USA > Vermont > Vermont in quandary, 1763-1825 > Part 3
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Settlers' dissatisfaction with New York's jurisdiction was in- creased by the necessity to pay to New York the feudal quitrent. Unlike the inhabitants of the middle and southern colonies, the overwhelming number of Yankees had never paid quitrents. Only in New Hampshire were certain land grants subject to a fee of 12d per 100 acres. West of the Connecticut River, the New Hamp- shire land grants were subject to quitrents of one ear of Indian corn each year for the first ten years and, thereafter, 1 shilling per 100 acres per year. Quitrents in New Hampshire remained nominal, chiefly because the Wentworths did not provide ade- quately for their collection.36 In New York a quitrent of 2s 6d per 100 acres was levied upon all grants and more strictly enforced than in New Hampshire.37 The substantial difference between the quitrents payable to New Hampshire and those payable to New
35. Hall, op. cit., II, 602-604, 643-645.
36. New Hampshire, Provincial and State Papers ( Concord, etc., 1867-1943), 40 vols., XXVI, 5.
37. Bond, Beverley W., The Quit-Rent System in the American Colonies ( New Haven, 1919), 254-285.
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REVOLUTIONARY ANTECEDENTS
York provided an additional incentive for the inhabitants of the New Hampshire Grants either to join New Hampshire or to estab- lish an independent province.
A more spectacular and purely economic grievance arose from the unhappy relationship between backcountry debtor and sea- board creditor. Frontier activities-felling forests, clearing land, erecting homes and purchasing stock and provisions-required small but significant amounts of credit which usually could be secured only from seaboard merchants. Often settlers misjudged their ability to pay their debts, or a promising crop was withered by drought, and occasionally the settlers were the victims of eco- nomic depression. When the worst happened, backcountry settlers found the payment of debts difficult or impossible. Particularly was this true during the depression which followed the French and Indian War. The surviving records of the Cumberland County Inferior Court of Common Pleas consist largely of suits for the recovery of debts.39
Governor Colden recognized that the pressure of creditors upon debtors was contributing to the settlers' hostility toward New York. Following a debtors' riot in the Grants, he declared: "if the debts of the people who have been concerned in this outrage were all paid, there would not be a sixpence of property left among them."39 In later years, Yorkers living in the Grants ac- cused Yankees of having established a separate government for the purpose of evading the payment of their debts to Yorkers. "We further represent," a petition from Brattleborough stated, "that a considerable number of the people in this County who are so warmly engaged in the setting up their new State have no property or but Little property which they can claim under any grant whatever; and that we Really Believe that the leaders of the People who are for the new State in this County are persuing what they Esteem their privit Interest and prefer that to the public weel of America."4º These and other agitators, who were harassed by the conflict over land titles, pressed to pay debts and
38. The records are in the Stevens Collection of the New York State Library.
39. Hall, op. cit., I, 239.
40. Records of the Governor and Council of the State of Vermont ( Montpelier, 1873- 1880), 8 vols., I, 366.
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REVOLUTIONARY ANTECEDENTS
subject to the New York Courts were convinced that they were morally justified in overthrowing New York's authority.
The Chester riot of 1770 against the New York Courts and an unpopular Yorker sheriff, John Grout, illustrates the growing . exasperation of the Grants inhabitants with New York's jurisdic- tion. The riot was instigated by Nathan Stone, who was heard to declare "that while he had life, he would oppose the sheriff, and that the people of Windsor and some other places would join and stand by him to the last drop of their blood." On June 5, Stone and a mob, composed of thirty men brandishing clubs and other weapons, burst into Samuel Wells' Court. Stone denied the right of New York to erect courts and demanded the dismissal of Grout, lest, he said, "we shall do something which I shall be sorry to be obliged to do, which will make Your Honour repent not comply- ing with our request." Forthwith Wells adjourned the Court. The rioters were not arrested. "The Court," explained Wells, "appre- hended it not prudent that the said Rioters should be put on Tryal."+1 Two years later Yankee inhabitants forestalled the sale for debt of the goods and cattle of Leonard Spaulding by moving his property to the east bank of the Connecticut Rive: out of the jurisdiction of the New York Courts.
The gulf separating Yankees and Yorkers was widened by the intellectual and religious ferment in the Grants during the years between the French and Indian War and the American Revolu- tion. In the early seventies a Yorker, Charles Phelps, described its significance and influence.42 "What has brought the Country into these Circumstances," he said, "we must take Liberty to be very Particular." He declared that many of the settlers also had an "idolatrous reverence" for the laws and customs of the New England colonies, "which contributes much to creating and keep- ing up of factions." Furthermore, he emphasized the ideas and activities of a religious sect which had become popular in the Grants. In pre-revolutionary years the Grants were one center of opposition to and reaction from New England Congregational orthodoxy. How much credence is to be given to one Yankee's
41. Hall, op. cit., I, 162, passim: II, 644.
42. l'helps' letter, burned to a crisp, is in the Stevens Collection of the N. Y. S. L.
