250 and Counting

Tag: New Hampshire History

  • September 16, 1775: New Delegates to Congress

    Cover art for September 16, 1775: Josiah Bartlett, painted by Edwin Tryon Billings, mezzotint, after a portrait by John Trumbull. The original by Trumbull hangs in the State House in Concord, New Hampshire. via Wikimedia and the New York Public Library.

    So obviously this Josiah Bartlett isn’t the guy on The West Wing, in part because President Bartlet is fictional. (Okay, maybe entirely because of that.) But he is supposed to be a direct descendant of the Founding Father. Why, and when, the terminal T dropped off was never explained.

    Anyway, Josiah Bartlett and John Langdon both arrived in Philadelphia from New Hampshire as delegates to the Continental Congress, and they both fought in the war, plus they were around for the Constitutional Convention—so there’s a lot of history between them.

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  • August 22, 1775: HMS Scarborough Leaves Portsmouth

    Cover art for August 22, 1775: the HMS Scarborough

    Things were heating up all over, but it was still especially prevalent in the northeast. This time around, problems are cropping up in New Hampshire.

    The HMS Scarborough was designated to keep the peace by patrolling the mouth of the Piscataqua River, but when relations broke down between the British and the colonists there (and with good reason), when the ship ran out of supplies they had to re-locate. So naturally they headed to…um, Boston.

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  • May 22, 1775: New Hampshire Gets Into the Act

    Cover art for May 22, 1775: "Private of the 2nd New Hampshire Continental Infantry" by Charles M. Lefferts, 1910.

    Up until now, New Hampshire has been rather quiet when it came to resisting British rule. But today was the day that “Live Free or Die” was more than a motto for their license plates, which had yet to be invented.

    New Hampshire already had militias, of course, but they had a much broader range of available men from whom to choose. In addition, they organized themselves into a tight fighting force quicker than anyone imagined they would.

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