Background
George Hack was born in 1623 in Cologne, Germany, of a Schleswig-Holstein family.
George Hack was born in 1623 in Cologne, Germany, of a Schleswig-Holstein family.
George Hack was educated in Cologne, Germany and received his degree in medicine at the university.
Emigrating to New Amsterdam, George Hack began his career in the New World with the practice of medicine but gradually abandoned it to form a partnership with Augustine Herrman in the Virginia tobacco trade. Marketing the produce from Maryland and Virginia in New Amsterdam, his firm had become a formidable rival to the Dutch West India Company.
In October of that year, however, the business slowly developed by Herrman and the Hacks received its death blow with the passage by the British Parliament of the Navigation Act, which excluded all but English ships from trade with the English colonies. This measure drove Herrman into bankruptcy and determined Hack to leave New Amsterdam and settle permanently on his estates in Northampton County, Virginia.
He was one of the framers and signers of the so-called “Engagement of Northampton” of March 25, 1651, in which the people of that county, though promising “to be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England as it is now established without King or House of Lords", left no doubt in the minds of the rest of the Virginians that they stood ready to support the fights of the exiled Prince Charles at the first seasonable occasion.
Though Anna Hack carried on a trade in tobacco with Herrman after 1651, George Hack devoted his time to its culture and to the practice of medicine, first in Northampton County, then in Northumberland and Lancaster counties, Virginia, and later in upper Baltimore County, Maryland.
The Hacks were formally made naturalized citizens of Virginia in March 1658 and on September 17, 1663, the upper House of Assembly of Maryland ordered the preparation of an act of naturalization of George Hack and his family and of Augustine Herrman. Before naturalization was completed, however, Hack died, on one of his Virginia estates. His will was proved in 1665.
Hack was married to Anna Verlett, a sister-in-law of Herrman. She was apparently a woman of much business sagacity and natural ability and carried on a trade in tobacco under her own name. They two daughters, neither whom married, and two sons: George Nicholas Hack, the founder of the Norfolk branch of the family; and Peter, for many years a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the founder of the Maryland branch.
