USA > Vermont > The story of Vermont (1889) > Part 2
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The first Sunday on the march Mr. Williams ob- tained from his captors the privilege of holding a ser- vice at a point in the southeastern corner of Vermont.
In
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THE OLD WARS.
The prisoners were gathered together upon the snow in a glade of the forest, a dusky fringe of red men encompassed them about and the woodland echoes gave back the unfamiliar sound as they sang the first Christian hymn that ever rose in the wilds of Vermont. . Not a soul was present who had not lost friends and relatives by the axe, and all had seen their homes in flames. It must have been a solemn and affecting sermon which the good preacher gave that day. His text was Lamenta- tions i. 18: " My virgins and my young men have gone into captivity."
It is a pleasure to know that Mr. Williams lived long after, to tell the story of that dreadful raid, and that the sufferings of the captives were soon terminated by their exchange. The grandson of Mr. Williams was in after years to become the historian of Vermont, and Williams himself has left a printed account of his captivity.
The French have a different version of this raid, and one which sounds much prettier in the telling. The good priest Nicholas of Caughnawaga, so they say, had urged the Indians of his mission to collect and send to France the pelts of many otters, beavers, foxes and other animals in return for a bell for their church. On the way over the ship which bore the bell was taken by the British; the bell found its way to Deerfield and there it hung, the
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THE OLD WARS.
popish inscription erased from its brazen side, until Father Nicholas and the braves of the tribe, in the dead of the winter, marched to rescue it from the hands of the heretics. With infinite labor they carried it through the snow till the shore of Lake Champlain was reached; there they buried it. When spring broke and the snow was gone, a band of young Indians brought the bell from its far hid- ing place to Caughnawaga. And when the people of the village heard the sound of the approaching bell, its clapper swinging against its sides as the young men bore it on a pole between them, they crossed themselves and cried in awed exultation, " It is the bell."
Whether the tale be true or no, certain it is that a little old bell, the inscription on whose side had been cut away, long hung in the belfry of the church of the Saut St. Louis at Caughnawaga, and all the Indians said no other bell had so sweet a sound.
But the stage was set for vaster scenes. The Indian depredations upon the English settlements were soon almost unheeded amid the stirring prep- arations made in England and seconded by the colonies for the conquest of Canada. In 1709 an expedition was projected for the capture of Quebec, but it accomplished little beyond cutting a good road from Albany to Lake George. A similar at-
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tempt was made in 1711 in conjunction with a fleet sent up the St. Lawrence. A great storm dispersed the fleet and the land force disbanded. The peace of Utrecht in 1713 put an end to the fighting, and it was more than thirty years before the stirring music of the fife and drum and the tramp of regi- ments were heard again by the shore of Lake Champlain.
It was during this interval that the first actual settlement was made in Vermont. In 1724 the State of Massachusetts built Fort Dummer in the southeast corner, near what is now Brattleborough ; one or two smaller forts or rather block-houses were afterward erected in the same vicinity. But in 1731 the French es- tablished a military post -first at Addison, Vt., and later at Crown Point on the New York side of Lake Champ- lain and, the war re- commencing in 1744, the presence of this post acted as a barrier to any further settle- ment of Vermont until the close of the last great struggle. There "IT IS THE BELL."
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were a few huts nestling under the walls of Fort Dummer and of Bridgman's fort; there were a few patches of corn, a little clearing here and there where timber had been felled for the block-houses, and that was all.
The immediate cause of hostilities in 1744 was the policy of the French who were building a line of forts to connect the St. Lawrence and the Mis- sissippi, on land claimed by Great Britain. To humble the pride of France the great expedition to Louisbourg was undertaken. It was completely successful, but when peace was signed at Aix-la- Chapelle in 1748, the fortress was returned, and each side resumed precisely the same territorial possessions it had held four years before.
Such a peace could not last long. In 1756 the war which was finally to settle the fate of America was declared. Already, in 1755, Braddock's ill-fated ex- pedition had been sent against Fort Duquesne, on the ground that the French were encroaching upon English possessions granted to the Ohio company, and in the same year an expedition set out for Niagara under Governor Shirley of Massachusetts ; one under General William Johnson was also sent against Crown Point. The latter got no further than Fort Edward where it was met by the French under Dieskau. A scouting party of about a thousand colonial troops under Colonel Ephraim
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THE OLD WARS.
