American Rebels: How the Hancock, Adams, and Quincy Families Fanned the Flames of Revolution by Nina Sankovitch
This book is about the connections between the Hancock, Adams, and Quincy families of Braintree, Massachusetts, as they fanned the flames of the War for Independence. We begin in the spring of 1744 at the funeral of the Reverend John Hancock. He had been a pillar of the community and his progeny and neighbors would be architects of the successful effort to create a nation free from the control of Great Britain. On that rainy day in 1744, mourners included the deceased’s son, also named John, as well as Dolly Quincy, John Adams, Abigail Smith, and Josiah Quincy. These people would become very involved in the work of forming a new country. Reverend Hancock died at 41 years old when his son was only 7.
The Adams, Hancock and Quincy families were close. Their kids, John Hancock, John Adams, and Josiah Quincy. played with each other. Young John Adams and John Hancock were very good friends. They three boys did a lot of things together, despite the fact that they were not all on the same socioeconomic level. The Quincy family was wealthy. The Adamses were yeoman farmers. The Hancocks were in-between.
The boys of the three families were very bright. After a few years in the local school, they all went the prestigious Boston Latin School in Boston. All of the families attended the same church and took part in the same social activities. They were close.
Author Sankovitch observes that the children of Braintree would become “These American rebels.”
Braintree had developed a reputation as being more independent than most New England towns. Reverend Hancock believed that, while he was working to save souls, “the civic covenant” was important. That referred to the fairness in how people dealt with other people they might not agree with in matters of life. Reverend Hancock was not quite as hell fire and brimstone-ish as many of his more doctrinaire peers.
Reverend Hancock’s brother, Thomas, went into the book publishing trade and made good money printing and selling books, including a lot of bibles. Thomas expanded his business interests to include selling rum, oil and fish to Europe, which made him a fortune. Thomas built an elegant mansion on Beacon Hill in Boston. After young John Hancock’s parents died, Thomas and his wife adopted him.
John Adams was getting sick of Boston Latin School (a condition shared by many who have attended BLS over the centuries) and wanted to become a farmer. His father quashed that and his son stayed in school but transferred to another school that fit him better. Young John Adams did well there and ended up at Harvard.
Religion was big in the 1750s. In the colonies, there was a tiff between the traditional Calvinist ministers who embraced predestination (you are what you were supposed to be) and the more liberal clergy who thought that human beings actually had a major role to play in their development. Braintree’s new minister, the Reverend Lemuel Briant, was of the new school. After a few years of back-and-forth, Braintree’s parishioners agreed with Reverend Lemuel that individuals had something to do with how they turned out. This was the kind of outside-the-box thinking that helped make Braintree a key driver of the revolt against Britain.
Over the years, there were some challenging marriages that didn't end well, but generally marriage resulted in solid families. John Hancock did not dabble in marriage but he did work to increase the wealth of his family’s company. He frequently did business in England and became comfortable with how the Brits did things, something that would help him transform independent colonies into a nation. John Hancock was a superb business man who relished taking on and meeting big challenges. He took risks, but they were almost always calculated risks that paid off.
John Adams was a lawyer struggling to get noticed. He observed the court activity around the British writs of assistance that essentially gave the Crown vast powers to search colonists' premises. Adams started to think about what liberty really meant.
In the 1760’s, Sam Adams created the Long Room Club, a space for discussing the rights of the colonists against the British. Josiah Quincy, who was studying the law, was an active member. While a lot of rabble-rousing and serious drinking went on at the club (after all, this was Sam Adams’ gig), there also was a lot of serious discussion about how to make Britain respect the rights of the colonies. At that point, there wasn’t much interest in rebellion, just fair play.
In 1764, Britain imposed the Sugar Act which was a big tax on the colonies. The English had been fighting wars for a long time and needed new revenue so they looked to America for the money. Josiah Quincy made the legal cases against the tax, something he would do for the rest of his life. He believed that the law would be enough to convince the Crown to play fair with the colonies.
