The underappreciated Founding Father answered radicalism with restraint, polarization with compromise.
The underappreciated Founding Father answered radicalism with restraint, polarization with compromise.
King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father, by Brooke Barbier (Harvard, 320 pages, $29.95)
I n the popular American imagination, John Hancock is remembered as little more than a signature. His ostentatious penmanship on the Declaration of Independence is recognized far more widely than any of his political accomplishments, philosophical inclinations, or personal exploits. But in the eyes of Brooke Barbier, a public historian whose work focuses on the American Revolution, Hancock was a man as enterprising and contradictory in nature as the nation he helped found. In her new book, King Hancock, she uses his life as a window into America’s struggle for independence and its subsequent emergence as a self-governing power. More than a simple biography, what Barbier has developed is a rollicking portrait of the entire Revolutionary Era, Hancock placed at its center. She chronicles his life in a style that is thorough yet concise, dedicating equal attention to his psychology and the grand historical episodes in which he was involved. Her thesis is that Hancock was a political moderate who shaped the American Founding by balancing radicalism with restraint — a notion germane to our own age of extreme polarization.
In the book’s initial chapters, we’re guided through Hancock’s childhood and somewhat restless early life. Orphaned at age seven, Hancock was adopted into the opulent Boston home of his Uncle Thomas, a merchant who had made a fortune supplying lead to the British Empire. As he came of age, Hancock acquired his uncle’s extravagant taste in fashion and decor, and soon developed an equally fine appetite for alcohol and sex. Eventually, he inherited his uncle’s business, the House of Hancock. At age 27, he had become one of the wealthiest men in New England and ascended to local fame in Massachusetts. But loneliness and an unmet need for acceptance haunted his rise to prominence. Throughout his life, Hancock was an alienated man who never fully recovered from the death of his father or from his subsequent estrangement from his mother. Barbier describes how Hancock spent his adulthood seeking real connection, which eluded him despite regular liaisons with women. Even when war consumed the colonies, it “did not stop Hancock from wanting to feel loved.”
There’s no trace of amateur psychology here. Barbier’s discussions of Hancock’s feelings and inner life are always grounded in the words of her subject and those closest to him, and they illuminate how he found success as a public figure despite his insecurities. We learn that Hancock used clothing as a façade to conceal his isolation and gain influence over his peers. He dressed to transcend the barriers of social class. Carefully selecting his outfits allowed him to appeal to elites and impoverished Americans alike, depending on his ambitions of the moment. On business, he decorated himself in fine silks and “heavily embroidered jackets” to project an image of power and control. Later, at his inauguration as the first governor of Massachusetts, he wore a plain suit to “look simpler and more like a man of the people” who had chosen him to lead.
As Hancock’s life unfolds, Barbier guides us through the formative events of the American Revolution. We follow him as he navigates the enactment of the Stamp Act and the Townshend Duties, the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the colonists’ eventual victory in the Revolutionary War. Barbier’s literary sensibilities distinguish the book from other histories of the period. Her style, though largely humorless, is fluent and sharply focused, with paragraphs that flow at the brisk pace of an adventure novel. She brings people and locations to life in a manner redolent of great fiction, and her vividly detailed descriptions of Boston in particular can inflame the senses. “The scents of saltwater, tar, brewing beer, burning wood, and animals and their excrement pounded his olfactory system,” she writes of Hancock’s arrival in the city. “Church bells clanged their unique peals, fishermen hawked their recent catches, horse hooves clomped through the street, the town crier barked out notices, and vendors rang their tinny handheld bells while pushing rattling carts. It was a crowded, smelly, and boisterous town.”
Barbier reveals that Hancock had little interest in politics throughout much of the revolution; he was more concerned with his continued financial gain than with potential infringements of his rights. When the Stamp Act passed in 1765, he reacted with indifference, believing that the colonists were “obligated to obey Parliament’s laws.” Gradually, he changed his mind, but only as the act began to interfere with his business. He made philosophical arguments against it purely to “shroud his pecuniary interests” and had no desire to give up his trading relationship with Britain. As talk of American independence grew, he distanced himself from the Sons of Liberty and radicals such as Samuel Adams, much to their frustration. He was elected to the Massachusetts house of representatives following the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, but Barbier stresses that he became a politician to “feel people’s affection” and gain prestige, not to “spend considerable time on political matters.” By the time of his fourth election to the house in 1770, he had become entirely detached from the revolutionary cause.
