USA > Vermont > The history of Vermont, from its discovery to its admission into the Union in 1791. By Hiland Hall > Part 9
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1 In the narrative of proceedings on the New Hampshire grants published in behalf of the New York patentees in 1773, a proclamation of Gov. Clinton of July 28, 1753, is referred to as having been a public warning to claimants under New Hampshire ; but that proclamation was occasioned by intrusions on Livingston's manor by people from Massachusetts, and it makes no mention of Connecticut river, or of any claim of New York to the eastward of a twenty mile line. It related to riotous proceedings between that line and the Hudson. See Doc. ITist. N. Y., vol. 3, 751, and vol. 4, 753. Col. Ilist. N. Y., vol. 8, p. 381.
2 Samuel Robinson, of Bennington, was one of the justices under New Hampshire, his commission bearing date Feb. 8, 1762.
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This proclamation of Lieut. Gov. Colden exciting apprehension and alarm among the settlers, Gov. Wentworth, on the 13th of March following, issued a counter proclamation denying the right of New York to the territory, and affirming that of New Hampshire. It declared the patent to the Duke of York to be obsolete, as a description of the boundaries of New York, and referred to the well known limits of that province and those of Connecticut and Massachusetts as proof that it was inoperative, claimed for New Hampshire the like extent of those two provinces to the westward, denied that the government of New York had ever at any time exercised any jurisdiction eastward to Connecticut river, and stated that if it should be his majesty's pleasure thereafter to alter the jurisdiction, there could be no doubt that " all grants made by New Hampshire that should be fulfilled by the grantees would be con- firmed to them." The proclamation of the governor of New Hamp- shire concluded by exhorting the grantees under that government " to be industrious in clearing and cultivating their lands agreeably to their charters," and by requiring and commanding " all civil officers within the province, of what quality soever, as well those that are not as those that are inhabitants of said lands, to continue and be diligent in exercising jurisdiction in their respective offices, as far westward as grants of land had been made by that government, and to deal with any person or persons, that might presume to interrupt the inhabitants or settlers on said lands, as to law and justice appertained, the pretended right of jurisdiction mentioned in the aforesaid [New York] proclamation notwithstanding." 1
The proclamation of Gov. Wentworth restored, in a great degree, the confidence of the settlers and grantees under New Hampshire in the soundness of their titles, and rapid emigration from the New England colonies continued until after the proclamation of Lieut. Gov. Colden in the spring of 1765 had announced the king's order, changing the jurisdiction. This latter proclamation contained a copy of the order in council, making Connecticut river the boundary, but was silent in regard to land titles, and the settlers would not at first give credit to rumors that came floating over the territory that the change was to be treated by the government of New York as annulling their charters. The appearance, however, among them of New York surveyors running lines across their cultivated fields and setting up new land marks soon convinced them that their all
1 Doc. ITist. N. Y., vol. 4, p. 570. Slade, 17.
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was at stake.1 And before they could take any steps to propitiate the favor of the New York government, they found most of their valuable lands granted, not to persons who desired to occupy their possessions, but to New York city gentlemen, who wished to make or increase their fortunes by compelling them to purchase their homesteads over again, or by disposing of them to others.
After the assumption by New York of jurisdiction over the New Hampshire grants, under Lieut. Gov. Colden's proclamation of April 10, 1765, the first New York patent of lands which was osten- sibly within the limits of the new territory, was that of twenty-six thousand acres called "Princetown. This incipient grant bore date May 21, 1765, and being important in itself, as well as characteris- tie of those which followed, deserves particular notice.