That same year, Thomas Hancock died. His adopted son, John, inherited the sizable estate, making him a very rich man.
John Adams married Abigail Smith in 1764, with the grudging approval of her parents who thought she was marrying down.
Lots happened to the Adams, Hancock, and Quincy families in 1764, but at that time very few Americans were entertaining any thoughts of breaking away from Great Britain.
In early 1765, Boston was tense. England needed money to pay the bills from recent wars and looked to the colonies for help. Parliament passed the Stamp Act which imposed fees and taxes to the point of stifling the local economy. Merchants were especially hard hit since they had made money during the just-ended Seven Years War supplying goods to British troops. Paul Revere almost went bankrupt.
John Hancock was elected as a Boston selectman. He and attorney Josiah Quincy, Jr., chose the path of reasoning with the Crown for relief. Sam Adams, who ran the activist Long Room Club, also worked with the Loyall Nine. This was a group of prominent Bostonians who thought that more than legal proceedings and entreaties to Parliament was needed to get rid of the taxes.
As the year wound on, more people concluded that direct action was needed to get Britain’s attention. In August of 1765, a mob of colonists went to Governor Francis Barnard’s house, started a bonfire, and demanded to speak to the governor. He ignored them so they went off to other government officials’ homes, demanding a meeting. They ended up at the mansion where Lt. Governor Thomas Hutchinson lived. By now, the locals were liquored up and immediately trashed the house, destroying furniture, paintings and many priceless historical documents. Hutchinson and his family managed to get away, a good thing since the house was burned to the ground. Many historians see this violence as the tipping point that derailed the relationship between the colonists and the Crown.
The Loyall Nine became the Sons of Liberty and greatly expanded its membership. As opposition to Britain grew, people who helped collect Stamp Act taxes were publicly humiliated. John Adams, now a fairly successful lawyer, wrote a series of anonymous letters against the taxes but remained calm. His letters were published in many logical newspapers. One of his themes was that when the government refuses to listen to the governed, the people have the right to revoke the governing authority. This was the basis for the Declaration of Independence.
John Hancock helped organize united opposition that resulted in a boycott of all goods brought into the colonies. It worked and hurt the British economy. Of course, it also deprived colonists of lots of goods, including tea. In May of 1766, the Stamp Act was repealed. Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty staged the biggest fireworks show ever held in America.
That fall, John Hancock was elected to the Massachusetts General Court, the legislature.
More trouble was ahead. In June, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, which imposed taxes and sent British troops to collect them. In the summer of 1767, The Townshend Acts, which required duties to be paid before goods could leave a ship. Violations of the act would result in draconian punishment including the accused’s losing the right to a trial.
Sam Adams wanted to bring diversity to the blue-collar Sons of Liberty, which to him meant getting more upscale folks to join the cause. He encouraged Josiah Quincy to write pamphlets to recruit new members. Quincy wrote a series of essays that were published in the popular Boston Gazette. Josiah still believed that the law was the way to end British overreach, but he believed that the Sons of Liberty were doing important work.
Josiah’s brother, Sam, was offered the position of solicitor general, a prime Crown appointment. This situation was a bit off putting to the Quincy family but he was still their brother. There was some hope that Sam might become a conduit between the colonists and Parliament to try to find common ground.
In May of 1768, the first British warships arrived, full of troops looking to enforce the Declaratory Act. John Hancock, Sam Adams, and John Adams organized opposition, including sending a letter to Parliament asking for repeal of the act while still asserting allegiance to the Crown. That didn’t work, and Governor Barnard suspended the General Court.
The Lydia, the first ship carrying taxable goods, arrived in April of 1768. John Hancock met it, confronted the British customs officer, and demanded to see the paperwork for the taxes. The date was wrong so the customs official left and no taxes were collected. Everything was legal. Hancock was a hero.
