans and dragging them across the sea. "If it is true in fact, that there is anyone so lost to all sense of goodness, and so abandon'dly vicious, as to advance such a detestable doctrine, I wish from my soul . . . that he should be obliged to serve" as a kidnapped sailor "aboard the worst Ship of War,” he wrote in 1747. Adams was talking about impressment, the conscription of British subjects to serve in the Royal Navy– hence the threat at the end.
He would have been yet more horrified at what the President is discussing now. Even impressment’s detractors acknowledged there was a theoretically legitimate reason for it. The state needed to man the Navy somehow. But it does not need to send our friends, family, and neighbors into the custody of a foreign dictator.
And the government’s current justifications are not legal claims, but claims against law itself. The Trump administration has determined without due process that some Americans are “terrorists,” and then claims that because of this they do not deserve due process. It has explicitly admitted to punishing Americans for their political views, most notably opposition to the genocide in Palestine. It has deliberately sent Americans to Nayib Bukele’s mega-prison, where US authorities cannot retrieve them. Now it claims that this means it cannot help them. It has asked Bukele to help with this authoritarian kidnapping, and now insists that it can ignore the Supreme Court’s order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to his family and friends in America… because it’s up to Bukele. Whom Trump has clearly asked not to return him! All of this is a violation of law itself so profound that even 17th and 18th-century lawyers would gasp. In the impressment crisis (as well as the Fugitive Slave Act crisis, but my specialty is the 18th century), it has a direct analog.
Now, arguments about what the Founders really wanted are always questionable. Thomas Jefferson wanted America to be a vast expanse of little patriarchal farms. Alexander Hamilton wanted it to be a large factory next to a larger bank. George Washington was known to the Haudenosaunee as the “Town Destroyer” for his genocidal attacks on their communities. Even the better figures, like Thomas Paine, do not deserve the status of prophets: they were ordinary men, and generally speaking the more ordinary they were the better their historical contributions. Lauding the best of America as “truly American” is likewise dangerous. We should want things because they are good, not because they are American.
But as we approach the 250th anniversary of the revolution, Samuel Adams has something to tell us about the best of America. His arguments matter not because they reach some true heart of America, but because they are correct, and because Adams’s strategy can inform how we conduct ourselves in this new era of resistance.
In 1747, 46 Americans were captured in Boston by the dreaded “press gang”-- squads who “pressed” men into service in the Royal Navy. Unlike what the President is doing today, the impressment was legal. Bostonians demanded “warrants”-- which were customary but not necessary– and eventually took hostages to secure the release of their friends and neighbors. After a tense few days of riot and mutual threat, this worked.
Many Americans sympathized with participants in what we call the Knowles Riot, after the commander responsible. But those who wanted to write about it and mount a legal, political, and intellectual defense of this resistance had a problem. Print norms demanded a degree of respectability and legality; printers could be punished or forced to move for producing radical material. Writing pseudonymously as Amicus Patriae, Samuel Adams (probably– if it isn’t him, as we generally suspect, then at least these words stand for themselves) carefully defended the protests while offering an ambivalent and perfunctory denunciation of their activities.
Adams began by renouncing the riot. Sort of. The people were “running together for their mutual Defence,” he insisted.” It was true that they had let their “Resentment” evolve into “Rage, and Madness,” and then unleashed their anger in an “indecent, illegal, and riotous manner.” But the state had reduced them to a Hobbesian “State of Nature,” and granted them a Lockean “natural Right” to defend themselves. It was not acceptable, but also not surprising, that they had done so in an “indecent, illegal, and riotous Manner.”
While his condemnation of the riot was measured, his agreement with their grievance was thunderous. He detailed the history of impressment, compared the American case to various exceptions, and insisted that what had happened in Boston was a violation of both particular legal forms and the very concept of righteousness himself.“Poor, and friendless Americans” who were passed from ship to ship were unable to breathe their “Native Air,” kept in a kind of indefinite confinement away from those they love. They were met with “cruel Usage,” or treatment, that was “too Horrid to be described,” Adams wrote. It “often if not always, breaks their Hearts, as it now almost breaks mine to think on it.”
This case is not identical, but only because what is happening now is worse. Say what you will about eighteenth-century warships– I would rather take my chances as a conscripted sailor than end up in the black hole that is CECOT, the prison that our fellow Americans are being sent to. And we must call them that! Adams did not distinguish between Americans who had been here for a month or a lifetime. Every one of his arguments would apply to them all. Ours should too. No one deserves to be kidnapped by the state, no matter where they are from or where they are now. It should break our hearts now to think on it.
This administration ignoring due process is a violation of our rights– if they can deport someone without caring about their status, they can kidnap citizens– but it is also a reminder that solidarity is the only shelter we have. Citizenship is a piece of paper. But Mahmoud Khalil and Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Rümeysa Öztürk are human beings. Left-wing values are always criticized by the right as weak, vulnerable idealism, as misplaced faith in something that is not real. But they have it backward. White nationalism is a construct, and a vile one at that. Your birth certificate will do nothing if ICE comes to your door. But your neighbors can do a great deal. Two and a half centuries ago, when something similar happened, they did. We can now.
Adams is a compelling figure in part because of his alignment with the radical commoner mob– while Washington was failing at military leadership in Virginia and scheming to expand his fortune, Adams was bumbling around with alcohol and defending artisan riots. He was no saint– his public silence on slavery despite apparent private convictions is condemnable– and he should not make for a moral yardstick. But he does offer a lesson in how to make the world a better place. His defense of radical action was a defense of the maritime vision of liberty that later helped end slavery in the North, and of democratic government and natural rights that could be, and were, and continue to be, mobilized against injustice.
Less than twenty years later, the same motley crew fought back against another impressment effort. Right-wing defenders of the revolution tend to portray it as a legitimate tax revolt. Critics to their left have instead described it as a war to defend slavery, or expand genocidal colonialism. It was both of those things, that’s important, and in future pieces for you, writing elsewhere, and my forthcoming book Enemies of Order I will talk about this. But the revolution was not only any one thing. In northern seaports, the most critical pre-revolutionary agitation came from radical maritime working people asserting a practical liberty: they wanted to be free from state oppression, free from something akin to police violence, and free from tariffs causing supply disruptions that threatened their ability to eat and keep warm in the winter.
Revolutions are dismal, destructive processes that are only ever justified by a lack of other options. Cosplaying revolution should be politically and morally disqualifying. We should all hope that the best of our first revolution will mean we do not need another one to make real America’s never-realized and now receding promises of liberty and equality. Unlike the 18th-century mob, we have many historical experiences of nonviolent resistance to draw on. One important thing now, in my view, is not confusing “violent” for “disruptive.” Cutting the power to ICE facilities is disruptive, not violent. Even disrupting the air traffic involved in these kidnappings would not, necessarily, be violent.
These direct action tactics may not be the wisest way to direct our energy now, but the moment we see them, we should not waste much breath arguing about whether they are wise or good. Instead we must ask how, given the fact that these actions are happening, we can best contribute to achieving our shared goal: a free America. Like Samuel Adams, I wouldn’t defend violent resistance (and in print I would not encourage illegal resistance like what I just mentioned either). But I do not think we should be surprised by it. If or when it occurs, blame lies solely with the Trump administration.
Whatever resistance happens now, you should respond like Samuel Adams: lightly critique it however you have to, then do whatever makes the most sense from your social position to stop the kidnappings. If you don’t like the strategies you see, do something better. But keep your focus on what matters. Justice will be done when ICE is gone, Stephen Miller has been sent to the Hague, and America begins trying to meet its promises of liberty and equality once again.
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