USA > Vermont > Vermont in quandary, 1763-1825 > Part 16
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43. C.O. 42, XII, 140-144.
44. "J. Ross Robertson" Simcoe Papers, II, bk. 2, 329-351.
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THE SWISS POLICY OF VERMONT
and many of its inhabitants anticipated that if Britain should go to war against Spain, she would help them to seize the mouth of the Mississippi.
Simcoe was delighted by this report and he described its con- tents in a letter to Clinton. The report, he said, "proceeds with a just view of the Country beyond the Allegheny-& the singular advantage of the St. Lawrence."45 Grenville was equally im- pressed, writing Dorchester on April 27, 1790, that he planned to make the commercial concessions requested by Vermont.46 A po- litical as well as a commercial motive was implicit in Grenville's dispatch to Dorchester of May sixth. In it he told Dorchester that the friendship of Vermont would be essential to Great Britain if the United States should occasion alarm to the British, and he instructed Dorchester to permit the import of flour, the one article not on the free list, into Quebec. He assured him that "such en- couragement has been given to Mr. Allen as will I hope dispose him to exert any influence which he or his connections may possess .. . . "47
Meanwhile in Quebec, the problem of re-export of Vermont articles had been brought to Dorchester's attention by a com- mittee report on a petition of the Vermonters, Stephen Keyes and Jabez G. Fitch.48 In July of 1789, they had requested permission to import pig and bar iron into the province because lumber was burdened with so many expenses that it was "impracticable in the present infant state of Vermont to render it an ample remit- tance to the merchants of Quebec." A committee reported in favor of admitting these articles; but stated that they could not be re-exported to Great Britain without paying the duties levied on such articles if they had been imported directly from the United States.49
This report caused Dorchester to write a letter to Grenville in July in which he asked why all American articles should not be re-exported from the province under the same regulations as were
45. Clinton Papers, Simcoe to Clinton, April 20, 1790.
46. 0, XLIX, 198.
47. Ibid., XLIV, 87-88.
48. Q, XLV, 22.
49. Ibid., XLV, pt. I, 16.
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Canadian articles. The privilege of re-export, he said, would enor- mously benefit the Quebec trade, and "interest our neighbours to preserve in the hands of Great Britain this outlet to the sea .... " He once more called Grenville's attention to the desire of Ver- monters to make a political alliance and cement it with com- mercial connections.50
The British government answered Dorchester's question affirma- tively. Re-export was legalized by an Imperial Statute which went into operation on July 1, 1790.51 The framework of the Com- mercial Empire of the St. Lawrence had been completed and a major aim of Levi's mission attained. But the political alliance for which Levi labored was never consummated. A British alliance with Vermont became unnecessary after Alexander Hamilton told George Beckwith, Dorchester's agent, that the United States was not willing to fight to secure the western posts, and Spain showed no desire to go to war against Great Britain over the Nootka Sound Crisis.52
Levi, however, did not know at this time that the possibility of an alliance with Great Britain no longer existed because during his absence Vermont had become the Fourteenth State.
50. Ibid., XLV, 532-534.
51. Imperial Statutes, 30 George III, c. 29.
52. Bemis op. cit., 571.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Fourteenth State
The thesis has been widely accepted that the Allens remained aloof from the new Federal Government until they could join it upon terms which were favorable to themselves. This interpreta- tion can no longer be sustained in the light of the records which survive of their activities between 1788 and 1791. They show that the Allens did not wish Vermont to become an American state. Therefore, the reasons for Vermont's ratification of the Federal Constitution must be sought in the activities of Vermonters who combatted and overthrew the policies of the Allens and Chit- tenden between 1783 and 1791.
That action begets reaction has long been a truism in American politics. Vermont's political history at this time provides addi- tional proof of this statement. During the Critical Period the Allen-Chittenden faction was associated with two policies, one domestic, the other foreign. Its domestic policy kept alive the democratic tradition of the American Revolution; its foreign policy sought to promote the commercial prosperity of Cham- plain Valley inhabitants by allying Vermont with Great Britain. Both policies were bound to antagonize Vermonters who did not sympathize with this tradition or who did not live in the Cham- plain Valley. In general, these persons were conservative in politics and potentially nationalistic in feeling. They lived chiefly in the Connecticut Valley and the Southwest, the sections lying within the American commercial orbit. In short, conviction and com- mercial interest led them to oppose the Allens and Chittenden and to join the Federalist Party after Vermont's ratification of the Constitution.