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REVOLUTIONARY ANTECEDENTS
statement that his neighbors "are avowed enemies to the cause of Christ, at least by practice," would be difficult to establish.43 At all events, religious zeal and dissent prepared in subtle ways for the coming upheaval.
Charles Phelps saw clearly how religious and political agita- tions were coalescing. Laying the blame, in part, on the attach- ment to liberty, he declared:
Another Kind of People who have Contributed much. to the Continuing the People in their state of outlawry is a religious order that have lately sprang up. One Reuben Jones is the Father of this Sect and one Alijah Lovejoy is a Fellow Labourer and preacher of the Same-this pious order profess the Greatest Reverence for the Holy Word of God and declare it is the Law of a perfect Law-giver, and contains in it all Laws necessary for the Well Ruling ordering and Governing all Kingdoms and Counties on . the Earth that it is Blasphemy against the g-d given [law] for anybody or bodies of men to make any Laws or ordonances and Sinful to obey such Laws and ordon- ances when made, and that in the one case and the other Gods holy law is Robbed of the Honour of being a per- fect Rule, that in the Holy book of God there is not so much as Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus Act, writs of Habeas Corpus, Supervisors, Sheriffs, Constables, Grand- jurors or pettit Jurys, and a long list of such idle Insigni- ficant words and names so much as once mentioned and that therefore these words names etc ought to be Treated with a Holy Contempt as becometh Saints, these two Reformers have had Considerable success not having been on their Mission more than a year.44
Was it any wonder that the early seventies witnessed more than one attempt to interrupt the sittings of the New York Courts in the Grants?
In these early acts of lawlessness, the British government was involved only to the extent that it supported the seaboard against the backcountry, primarily through the person of the royal gov- ernor. With the sole exception of the Privy Council decision of 1764, the British government leaned, as the American Revolution
43. Bayley, E. A., "Brigadier-General Bayley," Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society, 1917-1918, 57-92, 67.
44. N. Y. S. L., Stevens Miscellaneous, badly burned.
+
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REVOLUTIONARY ANTECEDENTS
approached, with more rather than less favor towards the settlers and speculators holding land under New Hampshire titles. In one particular only did the British government give offense directly to the inhabitants. This consisted in British efforts to reserve white pine fit for masts for the use of the royal navy. By placing the mark of the Broad Arrow on the finest pines and by granting bounties on masts and naval stores, the British hoped to make their navy less dependent upon the Baltic source of timber and to fit New England's economy into the imperial economy by de- veloping Yankee activities which would not compete with British activities.45
The Broad Arrow policy was inaugurated in 1729 and a Sur- veyor-General of His Majesty's Woods was appointed to enforce it. The position was held first by Benning Wentworth and later by his nephew, John. The younger Wentworth took his duties seriously, perhaps because in his private capacity he purchased marked pine under contract for the British Navy.46 He found it difficult to prevent the cutting of marked pine because the in- habitants of the Grants insisted that the Broad Arrow violated their rights. Time and time again his deputies reported the illegal cutting of pine. Efforts to overawe the settlers by the pomp and ceremony of the Governor's passage through the woods were of no more avail than court proceedings against illegal cutters. Wentworth was forced to acknowledge that the settlers looked upon every reservation as "an increased infringement upon prop- erty."47 He informed Shelburne that "they would hardly admit any Law to take place." 48
Despite the outcry against the Broad Arrow, the antecedents for a popular revolution against provincial authority and, to a degree, against imperial authority are to be sought in the local grievances of the settlers. The prerequisite for such a revolution within a revolution was the forging of an alliance between the
45. Albion, Robert G., Forests and Sea Power, The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652-1862 (Cambridge, 1926), 247.
46. Ibid., 251-253. See also Mayo, Lawrence S., John Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire, 1767-1775 (Cambridge, 1921), 51-58; Gipson, Lawrence H., Jared Ingersoll . a Study of American Loyalism in Relation to British Colonial Government ( New Haven, 1920), 87-106.
47. New Hampshire Historial Society, Wentworth Transcripts, Wentworth to Messrs. Durand and Bacon, June 23, 1770.
48. Ibid., Wentworth to Shelburne, Sept. 3, 1767.
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REVOLUTIONARY ANTECEDENTS
settlers and the speculators. Until 1772 the strategy of the Yankees was not based upon such an alliance. Speculators, especially Samuel Robinson, had relied almost exclusively upon legal repre- sentations which had little appeal to settlers not involved in land speculation. After 1772 a new and effective leadership emerged with the arrival of the brothers Allen-Ethan, Heman, Zimri, Heber, Levi and Ira-in the Grants. The Allens took advantage of the approaching revolutionary crisis between Great Britain and the colonies to assume leadership of the speculators' cause which was languishing because of failure to identify it with the griev- ances of the settlers against New York.
