USA > Vermont > The Vermont lease lands > Part 4
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There had been some granting of land in the southeastern corner of Vermont by Massachusetts Bay, and these grants were affected by the boundary Order of 1740. But these settlements did not survive and were not among the issues which lead to the New Hampshire-Massachusetts boundary settlement. When the grants finally were revived, it was by receiving New Hampshire confirmations. Conflicting grants in southern New Hampshire and, especially, the status of Fort Dummer were at stake. Indeed, while Massachusetts appears in the picture from time to time, until the last,7 her role in the conflicts swirling through the New Hampshire Grants was definitely a passive one and was induced by the efforts of former Massachusetts men interested in the Grants who thought the Bay colony might afford a stronger advocacy for their case. Essentially, the issues were drawn between New Hampshire and New York and remained thus until in 1775 a third element was introduced when the first definite suggestions were made public that the men in the Grants establish their own government. Matt Jones has said that,
7. Special Master, Finding 194, pp. 346-347.
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VERMONT LEASE LANDS
Its [Vermont's] early history is the story of a contest between partisan groups over a district that, until these settlers came, had been virtually a no man's land. This conflict involved two incom- patible theories of land ownership and development. New York fostered great manors owned by a few wealthy men and cultivated by tenant farmers, while New Hampshire, like the rest of New England, followed the policy of dividing the land into relatively small farms owned in fee by the men who tilled the soil. In the end the New Hampshire group prevailed 8
The story is essentially another of the incidents in North American affairs in which the British government failed at colonial administra- tion. In this case, at least, one discovers the admixture, on the one hand, of London's inability to visualize the dimensions and nature of colonial circumstances, the failure to appreciate the dynamic and often urgent character of colonial developments, the lack of careful selection of colonial administrators; and on the other side of the Atlantic, the con- flicts of interest and policy of governmental authorities, the cupidity and greed of speculators, and the almost primitive insistence of the small man on his being permitted to open the wilderness as a home. For its beginning, we must go back, as did the Privy Council in 1764 and the United States Supreme Court in 1932, to the grant made by King Charles II to the Duke of York in 1664, as the eastern boundary therein established was the line at which the New Hampshire-Massachusetts Bay boundary would "meet (s) our other Governments."9
For some time this eastern boundary of New York was quiescent. New York granted lands along or near it; to some extent, these grants followed the New York "patroon" pattern of large individual holdings. Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay were busy nearer the coast. But, as the latter colonies became more mature, there was the inevitable west- ward movement in them, and we find them during the early eighteenth century granting lands so far to the west as to come into conflict with the New York jurisdiction. This condition came to be attended by all the details so familiar in the history of American expansion-squatters on the land, struggles between groups of small holders and large-scale claimants, vociferous claims and counter-claims of a legalistic nature,
8. Jones, p. vii.
9. "Representation of the British Board of Trade, July 10, 1764, Concerning the Boundary Line Between the Provinces of New Hampshire and New York," in British Public Record Office, C. O. 5/942, fols. 284-301, quoted in Jones, App. A, 397; cf. Special Master, Findings : 2, pp. 223-224; 4, pp. 225-226.
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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
insistence by both parties that all they wish is a fair determination of the dispute by governmental authority, and then the refusal by the losers of peaceful acceptance of such rulings. And, finally, as again has been so frequent in American land history, one finds that ultimately a tena- cious, actual, physical possession of the land proved to be the valid nine- tenths of the law.
The Connecticut-New York portion of the line had presumably been settled by agreement about 1684 so that the quarrels in that section were chiefly individual affrays between New York patentees and Connecticut squatters.10 The line between Massachusetts Bay and New York was the source of considerable friction and difficulty. Massachusetts in a very casual way apparently assumed that it should extend itself westerly to a position even with Connecticut, and the government in New York was more than casual in its protests over what, in its view, were en- croachments.11 The boundary was not adjudicated until after 1770, but, what with the energy of Massachusetts settlement and the lack of vig- orous countering measures in New York, for every-day, practical pur- poses the line may be regarded as having been an approximate exten- sion of the Connecticut-New York line. North of Massachusetts Bay, New York assumed that its eastern extent was to the Connecticut River, but the New York government did nothing about the area so included and, in fact, seemed hardly aware of its existence. This is indicated by the absence of any New York activity respecting the various phases of the history of Fort Dummer, which actually lay within the area.
