I used to prefer “history” to “historical fiction” until I learned that “history” can be so dependent on the perspective of the writer that sometimes it is hardly more “objective” than fiction. Historians have perceptual and linguistic biases filtered through the current social and political agendas. Most importantly, what they choose to <em>omit</em> can be critical. The determination of what is <em>relevant</em> has enormous consequences in helping to fashion the contours of history.

I was particularly struck by the selection of which facts were relevant and which should be omitted in this new history of John Hancock.

Willard Sterne Randall, thanks to recently digitalized archives of Hancock’s papers as well as those of other Founders, paints a portrait of a John Hancock as an excellent businessman, a selfless philanthropist, and a major shaper of American political development. He also explores Hancock’s relationship with other Founding Fathers. He refutes critics from previous influential biographical essays that claimed Hancock and the others did not get along.

Randall also wants to shape our perception of the actions taken by Hancock and his fellow patriots in Massachusetts against British authority, but in a decidedly positive way. Thus he highlights some aspects of this time in America, but casts other into shadow.

From the beginning, there are blatant omissions.

Take, for example, this description of Thomas Hancock’s business (Thomas was John’s uncle and he raised John, who followed in his practices):

“Turning to international bartering, Thomas commissioned shipbuilding. He sent lumber to treeless Newfoundland, traded it for salted cod to sell to plantation owners in the French West Indies and exchanged the cod for molasses to send to Holland for distilling into rum. Then he imported the rum to sell in his Boston emporium.”

Notice anything missing?

The French Indies played a key role in the infamous “slavery triangle.” Sugar was the main crop produced on plantations throughout the Caribbean in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe. Most islands were covered with sugar cane fields, and mills for refining it. The main source of labor was enslaved Africans.

Overall some four million slaves were brought to the Caribbean to work directly or indirectly in the sugar industry. Between 12 and 25% of slaves died on British ships on the way from Africa to the Caribbean colonies. The slaves arrived to harsh conditions, with extremely high mortality rates - not only from the difficulty of the work but from abuse - both physical and sexual; disease; and malnutrition. Debilitating work injuries from the machetes and boiling vats were common. The plantocracy opted for “replacement” of slaves, cheaper than actually improving conditions for them.

Randall would have us admire the Hancock family’s business acumen without knowing about that aspect *at all.*

Randall also bruits Hancock’s point of view that British tariffs and taxes were unfair, and the customs service officials administering them were unscrupulous, abusing seizure powers for personal gain. This might have been so, but the reality was a bit more nuanced. As historian Harlow Giles Unger points out in his story of the Boston Tea Party (“American Tempest”), the real issue Bostonians had with taxation issues and writs of assistance (or search warrants) was that they interfered with the huge smuggling operations which had been making them exceedingly rich. The purpose of the smuggling was to avoid paying any tax or duties to the Crown.

As an example, Unger points out that at the time of the passage of the inflammatory Molasses Act of 1733, rum was New England’s most popular drink. To make it, New England merchants smuggled an estimated 1.5 million gallons of molasses a year. They should have paid 37,500 pounds in duties for this molasses, which amounted to only three percent of their gross revenues. The proposed six-pence-per-gallon duty would have cut their gross profits from 1,200 percent to 1,161.5 percent! *This* is what caused Bostonians to get so incensed about their “natural right” to import cheap, duty-free molasses from the French, Spanish, and Dutch West Indies! (And it was so cheap, of course, because it was produced by slave labor.)

Hancock had amassed enormous wealth by smuggling molasses, along with glass, lead, paper, and tea. But he stood to lose the most from imports of English tea, driving his political ardor which was couched in more idealistic terms about “freedom.”

[Nevertheless, on top of not wanting to pay any taxes, the colonists expected the British to pay for (without any contributions from them) some 10,000 British regulars guarding the western frontier, the British navy protecting the eastern coast.]

I could go on in this vein to illustrate how selective and biased this history is, but I should add there is also much commendable about this biography. The large role Hancock played in the early years of America was not so well known, but Randall brings to light how he changed business and political practices in ways that spread throughout the colonies.

The biography is also brief compared to those of other Founders, but the brevity makes for a more sprightly account with a honed focus on matters of importance to the early country. And Hancock’s life and times are undoubtedly fascinating. It does fill a gap in scholarship about that time, and if read in conjunction with other accounts offering different perspectives, it makes an excellent addition to any library of early America.

BOOK REVIEW: John Hancock: First to Sign, First to Invest in America’s Independence by Willard Sterne Randall (Dutton, 2025).

Trends of historical research over the past few decades have steadily moved away from the “Great Man” study of the past that produced a slew of works on singular characters of important periods in favor of an approach that focuses on the periphery of societies. Still, from the amount of biographies and character studies released in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it will probably come as a surprise to the reader that a name as famous in the founding mythology of the United States as John Hancock would be largely ignored. This work, John Hancock: First to Sign, First to Invest in America’s Independence, is noted biographer Willard Sterne Randall’s attempt to remedy this omission.

The early twentieth century saw the rise of an economic interpretation of the American Revolution popularized by Charles Beard; caught up in that generalized dismissal of the elite leaders of the Revolutionary movement was Hancock. Randall points out instances such as a scathing piece in the Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1930 that excoriated the Boston merchant, reducing him to his wealth and his well-known gout, a secondary indication of his social status as one of the colonies’ richest men. Hancock has long been notable as one of the most understudied figures among the founding fathers, something that has only been partially remedied in the past few decades with works such as Harlow Unger’s John Hancock: Merchant King (2000) and most recently Brooke Barbier’s King Hancock (2023). Still, despite receiving more attention than in previous decades of scholarship, the prevailing view of Hancock remained that of a foppish dandy rather than a foundational figure of the Revolution.

