First in Freedom, The Constitution Nobody Remembers

On the fifth of January, seventeen seventy-six, New Hampshire made a decision that the history books have largely forgotten. Six months before Thomas Jefferson finished drafting the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, the provincial congress of New Hampshire adopted a state constitution and, in doing so, became the first colony to set up its own government under a written constitution. It was a spare document, just two pages, and its authors framed it as a temporary measure until relations with Britain could be sorted out.

But there was nothing temporary about what it meant: a colonial legislature had written its own law, drawn its own governing authority from the consent of its own people, and published the result. The world had never seen anything quite like it. Legal scholars have argued it was the first written constitution of government in modern history.

Twelve years later, New Hampshire would do it again. By June of seventeen eighty-eight, the new United States Constitution had been ratified by eight states. It needed nine to take effect.

The stakes were enormous, without a ninth ratification, the entire framework collapsed. New Hampshire's delegates met in Concord on June twenty-first, seventeen eighty-eight. The vote was fifty-seven in favor, forty-seven against.

New Hampshire was the ninth state. The Constitution became the law of the land. These two moments bracket the founding era and define something essential about how New Hampshire understands itself.

This is a state that did not wait for permission. It wrote its own rules first, then made them stick. The license plates still say it plainly.

Live Free or Die. It was not an accident that those words were written here.