If you go to Boston you’ll undoubtedly see a store on the corner – the Connah Stah. Sully and Fitz will buy smokes there and two-dollar scratchers. There will be a bar next door but they’ll call it a tavern because that’s what they called it when it was built not long after the Pilgrims arrived. There will be a couple of TVs most likely tuned to the hockey game and if you want to change the channel you’ll need to ask the bah tenda (good luck with that). Within a block or two, there will be twelve places to buy cannolis and donuts made by Dunkin, but what you’ll find in equal abundance are Patriots because Boston is really located on the connah of history.

A lot of the things we think of as American today started in and around Boston. In 1600 the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies prohibited people from living alone. Unattached individuals had to live with a family and abide by the rules of that family. These colonists, these patriots, acted as a collective Yoda, providing a loose, malleable code that subsequent generations could augment with muscle and innovation to push the experiment forward. This kind of liberty was truly a revolutionary idea, worth fighting for, many times by some unlikely combatants. Henry Knox (think Fort Knox) was a Boston bookseller. He found a way to drag fifty or so cannons (he used homemade sledges) 300 miles from Fort Ticonderoga, New York, to Boston where they were used to blast the British at Dorchester Heights.  

Once a revolution is started, the fight lasts forever. During the War of 1812 the British bombed Fort McHenry (near Baltimore) all night. A likely terrified poet named Francis Scott Key witnessed it from the harbor, and was proudly amazed in the morning “that our flag was still there.” It’s a flag the Boston patriots planted. Here are some of the Patriots you may bump into in old Boston.

Samuel Adams believed that the Republic’s very existence was an internal guarantee of liberty. He believed that disobedience to the monarchy was unavoidable, but that disobedience to the Republic was unthinkable. He was a prolific and incessant writer. He would have been the Walter Cronkite of his day launching a news service to all the Colonies that was invaluable in the march toward Revolution. It’s an open question whether he ever was, in fact, a brewer, but his father owned a malting house and he worked there for a time. Jefferson compared Samuel Adams to the helmsman of the Trojan warship, and he is generally regarded as the Father of the American Revolution. In the first contested presidential election in 1796, many Virginians wanted him to be Jefferson’s vice president. He signed the Declaration of Independence, served two terms as governor of Massachusetts and died in 1803 at age eighty-one.

John Hancock served more than two years in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and he was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence in his position as president of the Continental Congress. Hancock was one of the richest men in the Colonies, making his money in the shipping trade. He was elected governor of Massachusetts, serving in that role for most of his remaining years.

Paul Revere was a coppersmith, the father of sixteen children and he opened the first copper mill in America. He died in 1818 at age eighty-three. It took Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem published in 1861 to turn this workingman into a legend, “Listen my children and you shall hear about the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”

James Otis Jr. was a lawyer in colonial Massachusetts, a member of the Massachusetts provincial assembly, and an early advocate of the Patriot views against British policy that led to the Revolution. His catchphrase, “No taxation without representation” became the basic Patriot position. Otis died suddenly in May 1783 at the age of 58, as he stood in the doorway of a friend’s house when he was struck by lightning. Not long before, he is reported to have said to his sister, “My dear sister, I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity that it will be by a flash of lightning.”

Christopher Gadsden was the principal leader of the South Carolina Patriot movement during the American Revolution. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress and a brigadier general in the Continental Army. He was also the designer of the Gadsden Flag (“Don’t Tread On Me”). Gadsden was eventually known as “the Sam Adams of the South.”

Ben Franklin was born in Boston, buried in Philadelphia and the fifteenth of seventeen children. He would have been in London during the early portion of the Revolution lobbying for patriot causes. He was the first postmaster general, ambassador to France, an avid chess player, prolific inventor and scientist, president of Pennsylvania and he drew the cartoon that would become the “Join or Die” flag.