The Province of New Hampshire

The Province of New Hampshire is the Granite State of the United Kingdom of America: a small, hard, northern country of mountains and mill towns that has organised its entire public life around the proposition that the best government is the one that governs least, costs least, and asks least. Its motto is not decoration. Live Free or Die is the plainest statement of purpose any polity in the Realm has ever put on a flag, and New Hampshire means every word of it, including, its neighbours will note, the second half. It taxes as little as it can manage, keeps its state small and cheap and amateur, and regards the whole apparatus of modern government with a suspicion that runs from the parish clerk all the way up, with one conspicuous exception, to the Crown.

That exception is the paradox at the centre of the Province, and New Hampshire sees no contradiction in it at all. It is the most anti-government polity in the Realm and among the most loyal, and it is loyal precisely because it is anti-government. New Hampshire loves the Crown for being distant, ceremonial, and undemanding, a monarchy that costs it nothing it can see and asks of it nothing it minds giving, and it would take up arms against a federal tax rate long before it would suffer a word against the King. It stayed a Province, where its neighbour Vermont became a Republic, for no dramatic reason at all: it simply never had a cause to break, and a Crown that leaves a man alone is exactly the sort of Crown a New Hampshire man is content to keep.

The Province occupies the northern interior of New England, bounded by the Province of Maine, Massachusetts Bay, the Republic of Vermont across the Connecticut River, and the sister realm of New Albion to the north. Its population is approximately 1.4 million, concentrated in the Merrimack valley and the southern tier within reach of Boston, and it returns three members to the federal House of Commons.

History

Indigenous homeland and the Pennacook world

Before it was a colony or a Province, the country between the Merrimack and the mountains was the homeland of the Pennacook and of the western Abenaki peoples, whose political geography ran by river valley and by season rather than by the town lines later drawn across it. Villages stood at the falls where the fish ran in spring, planting grounds lay on the intervale soils, and the high country was hunted and travelled rather than settled.

Epidemic disease carried by European contact reduced these communities catastrophically in the first decades of the seventeenth century, much of it before sustained settlement began, and the wars of the following century did the rest. The colonial government of New Hampshire, in common with its neighbours, offered public money for the scalps of Native men, women and children, and companies of bounty men ranged the northern rivers under provincial commission. That was the policy of a government, enacted by a legislature and paid out of a treasury, and the Province’s public history has been slow to say so in those words.

Abenaki people did not disappear. Families remained, married in, worked the woods and the mills, and often stayed out of the written record because being in it was dangerous, and their descendants live in the Province. New Hampshire is among the polities in which no nation government holds recognised treaty or compact authority inside the provincial boundary.

The royal province and the Wentworth governors

New Hampshire’s constitutional history is, by the standards of the founding, almost eventless, and the Province is quietly proud of that too. It was one of the oldest of the New England colonies, settled early along the short seacoast and up the Merrimack, governed for its colonial century from Portsmouth under the royal Wentworth governors, a place of timber, fish, ships, and trade with a settled respect for the Crown-Parliament framework that made all four pay.

The timber mattered most. White pines of the Piscataqua watershed were reserved to the Crown by the broad arrow and cut for the masts of the Royal Navy, and surveyors of the King’s Woods marking trees on land a man believed he had bought were resented in very nearly the terms New Hampshire now uses about federal inspectors. The colony was separated from Massachusetts jurisdiction in 1741, and the Wentworths held the governorship for most of what followed.

The regime governed by land. Its instrument was the town charter, granted out across the interior and, controversially, across the Connecticut River, with reserved lots for the governor in every grant. It was patronage, it was effective, and it built the settlement pattern the Province still has: several hundred small chartered towns, each with its own meeting, its own clerk and its own opinion. John Wentworth also secured the royal charter of Dartmouth College at Hanover in 1769.

