USA > Vermont > A history of Vermont : with geological and geographical notes, bibliography, chronology, maps, and illustrations > Part 11
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Lake Memphremagog had been of old a famous fish- ing ground among the Indians, and they were loath to leave. In its waters they had taken salmon and mas- kinonge, and through the adjacent woods they had hunted moose, deer, bears, and smaller fur-bearers. It is not strange that in the fall and winter of 1799 Troy received a visitation from Indians. A party of men,
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squaws, and papooses, under the chief Susap, came and built camps beside the river and wintered there near the settlers. The deer and moose were growing scarcer, and the company were half starved through the winter. They made baskets, cups, and pails of birch bark, and eked out a scanty living until spring ; then they left, never to return.
One of their number, an old woman known as Molly, gained a great reputation as a doctress among the whites, who suffered that winter from an epidemic. This woman was familiar with the events of Lovewell's War, which occurred in 1725 and at which she said her husband was killed. Some years after her kindly services to the settlers at Troy she went to Guildhall. In 1817 she was found dead on White Cap Mountain, in East Andover, Maine, where she had gone to gather blueberries. She had survived her husband nearly a century.
At Richford we hear that Indians hunted along the Missisquoi River and in the mountains in winter, freez- ing the meat which they secured from their slaughtered game. In the spring when the ice broke up in the river and lake they took their meat by way of Cham- plain and the Sorel River to Caughnawaga to market. But the coming of the white settlers hastened the day when the Indian must depart. These occasional trips were but his last farewell to the land of his fathers and the places which soon would know him no more.
Some Indian chiefs in Canada applied to the legisla- ture in 1798 for compensation for the lands which their tribes had owned in Vermont. The claim embraced
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nearly the whole of the present counties of Addison, Chittenden, Franklin, and Grand Isle. The legislature supported the agents of the Indians during their mis- sion, and sent them away with one hundred dollars as a friendship token, but did not solve the vexing problem of how to extinguish with equity the claims of the prior inhabitants to the lands of which they had been dispossessed. A later session decided that the Indian claims were extinguished, if they had ever existed, by the treaties between France and Great Britain in 1763 and England and the United States in 1783. A resolution to this effect was sent to the Indians, and although it would be interesting to know how they interpreted the logic of this decision, it appears to have stopped any further claims.
One more incident will be enough to finish the pic- ture of life in these northern settlements between the Revolution and the War of 1812. In the spring of 1796 Ephraim Adams and three other young men from Ipswich, New Hampshire, purchased a thousand acres of land in Knight's Gore, now in the eastern part of Bakersfield. On this land they worked three summers, and in the winter went back to New Hampshire to teach school. Working in this way, in three seasons they cleared their land and made farms for themselves, having wheat to sell. We can guess that they never forgot the events of those three summers, when they slept under the bark of an elm for cover and cooked their food over an oven built of stones and plastered with mud. They finally bought a cow, and when their wheat ripened sufficiently to cut, they boiled it and
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REVOLUTION TO THE WAR OF 1812
ate it with milk. They made a threshing floor out of basswood logs split in halves and laid flat side up, and improvised a fanning mill for winnowing their grain. People came from the lake to buy their wheat. From the ashes which he saved while clearing his land young Adams secured cash for the building materials of his first dwelling.
From such instances we can see that the process of settlement was much the same as it had been two or three decades earlier in the older portions of the state. But if the process was no less hard at first a more rapid development appears. Neighbors were plentier, and the older towns served as markets for the newer. Then, too, for this northern part Montreal and Quebec furnished markets and a trade which led to interest- ing results when national policy once more became uppermost in Vermont history. But that brings us to the War of 1812.
CHAPTER IX
THE WAR OF 1812
PLATTSBURG BAY, Sept. 11, 1814.
