John Hancock, the picturesque patriot

Front matter

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Preface

John Hancock's famous signature has made him more widely known than most other and later signers of the Declaration of Independence. Yet less is commonly known about him than concerning other prominent patriots of the Revolution. He was active and conspicuous in his time ; but he left few materials for a biography, and these for the most part in remote hiding places. John Adams once remarked, "The Life of John Hancock will not ever be written." Twenty years later, when political disagreements were overlooked, Adams wrote, " If I had the forces I should be glad to write a volume of Mr. Hancock's life, character, and generous nature."

One hundred and three years had passed after the death of its first Governor, in 1793, when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts dedicated a monument to his memory in the old Granary Burying Ground near Boston Common. On this occasion Governor Wolcott remarked with regret upon the neglect which had allowed the grave of a man who played so large a part in the Revolutionary period to remain unmarked by any enduring monument. In editing letters from Hancock's Letter-Book, extending over a period of twenty years of commercial activity, Abram English Brown assigned viii Preface

among reasons why Hancock's biography had never been written : " He left no descendants. His numerous relatives received and enjoyed his great wealth; but neither pride nor gratitude incited them to the work of writing the life of their benefactor. His unremitting toils and sacrifices for the public good may have been so far overshadowed by his unaccountable management of the treasury of Harvard College as to deter any man of that institution from undertaking the work. It is to be hoped that some pen is now at work upon an adequate history of John Hancock which the public will welcome before many years."

Among the Chamberlain manuscripts in the Boston Public Library is a newspaper clipping, dated February ii, 1884, which states that materials for a biography were once collected, but later purchased for a thousand dollars and suppressed; a statement which, if true, adds interest to the particulars of a career that can now be well understood from authentic sources.

Prominent as Hancock was in his day and generation, his services to his own State and to the country were of a nature to be overshadowed by more noticeable exploits and achievements, military and civil ; and the accounts of his doings are often incidental and fragmentary in the records of the period.

Hancock has been called picturesque not as qualifying his patriotism, but as recognizing a feature which has its own interest in a movement that

Preface ix

generally lacked this element. Yet he was more than a bit of color in a sombre landscape. He was the earliest considerable sufferer from commercial oppression ; the first aristocrat of Boston to join a party which had little property to lose ; one of the two whom royal displeasure excluded from pardon ; often chairman of liberty meetings ; a member of the Great and General Court ; deputy to the Provincial Congresses and presiding officer ; also deputy to the Continental Congress and for two and a half years its President; the first Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and ten times re-elected. His large contributions to the Revolutionary cause ; his skilful guidance of discordant statesmen into agreement in a critical time ; his efficient service in retaining the French good-will when its threatened loss would have entailed eventual defeat at Yorktown ; his influence in securing the ratification of the Constitution by Massachusetts, and in consequence by a majority of the States, — all these services and responsibilities together made him a man to be reckoned with in a troubled period. Also to be courted and flattered. If he was vain, he had contributors to his vanity ; if he loved popularity, he paid a good price for it ; if he was fond of display, he could afford it out of his own purse ; if he neglected the affairs of a needy college in the pressure of national business, he also neglected his own, receiving no compensation as other presidents did. He was human but self-respecting ; courtly and cour-

X Preface

teous; an aristocrat with sympathies for common people ; benevolent and hospitable ; a man for his time without whom the results of what at first was an unpopular struggle might have been otherwise than they finally were. He at least deserves recognition in a day when deeds can be seen in their true relations, and the lives of their doers in proper perspective.

Repetition of the familiar story of the American Revolution has been avoided as far as possible, those phases only being noted with which Hancock was directly associated. More attention has been given to his surroundings, particularly in the years before he entered upon pubhc Hfe, in order to show what share his environment may have had in shaping his future career.