Like most American parties, the party in opposition to the Allens in Vermont was composed of several factions. Socially, it represented land speculators, merchants, lawyers and officers of the revolutionary war. Some of these were Yorkers, long resident
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THE FOURTEENTH STATE
or recent arrivals in Vermont. Typical of these was Lewis R. Morris of the influential New York family of Morrisses, who had moved to Springfield about 1785 in order to care for the lands of his father, Richard Morris. The long-standing quarrel between Yorkers and Yankees did not prevent them from cooperating to destroy the political power of the Allen-Chittenden faction. Among these Yankees were Moses Robinson, son of Samuel Rob- inson of Bennington, and the conservative Jacob Bayley of the Coos Country. The leadership of these diverse elements fell largely into the extremely capable hands of Isaac Tichenor and Nathaniel Chipman. Tichenor eventually became an outstanding Federalist leader and several times Governor of Vermont. Al- though less successful than Tichenor in his appeal to the people at large, Chipman emerged as the major political strategist who achieved the political defeat of the Allens and the overthrow of their policies.
In welding the various factions into a political party, Chipman relied upon the smouldering hostility of many Vermonters to the unpopular Haldimand Negotiations. As early as February 16, 1783, the Assembly had struck indirectly at the Allens' policies by ap- pointing a committee to find a means of preventing Vermonters from trading with the British.1 This act of the Assembly so fright- ened Ira that he signed a document on February 25, which de- clared that Vermont was attached to the American cause and desired to join the Continental Congress. It alleged that the Haldi- mand Negotiations were designed solely to effect an exchange of prisoners. Taking him and his associates at their word, the Assem- bły passed a bill against high treason. Governor Chittenden and the Council, which included Ira Allen, accepted the bill on March 2, 1784.2
When the Allens attempted, as has been shown, to secure the appointment by the Assembly of a delegation to arrange for a commercial treaty with Quebec, they met the stiffest kind of. op- position in the Assembly. After a long debate, it refused to em- power the delegation, which included Ira, to negotiate a treaty.
1. Records of the Governor and Council of the State of Vermont, III, 17.
2. Ibid., III, 42.
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THE FOURTEENTH STATE
Instead the Assembly authorized the delegation to discover whether the Canadian government was willing to permit Ver- monters to trade with Canadians.3 When Ira submitted to the Assembly on June 9, 1785, a report on the mission to Quebec, it was received with hostility. On the thirteenth Isaac Tichenor in- troduced a bill to repeal the act which had authorized the delega- tion. His bill was passed by the Assembly and sent to the Gov- ernor's Council where it was laid upon the table. When the Coun- cil of Censors met in the autumn of the same year, it recom- mended that the act authorizing the delegation be amended in such a way that the state should not incur further expense. The Council thought it was unreasonable "to tax the inhabitants of the State at large to defray the expense of a treaty, the benefits of which will be partial and confined to a few individuals."4
The opposition showed a similar attitude towards the bold efforts of the Allens to secure commercial concessions from Haldi- mand by advocating the return of loyalists to Vermont. Ira's letter in the Bennington Gazette, which recommended that Vermonters permit loyalists to return, was answered in the Gazette on August 21, 1783. "I think it is high time," declared Stability, "for the free- men of Vermont to take proper care in their voting." The return of loyalists, he said, would set loose upon the inhabitants of Ver- mont loyalists whom he described as "devils incarnate." On March 4, 1784, Vermonters presented a petition to the Assembly which protested against the return of loyalists and their participation in politics.5 The election of the loyalist, Daniel Marsh, to the Assem- bly evoked a storm of indignation. Vermonters declared that Marsh should not be permitted to serve in the Assembly because he had joined the British and had committed "many acts of cruelty and outrage against the good citizens of this State and hath long been and Still is Plotting the Destruction of this State and contriving to bring it into subjection to Neighbouring State. .. . "" The peti- tions of loyalists who had returned to Vermont on the invitation of the Allens in an attempt to regain their property or to collect
3. INid., III, 397-399.
4. 13:2., III, 399.
