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The American Republic: 1760-1870

Life, Liberty, and Land: Vermont 1763-1783

By J. Kevin Graffagnino, Executive Director, Vermont Historical Society

Adapted from a presentation, March 10, 2008 at Barre Town Elementary School

The Flow of History asked me to provide an overview of the main currents of Vermont events, developments, and history from about 1763 to the end of the American Revolution in 1783. If I had to put a short title on that period in our state’s existence, I’d probably call it “Life, Liberty, and Land” as an evocation of the tenor of the times. These three “L” words encompass all the critical dynamics of early Vermont.

Let’s start with the background for bringing European-American settlers into the area between the upper Connecticut and Hudson Rivers. As the only part of New England without a seacoast, the Vermont area was the last to attract English settlement moving inland. In 1749 the royal governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, decided to extend his colony west across the Connecticut River, and he started by creating the new town of Bennington as far west and as far south as he thought he could reasonably claim that New Hampshire had jurisdiction. Wentworth knew that New York would object, but he counted on the fuzziness of the colonial charters and the desire of the Crown to populate the wilderness with English settlers to get his redrawing of the map approved in London.

The New Hampshire Grants

Wentworth granted several more towns in what will become Vermont during the next few years (and New York did object and started making its own grants east of the Hudson), but the start of the French and Indian War in 1754 stopped speculation in and settlement of Vermont real estate, because no English settlers were much interested in new towns that might be attacked by French and Indian war parties coming south from Canada.

The war ended in North America in 1760, and three years later France turned Canada over to England, opening the floodgates for renewed interest in this area. Benning Wentworth resumed granting Vermont towns with considerable enthusiasm in the early 1760s, selling charters for more than 100 new communities covering approximately two-thirds of the Green Mountain State—hence the Vermont area became known as “The New Hampshire Grants.” New York protested long and loud to England, while making more new grants of its own, and in 1764 the Crown ruled that the Connecticut River was “to be” the boundary between New York and New Hampshire. That “to be” phrase offered a loophole to the thousands of settlers and speculators who had bought New Hampshire titles, because it let them argue that prior to the 1764 ruling Vermont had belonged to New Hampshire, so that Wentworth’s charters constituted legal basis for ownership claims.

In the ensuing conflict the New Hampshire claimants became the “Yankee” side and the New York claimants became the “Yorker” side. Following the Crown’s decision, New York tried to govern the Grants, with spotty results and strong opposition from the Yankees who had begun to set up farms and towns. They did not want to buy their land again from New York. In addition, as New Englanders accustomed to owning their farms and governing by towns, they did not like New York’s county-based, landlord-and-tenant systems of government and economy. In general, many of them resisted New York’s attempts to extend its authority east to the Connecticut River. The early stages of this struggle came to a head in 1770, when New York held trials at Albany to resolve the legal issues of land ownership in the Grants area. These are known as the Ejectment Trials, and they mark the arrival in Vermont of Ethan Allen, who signed on to manage the Yankee side’s legal strategies. The Ejectment Trials quickly came to a close for Yankee hopes when the New York judge ruled that no Wentworth charter was admissible as evidence of land ownership. This meant that most of the settlers on the Grants would have to repurchase their land from New York or lose title to their property.

However, the more militant members of the Yankee faction refused to surrender, and soon after the legal proceedings at Albany, Ethan Allen helped create the Green Mountain Boys as a paramilitary force to keep New York from governing the Grants. The Green Mountain Boys proved quite effective at intimidating Yorker settlers and officials, especially west of the Green Mountains, and in the early 1770s New York was unable to subdue the recalcitrant Yankees or govern effectively in the Vermont area. The Green Mountain Boys accomplished this by a fluid mix of beatings, house burnings, lurid death threats, and other harassment of anyone professing allegiance to New York, and by the eloquent use of rhetoric and language that cast the Yankee side as small farmers and brave freemen battling greedy, aristocratic Yorker speculators who want to enslave them.