The next ship, the Liberty, which was owned by John Hancock, arrived. The captain locked up the customs officer and offloaded a lot of wine. The Brits were in a snit so they seized the Liberty, which was a punishment authorized under the Townshend Acts. John Hancock was accused of various things but John Adams got him off. Hancock did lose the Liberty.
The seizing of the ship inflamed the American colonies and hardened the opposition to Britain. By the fall of the year, thousands of Redcoats had arrived in Boston. They needed places to stay and soon the citizens were fed up with having to quarter soldiers who were there to oppress them.
In late 1769, Josiah Spaulding and Abigail Phillips wed. Josiah had tuberculosis and was often under the weather but the wedding was splendid. John Hancock had been courting Dorothy Quincy, Josiah’s sister. Everybody was connected.
Josiah and John Hancock had written and sent a lot of letters off to England asking for relief from the new taxes but they were ignored. Josiah and John were gradually becoming more radical in their approach to dealing with Great Britain. Sam Adams did what he always did – going to taverns and organizing the rabble to rouse up.
Bostonians were back to boycotting British goods. There were protests but there was little violence until March, 1770. A group of British soldiers fired on hundreds of colonials protesting the rough treatment of a young boy by the Brits. Five men were killed including Crispus Attucks, a former slave.
Order had to be maintained and it was. The soldiers involved in the incident were arrested. Occupying troops relocated to Castle Island, away from downtown Boston.
The soldiers deserved a fair trial. Josiah Quincy and John Adams were their counsel. There was some pushback to this by some colonists but Adams and Quincy thought that giving the accused soldiers a good defense would perhaps convince Britain to back off. Ironically, around the time of the Boston Massacre, Parliament repealed the hated Townshend Acts, but the trial went on after a delay of many months which allowed things to cool down. Most of the soldiers were acquitted, with two being convicted on relatively minor charges. The defense argued that the mob was complicit in what happened, so the result seemed to make sense.
The Boston Massacre was used as a symbol to push back against Britain. Paul Revere created a series of tableaux images that were displayed in store windows. Virtually everyone in the city saw them. They galvanized support for the incipient rebels.
Josiah Quincy was having a very good 1771. His law practice was booming and he had become a respected voice of the opposition to the Crown’s overreach against the colonies, especially Massachusetts.
John and Abigail Adams decided to take a break from Boston to which they had moved several years earlier. They went back to their home in Braintree which gave John respite from the constant swirl of tension with Britain. His law practice continued to grow as he traveled all over Massachusetts to do work for clients. He was on the road a lot, much to the consternation of Abigail Adams.
Governor Hutchinson saw John Hancock as the key leader of the opposition. The governor offered Hancock a prime appointment as the head of the Cadet Corps, an elite military unit. Hutchinson expected that Hancock would ease up on his criticism of the Crown. It didn’t work, and the Cadet Corps commander continued to work with Sam Adams and crew to stake out American interests.
Hancock was good at organizing people and he was generous in supporting folks who needed help. He gave a lot of money to a lot of people and causes, which of course increased his credibility as a leader. John Hancock was the son of a country preacher. He had not been born to wealth so he understood that not everyone was as fortunate as he was.
By 1772, Britain had continued to pass laws and mandates that irritated the colonists. Sam Adams called for the establishment of a “Committee of Correspondence… to state the Rights of the Colonists and of this Province” and to communicate those rights to the other colonies and the world.
This committee was the organizing entity of the American Revolution. It was the Internet of the day. Their mission statement included references to the rights of life, liberty, and property, all of which would be incorporated in the Declaration of Independence four years later.
As 1773 dawned, John Adams became central to writing the rationale for the colonies’ opposition to British hard rule. He did not argue for independence but rather for Americans to have more power to govern themselves.