The Four-Year War and the Charter of 1783

When the armed crisis of 1775 broke over New England and the Four-Year War began, New Hampshire fought, and fought hard, but it stood at no single crossroads of its own. Its opening act came early: in December 1774 men from Portsmouth and the surrounding towns took the powder and small arms from the royal works at New Castle. John Stark, the Province’s best-known soldier, commanded at Bennington in 1777. A provisional form of government was adopted at Exeter in January 1776 while royal authority was suspended, and lapsed quietly when the settlement was restored.

New Hampshire had no equivalent of the Grants quarrel that made Vermont a country or the great confrontation that Massachusetts Bay still measures itself against. It came through the war and into the Charter of Union of the American Colonies of 1783 as what it had always been, a Province, and has remained one ever since. The royal governorship became the Lieutenant-Governorship, the General Court kept its name and its habits, and the towns noticed very little difference at all.

The absence of a rupture is itself the Province’s founding fact. Vermont had its independent republic to keep and Massachusetts Bay its terrible memory of the choice it did not make, but New Hampshire had only its work, its trade, and its hills, and it saw no profit in breaking a frame that suited it. Where its neighbours’ loyalties are complicated by history, New Hampshire’s are simple by default. It is a Crown Province because it was always a Crown Province and never found a reason to be anything else, and that unbroken plainness, undramatic and a little smug, is the ground on which everything else in the Province stands.

That plainness met a legal test early. When the General Court attempted to reconstitute Dartmouth’s governance by statute, the college resisted on the ground that a Crown charter was not a legislature’s to rewrite, and Daniel Webster carried the argument. New Hampshire lost, and has cited the precedent ever since.

Salmon P. Chase, born at Cornish in 1808, became New Hampshire’s most consequential nineteenth-century contribution to the national constitutional order. Although his legal and political career was made in Ohio, provincial memory claims the austere New England formation that shaped his anti-slavery constitutionalism, wartime financial administration and later Governor-Generalship.

The Grants quarrel and the parting with Vermont

The messiest episode in New Hampshire’s constitutional history is also the one that produced its neighbour. Benning Wentworth’s practice of chartering towns west of the Connecticut, on land New York also claimed, created the New Hampshire Grants and, out of the resulting quarrel, the men who declared the Grants an independent republic in 1777. New Hampshire had provoked a country into existence and then, characteristically, declined to fight about it.

The valley did not immediately accept the river as a border. Between 1778 and 1782 blocs of towns on the New Hampshire bank voted themselves into the new republic, twice, having more in common with the settlements across the water than with a capital several days away. Both unions were undone under pressure. The boundary was ultimately fixed not at the middle of the channel but at the low-water mark on the Vermont bank, so that the whole of the Connecticut River lies within New Hampshire, which is a fact of no consequence whatever until it is, and one that still produces litigation over bridges, docks and riverside assessment.

The mill century

The nineteenth century made the modern Province. At Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company built the city of Manchester to a plan of its own: canals cut from the river, brick mill blocks a mile long, boarding houses, streets and churches, and a company that owned the water rights, the housing stock and the map. Textiles at Manchester were joined by shoe shops at Dover and Rochester, machine tools at Nashua, and pulp and paper at Berlin on the upper Androscoggin, and for a century New Hampshire was an industrial polity that happened to have mountains in it.

The labour came from everywhere: farm daughters from the northern towns, then Irish families, then, in the largest movement, French-speaking workers from Quebec in the neighbouring realm of New Albion, whose parishes and newspapers made Manchester a substantially French-speaking city for generations. The older Yankee towns regarded the mill cities with a suspicion that was partly religious, partly linguistic and partly a matter of class.

That century complicates the Province’s account of itself. New Hampshire’s creed holds that a small state is a free state, but the largest government most mill workers encountered was not the General Court but the company, which set the hours, owned the house, ran the store and could withdraw all three at once. Children worked in the mills, the machinery maimed people, and the Province’s legislature, faithful to its own principles, regulated all of it late and lightly.