3. Journals of the Vermont Assembly, Bennington Session, 1784, 57.
6. Nye. Sequestration, Confiscation and Sale of Estates, 103.
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THE FOURTEENTH STATE
debts were, by and large, treated coldly by the Assembly. On February 21, 1787, it dismissed the petition of the loyalists, Richard Sackett and Elisha Hard, which requested authorization to collect monies owed to them.7
While the Allens and Governor Chittenden were being accused of courting the favor of the British by their friendliness to loyal- ists, they were being execrated by lawyers, land owners and mer- chants for their radical proposals for mitigating the distress occa- sioned by the post-revolutionary economic depression. During the depression after the French and Indian War, the Allens had shrewdly championed redress of the economic grievances of the settlers to their own political advantage. The Allens had joined with them to make common cause against the lawyers, debt col- lectors and public officials of New York. The economic distresses which followed the Revolution were much the same as those which followed the French and Indian War and, in general, pro- duced about the same discontents.
Some of the ingredients for a debtors' uprising, like that of Shays' Rebellion of 1786 in Massachusetts, were present in Ver- mont. A major grievance of the settlers in Vermont, as elsewhere, was the inadequacy of the money supply. The extreme scarcity of money, said the Bennington Gazette on March 6, 1784, was "a universal cry ... originating in a degree from a multiplicity of hawkers and pedlers being tollerated in this state," by which the state was drained of specie.
Another grievance was the alleged harshness of the means em- ployed by creditors and their attorneys to secure the payment of debts. Lawyers, as agents for the creditor classes, were described by one Vermonter as a set of vultures.8 Some of the reasons for this hostility to lawyers were given in a petition of Rutland in- habitants. In particular, they complained of the expensive pro- cedure in civil suits which forced them to pay what they con- sidered unnecessarily large costs. Attorneys, so the petitioners de- clared, secured bundles of blank writs on which they would ob- tain the signature of a Justice of the Peace; and then they solicited
7. Ibid., 100-111.
8. Bennington Gazette, Feb. 7, 1784.
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THE FOURTEENTH STATE
an equal number of notes and issued the writs, regardless of the size of the debt. To increase legal costs, the lawyers thereupon placed these writs in the hands of Deputy Sheriffs by which means legal expenses would exceed the debts. Lastly, the estates of the debtors would be put up for auction and bid off to at- torneys, sheriffs, or their creditors for very small sums. Everyone, charged the petitioners, wanted to be a Deputy Sheriff because the position was so remunerative. The petitioners accused Deputy Sheriffs of loitering near Sheriff offices, filling their pockets with writs and collecting four pence per mile for serving them "and the more writs they have the Better thus they live upon the Spoils of their fellow Subjects and people feel by this means the cruel hand of oppression."9
The first revolt against creditors since the Revolution occurred in Bennington County in October of 1783, when a "confederated banditti of bankrupts entered into a house [and] stole notes, obli- gations & bonds drawn for hard money & payable previous to July, 1782."10 These forms of direct action frightened Vermonters who were creditors. "I have noted with alarm," said one of them, "the general complection of this rising state, which from the licentiousness that appears creeping gradually into the minds of the people, alarms and astonishes me." He commented upon the depravity of persons who endeavoured to avoid the payment of debts or compliance with contractual obligations. So long as this situation existed, Vermont, he warned, would "never be a com- mercial state."11
So great became the hostility of debtors to their creditors that hard-pressed Vermonters attempted in November, 1786, to close the courts in Windsor and Rutland counties. The overwhelming majority of Vermonters refused, however, to participate in such acts of violence because they hoped that the Assembly would remedy their grievances. One solution proposed was that the state limit the number of attorneys who could practice in any court, restrict their fees and curb the avarice of Deputy Sheriffs. Much
9. Manuscript State Papers, XVII, 169.
10. Bennington Gazette, Jan. 8, 1784.
11. Vermont Gazette, Jan. 5, 1785.
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THE FOURTEENTH STATE
greater in popular appeal were the proposals to pass a General Tender Act or to issue paper currency. The first was a popular panacea because it would enable debtors to tender specific articles for payment of debt; the second would enable them to secure money with which to meet their obligations and would tend to scale down the value of their debts.