Governor Hutchinson saw any opposition to what he wanted to do as treason, so Adams’ entreaties did not move him. The Committee of Correspondence had become many committees of local people organizing against the Crown. The House of Burgesses in Virginia – the local legislature – signed on to John Adams’ suggestion that the colonies band together in opposition to Britain. They still were not seeking independence, but Massachusetts and Virginia were the big dogs of colonial America so this was a big deal.
Several months earlier, Josiah Quincy, Jr., set sail for South Carolina to organize opposition to British rule. He also felt that getting away from Massachusetts might help his health, which was sketchy due to his tuberculosis. After a perilous journey, he landed in Charleston and met with local leaders. He then traveled north and organized lots of people to join in the fight to have the colonies have more of a say in their relationship with Britain. Quincy thought that southerners were frivolous, but he found common ground in protecting the colonists’ interest.
John Adams, Sam Adams, and John Hancock all served in the Massachusetts legislature as they continued to work for the colonists’ interests. Governor Hutchinson was embarrassed when someone obtained and published copies of letters he had written to the English government in which he ridiculed Hancock, Sam and John Adams, and many other patriots. Josiah Quincy returned home from his work in the southern colonies and continued to write essays about the political situation.
Parliament passed the Tea Act which placed high taxes on tea that the East India Tea Company shipped to America. The Committees of Correspondence organized so that no ships could offload their tea cargo in Boston. The effort had mixed success at first. Some tea did get into Boston, but some ships just stayed in the harbor without unloading. By December of 1773, the Sons of Liberty had figured out what to do. Two thousand men stormed Griffin’s Wharf, where the tea ships were berthed, and dumped 46 tons of tea into the cold harbor waters. Other colonies passed similar prohibitions.
The Boston Tea Party really inflamed British leaders. John Hancock and Sam Adams were accused of treason. Six ships carrying seven regiments of soldiers were headed to Boston. The die was cast for the American Revolution.
In May of 1774, the ship Harmony landed in Boston Harbor carrying a proclamation – which came to be known as the Intolerable Acts - that stated that after June 1st there would be a full blockade of the port. No commerce could be done until the colonists compensated the East India Tea Company for the losses caused by the Boston Tea Party. More ships carrying more troops kept landing.
Josiah Quincy’s health was failing but he managed to write an 82-page broadside that was widely disseminated. He made an eloquent case that this time the Brits had gone too far. The public agreed. The flames for strong resistance to the Crown’s bullying were fanned. A few weeks after Josiah had published his work, Ben Franklin, who was in London, got a copy of the essay which he distributed to his friends and acquaintances in London, many of whom agreed that Parliament had gone too far.
Just as the blockade began, Thomas Gage replaced Thomas Hutchinson as governor. He clamped down the port and set up a camp for the troops on the Boston Common.
Since no ships could be offloaded in Boston, other towns including Salem, Gloucester, and Marblehead, came to Boston’s aid and supplied food and other needed goods. Soon, other colonies were sending supplies. The Intolerable Acts really unified the colonies against Great Britain. The Boston Committee of Correspondence reached out to other committees and scheduled a Continental Congress for September in Philadelphia. John Hancock was fighting a bout of gout so he did not plan on attending. John Adams and a band of patriots would represent Massachusetts.
As the harbor continued to stay closed, Boston and surrounding towns decided to boycott British authority. People refused to pay any taxes. No one would serve on juries. Communities organized local militias. Governor Gage suspended the General Court and replaced it with loyalists but he couldn't find enough willing to serve and be humiliated by the patriots. The situation had worsened.
John Adams led the delegation to the Continental Congress. It took three weeks for the group to get to Philadelphia, mainly because they stopped and spoke with colonists along the way, further organizing the opposition to Britain.
Back in Boston, Governor Gage seized warehouses full of gunpowder and ammunition. He tried to build housing for his troops but local carpenters refused to work for him. Troops kept coming to Boston, along with artillery pieces.