Grateful acknowledgments are due to the librarians of the Public Library, the John Hay Library, and the Historical Society in Providence for special privileges ; for the same in the Public Library of Boston, in the New England Historic and Genealogical Society's Library ; among the manuscript Archives of Harvard University, the Hancock manuscripts in the Archives of Massachusetts at the State House, and the valuable collection of letters in the possession of WilHam P. Greenough, Esq., of Boston. To his classmate, S. Arthur Bent, Esq., of Boston, the author is indebted for many helpful courtesies, and to several authors, correspondents, and friends for various favors.

Providence, April, 191 2.

Contents

CHAPTER FAGB

I. An Insurgent Town . . . . i

II. Home and School 12

Chapter I

Old Braintree on Massachusetts Bay, the birthplace of John Hancock, always had distinctions of its own in the direction of independence. Situated on the trail from Plymouth towards Boston, Wessagusset became a retreat for two early adventurers who were as unlike the settlers at Patuxet and Shawmut as these were different from the Cavaliers of England. The freedom which Pilgrim and Puritan came here to enjoy had its Hmitations, as all intruders discovered ; but the interlopers who arrived between them, in place and time, stretched the principle of liberty to absurd license and to their own consequent discomfiture. Yet their presence in the neighborhood and their respective fortunes have a prophetic interest when later advocates of a more reasonable freedom are recalled, who thus gave the old town a nobler eminence. In an age of extremists two aliens in particular illustrated their own ideas of liberty ia ways that had something of romance and picturesqueness in the midst of a grim generation.

Thomas Morton of CTmord's Inn, Gent., as he styled himself, was the first of these adventurers to settle in Wessagusset, where he became known as Morton of Merry Mount. The story of his doings there cannot be told so often as to lose its raciness amidst the dreary chronicles of the Bay. He brought with him two quahfications which his neighbors did not require of incomers. Such legal attainments as he possessed were not desired in a dispute that was brewing about land ownership; and the religious inclination he manifested was not agreeable, since it was according to the rites of that EstabHshed Church which the early settlers had abandoned. This might have been endured if he had kept good order on ''Mount Dagon" and in adjacent territory. Instead, he surrounded himself with a gang of bond-servants left behind by Captain Wollaston when he took the rest of the lot to Virginia to serve out their indentures — a vagabond crew not unlike the shipload of emigrant adventurers which came to the Old Dominion with John Smith a dozen years before. With this motley crowd Morton, kingsman and courtier, set up a miniature commonwealth at Mount Wollaston in the autumn of 1626, not anticipating the Cromwellian pattern, except that he was to be a Lord Protector. Aside from this, there was not much provision for anything beyond an Arcadian state of jollity. It was worse than this when he invited Indians and their squaws into his roistering camp.

and at length began to trade guns and ammunition with them for food and furs.^ Then it was time for Endicott and Standish to hew down the antlercrowned May-pole, burn the common house, and leave Morton on a secluded island to the hospitality of savages, which he preferred to theirs ; and finally to send him back to England as a warning to all who might mistake this land of modified liberty for a resort of Hcense. Morton had his revenge in writing a spicy account of his sojourn in the wilderness under the title of ''The New English Canaan," in which he extolled the country more than its colonists. His description of its pleasant hillocks, meandering streams, and abundance of game might have induced immigration if his portrayal of the new inhabitants of the land had not been more repelling than his account of the aborigines. Yet it has appealed sufficiently to sundry descendants of the early fathers to become the basis of stories by Hawthorne and Motley, who have made the Merry Mount camp the one joyous feature in the first decade of colonial life in Massachusetts Bay.^

1 Young's "Chronicles of Massachusets," p. 156; Bradford's "History of Plymouth Plantation," p. 284.

2 The "New English Canaan" is to Bradford's "History" and Winslow's "Journal" what the life at Merry Mount was to that at Plymouth. Written before 1 63 5 , it was printed at Amsterdam in 1637. Force reprinted it in the second volume of his "American Tracts," Washington, 1838. A revised, corrected, and annotated edition was edited by Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and published by the Prince Society, in Boston in 1883. It is akeady a rare book, only 250 copies having been printed.

