Oct 2, 1803. Samuel Adams dies in Boston at 81. Probably the most important founder a lot of people only know from a beer label. Quick myth bust first: he wasn't a brewer. His father ran a malt house, and Sam worked in the family business for a while. He was bad at it. He was bad at most business, honestly. He blew through a big chunk of his inheritance, and as a Boston tax collector he fell so far behind on collections that he ended up owing the town money himself. What he was good at was politics. Maybe better than anyone in America. Through the 1760s and 1770s Adams organized Boston against Parliament. He worked the town meetings, wrote constantly for the newspapers under a pile of fake names, helped build the Committees of Correspondence that let the colonies coordinate with each other, and was right in the middle of the protests that ended with tea in the harbor in 1773. The British knew exactly who he was. When Gen. Thomas Gage offered a pardon to anyone in Massachusetts who would lay down their arms in June 1775, he left out exactly two men: Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Those were the two the redcoats marching to Lexington were hoping to catch. When Massachusetts sent him to the Continental Congress in 1774, he was so broke that friends chipped in to buy him a new suit, wig, and shoes so he wouldn't embarrass the colony in Philadelphia. He signed the Declaration of Independence, served in Congress through the war, and later became governor of Massachusetts. He died without much money, the way he'd lived. His second cousin John Adams, a president, outlived him by 23 years. But it was Sam who had been pushing for independence back when John was still a young lawyer defending British soldiers in court.