Daniel Henchman was an American merchant and bookseller. He was also lieutenant-colonel of the Boston regiment, a justice of the peace, a deacon of the church, and overseer of the poor.
Background
Daniel Henchman was born on January 21, 1689 in Boston, Massachussets, United States. He was the eldest of the four children of Hezekiah and Abigail Henchman. His paternal grandfather, also called Daniel, won note as an active participant in King Philip's War and as one of the founders of Worcester, Massachussets.
Career
Henchman started in business about 1710. He soon became one of Boston's leading booksellers and cut a picturesque figure in the public life of the little town.
His activities in the narrow field of colonial commerce are revealed by his accounts and other papers. These have been tenderly preserved, doubtless because of his connection with the patriot Hancock, and they shed a valuable light on the everyday business life of the times. Henchman's lists of debits and credits reveal him as a man who carried out far more essential and varied tasks than the word "bookseller" would suggest. He essayed the allied role of publisher, and a series of sermons, petty tracts, and almanacs show how he helped to foster their trade when it was--so far as the colonies were concerned--still in its infancy.
He is credited with the first American edition of the Bible (said to be a pirated issue dated 1749), but the evidence for this claim is weak. He was also an importer of manufactured goods from Britain. These he sold to a host of country villages, taking farm produce in return. Often, too, he held shares in the little vessels with which the New Englanders carried on a triangular peddling trade between Newfoundland, Boston, and the West Indies, sometimes in violation of the Navigation Acts.
Both his home and overseas dealings involved a constant struggle against crude monetary systems, and indeed his accounts make it clear that American business was still largely based on various forms of barter. Still another venture in which he took a leading part was a manufacturing project. In 1728 he and four partners set up a paper mill--the first in New England--at Milton, where the ebb and flow of the tides in the Neponset River gave an intermittent source of power. The province granted a ten-year monopoly to the company, but conditions in America were not yet favorable to manufacturing, and the tiny mill had no chance of real success.
Henchman did at least manage to keep it in operation for about a dozen years. A man of many interests, he is an illuminating example of the unspecialized merchants who were to be found in the simple economies of the eighteenth century. His business acumen won him a small fortune, and his gifts to Harvard College--for the time and place--were considerable.
Achievements
Connections
Henchman was conveniently linked by marriage to other men of substance; his wife, to whom he was married on January 14, 1713, was Elizabeth Gerrish, and their one child, Lydia, married Thomas Hancock and so came to act as mother to John Hancock.