Key figures: New Hampshire’s Fifth Provincial Congress (convened at Exeter)
Summary
The New Hampshire Constitution of 1776, promulgated on January 5, 1776, was the first written constitution adopted by any of the American colonies—predating the Declaration of Independence by six months. It was framed by New Hampshire’s Fifth Provincial Congress, an extralegal revolutionary body that had assembled at Exeter in December 1775 after the collapse of royal authority under the last colonial governor, John Wentworth. The congress acted on a recommendation issued by the Continental Congress in November 1775 that colonies without functioning governments establish new ones for the duration of the conflict with Great Britain.
The document was brief and provisional. At roughly 930 words—more than a third of it taken up by the preamble—it created a bicameral legislature and made no provision for an independent chief executive, an office New Hampshire deliberately declined to revive after the flight of its royal governor. It contained no formal declaration of rights, though its preamble invoked the people’s “natural and constitutional rights and privileges,” and it stopped short of declaring independence, framing the new government as a temporary expedient to serve “during the present unhappy and unnatural contest with Great Britain.” Hastily drafted for wartime necessity, it nonetheless demonstrated that a legitimate civil government could be constituted by the people’s representatives without reference to the Crown.
A Provisional Frame of Government
The constitution transformed the revolutionary congress into a standing legislature. The Fifth Provincial Congress resolved to reconstitute itself as a House of Representatives, elected by the towns, and to create an upper chamber, the Council, whose members were drawn from the several counties. Together the two houses exercised legislative authority and, in the absence of a governor, oversaw the appointment of the civil and military officials needed to run the state during the war. Executive functions that a governor would ordinarily have performed were distributed among the legislature and its committees rather than vested in a single magistrate.
The document’s brevity reflected its purpose. Unlike the elaborate constitutions later written by Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other states, it offered no separate bill of rights, no elaborate separation of powers, and no permanent structure intended to outlast the emergency. It was drafted at a moment when reconciliation with Britain still seemed possible to some, and its cautious language avoided any explicit renunciation of allegiance. New Hampshire replaced this stopgap frame with a fuller constitution—including a declaration of rights and an executive—that took effect on June 2, 1784.
Significance
New Hampshire’s action set the precedent that colonies could lawfully replace royal government with governments of their own making, grounded in popular consent rather than a monarch’s charter. Coming half a year before the Declaration of Independence and at the express suggestion of the Continental Congress, it was the first concrete step by an American colony toward independent statehood in written constitutional form. The example encouraged the other colonies, most of which adopted their own constitutions over the following year, and it anchored the emerging American conviction that legitimate authority derives from the community. Though soon superseded and modest in ambition, the 1776 frame marks the beginning of the tradition of written state constitutions that shaped the design of the United States Constitution a decade later.