Who said: “Anyone who supports the Tea Act is an enemy to America”?
November 5, 1773 — John Hancock is elected today as moderator at a Boston town meeting that resolves that anyone who supports the Tea Act is an “enemy to America.”
A merchant, smuggler, statesman, and prominent Patriot of the American Revolution, Hancock served as president of the Second Continental Congress and was the first and third governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is remembered for his large and stylish signature on the United States Declaration of Independence, so much so that the term “John Hancock” has become, in the United States, a synonym for a signature.
Did you know: Before the American Revolution, Hancock was one of the wealthiest men in the original 13 colonies, having inherited a profitable mercantile business from his uncle, himself a prominent smuggler. He began his political career in Boston as a protégé of Samuel Adams, an influential local politician, though the two men later became estranged. As tensions between colonists and Great Britain increased in the 1760s, Hancock used his wealth to support the colonial cause.
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Words of Wisdom
John Hancock became very popular in Massachusetts, especially after British officials seized his sloop Liberty in 1768 and charged him with smuggling. Although the charges against Hancock were eventually dropped, Professor Peter Andreas, author of Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America explains:
It is perhaps appropriate that the first signer of the Declaration of Independence was Boston's most well-known merchant-smuggler, John Hancock.