The patent was issued nominally to Isaac Vrooman and twenty- five others for one thousand acres cach as tenants in common. but a few weeks after its date all the patentees except Robert Colback (who was perhaps a myth ). conveyed their shares to John Taber Kempe, James Duane and Walter Rutherford, all of the city of New York, Kempe being attorney general of the province, Duane a prominent lawyer, and Rutherford a merchant speculator. They were no doubt the real parties for whose benefit the grant was originally made. The tract covered by the patent was one of the most valuable in the territory, comprising the rich valley of the Battenkill. It extended from about a mile west of the present village of Arlington north-easterly through the township, across the corner of Sunderland and through Manchester into Dorset, being about twelve miles in length by an average width of a little more than three miles. It was of irregular shape and had no less than nine angles, the lines being run along the base of the mountains which bounded it on each side, leaving it narrow in the middle where the mountains approached each other, and widest at the ends where the valley is broadest. At the time of this grant there were a large number of settlers occupying lands under the New Hamp- shire title, in the several townships through which it reached, which
1 It should be borne in mind that the early grants of New York were not, like those of New Hampshire, in a square or rectangular form, but were made to the patentees in such shape as they chose ; the desired quantity of land being run around by the surveyor in such manner as to include the best land, without regard to regularity of form, leaving outside the tract, wherever practicable, all mountains and rocky or other undesirable soil. By this mode of making grants, numerous ill-shaped spaces or gores of unpatented lands were left between different grants.
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fact was well known to the granting authority, the description of the land in the patent itself commencing its boundaries " one hun- dred and six chains to the westward of John Holley's house," one of the settlers, and included the house within its limits. Not only were the rights of the New Hampshire occupants thus insultingly disregarded, but the instructions of the crown, regulating the granting of lands, were also violated in order to enhance the value of the grant to the favored patentees. Those instructions, as has been before seen, required the land commissioners, of whom Mr. Attorney General Kempe was one, to certify that in setting out the tract they had regard to "the profitable and unprofitable acres, so that each grantee might have a proportionable number of one sort, and the other, as likewise that the length of euch tract did not extend along the banks of any river." This certificate was given, though it appeared upon the face of it, copied into the patent, that the tract was in the vicinity of mountains, and that it extended twelve miles in length on both sides of the Batten kill, by about three miles across it.1
Besides grants of this class there were others denominated Mili- tary grants which were made in compliance with the proclamation of the king, of the 7th of October, 1763. By this proclamation the reduced officers and soldiers of the regular army who had served in America in the late war with France, were to be entitled to grants of land in such of the king's royal provinces as they might prefer in quantities as follows, viz : to one having the rank of a field officer five thousand acres ; to a captain, three thousand acres ; to a subaltern or staff officer, two thousand acres ; to a non-commissioned officer, two hundred acres ; and to a private, fifty acres. A large portion of the troops entitled to this bounty were disbanded in New York city, and being principally from Europe, and desirous of returning there, were in general, very ready to dispose of their claims on such terms as were offered them, and nearly all of them went into the hands of speculators. It appears from the report of the New York commis- sioners for distributing among the land claimants the sum paid by Vermont on the final adjustment of the controversy, that of three hundred and twelve claims presented for military patents, covering over one hundred and seven thousand acres, only five of them, em- bracing seven thousand four hundred, were in the names of the original patentees or their representatives, the remaining three hun-
1 Ante, p. H07-8. Albany Records Patents, vol. 14, p. 66, and Report of New York Commissioners on Land Claims in Vermont, 1797, p. 42.
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dred and seven claims being brought forward by assigness. Few, if any of the patentecs ever undertook to settle personally on their lands.1
Other grants immediately followed that of Princetown, and thence- forward patents were issued by Colden, with great rapidity, and with little or no regard to the claims under New Hampshire, until the first day of November following, when their further issue was suddenly stopped by an event which cannot well be passed over without notice.