I could only look at the enemy's galleys going off in a shattered condition ; for there was not a mast in either squadron that could stand to make sail on, the lower rigging being nearly all shot away, hung down as though it had just been placed over the mast heads. The Saratoga had 55 round shot in her hull; the Confiance one hundred and five. The enemy's shot passed principally just over our heads, as there was not 20 whole hammocks in the nettings at the close of the action ; which lasted, without intermission, two hours and twenty minutes. - Extract from Macdonough's Report to the Secretary of the Navy.
MILITARY EVENTS OF THE WAR
The above extract makes it apparent that a naval engagement of no mean importance had taken place on Lake Champlain in early September of the year 1814. What was it all about ?
While our Vermont settlers had been clearing land, selling ashes, raising wheat, building mills, opening quar- ries, establishing iron works, founding schools, erecting churches, trading with Canada, and doing a lot of peace- able things which were good for them and the state as a whole, the national government had begun a war with England which involved the settlements along the Cana- dian border and the Champlain Valley, interfered with the trade to Canada, and gave rise to a great naval bat- tle. That battle was what the American commander was reporting to the Secretary of the Navy. We shall learn more about it presently.
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THE WAR OF 1812
So far as Vermont was concerned the theater of this war was much the same as that of the Revolution, or to go back still farther, that of the French and Indian wars. Already the Americans had attempted an inva- sion of Canada. Now the British were going to operate from Canada and invade the states.
In this emergency the distress of the northern border can be well imagined. It was settled enough to invite attack, but not enough to repel it. It is no wonder that the thinly populated towns were in a quiver of excitement. The almost unbroken wilderness stretching back from the boundary was peopled with imaginary terrors. The entire length of the Champlain Valley was exposed to border warfare; and although the north of the state was farther from the beaten line of invasion, it was penetrated by the Memphremagog and its tributaries and a few highways of traffic to the neighborhood of many settlements.
Rumors of projected Indian raids came floating through the woods. . Many people sought safety in flight and abandoned their homes until more peaceful times. Cattle were driven off, portable property removed, and cultivated farms left untilled. The more courageous remained at home, but stockades were built, and parties of volunteers were stationed at various points along the border. The main roads into Canada were at Troy, Derby Line, and Canaan. Guards were maintained at these places. At Derby Center barracks were built between the graveyard and the pond, with a guard- house on the hill near by. A company of men was raised from Derby, Holland, and Morgan, and spies were sent into Canada. Rumors that an invasion was to be
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made through Stanstead gave way to the more reason- able news that it was to be through the Champlain Valley. The Derby company and other similar ones throughout the state were then hurried off to Plattsburg.
The United States entered this war with more enthusi- asm than prudence. The fortunes of battle were against her at the start. Her magnificent foreign commerce instead of being benefited by war was destroyed by it. By the close of the year 1814 there was scarcely an unarmed vessel on the ocean which dared carry the stars and stripes. Our national capital was taken by Brit- ish troops. In Europe, where the English were at the same time fighting Napoleon, that conqueror of nations was forced back step by step until he was forced off his throne. Then England sent her veterans to Canada. A force of eighteen thousand men began to move up Lake Champlain toward Plattsburg.
Meantime there was a buzz of preparation in the Champlain Valley. During non-intercourse and the war business boomed at Vergennes, where the great falls in the river lent water power to mills and forges. It was here that Macdonough's fleet was fitted out. Here also were cast supplies for the war- no less than one hun- dred and seventy-seven tons of shot. Such business employed furnaces and forges and kept rolling mill and wire factory humming. With magical rapidity the American fleet was built. The flagship Saratoga was launched the fortieth day after the great oak which went into her keel had fallen from its stump in the forest.
No action worthy of note occurred on the lake until June, 1813. On the second day of that month two
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sloops, the Growler and the Eagle, started from Platts- burg in pursuit of a couple of British gunboats which had put in a tantalizing appearance. The next morn- ing, while chasing the boats near the Canadian line, the sloops got cooped up in the narrow channel of the Sorel River, into which the boats had fled, within sight of the fort on Isle-aux-Noix. Land forces came up both sides of the river to help the galleys. Wind and current were dead against the sloops, and after a plucky fight of three hours they surrendered. Two more vessels were thus added to the enemy's fleet.
