MAGAZINE OF AMERICAN HISTORY

VOL. VIII

ΤΗ

JANUARY 1882

THE NEW HAMPSHIRE GRANTS

GERMS OF NULLIFICATION AND SECESSION IN 1776

No. I

HE first free assembly of New Hampshire, elected as such, met at Exeter, on December 18, 1776. No one of the colonies had arrived at the era of independence with less of preparation. In none of them had the transition marked by the Declaration of Independence been more abrupt. Unlike the other New England Colonies, New Hampshire had never had a charter, nor anything answering to a framework of constitutional government such as existed elsewhere in America. The government of the colony had been as nearly absolute in form as the most strained construction of the British Constitution would allow. The royal governors had admitted the people to the smallest possible share in legislation. Nothing but the traditional town system had preserved the spirit of liberty and a practical knowledge of affairs sufficient to inspire the new assembly with courage equal to its task. The barest skeleton of a free state was present to its hand. The last provincial congress of the colony, held after the suspension of the royal authority, and which "took up civil government" on January 5, 1776, had indeed constructed a rude constitution-a sort of stepping-stone from the old to the new. Some such device the situation had imperatively demanded. Although an unequivocal social compact had thus been entered into, with the substantial result of a body politic which had taken the name of the State of New Hampshire, still the chief work of organization remained to be done.

To such a task had the Exeter Assembly come. War without and inexperience within were the conditions under which it was to be performed. Appalling as were these difficulties, a greater perhaps than either presented itself at the very outset. On the first day of the session, instead of representatives, there came from a large number of towns in the northern and eastern part of the State, angry protests against the legitimacy of the new government, coupled with explicit refusals to be represented in it or con

sidered a part of it. The disaffected towns, nearly fifty in number, suddenly asserted the right to decide, each for itself, what should be deemed an infraction of the compact of January 5th, and to pass definitively upon the extent of the obligation which it imposed upon them. Rather it might be said they recognized no obligation to abide by it longer than expediency might dictate. In other words, those towns viewed the new government which they had helped to create as one whose acts they might nullify at will, and the infant State as a mere confederation of towns, from which each was at liberty to secede at its pleasure.

This remarkable episode has attracted but little attention from historians, but it is nevertheless worthy of careful study as containing the germs of doctrines which, half a century later, in their application to the Union of the States, came to be the absorbing topics of political discussion, and to which a gigantic civil war has scarcely yet given their full quietus. It was not a mere freak of men suddenly freed from undue restraint, but the product of intelligible causes not difficult to discover in the history of the settlement of the Upper Connecticut Valley. A brief sketch of that history is essentiai to a full understanding of it, and at the same time will serve to furnish, perhaps, some sort of palliation of what seems at first sight an inexcusable political crime.

The original Province of New Hampshire, as granted by the Council of Plymouth to John Mason in 1629, was of very limited extent compared with the dimensions which it had acquired at the period of the Revolution. Bounded on its present seacoast line, it extended thence west on Massachusetts sixty miles, north on Maine sixty miles, and had for its remaining boundary a straight line drawn between those western and northern extremities. This territory is known in history as the Mason Grant, to distinguish it from the enlarged New Hampshire which came later, and its northwestern boundary as the Mason Line.

The settlers on the Mason Grant, after being a long time under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, at length petitioned the Crown for a separate government; and in 1679 a president and council were appointed by royal commission to govern the province in a manner which was, theoretically at least, purely arbitrary and unrestrained; a form of government which continued without substantial change till the revolt of the colonies.

By the literal terms of the original grant of Massachusetts, that province had embraced a large part of the territory west of the Merrimac River, which is now included in New Hampshire and Vermont. The present north line of Massachusetts being established in 1741, pursuant to an order of the king in council, it followed that all the territory at present belonging to

New Hampshire and Vermont, not included in the Mason Grant, remained ungranted and outside the jurisdiction of any of the colonial governments, unless New York might rightfully claim eastward to the Connecticut River, which was a matter in dispute; that is to say, it remained under the immediate jurisdiction of the Crown.

In this state of affairs Benning Wentworth was appointed Governor of the Province of New Hampshire, on July 3, 1741. The royal commission issued to him described the province as "bounded on the south side by a curve-line pursuing the course of the Merrimac River, at three miles' distance on the north side thereof, beginning at the Atlantic Ocean and ending at a point due north of Pautucket Falls, and by a straight line drawn from thence due west across said river, till it meets with our other governments; and bounded on the east side by a line passing up through the mouth of Piscataqua Harbor, and up the middle of the river to the river of Newichannock, part of which is now called Salmon Falls, and through the middle of the same to the farthest head thereof, and from thence north two degrees westerly until one hundred and twenty miles be finished from the mouth of Piscataqua Harbor aforesaid, or until it meets with our other governments;” a description, it will be observed, which embraced not only the Mason Grant, but all the adjacent ungranted territory westward to New York and northward to the Province of Quebec; whereas all previous commissions for the government of the provinces had limited it within the Mason Line of 1629.

Wentworth's commission authorized and commanded him to grant townships in this new territory, in the king's name, and to incorporate the grantees into bodies politic, with powers and privileges equal to those enjoyed by the Massachusetts and Connecticut towns, from whence it was contemplated immigrants were to be drawn. Whether or not the acceptance of these town charters would operate to unite the recipients of them into one body politic with the people on the Mason Grant, was a question not thought of at the time, but about which there arose a fierce discussion with the advent of independence.

Practically the whole region between the Mason Line and Lake Champlain was at this time an unbroken wilderness, unvisited by the white man and only roamed over by the weak St. Francis tribe of Indians. Nor was much progress made toward its settlement during the first years of Wentworth's administration. He confirmed a few grants which had been made by Massachusetts in the southernmost part, before the line of 1741 was established, and in 1749 granted the town of Bennington, bounding it westerly on the continuation of the west line of Massachusetts, thus serving notice