The Declaration's deepest legacy in New Hampshire has been the reinforcement of town-based, consent-of-the-governed democracy. Town meeting government, rooted in the colonial period, continues to the present day, and the Declaration is understood as sanctioning that local tradition. The principle found formal expression in Article 10 of the 1791 state constitution—the so-called right of revolution provision—which grew out of the Shays’s Rebellion crisis, when armed insurgents surrounded the New Hampshire Assembly in Exeter in 1786 to demand tax relief. In the twentieth century, the state's no-income-tax pledge is widely framed by supporters as a legacy of the Revolutionary principle of no taxation without representation—though critics argue this misreads the Declaration. The Fourth of July is celebrated town by town, each community honoring its own local Revolutionary figures.
Interviewees
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Eliga Gould
- Professor of History, University of New Hampshire