On the 30th of July a British detachment landed at Plattsburg and destroyed the American barracks. The public stores had been removed to Burlington, and the enemy after leaving Plattsburg proceeded thither and fired a few shots into the town. The cannon on the shore began presently to play on them and they forthwith retired, leaving the town unharmed.
For a time the northern army was located at Burling- ton, under General Hampton. On the 25th of Septem- ber Colonel Clark was detached with one hundred and two men and ordered to attack a small British force at St. Armand on Missisquoi Bay. He found the enemy un- prepared. After a ten-minute fight the entire English force surrendered, and the one hundred and two Ameri- cans marched one hundred and one prisoners back to Bur- lington. On the 19th of December Lieutenant Macdon- ough went into winter quarters at Otter Creek with his flotilla, and the northern campaign ended for that season.
In the following spring thirteen English galleys, three sloops, and a brig passed up the lake and stopped at the
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mouth of the Otter Creek. They opened a spirited fire on the battery at the mouth of the river, intending to carry it, to force their way up the river, and to destroy the American shipping at Vergennes which was being made ready for service. But the garrison at the battery, aided by the Vermont militia, repelled the attack and the enemy turned again northward. The American ship- ping saved that day from destruction proved its worth four months later at the battle of Plattsburg Bay.
As the summer months passed it became evident that a land battle would be fought on the New York side of the lake. The northern army had been ordered to the Niagara frontier, and the situation grew embar- rassing to the one brigade at Plattsburg. Prevost had concentrated at the head of the lake a large army of veterans for this invasion of New York. A strenuous cry for help was made to the neighboring states.
Acting officially for the state of Vermont, Governor Martin Chittenden, son of the old governor, Thomas Chittenden, did not consider himself authorized to order the militia into service outside the state. The gover- nor was a Federalist. His Federalism, however, did not prevent him from issuing a call for volunteers. The response was a ready one. By the 11th of September, the day when the great fight occurred in Plattsburg Bay, twenty-five hundred men from the Green Mountain State had reported at Plattsburg ready for service.
Early in the morning on that same day the British fleet weighed anchor at Isle La Motte and sailed south around Cumberland Head, where Macdonough's vessels lay anchored in a line stretching thence to Crab Island
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Shoal. On shore an American army of less than five thousand men stood on the south bank of the Saranac River waiting for the first move of the British force of three times their number which was drawn up on the opposite side.
Between eight and nine o'clock in the morning the naval fight began. A shot from the Linnet struck a
AN OLD PRINT OF THE BATTLE OF PLATTSBURG
hencoop on the Saratoga and released a gamecock. He hopped up on a gun slide and crowed ; and while the men laughed and cheered at the omen, Macdonough, having first kneeled in prayer on the deck of his ship, fired the first shot from one of the long guns. All the vessels were presently engaged.
A double-shotted broadside from the British flagship struck the Saratoga squarely and sent half of her men
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sprawling on the deck. Forty were killed or wounded; the rest picked themselves up and sprang again to the guns. Macdonough was working like a common sailor. As he stooped to sight his favorite gun a shot from the enemy cut in two the spanker boom and it came crash- ing down on his head, knocking him senseless. Within three minutes he was again at the gun. Then another shot came, tore off a gunner's head, and sent it into Macdonough's face with enough force to knock him to the other side of the deck. Such was the fashion of the fight. For more than two hours it went on, while all along the lake shore and through the valley and on the uprising hills there watched or listened to the rever- berating thunder of the guns the people to whom the result meant safety or flight.
On the brow of one hill on an island opposite Platts- burg stood a boy of some thirteen years looking down at the fight in the bay below him. His father was in the American army. Long before sunrise that morn- ing he had the horses harnessed, and when the tops of the British masts appeared, coming south from Isle La Motte, he drove to the hill, hitched the horses to a tree, and found a spot where he could overlook the whole scene. After the British hauled down their colors he saw a boat with two or three men in it putting out from the shore close by. He wanted to see the British ships, so he ran down to the shore, called to the men in the boat, and together they rowed out to the scene of battle.
