over so many social dinner parties and gay assemblages, dressed out, both host and guests, in that rich costume which Copley, who was one of Hancock's near neighbors, loved so well to paint, and of which his pencil has transmitted to us so vivid an idea. Nor did he show himself abroad with less display than he exhibited at home, his custom being to ride on public occasions in a splendid carriage drawn by six beautiful bays, and attended by several servants in livery.
While the public attention was thus drawn upon him by a display which at once attracted and gratified the eyes of the multitude, whose envy at that time there was less fear than now of exciting, and by a generous and free hospitality, the more captivating for not being either indigenous or common, the part which Hancock took in the rising disputes with the mother country converted him into that popular idol, which he continued to be for the remainder of his life; and which, to one so greedy as he was of honor and applause, must have been in the highest degree gratifying. It is indeed not uncommon to depreciate the public services of such men as Hancock, by ascribing all to vanity and the love of distinction; as if without the impulse of these motives any great efforts would be made to serve the public! Worthy indeed of all honor are those men in whom these impulses take so honorable a direction; and happy the nation able to purchase such services at so cheap a rate!
In 1766, two years after his uncle's death, Hancock was chosen, along with James Otis, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Cushing, one of the four representatives from Boston to the General Court. The seizure, two years after, of his sloop Liberty, for alleged violations of the revenue laws, in evading the payment of duties on a cargo of wine imported from Madeira, closely and personally identified him with the resistance then making throughout the colonies to the attempt to collect a revenue in America by parliamentary authority alone. This seizure led to a riot which figures in all the histories of that period, by which the commissioners of the customs were driven from the town, and in consequence of which two or three British regiments were ordered to Boston – the first step on the part of the mother country towards a military enforcement of the authority which she claimed. Hancock felt personally the consequences of this riot, in a number of libels or criminal informations filed against him in the Court of Admiralty, to recover penalties to the amount of three or four hundred thousand dollars, for violations of the revenue laws. "It seemed," writes John Adams in his Diary, and he had ample opportunity to know, for he was retained as Hancock's counsel, "as if the officers of the court were determined to examine the whole town as witnesses." In hopes to fish out some evidence against him; they interrogated many of his near relations and most intimate friends. They even threatened to summon his aged and venerable aunt: nor did those annoyances cease till the battle of Lexington, the siege of Boston, and the expulsion of the British from that town shut up the Admiralty Court, and brought the prosecution, and British authority along with it, to an end.
At the commencement of the disputes with the mother country, the sentiment against the right of parliament to impose taxes on the colonies had seemed to be almost unanimous. The only exceptions were a few persons holding office under the crown. The rich especially, this being a question that touched the pocket, were very loud in their protests against any such exercise of parliamentary authority. But as the dispute grew more warm and violent, threatening to end in civil commotions, the rich, not doubting that the mother country would triumph in the end, and fearing the loss of their entire property in the attempt to save a part of it, began to draw back; thus making much more conspicuous than ever the position of Hancock as a leader of the popular party. Indeed there was hardly a wealthy man in Boston, he and Bowdoin excepted, both of whom had not accumulated but inherited their property, who did not end with joining the side of the mother country. And the same thing may be observed of Massachusetts, and indeed of New England generally. Of all the larger and better-looking mansion-houses, of eighty years old and upwards, still standing in the vicinity of Boston, of which the number is considerable, there are very few that did not originally belong to some old tory who forfeited his property out of his very anxiety to preserve it. Hancock's acceptance of the command of the company of cadets or governor's guard, whence the title of colonel by which for some time he was known; his acting with that company as an escort, at the funeral of Lieutenant-Governor Oliver, who was very obnoxious to the patriots; his refusing to go all lengths with Samuel Adams in the controversy with Hutchinson as to the governor's right to call the General Court together, elsewhere than in Boston; and the circumstance that although he had been several times before negatived as a member of the council, Hutchinson had at length allowed his name on the list of counsellors proposed by the General Court; these and perhaps some other circumstances excited indeed some suspicions that Hancock also was growing lukewarm to the popular cause. But these he took care to dissipate by declining to sit as counsellor, by acting as orator at the Anniversary of the Boston Massacre, and by accepting, not long after, an appointment as one of the delegates to the Continental Congress. The oration above alluded to, delivered in March, 1774, and which Hancock's enemies pretended was written for him by Dr. Cooper, was pronounced by John Adams, who heard it, "an eloquent, pathetic, and spirited performance."
"The composition," so he wrote in his diary, "the pronunciation, the action, all exceeded the expectation of every body. [These last were certainly not Cooper's.] They exceeded even mine, which were very considerable. Many of the sentiments came with great propriety from him. His invective, particularly against a preference of riches to virtue, came from him with a singular dignity and grace." A passage in this oration, which was afterwards printed, on the subject of standing armies, gave great offence to the British officers and soldiers by whom the town continued to be occupied, and not long after Governor Gage dismissed Hancock from his command of the company of cadets; whereupon they disbanded themselves, returning the standard which the governor on his initiation into office had presented to them.
The sensibilities of the British officers and soldiers being again excited by some parts of an oration delivered the next year by Dr. Warren, on the same anniversary, a few weeks before the battle of Lexington, a military mob beset Hancock's house and began to destroy the fences and waste the grounds. Gage sent a military guard to put a stop to their outrages.
But it was no longer safe for Hancock to remain in such close contiguity to the British troops. He was president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, which, in consequence of the act of parliament to modify the charter of that province, had lately assumed to themselves the power of the purse and the sword. He was also president of the provincial committee of safety, which, under authority of the Provincial Congress, had begun in good earnest to prepare for taking arms for the vindication of those rights which the men of Massachusetts claimed under the now violated and (so far as parliament had the power) abrogated Charter of the province. Under these circumstances, Hancock abandoned his house, which was subsequently occupied by Lord Percy as his headquarters; and at the time of the march of the British troops for Concord, he was living at Lexington, in company with Samuel Adams. Indeed it was supposed that one of the objects of this march was to seize the persons of those two patriots, to whom Gage seemed to point as the authors of the collision at Lexington by the issue of a proclamation, in which pardon was offered to all who, giving over their late traitorous proceedings, would furnish proof of their repentance and of their renewed allegiance to their king, by submitting to the authority of his duly appointed governor, and of the late act of parliament: but from this pardon John Hancock and Samuel Adams were excepted, their offences being too flagrant to be passed over without condign punishment.
Before the issue of this proclamation, Hancock had already proceeded to Philadelphia, where the famous Continental Congress of 1775 was already in session, composed, to a great extent, of the same members with its predecessor of the year before, but of which he had been chosen a member in place of Bowdoin. He was a fluent and agreeable speaker, one of those who, by grace of manner, seem to add a double force and weight to all which they say; yet in that illustrious assembly there were quite a number, including John Adams, from his own State, compared with whom he could hardly have claimed rank as an orator. There were also in that assembly several able writers; the state papers emanating from whose pens were compared by Chatham to the ablest productions of the republican ages of Greece and Rome; but Hancock was not one of those. There were men of business there who undertook, without shrinking, all the Herculean labors of organizing the army and navy, the treasury and the foreign office of the new confederation – but neither in this line does Hancock appear to have been greatly distinguished. And yet it was not long before, by his