Sam Adams - Brewer Patriot

Born and raised in Boston, Adams (1722-1803) was instrumental in securing independence from Great Britain. He not only armed American colonials with unassailable legal and historical arguments for home rule and civil and economic rights, he helped create political and cultural institutions such as the Sons of Liberty (the group that fought against British occupation and masterminded the Boston Tea Party); the "committees of correspondence" (which coordinated activities among pro-independence colonial assemblies), and the Continental Congress (which produced the Declaration of Independence) that made the Revolution possible.

As Puls, a former reporter and the coauthor of 2005's "Uncommon Valor: A Story of Race, Patriotism, and Glory in the Final Battles of the Civil War," notes, "of the major founding fathers, only . . . Adams advocated independence before [the battle of] Lexington. In the critical prewar years, it was Adams who mapped out what became known as American values about liberty, self-government and natural human rights."

An indifferent businessman, Adams was a bust as a brewer and he similarly proved incompetent during a short stint as a tax collector (of all things). But he was a complete success as a patriot, spearheading remarkably effective boycotts against English goods in response to the Sugar and Stamp Acts and writing voluminous, widely reprinted anonymous essays, tracts and articles that made the case for no taxation without representation.

Dubbed "the patriarch of liberty" by Thomas Jefferson, Adams, who eventually served as governor of Massachusetts, helped make the "theme of individual liberty . . . central to the American psyche," Puls writes. More than a decade before the Declaration of Independence, Adams wrote that individuals were "unalienably entitled to those essential rights in common with all men," the core sentiment of Jefferson's manifesto.