The New York boundary with Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay is of concern to this study because it was used, first by Governor Ben- ning Wentworth12 and later by the New Hampshire grantees, as the basis for claiming that the Massachusetts Bay-New Hampshire boundary line, as established in the Order of 1740, met the New York government at a point twenty miles east of the Hudson River. Otherwise, there would have been no position whatever between the Connecticut River and Albany at which the New Hampshire Grants could have been terminated with sufficient reason even for the specious logic by which they were supported. While the claim to this line by the protagonists of the New Hampshire cause has been viewed by judicial eyes as invalid,13 the
10. Special Master, Finding 5, p. 226.
11. Ibid., Finding 6, p. 226.
12. Ibid., Findings : 4, pp. 225-226; 8, pp. 226-227.
13. First by the Supreme Court of New York in the ejectment suits of 1770 and later in the case of Vermont v. New Hampshire, 289 U. S. 593 (1932).
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VERMONT LEASE LANDS
practical argument respecting it led to the appearance of Vermont as a separate jurisdiction and affects the study of the lease lands. So it must here be regarded as having existed, at least in the minds of some of the men of the time.
Having thus briefly reviewed the boundary relations around the New Hampshire Grants and the place of Massachusetts in the story, it will be well, before proceeding with the history of the Grants, to have a clear impression of the various land grant operations with which the lease lands are involved. Connecticut, like Massachusetts, is soon elimi- nated. Although Connecticut at one time possessed an area of land of some 44,000 acres within the region under consideration, it need detain us but little. This area was the so-called Equivalent Lands, received from Massachusetts in an earlier boundary settlement between those two colonies. The Equivalent Lands were soon sold at auction to Massachu- setts people. For our purposes, the significant fact is that at a later date, when permanent settlement took place, the title to these lands was con- firmed by New Hampshire grants. Another set of grants of which notice should be taken, before being dismissed, was the French seigneuries, the grants of which extended down the eastern side of the Champlain Valley. To quote Matt Jones :
For some time after the Champlain Valley became a British pos- session the proprietors of the French seignories along the lake continued to urge their claims before the British government, which, at times, appeared well disposed, but in the end the terri- tory was occupied by settlers claiming under British provincial titles.14
Thus neither of these situations can have had any material effect on the lease lands.
Except for a small amount of early incursion by squatters, which it would be difficult, if at all possible, to identify at the present time, the lease lands are found to have been involved in four land grant opera- tions, three of which were of general concern and broad extent and the last of which was a localized affair of a peculiar nature. These were : first, the grants made by Benning Wentworth as Governor of New Hampshire ; second, ordinary grants and patents issued in the name of the provincial government of New York; third, patents based on a royal proclamation of October 7, 1763, and issued through the New York
14. Jones, p. 6; Guy O. Coolidge, "French Occupation of the Champlain Valley," Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society, New Series, VI, No. 3 (1938), 144-313.
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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
government to reduced officers and discharged soldiers of the French War, together with additional military patents obtained by mandamus orders from the Crown; and fourth, the land manipulations of Colonel John Henry Lydius, who procured deeds from Mohawk Indian chiefs to a large tract of land some sixty miles by twenty-four miles in extent along the Otter Creek Valley in the western part of Vermont.15 The following survey will merely attempt to show the relations between these four groups of land grants, and the people affected by them, and thus offer a clearer conception of how the present status of the lease lands evolved.
