Time & Perspective Quote by William Whipple

A revolutionary unease hides inside that polite phrase: "in time". Whipple is not merely praising sovereignty as an abstract virtue; he is managing a conflict between urgency and consent. In the 1770s and early 1780s, New Hampshire and its neighbors were improvising government while war and debt pressed in. To say he "hopes" they will "feel the importance" is to frame sovereignty less as a legal doctrine than as a civic instinct that must be cultivated, almost taught into being.

The wording does quiet rhetorical work. "Feel" is psychological, not constitutional; it suggests sovereignty isn’t secured by proclamations alone but by a shared willingness to act like a self-governing people. At the same time, "as well as the other States" nudges New Hampshire toward conformity. This is sovereignty pitched not as isolation, but as membership in a new political club where each state must carry itself with equal seriousness. The subtext: stop thinking like a colony waiting for direction, and stop behaving like a minor partner expecting someone else to shoulder the burden.

Whipple’s era was also discovering sovereignty’s double edge. State power was a rallying cry against empire, yet it risked becoming an alibi for parochialism and disunion. His line reads like a preemptive warning: if New Hampshire can’t internalize sovereignty, it will either be pushed around by larger forces or undermine the fragile experiment of coordinated independence. The sentence is soft-spoken, but the stakes are coercive: learn to govern, or be governed.