Portsmouth Politicians Started and Revived
NH's Only Ivy League School

The next time you go golfing with chums from Dartmouth, look carefully at the logo embroidered on their caps and polo shirts. The college "shield" shows two Native Americans holding a giant book. They are walking out of the forest toward a two-story building topped by a Christian cross. The image speaks volumes. It is the symbol of a controversy that has burned at the heart of the prestigious college since it was founded in 1769.

The logo also links the founding of Dartmouth College directly to Portsmouth. I had no clue about this connection until I was asked to address a group of Dartmouth alumni the other day. I was nervous. What do I know about life in the Ivy League? Sure, I’ve seen the movie "Animal House," written by a Dartmouth grad. But I went to the University of New Hampshire. Our seal is pretty mundane – a lamp, a chain, some laurels and an arm holding a hammer. Still, I do know Portsmouth, so I poked around – and here’s the scoop.

Dartmouth College was originally conceived as a missionary school for Native Americans. The idea came from Rev. Eleazar Wheelock who established an Indian school in Connecticut as early as 1756. Hoping to move and expand his small school, Wheelock sent two of his best Indian students to England to raise funds a few years before the American Revolution. Donations poured in, with a generous contribution from William Legge, the second Earl of Dartmouth. The Earl was a close friend of Sir John Wentworth, the royal governor of the province of New Hampshire. Wentworth’s former home still stands on Pleasant Street in Portsmouth. Both the Earl and John Wentworth were openly opposed to the British taxes that eventually sparked the Revolution.

Wentworth to the Rescue

Rev. Wheelock had money, but was unable to obtain a charter to start his college in Connecticut. So he appealed to Wentworth, the handsome, active and likeable governor descended from a powerful and influential family. Wentworth offered Wheelock land in a distant forested spot on the Connecticut River called Dresden, later Hanover, NH. Wentworth knew influential people and was able to obtain a charter for the college from King George III. This was the last royal charter granted, making Dartmouth the youngest and still smallest of the colonial Ivy League schools.

Dartmouth got its charter in 1769, a big year for John Wentworth. That same year he built a massive summer home on a 5,000-acre tract in the wilds of Wolfeboro on what is now Lake Wentworth. The progressive young governor was driving New Hampshire’s economy westward along a series of improved provincial roads. One of those new roads would pass his Wolfeboro mansion en route to Hanover. Wentworth was planning ahead, but he was running out of time.

Wentworth also served in a famous Boston court case in the summer of 1769. NH’s royal governor, among others, found a colonial ship captain not guilty of murder when he killed a British soldier who was attempting to seize the ship’s cargo. The defense lawyer in the case was a Harvard classmate of John Wentworth named John Adams, who would later become president of the United States. That year Wentworth also divided New Hampshire into counties, naming three of them Hillsborough, Strafford and Rockingham after wealthy British nobles.

As the powerful Surveyor of the King’s Woods, Wentworth was in charge of the valuable trees that powered the NH economy and included the tall valuable pines stretching all the way to Nova Scotia. After a trip to Halifax in 1769, Wentworth returned to Portsmouth and married his cousin Frances Atkinson. The wedding took place just 10-days after her first husband’s funeral.

CONTINUE DARTMOUTH

Wentworth on the Ropes

Rev. Wheelock, meanwhile, had adapted his plans. His new college, he declared, would provide instruction to white men as well as Indian students. The Earl of Dartmouth, for whom the school was named, opposed the change. (Originally, according to The Dartmouth Review, Whhelock planned to call his new school Wentworth College.) Perhaps Wheelock was currying favor with his British benefactors when he created a seal depicting Native Americans. The British were more interested, at the time in Christianizing the "savage" Indians than they were in educating the uppity colonists. Although Wentworth was loyal to the Church of England and Wheelock was of the opposing Congregational faith, the two worked out a compromise. Wheelock got his land while Wentworth placed an Anglican bishop on the Dartmouth board of trustees.

Wentworth’s plan was as practical as it was religious. Dartmouth might be good business for wealthy Portsmouth merchants. Like his uncle, former governor Benning Wentworth, John wanted to establish an Anglican parish in every new NH town. By offering free land to Christian missionaries, Wentworth could not only convert the Indians, but retain political control in an era when church and state were one in the same. Because the Church of England was unpopular in Revolutionary America, Wentworth kept his plans secret. Perhaps, historians have suggested, Wentworth had long-term plans to convert Dartmouth to an Anglican school. Getting more settlers into the unpopulated parts of New Hampshire, however, was likely his top priority. The college Latin motto, after all, roughly translates as "A voice crying in the wilderness".