Williams of Massachusetts was met by the main army of Dieskau and utterly destroyed. In the battle which followed Johnson gained the upper hand, but failed to follow up his advantage. The campaign of 1756 was also an utter failure. The short summer was wasted in preparations and the winter closed in before a single blow was struck, except by the French, who captured the important fort at Oswego with fourteen hundred prisoners, some of whom were massacred by the Indian allies.
In the campaign of 1757, which was not less disastrous to the British arms, John Stark who was in later days to become the hero of Bennington, distinguished himself at the head of a small party of New Hampshire rangers. He was engaged in Vermont in a desperate battle with a superior force of French and Indians and the night fell upon his little band - victorious indeed, but likely to perish in the wilderness from cold, for it was midwinter and many of the party were wounded.
The command made a night march to Lake George, and Stark with two others traveled its entire length upon the ice to Fort William Henry at its foot; here he organized a relief party with sledges to bring off the wounded. Instead of staying himself under shelter he returned with the rescuing party and helped to drag one of the sledges back to the fort, having been continuously
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fighting and working for fifty-six hours. It was at Fort William Henry later in the same year that the worst of the series of massacres which were permitted to stain the good name of France oc- curred. General Montcalm with a superior force from the north compelled the surrender of the fort from General Monroe who occupied it. The three thousand prisoners of war taken that day were ex- posed to the merciless assaults of the Indian allies ; by savage tomahawks fully fifteen hundred were slain. The French have always held that it was impossible for Montcalm to restrain his allies, but it was difficult to convince the New Englanders of the truth of this plea.
The fall of Forts William Henry and Oswego made the situation of the English colonies des- perate indeed, but the genius of William Pitt, prime minister of Great Britain, changed defeat to victory. Under the direction of that great war minister Louisbourg was again reduced and Fort Duquesne occupied by a superior force in 1758. A third army under General Abercrombie was re- pulsed in an attack upon Fort Ticonderoga which put an end to the operations for that year. Major Israel Putnam and Major Rogers were left in Ver- mont to watch the French at Crown Point and Ticonderoga across Lake Champlain.
It was while engaged in this duty that Major
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Putnam was captured by the Indians and bound to a tree for the torture. The fire, we are told, was actually applied to the heaps of dry fagots about his feet when a French officer dashed away the kin- dling brands and released Putnam. He was carried as a prisoner of war to Canada, where he made the acquaintance of many other distinguished but un- fortunate colonials, among them Mrs. Howe, the " fair captive " whose history is typical of New England life in those days. 1771685
She must have been a very beautiful woman, for so she is invariably described. Her first husband, Mr. Phipps, was killed near Fort Dummer by the Indians in 1745. Her second, Mr. Howe, met a like fate at Bridgman's Fort in 1756, and Mrs. Howe was taken with her seven children to Canada, suffering incredible hardships on the oft-traveled bloody Vermont trail. Once in Canada, she was, by the influence of General Peter Schuyler, him- self a prisoner at the time, released, after many sufferings.
It was in the year 1759 that the French power in America received the final crushing blow. Wolfe's victory on the Plains of Abraham gave England the strongest fortress in the new world, and Amherst, at the head of fourteen thousand men, drove the French from Crown Point and Ticon- deroga with comparatively little loss. In the fol-
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lowing year the British armies were concentrated before Montreal, and the easy task of compelling its surrender was accomplished. The French had proved themselves daring in war, fertile in resource, unequalled in finesse, but British pluck and per- severance had conquered at last, and the peace of 1763 confirmed to Great Britain undisputed rule in North America.
In all these wars and forays, what is now the State of Vermont bore a most conspicuous part. Its streams were the highways of the restless In- dians, its forests sheltered the hiding savages and the beautiful lake which is its western boundary saw more fierce fighting than the St. Lawrence or the Hudson. The very importance of the region as a battle ground, and the fierceness with which the opposing forces struggled for possession had greatly delayed its settlement, while Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York were rapidly filling up.
