In 1679 King Charles II separated New Hampshire from Massachusetts and chartered it as a royal province, giving it its own colonial government — though the boundary and governance ties with Massachusetts stayed tangled for decades. Across the colonial period, New Hampshire developed the tradition of the town meeting, in which residents of a town gathered to decide local affairs directly. That habit of hands-on local government still shapes the state.
New Hampshire moved early toward independence. In January 1776 it became the first of the thirteen colonies to set up a fully independent government with its own written constitution, ahead of the Declaration of Independence that summer. New Hampshire men fought in the Revolution, and the state's Revolutionary identity is bound up with figures like General John Stark, to whom the state's later motto, 'Live Free or Die,' is attributed.
When the new United States Constitution was sent to the states, New Hampshire's vote proved decisive: on June 21, 1788, it became the ninth state to ratify, reaching the two-thirds threshold that put the Constitution into effect for the nation.