The Suffolk Resolves, which were written by patriot leaders, called for a boycott of British goods and the creation of a carrier system to spread information among the colonies. In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress approved the Resolves for the rest of the colonies as well as passing many measures that brought the colonies closer together in a loose network.
Since the governor had suspended the General Court, John Hancock organized a Provincial Congress of 260 men from all over the colony. He was made head of the Committee on Safety and raised a militia. He also developed a new tax system that would raise money for Massachusetts independent of the Crown. This was a major step on the road to freedom.
John Adams and his retinue returned to Boston in early November, greeted as heroes. They were looking forward to the Second Continental Congress that would convene in May, 1775.
In the fall of 1774, Josiah Quincy sailed to England to personally make the case for fairer treatment for the colonies. He got there in mid-November and promptly met with Ben Franklin, who helped him schedule meetings with important people. He met with Lord North, the British prime minister, who was not sympathetic. Quincy also spoke with William Pitt, George Saville, and other members of Parliament. King George regularly railed against the upstart colonies. In early January, Parliament met, but there were only a few members who were at all sympathetic to the American cause.
Josiah soon figured out that there was little hope of peaceful reconciliation. The colonists were seen as bad people who were being mean and unreasonable. Quincy, who had never been to England, realized that the mother country was very different from the American colonies. There was a wide cultural and political chasm between the two regions. In March of 1775, Quincy left London for Boston, knowing that war was inevitable.
In Boston, Hancock convened the Provincial Congress, which had grown to 300 members. Rumors flew that Hancock and his colleagues were about to be arrested. British troops, who were bored and hungry, outnumbered Boston residents. There were ongoing tensions and occasional skirmishes.
John Hancock saw that conflict was imminent. He increased the size of the militia and seized artillery and shells from the British army. Things were getting nasty in Boston, with British troops threatening to destroy his house. In April, the family relocated to Lexington. By the middle of the month, British troops were on the march to Lexington, where the Hancocks had gone for safety. John’s fiancée, Dolly, and his aunt, Lydia, relocated to a minister’s parsonage where they would be protected from whatever happened. John wanted to fight at Lexington but Sam Adams spirited him away from where the action would be.
Early in the morning of April 19, 1775, on Lexington Green, the British commander demanded that the rebel militia disperse. They didn’t. The war had begun. The next morning, 15,000 American militiamen, from all over New England, assembled in Cambridge.
The Hancocks relocated to Worcester. Josiah Quincy’s wife, Abigail, and their son, Josiah III, went to Connecticut to get away from the war. A few days earlier, the Quincy’s young daughter, Abigail, had died, probably of smallpox which was raging. On April 26, Josiah Quincy, II, finally arrived in Gloucester Harbor after an arduous trip from England. He was very ill and died aboard the ship before he could go ashore.
The Massachusetts Continental Congress delegation headed off to Philadelphia, cheered on by people from each of the colonies they traveled through. John Hancock still was not well but he was with his colleagues, looking forward to the discussion about America’s future. Hancock ended up president of the Congress, with John Adams working behind the scenes as needed. Hancock was seen as a moderate, while Sam and John Adams were more radical.
The summer of 1775 was hot all over the colonies. Philadelphia was stifling and there was a drought in eastern Massachusetts. Boston still received no food through its port and farmers began to worry that a crop failure would be catastrophic.
On June 17, Abigail Adams heard loud cannon fire coming from Boston. Colonial troops were defending Breed’s Hill in the battle that would be known as Bunker Hill. The rebels abandoned the hill but the British paid a high price in casualties. Dr. Joseph Warren, a key leader of the patriots and a close friend of the Adams family, was killed in the fight.
On July 3, George Washington of Virginia took command of the colonial militia on Cambridge Common. The Continental Congress had authorized his appointment as the leader of the rebel army. Washington was very tall and looked good on a horse. He gave the troops a rousing speech, asserting that, no matter where they lived, they were now fighting for the common good. He spent some time turning a ragtag assemblage of farmers and merchants into an effective military force.
