Portsmouth, New Hampshire: The Town That Struck First

Long before the musket volleys at Lexington and Concord echoed across Massachusetts, the seeds of armed rebellion had already been sown ninety miles to the north, in the bustling seaport of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This prosperous colonial town—home to royal governors, ambitious merchants, skilled shipwrights, and restless patriots—became the site of one of the earliest overt acts of military aggression against the British Crown, a raid so audacious that it predated the more famous events of April 1775 by a full four months. Portsmouth's Revolutionary War story is not a footnote to Boston's or Philadelphia's. It is a story of first strikes, first ships, and first salutes—a narrative that belongs at the center of any honest accounting of how thirteen colonies became a nation.

To understand Portsmouth's revolutionary moment, one must first understand what the town was in the years before independence. Situated at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, Portsmouth had grown wealthy on the timber trade, shipbuilding, and Atlantic commerce. It was the capital of the Province of New Hampshire and the seat of Governor John Wentworth, the last in a dynasty of royal governors who had guided the province for decades. Wentworth was no caricature of tyranny; he was educated, cultured, and genuinely popular among many of his constituents. He had built roads, championed Dartmouth College, and governed with a relatively light hand. But Wentworth was also an unflinching loyalist, and as tensions between Britain and its colonies escalated through the early 1770s, his position became increasingly untenable. Portsmouth was a town divided—loyalist merchants rubbed shoulders with firebrand patriots in its taverns and meeting houses—but the balance of sentiment was tipping fast.

The spark that ignited Portsmouth's revolution arrived on horseback. On December 13, 1774, Paul Revere—the same Boston silversmith and courier who would later make his legendary midnight ride to Lexington—galloped into Portsmouth carrying urgent intelligence from the Boston Committee of Correspondence. The message was alarming: the Crown had issued orders prohibiting the export of military stores to the colonies, and British reinforcements were reportedly being dispatched to secure Fort William and Mary, the lightly garrisoned royal fortification situated on New Castle Island at the mouth of Portsmouth Harbor. The fort held gunpowder, muskets, and cannons—supplies the patriot cause desperately needed and could not afford to let fall further under British control.

Revere's warning galvanized Portsmouth's patriots into immediate action. On December 14, 1774, General John Sullivan—a prominent local lawyer, Continental Congress delegate, and natural leader of men—organized a force of approximately four hundred militiamen and townspeople. They marched to the fort, which was defended by a skeleton garrison of just five soldiers under Captain John Cochran. Cochran, to his credit, refused to surrender, and his tiny garrison fired three cannons at the approaching mob. No one was killed. The patriots overwhelmed the fort, hauled down the British flag, and carried away approximately one hundred barrels of gunpowder. This was the first raid on Fort William and Mary, and it represented one of the earliest instances of colonial subjects seizing royal military property by force—an act of open rebellion against the Crown months before the battles that are conventionally understood to have started the war.

But the patriots were not finished. The next day, December 15, Sullivan led a second raid on the fort. This time, the men removed muskets, bayonets, and sixteen light cannons. The seized gunpowder was spirited away and hidden in towns across New Hampshire; some of it, according to persistent local tradition, eventually made its way to the Continental forces at Bunker Hill. The two raids on Fort William and Mary were acts of extraordinary boldness. They demonstrated that armed resistance to British authority was not merely theoretical—it was already underway, and it had begun in Portsmouth.

The consequences for royal authority in New Hampshire were swift and severe. Governor Wentworth, who had watched his power erode with each passing month, found himself effectively abandoned by the summer of 1775. After the news of Lexington and Concord reached Portsmouth in April, whatever remaining loyalist sentiment in the town evaporated almost overnight. Wentworth attempted to govern from his elegant mansion, but patriot mobs made his position impossible. In June 1775, he fled Portsmouth, first to Fort William and Mary and then aboard a British warship, never to return. His departure marked the end of royal governance in New Hampshire and the beginning of the state's experiment in self-rule. New Hampshire would go on to adopt one of the earliest state constitutions in January 1776, six months before the Declaration of Independence.

With the governor gone and war now openly declared, Portsmouth turned its considerable shipbuilding expertise to the patriot cause. The town's shipyards along the Piscataqua had been producing vessels for generations, and they now became critical assets for the fledgling Continental Navy. In 1776, the Continental frigate Raleigh was constructed in Portsmouth—one of the first thirteen frigates authorized by the Continental Congress. The Raleigh was built with remarkable speed, a testament to the skill of Portsmouth's shipwrights and the urgency of the moment. She was among the earliest warships to fly what would become the American naval ensign, and though her combat career would prove short and troubled, her construction demonstrated that the colonies could build warships to challenge British sea power.