One reason, perhaps me chief one, for Morton*s presence here has sometimes been overlooked. If it is true that he was one of Sir Ferdinando Gorges' son John's emissaries or agents, the misrule and riot of his stay were not so much the object of his adventure as incidents of a residence which otherwise might have been as prosy as in the other settlements. The Gorges' claim to a tract of New England some three hundred miles square, lying north of the Charles River, was disputed after the Massachusetts Company was granted by the crown the whole territory as far as the Merrimac, including the Gorges Concession. This, it was contended, had been secured to the Gorges by the settlement of Blackstone, Jeffreys, and others; whereupon Endicott made haste to send forty or fifty squatters there. Then it became desirable to have the Gorges' interest looked after by some one on the ground or near by, and Morton may have been sent for this purpose.^

There was another and later instance of inde-

"The cumbrous sarcasm and the pedantic scurrility of the New English Canaan." — Doyle's "English Colonies in America," II, 274.

^ The Gorges expedition made the first permanent settlement on the shores of Boston Harbor, and from the post at Wessagusset came the men who first settled within the present limits of Boston. Lodge's "Boston" in "Historic Towns," p, 6. For the extent of the Gorges' enterprises on the coast, see "Maine Hist. Soc. Coll.," I, 56. Also Osgood's "American Colonies in the XVII Century," iii, chapter 3. The text of the Grant may be found in MacDonald's "Select Charters," p. 249.

pendent life, less noisy and obtrusive, which, however, did not escape the attention of the ruling spirits at Shawmut and Naumkeag. Not far from Mount Wollaston, to which Morton had found his way back at this date, appeared about the first of May, 1630, Sir Christopher Gardiner, Knight, pretending that he was weary of wandering in the Old World and that he was seeking a retreat in the wilderness. His adventures suggest those of the martial John Smith, that soldier of fortune in strange lands. He had picked up a university degree somewhere, and had exchanged what Protestantism he possessed for the Roman faith. Moreover he brought with him, besides a servant or two, one Mary Grove, whom he called his cousin, about whose degree of consanguinity the neighboring elders were in doubt, but concerning whose relations with Sir Christopher they were more positive in their opinions. His case was not so easy to manage as Morton's had been. The colonists' English reverence for titled persons and the absence of positive proof to confirm their strong suspicions held direct interference in check for a while. As he did not give magistrates the cause for complaint that Morton did in consorting with savages, the most they undertook at first was to make inquiry about two women in England who were each disputing the right of the other to call Sir Christopher husband. This was accordingly entered upon the records: **It is ordered that Sir

Christopher Gardiner aM. Mr. Wright shall be sent as prisoners into England by the ship Lyon, now returning thither." ^ When they came for the knight he took to the woods, leaving Mary Grove to be carried to Boston, where she was ordered to be sent to the two wives in England " to search her further." Meantime, while she was detained in Boston, Sir Christopher being in hiding, her doubtful relation toward him was disposed of by her marriage to one Thomas Purchase, who came out of the Maine woods to buy axes, ammunition, and incidentally to find a wife. Gardiner may have heard of her good fortune, since he appeared in time to accompany the couple to the Androscoggin country, whence, after a year's stay in their home, he returned to England to assist in urging the Gorges' claim to the New England tract, which was finally disallowed. He then disappeared from view and was heard of no more.

These two romantic episodes in the early history of Braintree were not, to be sure, formal declarations of independence of the ruling order, but they were diametrically opposed to its temporal interests, its social regime, and its spiritual tone. The first were contested in the courts of the realm; the second was flouted by scandalous and disorderly living; the third was antagonized by the

*"With such trash, God be your direction," wrote John Clotworthy to John Winthrop. s "Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll.," VI, 209.

two forms of religion which the colonists came here to escape. All together, the contrast between the two renegades with their households at Wessagusset and the staid families at Plymouth, Salem, and Boston was vivid enough to give early notoriety to the town which afterward became famous as the birthplace of national independence, in so far as it was the native town of two of the most active early advocates and promoters of separation from the mother country. ^ It might be imagined that there was something in the very air of the place to foster notions of protest against unwelcome restraint, by whomsoever maintained, since control of diverse nature had been contested there by men of different minds. At all events it became as famous in the latter part of the eighteenth century as in the first part of the seventeenth by reason of two men who were born there, whose application of the principle of liberty differed radically from the lawlessness of Morton and Gardiner.

