5. New Hampshire Breaks Free

Conflicts over land grants and claims, and over corollary governmental jurisdiction, were important sources of intercolonial conflict in eighteenth-century New England. Massachusetts laid claim to the bulk of New Hampshire, and the General Court handed out arbitrary grants to New Hampshire land. Furthermore, the Massachusetts towns insisted on claiming tax revenue from their junior New Hampshire neighbors. Massachusetts encroachment on New Hampshire was facilitated by their having a common governor, and by the 1730s Governor Jonathan Belcher, a wealthy Boston merchant, was heading the Massachusetts party in alliance with Secretary Richard Waldron III and the oligarchs of the New Hampshire Council. The popular opposition to Massachusetts in New Hampshire was led by Lieutenant Governor John Wentworth and then by his son Benning, also a powerful merchant. The opposition shepherded the New Hampshire legislature into making conflicting land grants of its own. To secure the favor of the Crown, the New Hampshire General Court voted the governor a fixed salary, thus going beyond Massachusetts. Influenced by this good conduct (in addition to bribe money spread where it could help), by the importance of New Hampshire ship masts, and by the perennial troublesomeness of Massachusetts, the English Privy Council finally decided in 1737 on a boundary in favor of New Hampshire. By 1741, New Hampshire was assured of approximately its present dimensions. Massachusetts conspired to revive the old Mason claim to proprietorship to New Hampshire.* Not only did this fail, but Britain, in disgust, removed Belcher from his post and ended the system of joint governorship, which threatened to keep New Hampshire under the tutelage of Massachusetts. The leader of the popular opposition, Benning Wentworth, now became full governor of Ne Hampshire in 1741, and Massachusetts received a royal governor of its own. Freed from the burden of this struggle, New Hampshire flourished and grew apace. At his inauguration, Governor Wentworth prophetically hailed the final separation of the two colonies as “an event which... will... be a lasting advantage; will be a means of replenishing your towns with people, of extending and enlarging your commerce.”

With New Hampshire secure from Massachusetts aggression, Governor Wentworth decider! to safeguard the newly decided-upon western part of the colony (now Vermont) for his control by parceling out huge land grants to that unsettled region (known as “the New Hampshire Grants”). Here, Wentworth was worried about New York’s old claims to jurisdiction over this territory. Wentworth, should be noted, took good care to assign himself a fee of five hundred acres in each newly designated township. Fortunately, no feudalistic proprietary was sustained, as the grantees quickly divided and sold the land. An annual quitrent of one shilling per hundred acres was demanded by the grantees, but they, typically, found it impossible to collect. With settlement rapidly developing, the period of transfer of landholdings from grantees to actual settlers fortunately tended to be brief. New York, however, continued to make its claim and to hand out conflicting western New Hampshire grants of its own.

Governor Wentworth began the grants in 1749 by creating the town of Bennington, and by the 1760s was founding many towns per year (sixty-three in 1761 alone). Here, considerable absentee speculation served as “wholesale” and “jobber” intermediaries before the land developed fairly rapidly upon the settlers. In making the grants, incidentally, Wentworth did not neglect his own family; at least a dozen Wentworths received handsome gifts, as did many leading citizens of New Hampshire and New England.

*See Conceived in Liberty, v. I, index listings for Robert T. Mason.