Born in Hillsboro, Franklin Pierce (1804–69), the nation's 14th president, serving from 1853 to 1857, was the only US chief executive to come from New Hampshire. Henry Wilson (Jeremiah Jones Colbath, 1812–75), US vice president from 1873 to 1875, was a native of Farmington.
US Supreme Court chief justices Salmon P. Chase (1808–73), Harlan Fiske Stone (1872–1946), and David Souter (b.1939) were New Hampshirites, and Levi Woodbury (1789–1851) was a distinguished associate justice. John Langdon (1741–1819) was the first president pro tempore of the US Senate; two other US senators from New Hampshire, George Higgins Moses (b.Maine, 1869–1944) and Henry Styles Bridges (b.Maine, 1898–1961), also held this position. US cabinet members from New Hampshire included Henry Dearborn (1751–1829), secretary of war; Daniel Webster (1782–1852), secretary of state; and William E. Chandler (1835–1917), secretary of the Navy. Other political leaders of note were Benning Wentworth (1696–1770), royal governor Meshech Weare (1713–86), the state's leader during the American Revolution; Josiah Bartlett (b.Massachusetts, 1729–95), a physician, governor, and signer of the Declaration of Independence; Isaac Hill (b.Massachusetts, 1789–1851), a publisher, governor, and US senator; and John Parker Hale (1806–73), senator, antislavery agitator, minister to Spain, and presidential candidate of the Free Soil Party. John Sununu, a former governor of New Hampshire (b.Cuba, 1939) was chief of staff during the George H. W. Bush administration.
Military leaders associated with New Hampshire during the colonial and Revolutionary periods include John Stark (1728–1822), Robert Rogers (b.Massachusetts, 1731–95), and John Sullivan (1710–95). Among other figures of note are educator Eleazar Wheelock (b.Connecticut, 1711–79), the founder of Dartmouth College; physicians Lyman Spaulding (1775–1821), Reuben D. Mussey (1780–1866), and Amos Twitchell (1781–1850), as well as Samuel Thomson (1769–1843), a leading advocate of herbal medicine; religious leaders Hosea Ballou (1771–1852), his grandnephew of the same name (1796–1861), and Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), founder of Christian Science; George Whipple (1878–1976), winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine; and labor organizer and US Communist Party leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890–1964).
Sarah Josepha Hale (1788–1879), Horace Greeley (1811–72), Charles Dana (1819–97), Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907), Bradford Torrey (b.Massachusetts, 1843–1912), Alice Brown (1857–1948), and J(erome) D(avid) Salinger (b.New York, 1919) are among the writers and editors who have lived in New Hampshire, along with poets Edna Dean Proctor (1829–1923), Celia Laighton Thaxter (1826–94), Edward Arlington Robinson (b.Maine, 1869–1935), and Robert Frost (b.California, 1874–1963), one of whose poetry volumes is entitled New Hampshire (1923). Painter Benjamin Champney (1817–1907) and sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) were born in New Hampshire, while Augustus Saint-Gaudens (b.Ireland, 1848–1907) created much of his sculpture in the state.
Vaudevillian Will Cressey (1863–1930) was a New Hampshire man. More recent celebrities include newspaper publisher William Loeb (b.New York, 1905–81) and astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr. (1923–98).