The day John Adams stopped trying
On May 15, 1776, John Adams wrote what he would later call independence itself.
He'd been in Philadelphia for a year. He'd watched Congress hesitate, the colonies split, the Crown harden. He'd seen New England in arms. He'd watched the army he and his cousin had helped pry into being march out of Boston and head south. He'd worked the rooms. He'd written the letters. He'd waited.
He had not been quick to this position.
Six years earlier, he had defended the British soldiers who fired into the crowd at the Boston Massacre. He believed in the law. He believed in the relationship between the colonies and the Crown — complicated and infuriating as it had become. He had spent a decade trying to hold together something the Crown itself seemed determined to break.
But by May of 1776, the math had stopped working.
Lord Dunmore had offered freedom to enslaved people who would fight for the King. British troops were burning American towns. The Olive Branch petition had come back unread. The Continental Army had left Boston, moved south, and was setting up to defend a city it didn't yet know how to hold. And in Philadelphia, Congress was still officially negotiating with a king who, by Adams's own reading, had already placed the colonies outside his protection.
So on May 10, Congress passed a resolution. It recommended that every colony form its own government.
That was a step. But it was not the step.
The step came five days later. Adams's preamble was added, and the resolution suddenly read like a declaration of independence by another name. "It is necessary," it said, "that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said Crown should be totally suppressed."
It was published in the papers. The colonies read it. Virginia's Convention voted that same day to instruct her delegates in Philadelphia to propose independence outright.
Adams went home that night and wrote that this was "the most important resolution that ever was taken in America." The preamble, he later wrote, was "independence itself."
The man who had defended the Boston Massacre soldiers had concluded that the rules he had spent his life trying to preserve could no longer protect what mattered.
That is a hard moment. It is the moment of a man who is not naturally a revolutionary realizing he has become one.
Rising Sons is set eleven years before this — in 1765, when no one in Boston yet knew where it would go. Adams was a young lawyer in a cluttered office on a Boston side street. The Stamp Act had just arrived. The Liberty Tree was new. The men who would later have to choose had not yet had to.
It's a book about that earlier time. About the lawyers, the smugglers, the women, and the loyalists who all had to decide what to be while the rules around them were still rearranging.
It launches in eight weeks. July 7.
If you've been on this list for a while, you already know the deal: I owe you a free ebook on launch day, and I'll keep my word. It will be in your inbox the morning of July 7 (or earlier!). Nothing else to do.
If you've joined recently — same deal. As of today, everyone already on this list gets the book free on launch day. I'm closing that offer to new subscribers as of this email, but I'm offering the first three chapters free for anyone, indefinitely.
So if you know one person — a friend, a parent, a someone — who would love a slow, atmospheric Boston-in-1765 historical thriller, this is the right week to send them the link to this page. The first three chapters are free NOW!
More soon.
Joe