With the welcome peace of 1763, however, the set- tlement of the new province began in earnest ; only a few years, comparatively speaking, passed before the unbroken wilderness became a thriving colony whose military valor did much to turn the scale in the war for American freedom, and the homely virtues of whose citizens were remarkable even in the land and days of steady habits.
The green hill-slopes and still more verdant
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valleys of the new land were being wistfully sighted by certain of the restless settlers in adjacent col- onies. As early as the close of the French War, it is asserted, they began to move toward the more attractive sections. With true prophetic fervor they declared " the land is given us for inheritance," and the new country received its christening when, in 1763, on the top of Mount Pisgah like another Moses, the Rev. Samuel Peters looked over the promised land and where, unlike the mighty prophet of old, he and his followers broke a bottle of spirits and named the country Verd Mont.
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CHAPTER II.
THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS.
ERMONT was discov- ered and explored by Frenchmen from the north. It was settled and held by English- men from the south. This difference was typical of the contrast- ing methods of the two great colonizing pow- ers. The French overran the continent, named its rivers and lakes, and held relations with the savage tribes far and near. The English paid less atten- tion to exploration and to the conciliation of the Indians, whom they despised and often ill-treated.
The friendship of the warlike Iroquois indeed stood them in good stead. But for this they were indebted not so much to any act of their own as to the hostile expedition of Champlain and the kindly conciliation of the Dutch settlers and traders of New Amsterdam. These, even after New York had
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become a British province, continued to transact a large proportion of the traffic with the Indians. While the French colonists were few and widely scattered, seldom pursuing husbandry or any in- dustry save the fur trade, the English built up from a score of sea-coast centres comparatively solid and compact settlements. These took firm root in the soil, they became fit to bear the brunt of war and, when the time came, to achieve their own independence.
Fort Dummer, already alluded to as having been built in 1724, near what is now Brattleborough, was the first structure of any importance erected by Englishmen upon the soil of Vermont. Other smaller forts were afterward built near it. Fort Bridgman and Sartain's Fort stood due south near the west bank of the Connecticut. They were little more than mere block-houses and af- forded but slight protection to the settlers. Each was burned by the Indians and rebuilt in the second war of the century.
In 1745 a fort was built on the Great Meadow in Putney. It proved too advanced an outpost, and was abandoned to its fate. The site was not again occupied till 1755. The Putney settle- ment went to ruin with the fort, but was renewed when the rebuilding of the stockade promised some degree of protection. One by one the pioneers
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crossed the Connecticut into the new country; by twos and threes they passed northward along its westward bank from Massachusetts or pushed from Connecticut into the southwestern corner of the new region. The victory at Montreal stimulated immigration, and when peace was declared in 1763 there were probably over two thousand people in Vermont.
These were mainly sturdy frontiersmen with a taste for the venturesome; soldiers who had fought against Montcalm; hunters and trappers who had penetrated the wilderness and seen its beauty and promise; land speculators and surveyors who saw a chance for profit in the new country. Their settlements were as yet wholly confined to the southern extremity of the State, when the boundary dispute which exercised such an important influ- ence upon its future began to be a burning question.
The territory of Vermont was, at the time of the building of Fort Dummer, claimed by Massachu- setts ; that colony made grants of townships to associations of speculators who undertook, in con- sideration of their grants, to effect certain improve- ments within a specified time. The present town of Westminster was so granted, under the title of " No. I," to a number of Taunton people, and other towns to the west of it were laid out on the colo-
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nial maps. But in 1740, in settlement of a dispute between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the king announced that the southern boundary of the latter province should run parallel with and three miles north of the Merrimac River to a point op- posite the Great Falls (Lowell), and thence upon a line due west to the " boundaries of His Majesty's other provinces." This decision put a stop to the Massachusetts settlements. Some of the grantees of towns were reimbursed by the colony for their expenditures. The others had hardly proceeded far enough in their enterprise to warrant the payment of quit money.