Jones remarks: "It may be truly said that the history of Vermont begins with Benning Wentworth's great land speculations, long known as the New Hampshire Grants."16 And in many respects this can be accepted as true : it was this activity which created the quarrel out of which the state was forged ; it was at this time that permanent settlement commenced; and it was at this point that officials and public became conscious of the existence of the region. Certainly, for the purposes for which Mr. Jones was writing, Benning Wentworth offers a most satis- factory point of departure. But, for the present study, a clearer picture can be afforded by following a chronology more strictly tied to that of the various land grant operations outlined above. This cannot be achieved completely because there was a considerable amount of overlapping in time as well as acres by the various grants. However, each can be in- troduced at least in its proper period and thus provide a sharper defini- tion of its influence on the lease lands.
This is particularly justified in this case because, as will be seen later, the fate of the lease lands was more closely related to land speculation than to land settlement. This statement might be challenged in some aspects of the issue, as, for example, on the grounds that the lease lands were provided on the assumption that they would encourage settlement, or again, that the final separate existence of Vermont was made possible by the presence of actual settlers. Nevertheless, it is asserted here and will be shown later that the buying and selling of land-one might well say, the greed for land-exerted a heavy influence on what became of the lease lands.17
15. Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society, New Series, I (1930), 83-84, 179-181; II (1931), 32; VI (1938), 220, 276-277, 281.
16. Op. cit., p. 19.
17. Special Master, Findings : 129, p. 307; 171, p. 335; 197, p. 348; 233, p. 371; 260, p. 389.
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VERMONT LEASE LANDS
Parenthetically, it should be observed at this point that the very assumption that the lease lands would encourage settlement indicated a belief in the cogency of the urge to possess and profit from lands. That the history of American lands is one in which the lands were largely regarded as a direct source of profit is too well known to re- quire support here. Land speculation, indeed, in the earlier days of our country attained a respectability achieved by the stock market during the third decade of the present century. And the profits to be made from the ownership, as distinct from the use, of land have played a power- ful part throughout the development of the United States. Sometimes we find such profits being derived directly from the sales of lands, some- times from lease-rents, and sometimes less directly from the fees ac- cruing to officials from the legal transactions involved. The clearing of obligations by the granting away of lands was still another pattern, set by the kings of England and continued by American politicians. All these practices appear in the Vermont story, and all of them were in- fluential on the lease lands.
The earliest land acquisitions which developed into towns recogniz- able today as a part of Vermont were the Equivalent Lands, already remarked. They were not then in the form of town grants but had been purchased at auction. They lay within the area of the present towns of Putney, Dummerston and Brattleboro in southeastern Vermont, and our interest in them is slight. There is the pleasant point that two of these original purchasers bequeathed their names to present-day towns even though the early settlement of them did not survive.18
But the Equivalent Lands deserve some space in this study. Prob- ably the most significant aspect of them is that they led to the establish- ment of Fort Dummer, and in turn, the fort appears to have been the earliest influence to attract the attention of Benning Wentworth to the region west of the Connecticut River. Wentworth became governor of New Hampshire in 1741, and shortly thereafter Massachusetts urged that responsibility for the maintenance of the fort be shifted to New Hampshire. This was agreeable to London, and instructions to this effect were issued by the Privy Council to Wentworth.19 Nothing was done for the fort by New Hampshire, but Wentworth in the course of
18. William Dummer and William Brattle.
19. Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, III, 789, cited in Jones, p. 15, n. 25; Special Master, Finding 7, p. 226.
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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
the extensive debating would have been brought to thinking of the trans-Connecticut region.
The Equivalent Lands have one more facet of interest here in that they came to be among Wentworth's earliest grants west of the river. In 1753 he acceded to petitions of the grantees' heirs and issued charters to replace the older Massachusetts titles. These charters were for Brattleboro, Dummerston (then Fulham), and Putney.