The Congress continued to meet, cobbling together a new nation. John and Abigail Adams exchanged letters frequently, with his correspondence being the best source of information about what was happening in Philadelphia. The group decided to send a sealed letter to the king, making a final case for more freedom. At the same time, a declaration of war was drafted and sent to the colonies.
Hancock’s gout was acting up again. He wanted to come home and meet with Washington, but George insisted that Hancock stay and do the important business in Philadelphia.
Boston was a mess. People were starving to death and the British were arresting a lot of people for no good reason. Dysentery, a very nasty intestinal disease, descended on the town. Each day, more and more loyalists left Boston, often to return to England.
The Second Continental Congress adjourned in early August. Delegates returned home to wait to see if King George would be reasonable.
John Hancock, who had steered the Continental Congress into essentially creating the foundation for a new country, returned home as a hero to many Bostonians. He used that status to implore people to provide whatever they could for the fight. The response was overwhelming.
Taking a break from his nation-building activities, on August 28, 1775, John Hancock married Dolly, his long-time girlfriend. Shortly after the wedding, they took off to Philadelphia for the second session of the Second Continental Congress. John’s gout had returned so Dolly helped him out by acting as clerk for her husband.
In September, Governor Gage was recalled to England for not having quickly defeated the rebels. In October, British ships attacked Falmouth on Cape Cod and burned the town to the ground. Destroying Falmouth motivated the Americans. Congress informally encouraged privateers to attack and seize any British ships and their cargo. The small American ships were very adept at seizing larger British vessels, especially those carrying arms and ammunition which were desperately needed by the rebels.
Any chance for peace was long gone. Abigail Adams realized that this would be a long and bitter war.
Washington was running out of men so he authorized Blacks to be in the army, a fairly radical notion at the time. He also begged John Hancock, who was literally in charge of the fledgling government, to send more ammunition and supplies. Finally, Washington successfully implored political leaders to let him drive the British out of Boston.
General Henry Knox led a band of soldiers to Fort Ticonderoga, NY, to seize British cannon and shells. It took fifty days, but he brought 60 tons of armament across hundreds of snowy miles in miserable weather in the winter of 1776 to Dorchester Heights. Knox literally had to sneak the artillery past British lines at night to get the job done. The Americans secretly built two forts on the Heights which overlooked Boston. In early March, the cannons and howitzers opened fire and rained death and chaos on the Redcoats who were totally unprepared for the assault. The artillery emplacements were up too high for the British guns to reach so it wasn’t a fair fight.
The cannon fire woke up people in Braintree, including Abigail Adams. She and others soon got word of what was going on and they were thrilled. Finally, the good guys were striking back. After two days of shells raining down on the Redcoats, the British asked Washington for a truce so that they could withdraw their troops from Boston in an orderly fashion. The deal was struck.
The victorious rebels reoccupied Boston and found relatively little damage. The residents were weary and literally shell-shocked, but they were delighted to welcome their soldiers.
In February of 1776, John Hancock began to draft a “Declaration of Independence” from Great Britain. Abigail Adams, who had been responsible for managing the family farm during John’s many absences, had become an early feminist of sorts. She found it unacceptable that women were denied the same rights as men. She asked John Hancock and other prominent patriots to spell out in their Declaration that women had equal rights to men. That didn’t happen. Hancock and his colleagues were probably supportive, but the document would have to get approved by thirteen colonies, most of which did not see women as equal to men.
During the spring of 1776, more and more members of the Second Continental Congress came to believe that complete separation from Britain was the only course forward. Hancock and the Massachusetts delegation had come to believe this a lot earlier, but everyone had to be onboard.
John Hancock led the development of instructions for a new nation, with the thirteen colonies each organizing their state’s government. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee, a firebrand from Virginia, submitted a resolution that all allegiance to Great Britain “ought to be dissolved.” John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were part of a committee tasked with drafting the formal Declaration of Independence.
