703. John Hancock: More Than a Big Signature

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. I had teased a few episodes ago where we talked about all the acts, like the Sugar Act and the Intolerable Acts that led to the Revolution, and I teased when I talked about the Townshend Acts that I was going to tell you a story about John Hancock and the Liberty Affairs, what it's known as, and we are going to do that today, so I'm very excited to talk about it.

I told you guys in a few other episodes that I've been really trying to learn more about the Founders, more than what we hear in the history books. I wanted to really find the lesser-known stories, and I was really excited to find out more about John Hancock. I think all of us when we hear his name probably think about his giant signature on the Declaration of Independence, which he allegedly said he wrote big so that the king wouldn't need his

glasses to read it. We don't know if that's true or not, but it's a fun story, I hope it is. So that's what we usually hear his name as, and a lot of people actually forget that he oversaw the Continental Congress as well for a while. So he had other roles that sometimes we don't think of, but one of his best roles was actually entrepreneur.

He was a great merchant, so we're going to talk about that today and how that ended up resulting in one of the events that really, it became a symbol of what was to come and what was at stake for the colonists. So John Hancock is a Massachusetts man. He was born there in 1737, so that's going to be his home. Now his father died when he was a young man, and so his uncle is who raised him, and his

uncle happened to be pretty wealthy, which was going to be a huge help to John, who was going to be able to use that to make something of himself to be an entrepreneur and to start his own business, and actually eventually he would become one of the wealthiest people in Boston in the Massachusetts area. So he was a merchant. So when we talk about the Revolutionary War times, when we talk about merchants, merchant

usually meant you were somebody who was trading, importing, maybe exporting by sea. So you had to, your life was shipping things to and from places, and this was not a career that was for the faint of heart, right? Because there's so much that could go wrong in these times if you were trying to navigate large cargo on big ship. First of all, we didn't have the navigation tools that we have today.

So imagine being on a ship for like weeks and then realizing, oops, we were on the wrong course the whole time, or there's a storm and that blows you off course, or worse, completely wrecks your ship, you shipwreck, and you lose everything because that's what's carrying all your cargo that you're going to take back and sell. And then of course, if you are on a ship for weeks and weeks, people often get sick. There were all sorts of things.

That's where scurvy comes from. If you've heard like pirates getting scurvy and that's why they had to eat lemons because lemons helped combat scurvy. So these things are happening. If that happens, sometimes the whole ships would be overcome with sickness and people would die.

Shipping was not glamorous. It was not, it was not a fun thing and also you did have like pirates, right? So you could also survive all of that and then you could have your ship be like held hostage and all your cargo stolen anyway. So this was not, this was not an easy business. It came with a lot of risks, right?

And all entrepreneurs take on risks. That's part of it. And so John Hancock was very good at what he did. Now part of the reason he was able to be so good, and I don't want to talk about this too much because I've talked about it in other episodes, is that this was during this period of time called Salatary Neglect where the king had these laws called the navigation acts.

And what the navigation acts were is they were rules on people who were merchants, just like John Hancock. And it basically said if you're going to import goods, it has to be on a British vessel. You have to come through British ports and go through British customs agents. You have to make sure that everything is legal, that you're paying your duties or your taxes on the items that you are, that you are importing.

And then you also are not allowed to trade with anybody who is a competing foreign interest. So that was a hard thing for the Americans to deal with because they did a lot of trading with the Dutch. The Dutch had a lot of really great and cheap items for them. So that's where they were doing their trading with. But it didn't really matter that this was against the law because the king wasn't really

paying attention to the colonists and was letting them do what they want. And if there was a customs guy who was like, oh, you're not listing to the law, usually the merchants could just slip them a little bit of money and bribe them and nobody cared. So this period of time allowed many merchants to make a lot of money. And that meant that if the merchants were getting a lot of items to the colonists, that means the colonists were able to stock their store shelves.

And with more items on the shelves, things were cheaper for people and everybody, as we know, the way the economy works, everybody was benefiting from that. But then of course, this is going to come to a screeching halt when the king starts intervening. But you can see, even from that description, I gave you how much the merchants mattered to the entire colonial economy, not just in Massachusetts, where John Hancock was from. The colonists were able to, one, have cheap goods, thanks to the Dutch, but were able

to have all these things because of the many merchants who were willing to risk all those risks I mentioned before to bring goods back into the colonies. And so John Hancock, yes, he's wealthy, but he's earned every penny of that wealth. He became wealthy in a way that is supplying the way of life for every colonist. And just a fun little side note, I don't necessarily know that he was humble about his wealth.

He's known as being very stylish, which I kind of appreciate, but also kind of flashy with his wealth. And so I'm very locally involved, as we know, because that's going to come into play in a minute. So he had kind of a fun personality, a very kind of loud personality, but he was also high profile.

So he was recognized, especially in Boston. This is going to come to play in a minute. Because when you have this high profile and people know who you are, if something does happen to you, people are more likely to react, right? So let's get into that now. So I talked about, and I've talked about this in other episodes also, that British control

started really, really ramping up. And one of the ways that that happened was on merchants was on these people bringing imports in. And you're going to have all these acts, I did a whole episode and all the acts, but you're going to have one called the Townshendacks, which basically expanded all the customs enforcement. It essentially said all those things we were looking the other way on before, we're actually

going to start enforcing them. Oh, and by the way, these vice admiralty courts that we had, but never used, we're going to use them. We're going to make them more powerful. These are courts where if you disobeyed these custom laws, they sent you without a jury, no jury, just one tribunal or one judge that the king appointed.

