John Hancock
John Hancock's signature on the United States Declaration of Independence, affixed in 1776, stands as one of the most recognizable in American history.
Hancock was born in Braintree in January 1737. He was educated at Boston Latin School before going on to Harvard College, a path that prepared him for a career in commerce and public life. After his schooling he built a career as a merchant, eventually moving into the roles of politician and statesperson that would come to define much of his public life. Those overlapping careers carried him through some of the most consequential decades in American history, and he remained active across both commercial and governmental spheres for much of his adult life.
Beyond his work as a politician and statesperson, Hancock was recognized by his peers in other ways. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an acknowledgment of his standing among the civic and intellectual figures of his era. His occupations as merchant, politician, and statesperson were not neatly sequential but ran alongside one another, and he moved between those responsibilities across several decades of active public life.
Hancock died on October 8, 1793, at Hancock Manor. His life had taken him from his birthplace in Braintree through two of Boston's established educational institutions and then into a long career spanning commerce and government. The signature that opened this biography remains the most concrete artifact connecting him to the founding of the United States — a single physical act, performed in 1776, that has kept his name in circulation long after his death at Hancock Manor in the autumn of 1793.
Quotes by John Hancock
Resistance to tyranny becomes the Christian and social duty of each individual… Continue steadfast and, with a proper sense of your dependence on God, nobly defend those rights which heaven gave, and no man ought to take from us.
people who pay greater respect to a wealthy villain than to an honest, upright man in poverty, almost deserve to be enslaved; they plainly show that wealth, however it may be acquired, is, in their esteem, to be preferred to virtue.
We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling different ways; we must hang together.
Some boast of being friends to government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny.
The more people who own little businesses of their own, the safer our country will be, and the better off its cities and towns; for the people who have a stake in their country and their community are its best citizens.
In circumstances as dark as these, it becomes us, as Men and Christians, to reflect that whilst every prudent measure should be taken to ward off the impending judgments, ...at the same time all confidence must be withheld from the means we use; and reposed only on that God rules in the armies of Heaven, and without His whole blessing, the best human counsels are but foolishness.
Sensible of the importance of Christian piety and virtue to the order and happiness of a state, I cannot but earnestly commend to you every measure for their support and encouragement ... Manners, by which not only the freedom, but the very existence of the republics, are greatly affected, depend much upon the public institutions of religion and the good education of youth; in both these instances our fathers laid wise foundations, for which their posterity have had reason to bless their memory.
I urge you by all this is dear, by all that is honorable, by all that is sacred, not only that you pray but also that you act!