At nearly the same time with the reception of the order of council annexing the territory of the New Hampshire grants to New York, news arrived in this country of the passage by the British parlia- ment of the famous stamp act. By this act, all important written instruments, including warrants of survey, and grants and conveyances of land, in order to be valid. were required to have affixed to them government stamps, which stamps were to be prepared in England, and distributed and sold by government agents in each of the colo- nies. This act, which was considered by the colonists as an infring- ment of their liberties, met with determined opposition and caused great agitation throughout the country. In Massachusetts, Connec-
1 Ms. Report of N. Y. Coms., 1797. Mrs. Grant's American Lady, 232 - 233. Among those who obtained military grants was Duncan Mc Vicar, a staff officer of the fifty-fifth regiment of Scotch Highlanders of the rank of lieutenant, and father of Mrs. Grant, author of an entertaining book entitled Memoirs of an American Lady. While her father was in the army during the French war, and for several years afterwards, Mrs. Grant, a child, was an inmate of the family of a worthy aristocratic lady at Albany, whom she designates as " Aunt Schuyler," and to whose memory her book is an affectionate and admiring tribute. Her father was entitled as such officer to two thousand acres of land, and by purchasing, as she says, " for a trifle" the claims of two brother officers, he became the proprietor of four thousand acres more, all of which he caused to be located in a body partly in the township of Shaftsbury and partly in what is now White Creek, N. Y., " the twenty mile line," according to her account, " running exactly through the middle of his property." Her father thus becoming. as his daughter expresses it, "a consequential land holder." resolved, as soon as circum- stances would permit, to seat himself upon the tract, and surrounding him- self with a dependent tenantry, to found a baronial establishment after the manner of European society. He called his property a township, and gave it the name of Clarendon. Determining " at his leisure to let his lands out on lease," preparatory to his removal to it. he anticipated great enjoyment on his baronial estate. His daughter in her childish fancy, pictured her future home upon it as a real paradise, talking of it as "a sylvan scene," " the vale of bliss"- was constantly " dancing on air " at the thoughts of it, and dwelling on " the simple felicity which was to prevail among the amiable and innocent tenants," of the Manor of Clarendon. But these
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ticut and other colonies, the stamp officers were induced by the threats and violence of the people to give up their stamps, and they had then been placed where they were secure against being used. The first day of November 1765 was the time appointed for the act to go into operation. In New York the first day of November came and went, and the stamps were still withheld from the control of the people. On their arrival from England, the stamp distributor, following the example of those in the other provinces, had resigned, refusing to receive them, but Lieut. Gov. Colden had taken them into Fort George, and had obtained a detachment of marines from a ship of war in the harbor, resolving to preserve them by force if necessary, and cause them to be distributed. In the evening of that day a vast torch light procession carrying a scaffold and two images, one of the governor and the other of the devil whispering in his ear, came from the fields, now the park, down Broadway to within eight or ten feet of the fort, knocked at its gate, broke open the governor's coach house, took out his chariot, carried the images upon it round town and returned to burn them with his carriages and sleighs, before his eyes, on the Bowling Green, under the gaze of the garrison on the ramparts, and of all New York gathered about. The next day, it becoming evident that the people were too strong to be successfully
fascinating anticipations were not destined to be realized. The people who were rushing to settle on the lands in that region, she says, were " fierce republicans," who refused to become tenants to any one, and insisted on owning the lands they should occupy, whose "whole conversation was tainted with politics-Cromwellian politics," who talked about " slaves to arbitrary power," and whose " indifference to the mother country, and illibe- ral opinions and manners " were extremely offensive to all loyal subjects of the king. Her father becoming disgusted with the surroundings of his pro- perty, unable to obtain a suitable tenantry and alarmed at the spread of republicanism and disloyalty, embarked in the summer of 1770. with his daughter, then about fifteen years old, for his native Scotland. Mrs. Grant carried with her the most embittered feelings towards "the drawling New England republicans " who had blotted out her " paradise of Clarendon," and she vents her indignation against the subsequently formed state of Ver- mont and its inhabitants, in no measured terms. Lieut. McVicar, his daughter says, "entrusted his lands to the care of John Munro, Esq., then residing near Clarendon, and chief magistrate of that newly peopled district, a very worthy friend and countryman of his own, who was then " in high triumph on account of a fancied conquest over the supporters of the twenty mile line." This triumph, which was probably the decision of the Albany courts against the New Hampshire title, as will appear in the sequel, was but fancied - not real.
