November 12 in New Hampshire History: Lawmakers, Not Voters, Chose John Langdon as the State’s First U.S. Senator in 1788

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

John Langdon’s election to the first Senate leads an edition that also follows Gen. John Sullivan to Portsmouth in 1775, the warship Kearsarge home to the yard that built her in 1886, and a 2003 ruling on a driver who fell asleep in a running car.

New Hampshire sent its first man to the United States Senate on November 12, 1788, without a popular vote. Five dates fall on November 12 across 228 years: a general ordered to hold Portsmouth, the Senate choice, the death of the first governor to serve a two-year term, a warship’s last homecoming, and a ruling on a driver who fell asleep after starting his car.

November 12, 1788

Lawmakers, not voters, picked the first senator

John Langdon was elected New Hampshire’s first United States senator on November 12, 1788, according to the U.S. Senate’s New Hampshire timeline. The timeline describes him as Portsmouth-born, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and a signer of the Constitution. When he was chosen, he was serving as the state’s president, the title New Hampshire then gave its governor.

No popular vote decided it. The new Constitution handed that choice to state legislatures: senators were to be “chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years,” in the words of Article I, section 3. The Senate’s own history of that clause says legislatures kept electing senators until the Seventeenth Amendment provided for popular election in 1913. Langdon’s seat was the first New Hampshire filled that way.

The state had already done its part to make the Senate exist. The same timeline records that New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify on June 21, 1788, which put the Constitution into effect under Article VII.

Langdon went on to hold the chamber’s gavel. The Senate’s biography of Langdon in its portrait collection says he served until 1801 and was the Senate’s first president pro tempore. Its list of presidents pro tempore dates his first turn to April 6 through April 21, 1789. He again served as governor from 1805 to 1809, and in 1812 he declined the Democratic-Republican nomination for vice president, the Senate biography adds.

Portsmouth readers that same day were reading about the same process in another state. The issue of The New-Hampshire Gazette dated November 12, 1788, held by the Library of Congress, carried a Boston item dated November 8 that praised Connecticut’s choice of federal senators and held it up as an example for the other states.

November 12, 1775

A general leaves for Portsmouth with orders to stop a landing

Brigadier General John Sullivan left for Portsmouth on November 12, 1775. George Washington reported it three days later in a letter to Jonathan Trumbull Sr. datelined Cambridge, writing that Sullivan “set out the 12th inst. for Portsmouth New Hampshire.”

Washington’s written instructions, dated November 7, sent Sullivan to finish the defensive works already begun at Portsmouth. If the British attacked Portsmouth or other seaports nearby, he was to raise whatever force he could and “at all Hazards prevent the Enemy from Landing.”

It was his second trip on the same job. The editors of the Washington papers note that Sullivan began work on Portsmouth’s defenses in late October and had to return to Cambridge on November 1, apparently for a council of war held the next day.

November 12, 1883

The first two-year governor dies in Hooksett

Nathaniel Head, governor of New Hampshire from June 5, 1879, to June 2, 1881, died in Hooksett on November 12, 1883, according to his National Governors Association biography. The biography, which lists the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources among its sources, says Head was elected by popular vote and became the first governor to serve a two-year term.

His path ran through a disputed seat. Head was elected to the state Senate in 1874 but was denied the seat over a technicality in how his name appeared on the ballot, the biography says. He won again in 1876 and 1877 and was Senate president in the second term. During his governorship, it records, a child labor law was approved, a new state prison opened, and a law required a telegraph in all railroad stations.

November 12, 1886

Kearsarge comes home to the yard that built her

The warship Kearsarge returned to Portsmouth on November 12, 1886, and was decommissioned at the Portsmouth Navy Yard on December 1, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command. The yard had launched her on September 11, 1861, with the wife of a Concord newspaper editor as sponsor.

Her Civil War service came first. On June 14, 1864, the command’s history says, Kearsarge found the Confederate raider Alabama in port at Cherbourg, France, and took up a patrol at the harbor entrance. In his report on the fight of June 19, 1864, Capt. Winslow wrote that the ships went 6 or 7 miles out from the Cherbourg breakwater and that Alabama went down about 20 minutes after it struck.

The cruise that ended at Portsmouth began when Kearsarge left New York on August 21, 1883, for three years that included the Mediterranean. She was recommissioned on November 2, 1888, and was wrecked on Roncador Reef off Central America on February 2, 1894. Her officers and crew got ashore safely, the Navy history records.

November 12, 2003

Started the engine, then fell asleep

On November 12, 2003, the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the drunken-driving conviction of a man found asleep in the driver’s seat of a running car, because a factfinder could conclude he had taken control of the car before he fell asleep. In State v. Winstead, 150 N.H. 244, the court recounted that a Claremont officer found the defendant at about 3:13 a.m. on April 6, 2002, upright and asleep in a parking lot with the engine running for heat. His breath test read 0.07, under the 0.08 level the statute treats as prima facie evidence of intoxication. A blood test then read 0.08.

The defense argued that a sleeping man who wanted only warmth had no control of the car. The court rejected that. Quoting its 1995 decision in State v. Willard, it defined control as the capacity bodily “to guide or exercise dominion over the vehicle at the present time.” A sound sleeper lacks that capacity, the court said, but the defendant had testified that he unlocked the door, pushed in the clutch, shifted to neutral and started the engine. That let a rational factfinder conclude he had actual physical control before he fell asleep.

Two other arguments, against the blood test and on equal protection, never reached the merits because they were not preserved at trial: the defense did not object to the blood test and did not raise equal protection there. Justice Duggan wrote the opinion, and the four other justices concurred.

Two of these five dates turn on the same question: who decides. In 1788 the Constitution gave the choice of a senator to the legislature. In 2003 the state’s highest court left it to the trial judge, who heard the case without a jury, to decide, from the defendant’s own account, what he had done before he fell asleep. Both records are public, and both are linked above.

Fact check

Editor’s note. This edition draws on the U.S. Senate Historical Office, the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America newspaper collection and Prints and Photographs Division, the Papers of George Washington as published by Founders Online, the National Governors Association, the Naval History and Heritage Command, and the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s opinion as published by CourtListener. The Library of Congress etching of Langdon is inscribed with a birth year of 1739; the Library’s catalog title gives 1741. This edition does not state his birth year.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.