USA > Vermont > A history of Vermont : with geological and geographical notes, bibliography, chronology, maps, and illustrations > Part 12
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A MEMORIAL of the Inhabitants of the town of St. Albans.
. After an impartial investigation of the subject, so far . . as they are capable, your Memorialists cannot conceive how the object of the general Embargo, which was the protection of our " vessels, our scamen and merchandise on the high seas," can be any way connected with the provisions of the law of March 12; or how our " vessels, our seamen and our merchandise on the high seas " can be exposed to any dangers from the belligerent powers of Europe, in consequence of a commercial intercourse, either by land or water, between the citizens of Vermont and Lower Canada, and other places in like situations ; nor can they be taught, that a law which forbids the exchange of such commodities as they do not want, for the conveniences and necessaries of life, and espe- cially for the sinews of war, the gold and silver of that nation, whose injury it seems, is contemplated by such law, can in any possible degree, tend to the welfare of the Union.
The militia in the meantime was ordered out and stationed at Windmill Point to stop some rafts bound to Canada. The rafts, favored by darkness and wind, escaped the vigilance of the militia and made their way through to the forbidden land. This incident served to throw suspicion on the efficiency of the Franklin County militia, and they were superseded by United States troops. The whole course of affairs served to irritate the people, alienate a portion of them in this section of the state from the support of the national policy, and to cheer the smugglers in their traffic, while the resort to force stimulated them to more desperate resistance.
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HISTORY OF VERMONT
Lake Champlain offered an unparalleled field for smuggling operations. An active contraband trade cen- tered at St. Albans. The northern part of the lake, with its many little shady nooks, secluded bays, wooded shores, and uninhabited spots, gave the illicit traders the assistance of nature and a most convenient high- way. In these hidden corners they could lie secreted by day and run their devious ways by night.
Of all the boats engaged in the smuggling business on Lake Champlain the Black Snake was the most famous. She had been built originally to run as a ferryboat between Charlotte, Vermont, and Essex, New York. But her construction made her an excellent boat for the smugglers. She was forty feet long, fourteen feet wide, four and one half feet deep, built with straight high sides, and could carry one hundred barrels of potash at a load. With freight running from five to six dollars a barrel, you can easily see why smuggling paid. The vessel had a sharp bow, a square stern, a forecastle but no cabin, carried seven oars on a side, and was manned by a powerful and desperate crew. She was unpainted, but had been smeared over with tar, and probably took her name from the color.
For months this boat plied her illegal traffic and either overawed or eluded the government officers. She was at length taken by the revenue cutter The Fly, and after a sharp fight all but two of the crew captured. These were taken later. The boat was caught up the Winooski River, whither she had gone for a cargo. Dean, one of the captured crew, was executed, and the rest were sent to the state prison, which had been built a few years before.
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THE WAR OF 1812
When the war opened and the British army entered Canada the incentives to trade greatly increased. The presence of this large body of transients afforded a tem- porary market for provisions such as beef, flour, and other products of the farm, which created an itching palm in many a thrifty farmer's hand and led to contra- band trade by land. There was an opportunity to lay the foundation of handsome fortunes, and not a few supplies from settlers in Orleans, Caledonia, Franklin, and other near-by counties found their way across the line. High prices were paid at Stanstead.
Of course attempts were made to intercept the trade. Officers were picketed at every road leading into Canada, and encounters with the smugglers were not infrequent. The latter then adopted the practice of going frequently in sufficiently large numbers to overawe or override the officers of the law. The northern trade, however, was seriously interfered with when military companies were raised for the war. The captain of the Derby company which has already been mentioned had orders to patrol a line extending from Essex County to Lake Memphre- magog. He picketed every road and stopped this illicit trade for a time. This not unnaturally roused the antip- athy of our neighbors across the border, for they were as anxious to buy as the settlers were to sell.
As soon as the invasion of the Champlain Valley demanded the presence of the volunteers at Plattsburg the Canadians had a chance to vent their spite. The absence of the local troops left the Derby frontier unprotected ; and one dark night a few Canadians stole across the line from Stanstead, set fire to the barracks,
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guardhouse, and officers' quarters, and made good their escape before the town was roused. But from that time until the close of the war it was not prudent for a Canadian to be seen on the streets of Derby after nightfall unless he was ready for a coat of tar and feathers.
