Paul Revere’s famous ride in April 1775 was not his first, nor his only ride. In the middle of December 1774, two messengers on horseback carried news to the people of New Hampshire’s seacoast. Two British warships were headed to New Castle to reinforce Fort William and Mary. The messengers, or dispatch riders, helped organize the resistance. One messenger was Paul Revere. And one was Wentworth Cheswell, a nonwhite man.
Revere made quite a few rides before the war broke out, and so did dozens of dispatch riders before and during the American Revolution. As part of the secret patriot network, the riders shared intelligence about the enemy and communications between the colonial provisional governments. Wentworth Cheswell took a number of rides like Revere. He volunteered for military service and fought at Saratoga. He is also considered New Hampshire’s first archaeologist – and the first African American elected to public office in the United States.
Wentworth was born on April 11, 1746, to a biracial father and a white mother. Wentworth’s father, Hopestill, a free black, was a successful housebuilder who afforded Wentworth a privileged education, leading Wentworth to work as a schoolmaster in Newmarket. By the time he reached 21, he owned more than 30 acres and a pew in the meetinghouse. At 21, he married 17-year-old Mary Davis, a young white woman from Durham, N.H. They then had 13 children.
In 1768, 22-year-old Wentworth Cheswell was elected town constable, becoming, probably, the first African American elected to public office. For all but one year of his life, Cheswell held public office, including town selectman, assessor, justice of the peace, and auditor.
For several years, New England colonists had risen up in sporadic violence to protest the British Parliament’s taxation and restrictions. Boston had its Tea Party, Providence its Gaspee Affair, and New Hampshire its Pine Tree Riot – to name a few. In the fall of 1774, the British government grew concerned about the rebellion then developing. So, it secretly banned the export of munitions to the American colonies, and in September, the British seized the gunpowder in Charlestown, Mass.
On Dec. 13, 1774, Paul Revere rode the 66 miles to Portsmouth with a letter from Boston’s Committee of Correspondence to its counterparts in Portsmouth and Exeter. The letter advised them to seize the weapons and gunpowder at the fort before the British warships arrived.
Portsmouth mustered volunteers for an assault the next day on the British soldiers who guarded the fort. The men of Newmarket, a strongly patriotic town, wanted to take part in the attack as well. But where and how?
Wentworth Cheswell then rode to Exeter to find out from the Committee of Correspondence where the Newmarket volunteers should go. The next day, 400 New Hampshire men marched on the fort and forced it to surrender. They took 100 barrels of gunpowder, light cannon, and small arms. The ships never arrived, but the patriots used the captured gunpowder and weapons in the Siege of Boston.
Cheswell enlisted in Col. John Langdon’s Company of Light Horse Volunteers and fought
at the Battle of Saratoga. After completing his military service, he returned to Newmarket, where he ran a store next to his schoolhouse. As a prosperous, well-educated citizen, he continued to lead in the town.
Wentworth Cheswell died at age 70 of typhus on March 8, 1817. He and his descendants were buried on his farm. Three years later, Wentworth Cheswell’s name surfaced on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Sen. David Morril of New Hampshire rose to speak against the Missouri Compromise, which forbade biracial people from obtaining citizenship in Missouri.
“In New Hampshire there was a man by the name of Cheswell, who, with his family, were respectable in point of abilities, property and character,” Morril said. “He held some of the first offices in the town in which he resided, was appointed justice of the peace for the county, and was perfectly competent to perform with ability all the duties of his various offices in the most prompt, accurate and acceptable manner. But this family are forbidden to enter and live in Missouri.”
