"The shot heard round the world" - After Lexington: the Provincial Convention of 1775 - "the first independent sovereignty upon this continent"

Almost 250 years ago, on 19 April 1775, the famous battle of Lexington and Concord took place in rural Massachussetts. The official National Parks Service website provides a summary. What of the Ulster-Scots dimension? A man from Londonderry (Ulster) had emigrated to Londonderry (New Hampshire), and became a key figure in the aftermath –

"At the breaking out of the Revolution, (Matthew) Thornton held the post of colonel in the New Hampshire militia, and had also been commissioned a justice of the peace by Benning Wentworth, acting under British authority; but after Lexington and Concord, on the 19th of April, 1775, John Wentworth, then governor, retired from the government of New Hampshire and went to England.

Under these circumstances the colony called a "Provincial Convention" of which Thornton was appointed president. There was no state constitution as yet and no declaration of independence, but there was no other constituted government in the province besides this provincial convention, and I am fond of thinking, and believe it to be historically correct to affirm, that this extemporized but indispensable New Hampshire convention, presided over by a Scotch-Irishman, Ulsterborn, was the first independent sovereignty upon this continent! It certainly assumed the functions of an independent government in the name of the people of the colony."

- from Scotch-Irish in New England by Rev. A. L. Perry, Professor of History and Politics, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.. Taken from The Scotch-Irish in America: Proceedings and Addresses of the Second Congress at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 29 to June 1, 1890.

• Matthew Thornton entry on the Dictionary of Ulster Biography website