Bretton Woods

For a Province so devoted to being left alone, New Hampshire’s proudest moment came when the world arrived on its doorstep. In 1944, as the Second Great War moved toward its close and the Allied powers turned to the shape of the peace, the Roosevelt government convened the powers not in a capital but in the White Mountains, at the great Mount Washington Hotel in the notch settlement of Bretton Woods, to build the monetary and financial order the postwar world would run on. The choice of a remote New Hampshire mountain resort for a work of such consequence was partly practical and partly poetic, and the Province has never let go of either the fact or the pride of it.

Bretton Woods is now shorthand across the Realm and beyond it for the economic architecture of the American-led peace, the settlement of currencies and credit and exchange that underwrote the golden-age boom, and its name is a New Hampshire place name, spoken in every finance ministry in the world. That the Realm’s most anti-government, leave-me-alone Province should have hosted the founding conference of the modern managed economy is a joke New Hampshire tells on itself with genuine delight. It asked for nothing, changed nothing about its own thrifty ways, and simply lent the world a mountain and a hotel for a fortnight, and got, in exchange, the one word that put tiny New Hampshire permanently on the map of the twentieth century.

The long adjustment

The Amoskeag was liquidated in the middle 1930s, and the shock to Manchester was total: the largest employer in the Province closed, leaving a city holding a mile of empty brick and a workforce with nowhere to go. The shoe towns followed over the next three decades and the northern paper mills after them, the last great pulp operation at Berlin closing in the early twenty-first century and taking the economic reason for a whole tier of towns with it.

Recovery came south and came late. Defence electronics and precision machining established themselves in the southern tier after the Second Great War, the motorway to Boston opened the Merrimack valley to commuters from the 1960s, and the Province’s tax position turned a geographic accident into a business model. Its population roughly doubled between 1960 and 2028, almost all of the growth in the four southern counties, while the North Country’s fell.

The most recent constitutional quarrel is with the security settlement built after the May Day bombings of 2006. New Hampshire’s federal members opposed the screening and listing powers with a consistency that made them useful to nobody. The objection was not to the security of the Realm, which the Province supports without qualification, but to the creation of registers a subject cannot see, cannot correct and is not told they are on.

Geography

The White Mountains

New Hampshire is a small Province of outsized landscape, and the land runs from a short, hard coast up into the highest and wildest country in the Realm’s northeast. To the north rise the White Mountains, the great granite range that gives the Province half its character, and above them all stands Mount Washington, whose summit records the worst weather in the Realm, wind and rime and killing cold that draw the reckless and bury a few of them every generation. The Presidential Range, the notches, and the deep north woods make this the Province’s grand country, its playground and its proving ground, threaded by the cog railway and the mountain road and watched over from the observatory that clings to the summit through winters no sane place would endure.

Above the notches the land is held in an intricate mixture: provincial reservations, tracts bought by a private forest society founded to stop the clear-cutting of the high slopes, and enormous working forests held under conservation easement, logged commercially and open to the public by long custom. New Hampshire holds that a landscape negotiated is better kept than a landscape mandated, and says so loudest when a regulator threatens the arrangement.

The Lakes Region, the granite country and the western valley

Lower down, the country softens into the Lakes Region around Winnipesaukee and the granite hills that give the Province its nickname and much of its stone, quarried out and cut into the monuments and gravestones of half the Realm. On the western edge, above the Connecticut River that divides the Province from Vermont, stands Dartmouth at Hanover, the college whose fight over its own royal charter gave the young Province its greatest son his most celebrated argument. And where the White Mountains once carried the Old Man of the Mountain, the great granite profile that was the Province’s emblem until the day the mountain finally let it fall, New Hampshire keeps the memory of the stone face as a kind of parable of itself: hard, proud, weathered, and, in the end, granite all the way down.

The lakes carry a summer economy a century and a half old, whose property values have made the tax bills of year-round residents a standing grievance. The upper valley around Hanover and Lebanon is the Province’s second economic centre, built on the college, its teaching hospital and the medical and research firms gathered around both, and it is the least characteristic corner of New Hampshire: professional, academic and visibly more comfortable with taxation than the rest. The valley works as one economy across a border that runs down the far bank, the two polities’ opposite fiscal arrangements meeting along a line thirty metres wide.