That's whose fate your hands rested in. So imagine if it was like you heard a friend's feelings or a friend claimed you heard their feelings and they're like, I'm going to put you on trial, but in front of a friend who sides with me already. It's not fair, right? That's not a fair trial and nobody else could, it was like a secret court.

And so this was huge, this is a huge deal. But here was the thing, no one, no one knew if they were serious or not, right? Because they weren't actually enforcing the law yet. And so it was kind of business as usual. The merchants kept doing their thing. And that's exactly what John Hancock did.

So John Hancock has this, this ship named Liberty. And one of the things that he imported was Madeira Wine. It's a kind of wine that actually is George Washington's favorite drink. He loved Madeira. But so that was one of the big imports that John Hancock was, was importing on Liberty. And he had just had his ship come into port.

I think it was 24 hours after landing, landing, you know what I mean? Docking, I guess. We're so used to speaking and like plain lingo docking. Actually, you could land a boat, can't you? I don't know. Anyway, the ship docking customs officials come and they start accusing John of breaking laws,

breaking customs laws, and they say, hey, in the middle of the night, you unloaded a big portion of your Madeira Wine so that you could get away with not paying the duties on that wine. And so we are taking your ship. We are taking Liberty. Now John Hancock is actually like, no, I did not do this.

You're accusing me of something I did not do. It didn't matter. They had already taken Liberty. And we could actually kind of talk about how this was sort of a precursor to what we know now as civil asset for sure, but that's a conversation for another time. So let's just talk about the customs enforcement.

So they take his boat. He's pretty angry, but also the entire town is angry. All of Boston is angry because they're like, hold on a second. We, you know, we, yes, we've heard you were going to crack down these laws, but you're actually enforcing it and you're enforcing it on one of the wealthiest merchants in Boston. If John Hancock isn't safe, none of us are safe.

And so riots erupt. People are chasing customs officials. Officials are literally leaving town because they're fearing for their safety because everyone is so outraged about what happened to John Hancock. And all this time he doesn't have the ship. The ship is being kept somewhere else.

The Brits have it. But he does get taken to vice admiralty court. And this is, this goes on for many months. And this is also really fun. Guess who defended John Hancock in this case, John Adams and James Otis Jr. And so they're going to be his representation and the courts dragging on and dragging on

and then all of a sudden very quietly drops the case. And so it was kind of a victory for John Hancock because nothing ever comes of it, right? He does get the case dropped. He isn't dragged fully in front of the vice admiralty court, but he never gets liberty back. Liberty is never returned to him.

And you could say, okay, but he's wealthy. I'm sure he recovered. But sure, yes, maybe he was more wealthy than other people, but he took a huge financial hit when he lost liberty. And so it wasn't like he's going to be okay. He has enough money, you know, that that's, that's not what happened.

This was a huge bull. Plus he lost, you know, the shipment of the things that were on the ship. So he never gets liberty back. And here's a thing that's, that's, I think a really interesting twist to this story. So the Brits actually end up or like the crown is owning the ship, but they ended up giving it two customs and customs takes liberty and they use it as a customs enforcement vessel,

meaning it's like, you know, roaming the seas, looking for people to bust for customs violations. So it's literally like doing the thing that, that got it taken away in the first place. I'm speaking of it as if it's like a person, but you know what I mean. So liberty is now a customs vessel. And I think it was not even a year later. It wasn't too, too much longer later where it's going to be sailing along and it's going

to be the vessel that is carrying customs officials who start seizing other people's boats for alleged wrongdoing and the merchants of the town. I want to say it was New Hampshire because I don't think it was, it was Massachusetts because it's, you know, sailing around, they were going to get so mad they are going to burn liberty. So liberty, unfortunately, even though it, it was an innocent bystander, liberty is going to get torched, but it's going to be torched as a symbol.

So liberty is a, is a symbol, one crazy that it was called liberty, right, that that in itself is almost kind of like, whoa, but the fact that this was also the first time that people are seeing, oh my goodness, the king is really going to enforce these laws. He wasn't, he wasn't lying, these are real. And then turning into a situation where it was making people so mad they rioted in the streets of Boston.

And because they were rioting, that probably had something to do with why the crown decided not to continue with the vice admiralty court. And then eventually you can see how angry the colonists even in other colonies are getting, they're going to burn liberty. So this is an important moment in the pre-revolutionary history because it's where the colonists find out that this is real, the enforcement is actually going to happen, that somebody like John Hancock

who's respected is going to, they're going to go after him, then they can go after everybody. This is a really big turning point because this is still in the late 1760s. So now we're going into the territory, into the 1770s where you're going to get Boston massacre, you're going to get Boston Tea Party, you're going to start seeing a real uprising from the colonists. And so the liberty affair, as it's now known, was really important because it sent a message

across the colonies that the king meant business, which means they needed to figure out if they meant business too. And I think it's really fun that John Hancock played a big role in this because again, we don't hear this story often, and maybe you guys do because a lot of you guys I know are parts of really fun, homeschool co-ops or alternatives to public education or even you have really good public school teachers maybe.

But this was not a story I ever learned, so I was really excited to find it. So liberty affair, John Hancock, not just a signature, he played a big role in the uprising or the unrest of the colonists. So I will leave it there. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast and until next time, I will talk to you later.