He always remembered that scene. In November, 1901, although over one hundred years old, he retold
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THE WAR OF 1812
the story as vividly as though it had happened but the day before.1 He described the ship which he visited as being built of oak and planked with white-oak planks six inches thick. That planking was stuck solid full of balls. He says:
The riggin' was cut all to pieces. There wasn't any of it left. Our folks used chain shot. That is, they bored holes in the can- non balls and took two balls and fastened them together with a big chain. They cut the shrouds and everything right off. The decks was the most awful sight I ever saw. It was - it was awful.
Blood, blood was everywhere! The decks was covered with arms and legs and heads, and pieces of hands and bodies all torn to pieces ! I never see anything in this world like it! Seemed as if everybody had been killed.
It seemed that way to others also. A British mid- shipman of the Confiance wrote to his brother as follows:
Our masts, yards and sails were so shattered that one looked like so many bunches of matches, and the other like a bundle of rags. The havoc on both sides is dreadful. I don't think there are more than five of our men, out of three hundred, but what are killed or wounded. Never was shower of hail so thick as the shot whistling about our ears. Were you to see my jacket, waistcoat and trousers, you would be astonished how I escaped as I did, for they were literally torn all to rags with shot and splinters ; the upper part of my hat was also shot away. There is one of our marines who was in the Trafalgar action with Lord Nelson, who says it was a mere flea-bite compared with this.
During the naval action something had been doing on shore. The opening volley of the Confiance had
1 This account of the battle may be found in The Outlook, Nov. 2, 1901, where an interview with the survivor, Mr. Benajah Phelps, was reported.
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HISTORY OF VERMONT
been the signal for the land forces to begin. At the bridges and the fords of the river the brunt of the fight- ing fell. The father of the boy who watched the fight from South Island was an orderly sergeant and was sent up the river with his company to guard a bridge and a ford. So of course the lad found out afterward how it was done.
They took every single plank off the bridge. Of course the British column had to go higher up stream then to the ford. That was about three miles up the Au Sable.1 Father's company guarded the ford all day. The woods was thick and the big trees and bushes came right down to the water's edge, and father's men hid in them. When the British stepped into the water to cross, they shot them right down. Some of them dropped in the stream and was carried away by the current. Not one of our men was killed. . .. The British tried hard to get across the river in Plattsburg but they could n't. Why, you see, all the Vermont milishy was there! It was impossible to git across that river.
Still another bridge was guarded by our Derby com- pany. When the British started up the Saranac to cross, the captain of this company was ordered to follow on the south side and destroy the bridge. He managed to keep a little ahead of the British and reached the bridge , first. Then he and his men made a dash for the bridge, picked up the planks, and walked to the shore on the stringers, carrying the planks. Before they had finished, the British came up and opened fire. Bullets struck the planks as the men carried them off, and some of the men were killed. But the men finished the work, and then shot the British off into the water when they tried to cross on the stringers.
1 It must have been the Saranac instead of the Au Sable.
18I
THE WAR OF 1812
As soon as news came of the surrender of the Brit- ish fleet the army began preparations to retreat. They retreated so precipitately that provisions, ammunition, military stores, and wounded men were left behind. The total British loss has never been correctly ascer- tained ; the Americans lost not more than 150 men. Young Macdonough's fleet comprised 14 vessels of 2244 tons, 882 men, 86 guns. The British fleet was some- what superior in equipment, - 16 vessels of 2404 tons, 987 men, and a total of 92 guns. On the approach of winter the victorious fleet was taken to Fiddler's Elbow, near Whitehall; there it lies to-day beneath the waves.