The seacoast and the Piscataqua

The Province meets the sea along the shortest coastline in the Union, a bare few miles, but it has made the most of them. Portsmouth, the old colonial capital, is a city of brick and ships and salt, home to the naval yard and to the Province’s maritime memory, the New Hampshire that Daniel Webster’s generation knew as a commercial, seagoing, Crown-loyal place before the mills and the mountains claimed the larger share of the story.

The naval establishment on the Piscataqua is the Province’s oldest continuous federal presence and the source of a jurisdictional oddity the two provinces concerned enjoy far too much: the yard carries Portsmouth’s name, most of its workforce lives in New Hampshire, and the island it stands on lies within the Province of Maine. Its modern work is submarine refit, and it is the one federal institution whose budget New Hampshire’s small-government politicians defend without embarrassment. The rest of the coast is a compressed strip of beach towns, salt marsh and fishing harbour, expensively priced and acutely exposed to storm surge.

Economy

The New Hampshire Advantage

Nothing defines the Province in the ordinary citizen’s mind more sharply than the way it declines to tax. New Hampshire levies no general income tax and no general sales tax, alone or nearly alone among the polities in refusing both, and it treats the refusal not as a policy that might one day be revisited but as a settled point of constitutional pride, entrenched in law and defended with a ferocity out of all proportion to the Province’s size. This is the New Hampshire Advantage, and the Province wears the phrase like a boast. A citizen may earn without the state taking a share of the earning, and buy without the state taking a share of the buying, and the Province dares its higher-taxing neighbours, across every border, to explain to their own citizens why they cannot do the same.

Retail along the southern and western borders is sized for a customer base larger than the Province’s population, and New Hampshire’s neighbours regard the arrangement as free-riding on services they pay for.

Revenue without broad-based taxes

The state funds its bare-bones self by other means, and does so with a certain sly satisfaction: through the property tax, which is high and local and keeps the spending close to the citizens who feel it; through fees and licences of every kind; and through the famous state liquor monopoly, whose stores, planted deliberately along the motorways at every border crossing, sell to the citizens of thriftier-taxed neighbours and remit the profit to Concord. New Hampshire has, in effect, arranged to be funded in large part by the residents of other polities passing through, and it finds the arrangement entirely satisfactory.

The refusal is narrower than the boast implies. What New Hampshire has no general tax on is wages and retail sales. It levies a profits tax and an enterprise tax on business, a tax on rooms and meals that falls substantially on visitors, duties on fuel and tobacco, motorway tolls, and, above all, property tax at rates among the heaviest in the Realm. The Advantage is therefore not an absence of taxation but a decision about who pays and how visibly, and its effect is the reverse of what the phrase suggests: property tax is charged on what a household owns rather than what it earns, so an elderly widow in a North Country town with a paid-off house and a small pension can face a higher effective rate than a southern-tier professional with several times the income. The obvious remedies are the two taxes the Province will not have.

Manufacturing and the southern tier

The material engine of modern New Hampshire runs down the Merrimack Valley, where the great mill cities grew. Manchester, the Province’s largest city, was built around the Amoskeag works, in their day among the largest textile complexes on earth, a mile of brick along the river that clothed a nation and then, as such things do, closed. But New Hampshire did with the mills what its temperament demanded: it refused to mourn and set about reusing them, and the old brick now houses the software firms, the finance and insurance houses, and the light industry that make the southern tier, from Manchester down through Nashua to the Massachusetts line, the prosperous, humming, low-tax commuter belt that is the Province’s economic heart.

The modern industrial base is smaller and more specialised than the mill economy it replaced, and higher education, health care and insurance now employ more people in New Hampshire than manufacturing does.