As the army's demand for beef increased encounters by land became more frequent. Through the northern woods, the back pastures, and in unfrequented places along the main roads smugglers took droves of cattle for the use of the British army. Eastward through the woods to the Connecticut River this scattered but exciting trade went on.
In the year 1813 a young lad from Albany was out one day in the timber, when he espied a large drove of cattle on what was known as Corey's smuggling road. This was a passage which the smugglers had cut in the woods, and it ran from Craftsbury through Albany, under the side of the mountain toward Lowell, coming out into the old Hazen road at a point about west of where Albany Center now stands. What the boy saw was a drove of beef on its way to feed the British army.
Tingling with excitement, the lad rushed to Irasburg, where the United States officer of customs was sta- tioned. Major Enos, the officer, heard his story, and taking the boy up behind him on his horse, started in hot haste for Craftsbury, where he raised a posse of determined men. They took the old Hazen road and followed the smugglers toward Lowell. Cattle not being rapid travelers, the drovers were overtaken at Curtis's Tavern near Lowell Corners, baiting their live stock.
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The smugglers determined to rely on the sympathy of the Lowell people and fight. Posting two men at the bars of the inclosure where the cattle were quietly feeding, they threatened to shoot the first man who attempted to let them out. The major, on reviewing his forces, found that neither he nor the entire posse had brought so much as a horse pistol with them. But they had what was better, good courage. Two of his men, armed with stout canes, marched up to the guardians of the bars and informed them that the first man who fired a shot would be laid dead. Then a third man coolly took the bars out one by one and laid them aside. The entire drove of cattle passed out and were headed back over the mountain without a shot being fired.
The smugglers tried to rally enough men to retake the cattle, but were not able to do so. The cattle, one hundred and ten in number, were taken to Craftsbury common that night and guarded by citizens till morn- ing. Then they were started for Burlington for the use of the American army. The smugglers followed after, still determined to retake their property. Several skirmishes occurred .on the road, the last one of which, at Underhill, drew some blood. But the cattle reached their destination safely.
In March, 1814, the customs officers at Barton received word that a party of smugglers had crossed the line and were coming through that town. Securing assistance, the officers undertook to stop the party at a hill near the present village of Barton Landing. After a smart fight the smugglers forced their way through. They carried cloth, steel wire, and other things merchantable
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among settlers. Part of the goods they hid ; part was taken by the officers. Two of the men were made pris- oners, but the next day they escaped. In August of the same year a drove of cattle was seized in this town by the officers, but a rescue party came from Canada to retake them.
Plenty of similar incidents took place elsewhere all along the border. Franklin County was the scene of many skirmishes. The smugglers frequently traveled by night, and went in such large companies that it was dangerous business for the officers to try to intercept them. The frequency of these occurrences shows how strong was the motive to trade. To the settlers it meant the possibility of getting a little hard cash, which was too rarely seen even in the best of times. The pres- ence of large numbers of British troops in the vicinity of the state created a temporary market for cattle at the farmers' doors; and a man could reason that he had a right to sell his stock in his own dooryard to any purchaser without asking embarrassing questions about destination.
The men who bought the cattle and drove them across the border clearly defied the laws of the land ; but they reaped an additional profit, and there are men in nearly every community who will take such risks. In Irasburg an association of smugglers was formed, and was not broken up until an association of anti-smugglers was formed in 1814 to defeat it. This company bor- rowed money to conduct its business of a man in a near-by town, and gave him a joint and several note as security. The taking and retaking of contraband goods
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THE WAR OF 1812
furnished the two associations considerable activity dur- ing the war. Such times were conducive to the erection of jails and courthouses ; and the former were said at times to furnish insufficient accommodations for all who were qualified to lodge in them.