On the eve of the Assembly elections in the fall of 1786, Gover- nor Chittenden set the stage for remedial measures in his address to the people. Although the Governor did not sponsor legislation as radical as some desired, he was able to prevent an explosion in Vermont as severe as that of Shays' Rebellion. He began his address by swiftly reviewing the grievances of the inhabitants and discussing the popular remedies-a Tender Act, a bank of paper money and the proposal to put to death lawyers and deputy- sheriffs. These measures, he warned, would be only temporary in their effect. The only permanent solutions, he said, were economy and the utmost caution in entering into contracts. Nevertheless, he suggested that the Assembly could remove some of the causes for popular distress by laying taxes on lawsuits and duties on imports, with the exception of absolute necessities. The revenues from these taxes could be used by the state to grant bounties for the raising of sheep and the production of wool. Thus far his supporters must have been sorely disappointed. He concluded his address, however, with the statement that as a last resort he would sponsor the establishment of a State Bank for the issuance of paper currency.12
The conservatives were immediately up in arms against Chitten- den's last proposal. "Lycurgus" in the Vermont Gazette of Ben- nington, denounced it as financially unsound. A paper currency bill must be defeated, he said, or else "every merchant and trader in the state must become bankrupt." He added that an issue of paper money would enable "the G-v-rn-r of the State, who by report of the auditors is 3000 in arrears to the treasury ... to dis- charge the same . ... come on then paper money." 13 The State Bank project was defeated by the strategy of Nathaniel Chipman and
12. Thid., Aug. 28, 1786. 13. Ibid., Aug. 31, 1786.
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THE FOURTEENTH STATE
his fellow conservatives in the Assembly, but only after a hard struggle. He was unable to prevent the passage of a General Ten- der Act, but he was able to secure the postponement of a bill to establish a State Bank by causing it to be submitted to a popular referendum.14
The failure of the voters to support the State Bank bill indicated the beginning of a conservative revolt against the radical Allen- Chittenden bloc. That Chittenden and Ethan Allen still sympa- thized with the settlers was demonstrated anew by their pri- vate reaction to Shays' Rebellion in backcountry Massachusetts. Many Shaysites fled to Vermont where Chittenden, bowing no doubt to conservative opinion, issued a proclamation on February 27, 1787, warning Vermonters against giving aid or comfort to these refugees. Privately, however, he and Ethan Allen expressed sympathy for them and their plight. An agent of Royall Tyler, the famous playwright, reported that Chittenden said that only rebellious behavior could be expected of an oppressed people. Ethan agreed with the Governor, declaring in typical fashion "that those that held the reins of government in Massachusetts were a pack of Damned Rascals and there was no virtue among them."15
Although the Allens and Chittenden quickly perceived oppres- sion in Massachusetts, they did not perceive that many Ver- monters deemed them oppressive because of their control of Ver- mont's governmental machinery. Before the Revolution, the Allens had manipulated to their own advantage the Grants folk's jealousy of Yorkers who dominated the three counties erected by New York. After the Revolution, the hostility formerly directed against New York was directed against them because they regarded Ver- mont as their personal creation and preserve. A reaction, express- ing itself in a struggle between the "ins" and the "outs," was bound to come with the passing of the years. As early as 1783, Ira Allen was severely criticized for holding simultaneously the offices of State Treasurer and Surveyor-General, and also holding a seat in
14. Chipman, Daniel, The Life of the Honorable Nathaniel Chipman'( Boston, 1846), 67-69. 15. V.H.S., Royall Tyler Manuscripts.
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the Governor's Council. "Constitutionalist" argued erroneously in the Bennington Gazette, September 18, that it was unconstitutional for Ira to hold more than one office at a time.
A much more valid reason for Ira's unpopularity lay in the slovenly manner in which he administered his official duties. So much dissatisfaction resulted from his land surveys, for example, that the Assembly passed an act in October, 1785, annulling those he had made and forbidding him to make any more. The Gover- nor's Council, however, supported him. It recommended that the bill be left over to the next session.16
The bill was soundly conceived if the testimony of a witness in 1818 is correct. This witness stated that the surveying instru- ments which had been used were of inferior quality, and often in bad repair, and that the surveyors had usually been incom- petent. Lines intended to be parallel, he said, varied in some cases one to five degrees. Lots supposed to be of the same size varied greatly in their dimensions. Such errors, he declared, threw neighborhoods into confusion with lawsuits as the consequence, "in the course of which all in the vicinity take sides, and mutual calumny and slander take the place of mutual harmony."17 These errors plagued the inhabitants of Leicester for some years. They declared in a petition to the Assembly that the inaccurate survey- ing of their town had given rise to a clash of interests. To add to the confusion, they found themselves involved "in a Dispute with the Proprietors of Salisbury by which we eventually Lost a con- siderable part of the Town."18
Ira's efficiency as an administrator of the State's finances also came under heavy fire from the Assembly. His accounts were never disentangled to his or to the Assembly's satisfaction. One source of this confusion was indicated as early as 1782. A com- mittee appointed by the Assembly, of which Isaac Tichenor was a member, reported.on October 12, 1782, that the Treasurer had made "no distinction," in crediting the State for monies he had received, between hard money and the paper currency which the
