Sam Adams, His Many Masks, and the Night the Ghosts Came Out to Play

Few revolutionaries wore more faces than Samuel Adams. In the pages of the Boston Gazette, he was not just one sharp mind but a whole chorus of them; Vindex, Candidus, Populus, Alfred, Valerius Poplicola, A Chatterer, and a rotating cast of other aliases deployed whenever the political winds required a different voice. Each pseudonym carried a distinct tone: righteous fury, calm logic, biting satire, or the voice of “the common people” urging action. Together, they formed the illusion of an entire public awakening, when in truth much of the agitation came from a single pen in a single room.

Sam Adams dreaming with his pseudonyms

The Print Shop After Midnight

The illustration captures that idea literally, Sam Adams, asleep at Edes & Gill’s print shop, slumped in a wooden chair as ghostly versions of his pseudonyms float around him. A Broadside hangs from his fingers, ink still tacky, the press looming behind him. It’s a scene that distills the entire period: one man writing as many, shaping the emotional tempo of a city on the edge. The print shop itself was a furnace for rebellion. Ideas entered as drafts and left as sparks; broadsides, essays, and etchings that circulated across Boston faster than British patrols could track them. Here, propaganda wasn’t a whisper; it was a printed roar.

A Broadside Scene in Broadside

In Broadside, this image becomes a full theatrical moment: Sam dozes in the shop after a long night of writing, only to have his pseudonym “ghosts” spring to life. They swirl around him, arguing with each other, bragging about which one stirred the most trouble, and bickering like siblings who share the same brain. Then the British soldiers burst in thinking they’ll finally catch the “network” of writers behind the Gazette. What they find instead is Adams alone… until the ghosts turn toward them. The soldiers can’t see them. The audience can. And that’s where the fun begins.

Sam Adams pseudonyms speak through Boston Gazette Broadsides

The ghost of Candidus lectures the redcoats on constitutional rights. Populus shouts populist slogans directly into a soldier’s ear. Valerius Poplicola bows dramatically like a Roman senator. A Chatterer buzzes around them, narrating every move. The soldiers, confused and unnerved, grow increasingly spooked as the room seems to hum with unseen agitation. Meanwhile Adams, half-asleep, murmurs the beginnings of another essay, unaware that his alter-egos are haunting the British for him. It is the perfect metaphor for his influence: the British weren’t fighting one man. They were fighting the appearance of an entire movement created by one exhausted revolutionary with too many aliases and too much to say. This is where Broadside shows its teeth and its humor. And it all starts with Sam Adams asleep at the press, surrounded by the restless spirits of his own invention.