Even more consequential was the vessel that followed. On May 10, 1777, the Continental sloop-of-war Ranger slid down the ways at John Langdon's island shipyard in Portsmouth and into the Piscataqua River. John Langdon—merchant, patriot, Continental Navy agent, delegate to the Continental Congress, and future governor of New Hampshire—had personally financed much of the ship's construction when congressional funds ran short. The Ranger was a sleek, fast vessel, purpose-built for raiding, and she was about to be entrusted to the most daring and controversial officer in the Continental Navy: Captain John Paul Jones.

Jones, a Scottish-born seaman with a complicated past and limitless ambition, arrived in Portsmouth in the summer of 1777 to take command of the Ranger. He spent months in the town outfitting the ship, recruiting crew, and clashing with local officers who resented his authority. On November 1, 1777, the Ranger sailed from Portsmouth for France, carrying dispatches announcing the American victory at Saratoga—news that would help secure the French alliance that ultimately proved decisive in the war. What followed was one of the most remarkable naval campaigns of the entire conflict. On February 14, 1778, as the Ranger sailed into Quiberon Bay, France, the French fleet rendered a formal gun salute to the American flag flying from her mast. This is widely recognized as the first foreign salute to the Stars and Stripes by a sovereign nation's military, a moment of enormous symbolic importance for a young republic desperate for international recognition and legitimacy.

Jones then took the Ranger on an audacious raiding cruise into British home waters—waters that no enemy had dared to violate in over a century. On April 22, 1778, Jones led a shore party in a raid on the English port of Whitehaven, attempting to set fire to the shipping in the harbor. The raid caused more panic than physical damage, but its psychological effect was profound: for the first time, the war had come to British soil, and the myth of the Royal Navy's invincible protection of the homeland was shattered. Two days later, on April 24, 1778, the Ranger engaged and captured HMS Drake in a fierce hour-long battle off the coast of Ireland—the first time a Continental warship had taken a British naval vessel in British waters. Jones sailed back to France with his prize, and his name became known on both sides of the Atlantic. All of this had been launched from Portsmouth.

The town's contributions extended beyond dramatic raids and shipbuilding. Throughout the war, Portsmouth served as a vital supply hub, a center of privateering activity, and a political engine for the patriot cause. John Langdon's financial and organizational leadership was indispensable, not only in building the Ranger and the Raleigh but in sustaining New Hampshire's broader war effort. Sullivan went on to lead Continental forces in critical campaigns, including the pivotal Battle of Rhode Island and the Sullivan Expedition against the Iroquois Confederacy in 1779. Portsmouth sent its sons, its ships, its gunpowder, and its treasure into the struggle.

The town's significance was recognized at the highest levels even after the war was won. On November 1, 1789, President George Washington visited Portsmouth as part of his triumphal tour of New England. Washington was received with great ceremony and public celebration, and his visit served as a kind of benediction upon the town's wartime sacrifices. He dined with John Langdon, toured the harbor, and acknowledged what the nation already knew: Portsmouth had been essential.

What makes Portsmouth distinctive in the broader Revolutionary narrative is the sheer concentration of consequential firsts. The first armed seizure of royal military property. The first major warships built for the Continental Navy. The first foreign salute to the American flag. The first enemy raid on English soil in a century. These are not minor events; they are inflection points, moments when the abstract idea of independence became tangible, physical, and irreversible. Portsmouth was not merely a participant in the Revolution—it was a place where the Revolution was actively invented, where patriots moved from protest to armed resistance before almost anyone else dared to do so.

For modern visitors, students, and teachers, Portsmouth offers something rare: the chance to stand in the exact places where these events unfolded and to grapple with the full complexity of the revolutionary experience. The town's compact, walkable historic district preserves structures that Jones, Langdon, and Sullivan would recognize. The site of Fort William and Mary still overlooks the harbor mouth. The river where the Ranger was launched still flows to the sea. Portsmouth reminds us that the American Revolution was not an abstraction debated only in congressional halls—it was a lived experience of risk, violence, sacrifice, and extraordinary daring, carried out by real people in real places, many of whom acted before anyone could promise them that history would judge them as heroes rather than traitors. That is why this town matters, and why its story deserves to be told alongside those of Boston, Philadelphia, and Yorktown.