When Britain’s thirteen North American colonies embarked on the organised resistance to the crown that would result in first a revolution and then their independence, their leadership was wildly impressive but disparate. Samuel Adams, a Puritan tax collector from Boston, and Benjamin Franklin, writer, printer, inventor, traveller and polymath, were the radical elder statesmen; the young farmer and bibliophile Thomas Jefferson joined forces with John Jay, a rich New York merchant; Virginian lawyer Patrick Henry provided the rhetoric that inflamed them all, famously calling for liberty or death. 

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