Albany Records, Land Papers, vol. 18, p. 111, 139 ; vol. 19, p. 97. Mrs. Grant's American Lady, Appleton's edition, 1846, p. 3, 232-3, 235-7, 239, 241, 247, 255 -7, 267, 274, 275, 276.
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resisted, Colden gave way, and the stamps were deposited in the City Hall, in the custody of the mayor and corporation.1
As all land patents were to be void unless stamped, and as no stamps could be obtained, their issue was necessarily suspended. Up to this time the patents issued by Colden, of lands within the disputed territory, now Vermont, covered over one hundred and seventy-four thousand acres, nearly all of which had been previously granted by New Hampshire. Of this quantity, it is worthy of special notice, that only four thousand acres were lands on the cast side of the Green mountain, the remaining one hundred and seventy thousand acres being on the west side. This quantity of four thou- sand acres comprised the rights of Gov. Benning Wentworth of five hundred acres each in the eight townships of Barnard, Bridgewater, Hartford, Hartland, Pomfret, Springfield, Weathersfield and Wood- stock, and was all of it unoccupied.
A sufficient reason for this difference in the location of New York patents on the two sides of the mountain may perhaps be found in the fact that the lands on the east side were at a greater distance from New York, and were much less familiarly known to the city speculators than those on the west side, and were therefore rarely sought for. But there appears also to have been another reason for this difference, of a somewhat peculiar character, which is not undeserving attention.
In 1764, a daughter of the Earl of Ilchester, a British nobleman closely connected with the ministry, to the great disgust of her family, made a clandestine match with one O'Brien, a play actor. To rid themselves as far as possible of the continued mortification of this unfortunate affair, it was deemed advisable by the bride's aristocratic friends, to send the happy couple to America, and to provide for them at the public expense. Orders of the king in council were therefore obtained directing the governor of New York to grant to Lord Ilchester, Lord Holland and a Mr. Upton, sixty thousand acres of land for O'Brien's benefit, and he was also recom- mended for an important appointment in the New York customs. The place in the customs appears to have been too strongly held by the incumbent to be made available, and O'Brien seems to have been further disappointed in not being permitted to locate his land in the rich valley of the Mohawk, and to have complained of the conduct of Lieut. Gov. Colden in that respect to the lords of trade. In answer to the letter of the board on that subject, Colden wrote to Lord Hillsborough, under date of June 7, 1765, averring that
1 Col. Ilis. N. Y., vol. 7, p. 771. Bancroft, vol. 5, p. 355.
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there were no unpatented lands on the Mohawk that could be granted ; and after stating that there were large tracts of good and valuable lands on and near Connecticut river subject to grant, added as follows : " I have put off the granting of land in that part of the country until October that I may know my Lord Ilchester and Lord Holland's pleasure as to the location of the king's grant to them." He did accordingly postpone the granting of any of those lands until the close of October, the patents of the four thousand acres, before mentioned, bearing date the 30th of that month. History furnishes numerous instances in which great and important events appear to flow from remote and trifling causes, and perhaps it is not possible to aver with absolute certainty that the settlers under New Hampshire on Connecticut river might not, like those on the Batten kill, have waked up some morning and found the lands they occupied had been granted to others by Gov. Colden, but for the lucky union of a female sprig of the British aristocracy with a vagabond play actor.1
It will at all events be perceived that, while the New York government was rapidly disposing of the property of the settlers and grantees of lands on the west side of the Green mountain, those on the other side of the mountain were as yet unmolested ; up to this time the injury to them was only prospective.
Ou the 12th of November, ten days after Colden had surrendered the stamps to the mayor of New York, Sir Henry Moore arrived from England and superseded him in the government of the province. Sir Henry had been lieutenant governor of the Island of Jamaica, where he had shown considerable skill and energy in suppressing a dangerous slave insurrection; in reward for which the order of knighthood and the office of governor of New York had been conferred upon him. Mrs. Grant, who at the time was an inmate of the Schuyler family at Albany, where Governor Moore visited, says of him in her American Lady that "like many of his predecessors he was a mere show governor," that " he had never thought of business in his life, but was honorable so far as a man could be who always spent more than he had, was gay, good natured, and well bred, affable and courteous in a very high degree, and if the business of a governor was merely to keep the governed in good humor none was fitter for that office than he."
