The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.

Finding itself deep in debt and looking for new sources of revenue the British Parliament sought for the first time to directly tax the colonies of British America. A graduate of Harvard College he was an unsuccessful businessman and tax collector before concentrating on politics. (1678–1737) the leader of the "popular party" a faction that resisted any encroachment by royal officials on the colonial rights embodied in the Massachusetts Charter of 1691.

Adams returned to Massachusetts after the American Revolution where he served in the state senate and was eventually elected governor. Samuel Adams (September 27 [O. Continued resistance to British policy resulted in the 1773 Boston Tea Party and the coming of the American Revolution.