New Hampshire for some years refused or neg- lected to man Fort Dummer, shrewdly and correctly reasoning that Massachusetts would continue the garrison as a protection to Deerfield and the neigh- boring towns, even though the fort was removed from the territory of the Bay Colony by the king's decision. But in 1749 Benning Wentworth, the royal governor of New Hampshire, who had been especially commissioned by the king to grant town- ships in the new territory to worthy persons, gave to William Williams and sixty-one others the town- ship of Bennington, named after himself and defined by its present limits. The king's instruc- tions to Wentworth and Massachusetts' appeals to New Hampshire to garrison Fort Dummer
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render it clear that the line of the latter colony was commonly understood in 1749 to run due west to the present southwestern corner of Vermont. This presumption was strengthened by the fact that the western boundaries of both Massachusetts and Connecticut had already been fixed at, speaking roughly, twenty miles east of the Hudson River.
ENTERTAINMENT FOR MAL
D' KIEDY Bridgman
DR. ADAMS'S STOOL OF REPENTENCE.
This line, however, was not finally determined until a later time.
In spite of this strong presumption, Governor Clinton of New York laid claim to the territory west of the Connecticut River and north of the Massachusetts line, on the strength of the royal
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grant to the Duke of York by Charles II. wherein the boundary of the province had been thus de- fined : " . and all that island or islands com- monly called by the several names of Matowacks or Long Island . and the narrow Highgan- setts abutting upon the main land, between the two rivers there, called or known by the several names of Connecticut and Hudson's River together also with the said river called Hudson's, and all the lands from the west side of the Connecticut River to the east side of Delaware Bay " and the islands of " Martin's Vineyard and Nantuckes." These boundaries had already been abandoned on the east so far as Massachusetts and Connecticut were concerned; the twenty-mile line had been estab- lished as already related; but New York still laid claim to the "New Hampshire Grants," as Ver- mont now began to be called.
The original grant of Bennington was made by Governor Wentworth as a test, under an agree- ment with Governor Clinton of New York that while the boundary question was pending before the king, no more grants should be issued; but before the end of the war in 1759 Governor Went- worth had issued fourteen grants ; by 1763 he had chartered one hundred and thirty-eight towns, all owing allegiance to New Hampshire. These extended in a reasonably compact body up the
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Connecticut, across the lower border of the State and up the twenty-mile line to Lake Champlain.
In the following year the king decided that the western bank of the Connecticut River was "to be " the eastern boundary of the province of New York. With this decision the border dispute first became a matter for really serious contention. The original grants of townships had been made to speculators who did not intend to occupy their lands, but with the cessation of hostilities these non-resident owners had begun to find a market for their holdings; both New York and New Hampshire therefore naturally became much more desirous of establishing their authority over lands which had a considerable money value than they had been of possessing an uninhabited wilderness.
The real bone of contention was, however, the profit accruing to the royal governors from every township grant. Benning Wentworth became a rich man from the two shares which he reserved for himself in each township, along with those set aside for the Church of England, for school pur- poses. and for the first settled minister. In New York the fees and perquisites for a grant of one thousand acres were, in 1772, as follows :
Governor
$31.25
Secretary
10.00
Clerk of Council
10.00
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Auditor .
4.62
Receiver General
14.38
Attorney General
7.50
Surveyor General
12.5C
Larger tracts yielded fees in like proportion. A good many of the governors were not above the suspicion of taking for themselves the major part of the subordinates' fees. Nearly all shamelessly enriched themselves by land jobbery considering it presumably only a fair return for their conde- scension in consenting to live in the colonies.
The greater part of the first settlers held title from the New Hampshire grantees. Naturally they favored the claim of that colony. They had paid for their little farms or had agreed to pay; in the majority of instances they had made improve- ments and built houses, barns and mills. With quick ingenuity they caught at the words " to be " in the royal decision and reasoned that, while in future the government of the grants must be con- ceded to New York, it was evidently the king's intention that grants already made by New Hamp- shire and settled upon in good faith should be respected.
