Home · States · New Hampshire · History
NHNew Hampshire History
Four months before Lexington, a few hundred men rowed down the Piscataqua, overpowered a six-man garrison at Fort William and Mary on New Castle island and hauled away about a hundred barrels of the king's gunpowder. The raid of 14 December 1774 followed Paul Revere riding north with word that the Crown had banned powder imports to the colonies, and it stands as one of the first organized armed acts against royal authority in America. Getting there early became something of a habit.
Pennacook country and the tidal rivers
The people here spoke Western Abenaki. The Pennacook confederacy held the Merrimack valley from its base near present Concord, with the Winnipesaukee around the big lake, the Pigwacket on the upper Saco, and the Squamscott and Piscataqua bands on the tidal estuaries. They planted corn on the intervale soils, took alewife and salmon at falls such as Amoskeag, and moved to the coast for shellfish in summer. Epidemics sweeping the coast between 1616 and 1619, before any permanent English settlement, killed a devastating share of the shoreline population and emptied villages the English later described as conveniently vacant.
Passaconaway, the Pennacook sachem, signed an act of submission to Massachusetts in 1644 and instructed his people not to fight the English. His son Wonalancet held to that. His grandson Kancamagus did not, and in June 1689 he led the raid that destroyed Dover and killed Major Richard Waldron, who years earlier had seized several hundred Pennacook under a flag of truce and sold many into slavery. The frontier wars that followed pushed most Abenaki north into Quebec.
Captain Mason's grant and a century run from Boston
In 1622 the Council for New England gave Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason a joint grant of the coast between the Merrimack and the Kennebec. They divided it in 1629, Gorges taking Maine and Mason taking the southern share, which he named New Hampshire after the English county where he had been governor of Portsmouth. Mason died in 1635 without ever seeing the place. Settlement started at Odiorne's Point and Dover in 1623, then Strawbery Banke, later Portsmouth, in 1630, and Exeter and Hampton in 1638. Exeter was founded by John Wheelwright after Massachusetts banished him in the religious quarrel that also expelled his sister-in-law Anne Hutchinson.
Massachusetts absorbed all four towns by 1641. New Hampshire was made a separate royal province in 1679, the first colony detached from Massachusetts, then shared a governor with it again from 1699 until 1741, when Benning Wentworth got the post on his own. Wentworth held it for 25 years, granted himself land in almost every new township, and issued 131 charters west of the Connecticut River. Britain awarded that ground to New York in 1764, the grantees refused to accept it, and the dispute eventually produced Vermont.
Broad arrows and the first state constitution
New Hampshire's white pines were the tallest straight timber the Royal Navy could reach, and surveyors of the King's Woods marked every suitable tree with the broad arrow, reserving it for masts. Mast ships loaded at Portsmouth for a century. Colonists who wanted the same timber for their own sawmills resented the mark, and in April 1772 millers at Weare who had cut marked logs beat the sheriff sent to collect their fines, in what became known as the Pine Tree Riot.
After the powder raid the royal governor John Wentworth fled in 1775. On 5 January 1776 the province adopted a written constitution of its own, six months before the Declaration of Independence and before any other colony did so. No battle of the Revolution was fought on New Hampshire soil, but Portsmouth's yards built the Continental frigate Raleigh and the sloop Ranger that John Paul Jones sailed to Europe, and John Stark's regiments held the rail fence at Bunker Hill and destroyed a British foraging force at Bennington in August 1777. Stark's written toast of 1809, live free or die, became the state motto in 1945.
The ninth ratification
The Constitution required nine of thirteen states to take effect. Eight had ratified by May 1788, and both Virginia and New York looked doubtful. New Hampshire's convention met at Exeter in February, counted heads, found a majority against, and adjourned rather than vote it down. Delegates went home, were lobbied hard, and reconvened at Concord on 18 June. On 21 June 1788 the convention ratified 57 to 47 with twelve recommended amendments. That vote, not Virginia's four days later, is what put the Constitution into force.
Slavery ended here without a single decisive act. In 1779 twenty enslaved men in Portsmouth petitioned the legislature for freedom and were tabled. The state passed no gradual abolition law, the enslaved population dwindled through the 1790s, and a clear statutory ban did not arrive until 1857. In 2013 the legislature granted the 1779 petitioners posthumous emancipation, ten years after the city's African Burying Ground was rediscovered beneath State Street.
Amoskeag and the mile of mills
The Merrimack drops fifty feet at Amoskeag, and the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, chartered in 1831, bought the falls, the water rights and the land around them. It laid out Manchester on a plan, built the housing and the churches, and by the 1910s ran the largest cotton textile operation on earth: roughly thirty mill buildings along a mile of riverbank and around 17,000 workers, heavily French Canadian, Greek and Polish. A nine month strike in 1922 over a wage cut and a longer week ended the paternal bargain between company and city, and the firm went into receivership in 1935 and shut.
Franklin Pierce of Hillsborough, elected in 1852, remains the only president born in the state, and his attempts to hold the Union together by conceding to the South left him unpopular at home before the war arrived anyway. New Hampshire sent about 34,000 men to the Union army, and the Fifth New Hampshire lost more men killed in battle than any other Union infantry regiment.
Portsmouth, Bretton Woods and going first
Twice the state hosted negotiations that reordered the world. In 1905 Russian and Japanese delegates met at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and signed a peace treaty on 5 September, ending the Russo-Japanese War and earning Theodore Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize for arranging it. In July 1944, 730 delegates from 44 nations spent three weeks at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods and produced the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the dollar-based exchange system that lasted until 1971.
The presidential primary came out of a 1916 law that at first only chose convention delegates. New Hampshire had the earliest date from 1920, and adding a direct preference vote for candidates in 1949 gave the primary its power. In 1952 Estes Kefauver beat a sitting president in the Democratic contest and Dwight Eisenhower won the Republican one without setting foot in the state; Harry Truman announced weeks later that he would not run. A 1975 statute now requires the secretary of state to hold the primary at least seven days before any similar contest anywhere. The Old Man of the Mountain, the granite profile on the state quarter and the highway signs, collapsed on 3 May 2003. The state still levies neither a general sales tax nor a tax on wages.
Nine states in, and the Constitution was live
Statedoku uses ratification order, original colonies and admission years as daily constraints, so the sequence sticks without memorizing a list.
Play today's puzzle →New Hampshire history questions
When did New Hampshire become a state?
It ratified the United States Constitution on 21 June 1788 as the ninth state. Because nine ratifications were needed, that vote is what actually put the Constitution into effect.
Which colony was the first to declare a constitution of its own?
New Hampshire, on 5 January 1776, roughly six months before the Declaration of Independence. Its royal governor had already fled the previous year.
What was the raid on Fort William and Mary?
An attack on the royal fort at New Castle on 14 December 1774, after Paul Revere carried news that Britain had banned powder shipments. Local militia took gunpowder and light cannon, four months before fighting began at Lexington and Concord.
Why is New Hampshire's primary always first?
The state has held the earliest presidential primary since 1920, and a 1975 state law directs the secretary of state to schedule it at least seven days ahead of any similar contest, which he has repeatedly done by moving the date.