We must remember that the settlements were more or less broken up, the times productive of lawlessness, and not a few of the best men away fighting for the American cause. We must remember, too, that party excitement ran high in this country at the time, and that New England especially had been opposed to the embargo, opposed to the war, opposed to the adminis- tration. Vermont's interests were essentially those of Federalist New England. She had elected a Federalist, Martin Chittenden, for governor. Communities were split up into factions and party spirit fairly boiled. So, while Vermont troops were not backward to repel inva- sion, many speculative men were not backward to make a dollar out of the presence of the enemy.
In this Vermont was not alone. It was said by the British themselves that two thirds of their army in Canada was living on beef supplied by American con- tractors. The road to St. Regis was covered with droves of cattle, and the river with rafts of goods, destined for the enemy's use. Such facts may not fill us with pride, but they show that Vermont was not peculiarly or will- fully errant, but rather was suffering with others the inevitable results of the war policy. The part which her sons voluntarily took in the military events of the war atones for the laxity with which a few of the stay-at-homes kept the laws.
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CHAPTER X
FROM THE WAR OF 1812 TO THE CIVIL WAR
PERMANENT FORCES AND CHANGING FORMS
The forest and the soil, these were the elements the settlers had to deal with, and social forms and forms of industry were governed by that fact. The settler was of necessity a farmer, or was engaged in those sim- ple, primitive, extractive industries which them- selves rest on the gifts of nature. The work of man, the complicated mod- ern system of organiza- tion which multiplies steps between producer and consumer, had not yet prominently appeared. The tilling of the soil has always been our first necessity.
If our settler-farmer, IF HE BROKE AN AX HELVE, HE MADE FOR HIMSELF ANOTHER chopping in the forest, broke his ax helve, which would rarely happen with such helves and skill as his, he made for himself another from the stick of tough ash
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seasoning in the shed. If one of the oxen broke a bow in pulling stumps over in the "new piece," another bow, properly shaped in his own workshop, was ready for its place. Very likely the yoke itself was of his framing. With ax, saw, auger, shave, and ever-ready jackknife, there were few structural needs in house, shed, or barn which he could not supply.
The demands which the conditions of life in a new land put upon him made him an adept at wood handi- craft, gave him skill and apti- tude, and created a reputation for the Yankee and his jackknife which has spread far and wide. The drafts upon his inventive genius were daily drawn, and a OLD-TIME AX HEADS century of American invention has been the result. In his sickle and brain lay the modern reaper ; in his scythe and brain was a mowing machine ; the short-tined fork with which bronzed arms tossed the fragrant hay in wind and shine suggested the hay tedder.
Beside the crude versatile power of his grandfather the helplessness of the modern man to do things for himself is appalling. From top to toe, inside and out, he is dependent upon others than himself. The prod- ucts of all continents and zones appear on every table.
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The contents of the humblest homes bespeak the work of spindles, looms, factories, and toiling hands innumer- able. Democracy, aristocracy, and despotism are hall- marked on our dishes, clothes, and viands. It is quite conceivable that a century ago a Vermont farmer, clad in rough homespun, sat down to eat his humble meal in a home which he had built with his own hands, on a chair which he had fashioned, at a table which was of his making, and ate from homemade wooden dishes food which had ripened in no other sun than that which daily passed across the blue over his little clearing.
If you follow this settler through the round of the changing sea- sons, you will find him at every WOODEN DISHES step a marvel of resource and self-reliance. The forest gave him material for shelter and furniture; the soil had in it sustenance for the inner man. With a few sheep, . a few cattle, and some poultry acquired, you will find him on the road to prosperous living. With a grist- mill, a sawmill, and a blacksmith shop in the neighbor- hood, you will find a community that is almost self- sufficing. Add a carding mill, a fulling mill, and a tannery, and the possibilities of luxury appear.
