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Gc 974.3 H35s 1771685
M. L.
REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01188 0751
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THE STORY OF THE STATES
THE STORY OF VERMONT
BY
JOHN L HEATON
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Illustrations by L J Bridgman
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BOSTON D LOTHROP COMPANY WASHINGTON OPPOSITE BROMFIELD STREET
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1771685
THE STORY OF THE STATES EDITED BY ELBRIDGE S BROOKS
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IBridgman
GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS ON THE MARCH.
F 843 .39
Heaton, John Langdon, . 1860 -·
The story of Vermont, by John L. Heaton. Illus- trations by L. J. Bridgman. Boston, Lothrop company [°1889]
319 p. incl. illus., plates. front. 21}em. (Half-title: The story of the states. IV. 41)
Series title also at head of t .- p.
CHELY CARO
1. Vermont-Hist. 1. Bridgman, Lewis Jesse, 1857- illus.
1-Rc-3091
Library of Congress F49.1143
F 843.39
COPYRIGHT, 1889, BY D. LOTHROP COMPANY. 37712
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PREFACE.
IF that land only is happy which has no history, then has Ver- mont been most unfortunate. In the brief period since white men first made their homes within sight of the Green Mountains, their lives have been menaced by savages, their lands coveted by robbers clothed with law and power, their families driven forth in terror when invading armies came among them, while the decisive battles of three great wars were fought on the lake of their glowing sunsets. Their State was the first ad. mitted to the Union, after a forty years' struggle for its rights which happily has had no parallel in this country. And when, years later, slavery was crushed and the Union saved in the cruel war whose wounds time has not yet healed, no soldiers of the North won so great glory or paid for it so heavy a price in suffering and in loss as did the grandsons of the Green Mountain Boys.
Poets, romancists and historians who have caught their in- spiration from Vermont's annals have confined their attention to the eighteenth century, as if after those years of storm there was no more to tell. But tales of war are not the only ones worth hearing. The record of a century of Statehood, with its peaceful victories and industrial accomplishments, the life of its people and the part they have played in the vaster history of the Republic - this as well as the old stirring days of war and outlawry, must be studied if one would know what claim the Fourteenth State has upon the gratitude and respect of the country.
PREFACE.
To tell the story of the State's early trials - which can never be too often rehearsed lest her sons should forget to be grateful for their ancestry; to add to this an account of the . more recent events that have escaped the attention they de- serve ; and to include so far as possible in this brief recital the growth of arts and learning, the development of industry and the evolution of laws, customs and institutions to meet the needs of a gracious, temperate and valiant people - such has been the purpose of the writer. Not only to the people of Vermont, but to the citizens of every state in our broad land, is the story of the Green Mountain State offered as a help, an inspiration and a record of sturdy endeavor.
he h. I teater
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE OLD WARS
IT
1609-1763
CHAPTER II.
THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS
38
1750-1775.
CHAPTER III.
THE FIGHT FOR LIBERTY
63
1775-1783.
CHAPTER IV.
BUILDING THE STATE
·
91
1776-1791.
CHAPTER V.
THE PARTIES DIVIDE
.
115
1798-1824.
CHAPTER VI.
HOMESPUN FOLK
139
1825.
CHAPTER VII.
THE GREAT WEST
.
163
1825-1850.
1
CONTENTS.
HOME HAPPENINGS
CHAPTER VIII. 1830-1850.
· 184
CHAPTER IX. THE TEMPERANCE REFORM
208
1844-1888.
CHAPTER X.
THE ANTI-SLAVERY CRUSADE
223 1840-1860.
CHAPTER XI.
IN THE FIELD
· 242 1861-1865. ·
CHAPTER XII.
SINCE THE WAR
·
269
1865-1889.
THE CHRONOLOGICAL STORY
299
THE PEOPLE'S COVENANT
309
BOOKS RELATING TO VERMONT
314
INDEX
·
317
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE.
Green Mountain Boys on the march .
Frontis.
"Slowly and cautiously they floated on." Initial
II
" The first white man "
15
The service of the captives
23
"It is the bell"
31
The " beech seal." Initial
38 42
The outlaw's proclamation
49
The judges judged
57
" Molly Stark " cannon. Initial
63
Parson Allen's appeal
67
In hiding from the Hessians
75
Allen and Runnals
85
A Hessian. Initial
91
Ethan Allen explains the delay
95
An old-time election
I01
Ethan Allen monument, Burlington . 109
Macdonough's medal. Initial
115
In the Green Mountains. Mt. Mansfield The prophecy of victory
119
125
Statue of Lafayette, Burlington, Vt.
