John Howe (October 14, 1754 – December 27, 1835) was a loyalist printer during the American Revolution, a printer and Postmaster in Halifax, the father of the famous Joseph Howe, a spy prior to the War of 1812, and eventually a Magistrate of the Colony of Nova Scotia. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts Bay colony, the son of Joseph Howe, a tin plate worker of Puritan ancestry, and Rebeccah Hart.
John Howe was born in 1754, the same year that the French and Indian War or Seven Years' War (1754–1763) began. It was the consequences of this conflict that motivated the British to demand greater taxes from, and assert greater control over, their American colonies and it was the consequences of this conflict that raised and disappointed the English-American colonists' expectations about their opportunities for expansion, all of which contributed to the colonists' determination to revolt against an increasingly costly, authoritarian, and obstructive British rule. Howe was eight years old at the end of this war on September 7, 1763, so he grew to maturity influenced by the events that followed, such as colonial resistance to the Stamp Act (1765–66), when he was 11, and the violence of the Boston Massacre (1770), when he was 16, in which British troops opened fire on a mob of Bostonians who were brawling with the troops.