There was a third departure from the purpose of the Bay settlers which, while it did not violate their sense of morality and of what was safe, had nevertheless a divergence from their own religious polity, and was almost as offensive as the waywardness of Morton and Gardiner. As early as 1689 a little group of Church of England people lived in Braintree, and in

* In "Where American Independence Began," D. M. Wilson makes the claim of this title for the town.

one house at least prayers from the service book were daily read; probably by that Lieutenant Veazy who contributed one pound sterling toward building King's Chapel in Boston, where doubtless he and his friends occasionally worshipped, as it was only ten miles distant.^ Eleven years later, the London Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was formed, and soon after, an '^annual encouragement of fifty pounds and a gratuity of twenty-five pounds for present occasion" was granted to "Mr. William Barclay, the minister of the Church of England at Brain tree in New England," with a collection of twenty books to form the nucleus of a church library. On account of the relaxation of Puritan discipHne, and the support given to Episcopacy by royal governors, it was impossible to make such short work with this alien element as would have suppressed it in previous years; but it was regarded with scarcely more favor than a similar intent in earlier days when a supervising clergyman was sent to Plymouth, who discreetly held his peace, or when Morton himself upheld the rites of the Estabhshed Church two generations before. Yet toleration was not in vogue, and the earliest Episcopal church in New England outside

* Ghostly reminiscences of King's Chapel from 1686, and in the Revolutionary period may be found in chapters seventy- Seven arid seventy-eight of "Dealings with the Dead, by a Sexton of the Old School," Boston, 1856.

of Boston and Newport was not to be countenanced by the standing order. Neither was it to be ignored, particularly when tithes were to be collected ; from the payment of which Church of England folk were by no means exempted. Down to 1 704 Colonel Edmund Quincy had hopes of suppressing churchmen by a town vote, toward which he had sixteen names pledged at one time. After a ten-years' struggle the resident minister could say : —

" The whole province has been very much disturbed on account of my coming to this place, in 17 13, and accordingly have not failed to affront and abuse me— 'atheist and 'papist' is the best language I can get from them. The people are independents, and have a perfect odium to those of our communion. These few are taxed and rated most extravagantly to support the dissenting clergy." ^

On the other hand, it appears that the Venerable Society had not been fortunate in the choice of their second missionary to Braintree. And the church warden had been fined for ^'plowmg on the day of Thanksgiving," while the Puritan persuasion "cohorted their families from Christmaskeeping and charged them to forbear." Evidently the exceptional placing of an Episcopal church in a separatist settlement was an episode of sufficient

1 The amount to be raised is indicated by the following : " 2th Jan. 1670, disposed i5£ to Mr. Peter Bulkley of Concord: 20 s. a man for all the ministers that had bine helpfuU to the chh." And on the 13 May, 1672, - "To try Mr. Moses ffiske for a house & yearly salary of 60 pounds & five acres of marsh grass from year to year." — "Records of the Town of Braintree," p. 11.

lo John Hancock

importance to be classed ^ith the earlier provocations which had stirred the village. It was another instance of independence of the primitive order which was not to be overlooked, and to be repressed if not suppressed, by the town-meeting if possible, or by such methods of ostracism as villagers can devise and make effective.

