Hancock family papers

The Hancock family of Boston included wealthy colonial merchant Thomas Hancock (1703-1764) and his nephew John Hancock (1737-1793), president of the Second Continental Congress, governor of Massachusetts, and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Hancock, the son of the Reverend John and Elizabeth Clark Hancock, was born in 1703 in Lexington, Massachusetts (then a part of the town of Cambridge.) At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to Samuel Gerrish (approximately 1680s-1741), a Boston bookseller. In 1724, he opened his own bookshop, “The Bible & Three Crowns,” in the North End of Boston. In an economic environment where cash was scarce and bartering prevailed, Thomas Hancock pursued a variety of business activities. He was a partner in a paper mill, exported goods, including codfish, whale oil, log wood, and potash, supplied rum and provisions to the Newfoundland fishing fleet, and owned shares in freighting vessels. During this time Hancock met and went into business with Daniel Henchman (1689-1761), a leading Boston bookseller. They jointly purchased large consignments of paper and supplies, which allowed Hancock to establish his own credit, and were publishers. Thomas Hancock married Henchman's daughter Lydia in 1730.

Between 1746 and 1758, Hancock and another partner, Boston merchant and slave trader Charles Apthorp (1698-1758), secured contracts to supply British forces during King George's War and the French and Indian War; they furnished ordnance, lumber, food, medicines, and ships, which transported soldiers as well expelled Acadians in the mid-1750s. Apthorp died in 1758, and five years later Thomas Hancock, having no children of his own, established his nephew John as his partner. Thomas Hancock died in 1764, leaving behind an estate estimated at £70,000, one of the largest in the colonies at that time.

John Hancock inherited the bulk of his uncle's estate at the age of twenty-seven. John's father was a clergyman, the Reverend John Hancock (1702-1744; Harvard AB 1719) of Braintree. After his father's death in 1744, John's mother, Mary Thaxter Hancock, agreed to send him to live with his uncle and aunt, Thomas and Lydia Hancock, in Lexington. He graduated Harvard College in 1754, and subsequently joined his uncle in business. In 1760, John was sent to London for nearly a year to learn the English end of trade, meeting with Hancock's agents and associates there. Upon his return to Boston, John Hancock found his uncle in poor health, and he took on an increasingly larger role in the business.

After Thomas Hancock's death, John became more and more involved in the cause of American liberty. He was a Boston selectman from 1765 to 1774 and a member of the colony's General Court from 1766 to 1774. In 1774 the General Court was absorbed into the Provincial Congress, and John Hancock was elected president. He was appointed as a Massachusetts delegate to the Second Continental Congress, and in May 1775 he was elected its president. In August 1775 he married Dorothy Quincy (they had two children; neither survived to maturity.) He left the Congress in 1778.

John Hancock's service during the Revolution and as later as first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1780-1785, 1787-1793), along with his other political involvements, shifted his focus away from his business, and he relied increasingly on subordinates. Hancock intended to return to trade full-time once he retired from public life, but soon after became ill and died in 1793 at the age of fifty-six.

John Hancock's younger brother, Ebenezer Hancock (1741-1819), remained with his mother and her new husband after his father's death. He graduated from Harvard College in 1760. In 1764, upon his uncle Thomas Hancock's death, he received £666 and three thousand acres of land in Maine. Hancock set up a retail store in partnership with Edward Blanchard, but the business failed by 1768. With the help of his brother, Ebenezer was set up in a new hardware shop. John Hancock's political connections helped secure Ebenezer a position as Deputy Paymaster General for the Eastern Department during the Revolution. He inherited a third of John Hancock's estate in 1793, including the Beacon Hill mansion known as Hancock House.

John Hancock's nephews, named Thomas and John Hancock, went into business in 1793, following their uncle's death. The brothers dealt mainly in coastwise shipping of cotton, tobacco, fish, and dry goods, and owned a general store. John Hancock (1774-1859) appears to have operated both in partnership with his brother and on his own, trading commodities including cotton, tobacco, coffee, flour, potash, and gunpowder with merchants in New England, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Baltimore, as well as in Great Britain, Europe, and the West Indies. He owned ships and at least one store on Long Wharf. Hancock also acted as an agent for Boston gunpowder sales of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company before and during the War of 1812.