The North Country and the mountain economy

That belt is also the Province’s great internal division, and no honest account of New Hampshire omits it. The southern tier is affluent, growing, and increasingly bound to Boston, full of families who crossed the border for the Advantage and the schools and the room; the North Country, above the notches, is poorer, older, emptier, and harder, mill towns without their mills and farms without their prices, holding the Live-Free-or-Die creed most fiercely of all because it has the least cushion against the world. The two New Hampshires do not always recognise each other, and the politics of the Province is in large part the argument between them: the prosperous south that likes low taxes because it can afford to prosper under them, and the flinty north that needs them because it cannot afford anything else.

What the north has instead of industry is the landscape, and that economy is real but thin. Skiing, hunting, snowmachining, the summer camps and the speedway at Loudon support much of the northern Province on low wages and seasonal work, with sugaring and timber making up the rest. The difficulty is not that the north lacks an economy but that the economy it has cannot fund the services a dispersed, ageing population in a hard climate requires.

Government and politics

New Hampshire governs itself through the most deliberately amateur, diffuse and inexpensive machinery of any polity in the Realm, built on purpose to be difficult to grow, difficult to capture, and impossible to mistake for a career. Its own bill of rights, older than the Charter in most of its language, retains an article affirming the right of a people to resist arbitrary and oppressive power, which New Hampshire reads without any apparent difficulty as directed at government in general rather than at the Crown in particular.

The Lieutenant-Governor

The Crown is represented by the Lieutenant-Governor of New Hampshire, resident at Concord, who grants assent, appoints the Premier, and embodies the constitutional continuity of the Province with the light, ceremonial touch the Province prefers in all things vice-regal.

The office descends from the royal governorship of the Wentworths and is the oldest continuous institution in the Province, a fact New Hampshire mentions rather more often than it mentions what the office does. What it does is little and is meant to be: open the General Court, assent to its Acts, sign the commissions, attend the county fairs and the fire service memorials, and hold reserve powers for which the occasion has never arisen. New Hampshire likes the office in direct proportion to its harmlessness.

The Premier and the Executive Council

The Premier of New Hampshire heads a government kept intentionally small, thrifty, and close to the ground, presiding over a state that spends little because it believes, as an article of faith, that a dollar left in a citizen’s pocket is a dollar better spent than any the government could spend for him.

The office has less independent capacity than its equivalent almost anywhere else, and the reason is the Executive Council, five councillors elected from districts of their own, without whose consent the Premier cannot make a senior appointment, commission a judge, or approve a substantial contract. The Council sits publicly, is under no obligation to support the government that must come to it, and is frequently held by the party opposing the Premier. Elsewhere this would be a constitutional defect. In New Hampshire it is the point: an executive that must ask five separately elected strangers for permission will not attempt very much.

The General Court

The engine of the whole arrangement is the General Court, and it is a wonder of the Realm. New Hampshire’s lower house, the House of Representatives, seats some four hundred members for a Province of modest population, one of the largest legislative bodies anywhere in the world, and it pays them a token pittance that has scarcely moved in a century and is meant never to. The result is exactly what the Province intends: a legislature of farmers, shopkeepers, retirees, and cranks, drawn from the towns in numbers too great to bribe and too amateur to professionalise, serving out of duty or stubbornness rather than ambition or salary. It is inefficient by design and ungovernable by nature, and New Hampshire would not trade it for the tidiest professional assembly in the Union, because a legislature that cheap and that crowded belongs, in a way no career body ever could, to the people who fill it.

A member represents on the order of three thousand five hundred people, sits for two years, receives a stipend of a hundred pounds for the term, has no office and no staff, and shares a desk. Any member may introduce a Bill and every Bill must receive a public hearing and a vote, so the Court hears several hundred measures in a session and the statute book carries the marks. The membership skews strongly toward the retired, because almost nobody with a job and young children can do it. Above the House sits the Senate, twenty-four members from districts of about sixty thousand, individually consequential in a way the four hundred are not, and existing in substantial part to decline what the House will pass at least once.