But such special pleading was not to find favor in the courts at Albany. This the settlers in the grants soon discovered. The towns were redivided for the benefit of New York favorites at the colo-
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nial court, without regard to the settlers' rights. The colonists were invited to quiet the new claims upon their farms by repurchase. Failing in this the court at Albany threatened to issue writs of ejectment and send the sheriff to serve them. In many cases this was actually done. The settlers dispatched Samuel Robinson of Bennington, as their agent to the king. Robinson obtained in 1767, just before his death in London by the small-pox, an order forbidding the Governor of New York to make any more grants until the king had made known his final pleasure. To this order, however, not the slightest attention was paid.
The formation of the organization known as the Green Mountain Boys was the direct reply of the Vermonters to the encroachments of New York. Of this organization, so famous in song and story, Ethan Allen was the acknowledged leader. He was born in Litchfield, Conn., and was in the prime of life when the boundary disturbances brought him into prominence. He was a man of ready wit and considerable ingenuity, gifted with a natural talent for leadership, great physical strength and endurance, fluent speech and a fine knowledge of men. He had a singularly handsome countenance, ruddy and bold, and an eye which flashed uncon- querable contempt for " Yorkers " and Tories. Brave to the pitch of rashness, he was more suc-
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THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS.
cessful in daring exploits than in pitched battle. His second in command and influence was Seth Warner, a cool and reserved man, an accomplished horseman, more cautious than Allen, but equally brave, and a capable military commander. These two men were a power in themselves; backed as they were by a number of vigorous and determined settlers, they kept for years the power of New York at bay.
The court favorites for whose benefit the Ver- mont lands were regranted by New York rarely made their appearance there. Their only object was enrichment, and they sent surveyors to divide their purchases into plots for sale, without regard to the existing improvements. The men of chain and compass were driven off by the settlers.
An appeal to the sheriff of Albany County brought little redress. The people of New York had no quarrel with the Vermonters; they had no interest in the land speculations of their crown- appointed officials and they certainly had no desire to form sheriff's posses to drive the Vermonters from their homes. The New York authorities tried with some success the policy of appointing resi- dents of the grants to lucrative peace offices, but the Green Mountain Boys with equal success sealed the New York commissions of these officers with the " beech seal " when they became troublesome.
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THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS.
Thus one Benjamin Hough, a justice of the peace under a New York commission, was given two hundred blows of a beechen goad upon his bare back, driven out of the grants and warned not to return on pain of death, as a punishment for hav- ing petitioned the New York assembly to declare Allen and others outlaws. To this day every Ver- mont boy is supposed to know the precise use of a " blue beech goad."
The " beech seal " was a questionable expedient ; others equally questionable were resorted to, if we may believe the solemn affidavits of the New Yorkers, forwarded to the legislature of that colony. John Munro, another " Yorker," complained that "a few nights agoe all my Pot and Pearlash with 20 barrels of Pot and Pearl Ash was burned to ashes." John Beaders, a Scotchman who settled on the tract of Colonel Reid, was examined by Hough, who testified that Beaders had been " unhumanly beaten'd by the New Hampshire Rioters." Samuel Gar- denier, who bought land of James de Lancey of New York, was visited by neighbors " some of them disguised in Blankets like Indians, others with Handkerchiefs and others with Women's Caps on their Heads," who threatened him and, a fortnight later, came back a hundred strong and overturned his hay-stacks.
It was at Durham that Allen and Remember
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THE OUTLAW'S PROCLAMATION.
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THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS.
Baker, another Green Mountain leader of impetu- ous temper, turned Benjamin Spencer out of bed. They knocked him on the head with a gun-barrel and committed other breaches of the peace, rather unnecessarily it would seem, since the " Yorkers " at Durham were not apparently occupying any land from which members of the other party had been driven.
Occasionally there was a grim humor in the pun- ishments inflicted by the Green Mountain Boys. There stood in the town of Bennington the Green Mountain House, a famed resort of those days, whose sign was a stuffed catamount grinning de- fiance toward New York. For too freely criticis- ing the acts of the Bennington partisans of New Hampshire, one Dr. Samuel Adams was hoisted up by the side of the cat and made to keep it com- pany through several unpleasant hours.
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