Almost exactly 250 years ago, as the sun rose on a late spring day, members of the fifth graduating class of Dartmouth College awoke to the sound of distant cannon fire. Eleazar Wheelock, the College’s founder and first president, noticed it too, writing in his diary and in letters to friends of the “noise of cannon” echoing through the valley.
The date was June 17, 1775, and remarkably, this cannon fire was said to be heard over 100 miles northwest of where it originated, from hundreds of British soldiers and colonial militia fighting and dying at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
The sounds of that day, which marked the first major battle of the Revolutionary War, engendered feelings of both excitement and fear at the College. As history and Native American studies professor Colin Calloway explained, although the Upper Valley would largely escape the war unscathed, the people living there were on tenterhooks.
“It was a pretty tense atmosphere at that moment,” Calloway said.
Two months earlier, on April 19, 1775, colonial militia had raised arms against the Crown, clashing with British troops in Lexington and Concord. Word spread throughout the colonies, eventually reaching the Upper Valley.
With the anniversary of the start of the American Revolution this spring and in the lead up to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, The Dartmouth spoke with historians and dove into local archives to learn about the Upper Valley’s Revolutionary War history.
Frontier and revolution
History professor Paul Musselwhite described the Upper Valley as a “very strange corner of the American Revolution.” The Upper Valley was considered a frontier, only recently opened to colonial settlement, when it was caught up in revolutionary political change.
As historian Stephen Marini wrote in his book “Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England,” the clash of frontier mentality and revolutionary political ideas led to the birth of a distinctive culture of Antifederalism in the Upper Valley, objecting to the standardization and industrialization of the growing urban areas of New England.
“This situation caused not only the breakdown of traditional ideas and institutions but also a search for new cultural forms expressive of the unprecedented realities of the new New England,” he wrote. “The result might be termed Antifederalist culture, reflecting the localist, egalitarian and tribal worldview of the settlers.”
Land in New Hampshire had only become available to New England settlers after the end of the French and Indian War, after the threat of French invasion had been removed, Calloway said. Within a decade or two, settlers poured into the area.
Between 1750 and 1764, New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth issued 124 township grants, including all the land between the Connecticut and Hudson rivers, according to Marini. The resulting mass influx of settlers was without parallel in American history.
“This massive encounter with the frontier was unprecedented in New England and American history, and it introduced grave problems of social and cultural fragmentation to a generation already bent on establishing national and regional autonomy,” Marini wrote.
Struggle with state governments
Because of the way the New Hampshire constitution worked before the Revolution, many of the towns on both sides of the Connecticut River weren’t really represented by the state government in Exeter, Musselwhite said.
“[The towns] are struggling with the state government throughout the revolutionary period,” he said. “In New Hampshire, the main resource that they’re squabbling over is land. But also, it’s trees. The big industry was ship masts, which were essential to the Royal Navy.”
This struggle would shape how the Upper Valley experienced the Revolutionary War and its aftermath.
Marini describes this conflict as representative of the “birth pangs of a new rural political stance deeply radical and democratic yet strongly loyalist and Antifederalist.”
“The development that caused the greatest disruption was the linkage of the ideology of national revolution to hill country demands for political autonomy,” Marini wrote.
There was also a question about secession, Musselwhite added. At one point — though it didn’t go far — the Upper Valley wanted to become its own state.
“At this febrile moment of democracy, can anybody just secede? The people in the Upper Valley are really testing that question,” Musselwhite said.
In early 1777, the New Hampshire Grants Convention — a group of 124 townships in the Connecticut Valley — declared the west bank of the Connecticut River should be a “free and independent jurisdiction or state” which gave itself the name Vermont.
Marini describes Vermont’s state constitution as New England’s “most radically democratic.” New Hampshire opposed the state’s push for recognition, and the struggle between the two state governments led to sporadic violence which didn’t end until 1784. Vermont wouldn’t become a recognized state until 1791.
“This is all happening in the years we’d think of as the Revolution,” Musselwhite said.
College ‘very intertwined’ with political struggle
“The College is very intertwined with this story during the early years of the American Revolution,” Musselwhite said, noting that several leaders of the College played important political roles in the Upper Valley during the conflict.
Wheelock, who had opened the College’s doors on the banks of the Connecticut River about five years before, had extensive Indigenous contacts, some of whom allied with the British.
“Wheelock had been trying to play both sides,” Musselwhite said.
General George Washington, assuming command of the colonial forces around Boston in June 1775, sent envoys up to Hanover to convince Wheelock to recruit some of his Indigenous contacts for the war effort.
In November, with Wheelock’s encouragement, James Dean, a Dartmouth graduate from the Class of 1773 and adopted member of the Oneida, became an interpreter and Indian agent for the American army, where he would help convince the Oneida to side with the colonies.
Concerns about Wheelock’s allegiances, nonetheless, ran throughout 1775. In July, for example, the College’s senior class had asked that no public Commencement be held at its graduation out of worry that suspicion of Wheelock’s allegiance to the American cause would grow if he threw a celebration while the war was ongoing.
Late in 1775, Wheelock ran into another controversy, as described by Leon Burr Richardson, Class of 1900, in his 1932 two-volume “History of Dartmouth College.”
Wheelock had mistakenly heard that the date for the Thanksgiving holiday would be November 16, and only after celebrating it on that day learned that the state legislature had in fact picked November 30.
Some Hanover residents demanded that the new date be obeyed, which Wheelock stubbornly refused to do. Finally, he relented, but emphasized that the service he held on November 30 was not to be regarded as an official Thanksgiving service.
“Wheelock’s enemies accused him of disrespect for the provincial Congress and thereby for the Colonial cause,” Richardson wrote. “The gossip went to such lengths that official action was thought to be necessary.”
On Jan. 2, 1776, the “Committees of Safety” of the towns of Hanover and Lebanon convened to consider charges against the president “to the effect that he had displayed unfriendly feeling toward the Colonies.”
The committees found no wrongdoing. According to Richardson, this was the last time suspicions of Wheelock’s loyalties were raised.
According to Marini, the suspicion of Wheelock was typical.
“In the absence of strong town governments, political authority was claimed by Committees of Safety and local militia units,” Marini wrote. “These agencies were constantly occupied in defending the settlements from subversion and attack, real or imagined.”
Beyond the actions of local leaders, however, there remains much to be explored in the daily experiences of people in the Upper Valley during this period.
“Very few historians have actually explored the position of non-elites in the Upper Valley,” Musselwhite said. “It’s actually probably quite distinct from other areas.”
Kent Friel ‘26 is an executive editor at The Dartmouth.