There is no standing still in the universe. From the teeming earth beneath our feet to the nebulous depths and innumerable stars that delight our uplifted gaze,
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all is in process of incessant change. The creatures who dwell upon the earth and are called men in the brief period of their visible existence here know no such thing as rest. When they disappear within their homes, and darkness comes which they call night, and they seek slumber and refreshment for their mortal frames, the life within their bodies pulses on, while on the other side of the orb there crawl forth into the sunlight other men who take up the ceaseless task of human toil. And the men of the East and the men of the West work for each other, although they know it not, for all human life runs into one seething stream. These men grow old and bent and gray, and their bodies are put away under the earth; but life and toil do not end thereby, RIVEN LATTICE for, lo, others have come to take their places. They begin where the others ended, so that no age among these men is like any other that was ever seen or known upon the face of the earth. They dig in the earth ; they sail on the waters to and fro ; they build ; they fetch; they carry. They die also. All is in process of incessant change.
In the quiet of this age which we now study were laid the foundations for the intricacy, the complications, the delicate adjustments of modern life. The demands which were put upon these people were broad as life itself; they began almost with the cradle and they
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lasted to the grave. New needs, greater economy, wider knowledge forced upon men methods, resources, and adaptations before unknown. Some of the changes we may trace, but many more we must pass unnoticed, merely noting how a few things were then and how they are now.
A HALF CENTURY OF PASTORAL LIFE
It may appear futile to characterize with one adjective any period of modern life which covers so long a time as fifty years, but it is unmistakable that the almost unbroken stretch from the war which we have just noticed to the next one that will be our study marked a period of our people's history with characteristics which were unique and never to be repeated. Vermont is still a rural state, a state of villages and small towns and scattered farms instead of cities. Our entire popu- lation if massed together would not make a city remark- able for size. Yet the rural life of the first half of the last century was of a character distinct from that of to-day. The hardship of settling was over ; the condi- tions of life were easier ; neighborhoods settled down into conventional lines of rural industry and social intercourse.
It was a transition period, as all periods are in a cer- tain sense. The significant features of modern organi- zation had begun ; but on the whole it was a breathing space preparatory to the tremendous shaking up which began before the Civil War, went on through that war, and is now whirling us on more rapidly than ever to some culmination which we can only remotely forecast.
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But in that age the stamp which comes from honest, toilsome life next the soil had not lost its character in the rush of our bespectacled age of specialization which substitutes machinery for muscle and divides labor so minutely that man becomes an automaton working on a piece instead of a creator of a whole thing. The modern drift of the wealthy classes back toward the country pays an unconscious tribute to-day to the superior ele- ments of country life in the bygone days. Men know no better means to conserve and perfect their physical lives than to do artificially and from choice what their fathers did naturally and from necessity. It was the simple, primal strength, . REVOLVING CHURN the whole-hearted and sweet neighborliness, the well- rounded development of their lives, which made the sons of this state, "Vermont men," everywhere the synonym of efficiency coupled with integrity, and still gives the oldest inhabitant license to talk on unchidden of the " good old times."
The season of 1816 tested the capacity of our early farmers for self-sufficiency, and so demonstrates one of the strong points in the life which we would
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describe. Spring came that year unusually early. Farm- ers planted their crops in the hope of a great harvest, but in the 1 month of June a belated frost smote the growing fields. On the morning of the 9th of that month farmers had to break ice before their cattle could drink in the troughs. Snow came in the northern part of the state and lay on the level one foot in 11. in depth, or was whirled by the wind into drifts two or THE SAP YOKE BORNE ON STRONG SHOULDERS three feet deep. The growing crops were cut down, the foliage of the trees was destroyed, and the hope of harvest was taken away.
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FROM THE WAR OF 1812 TO THE CIVIL WAR
The beeches did not put forth their leaves again that summer.
Ready money was never plenty, for barter of home- grown commodities had always taken its place. But now, with the shortage of crops, through the greater part of the year not a dollar could be raised in many an interior town save from the sale of ashes. Ashes and salts of ashes were about all that could be exchanged. All forms of provisions were scarce and high; there was no corn or rye except the little which could be brought from a great distance. Some wheat was made use of
AN OLD DUGOUT TROUGH
by harvesting it in the milk, drying it in ovens, and mashing it into a dough which could be baked or boiled like rice. Fresh fish and all forms of vegetable life which were wholesome were eaten. At Swanton there were ten fishing grounds between the falls and the lake where great seines were drawn, and hither came people to barter their maple sugar and other scanty resources for fish. We hear of no outside relief ; we hear of no starvation ; the settlers were self-sufficing.