Other early Massachusetts activities should be noted here, too. In 1735 two townships were laid out by Massachusetts on the west side of the river, as a small part of a larger maneuver in the long boundary dispute with New Hampshire. Nothing fruitful in the way of settlement occurred, but these townships, like the Equivalent Lands, contributed to directing Wentworth's attention westward. Here, too, the heirs re- ceived charters from Wentworth, supplanting the earlier Massachusetts grants. These charters, issued in 1752, established the towns of Rock- ingham and Westminster. These five towns were not the first of Went- worth's charters in the disputed area.20 They open the narrative because the Massachusetts efforts out of which they developed were the earliest English land grants between the Connecticut River and Lake Cham- plain. As to the lease lands, they do not offer difficulties.21 The cover- ing charters from Wentworth provided for public shares with the ex- ception of school land, and settlement had been so slight that space re- mained for accommodating these shares.
New York enters the scene next with the Walloomsack Patent of 1739. This was a rather considerable grant, including some 12,000 acres, and was in favor of Edward Collins, James Delancey, and others. The patent was essentially to include the major portion of the valley of the Walloomsack River, which makes a great curve through the area now represented by the Town of Bennington, joining just westward of Vermont with the Hoosic River and flowing thence into the Hudson.
20. They do, though, bulk large in the first phase of Wentworth's land opera- tions, representing just short of a third of all his charters prior to the French and Indian War, he having issued sixteen charters before hostilities temporarily stopped him.
21. However, some lease lands were indirectly affected. The Massachusetts program also provided some townships on the east bank of the Connecticut. Just after Wentworth made his grants of Rockingham and Westminster several families crossed from Charlestown, New Hampshire, and squatted in what later became the Town of Springfield. They were successful in resisting ejectment by later legitimate settlers and so created one of the early instances in which adjustment of conflicting claims was necessary. Jones, p. 18.
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VERMONT LEASE LANDS
No settlement developed in connection with this patent, and it lay quies- cent for many years. Indeed, it might well have been disregarded in this study except for its later significance. When the era of land speculation was in full bloom and New York's interest in the lands east of the Hud- son had been stimulated, this old patent was revived by individuals in New York and added its quota to the babel of dispute.
Although not in some respects an English land grant operation, a third instance of early land operations in the Vermont area is of con- sequence. This is the speculation of Colonel John H. Lydius, which in- volved originally a large section of western Vermont. Lydius was a Dutchman from Albany, New York, who managed, in 1732, to secure from Mohawk Indian chiefs "title" to an area of about a million acres of land following the Otter Creek Valley for some sixty miles. It was not an "English operation" in that it was a grant which was not derived from the royal authority, nor was the speculator an Englishman. How- ever, it became a matter of concern to the English. Lydius and his title from the Indians seem never to have had any acceptance or standing with British colonial authorities. Despite these handicaps, his affairs intrude on the lease lands. He displayed an energy and ingenuity much greater than that of the majority of land speculators, with the result that he succeeded in marketing a considerable portion of his question- able holding. Instead of concentrating on the New York land market, he looked mostly to New England and had an active market there, not- ably in Connecticut and Rhode Island. One cannot but admire the sound- ness of his business instinct, regardless of his ethical position. Although he was accustomed to the New York system of land holding, he cut his cloth to please his customer and proceeded to lay out his grant in townships six miles square, giving them names and numbers. Further- more, in disposing of the lands he fell in with that with which New Englanders were familiar and erected a proprietary by selling, or grant- ing, proprietors' rights to undivided equal shares of the township, the shares being 60 in number, again a customary New England practice.
It should be understood that the Lydius marketing activities oc- curred at a much later period-not until after the close of the French War. The years 1760 to 1763 are the span of the development, which it will be seen coincided with the period of greatest activity of both Wentworth and the New York authorities; and thereby the Lydius grant gained more influence as a part of the picture of conflicting land claims than it would have had otherwise.
