“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, — go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!”

Samuel Adams, born this day in 1722

September 27, 1722. My great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Thos. Blackledge of Bucks Co. Pennsylvania, was a teenager and Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders that year. Johann Sebastian Bach had written The Brandenburg Concertos the year before. Honestly, all I really know about Sam Adams, right off hand, was that his fellow Sons of LIberty got him a fine crimson suit of clothes to wear to the Continental Congress in Sept. 1774. And John Adams got his nose a bit out of joint when Parisians continually confused him with his older, better-known cousin, Samuel, over in Boston. I understand that there's a fine beverage named after him. And I found out just today that today's Samuel Adams's birthday, that he graduated from Harvard in 1740. When he died in 1803, how different was the world, in large part because of the revolution of which he was a bull-headed founder.