It may justly be said of him that though well meaning he was indolent and frivolous and addicted to social pleasures and amuse-
1 Col. Ilist. N. Y., vol. 7, pp. 741-745. Calendar of N. Y. Land Papers, p. 344.
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ments, and was consequently in the ordinary affairs of his govern- ment influenced and led by those about him.
On learning of the arrival of a new governor, the settlers in the townships of Pownal, Bennington, Shaftsbury, Arlington. Sunderland, Manchester and Danby, resolved to apply to him for relief against the New York claimants. They accordingly appointed Samuel Robinson of Bennington, and Jeremiah French of Manchester, their agents for that purpose, who repaired to New York in the month of December and laid their case before him. He gave them pleasant language, but offered them no protection against the patents of their lands which had already been issued by Colden, nor any effectual security against future grants.
On a change of ministry in England, the stamp act had been repealed in the month of March 1766, information of which reached New York the ensuing May. So much complaint had been made to Sir Henry Moore by the settlers under New Hampshire, of the con- duct of his predecessor in granting their lands to others. and so much difficulty seemed likely to arise in consequence. that he thought it advisable to have an order of his council made and published, allow- ing three months from the 6th of June. for persons claiming under such grants to appear and produce evidence of their titles, in which order it was declared that on their failure to do so their claims were to be rejected, "and the petitions already preferred for said lands forthwith proceeded on." 1
In consequence of this order, petitions were presented to Gov. Moore by the proprietors of a considerable number of the townships granted by New Hampshire, for a confirmation of their charters, and verbal negotiations were entered into in relation to many more. But the expense of obtaining the confirmation of a township charter, which included not only enormous patent fees but also the cost of a new survey which was always required. was found to be so great as to render it impossible for most of them to comply. This was the more difficult and oppressive on the west side of the Green mountain, where there was scarcely a township in which grants of more or less extent had not already been made by Colden and generally of the best lands, leaving only the poorer and less valuable subject to confirmation. The settlers had in general, been farmers and mechanics at their former homes, in moderate circumstances, or the sons of such persons. They had expended their small fortunes in acquiring the New Hampshire title, in preparing for the settlement, and in improvement of their lands, and they were absolutely unable to meet this additional demand.
' N. Y. Doc. ITist., vol. 4, p. 584, 587. N. Y. Land Papers, vol. 19, p. 28.
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CHAPTER IX.
APPLICATION OF THE SETTLERS TO THE CROWN FOR RELIEF, AND ORDER IN COUNCIL IN THEIR FAVOR.
1766-1767.
Samuel Robinson agent of the settlers to present their petition to the king - Copy of their petition - Their case stated more in detail by one from Samuel Robinson prepared in England - Another presented by the society for the propagation of the gospel - Letter of censure from Lord Shelburne to Gov. Moore, enclosing the two petitions -Gov. Moore's reply -Order of the king in council of July 24, 1767, forbidding further grants by New York of the controverted lands - Mr. Robinson's death in London - End of Gov. Moore's administration.
THERE being no longer any hope of relief from the government T of New York, the claimants under New Hampshire resolved to appeal for redress of their grievances to the conscience of the king. A petition was accordingly prepared and signed by over one thousand of the settlers and grantees, and Samuel Robinson, Esq., was appointed their agent to repair to England and lay it before his majesty. Mr. Robinson had emigrated from Hardwick, Mass., to Bennington, in 1761, and had held the office of justice of the peace under New Hampshire from February, 1762. He had served as captain in the troops of Massachusetts in the French war during several campaigns, and was at the head of his company in the battle of lake George, in September, 1755, when the French were defeated by Generals Johnson and Lyman. Although about sixty years of age, he was active, intelligent, enterprising and energetic, and of an unblemished moral and religious character, and he could not be considered as wholly unsuited to the responsi- ble position to which he had been assigned.
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