Vermont in the Revolution

The start of the American Revolution in 1775 brought major changes to the struggle for the Grants. The war forced residents of the area to choose sides, and many of the Yankees join the rebellion against England—most notably Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, who in May 1775 seized Fort Ticonderoga in what is often described as the first offensive action of the Revolution. Ethan got himself captured in Montreal in the fall of 1775, taking him out of the Vermont picture for the next two and a half years, but the Yankee resistance to New York thrived without him. The war gave New Hampshire, New York, the Continental Congress, and everyone else in America far more pressing issues to worry about than which state government is going to control the Grants. So the 20,000 or so people living in the area are going to be the first to have the opportunity to adapt the example of the break from England for local application. They are going to get to decide which government will hold sway between the Hudson and the Connecticut.

In January 1777, a few dozen representatives of towns on both sides of the Green Mountains gathered in Windsor and proclaimed the independence of the new state of New Connecticut, reflecting that the majority of settlers were from western Connecticut. They changed the name to Vermont that summer, when they learned that a part of western Pennsylvania was already being called New Connecticut. They also established a state constitution noted for its liberal provisions on voting rights (no property qualifications for either voting or holding office), a ban on human slavery, and limited executive power.

Vermont was the first addition to the 13 original American states, and its creation was a major source of consternation to New York and the Continental Congress, neither of which could quite figure out what to do with the self-proclaimed new state.

Vermont was born during the heaviest local fighting of the American Revolution, since 1777 is the year that the British attempted to win the war by breaking New England off from the rest of the United States. Lake Champlain and its valley were a crucial military corridor for this strategy, and in the summer of 1777, General John Burgoyne led a large British and Hessian army south from Canada to link up with two other British forces coming north from New York City and east from western New York. Burgoyne took Fort Ticonderoga easily and planned to continue south to Albany, while sending part of his force into Vermont to seize horses, livestock, and food for his army. But that plan fell to pieces on August 16, 1777, when John Stark and his New Hampshire and Vermont troops routed 1,500 Hessian troops in the Battle of Bennington, a crushing defeat that played a major role in Burgoyne’s having to surrender his army at Saratoga several weeks later.

The averted threat from Burgoyne and the ongoing concern over the British military presence in the Champlain Valley and in Canada were major external worries for Vermont, but the internal opposition to the state’s existence was equally troublesome. During the early years of Vermont’s independence, I think it’s quite accurate to say that Vermont’s survival was far from a sure thing. There are Yorkers still living here, especially east of the Green Mountains, who despise the west side-dominated Vermont government and want New York to govern the place. There are Tories, or loyalists, who have no allegiance to the United States. There are many residents on the east side who would like to see New Hampshire reassert its claim to all of Vermont. And there are new groups that favor Massachusetts taking over the southern third of Vermont, or splitting Vermont at the Green Mountains between New Hampshire and New York. There is also a particularly determined faction based at Hanover, New Hampshire, that wants to form an entirely new state out of eastern Vermont and western New Hampshire that will use the Connecticut River as a highway rather than as a boundary. The upshot of all these contending factions is that the Allen brothers, their ally Thomas Chittenden in the governor’s chair, and the small group of west-side leaders who support Vermont independence are constantly facing new challenges from inside the state between 1777 and 1783.

War of Words

One interesting aspect of this situation is that all sides rely as heavily on rhetoric and words to promote their causes as they do on military strength—and that made the printing press a very important tool during these years. Ethan Allen and his Yorker opponents had turned out pamphlets and small books to publicize their arguments in the early 1770s, and the contestants in Vermont did the same after 1777. The Allens made a strategic change in their rhetoric as soon as the American Revolution started. Whereas before the break with England they had always portrayed their Yankee side as loyal Englishmen fighting against Yorker tyranny, from 1777 on they depicted Vermont as faithful to the American cause, struggling against both English and Yorker efforts to subjugate free Americans.

While the Vermont propaganda evoked legal precedent and the letter of the law, the Allens were much better at calling on the spirit of justice—the natural rights of free men, the evils of aristocracy and inherited privilege, and the virtues of democracy over oligarchy or monarchy. In short, the Vermonters took the arguments of Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Adams and reworked them for Green Mountain consumption and inspiration. Their opponents tended to rely much more on the letter of the law, and in a frontier setting like Vermont (or the American West in the 1880s), appealing to the heart and to the spirit of justice proved infinitely more effective. In that pre-electronic age, the fact that Ethan and Ira Allen together turned out hundreds of pages of fiery, passionate rhetoric to win converts and supporters here and outside the state made the printing press one of the most important weapons an embattled Vermont could employ.

