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The rebel insurgency, in their quest for independence, resisted government control in many illegitimate ways and orchestrated the cruel, unfair treatment of America Loyalists. They were involved in the smuggling of goods and many other corrupt illegal acts. Groups such as the Sons of Liberty, intimidated government officials through vicious propaganda, performed cruel acts such tarring and feathering of Loyalists in many of the States and violently resisting any form of control.

Their propaganda said they were fighting for the inalienable rights of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, but the colonists were living, King George had given them the freedom to live in America, to virtually self-govern, to own property, to set up businesses and allowed them to trade.

All strategies were based on a serious misreading of sentiment in America. It was an axiom of British policy that most Americans were loyal to the Crown, and that the Revolution was led by “the intrigues of a few bold and criminal leaders.” Loyalists in the Colonies tended to confirm this biased view.

Hancock was elected Harvard treasurer in July 1773, taking into his possession 15,400 pounds sterling in securities, along with the College account books. By November 1774, Harvard President Samuel Langdon and others wrote the first in a two-year series of dunning letters to Hancock, calling for an accounting and for him to return the materials. The fifth such letter arrived at Hancock’s Concord, Mass., home in April 1775, a week before the opening battles of the Revolutionary War in Lexington and Concord. His response — the original resides at Harvard’s Houghton Library — was so chilly that he cast it in the third person, offering that “he very seriously resents” the letter’s implications.

On March 17, 1776, Langdon penned a more conciliatory letter, since by then he was fully aware of Hancock’s growing role in the unfolding Revolution.