John Hanson (April 14, 1721–November 15, 1783) was an American Revolutionary leader who served as a delegate to Second Continental Congress and, in 1781, was elected the first “President of the United States in Congress assembled.” For this reason, some biographers argue that John Hanson, rather than George Washington, was actually the first President of the United States.

John Hanson was born on his wealthy family’s “Mulberry Grove” plantation in Port Tobacco Parish in Charles County, Maryland, on April 14, 1721. His parents, Samuel and Elizabeth (Storey) Hanson, were well-known members of Maryland’s social and political elite. Samuel Hanson was a successful planter, landowner, and politician who served two terms in the Maryland General Assembly.

While few details of Hanson’s early life are known, historians presume he was educated at home by private tutors as were most children of wealthy Colonial American families. Hanson then joined his father as a planter, slave owner, and public official.

Early Political Career
After serving as sheriff of Charles County for five years, Hanson was elected to the lower house of the Maryland General Assembly in 1757. An active and persuasive member, he was a major opponent of the Stamp Act of 1765 and chaired a special committee that coordinated Maryland’s participation in the Stamp Act Congress. In protest of the British-enacted Intolerable Acts, Hanson co-signed a resolution calling for a boycott of all British imports to the Colonies until the acts were repealed.

In 1769, Hanson resigned from the Maryland General Assembly to pursue business interests. After selling his Charles County land and plantation, he moved to Frederick County in western Maryland, where he held a variety of appointed and elected offices, including surveyor, sheriff, and treasurer.

Hanson Goes to Congress
As relations with Great Britain went from bad to worse and the colonies traveled down the road to the American Revolution in 1774, Hanson became recognized as one of Maryland’s foremost Patriots. He personally orchestrated the passage of a resolution denouncing the Boston Port Act (which punished the people of Boston for the Boston Tea Party). As a delegate to the First Annapolis Convention in 1775, Hanson signed the Declaration of the Association of the Freemen of Maryland, which, while expressing a desire to reconcile with Great Britain, called for military resistance to British troops in place to enforce the Intolerable Acts.

Once the Revolution broke out, Hanson helped recruit and arm local soldiers. Under his leadership, Frederick County, Maryland sent the first troops from the Southern Colonies north to join General George Washington’s newly-formed Continental Army. Sometimes paying the local soldiers out of his own pocket, Hanson urged the Continental Congress to declare independence.

In 1777, Hanson was elected to his first of five one-year terms in the new Maryland House of Delegates, which named him as the state’s delegate to the Second Continental Congress in late 1779. On March 1, 1781, he signed the Articles of Confederation on the behalf of Maryland, the last state needed to ratify the Articles and bring it into full effect.

First President of the USA?
On November 5, 1781, the Continental Congress elected Hanson as “President of the United States in Congress assembled.” This title is also sometimes called “President of the Continental Congress.” This election has led to the contention that Hanson, rather than George Washington, was the first President of the United States.

However, under the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. central government had no executive branch, and the position of president was largely ceremonial. Indeed, most of Hanson’s “presidential” duties consisted of dealing with official correspondence and signing documents. Finding the work so tedious, Hanson threatened to resign after just one week in office. After his colleagues in Congress appealed to his well-known sense of duty, Hanson agreed to continue to serve as president until the end of his one-year term on November 4, 1782.

Under the Articles of Confederation, presidents were elected to one-year terms. Hanson was neither the first person to serve as president or to be elected to the position under the Articles of Confederation. When the Articles went into full effect in March 1781, rather than elect a new president, Congress simply allowed Samuel Huntington of Connecticut to continue serving as president. On July 9, 1781, Congress elected Samuel Johnston of North Carolina as the first president after ratification of the Articles. When Johnston declined to serve, Congress elected Thomas McKean of Delaware. However, McKean served for less than four months, resigning in October 1781. It was not until the next session of Congress convened in November 1781, that Hanson was elected as the first president to serve a full term as president.

Hanson was responsible for establishing Thanksgiving Day. On October 11, 1782, he issued a proclamation setting aside the last Thursday in November as “a day of Solemn Thanksgiving to God for all His mercies…” and urging all Americans to celebrate progress in negotiations with Britain ending the Revolutionary War.

Later Life and Death
Already in poor health, Hanson retired from public service immediately after completing his one-year term as president of Congress in November 1792. He died just one year later at age 62, on November 15, 1783, while visiting his nephew Thomas Hawkins Hanson’s plantation in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Hanson is buried in Fort Washington, Maryland, in the cemetery of the Saint John’s Episcopal Church.

The Meaning of Freeman
The possibility remains that the John Hanson in question had one or more African ancestors, either known or not known to his colleagues or even to himself. J. Bruce Kremer, one of Hanson’s biographers, states that Hanson’s grandfather and his three brothers emigrated in 1642 from Sweden to the recently formed New Sweden settlement on the Delaware River with newly appointed Governor Johan Printz. Kremer points out that one of the Hanson brothers, Andrew, had the same name as “Andrew Hanson, freeman, who once worked as a farmhand” for New Sweden landowner and military leader Lieutenant Måns Kling, the owner of a tobacco plantation on the Schuylkill.

Whether this Andrew was the same man as John Hanson’s great-uncle, “must be a matter of conjecture,” Kremer concludes.

One could conjecture, therefore, that John Hanson had an African ancestor as he may have been related to a man described as a freeman, that is, a freed black slave. Yet, the term freeman, in the context of the 17th-century New Sweden colony, did not indicate a freed black slave, as one might assume. According to Gregory B. Keen of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, who has researched and written about the New Sweden colony, “The ‘freemen’ (frimännen)— so called because they had settled in the colony entirely of their own will, and might leave it at their option—held land granted them in fee, temporarily not taxed, which they cultivated for themselves, being aided also by the [Swedish West India] Company with occasional gifts of money, food, and raiment.” Such “freemen” were distinguished from criminals forced to leave Sweden who had to work for a few years in New Sweden before they were classified as frimännen.

Those who believe that John Hanson was black might argue that his signing of the Proclamation of the Freemen of Maryland lends credence to the claim of African heritage. The Freemen of Maryland, however, was not an association of freed black slaves but of men advocating resistance to what they perceived as British tyranny in the period that led to the colonists’ break with England. On July 26, 1775, the Freemen of Maryland resolved that the American colonies “be put into a state of defense” and approved armed resistance to British troops.

The Internet provides proponents of conspiracy theories with a way to reach a vast audience. Googling the phrase “John Hanson first black president” retrieves more than 350,000 hits. One website argues that because Hanson’s signature is not to be found on the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, and that a black man appears in the engraving on the back of the two-dollar bill of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, therefore a conspiracy to keep knowledge of Hanson’s African-American identity from the public must have occurred. Yet Hanson was not a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1776, the year in which all but one of the signers signed the Declaration. Hanson died before the Constitution was created. Hanson, however, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention beginning in June 1780 did sign and ratify the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781. In addition, while the skin color of one figure on the back of the two-dollar bill is ambiguous, the engraving was based on the painting in the U.S. Capitol by John Trumbull of the signing of the Declaration. In the painting, none of the figures have black or brown skin.

• John Hanson was a merchant and public official from Maryland during the era of the American Revolution. In 1779, Hanson was elected as a delegate to the Continental Congress after serving in a variety of roles for the Patriot cause in Maryland.
• Born: April 14, 1721, Port Tobacco, MD
• Died: November 15, 1783, Prince George’s County, MD
• Nationality: American
• Buried: Addison Graveyard, Oxon Hill
• Spouse: Jane Contee (m. ?–1783)
• Parents: Samuel Hanson, Elizabeth Hanson