Dartmouth survived in New Hampshire, but Gov. Wentworth did not. A fewe months after the famous patriot raid on Fort William and Mary in New Castle (that Wentworth described in a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth), local citizens forced the governor and his family to flee. The mob pointed a cannon at the governor’s mansion and even threatened to kill his five-month-old son. Under the cover of darkness in June 1775, the royal governor slipped out the back door of his house, stepped into a small boat on the South Mill Pond, and quietly rowed out of American history.

It really wasn’t personal. People liked him. But Wentworth represented the "mad" King George III and he simply had to go. Curiously, it was a series of private letters between Wentworth and the Earl of Dartmouth that helped seal the governor’s fate. John Langdon and John Sullivan, leaders of the insurrection, published the letters and claimed that Wentworth was planning to use military force against the people of Portsmouth.

CONTINUE DARTMOUTH

Young Lawyer Dan

Condemned as a traitor in his own home, John Wentworth never returned to his beloved New Hampshire. In 1783, as the war ended, he accepted the post of royal governor to Halifax, Nova Scotia, its population swelled with Loyalists in exile. One year earlier, in 1782, the next great hero of Dartmouth was born.

Dartmouth graduates are notoriously loyal to their alma mater. But no alum is more integral to the college than Daniel Webster. Born in Salisbury, NH, educated at Phillips Exeter, Webster graduated from the Dartmouth class of 1801. Fewer than 150 students attended the isolated and unremarkable school in Webster’s era. Dartmouth had survived, but it was not yet out of the woods.

In 1807 Daniel Webster brought his new bride to the bustling seaport of Portsmouth and set up a law practice. Here Webster cut his teeth as an attorney, sharpened his speaking skills and started a family. But Portsmouth had already hit its economic peak. Ravaged by a series of fires, blockaded by the British in the war of 1812, the city faltered. Webster’s own house on Pleasant Street (not far from John Wentworth’s former home) burned in 1813. Of the four houses he occupied during nine years in town, only the one moved to Strawbery Banke Museum survives.

By 1815, as Webster abandoned Portsmouth for Boston, Dartmouth College too was on the skids. Its second president, John Wheelock, was on a rampage. The son of the founder, John Wheelock was a "pompous, obstinate, willful man," according to one Dartmouth historian. When the college trustees fired Wheelock, the battle turned political. Wheelock took his fight to the governor of New Hampshire. In a complex partisan decision, the state legislature took over the campus that had been chartered by the king of England half a century earlier. Wheelock was appointed president of the state school re-named Dartmouth University.

The trustees of Dartmouth College fought back. Scraping together funds, they hired former student Daniel Webster who took the famous case all the way to the Supreme Court. In a landmark decision in 1819, the justices sided with the original Dartmouth trustees, upheld the private charter, and took the college away from the state of New Hampshire.

"It is, in some sense, the case of every man who has property of which he may be stripped," Webster said at the end of his four-hour oration. Then he concluded:

"Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak; it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out: but if you do, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those great lights of science, which, for more than a century, have thrown radiance over the land! It is, sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those that love it."

At the end of his speech Webster broke down. Chief Justice John Marshall, and many of the men in the room also wept. The victory launched Webster’s stellar career in the US Senate. But it did not greatly improve the quality of education at Dartmouth, that did not gain its superior reputation until well into the 20^th century. Chartered to "civilize" Native Americans, the college graduated only about a dozen Indians in its first 200 years of operation. Today, Dartmouth educates more Native American students than all the other Ivy league schools combined. The deeply entrenched battle between Dartmouth trustees, however, still rages on.

And what of poor John Wentworth? He died impoverished in Canada in 1820, the year after Daniel Webster saved Dartmouth. That same year, as if in mourning, Wentworth’s grand mansion in the wilds of Wolfeboro – half way from Portsmouth to Dartmouth -- caught fire and burned to the ground leaving only its stone foundation and a cellar hole thick with weeds.

Copyright © J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. Robinson is editor of the web site SeacoastNH.com and author of Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making.

READ: Governor John Wentworth and the American Revolution: The English Connection by Paul W. Wilderson (1994)

VISIT: (1) Mark Wentworth Home, 346 Pleasant Street, Portsmouth, NH; (2) Fort Constitution, New Castle, NH; (3) Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; (4) Daniel Webster Birthplace and Webster Farm, Franklin, NH; (5) Wentworth Mansion historic site in Wolfeboro, NH.