Biography
John Hancock was born in Jackson County, Alabama, the seventh of ten children born to John Allen Hancock and Sarah Ryan Hancock. His older brother George Duncan Hancock was a veteran of Battle of San Jacinto and represented Travis County in the Eleventh Texas Legislature.
Hancock attended the East Tennessee University at Knoxville. He later worked on his father's farm in Alabama before beginning his study of law in Winchester, Tennessee. In 1846 he was admitted to the Alabama bar. In January 1847 he moved to Austin, Texas where he practiced law. In 1851 he was elected district judge of the Second Judicial District for a term of six years. After four years he resigned to resume his lucrative law practice, as well as to engage in farming.
Read more about this topic: John Hancock (Texas Politician)
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)