Interviewees:
-
Eliga Gould
- Professor of History, University of New Hampshire
The American Revolution in New Hampshire brought more continuity than upheaval at the local level. Town governments elected the same kinds of men before and after independence. At the state level, power shifted from the Wentworth oligarchy to Congregationalist merchants and attorneys from towns just west of Portsmouth. John Sullivan of Durham—delegate to the Continental Congress and Continental Army general in the Saratoga campaign and the brutal Sullivan-Clinton campaign against Haudenosaunee towns—became the state's most prominent Patriot figure and later its governor. Josiah Bartlett and Samuel Langdon also shaped the new state government. New Hampshire retained its colonial governor's council, now elected, and built one of the largest legislatures in the world, with every representative tied to a specific town—a structure that persists to the present day.