But the spirit of independence came with the wind from off the ocean, inhaled by every inhabitant ; and though Judge Sewall'in his time was glad to note that *' trade went on as usual in Boston on Christmas Day, 1727," he also observed that ^'Mr. Miller kept the day in his new (Episcopal) Church at Brain tree, and the people flock thither" ; as they do to-day in greater numbers, since the prejudice and opposition have vanished after two centuries of varying persistence and strength.^

A town which was remarked beyond its neighbors for radical doings in its pristine days might naturally be expected to distinguish itself further in the same direction in the progress of time and events. At least it would be regarded as a fitting birthplace of leaders in new movements and departures. The traditions of the place were those of protest if not of successful revolt ; the environment of the inhabitants was the spirit of freedom. Reverence for custom and public sentiment had been lacking

* "We have a few rascally Jacobites and Roman Catholics in this town, but they do not dare show themselves." — John Adams, in "Works," ix. 335.

in notorious instances, and an established order had not always been accepted by universal consent. If the atmosphere of a neighborhood, its known history, and common talk are recognized molders of disposition and temper, such men as Adams, Hancock, and Quincy seem to be the inevitable product of Old Braintree, and the political changes they were forward in bringing about were the legitimate result of their environment.^

^The North Precinct of Braintree was named Quincy in 1792 for the John Quincy of Mount Wollaston, through the influence of Christopher Cranch. Otherwise, according to Charles Francis Adams, in his "History of Quincy," p. 272, the town might have been named for Hancock, as he was a native of the North Precinct, and more widely known, " and popular to a degree which no other pubHc man has since equaled." A county afterward was to bear his name. See also D. M. Wilson's " Col. John Quincy, Master of Moimt Wollaston," p. 25.

Chapter II

The Reverend John Hancock, minister of the First Church in the North Precinct of Braintree, made the following entry in the parish register of births: ''John, son of John Adams, October 26, 1735." About fifteen months later he made this one: ''John Hancock, my son, January 16,

I737-"

An eminent jurist and writer on New England

origins has remarked that if one is looking for the aristocracy of the Puritan period, he must inquire for the ministers and deacons : an observation whose truth colonial history abundantly confirms. It has also been shown, contrary to the common supposition, that there are fewer scapegraces among the families of these worthies than elsewhere: another genealogical conclusion which the two boys who began life so near together exemplified in their respective careers.

Of the Hancock genealogy it may be said that a Nathaniel Hancock was in Cambridge as early as 1634. He died in 1652. An eldest child may have been born before he came to this country. A son,

Nathaniel, was born in 1638 ; his son John," Bishop" John, pastor of the Lexington Church, was born in 167 1 ; his son John, pastor of the Braintree Church, was born in 1702; and his son, John Hancock the patriot, was born on the i6th of January, 1737. A daughter, Mary, was born on the 8th of April, 1735 ; a son, Ebenezer, on the 5th of November, 1744.

Two children were born to John Hancock the 3d: Lydia Henchman, born in January, 1777, who died in the following summer, and John George Washington, born May 21, 1778, who died from an accident in 1787 while skating.

The Hancock coat of arms consists of an open hand, raised as if in protest, above which in the chief are three fighting-cocks. Perhaps it was with this blazonry in mind that John's father-in-law used to write of him as Mr. Handcock. Such devices of "canting arms," allusive to one's name or occupation, sometimes have been taken as indicating recent fabrication, not unknown in a new country; but trustworthy authorities in heraldry state that such descriptive display is proof of antiquity and is of highly honorable character. The crest is a chanticleer in bellicose attitude, made more terrible by the metamorphosis of postern plumes into the tail of a dragon. Appended to the whole runs the motto, — not without fitness in the life of a sumptuous liver, — Nul Plaisir Sans Peine.

It is not difficult to im^ine what was the boyish life of the two playfellows. Doubtless they were more carefully watched and commented upon than their companions, since they belonged to households that were expected to be patterns to the rest of the community; and for this reason it is likely that they suffered some superfluous restraint at home which they might otherwise have escaped. The noblesse oblige of their day and station was largely negative. Thou shalt not do all that other boys do, for thou art the minister's son, or the deacon's; which was restrictive enough to cramp the spirit of freedom in any natural boy, unless it should be too strong to be bound by convention. If such was the tendency of the Hancock lad's training it did not last many years, for when he was seven his father died, leaving a widow and three children no larger inheritance than is usual with clergymen whose parishioners have not exposed them to the deceitfulness of riches. Had he Hved longer he would doubtless have fitted the boy for college, as ministers of that time could, and would have expected the son to follow in his steps, as he himself had in his father's, the noted "Bishop Hancock," as he was called for his masterful efficiency as pastor of the Lexington church and as a presiding officer. Even in his father's hfetime the lad fell into other hands when, in company with John Adams, he was taught by Joseph Marsh, the son of the elder John Hancock's predecessor in the Braintree pas-

Home and School i^

torate. Upon his father's death, an important change awaited the son.