I33
The spinning-wheel. Initial
I39
The singing-school
143
At the tavern
151
Borrowing fire .
1 57
A " Prairie Schooner." Initial
163
A quilting bee .
167
The railway coach of our fathers
173
An old-fashioned hand-loom
179
The State House. Initial
18.4
Lake Memphremagog ·
ISS
Sugar-making : the critical moment
195
·
.
Dr. Adams's stool of repentance
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE.
" When every man was his own cobbler"
203
An old-time tipple. Initial
208
Signing the pledge
211
A raid on the rumseller
215
A Bloomer
219
Eagle Bay, Lake Champlain. Initial 223 .
Dinah Morris's certificate of freedom 227 233
A base-ball club volunteering for service .
In a marble quarry
239
" 1861." Initial
242
The sleeping sentry 246
The Vermonters at Gettysburg : Stannard's Charge 253
For the soldiers
263
At a creamery. Initial
269
University of Vermont
273
On Lake Champlain
28 I
Ice yachting on Lake Champlain
. 293
.
THE STORY OF VERMONT
CHAPTER I.
THE OLD WARS.
UST as the sun was sinking in the west one summer afternoon long ago a band of Indians paddled their canoes along the edge of a beautiful lake in the heart of the woods. Slowly and cautiously they floated on, stealing their silent way under the shelter of the shore as if expecting the approach of an enemy. Yet though their course was cautiously chosen, there was less of apprehension than of curiosity in the gaze with which they scanned the horizon to the northward; for this was a strong war party of tried and chosen braves, who bore themselves with the air of men used to victory. I
/119 40 78012 317
12
THE OLD WARS.
The scene was one of wild and singular beauty. On either hand the shore rose, now abruptly, now with gentler slopes leading the eye back from the water's edge, into rounded mountains covered to their very tops with the virgin forest save where the glistening walls of cliffs peeped through the foliage. The shore was irregular, curving out at times into points and headlands and partly shutting off the view where, to north and south, yet more blue water gleamed in the distance. The lake's surface mirrored many a leaning tree or jutting crag or clinging wreath of ivy; but nowhere on all its surface did it give back the reflection of any human habitation. Nor path, nor house, nor clear- ing, nor rising film of smoke met the traveler's eye. . But for the little fleet in the foreground, the wilderness was apparently unseen and untenanted by any human soul.
The sun had passed behind the western mount- ains, the cool shadows of evening were beginning to gather, when suddenly another fleet of canoes swept round a point of land ahead and came into full view. There was a moment of indecision and then the new-comers swerved outward from their course and retreated an arrow's flight from the shore; the first party was already landing in hot haste, making the woodland echoes ring with sav- age yells of defiance.
13
THE OLD WARS.
The day was too far spent to fight the battle for which both sides were eager; the night was passed in singing the war songs of their tribes, in prepar- ing their weapons for the fray which would begin with the dawn, and in shouting threats and boasts from fleet to shore now scarce a bow-shot apart. When the morning broke, the second band secured their canoes upon the shelving beach and advanced to meet the foe. During the night the latter had been busily at work with their rude stone axes and had built from slender poles held together with twisted withes a rude palisade to serve as a slight defence in case of need. Yet they hardly seemed to require such means of shelter, for they outnum- bered their assailants three to one; scorning to take. refuge within the enclosure, they eagerly pressed forward on the level space without.
And then a strange thing happened. For out of the canoes of the smaller party, where till now they had remained unseen, stepped three mysterious figures clad, each, from head to foot in steel. The sun rising over the lake shone full on their bur- nished cuirasses and tipped their helmet crests with dazzling light. One who seemed the leader boldly advanced till he stood midway between the lines, carrying his arquebuse at rest ; the other two, similarly armed, took up their position on the flank of the astonished savages. Never before had the
14
THE OLD WARS.
red-men looked upon such a sight as the three steel- clad warriors ; but their superstitious awe of the strangers quickly deepened into abject terror when they saw the fire flash from the leveled arquebuses and heard the thunder of their discharge, and when one after another of their chiefs and leaders fell be- fore the unseen missiles. Of what use was resist- ance against these mysterious visitors who wielded the lightnings to strike dead those who dared oppose them and upon whose charmed bodies arrows could not prevail? It was not long before the frightened braves fled in the utmost confusion, leaving many of their number dead upon the shore, and others as prisoners bound for the torture.