When the sun began to warm up the blood of the maples in spring our farmers began their sugar- ing, not in a comfortable sugarhouse with the modern
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refinements of evaporator, arch, and sugar pans and the luxury of tin sap buckets and a gathering team, but in the open air, with a great kettle hung in front of the rude covering which sheltered the sap boilers through the night and from the occa- sional heavy fall of a "sugar snow." OLD SUGAR KETTLES Instead of the neat, small hole in the maple, you would have found then the broad gash of the ax or gouge, or wound of the large bit. Instead of the gathering team you would then have seen the sap yoke borne on strong shoulders, with much trudging here and there among the maples, sometimes on snow- shoes, sometimes without.
Then, for many frosty mornings, while the fish hawks began to circle near and the wild geese to fly north and the buds to swell in the hard-wood forest, there was the season's stock of firewood SUGARING UTENSILS OF FIFTY YEARS AGO to cut and work up. What a smell of new life in the air as the chips flew among the dank leaves and the pungent odor of the recking earth crept up to the nostrils !
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FROM THE WAR OF 1812 TO THE CIVIL WAR
When the buds burst into leaf on birch and maple there was rustling among the seeds stored away in mouse-proof cans and boxes, and a supply was brought out for garden and field; while the old-fashioned plow with its wooden mold-board turned over the rich loam, and the first bobolink gave sign that it was time to plant the corn, for the maples were "gosling green."
There was plenty of work in spring, with soap to be made, sheep to be sheared, and fencing to be done before the young stock was turned into the timber and half- cleared lot that was called the back pas- ture. "Slash fence" was built most quickly and easily there; but along the slope of the well-tilled piece in the INSTEAD OF THE NEAT AUGER HOLE YOU WOULD HAVE FOUND THE BROAD GASH OF THE AX clearing, if boards were not over plenty, the Virginia or snake fence zigzagged its way along in pasture and division linės.
We find the farmer planting a greater diversity of crops than we plant to-day on these Vermont hills, because he had to produce so many different things for himself. For example, to supply the need of household linen, flax must be raised. . A variety of grains was sown
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HISTORY OF VERMONT
on every farm, - rye, barley, oats, winter wheat, Indian wheat, and Indian corn. All kinds of vegetables now in common use were then raised. After the crops were in, there were sure to be a few days of stone piling, stump pulling, and odds and ends of work to be done. Perhaps there was a short-handed neighbor to help, and tools to fit up and put in shape for haying.
GETTING IN THE SEASON'S STOCK OF FIREWOOD
When the freshness and crispness of the spring morn- ings had burned off in summer's haze, the swing of the scythe through the grass in unvarying rhythmic motion told of strong backs and sinewy arms. Between hocing and haying perhaps a day's fishing might intervene and take the farmer's boy into the cool depths of the forest beside some murmuring stream; but for the most part the youngster was rapidly maturing in the company of his elders. There was no place on the farm where a boy could not be useful; sometimes he could do as well as a man, for he could turn the grindstone, spread the
FROM THE WAR OF 1812 TO THE CIVIL WAR 203
hay, and get the cows, and in the same tasks a man could not do more. Large families were obviously a blessing.
As good sport as fishing it must have been to line bees or go to June training, or to a raising at one of the neighbors', or where some public enterprise like the building of a church or schoolhouse needed helping hands. Then there were the roads to be worked, and the sheep to be washed in the pool, and perchance a neighbor to be helped with a clearing bec.
On Sunday what a relaxation of tired muscles and what a straining of the mind when the entire neigh- borhood listened to the long forenoon and afternoon sermons, happily broken by a FOOT PANS, BROUGHT WITH LIVE COALS, FURNISHED THE WARMTH midday lunch with gossip around the church steps, the horse sheds, and in the neighboring graveyard. This must have been as welcome and as serviceable as a weekly newspaper. Little wonder that a tithingman was needed to prod the drowsy into the form if not the spirit of greater godliness, when wearied bodies and sated minds gave way before the combined attack of pew and pulpit and sank into natural and audible repose.
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