John Hull (December 18, 1624 – October 1, 1683) was an English-born merchant, silversmith, slave trader and politician who spent the majority of his life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

After arriving in North America, he worked as a silversmith in Boston before becoming the moneyer responsible for issuing the colony's pine tree shillings in the mid-17th century.

[2][3] At age eleven, he immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with his father, mother, and half-brother Richard Storer,[1] departing Bristol on September 28, 1635, and arriving in Boston on November 7.

[13] From the 1620s through the early 1650s, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's economy had been entirely dependent on barter[14] and foreign currency, including English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and counterfeit coins.

[15] In 1652, the Massachusetts General Court asked Hull to weigh, assay, and countermark foreign coins to determine their authenticity and value.

[10] From June to October 1652, Hull produced silver coins with a simple design: the stamped letters "NE" for New England on the obverse, and the denomination in Roman numerals on the reverse.

In October 1652, the General Court ordered a more complicated design with a double ring of beads to discourage clipping.

[36] He also shipped New England farm products, including flour, salt beef and pork, biscuits and butter to the Caribbean colonies,[37] as well as other miscellaneous goods.

[41][42] Hull ordered his ship captains not to sell damaged goods, mistreat sailors, swear, or trade on Sundays.

[43] Mark Valeri claims that Hull forbid his associates from the slave trade,[43] but Clarke has identified two occasions when Hull engaged in the slave trade: the first during King Philip's War in 1675, when Hull transported more than one-hundred Native American captives to be sold into slavery in Cádiz and Málaga,[44] and the second on September 16, 1682, when he instructed one of his captains to transport and sell a Black man named Jeofrey and a Black woman named Mary in Madeira.

[45][46] Samuel Eliot Morison notes that Hull instructed his captain to use the proceeds from the sale of Jeofrey and Mary to buy Madeira wine to be imported to Massachusetts.

When the mine proved unprofitable, Hull began raising herds of cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses on the land to be sold in the West Indies.

[54] During King Philip's War in 1675 and 1676, Hull loaned the colony approximately £2000 to buy muskets, shot, and saltpeter, and to clothe and pay the soldiers.

[41] In 1681, Hull helped organize a settlement with the heirs of Ferdinando Gorges to acquire the Province of Maine for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

[59] Hull was one of Harvard College's earliest benefactors, donating his landholdings at Point Judith, Rhode Island, to finance scholarships for poor boys[51] as well as a sum of £100.

[62] In the 1840 story collection Grandfather's Chair, Nathaniel Hawthorne recounts a legend in which John Hull gave his daughter Hannah her weight in pine-tree shillings (approximately 10,000 coins) as a dowery at her wedding to Samuel Sewall.