Exeter, New Hampshire: The Revolutionary Capital That Forged a State and Helped Birth a Nation

When the royal governor of New Hampshire fled his own province in the summer of 1775, he did not leave behind a vacuum. He left behind Exeter — a modest town on the Squamscott River that would spend the next decade serving as the revolutionary capital of New Hampshire, the seat of its provisional government, the engine of its military contributions, and the birthplace of the first state constitution adopted by any of the thirteen colonies. Exeter's story is not one of dramatic battlefield engagements or famous midnight rides. It is the story of governance under fire, of institution-building in the midst of uncertainty, and of a handful of extraordinary citizens whose decisions in this small New England town rippled outward to shape the founding of the United States.

To understand Exeter's significance, one must first appreciate the crisis that elevated it. Throughout the colonial period, Portsmouth had served as New Hampshire's capital, the seat of royal authority embodied by Governor John Wentworth. Wentworth was not, by most accounts, a tyrant — he was an educated, capable administrator who had invested in the province's infrastructure and enjoyed considerable personal popularity. But by 1774 and 1775, as tensions between the colonies and Parliament escalated, Wentworth found himself caught between imperial directives and an increasingly restive population. The breaking point came in stages. When patriots raided Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth harbor in December 1774, carrying off gunpowder and weapons that would later serve the revolutionary cause, Wentworth was powerless to stop them. By June 1775, with armed conflict already underway at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, the governor's position had become untenable. Wentworth dissolved the colonial assembly, attempted to govern by decree, and finally, recognizing the futility and danger of his situation, fled to the safety of HMS Scarborough, a British warship anchored offshore. He would never return to govern. Royal authority in New Hampshire was finished.

Into this void stepped the New Hampshire Provincial Congress, which convened in Exeter beginning in the early months of 1775. The choice of Exeter was both practical and symbolic — it was inland enough to be safe from potential naval bombardment, it had a tradition of independent civic life, and it was home to several of the province's most prominent patriot leaders. What began as an extralegal assembly, meeting without royal sanction, rapidly assumed the full functions of government. The delegates organized militia, coordinated supplies, managed finances, and corresponded with the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Exeter was no longer simply a town; it was the operational headquarters of a revolution in New Hampshire.

Among the most consequential acts of this period was the establishment of the New Hampshire Committee of Safety, a body that functioned as the executive authority of the province when the full Provincial Congress was not in session. At its head stood Meshech Weare, a figure whose importance to the Revolution is dramatically underappreciated outside New Hampshire. Weare served simultaneously as president of the Committee of Safety, president of the state's governing council, and chief justice of its superior court — a concentration of responsibilities that made him, in practical terms, the most powerful man in the state for the duration of the war. Operating from Exeter, Weare managed the staggering logistical challenge of mobilizing a largely rural province for sustained military conflict. He oversaw the raising of Continental regiments, adjudicated disputes over supplies and impressment, maintained correspondence with General Washington and the Continental Congress, and struggled constantly to keep the state solvent. He did all of this with a fraction of the resources available to larger states, and he did it with a quiet steadiness that earned him the deep, if unglamorous, respect of his contemporaries. If Exeter was the revolutionary capital of New Hampshire, Meshech Weare was its indispensable man.

The town's contributions to the military effort were substantial and immediate. As early as 1775, Exeter was actively raising and supplying Continental regiments, drawing on its population of farmers, artisans, and tradesmen to fill the ranks. New Hampshire troops served with distinction at Bunker Hill, and the state would go on to provide soldiers for nearly every major theater of the war. One of the most dramatic moments in this military story came in the summer of 1777, when John Langdon — a wealthy merchant, delegate to the Continental Congress, and future governor — personally pledged his own fortune to finance and equip New Hampshire troops for the Saratoga campaign. "I have a thousand dollars in hard money," Langdon reportedly told the state legislature. "I will pledge my plate for three thousand more. I have seventy hogsheads of Tobago rum, which shall be sold for the most they will bring. These are at the service of the state." Langdon's generosity was not mere rhetoric; the troops he helped finance joined the forces that surrounded and defeated General Burgoyne's army at Saratoga in October 1777, a turning point in the entire war that directly led to the French alliance. Langdon's role as Continental Navy agent, also administered from the Exeter–Portsmouth corridor, further underscored the region's importance to the patriot cause on both land and sea.

