Exeter

Exeter, New Hampshire, was the revolutionary government of an entire colony — and then a state — for the better part of a decade. That is not a metaphor. When royal governor John Wentworth fled Portsmouth in August 1775, the formal colonial apparatus of British authority in New Hampshire collapsed with him. What replaced it met in Exeter. The provincial congresses, the Committee of Safety, the state legislature — the entire institutional architecture of New Hampshire's self-governance operated out of this small Squamscott River town while the war was fought. The choice was not accidental: Exeter sat far enough inland that a British naval force could not simply sail up and bombard it, and it had a tradition of independence rooted in its Congregational meeting culture and distance from Portsmouth's patronage networks.

The man who made that government work was Meshech Weare. His name is little known outside New Hampshire, but within it he was the indispensable figure of the Revolutionary period. He served simultaneously as president of the Committee of Safety, chief justice of the Superior Court, and — after 1776 — as the state's first elected president. He was an administrator of extraordinary competence in a period when competence was what the Patriot cause most needed and least reliably got.

Exeter also matters because New Hampshire was first. On January 5, 1776 — eight months before the Declaration of Independence — the New Hampshire Provincial Congress adopted a new constitution establishing a republican government, the first colony to do so. The document was explicitly provisional, but its adoption was a direct repudiation of royal authority at a moment when many colonists still hoped for reconciliation. Phillips Exeter Academy, founded in 1781, is one of the lasting institutions that grew from this culture of civic seriousness — John Phillips's founding deed explicitly connected education to citizens' capacity for self-governance.