16. Records of the Governor and Council of the State of Vermont, III, 95.
17. V.H.S., John Johnson to the Green Mountain Repository (copy ).
18. Manuscript State Papers, XLII, 140.
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State had issued during the Revolution.19 That all was not well with these accounts is hinted at by Ira in a letter to Levi. He wrote his brother on August 20, 1786, that he was closing his ac- counts by February first. Consequently, he said, "you ought to see me before I do this for more Reasons than I think proper to com- mit to Writing."20
.
The opposition to the Allens and Chittenden was climaxed by the charge that, under their leadership, the Assembly had passed acts laying punitive taxes on unimproved lands held by absentees for speculative purposes. If these taxes were not paid within thirty days, the land was legally sold at what Vermonters called "ven- due" sales. These taxes were, however, popular with residents be- cause the revenues derived from vendue sales were used to build roads and promote other needed public improvements. The resi- dents of Rockingham, for example, petitioned the Assembly to lay a tax on absentee-owned lands because one half of their town was owned by non-residents who were indifferent to the needs of the actual settlers. So long as the Assembly did not lay a tax on these lands, they said, "there will be no likelihood of those Lands being settled and ... the Inhabitants think it very hard that there own Indistery Must Inrich and grandize people abroad that are not and will not contribute anything to assist a poor people."21
The sale of absentee-owned lands on which taxes had not been paid, enabled Vermonters to purchase these lands at very low prices and in circumstances which suggested collusion. The Allens, among others, were accused of purchasing lands at bar- gain prices and thereby utilizing the popular hostility to absentee- ownership to their own advantage. "Junto" declared in the Ver- mont Journal of Windsor that these sales would "expose state to hate, ignominy, and disgrace abroad; make unfriendly former friends, and brand Vermont with name of land-thieves."22
While the policies and measures of the Allens and Chittenden were causing the development of a determined and intelligent opposition, New York was slowly undergoing a perceptible change
19. Manuscript Assembly Journals, 1781-1785, 164.
20. N.Y.S.L., Leci Allen Papers 1787-1789.
21. Manuscript State Papers, XVII, 108, March 14, 1785.
22. Vermont Journal, April 25, 1786.
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in its attitude towards Vermont. This change was due, in part, to the decline of the political influence of Yorkers unfriendly to Ver- mont. The Revolution was an important cause for this decline because it had removed from power many loyalists who, like Wil- liam Smith, had led the fight against the New Hampshire land speculators. After the Revolution, the influence of what opposi- tion remained was increasingly offset by a new group of land- speculators in New Hampshire or Vermont land titles which favored Vermont's independence. The Surveyor-General's Papers in the State House at Montpelier contain a surprisingly large number of names of Yorkers who owned land in Vermont after the Revolution. Indeed so great was the demand for Vermont lands at this time that a land office was opened in the City of New York.
Until 1787 little or nothing was done in New York to overcome the opposition which remained to recognition of Vermont's decla- ration of its independence. In that year, Alexander Hamilton es- tablished connections in Vermont with Nathaniel Chipman. The reason for the haste of Hamilton and other future Federalist leaders to secure Vermont's ratification of the Articles of Con- federation, and later of the new Constitution which emerged from the Philadelphia Convention, was given by Washington in his let- ter of March 31, 1787, to James Madison. In it he said that he would be gratified to know that Vermont had joined the other states upon terms agreeable to New York and Vermont and he recalled that he had taken the liberty some years earlier to inform leading Yorkers that Vermont was lost to them. So long as the quarrel continues, he said, the national interests are the sufferers and lastly "considering the proximity of it to Canada if they were not with us, they might be a thorn in our sides, which I verily believe would have been the case if the War had continued." 23
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