But Exeter's most historically distinctive contribution may have been constitutional rather than military. On January 5, 1776 — six full months before the Declaration of Independence — the Provincial Congress meeting in Exeter adopted a state constitution, making New Hampshire the first of the thirteen colonies to establish an independent governing framework. The document was brief and provisional, essentially converting the existing revolutionary congress into a formal government, but its symbolic weight was enormous. In adopting it, New Hampshire declared, before any other colony, that royal government was finished and that the people themselves were the source of legitimate authority. This act of constitutional innovation did not occur in a vacuum. It was encouraged by the Continental Congress, which had advised colonies to form their own governments, and it reflected the practical reality that New Hampshire needed a stable governing structure to prosecute the war. But the fact that Exeter was where it happened — that this small river town became the site of America's first experiment in state constitution-making — is a distinction of genuine national importance.

That constitutional legacy deepened over the following years. In 1784, after years of debate and multiple rejected drafts, New Hampshire adopted a permanent constitution, again from Exeter, a document that reflected hard-won lessons about the balance of power and the rights of citizens. And on June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the United States Constitution, providing the critical vote that met the threshold required to put the new federal framework into effect. That act of ratification, carried out by delegates who had debated and deliberated with the gravity the moment demanded, meant that New Hampshire — and by extension, the political culture nurtured in Exeter — provided the decisive margin that brought the Constitution to life.

The town's revolutionary story is inseparable from the individuals who inhabited it. Josiah Bartlett, a physician from nearby Kingston who was deeply involved in Exeter's political life, served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and cast what is traditionally recorded as the first vote in favor of independence on July 2, 1776. Because the roll was called in geographical order from north to south, and because the New Hampshire delegation voted first, Bartlett's "yea" was the opening note of the chorus that would produce the Declaration of Independence. He would go on to sign that document, to serve as chief justice and governor of New Hampshire, and to embody the transition from revolutionary resistance to stable republican governance. Nicholas Gilman Jr., an Exeter native, served as an officer in the Continental Army before representing New Hampshire at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and signing the finished document. His trajectory — from soldier to statesman — mirrored the town's own evolution from wartime capital to cradle of constitutional order.

Even in the cultural sphere, Exeter's revolutionary era left a lasting mark. In 1781, with the war still grinding on, John Phillips — a prosperous merchant and philanthropist — founded Phillips Exeter Academy, endowing it with the conviction that a republic could survive only if its citizens were educated. The academy's founding during wartime was itself a statement of faith in the future, a declaration that the revolutionaries of Exeter were fighting not merely to win a war but to build a society worthy of the principles they espoused. Phillips Exeter Academy endures today as one of the nation's most distinguished secondary schools, a living monument to that revolutionary-era idealism.

What makes Exeter distinctive in the broader story of the American Revolution is the concentration of consequential governance that took place within its borders. This was not a town where a single famous event occurred; it was a town where the daily, unglamorous, absolutely essential work of revolution was carried out over the course of a decade. Constitutions were drafted and debated here. Armies were raised, financed, and supplied here. The machinery of an entirely new state government was invented and operated here, often by men who were learning the art of self-governance as they practiced it. Exeter reminds us that the Revolution was not won solely on battlefields — it was won in meeting rooms, at writing desks, and in the deliberative assemblies where free citizens decided, for the first time, how they wished to be governed.

Modern visitors, students, and teachers should care about Exeter because it illuminates the dimensions of the Revolution that are most relevant to our own time: the challenge of building legitimate government from scratch, the tension between urgency and deliberation, and the extraordinary civic commitment required of ordinary citizens in extraordinary moments. Walking the streets of Exeter today, one walks where Meshech Weare administered a state at war, where Josiah Bartlett prepared to cast his fateful vote, where John Langdon pledged his personal wealth to the cause of liberty, and where the first state constitution in American history was brought into being. It is a place where the Revolution was not merely fought — it was governed, financed, and constitutionally imagined. That is a story every American deserves to know.