John Hancock and the American Revolution
John Hancock is best remembered for the bold signature on the Declaration of Independence. His role in the American Revolution went well beyond that flourish: he was a merchant, a political leader in Massachusetts, and president of the Second Continental Congress when it adopted the Declaration in 1776.
The Revolution grew out of disputes over taxation, representation, and imperial authority. Fighting began in 1775, independence was declared in 1776, and Britain recognized the United States in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The outcome depended on many people, military forces, and foreign allies; Hancock helped organize and finance the American cause.
John Hancock was born on January 23, 1737, in Braintree, Massachusetts, in the area now called Quincy. He died on October 8, 1793. He served as president of the Continental Congress from 1775 to 1777 and later became the first governor of Massachusetts under its 1780 constitution.
Before the Revolution, Hancock became one of Boston’s wealthiest merchants after inheriting a profitable business from his uncle. His relationship with Samuel Adams drew him further into colonial politics, although Hancock’s political positions were not always as radical as Adams’s. The seizure of Hancock’s sloop Liberty by British customs officials in 1768 made his business a flashpoint in the dispute over British authority. The smuggling prosecution was eventually dropped.
Hancock’s family and early career
Hancock was the son of the Reverend John Hancock and Mary Hawke Hancock. His father died while he was a child. The family’s comfortable circumstances did not place it outside the institution of slavery: enslaved people lived and worked in Massachusetts households, including those connected with the Hancocks.
After John’s father died when he was seven years old, he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle, Thomas Hancock and Lydia Henchman Hancock. It was this uncle who owned the mercantile business that later made John wealthy. The business called the House of Hancock, imported goods from Great Britain and exported goods like rum, whale oil, and fish. Thomas and his wife were prominent citizens of Boston and lived in Hancock Manor on Beacon Hill. As they had no children of their own, they raised John as their son and to be their heir.
When Thomas Hancock died in 1764, John inherited the mercantile business, Hancock Manor, substantial land, and enslaved household workers. His commercial wealth helped establish his influence in Boston. That inheritance also connects his story to the contradiction between revolutionary arguments about liberty and the continued enslavement of other people.
John became a Boston selectman in 1765, an office his uncle had also held. As resistance to the Stamp Act grew, he supported the boycott of British goods. He was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1766.
Samuel Adams, the clerk of the Massachusetts House, became an important political ally. Their backgrounds and temperaments differed: Hancock was a wealthy merchant with a taste for an impressive public style, while Adams was known for his persistent political organizing. They helped bring different groups of Bostonians into the resistance movement.
Resistance and the Continental Congress
After the Boston Massacre in 1770, Hancock joined other town leaders in demanding the withdrawal of British troops from central Boston. He also supported resistance to the Tea Act. Samuel Adams, rather than Hancock, was the central figure at the Old South Meeting House gathering associated with the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Hancock delivered a prominent Boston Massacre anniversary oration in March 1774.
Hancock became president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1774. By April 1775, he and Samuel Adams were staying at the Reverend Jonas Clarke’s house in Lexington, a house connected with Hancock’s childhood. Paul Revere and William Dawes carried warnings on the night of April 18. The British expedition’s documented orders focused on military stores at Concord.
The first fighting came at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. In June, General Thomas Gage offered a pardon to rebels who returned to obedience, expressly excluding Hancock and Samuel Adams. Their exclusion strengthened their public standing as leaders of the American cause.
In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress elected Hancock president in May 1775. He married Dorothy Quincy later that year. Their two children died young: Lydia in infancy and John George Washington Hancock in a skating accident in 1787.
The Declaration and the Massachusetts governorship
Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The first printed copies, known as the Dunlap broadsides, carried the printed names of Hancock and secretary Charles Thomson. Congress ordered the engrossed parchment copy on July 19, and most delegates signed it on August 2. Some signatures were added later. Hancock’s famous handwritten signature belongs to that parchment document.
Hancock left the presidency of Congress in 1777 and briefly returned to Congress in 1778. Elected governor of Massachusetts in 1780, while the war was still underway, he served until 1785 and again from 1787 until his death. His support also helped secure Massachusetts’s ratification of the federal Constitution in 1788. His legacy includes political leadership and public generosity as well as the signature that made his name familiar.
Learn More
John Hancock — National Park Service
Hancock Family Papers — Massachusetts Historical Society
Signing the Declaration of Independence — U.S. Government Publishing Office
Samuel Adams in the American Revolution
Who’s Who in the American Revolution — Free eBook
King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father — Brooke Barbier
