John Hancock (January 23, 1737 [O.S. January 12, 1736] – October 8, 1793) was an American merchant, smuggler, statesman, and prominent Patriot of the American Revolution. He 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.
Before the American Revolution, Hancock was one of the wealthiest men in the Thirteen Colonies, having inherited a profitable mercantile business from his uncle, himself a prominent smuggler. Hancock 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. He 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, as 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."
Running the cameras on what they are waiting to say
Fixing the picture to who you will gather and pray
Some will protest and some will defy in the night
Some will cry for an ending to come, waiting to let them selves go
Liberty, dying to set yourselves free
In your hour of darkness your fighting for freedom to be
Liberty, hurtling towards victory, from the gutters and gate
Posts your children are coming to see liberty
Controlling you mind, supressing your thoughts and beliefs
Crushing your senses conormities all that is real
Sound the call in the morning you march to the sword
paying prices for what you have done, wanting to let yourself go
Liberty, dying to set yourselves free, standing one and for all
You must sacrifice all that you see.
Liberty, hurtling towards victory
Only god will convince them for one is for all to be free
Liberty yea
Sound the call in the morning you march to the sword
paying prices for what you have done, wanting to let yourself go
Liberty, dying to set yourselves free
In your hour of darkness your fighting for freedom to be
Liberty, hurtling towards victory, from the gutters and gate