The book is perhaps most striking in its portrayal of Hancock as a man driven by opportunism rather than principle. After Parliament in 1773 passed the Tea Act, which required the colonists to buy tea exclusively from the British East India Company, Hancock reengaged with politics. He opposed the legislation because it interfered with his ability to “import and profit from the commodity”; money, not ideology, dictated his decision. He soon began working with the revolutionaries to interfere with British tea shipments and recruiting working-class rebels to participate in the Boston Tea Party. He publicly endorsed unification of the colonies, declaring that the “struggle for liberty would end well for America.” When the war officially began, he relocated to Philadelphia and became president of the Continental Congress. In early 1776, however, he refused to support independence from the crown, again out of fear that separating from the British Empire would prove disastrous for his business. As the conflict intensified, he eventually acquiesced, signing the Declaration of Independence and recognizing its significance. He remained in politics after the revolution, spending most of his final years as governor of Massachusetts.
It’s difficult to tell whether Barbier regards Hancock as a sympathetic figure. Though she repeatedly stresses that self-interest animated much of his life, she also explores the noble aspects of his character. We learn, for instance, that he became ardently opposed to slavery in his later life and tried to fight the practice in Massachusetts. The “lower orders” had been fundamental to his election, and he worked to help the “poor and middling” by taking a lax approach to tax collection and the enforcement of unpopular laws at a time of great economic strain. He found success as governor by appealing to both this group and the elite class to which he belonged. For Barbier, this is proof of her overriding thesis in King Hancock: He was a “man who avoided extremes,” his moderation being beneficial not only to him but to his country. He distilled the radical ideas of his fellow founders into a form more palatable for the masses and had the charisma to express those ideas persuasively.
This is certainly a pertinent point. Intense partisanship has become an inescapable reality of contemporary American politics. On the left and right alike, extremists and ideologues have been emboldened while moderate voices go ignored. Consequently, factions within both parties are unable to reach consensus with one another, and neither party can build and advance a sensible agenda that will appeal to a majority. Our current lack of cooperation between radicals and moderates has yielded an increasingly bitter and dysfunctional political climate, in which performative shouting matches are a common substitute for serious legislation in the halls of Congress. Barbier observes that Hancock found a middle way to navigate the challenges of American independence. Through compromise and negotiation, Republicans and Democrats could do the same to resolve the issues of today. But they would rather indulge the worst excesses of their respective fringes than engage in serious governance.
Unfortunately, Barbier develops this thesis sporadically throughout the book. Chapters usually end with a reminder of Hancock’s moderate tendencies, but she gives too few examples of how his ability to resist radicalism and streamline revolutionary thought affected the course of the revolution or helped popularize certain ideas. We’re told repeatedly that Hancock possessed this skill, but it mostly seems to manifest in the context of class, where he manages to appeal to both rich and poor Americans without adopting the extreme views of either group. As embarrassing as many of our supposed political thought leaders may be, it’s difficult to view Hancock as an aspirational figure for modern times, given his tendency to exploit those around him for personal gain.
Indeed, the equally timely themes of political virtue and political responsibility are present in King Hancock but often overlooked. When Hancock became governor of Massachusetts, his inauguration was a sober political ceremony that quickly morphed into a bacchanal. Attendees “drank thirteen toasts, each followed by a cannon firing,” and danced and gorged until sunset. Samuel Adams saw this display of excess as an affront to the public virtue that the newly independent America demanded, while John Adams decried Hancock’s “demagoguery and materialism.” Though much of the acrimony between the men stemmed from petty grievances, the Adamses’ concerns seem prescient. There’s a widespread disregard for decency and decorum among our modern political class, which appears incapable of providing a model of virtuous behavior for the broader public to emulate. Members of Congress and other public officials wield great power but regularly treat their positions without a shred of seriousness. This disregard for responsibility is spreading corrosively through our civic institutions. Barbier offers minimal analysis of whether John and Samuel Adams were right to decry Hancock’s public persona. But examining whether he treated his role with appropriate seriousness, and what the implications of that were for the burgeoning American republic, could have illuminated much about the man and where the country he helped establish stands today.
King Hancock is a lively and fiercely researched biography of a Founding Father who deserves greater scholarly attention. Yet it ultimately leaves an uncertain impression of its subject. Hancock appears roguish and manipulative but charming in his speech, admirable in his intelligence, and sympathetic in his struggle for connection. His life is always compelling to follow, but Barbier’s argument that it was defined by moderation lacks development and is consequently limited in its broader political and historical applications. Nonetheless, in a divided time, King Hancock is a necessary reminder of restraint as a response to radicalism and of compromise as an antidote to polarization. Beneath that, as a study of a neglected figure who played a central role in the American Founding, it’s irresistibly enjoyable to read. Hancock would be pleased to find himself remembered as more than faded ink on a yellowing page.