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.