Such was the battle which, on the thirtieth of July, 1609, Samuel de Champlain, Lieutenant-Gov- ernor of New France, waged with the Iroquois upon the western shore of the lake which bears his name. Though but three white men and less than three hundred Indians were engaged in it; though for months Europe did not hear of it and even then did not deem it of much consequence in compari- son with more engrossing warfare nearer home, it is no exaggeration to call it one of the world's decisive engagements, upon whose issue the fate of a continent may have rested. For if France, whose power in America Champlain represented, was then the foremost nation in Europe, the Iro-
15
THE OLD WARS.
quois were no less prominent among the savage tribes of the New World. They held the mountain passes which were the key to the continent. They were the acknowledged masters of the route which led by Lake Champlain and the Hudson from the St. Lawrence to the sea, dividing the Eastern from the Alleghany tribes - that route which was then
"THE FIRST WHITE MAN."
the scene of bloody warfare between Indian and Indian and which was to witness even more deadly conflict between white man and red, Frenchman and Englishman, Tory and Colonist. By their strength, their military sagacity and their com- manding position they had almost silenced oppo-
16
THE OLD WARS.
sition to their sway over a region extending from the lakes to the sea and from the St. Lawrence to the Chesapeake. Their friendship would have been invaluable to France in the long struggle which followed for the possession of the western world. Their resentment was implacable and dearly did the French pay for having incurred it.
But all this Champlain, fresh from the gay courts of Europe and ignorant of forest politics, could not be expected to know. He had come sailing up the St. Lawrence River from far-away France. He had made firm friends of the Indians of Huron or Mon- tagnais blood and willingly went at their request to chastise the Iroquois who had driven them from their ancient hunting-grounds and even now pursued them with relentless hostility. He was the first white man who ever saw what is now the State of Vermont, and his published narrative of his advent- ures contains the best account which we possess of that commonwealth as it existed nearly three hundred years ago.
Champlain ascended the Sorel River to the falls in his shallop and then pressed on with sixty Indians and twenty-four light bark canoes. He passed from the river into the lake, whose beauty awoke in him, as it still does in each fresh ob- server, delight and admiration. "There are many pretty islands here," he says, "low and containing
/
17
THE OLD WARS.
very fine woods and meadows with abundance of fowl and such animals of the chase as stags, fullow deer, fawns, roebucks, bears and others which go from the mainland to the islands. We captured a large number of these animals. There are also many beavers, not only in this river, but also in numerous little ones that flow into it. These regions, although they are pleasant, are not in- habited by savages on account of their wars; but they withdraw as far as possible from the rivers into the interior not to be suddenly surprised."
Through this beautiful but desolate region Champlain with his Indian guides proceedai for some time, traveling southward from evening until well into the night; lying concealed by day the better to avoid surprise, and taking, constantly, keen note of his surroundings. He saw ahead of him the high peaks of the Adirondacks and on his left the lower hills of Vermont. The white gleam of the limestone rocks that tinged these latter heights he mistook for snow.
But though Champlain was thus the first white man to see Vermont even he never set foot upon its soil. His mission upon the lake was war and not exploration, and for nearly its whole length he skirted the western bank until he found the Iroquois near Ticonderoga. And when the Mon- tagnais braves had chased the flying remns of
18
THE OLD WARS.
the defeated force to their hearts' content, it was still upon the New York shore that they camped for the night and recalled the ecstasies of combat in the savage delights of the torture. When the dusk of evening came the lurid light of the camp- fire fell upon a scene which must have seemed strange indeed to Christian eyes.
Champlain tells us that, when all was ready for the torture and an Iroquois captive was bound to the stake that the barbaric revel might begin, he was urged to take a torch and, as became a brave commander, taste first the joy of burning the poor victim's flesh. Till then he had never witnessed the full enormity of the tortures which the Indians practiced upon their captured enemies and, unable to bear the sight, he seized his arquebuse and shot the uncomplaining savage dead.
All this happened in 1609, some weeks before Hendrik Hudson sailed up the North River to Albany and eleven years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth; yet even before that early date France had entered upon her struggle with Great Britain and Spain for the possession of the New World, and her representative had nearly a century earlier claimed for the most Christian king an empire on its untrodden shores as large as all Europe, the boundaries and extent of which indeed were at the time unknown.