Town government

Beneath the Province, and in its own estimation above it, sits the town. New Hampshire’s two hundred and thirty-odd towns and thirteen cities raise most of the money and provide most of the services people meet: the school, the road, the fire company, the library, the assessment on the house. The town meeting convenes in March, warrant article by warrant article, to adopt the budget, argue the school assessment and elect the officers, and the selectmen who run the town between meetings do so under the instruction of the last one. Many towns have since adopted an official-ballot procedure in which a deliberative session amends the warrant and the vote is taken later at the polls, which raises turnout, lowers the temperature, and is regarded by traditionalists as a defeat.

Federal representation and party politics

New Hampshire returns three members to the federal House of Commons, the floor guaranteed to every polity: constituency members for Manchester and the Merrimack and for the White Mountains, and one top-up member returned by the per-polity correction. A delegation of three in a House of four hundred and sixty exercises influence out of proportion to its size by being predictable, and the Province regards its own consistency as its principal parliamentary asset.

Provincial politics is dominated by the Conservative and Crown Union, though a New Hampshire Conservative is a distinct animal: fiscally absolutist, constitutionally monarchist and frequently hostile to the social conservatism of the party’s southern wing. The Liberal Federal Democrats are strong in the upper valley, in Portsmouth and among the professional in-migrants of the southern tier, and the Labour and Social Democratic Party carries the mill wards of Manchester, Nashua and Berlin on a vote older and more industrial than the Province’s image allows.

Alternative for the Realm has found a hearing in the North Country among voters whose towns lost their mills and were not compensated. It and the Province’s own tradition sound alike and are not: New Hampshire’s loyal libertarianism wants a Crown that stays ceremonial, while the newer party wants a Crown that intervenes against the political class, which is an active monarchy exercising real power, and that is the one proposition the Province’s creed cannot accept.

New Hampshire is also the standing home of the narrow reading of the American Rights Act, holding that the Act is a shield against power rather than a claim upon the public revenue. That position, shared with the Goldwater current in the Conservative and Crown Union, is a respectable and unresolved constitutional tradition rather than a local eccentricity.

Culture and daily life

Temperament and manners

New Hampshire’s people are, by long reputation and their own contented admission, the flintiest in the Realm. They are private to the point of taciturnity, self-reliant to the point of stubbornness, and suspicious of outsiders, improvers, and anyone who arrives with a plan for how the Province might be run better than it is running itself. A New Hampshire welcome is not warm on first meeting and is not meant to be; it is earned, and once earned it is deep and lasting, the loyalty of people who do not give their trust cheaply because they do not give anything cheaply. The granite is not only in the hills. It is the settled temperament of a folk who expect to be left alone, expect to leave others alone in turn, and regard both expectations as the whole of good manners.

That character makes the Province, for all its three seats, one of the loudest voices in the Realm’s politics, and reliably its most contrary. New Hampshire is the standing conscience of the Realm’s libertarian right, the polity that can always be counted on to speak for lower taxes, smaller government, and the autonomy of the provinces against every scheme New Westminster devises to spend, to regulate, or to standardise. It punches far above its size in the national argument, exactly as Vermont does from the opposite pole, and the two small mountain neighbours together supply the Realm with its sharpest running debate about how free a free people ought to want to be.

Demography and in-migration

New Hampshire is old and getting older. Its median age is among the higher figures in the Realm, its birth rate is low, and the growth of the last sixty years has come overwhelmingly from people moving in, most of them from Massachusetts Bay. The Province’s complaint is that the new arrivals came for low taxes and then asked for the services they had left behind; the arrivals’ answer is that they came for a house they could afford and found a Province that had decided not to have public transport.

The Province is less varied racially and ethnically than the Realm as a whole, and its recent immigration is concentrated in a few places. Manchester, Concord and Nashua have received resettled refugee communities over the past three decades, and the schools of those cities now teach children speaking many languages in a Province whose towns often teach children speaking one. The reception has ranged from the practical to the ugly, and the ugliness has been loudest in the places furthest from where any resettlement actually happened.

