It made for an uneasy pairing. One man was all preening and extravagance, the other all austerity and ideals. Hancock displayed in his mansion the magnificent John Singleton Copley portrait of Adams that today hangs in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, a portrait Hancock most likely commissioned. But at various junctures he also attempted to distance himself from his mentor. Crown officials compared Adams’s recruiting of Hancock with the devil’s seduction of Eve. Every time the younger man attempted to liberate himself, Adams would — like a squid — “discharge his muddy liquid,” disorienting Hancock all over again.
Early in the 1770s, Hancock finally succumbed to the blandishments of the royal governor, who reminded him of the toll Adams and his radical politics were taking on Hancock’s private affairs. He bought off Hancock with a corps of ceremonial cadets; Hancock threw himself into ordering musical instruments and uniforms, outfitting his men in scarlet coats and beaver hats. He swore off all connection with Adams, whom he hoped never to see again. He then started a campaign to oust Adams from the Massachusetts House, proposing an inquiry into his finances. (They were a morass.) Hancock managed to detach nearly a third of Boston voters from Adams, who was forced to run about town, defending himself against comments he had never made.
Ultimately friends reconciled the two, though the relationship limped along from slight to recrimination and back again. One man was all steadfast starch, the other “flattered by ideas of his own consequence,” as a contemporary put it. At the same time, there were no illusions about who was directing whom. As one Crown officer saw it, Hancock was “a poor contemptible fool, led about by Adams.”
The two arrived together at the second Continental Congress but would fall out spectacularly on that larger stage. Adams was particularly disgusted by Hancock’s attempt to arrange for a formal farewell ceremony before a Philadelphia departure; it was the kind of ostentation that Adams abhorred in a nascent republic. Hancock traveled north with a troop of light horse and liveried servants that left the country people gaping in awe. Adams quietly made the same trip several weeks later. Tavern keepers along the way complained: Hancock and his enormous retinue had neglected to settle their bills.
Back in Boston, Hancock lost no time in maligning Adams. He nursed a rumor that Adams had participated in the Conway Cabal, a shadowy plot against General Washington. Adams could only stutter in disbelief. He did his best to ignore the slight, but it stung. To any and all he insisted that though Hancock considered him his enemy, he considered Hancock a friend.
The two disagreed violently about Shays’ Rebellion in 1786, when western Massachusetts farmers rose up in armed revolt against new taxes. Adams saw the ringleaders as a threat to a legitimately elected government. He believed they should hang. As governor, Hancock pardoned them.
Though the two reconciled briefly before Hancock’s death, their ghosts continued to fight it out in the press, precisely as their spirits do today.