Governor John Wentworth

John Wentworth was born in 1737 into the most powerful family in New Hampshire colonial politics, his grandfather Benning Wentworth having served as royal governor for an extraordinary twenty-five years and his family having placed members in nearly every significant office in the colonial government. Educated at Harvard, John Wentworth succeeded his uncle as royal governor in 1766, bringing genuine ability and considerable charm to an office that his family had treated almost as hereditary. He proved a capable administrator who worked to balance imperial demands against colonial interests, earning respect from many New Hampshire leaders even as the political situation deteriorated around him.

As the Revolutionary crisis deepened through the early 1770s, Wentworth found himself in an increasingly untenable position, representing a crown whose policies were generating rage among the very colonists he was supposed to govern. He attempted to maintain royal authority through a combination of conciliation and firmness, but the December 1774 raid on Fort William and Mary — led by John Sullivan and John Langdon — demonstrated that Patriot forces were willing to take direct military action against crown property while he remained powerless to stop them. The provincial assembly's defiance escalated through 1775, and when a crowd gathered to prevent his loyalist allies from being seized, Wentworth fled Portsmouth entirely, taking refuge aboard HMS Scarborough in August 1775. He never returned to New Hampshire.

Wentworth's departure ended one hundred and fifty years of nearly unbroken Wentworth family dominance over New Hampshire's political life, a dynastic control that had shaped the colony's land distribution, commercial relationships, and governmental structures across four generations. He eventually served as royal governor of Nova Scotia, a position he held until 1808, but his influence never again approached what his family had wielded in New Hampshire. The institutions that Exeter's Patriots built to fill the governmental vacuum his flight created — the revolutionary legislature, the Committee of Safety, the mechanisms of Patriot governance — became the foundation of New Hampshire's republican government.