Seasons, sport and the table

Life in New Hampshire is organised by the calendar more thoroughly than by anything the government does. Sugaring runs in late winter; mud season follows and closes the back roads; summer doubles the population of a hundred small towns; and winter brings the ski trade, the snowmachine trails and the plough budget that town meeting will argue about in March. Religious practice is comparatively light, and the Congregational meeting houses on the town commons are as much civic buildings as religious ones, while the bean supper at the church or the fire station raises money for the things the town has voted not to tax itself for.

The Province’s most characteristic occasion is Old Home Day, established at the end of the nineteenth century when the towns were emptying westward and a provincial administration proposed that each set a summer day aside to invite its departed sons and daughters back. Towns still hold it, and in the North Country, which is emptying again, it has recovered its original meaning entirely.

Political tensions

The two New Hampshires and the limits of the Advantage

The Province’s central political problem is that its fiscal settlement works best exactly where it is least needed. The southern tier is prosperous, its property values are high and its schools are well funded from those values. The North Country is poor, its property values are low, its schools are funded from those values, and the absence of income and sales taxes leaves it a base it cannot raise without taxing the people least able to pay.

The argument surfaces as a school funding dispute roughly once a decade. The Supreme Court of New Hampshire held, in the line of cases beginning at Claremont in the 1990s, that the provision of an adequate education is a duty of the Province and not merely of the towns, and that funding it wholly from unequal local property wealth does not discharge that duty. Every remedy attempted since has been fought, diluted and litigated again, because each requires the Province either to raise a broad-based tax or to redistribute between towns, and the political culture forbids both.

The defenders of the Advantage point to sixty years of in-migration, a high median household income and books balanced without borrowing against the future. Its critics point to what those aggregates conceal: the North Country’s poverty, the elderly paying property tax out of fixed incomes, deferred maintenance on roads and bridges, a mental health and substance treatment capacity inadequate for a decade, and a school system whose quality depends on the assessed value of the land a child happens to live on. Both accounts are accurate and they describe the same Province.

Housing, land and the Rights Act

New Hampshire’s most serious institutional failing is in housing, and the mechanism is its own local government. Towns control zoning, towns are governed by their existing residents, and existing residents in a property-tax Province have a direct interest in excluding development that costs more in services than it yields in assessment. The result, accumulated over sixty years of town meetings acting entirely lawfully, is a Province zoned overwhelmingly for large-lot single houses, in which multi-family building is prohibited across most of the buildable land.

The consequences are not disputed. The people who teach in New Hampshire schools, staff its hospitals, plough its roads and run its ski lifts increasingly cannot live in the towns that employ them, and the seasonal conversion of housing stock in the lakes and mountain towns has removed year-round dwellings from communities with no capacity to replace them. The General Court has enacted a workforce housing statute, and towns have found it a manageable obstacle.

The Province is accordingly among the more frequent respondents in American Rights Act housing litigation, and the position is constitutionally awkward: the polity that argues most insistently that the Act is a shield and not a claim on the revenue is one whose towns have been found repeatedly to have failed the standard of reasonable progressive fulfilment. Its critics observe that a Province which will not raise a broad-based tax, will not permit its towns to be overruled and will not accept a federal remedy has arranged to have no available answer at all. The Province replies that a court which can order a town meeting to rezone has taken from the town the only thing the town has.

The Abenaki and recognition

The absence of a recognised nation government within New Hampshire is not evidence that no nation was there. It is the outcome of dispossession, removal, bounty statutes and two centuries of administrative practice that treated Abenaki families as individuals rather than as a people, and their descendants have sought recognition, in one form or another, for generations.

The Province’s response has been a commission on Native affairs with an advisory remit, some progress on repatriation and place names, and no movement on the questions that carry legal consequence: land, jurisdiction, and status under the treaty and compact arrangements other polities have. Its stated reasons are documentary, since the record was made by the government that made the removals, and fiscal. Advocates reply that a Province which insists a charter cannot be revised by a later legislature has an unusually poor basis for arguing that a people’s status may be extinguished by administrative silence.

