Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

From the beginning, the many great men who have stood out before the country as representatives of New Hampshire will be found to be descendants, either lineally or collaterally, from these progenitors.

One of the descendants of the Scotch Presbyterians, or one might say almost a contemporary, because he was born with the century, is Hon. George W. Nesmith, late Justice of the Supreme Court of Judicature of New Hampshire. He is still in healthful, vigorous old age, with a mind clear, thoughtful, and comprehensive, and, in 1889, gives promise of a much further prolongation of life, a promise which all hope will be fulfilled. This venerable man has done a thing the like of which no man ever will do again, upon the doctrine of chances: he voted in 1840 as presidential elector for the election of William Henry Harrison as President of the United States, and, in 1888, forty eight years after, as such elector, voted to make president his grandson, Benjamin Harrison.¹

Nay, so potent were the Scotch Irish Presbyterians in the councils of New Hampshire, and so intense was their hatred of popery, that in the constitutional convention of 1784, which organized the province as a State of the United States, they were enabled to have inserted in the Constitution (which in almost all things else copied the Constitution of Massachusetts of 1783) clauses enacting that every officer of the State, elective or appointive, must profess the Protestant religion. Yet at the time there was not a single Roman Catholic parish, or priest exercising his functions, within the limits of New Hampshire. And so strong has been the feeling transmitted from father to son that this clause was not expunged from the Constitution until four conventions to amend it had been held.

The fact that there were very many English among the early settlers in New Hampshire had an effect upon the pronunciation of the language, and especially of the proper names, which was almost as marked as a like pronunciation in Virginia, and, until lately, the pronunciation in England. For example, the proper name Currier was always pronounced as if spelled K-i-a-h, and the highest courts in New Hampshire have judicially determined them to be idem sonans. Goodrich was pronounced as if spelled G-u-t-r-i-d-g-e; Seelye as if