An uncle, Thomas Hancock, was accounted the richest merchant in Boston and the most enterprising in New England at a time when colonial commerce made many opulent, notwithstanding demands from the home government across the sea. Besides, it did not then require millions to make one rich. On the other hand, personal abiHty was not supplemented by combinations of capital and venal legislatures. Success was won by single-handed effort in an open field for all comers, in which there was nothing worse than evasion of oppressive revenue laws by everybody who dared to defy them. Furthermore, Thomas Hancock had married a daughter of Henchman, a prosperous bookseller and stationer of Boston, and her inheritance eventually augmented the fortune of the childless aristocrat, making the prospect golden for an adopted heir. Doubtless the uncle had his reasons for choosing only one out of the three children at the Braintree parsonage as the object of special favor, although he did not neglect the other nephew and the niece. The widow was provided with a husband and home not long after her bereavement, as was apt to be the case with clergymen's ''relicts" in colonial days.

The favored son John was transferred from a country village to the chief town of the province and the busiest seaport along the coast, where the descendants of genti^who came over in the decade before Cromwell's rise had lived and thrived for a hundred years, now numbering about 17,000 inhabitants, including alien mixtures. The swift and slow ships that carried oil and timber, fish and furs to London brought back silks and velvets, wines and spices, costumes and equipages, with the fashions of court and hall to be followed by citizens whose simplicity was by no means republican, as their poHtics also were not at this time adverse to the crown. Moreover the boy was ushered into the best house in Boston. Great prosperity had followed Thomas Hancock after he left his future father-in-law, married the daughter Lydia, and set up for himself as bookbinder and bookseller at the Stationers' Arms on Ann Street in 1729. Within seven years he began to make contracts for a mansion to be built on the sunny side of Beacon Hill, a large part of which he had acquired for nothing.^ Granite blocks, squared and hammered, came from Braintree, and brownstone trimmings from Hartford, at a cost of 300 pounds sterling *'in goods." The best crown glass, 480 squares, 12 by 18 and 8 by 12, were ordered from London, with wall papers on which there should be " peacocks, macoys, squirrel, monkeys, fruit

1 "The result is that Thomas Hancock thus obtained all Beacon Hill without paying one cent for it, and he and those coming after him retained possession by pasturing cows there." — Justin Winsor, "Memorial History of Boston," ii, 520. On the value of the land then and now see lb., Introd., xlvi.

and flowers/' which the merchant thinks "are handsomer and better than paintings done in oyle." Also, for the kitchen, ''a Jack of three Guineas price, with a wheel-fly and Spitt-Chain to it,'' suggestive of generous Hving, as also are subsequent orders for Madeira wines " without regard to price provided the quality answers to it" ; to be accompanied by "6 Quart Decanters and 6 pint do., 2 doz. handsome, new fash'd wine glasses, 6 pr. Beakers, 2 pr. pint Cans, and 1-2 do., 6 Beer glasses, 12 water glasses, and 2 doz. Jelly glasses." Well he might write a friend, "We live Pretty comfortable here on Beacon Hill," as he continued to for twenty-five years.

The minister's son must have had awesome thoughts as he climbed the grand steps and entered the panelled hall with its broad staircase adorned with carved and twisted balusters and a '' Chiming Clock" surmounted with carved figures ''Gilt with burnished Gold," the case "to be 10 foot long, the price not to exceed 50 Guineas," — so the order for it ran. Then there were portraits of dignitaries on the walls of the great drawing-room where still more notable men were soon to assemble, incidentally for a boy's education in things not taught at school.