John Langdon of New HampshireJohn Langdon (June 26, 1741 - September 18, 1819). Born to a New Hampshire farming family and trained as a clerk to a merchant (a training similar to that of Alexander Hamilton), Langdon made a fortune in the West Indies trade in the decades before the Revolution. Langdon had one of his cargoes seized under the more vigorously enforced British acts of trade in the early 1770s, and became thereafter a leader in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the protests against British imperial policy. He was sent to the Continental Congress, but left, to pursue the lucrative business of finding supplies for the new American army, before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. If trade had made him wealthy, serving as a procurement officer for the revolutionaries made him even richer, but he also served in military campaigns in 1777 and 1778 in the northeast.  

Langdon had enormous power in New Hampshire politics, and used that power to help protect the interest of the rich and powerful. He worked for moderation in the treatment of Loyalists (as did Hamilton), and advocated a strong, independent executive, to resist the "leveling-tendency" of the popularly-elected house. During and after the war, Langdon served in the state house (assembly) and the Continental Congress as well as as president of New Hampshire. The legislature sent Langdon to Philadelphia, where he became a vigorous advocate for giving the government power to regulate commerce (regulation that would support the interests of his merchant friends in New Hampshire). More generally, he supported efforts for a strong national government (voting for Madison's unsuccessful proposal to give the national government the power to veto state legislation), and allied himself with such merchants as Pennsylvania's Robert Morris.

 

Charles Beard, in his famous progressive-era study of the Convention, The Economic Origins of the Constitution, charged that many of those who supported a strong national government held wartime government securities, and that they expected to profit from the ability of a strong government to redeem these securities at their full value. Langdon certainly fits this charge, as he was a major creditor of the government under the Articles.
 

After ratification, Langdon served in the Senate and supported the Hamiltonian program (assumption of state debts, funding at face value of the national debt, creation of a national bank)-which, of course, served his own interests as well-but in 1794, as the Senate debated Jay's Treaty, he moved toward the Jeffersonian opposition. Thereafter, he served, by choice, primarily in the state legislature (where, among other things, he helped end the importation of slaves, before this became national policy in 1808).
 
 
 

Sources: Lawrence Mayo, John Langdon of New Hampshire (1937).