page_title: Sir John Wentworth, 1st Baronet
section_title: Governor of New Hampshire
hierarchical_section_title: Sir John Wentworth, 1st Baronet / Governor of New Hampshire
caption_attribution_description: English: Governor John Wentworth house, Portsmouth, New Hampshire
context_page_description: Sir John Wentworth, 1st Baronet was the British colonial governor of New Hampshire at the time of the American Revolution. He was later also Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia. He is buried in the crypt of St. Paul's Church.
context_section_description: Under Wentworth's administration the growing province was divided into five counties to distribute administration and judicial functions to communities remote from Portsmouth.  Wentworth was responsible for naming them, choosing names of current British leaders (including Rockingham), but also named Strafford County after one of his distant relatives, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford.
  He also began the process of developing roads between the major population centers of the province, which had grown around the coast and the Merrimack and Connecticut Rivers.  Although the provincial assembly was reluctant to fund new roads, Wentworth used quitrents collected on recently issued land grants to pay for the work.  In 1771, he reported having constructed more than 200 miles (320 km) of roads at a cost of £500.  The same year he convinced the assembly to appropriate £100 for surveyor Samuel Holland to produce the first detailed high quality map of the province.
  Wentworth was ironically responsible for significant improvements to the provincial militia organization.  When he arrived the militia consisted of about 10,000 men, who were by his report "badly accoutred and scarcely at all disciplined".  He expanded the militia, adding 1,600 men and three regiments to the force, and regularly attended regimental reviews.
  Although Wentworth was successful in keeping New Hampshire from implementing harsh boycotts in response to the Townshend Acts, he was clearly troubled by both colonial resistance to Parliamentary acts and by the introduction of troops into Boston in 1768.  He wrote to Rockingham that the troop movement was likely to be problematic, and that government and other reforms were more likely to succeed.  New Hampshire businessmen were eventually pressured into adopting a boycott of British goods when Massachusetts businessmen threatened to suspend trade with them.
  After the Boston Tea Party in late 1773 further inflamed tensions in New England, Wentworth successfully defused the threat of similar action in Portsmouth.  After issuing careful instructions to the master of a ship arriving with a consignment of tea, Wentworth departed Portsmouth for Dover.  During his absence the tea was landed and stored in the Portsmouth customs house.  This removed the possibility of the tea being dumped as it had been in Boston, but the townspeople were still opposed to its presence.  A committee of Portsmouth merchants negotiated its safe passage to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the tea was safely transported through the town and reembarked on a ship.
  Wentworth's popularity in the province began to fall as tensions continued to rise in neighboring Massachusetts.  When the Boston port was closed as punishment for the Tea Party, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage found it increasingly difficult to find workers willing to support the military (despite rampant unemployment caused by the port closure).  He therefore asked Wentworth to assist in the procurement of carpenters in New Hampshire to build barracks for the troops.  When his secretive methods to do so were exposed and publicized, local revolutionary committees denounced him as an "enemy to the community".  Although he intuited that the arrival of Paul Revere on December 13, 1774, was likely to cause trouble, he was unable to prevent the local militia, now effectively under control of the revolutionary committees, from marching on Fort William and Mary the next day and seizing the provincial armaments and gunpowder.  Wentworth had warned the garrison before the event, and called for naval support afterward, but it arrived too late to be of use.
  He eventually asked for further reinforcements but received none, and realized that any attempt to arrest the ringleaders of the rebellion would likely result in an uprising.  He organized a small force of trusted men to act as guards of his person and property, and during early 1775 pressure on the province's Loyalists was prompting some of them to flee to the safety of the British Army presence in Boston.  Despite the opening of hostilities w
caption: The Wentworth House was built by Mark Hunking Wentworth, and occupied by his son, Gov. John Wentworth, until he left New Hampshire after a cannon was pointed at the front door by revolutionaries [7]
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