America's unsung founding father

When John Hancock scrawled his enormous signature at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, it was a brave act; capture by the British might have meant execution.

- TED WIDMER

The musical 1776 has Hancock claiming that he wrote it out supersized "so Fat George in London can read it without his glasses!"

But despite his courage, Hancock remains a little hard to see. Unlike Adams and Jefferson, he did not leave extensive writings. Unlike Washington, he did not play a leading military role (though he longed to). Unlike all three of them, he did not make it to the presidency, but served as a precursor of sorts in the Continental Congress.

These deficits have left their mark. Historians generally neglect Hancock when they write collective biographies of the founders, and there are no major monuments to him. There will be 250 statues in Donald Trump's National Garden of American Heroes that is supposed to be completed by July 4 next year. The actress Ingrid Bergman and the Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek have made the cut, but not the American who did more than most to define Independence Day.

The Declaration of Independence may have been composed by a different founder, but, as the historian Willard Sterne Randall writes in John Hancock, it was Hancock who led the Second Continental Congress to appoint the committee that drafted it. He also raised funds for the Continental Army, oversaw shipbuilding efforts for the Navy and kept Congress together even as it fled Philadelphia when the British came too close for comfort.