While Vermont was split internally, its relations with the American nation provided another, external worry during the years of the Revolution. Vermont began petitioning Congress for admission as the 14th state soon after our declaration of independence, but Congress proved quite reluctant to grant that request. New York had considerable influence in Congress, of course (which is generally not noted for strong decisions or effectiveness in enforcing them during the war), and many in Congress were unwilling to set a precedent that other backwoods areas in their own states might take to heart. Vermont kept sending delegations to Congress, and Congress kept delaying or suggesting that Vermont might accept New York authority. Vermont bore some responsibility for this lack of national support, since in 1778 and 1781 it briefly claimed good-sized sections of western New Hampshire as part of Vermont, in what are known as the East Unions, adding a big chunk of northeastern New York as well in 1781 in the West Union—exacerbating the anti-Vermont sentiment in Congress as well as enraging our neighbors.

The Haldimand Negotiations

Unable to secure satisfaction from Congress, some Vermont leaders looked elsewhere for support, and near the end of the Revolution this led to the most controversial aspect of all Vermont history. When the British in Canada approached the Chittenden/Allen faction late in 1780 about the possibility that Vermont might drop out of the American side and become a British province, the Allens and a handful of their political allies gave the idea serious consideration. These secret talks with the British became known as the Haldimand Negotiations, after Frederick Haldimand, commander of the British military in Canada who pressed the issue for the better part of a year. Haldimand proposed that the Allens lead Vermont back to the English side, in return for which England would validate the Wentworth titles, give Vermont considerable autonomy to govern itself, and protect the state against American military invasion. The Allens told Haldimand they were willing, and in the fall of 1781 he sent an army south from Canada with a proclamation welcoming Vermont back into the British fold.

And the only thing that stopped the process and saved the Allens from having to choose was news coming from Virginia that Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown. Haldimand recognized that word of that great American victory would substantially change the way Vermonters viewed the war, and he withdrew his army back to Canada.

I can’t settle for you definitively whether the Allens would really have betrayed the American Revolution or, as they later said, they were just leading the British on to keep their army bottled up in Canada and not attacking the Vermont frontier settlements. But the true motivation of the Allen brothers in the Haldimand affair is the great controversy of Vermont history. The removal of the British military threat in Canada opened the floodgates for thousands of new settlers to pour into northern Vermont. Vermont’s population rose rapidly as a result, and the chaotic atmosphere faded quickly as towns grew, trade developed, and we lost the look and feel of a tumultuous frontier. After the war doubts about whether or not Vermont would survive faded quickly. Although New York stubbornly continued to insist that it owned Vermont, the Empire State made no attempt to govern here and nobody believed it would ever be able to do so. When it became clear that Kentucky and other southern areas were going to have to become new states, Alexander Hamilton and others in New York realized that letting Vermont join the Union served a higher purpose than maintaining New York real estate claims—since Vermont as a state would keep a North/South balance in Congress and the federal government. Vermont became the 14th state in March 1791, getting in a year ahead of Kentucky because folks down there were slow with the necessary paperwork.

Was Vermont an Independent Republic?

It’s worth some consideration of the question whether or not Vermont was an independent republic between 1777 and 1791. Tom Naylor and his Second Vermont Republic have been quite vehement on this point in recent years, arguing that Vermont certainly was a republic then and that our status for those 14 years constitutes a legal precedent for secession from the Union today. I don’t have a dog in the “what should we do now” fight, but I don’t really see Vermont as a republic back then. The key point for me, and one I really don’t think we’ve given enough weight, is how the people living in Vermont perceived their situation—i.e., were they living in a separate country or in a state-in-waiting that was part of the American nation and just waiting for Congress to make it official. My very strong sense is that the great majority of Vermonters between 1777 and 1791 thought of themselves as Americans, thought of Vermont as a state, and wanted us to join the Union as soon as possible. There’s a lot of work waiting to be done on this point, but the fact that when Congress finally did give Vermont the opportunity to join, the vote at the Bennington convention to get us into the Union was 105-5, with virtually no discussion of the virtues of continuing our independent existence, seems fairly convincing to me. I will freely admit that the Second Vermont Republic folks see this in an entirely different light, and if it’s a subject that interests you at all I urge you to join in the search for evidence one way or another.

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