Author: Karen Sikes Collins
Judge John was despised by many of his neighbors because he was a Unionist. He told prospective clients up front and lost a lot of law business from his Confederate neighbors after February 1861 when Texas joined the rebelling states. His two nephews, William and James Hancock, whom he raised, actually volunteered in the Union cavalry to fight against their neighbors. Threats against him got so serious during the Civil War that he secretly escaped to Mexico and on to New Orleans which was in Union hands. But later his neighbors had to turn to him when they realized the United States Congress would not seat any person who had sworn fealty to the U.S. constitution and then borne arms against it. He was about the only one they could find to became the Representative to Congress from the Austin area in 1870. He ended up serving 4 terms.
Though a Unionist, Hancock was a slave holder. He came from an Alabama family that fathered many of their slaves. That meant that some of Hancock’s slaves were his half brothers or other kin. Judge John also had mulatto children with a female slave. He freed at least three slaves including his sons but 26 others remained enslaved to work on his farm until the end of the Civil War. He apparently kept slave families together and never sold a slave. Following the Civil War judge John didn’t think former slaves should be allowed to vote, but he helped his freed slaves find work and buy farms.
Judge John had come to Texas in 1847 after the death of his mother, and soon began acquiring land as payment for lawyer services. He became a well regarded district judge. When his older brother William Ryan of Bastrop died in 1852, bachelor Judge John took William L. and James W., the two youngest sons and not yet teenagers, to raise. He also purchased a large piece of land next to the Martin Moore tract and began building slave houses for his growing group of slaves. This may also have been the time when Judge John engaged a white overseer from Alabama, James Doughtry. The year 1855 was a major milestone. At age 29 Judge John married Susan Richardson.
In 1855, his widower father, John, in Bellefonte, Alabama died without a will, and all his assets, including his home, were sold and proceeds probably divided among his heirs. [The town Bellefonte was almost destroyed a few years later in the Civil War and was soon abandoned.] Judge John bought 9 slaves from his father’s estate.
He also had a mulatto son, Hugh, by his slave, Eliza.
His only white child, Edwin, was born only months after his mulatto son.
Though a lawyer, he invested much thought and expense in farming and livestock. He was not afraid to try new things. At various times he had 500 sheep and 140 mules. He was the first to grow wheat in the area; he imported English Sparrows because he heard they eat the boll weevil (they don’t); he imported carp from Europe because he was told they tasted as good as salmon (they don’t). He raised fine race horses, had his own jockey, held races at his house and even sent his horses to England to compete. He was involved in bringing railroads to Austin, building a dam on the Colorado River, locating the University of Texas in Austin, and buying land for a fairground in Hyde Park.
And he encouraged his nephews to start a dairy here in the old farmstead purchased from Elizabeth Moore in 1866.
The large “mansion” and spring house Judge John built in 1870 in the oak grove on North Loop and Hancock Drive are gone. But because Judge John’s nephews turned this tract with the log house into a dairy, using the rock root cellar for cooling milk, it survived. During the 1890s, when the nephews moved onto other things, the dairy continued. Dairyman George Boswell tried to purchase the dairy in 1898 but couldn’t meet the payments. And then the Will Peterson family rented the old dairy for a few years until it was sold to J. P. Wallis who also operated a dairy here.
Austin remembers John Hancock as a lawyer, a judge, a farmer, a Unionist, a slaveholder, and a Congressman. Judge John no longer has any white descendants but he has many black descendants including talk show host and actress Aisha Tyler of Friends. But, other than his descendants, the Moore-Hancock Farmstead is the only tangible legacy of Judge John Hancock.
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