One reason for this lack of representation is the relative lack of documentation for Hancock’s early and more personal life, particularly when compared to the wealth of sources available for the top tier of founding figures such as John Adams or George Washington. Randall also points out that previous biographers had overly relied on the writings of the wealthy Bostonian’s political enemies. Working under some of the constraints of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, Randall relied on much of the recently digitized archival material that has gone so far in democratizing the research and writing process. These research limits do, however, noticeably impact the depth and length of this work; it comes in at only 288 pages in its printed version, short for a full-length biography and short by the standards of Randall when compared to his popular works on other founding figures.

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This brevity is most apparent in the opening section covering Hancock’s early life. Only three short chapters cover his days before taking over a prominent trading house from his extremely wealthy uncle. The heady days of growing discontent and revolutionary rhetoric of the 1760s are addressed in Chapters 4 through 6 before getting into the meat of any discussion on Hancock, which must include his role as a rebel leader and time as president of the Second Continental Congress, covered in Chapters 7 through 13. The work finishes out with a brief overview of Hancock’s role as the first governor of Massachusetts and his political work in trying to set precedents for democratically-elected government in his home state.

In John Hancock: First to Sign, First to Invest in America’s Independence readers will get an easily digestible reassessment of the contributions of a man often overlooked in the story of how the United States came to be. What the reader will not get is a deeply detailed look into the private life of Hancock or a highly nuanced interpretation of his life and times. Notably for any work produced in the last several decades, Randall does not attempt to investigate the relationship of the Hancocks with the institution of slavery.

He also presents an image of the loud, early supporter of a break with Britain which contrasts with the more consensus view that Hancock was a moderate who was happy to profit from his relationship with the mother country until the various crises of the 1760s impacted his personal economy, and who often vacillated between the two points until relatively late in the game, at least when compared to radicals like Samuel Adams. At times the tone of this work can verge on the hagiographical, harkening back to an era of American biographies that contributed to the mythologizing of the founding era. The most apparent example of this is the uncritical presentation of Hancock’s well-known generosity as simple philanthropy rather than as a likely well-considered political tool.

Yet, even with these limitations, Randall’s biography succeeds in one crucial respect: it places John Hancock back into the core of the Revolutionary story, not as a footnote with a flamboyant signature, but as a consequential actor whose wealth, charisma, and political maneuvering deserve renewed attention. As a merchant, Hancock was integral to the economy of America’s most important port city, and as a politician he guided a fractured colonial legislative body toward a final break with Great Britain and molded the political atmosphere of Massachusetts in its earliest years. When revolutionary principles seemed to be dying in the post-war years leading to one of the first major challenges to newly established government in Shay’s Rebellion, Hancock was the man, sick and beaten down from a lifelong battle with gout, who returned to executive office as the only political figure with enough popularity to bring his state back together.

In that sense, this biography is not just a study of Hancock – it is a reminder of how easily history can overlook even the most visible figures. While this may not be the definitive work on Hancock’s life, it still has incredible value as an accessible and much-needed entry point into the life of a critical founding figure often reduced to a signature. As a narrative, this is an important gateway for readers into Revolutionary-era scholarship.

Offering a fresh perspective on the life of John Hancock, this engaging and informative biography reveals his pivotal role in the American Revolution. The book covers his business success, political career, and personal life, exploring his significant but often overlooked leadership and financial contributions to the independence movement.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

John Hancock First to Sign, First to Invest in America's Independence by Willard Sterne Randall was received directly from the publisher and I chose to review it. John Hancock, a rather famous founding father that no one really seems to know much about as there have been few books or movies about him, until now. This book details all of the major occurrences in the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party to the battles of Lexington and Concord, onward to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, all had Hancock’s influence. The man helped make America what it was. Funny how I dont recall being taught about him ways never taught in the history books. I am not saying he wasnt mentioned, we all know he was the first to sign the Declaration and independence and made his signature legible. I recommend this book to be put on the family library shelves for each child to read at some point.

I received an ARC (advanced reader copy) of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review on my Goodreads page. Mr. Randall is known for his many wonderful biographies and histories of the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary period. This book was a sorely needed modern day biography of one of the most little known Founding Fathers, John Hancock. I read a biography on Hancock last year that left a terrible impression of him as a snob, among other things. This biography was much more cheerful and showed just how essential Hancock was to the success of the Revolution and ultimately, the ratification of the Constitution. From his birth to his death, this book succinctly and chronologically covers Hancock's life. Many times historians will get too technical in their biographies, but this book was easy to read and enjoyable. It would be appropriate for reading for both the casual history buff and the more seasoned history reader. I especially enjoyed how the author put modern day dollar amounts when discussing money which in this instance, really supplied a great deal of modern perspective to just how much money Hancock spent on charity and the Revolution out of his own pocket. The book also gave the reader insight into the historical events surrounding the subject without being overpowering in this regard. Highly recommend this book!

My review can be found at: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7432515762

If you are looking for a relatively simple and informative read about one of the main leaders of our nations first pass at government, this is a very solid choice. Randall is an established biographer who knows how craft well and it’s a very enjoyable and well researched look into Hancock’s life.

I did find the book quite repetitive and overly positive at times. Hancock often reads as a well loved man who was popular but there is little critical feedback of how his peers viewed him and how he managed some of the horrific parts of this early country such as slavery and the take over of Native American lands. Very little in here also tested the politics of the age which would have helped many stories in this book. I know the author was trying to provide a different look into Hancock’s life but I think it went too far to celebrate him as a heroic figure vs a real person with nuance. Much of the book about his gout was over done and went on for too long of a time.

Overall, this is a solid biography and I learned a lot about Hancock not previously taught in history classes so worth a quick read given he is one of the main revolutionary figures.