King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father
​A rollicking portrait of the paradoxical patriot, whose measured pragmatism helped make American independence a reality.
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“A concise and highly readable biography…[Hancock’s] legacy is very much worth our remembering.”―William Anthony Hay, Wall Street Journal
“[An] approachable biography…American history buffs will enjoy the immersive portrait of Boston’s Revolutionary era.”―Publishers Weekly
“King Hancock is a vastly enjoyable work of popular history that wears its impressive scholarship lightly. It deftly explains the wider forces that unraveled the colonists’ close bonds with the mother country… The book also features an almost tactile account of what it was like to live in Boston in the eighteenth century.”―Marc M. Arkin, New Criterion
“Brings careful nuance and deep historical context to a figure known by most Americans only for his larger-than-life signature on the Declaration of Independence…Hancock emerges as a fully fleshed-out human being, replete with virtues and flaws both typical and atypical for his time, and driven not just by high ideals and momentous events but also by the mundane trivialities, petty hardships, and simple pleasures of eighteenth-century life.”―Donald F. Johnson, American Historical Review
WINNER New England Historical Association Book Award 2024
WINNER New England Society Nonfiction Book Award 2024
FINALIST Herbert J. Storing 2024 Book Prize
HONORABLE MENTION Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award 2024
Americans are surprisingly more familiar with his famous signature than with the man himself. In this spirited account of John Hancock’s life, Brooke Barbier depicts a patriot of fascinating contradictions—a child of enormous privilege who would nevertheless become a voice of the common folk; a pillar of society uncomfortable with radicalism who yet was crucial to independence. About two-fifths of the American population held neutral or ambivalent views about the Revolution, and Hancock spoke for them and to them, bringing them along.
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Orphaned young, Hancock was raised by his merchant uncle, whose business and vast wealth he inherited—including household slaves, whom Hancock later freed. By his early thirties, he was one of New England’s most prominent politicians, earning a place on Britain’s most-wanted list and the derisive nickname King Hancock. While he eventually joined the revolution against England, his ever moderate—and moderating—disposition would prove an asset after 1776. Barbier shows Hancock appealing to southerners and northerners, Federalists and Anti-Federalists. He was a famously steadying force as president of the fractious Second Continental Congress. He parlayed with French military officials, strengthening a key alliance with his hospitable diplomacy. As governor of Massachusetts, Hancock convinced its delegates to vote for the federal Constitution and calmed the fallout from the shocking Shays’s Rebellion.
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An insightful study of leadership in the revolutionary era, King Hancock traces a moment when passion was on the side of compromise and accommodation proved the basis of profound social and political change.