The committee made Jefferson the primary writer. He wasn’t more eloquent than John Adams or the others, but he was southerner, and those colonies would be the hardest to convince to sever ties with Britain.
They did a good job.
The colonial Congress debated the language of the finished declaration in early July, with closed windows to keep things private. It was pretty hot. After nine hours of continuous debate, the motion was called for a vote.
John Adams was really nervous. He knew that many delegates were still skittish about becoming completely independent. He was pleasantly surprised when some of the delegates from Pennsylvania who were against the resolution chose not to vote so their colony ended up supporting independence without full voting participation. The southern states surprised Adams by universally supporting independence, but they had some problems with one provision.
Jefferson had written a strong anti-slavery paragraph which slaveholders were not wild about. The leaders decided that the next day there would be an opportunity to change some language. On July 3, the slavery reference was removed and the stage was set for the final vote. On July 4, the Second Continental Congress unanimously approved the Declaration of Independence.
Upon hearing about the vote, people in each of the thirteen former colonies celebrated long into the night.
The rest is indeed history.
Bob’s Take
A great take. I’ve read a lot of books on the colonial period and the War for Independence. This is the best one in terms of giving the reader an incisive overview of what-happened-when and who-did-what to create the nation that became the United States of America.
I thank Jack from the Cape for giving me this book for Christmas. He has great taste in beer and books, among other things.
Travel was really challenging. Horses did most of the heavy lifting for their human passengers. It could take many days to go 150 miles. John Adams’ legal work took him all over New England. He spent days getting from court to court. He wasn’t home much.
It’s a miracle that we won. On paper, Great Britain, the most powerful nation in the world, should have swatted down the revolution. It didn’t turn out that way. John Hancock, John and Sam Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, Dr. Joseph Warren, and many others stepped up big-time and met each of the challenges of defeating the superpower of the day.
The founders included slave owners, and they didn’t give women equal rights. But, without their success in separating from Great Britain, millions of people from all over the world would have lost a lot of opportunities over the centuries to be all that they could be.
John Hancock and George Washington were the right people at the right time to lead the revolution. Washington thought Sam and John Adams were too radical for his genteel Virginia sensibilities, but he really liked John Hancock, who was more pragmatic. Hancock essentially hired Washington to run the army. They had a good relationship.
John Hancock was special. I had no idea what a monumental and important historical figure John Hancock was. He was the glue that kept all of the disparate elements of colonial America together enough to form a new nation. He came from humble roots as the son of a preacher. After his parents died young, he was raised in a wealthy home that opened up great opportunities to him. He was savvy enough to seize them and do great things for the new nation.
Hancock literally wrote the blueprint for the new country. He had great negotiating skills that he used to keep everyone sort of happy. He threaded the needle with the British governors and leaders of the Massachusetts colony, and he figured out how to get the southern colonies supportive of the new nation.
There are very few books about John Hancock. Unlike John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., he didn’t write many letters, so there’s little primary source research material available. The books that have been written about Hancock tended to be critical because the sources the authors selected were negative tabloid newspaper columns.
The Knox Trail. In 1975-76, I was the official photographer of the Massachusetts Bicentennial Commission. (I of course got the job because I was the best photographer, not because I was tight with the guy who headed up the commission.)
One of the major events of the commission was reenacting Henry Knox’s cannon trek across New York and Massachusetts. In January of 1976, I accompanied the reenactors as they dragged heavy artillery across the winter tundra. It was snowy and really cold, with temperatures way below zero. I had three Nikon cameras that took turns freezing to the point that they wouldn’t work. I learned how to use my body heat to keep those suckers semi-functional.
I was amazed that I was being paid to take pictures on the trip. It was great fun.
Wedding days. John Hancock married Dolly on August 28, 1775. I married Susan on August 28, 1976. Coincidence? I think not.
