Before the Declaration: New Hampshire Goes First

When I bring school groups into the Ladd-Gilman House, I ask them: when did New Hampshire declare independence from Britain? They say July 4, 1776. I tell them the right answer is January 5, 1776 — and it happened in this town. New Hampshire was first.

The 1776 constitution the Provincial Congress adopted in Exeter called itself provisional. But the act of adopting it was not provisional at all. You do not create a republican government — elected assembly, elected council, replacing the royal governor — unless you have decided that royal authority is no longer legitimate. The document's language was cautious. The act itself was revolutionary. Eight months before Philadelphia, men meeting in Exeter decided that New Hampshire would govern itself as a republic. They had the institutional capacity because Exeter had been building it — through its meeting culture, its Congregational church traditions, its market economy — for generations.

What I want students to understand is that the Declaration of Independence declared a fact already established in many of the colonies. The building of the revolution happened before July 1776, in places like this one.