1
19
THE OLD WARS.
It was in the year 1534 that Jacques Cartier, a bold sailor commissioned by the king of France to undertake the work of exploration, discovered partly by accident the bay of St. Lawrence and spent the brief Northern summer in exploring its shores. Returning the following year, he reached the mouth of the mighty river St. Lawrence. This he at first hoped might prove to be the long-looked-for west- ward channel to the East Indies, but the native dwellers along the river assured him that its water was fresh and that it came from inland seas, de- scending rapids in its course.
Though somewhat disappointed by this infor- mation, Cartier persevered and by the end of October had reached the Indian village of Hoche- laga, which he rechristened Mount Royal, now Montreal, in honor of his king. He had been for the most part well treated by the Indians, though Donnacona, the great chief who had his headquarters at Quebec and lorded it over the tribes of the middle river, was opposed to his further explorations. The natives at Hochelaga were especially kind to the French adventurer. They showed him their village, a strongly fortified place with a single gate, and the "stones and peb- bles for the defence of it " which they had heaped up within. They supplied his ships with fresh stores of corn and fish. On the second day they
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----
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20
THE OLD WARS.
led Cartier to the top of the hill and, looking out for miles around upon the dense forest, threaded here and there by streams narrowing in the dis- tance until they were lost to view, they told him of the country that lay beyond. Westward, they said, were great fresh water seas and a mighty river flowing through fair and rich regions to the ocean. To the north was a wilderness full of game and pierced by numerous rivers. Due south, follow- ing the smaller stream which lay before their eyes, was a lake shut in by hills. The great river of the Southwest was the Mississippi, the nearer lake was Lake Champlain, and all about them lay the land which Cartier had claimed for the king.
Had the Indians known of Cartier's purpose, had they foreseen the anxieties and hardships in which the coming of the whites would involve their race, and the doom which was to be the end of all, they would not so kindly have received the first white men who ventured into their land. But not for many years thereafter were the Indians seriously troubled by French aggressions. It is true that Cartier and other captains came again to explore the northern waters, a little discouraged by the fact that they had found neither the passage to India nor any sign of precious metals; it is true that private enterprise supplemented the efforts of the Crown by sending every year small vessels filled
-
21
THE OLD WARS.
with hardy seamen to prosecute the fisheries on the Newfoundland banks; but it was not till well within the next century that the exploration of the regions lying about the St. Lawrence was con- tinued with much vigor or success. The genera- tion that had welcomed Cartier had vanished before the day of Champlain, and even the village of Hochelaga had utterly disappeared when he arrived upon its site.
With the coming of Champlain the history of French conquest and exploration in America fairly begins. That brave and prudent commander made at the outset the fatal mistake of attacking the Iroquois instead of seeking to conciliate them. Had he adopted the latter course France might have occupied the continent so securely as to defy the efforts of the British to dislodge her. The Hudson and the Mohawk might have been hers as well as the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries, and her armies might have hemmed the English colonies in upon the seacoast, thrown against them the full power of the Indian nations and finally left them not a foot- hold. But it was not to be expected that the haughty Iroquois would soon forgive or forget the intruders who had compassed their defeat before the very eyes of the despised Hurons and caused the song of victory to be raised by every tribe of
:
22-3
THE OLD WARS.
Algonquin blood along the St. Lawrence and the lakes. It was not long before they were enabled to obtain firearms from the Dutch settlements about Albany, paying the thrifty burghers, we may be sure, dearly for them in peltry. Thus armed they menaced for many years the very existence of the French settlements.
For the present, however, there was no fear cf reprisals by way of Lake Champlain. The Canadian colonies passed through years of alternating pros- perity and adversity, gradually extending their grasp westward and gaining more and more influence with the tribes of Huron blood, but never succeeding in placating the Iroquois. French missionaries and French explorers had threaded and mapped the great lakes and the sources of the Mississippi before it became necessary again to lead a war party down Lake Champlain.
By 1665 the Iroquois had become so formidable and so threatened and harassed the feeble colonies along the St. Lawrence that two regiments were sent from France to reduce them. Courcelles, gov- ernor of Canada, made the mistake of sending south a winter expedition for this purpose. Unused to the rigors of the climate, the troops reached the frontier town of Schenectady half dead with cold and hunger and would have fallen an easy prey to the Indians had not a Dutch burgher named Arendt
1.7
...