Vermont across the river

New Hampshire and the Republic of Vermont are the closest of neighbours and the sharpest of opposites, and each is, in the other’s political rhetoric, the standing example of what happens when a small mountain people gets it wrong. Vermont taxes and spends and regulates and is proud of it; New Hampshire does none of the three and is prouder. Each accuses the other of exporting its problems: Vermont says New Hampshire free-rides on services it declines to fund, and New Hampshire says Vermont taxes its young people into the Merrimack valley.

The rivalry is genuine and almost entirely rhetorical. The two polities share a hospital system in the upper valley, an interlocking labour market and a nearly identical body of complaints about federal transport funding, and vote together in the Realm’s intergovernmental forums more often than either admits.

✎ Editor's Note · The loyal libertarian: monarchist because the Crown leaves it alone

New Hampshire is the setting’s answer to a question the real Live-Free-or-Die state never has to face: what does a fiercely libertarian, anti-tax, small-government polity look like when it sits, contentedly, inside a monarchy? The design choice is to make the two not a contradiction but a partnership. New Hampshire’s hostility to government is real and total, but it is a hostility to government as an active, taxing, meddling thing, and a constitutional Crown of the UKA’s kind is almost none of those. It is ceremonial, distant, and cheap; it asks for loyalty and offers continuity and otherwise leaves the Province to run itself into the ground however it likes. So New Hampshire loves it, sincerely, as the one form of authority that never troubles a man at his own gate. The Province is the deliberate mirror of Vermont next door: two flinty New England independents, one that turned its independence into a Republic and needles the Crown from the left, and one that never broke at all and defends the Crown from the right, each convinced it has found the truer freedom.

Trivia

In-Universe New Hampshire is the paradox of the Realm: its most anti-government polity and among its most loyal to the Crown. It squares the two by loving a monarchy that is ceremonial, distant, and cheap, the one authority that never taxes or troubles a man at his own gate, and it would fight a federal tax rate long before it would question the King.
In-Universe The Province's General Court seats roughly four hundred members in its lower house, one of the largest legislatures in the world for so small a polity, and pays them almost nothing on purpose. New Hampshire wants a legislature too big to bribe and too amateur to professionalise, filled with farmers and shopkeepers serving out of stubbornness rather than salary.
In-Universe New Hampshire levies no general income tax and no general sales tax, treating the refusal as entrenched constitutional pride rather than mere policy. It funds its bare-bones state through property taxes, fees, and a state liquor monopoly whose stores, planted at every motorway border, are stocked to sell to the thriftier-taxed citizens of its neighbours. This is the New Hampshire Advantage.
In-Universe In 1944 the Roosevelt government convened the Allied powers at the Mount Washington Hotel, in the White Mountains settlement of Bretton Woods, to build the postwar monetary order. That the Realm's most leave-me-alone Province hosted the founding of the modern managed economy is a joke New Hampshire tells on itself with delight.
In-Universe New Hampshire stayed a Crown Province while its neighbour Vermont became a Republic for no dramatic reason at all: it simply never had a cause to break. Where Vermont keeps an old independence and needles the Crown from the left, New Hampshire never ruptured and defends the Crown from the right, two flinty mountain independents who found opposite roads to the same stubborn freedom.
Real-World The real New Hampshire is the Live-Free-or-Die state, with no general income or sales tax, a state liquor monopoly, and a House of Representatives of about four hundred members, one of the largest legislative bodies in the English-speaking world. The 1944 Bretton Woods conference really was held at the Mount Washington Hotel in the White Mountains, and really did set the postwar monetary order.
Real-World The five-member Executive Council, the ownership of the whole Connecticut River to the Vermont low-water mark, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard standing on an island in Kittery, Maine, the Claremont school funding decisions and Old Home Day are all drawn from the record. So is the ugliest of it: the colonial governments of New England, New Hampshire's included, genuinely paid bounties for Native scalps, and New Hampshire is one of the few northeastern states with no federally recognised tribe within its borders.
Etymology The motto 'Live Free or Die' comes, as in our world, from the Four-Year War general John Stark, who sent it as a toast to his old comrades years after the fighting: 'Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.' The Province took the first four words for its own, and they have never fit a place more exactly.