Hancock family.

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, a Boston bookseller. In 1724, he opened his own bookshop, “The Bible & Three Crowns,” in the North End of Boston. The conditions of trade at that time-the lack of currency and the resort to barter-compelled Thomas Hancock into more varied business activities. Hancock 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, a leading Boston bookseller. They jointly purchased large consignments of paper and supplies, which allowed Hancock to establish his own credit. They also published works on questions of the day. Thomas Hancock married Henchman’s daughter Lydia in 1730.

Between 1746 and 1758 Hancock and his partner, Charles Apthorp, furnished supplies to all the British forces in Nova Scotia. 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's health declined, and he died in1764. He left 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, of Braintree. After his father's death in 1744, John was sent to live with his uncle and aunt, Thomas and Lydia Hancock, in Lexington. He was sent to Harvard College, graduating in1754, and then joined Thomas in business. In 1760, John was sent to London for nearly a year to learn the English end of the business. 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’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 resolved itself 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 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, caused him to take valuable time and attention away from his business. He was forced to rely increasingly on subordinates. Although he tried to resume his business activities after the Revolution, he was not very successful. When John Hancock died in 1793, at the age of fifty-six, he was still a wealthy man, but he had considerably depleted the fortune he inherited from Thomas Hancock.

The business concerns of John’s younger brother Ebenezer Hancock (1741-1819) are also represented in the collection. Upon Thomas Hancock's death in 1764, Ebenezer received £666 and three thousand acres of land in Maine. He set up a shop in the retail business, in partnership with Edward Blanchard. The business failed by 1768, however. With the help of his brother John, Ebenezer was set up in a new hardware business shop. Thanks to his brother, he was Deputy Paymaster General for the eastern department during the Revolution. He inherited a third of John Hancock's estate in 1793, including John's Beacon Hill mansion, known as Hancock House.

The last two Hancock family members represented in the collection are John Hancock’s nephews, named Thomas and John Hancock. They set up business in 1793 and announced that they were carrying on the family firm. However, there was little continuity, as the brothers dealt in cotton and tobacco, rather than in general trade. Their accounts and correspondence provide an interesting look into nineteenth century industry.