Publishers Weekly
08/14/2023
In this approachable biography, historian Barbier (Boston in the American Revolution) portrays John Hancock (1737–1793) as a political figure with “middle-of-the-road and often shifting political views.” Born in Braintree, Mass., Hancock was raised in Boston by his uncle, a prosperous merchant and smuggler, whose business and wealth Hancock eventually inherited. In 1768, British officials seized his sloop Liberty, claiming it was laden with smuggled wine. Defended in court by John Adams, Hancock became a popular hero in Boston while he was derided by the British as “King Hancock.” Yet Barbier contends that Hancock “was a moderate in a time and place of radicals,” noting that the British lumped Hancock and Samuel Adams together as rabble-rousing traitors, while radical republicans like Mercy Otis Warren referred to Hancock as “the Guilded puppet.” Barbier portrays her subject as a people pleaser, a man who always wanted to “feel accepted and seen,” though she notes that Hancock didn’t get along with everyone—as governor of Massachusetts, he locked horns with President Washington as he “grew more suspicious of the federal government.” It’s a reliable account of Hancock, even if Barbier’s framing of the founding father as a political moderate is not fully realized. (Her view that moderates “are naturally prudent, cautious, and self-protective” sometimes oversimplifies political analysis by turning it into a personality assessment.) Still, American history buffs will enjoy the immersive portrait of Boston’s Revolutionary era. (Oct.)
Alan Taylor
In this lively and insightful biography, Barbier illuminates John Hancock’s mastery of popular politics in an age of revolution. Drawing on a rich and profound knowledge of eighteenth-century Boston, she recovers the social world of a leader whose skills extended far beyond his celebrated penmanship.
Wall Street Journal - William Anthony Hay
A concise and highly readable biography…[Hancock’s] legacy is very much worth our remembering.
Sharon V. Salinger
An exuberant biography, well told and spirited. As we follow John Hancock through the turmoil that led to the Revolution, we see a man guided more by a desire to charm, entertain, and curry favor with both elites and ordinary people than by a rigid commitment to a specific politics or ideology. In Barbier’s hands Hancock’s life unfolds as dramatic theater.
Benjamin L. Carp
Barbier has written a fine biography, carefully guiding readers through Hancock’s life, his political career, and the world around him. In our politically polarized times, this founding father’s legacy of political moderation is sure to resonate.
New York Sun - Carl Rollyson
Hancock’s success might seem inevitable given his resources, his canny political sensibility, and just plain good fortune. Yet, as Ms. Barbier suggests, biography and history are contingent. What looks inescapable did not seem so to those who struggled to create a new country.
New Criterion - Marc M. Arkin
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.
Robert J. Allison
A terrific book. Barbier’s meticulous research sheds light on how one of the wealthiest men of his time made himself into a man of the people—a politician whose genuine capacity for sensing the popular mood commanded fierce loyalty, even as he clashed with both Loyalists and radical Patriots. John Hancock was an important figure, and this biography helps restore him to his proper place.
