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. The great eastern white pines of New Hampshire's forests—some growing over 150 feet tall and perfectly straight—were among the most prized natural resources in the British Empire, ideal for the masts of Royal Navy warships. During most of the 17th and 18th centuries, Portsmouth was one of the principal centers of the mast trade. Royal surveyors marked the best trees with the "King's Broad Arrow," and colonists were not allowed to cut down these marked trees for their own use. The resulting resentment ran deep: the Pine Tree Riot of 1772 occurred in New Hampshire , an early flash of violent resistance to British authority that predated even the Boston Tea Party.

Portsmouth 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. His ancestry went back to some of the earliest settlers of the Province of New Hampshire, and he was a grandson of John Wentworth, who served as the province's lieutenant governor in the 1720s, and a nephew to Governor Benning Wentworth —roots five generations deep in New Hampshire soil. 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. Probably no governor in North America took more genuine interest or greater pride in his colony than John Wentworth. 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 son of a wealthy farmer and shipbuilder, Langdon had declined his father's offer to join the family business and instead gone to sea, becoming captain of a cargo ship by age 22 and eventually acquiring a small fleet of merchant vessels engaged in trade among Portsmouth, the Caribbean, and London. Another prominent patriot merchant, William Whipple, had landed in Portsmouth in 1759 and, in partnership with his brother, established himself as a merchant. Both men would soon play outsized roles in the Revolution.

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. In June 1774, Whipple was on a Committee to prevent the landing of tea in Portsmouth.

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

The Raid on Fort William and Mary

The spark that ignited Portsmouth's revolution arrived on horseback. On December 13, 1774, the Boston Committee of Correspondence quickly dispatched Paul Revere 66 miles north to Portsmouth with a message for Samuel Cutts , a local patriot merchant. Revere arrived in Portsmouth at about 4:00 PM on the cold, snowy afternoon and attempted to locate Cutts. By chance, he encountered a man he had known in Boston, William Torrey, on the Portsmouth Parade (now Market Square). Cutts happened to be passing by, and Torrey pointed him out. Revere caught up with the patriot leader and the two headed off to Stoodley's Tavern. The message was alarming: Patriot leaders in Boston had received word that General Gage was planning to send a contingent of British marines to Fort William and Mary.

Cutts called for a meeting of the Portsmouth Committee of Correspondence, and the decision was made to strike first.

The next morning, December 14, John Langdon made his way through Portsmouth with a drummer, collecting a crowd to descend on the fort.

Nearly 400 militiamen from Portsmouth, New Castle, Rye, and Kittery answered the call, setting out for the fort by way of the Piscataqua River. Pushing off ahead of them was a tidewater barge known as a "gundalow," filled with about 50 would-be raiders.

Fort William and Mary, built around 1632 on New Castle Island at the mouth of the Piscataqua, was defended by a six-man British contingent that refused to surrender. Captain John Cochran, the garrison commander, fired three of his cannon at the attacking militiamen.

At about three o'clock a few shots were exchanged between the patriots and the king's soldiers, but no one was injured.

The Patriots, who did not suffer any serious injuries, poured over the fort walls and overwhelmed the guard.

The victorious patriots seized a stunning haul. The king's colors were lowered, and patriots made off with 97 barrels of powder.

During the raid, the Patriots removed the British flag from the fort—believed to be the first time Americans lowered the King's colors during the American Revolution.

But the raiders were not finished. On the following day, rebels led by colonial military officer John Sullivan again raided the fort, this time seizing numerous heavy cannon, ammunition, and supplies. Sullivan had marched his men from Durham to Portsmouth to finish what Langdon's party had begun.