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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The entire narrative of the Lydius episode is told here, somewhat out of chronological sequence, in order to dispose of this unique ele- ment of the jigsaw puzzle of Vermont lands. As with so many of the speculative land grants in the region, nothing finally came of most of the Lydius grants, and they fell into desuetude. However, some of the grantee proprietors did sell their shares; and, in fact, settlement, based on the Lydius Indian title, did occur in two of his townships. These Lydius towns, Durham and Fairfield, overlay portions of the Went- worth towns of Clarendon and Rutland, and this led to a dispute be- tween the settlers under the Lydius claim and grantees of the Went- worth towns. The dispute went into the New York courts with success for the Lydius adherents, even though the New York provincial au- thorities had earlier prohibited settlement under Lydius titles. An im- portant result of the litigation was that the attorney for the Lydius settlers, James Duane, took his fee in a large holding of land in the Lydius towns concerned. This fact is considered important because Duane, who was a land speculator of consequence, had great influence in New York and did much to advance generally the fortune of New York claimants of title to lands in the Vermont region as against claim- ants under the Wentworth charters. Lydius becomes a part of this study because, it must be remembered, only the Wentworth grants included reservations of land for the public rights prior to Vermont independence. Any other source of land grants or land settlement consequently exerted a force toward reduction of lease land acreage or even total elimina- tion of the public shares by the simple act of prior occupation of the land under a title which gave the beneficiaries of the public shares no legal wedge by which in later years they could open a claim to land. Not only did Lydius' operations lead to these actual settlements which produced land conflicts, but the New York decision of 177122 (which amounted to a foreclosure of New Hampshire titles) cast such a shadow over the Otter Valley that the General Assembly of Vermont took cognizance of the problem, as one of serious proportions, and passed an act in 1785 to quiet titles of land involved.23
The several localized early land operations have now been described,2ยช
22. Special Master, Findings : 55, 56, p. 251; 59, p. 252; 60, pp. 252-253.
23. Slade, State Papers, pp. 500-503.
24. The seigneuries in the Champlain Valley were not included because in every case they failed both as a basis for land titles and for permanent settlement. Consequently, they exerted no influence on the state nor on the lease lands.
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VERMONT LEASE LANDS
and the way is clear to proceed with the story of the major land opera- tions and the principal protagonists in the competition for the wild lands lying between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain, the com- petition which grew into a conflict out of which Vermont was created as a separate state. In its simplest terms it was a rivalry between Benning Wentworth and the authorities of the Province of New York, the latter principally personified by Lt. Governor Cadwallader Colden. Later on, the efforts to control the land became a struggle of many ad- versaries on either side of the issue, speculators and settlers.25 But these two men, more than any others, created and fostered the situation. Much ink has been spread in efforts to prove one or the other of them justi- fied in his position. For the most part, such writing has not had more than an incidental interest in defending the ethics of either of the men, except as this contributed to supporting the "rightness" of one or an- other set of land claims or the actions involved in the separation of Vermont from New York.
In this study there is no concern with the merits of the argument of either side of the struggle. The central fact is that the lease lands were granted in town charters, which, together with the later Vermont charters, essentially blanketed the entire region now embraced in the state of Vermont. Our interest is not in whether such grants should have been made, but is in what became of them. It is only as conflicting land grants and competing claims to land may have affected the fate of the lease lands that the history of the New Hampshire-New York issue must be observed. Only those aspects of the matter having such a di- rect bearing on the outcome are to be presented, and this focus of in- terest is to be borne in mind wherever judgments are herein offered.
Regarding the colonial history of Vermont from the viewpoint of its land grants, it may be divided roughly into two periods or phases, one preceding the French War (1754-60) and the other following that period of hostilities.26 Although Wentworth became governor of New Hampshire in 1741, the first phase should be regarded as actively open-
25. Special Master, Findings : 45, 46, p. 247; 92, p. 274; 93, pp. 276-277; 99, 100, p. 285; 108, pp. 291-292; 114, p. 294; 129, pp. 307-308; 171, p. 335; 197, p. 348; 233, p. 371; 260, p. 389; 269, p. 393; 271, p. 394; 273, pp. 395-396.
26. The war years are largely a blank space. Settlement naturally did not proceed. In fact, it tended to decrease in the face of the hazardous position be- tween the British and the French colonial forces. Neither did the region hold any attraction for land speculators with the French forces in Canada so greatly in- creasing speculative risk. It is noticeable that even Wentworth made no grants dur- ing the war.
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