Samuel Adams received a bachelor's degree in 1740 and a master's degree in 1743 from Harvard College. Title of his master’s thesis: "Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved." After college, Adams and his father, Old Samuel Adams, began a partnership in a brewery. He lost most of his inheritance by poor business management. Adams wrote political essays for the newspaper, the Independent Advertiser, and joined the political clubs and Boston’s South End Caucus. Between 1756 and 1764 he served as a tax collector, often using the non- collection of taxes as a political bargaining chip.

In he helped to draft protests against the Stamp Act. After the Boston Massacre in 1770 (a term Adams coined), Adams formed a petition demanding British troops leave Boston. The Governor, Thomas Hutchinson, eventually removed both regiments of British troops from the city. In 1772, Adams chaired the newly formed committee of correspondence, which was “to keep the other colonies aware of the British government’s actions against the liberties of the people of Massachusetts.” In this year he wrote The Rights of the Colonists for the committee. Adams organized a group called the "Sons of Liberty," who resisted the tea tax by secretly dumping tea into Boston harbor in the famous "Tea Party." Adams made a case for independence to John Adams, his second cousin, and a wealthy merchant named John Hancock. At the First Continental Congress in 1774, Samual Adams promoted his ideas for independence, and in the Second Continental Congress, Adams signed the Declaration of Independence in July, After the war, Adams served as president of the Massachusetts Senate. His belief in American independence and ability to persuade others to support this cause earned him the name “The Father of the American Revolution.”

Natural Rights of the Colonists as Men: 1.Right to life 2.Right to Liberty 3.Right to Property with support to defend it 4.Right to enter or leave a society Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists (1772) “Those are evident Branches of…the first Law of Nature— All men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please: And in case of intollerable Oppression, Civil or Religious, to leave the Society they belong to, and enter into another.” “All positive and civil laws, should conform as far as possible, to the law of natural reason and equity.”