THE SERVICE OF THE CAPTIVES.
١
25
THE OLD WARS.
Van Curler foiled their purpose by sending them on a wild-goose chase after other enemies who, he said, were advancing upon them. The Indians not only forgave Curler his trick, but thought so highly of him for that and other magnanimous deeds that for many years the governors of New York were called by them " Corlaer," even as they styled the French governors, after the days of Frontenac, " Onontio." Lake Champlain itself was long known as Corlaer's Lake, the worthy Dutchman having been drowned in its waters while on a trip to visit Courcelles in Canada.
Two years later the French were enabled to make a peace with the Iroquois which lasted for twenty years ; this interval they busily employed in cement- ing their friendship with the forest folks. Despite their utmost effort, they made little progress in gaining the affections of the Iroquois, but their pioneers met with more marked favor among the Indians of other tribes. Along the whole length of the chain of great lakes French missions were established, French priests baptized the red-men into the Christian church, French hunters, voyageurs and fur-traders took to themselves Indian wives and lived in comity with the people. Their interest in the moral welfare of the Indians was one secret of the French influence over them, the considerable number of intermarriages was another and still a
١
26
THE OLD WARS.
third was the never-failing politeness of the French diplomats. They carried into the forest all the arts and graces of the courts; they treated the chiefs with the deference they imagined due to them ; they observed all the punctilios of Indian custom. They are said to have gone so far on some occa- sions as to sit naked in council after the Indian fashion. However this may be, they were certainly adepts in dealing with the Indians.
The peace closed in 1687 by another war so sud- den and so disastrous to the French colonies that Montreal was taken and burned and a thousand people put to death by the Indians. The province was on the verge of ruin when the arrival from France of Count Frontenac with a strong body of troops put the Indians again on the defensive. A treaty had scarcely been concluded when war broke out between France and Great Britain.
The French colonies in Canada, though hardly recovered from their own danger, projected a winter raid on the settlements in New York. The raiders, following the bloody trail along Lake Champlain, fell upon Schenectady one bitter night in February, 1690, massacred sixty settlers and took prisoners twenty-seven of the Dutch burghers, who were now subjects of Great Britain, the New York prov- ince having passed under British control a quarter of a century earlier. So cold was the night that
E
27
THE OLD WARS.
twenty-five of the fugitives from the scene of fire and slaughter reached Albany with limbs so badly frozen as to require amputation. It was a poor requital of Van Curler's kindness.
This was not the only raid made upon the English settlements in those fierce old times. At Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, thirty persons were killed and many prisoners taken. At Dover twenty-three were killed. In all these expeditions the Indians and their French allies passed southward by way of the Sorel and Lake Champlain and crossed Vermont through the valley of the Winooski and White rivers, or along the course of Otter Creek; if the attack was to fall upon New York they passed by Lake George, Wood's Creek and the Upper Hud- son. Pursuing the same way home with reddened hatchets and the scalps of white men at their belts, the savages dyed the soil of Vermont with the blood of butchered prisoners.
It must have been by the Winooski trail that the descent on Deerfield, Mass., was made in 1704. The peace of Ryswick, patched up in Europe, in 1697, scarcely put an end to Indian ravages upon the New England settlements and when, less than six years later, war was again declared between Great Britain and France, the Canadians were prompt to take advantage of it.
There were at the time no English towns in all
.
28
THE OLD WARS.
the State of Vermont, but in Central Massachusetts venturesome pioneers had planted a number of towns. One of the fairest of these was Deerfield, a place of considerable size and importance. An attack upon this town was one of the first fruits of the new war. It was an attack so cruel in its nature that it may fitly be chosen to typify the brutalities of Indian warfare and to illustrate the dangers which the pioneers in the American conti- nent encountered.
In the long, silent and secret march through the snow-laden trees of the forest, in the sudden- ness and fierceness of the attack, in the cruel vin- dictiveness and bloody deeds of the savages and in their forced march to Canada with the remnant of the colonists, the Deerfield raid was precisely like a score of others witnessed in those bad, dark days. It was exceptional only in the size of the town and the number of prisoners taken. Many persons were killed, a few escaped, but no less than one hundred and twelve were carried captive to Canada, there to be held for ransom. The Rev. John Williams, pastor of the Deerfield Congregational Church, had two of his children slain in the raid and was made a prisoner with five others.
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