Macdonough was presented with a tract of land on Cumberland Head, overlooking the scene of his victory, as an expression of the appreciation of his services on this occasion. You will find this opinion expressed in Theodore Roosevelt's history of the Naval War of 1812: " Macdonough in this battle won a higher fame than any other commander of the war, American or British. . Down to the time of the Civil War he is the greatest figure in our naval history." He served his country later on foreign seas until his health gave way, and died at sea in 1825 on board a trading brig which had been sent by the government to bring him home.
The Green Mountain men, who had rallied to the help of the frontier before the government at Washington had even asked their aid, received thanks from the commander at Plattsburg and thanks from the general government for their services. And here, so far as
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its military features go, the War of 1812 ends for Ver- mont. The national policy which led to this war pro- duced some results, however, that were not strictly of a military nature, and it will be of interest to notice what they were.
THE SMUGGLERS OF EMBARGO DAYS
It is one of the ideas which statesmen have that if you are going to war with a nation you ought not to trade with its people at the same time. It violates the principle of consistency, and this is very important in politics. But it sometimes happens that those who do the trading think differently from the politicians, and then one finds that secret or clandestine trading goes on, which is commonly called smuggling. This was what happened in the seaport towns of the Atlantic colonies before the Revolution, and this was what happened along the northern borders of Vermont before and during the War of 1812.
The policy of withholding trade from Great Britain was not intended merely to prevent any such trade from growing up in the future, but it was designed to cut off the already existing trade. We have already seen what a blessing it was to the settlers of northern Vermont to have the markets of Canada open to them. The restrictive policy, therefore, bore upon them with corresponding heaviness.
The first embargo act, which Congress passed in December, 1807, interfered with seaboard commerce. Since Vermont had no seaports it did not injure her;
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in fact it had the reverse tendency, for it turned more people toward Canada as a market for their timber, potash, and pearlash. But when this first embargo was supplemented by the land embargo of March, 1808, the shoe began to pinch. What made it worse, steam navigation was just opening on Lake Champlain, and people were beginning to see that good profits could be made from this lake trade.
To the genuine distress of the people at this land embargo you must now add another element, the zeal of the federal politicians. They seized this opportunity to excite great dissatisfaction with the national govern- ment, and they alarmed its supporters in this state. The very day that the embargo law was received by the col- lector of the Vermont district he wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury that it would be impossible to execute that law without a military force.
President Jefferson's embargo policy did not meet with uniform approval or success. In fact it was every- where systematically evaded. Jefferson had made a brief visit to Vermont in 1791, and if we may judge by the letter he wrote home he did not enjoy himself. Lake Champlain was muddy; there were not enough fish; the wind blew in his face; the weather was sultry; he under- stood that there was as much fever and ague and bilious complaint on Lake Champlain as in the swamps of Caro- lina; the land was locked up in ice and snow for six months. So it is probable that the President's personal recollections, added to the accounts which he heard of the great trade which was springing up with Canada, gave him a somewhat jaundiced view of the situation.
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He forthwith issued a proclamation the preamble of which was as follows:
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES A PROCLAMATION
Whereas information has been received that sundry persons are combined or combining and confederating together on Lake Champlain and the country thereto adjacent for the purposes of forming insurrections against the authority of the laws of the United States, for opposing the same and obstructing their execu- tion ; and that such combinations are too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the Marshals, by the laws of the United States :
Therefore all such persons were ordered to disperse and military officers were directed to aid in subduing this trouble. The collector's fears may have been well grounded, but such a proclamation only served to make the situation worse.
When the proclamation, which was published in full in Spooner's Vermont Journal May 9, 1808, met the startled eyes of the inhabitants of this state it roused a variety of emotions. But one thing was sure, they did not relish being advertised as insurrectionists. Accordingly in the following month the same paper had the pleasure of printing the following memorial, with a petition that the land embargo be discontinued. It is worth quoting because it throws light on the situ- ation and reflects the general indignation at Jefferson's proclamation, besides stating pretty fairly the position of the petitioners. From this statement it would appear that Vermont in 1808 would not have been wholly averse to a free-trade policy.
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NO REBELS IN VERMONT
TO THOMAS JEFFERSON, ESQ., President of the United States
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