Sir John Wentworth, 1st Baronet

Sir John Wentworth, 1st Baronet (9 August 1737 – 8 April 1820) was the British colonial governor of New Hampshire at the time of the American Revolution. He was later also Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia.

Early life

Wentworth was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on August 9, 1737.^[1] His ancestry went back to some of the earliest settlers of the Province of New Hampshire, and he was grandson of John Wentworth, who served as the province's lieutenant governor in the 1720s, and nephew to Governor Benning Wentworth^[2] His father Mark was a major landowner and merchant in the province, and his mother, Elizabeth Rindge Wentworth, was also from the upper echelons of New Hampshire society.^[3] In 1751 he enrolled in Harvard College, receiving a BA in 1755 and an MA in 1758.^[4] During his time at Harvard, he was a classmate and became a close friend of future Founding Father and President of the United States John Adams.^[5]

In 1759 the young Wentworth made his first significant investment, joining a partnership in the purchase and development of land in the Lake Winnipesaukee area. Wentworth sat on a committee of partners that oversaw the settlement of the community, which the investors named Wolfeboro. In 1763 his father sent him to London to act on behalf of his merchant interests. Based on his father's introductions, he was soon mingling with the upper levels of British society. Among the connections he made was one with the Marquess of Rockingham, a distant relative (although neither was apparently aware of this) and a leading Whig politician. In 1765 Wentworth, still in London, was appointed by the province as one of its agents. That same year Rockingham became Prime Minister and led the repeal of the hated Stamp Act. Whether Wentworth influenced Rockingham's decision is uncertain, but New Hampshire's other agent, Barlow Trecothick, drafted with Rockingham a position paper on the matter, and Wentworth was clearly sympathetic to colonial opposition to the Stamp Act.

Wentworth's uncle Benning had spent many years of his governorship lining his pockets by selling land grants to the west of the Connecticut River, territory to which the province held dubious claim. In 1764 the Lords of Trade ruled that New Hampshire's western border was at the Connecticut River, decisively awarding the territory (the future state of Vermont) to the Province of New York. The governor, however, refused to resign, leading the Lords of Trade to consider his recall. Wentworth interceded, and convinced them to allow his uncle the dignity of resigning in his nephew's favor.

In August 1766 he was commissioned as Governor and vice admiral of New Hampshire, and surveyor general of the woods in North America. Before he returned to North America he was awarded a Doctorate of Common Law by Oxford University. After a difficult crossing he arrived at Charleston, South Carolina in March 1767, where he proceeded to make the first major survey of the forests of Georgia and the Carolinas on behalf of the crown.^[6] He then made his way north overland, and was received in Portsmouth with pomp and ceremony on June 13, 1767.

Governor of New Hampshire

Under Wentworth's administration the growing province was divided into five counties to dstribute 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 name 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 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 the 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 threaten 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".^[8] 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 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 with the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19 (after which numerous New Hampshire militia went south to join the Siege of Boston), Wentworth convened the provincial assembly in late May. Composed primarily of rebel sympathizers, it refused to consider the Conciliatory Resolution proposed by Prime Minister Lord North to defuse the crisis. Wentworth therefore prorogued the assembly, hoping that a delay would favorably change the atmosphere. It did not: on May 30, rebel militia began occupying and fortifying Portsmouth. Captain Andrew Barkley of the HMS Scarborough further exacerbated tensions by impressing local fishermen and seizing supplies for use by the troops in Boston. Wentworth managed to defuse the situation by convincing Barkley to release to fishermen.

On June 13, 1775, after his house was surrounded by a mob of armed men seeking to arrest a Loyalist militia officer, Wentworth and his family fled to Fort William and Mary, which was under the guns of the Scarborough. Conditions continued to deteriorate, and Wentworth boarded the Scarborough and sailed for Boston on August 23. After sending his family to England, he remained in the city until it was evacuated to Halifax in March 1776. He remained with the fleet until New York City was captured in September 1776, and finally sailed to England in early 1778. The New Hampshire government established after his departure seized most of his property, but specially reserved to the family portraits and furniture from the Portsmouth mansion.

Nova Scotia

Wentworth later served as the royal governor of Nova Scotia from January 23, 1792 to 1808.

He stabilized the colony's finances, tried to settle free blacks who came as Loyalists (they were finally resettled in Sierra Leone), and quieted the Indians. Responding to the war with France that began in 1793, he cracked down on internal dissent, especially of the democratic sort voiced by the Yankees. His feuds with the informal leader of the country party, William Cottnam Tonge escalated into a constitutional struggle between the governor-in-council and the House of Assembly, controlled by Tonge. Wentworth, steeped in corruption and nepotism (which is how he became a governor in the first place), assisted the Halifax merchants but neglected everyone else. London removed the reactionary governor in 1808 and replaced him with George Prevost.^[4][9]

While governor he raised the Nova Scotia Regiment and became its first colonel.^[10] Wentworth was knighted and awarded a baronetcy in 1795.^[11] He also served as Grand Master of the Free Masons. He retired as governor of Nova Scotia in 1808 on a pension of 6500 dollars.^[10]

Family and legacy

Wentworth married Frances Deering Wentworth, the widow of Theodore Atkinson, Junior, Secretary of the Colony of New Hampshire, who had died at Portsmouth, October 28, 1769 two weeks before. Her name is preserved in the towns of Francestown, Deering and Wentworth. She died at Sunninghill, Berkshire, England, February 14, 1813, aged 68. Wentworth died at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on April 8, 1820, aged 84. He was buried in St. Paul's Church, where a tablet exists to his memory. The couple had one son, Charles Mary Wentworth, who succeeded to the baronetcy.^[10] The son, who served as a councilor in Nova Scotia, died without issue in 1844, extinguishing the baronetcy.^[12]

The Governor's Lady, by Thomas H. Raddall, is a novel based on his life.

Notes

References

• Mayo, Lawrence Shaw (1921). John Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire: 1767-1775. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. OCLC 1609815. http://books.google.com/books?id=irUnAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover. 
• The Heraldic Journal

External links

• Biography in BluPete's History of Nova Scotia
• Paul Wilderson, "Governor John Wentworth" at Seacoastnh.com (A New Hampshire perspective)
• Biography at ns1763.ca