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.

By the end of 1774, Portsmouth boasted a profusion of patriot committees. On the very afternoon of the Boston Tea Party—December 16, 1773—the town established its own local committee of correspondence, its five members including the merchant John Langdon, a liberty-minded former sea captain and opponent of the Wentworth administration.

The town also maintained a "Committee of 45," charged with keeping public order and scrutinizing anything "unfriendly to the Interest of the Community." When Governor Wentworth hatched a plan to secretly provide General Gage with New Hampshire carpenters to build winter barracks for the redcoats in Boston, the Committee of 45 issued a proclamation suggesting that he was an enemy to the community.

In June 1774, Portsmouth patriots stopped the ship Grosvenor from disposing of her cargo of tea in the colony; in early September, they stopped the Fox from doing the same.

Portsmouth responded to the Tea Crisis by rejecting shipments of British East India Company tea and sending them to Halifax.

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. In 1774, the fort was the only permanently occupied military post in New Hampshire. It held gunpowder, muskets, and cannons—supplies the patriot cause desperately needed and could not afford to let fall further under British control.

Once he arrived in Portsmouth, Revere met with Samuel Cutts, a local merchant, and together they worked with local patriots on a plan for the fort.

Vice Admiral Samuel Graves had already ordered four warships—the Gaspee, Halifax, Lively, and Canceaux—to prepare for sea after receiving the Order in Council on December 4, 1774. The clock was ticking.

Revere's warning galvanized Portsmouth's patriots into immediate action. On December 14, John Langdon made his way through Portsmouth with a drummer, collecting a crowd to descend on the fort. Several hundred men responded to his call, setting out for the Castle by way of the Piscataqua River. General John Sullivan—a prominent local lawyer, Continental Congress delegate, and natural leader of men—organized the effort alongside Langdon. Only one provincial officer, Captain John Cochran, and five provincial soldiers were stationed at Fort William and Mary. Despite the odds against them, they refused to capitulate to patriot demands.

When Langdon's men rushed the fort, the defenders opened fire with three cannons and a volley of musket shot. Patriots stormed the walls and Cochran's men engaged in hand-to-hand fighting before being subdued by an overwhelming number of raiders. Langdon's volunteers not only broke open the powder house and absconded with about one hundred barrels of gunpowder but, to three cheers, hauled down the fort's British flag.

Sullivan returned the next day, December 15, to seize the fort's cannons.

More than a thousand men from outlying towns arrived in Portsmouth, having received word of Paul Revere's message. They continued the raid on the King's fort, removing sixteen cannon and sending a supply of small arms upriver for storage.

The stolen munitions were loaded onto gundalows for transport on the Piscataqua River to inland towns for safekeeping.

Some of the gunpowder was offloaded and shipped overland to Exeter, Durham, and Dover, with the bulk of seventy-two barrels going to Exeter.

The storming of Fort William and Mary was an organized attack on uniformed troops and property of the King, and constituted open treason, an offense that was punishable by death.

Despite the Governor's proclamation deploring the traitorous acts, the men involved, including John Sullivan and John Langdon, were never arrested. The weight of public opinion was assuredly on the side of the perpetrators, and Governor Wentworth knew that pursuit of their prosecution would have further stoked their cause.

In response to a call for aid by Governor Wentworth, the armed hydrographic survey sloop HMS Canceaux arrived to keep the peace on December 17, followed by the twenty-gun post ship HMS Scarborough on December 19, with several marines aboard. But the powder was already gone.

The supplies captured by patriots in December 1774 were later used by New Hampshire forces during the Siege of Boston and the Battle of Bunker Hill.

New Hampshire provided more soldiers than any other state at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The gunpowder seized from a tiny island fort in Portsmouth Harbor helped fuel the opening chapter of the war.

The aftermath of the raid accelerated the collapse of royal authority in New Hampshire.