Soon the Allens were to endeavour to convince the settlers that New York was an exploiting monster, bleeding the poor folk of the Grants of their substance, harassing them with debt-collectors, heartlessly appropriating their land and denying them their funda- mental political rights. They hoped that this propaganda would enable them to arouse a truly popular and potentially revolu- tionary fervor which they could direct in its initial stages not so much against a remote Great Britain as against a neighboring province. This propaganda contained enough truth to make it convincing; enough, too, to make the settler overlook the fact that, in siding with and accepting the leadership of the Yankee speculators, he possibly ran the risk of exchanging one set of land- jobbers for another.
CHAPTER THREE
The Coming of the Allens
The Allens not only developed a new leadership within the Grants to replace the old, but also shifted the locale of opposition to New York from the Connecticut Valley and the Southwest into the Champlain Valley. The coming of the Allens meant new direc- tions, new ambitions and new problems, no less than a new lead- ership.
For almost a decade before the Allens arrived, the Champlain Valley had been largely under the influence of land speculators and a handful of settlers from New York. The presence of these Yorkers was due to several factors. The great amount of land to be settled in the Province of Quebec made French Canadians lack interest in the settlement of lands lying south of the forty- fifth parallel along which the New York-Quebec boundary had been drawn in 1762.1 This lack of interest caused the government to forfeit the pre-conquest French grants in the valley for not complying with the requirements for settlement .? At this time few Yankees displayed much interest in these lands because they were busily engaged in establishing permanent settlements in sections nearer to the older New England towns. Yorkers, on the other hand, could easily enter the Champlain Valley by the Southwest or by crossing from the Hudson to the head of Lake Champlain.
The most prominent of these Yorkers who took advantage of the commercial opportunities and abundant land in the valley were Philip Skene and Will Gilliland.3 Both secured grants of land in the first years after the end of the French and Indian War; the former at the south end of the lake, the latter on its western shore. Because their lands lay wholly outside the area comprised within the New Hampshire Grants, their titles were at no time in dispute.
1. Public Archives of Canada, Internal Correspondence of the Province of Quebec (S Series ), XIII, 124; Board of Trade Papers Relating to Canada (C. O. 42), VI, 174-175. 2. P. A. C., C. O. 42, I, pt. I, 63-65.
3. Pell, John, "Philip Skene of Skenesborough," Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association ( IX, I, Jan., 1928), 27-44; Pell, John, "The Saga of Will Gilli- land," New York History ( XIII, 4, Oct., 1932), 390-103.
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THE COMING OF THE ALLENS
When Philip Skene, who was born in Fifeshire, Scotland, scouted the valley during the French and Indian War, he saw its future possibilities for trade and settlement. After considering several sites, he decided in 1765 to settle near the present town of Whitehall. There he developed a great estate of 29,000 acres called Skenesborough, which he modelled on the manors of the Hudson Valley. His imposing stone house, one hundred and thirty feet long, dominated the landscape. Nearby he built a saw mill, a forge, and opened a general store stocked with supplies, many of which had been purchased in Quebec. He thought that the timber cut by his laborers and tenants would find a ready market in Quebec and that a prosperous trade would eventually develop with the Northern province. The Quebec Gazette reported on July 1, 1771, that two vessels were in the stocks at Skenesborough. Skene was slowly realizing his ambitions before the Revolution. After its outbreak, he was denounced as an aristocrat and a loyal- ist and was swept from his estate by his tenants. Eventually he went to London to live.4
The second man who desired to establish an estate was Will Gilliland. He settled near Point au Fer on the western shore of the lake, at a place he named Willsboro. In 1765 he transported from New York a minister, two millwrights, one carpenter, a clerk, four weavers, a housekeeper and an indentured woman servant. In the following year 22 wagon loads of stores and furni- ture arrived at Willsboro. Before the Revolution he cleared lands, built houses and mills and, like Skene, bought supplies in Quebec and shipped lumber into the province by Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River. Gilliland went to Montreal in July of 1765 to purchase supplies and provisions. He wished to render the Richelieu navigable to ocean-going vessels by building a canal around the rapids. Although he saw that the natural market for the valley was in the Province of Quebec, he was interested in improving the overland route from the Champlain Valley to the Hudson. He wrote the Society for Promoting Arts, Agriculture and Economy of New York that the present route must be im- proved because he and his settlers had experienced great difficul-
4. Pell, op. cit., "Philip Skene of Skenesborough", 30.
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THE COMING OF THE ALLENS
ties in transporting goods from the Hudson to Lake Champlain. He described the route as a "Labyrinth of fatigue, anxiety, troubles and expense."
The activities of these men were soon eclipsed by the Allens who came into the valley in the wake of the first generation of speculators. They were fortunate to reap where others had sown. For more than twenty years the history of the Champlain Valley was largely the history of this truly remarkable family. Unfor- tunately, little is known concerning the early life of the three more active and enterprising brothers: Ethan, Levi and Ira. Avail- able records show that they came from good but relatively humble Connecticut backcountry stock, that Ethan, the oldest, was born in 1738, and that Ira, the youngest, was born in 1751. The family lived first in Litchfield, then in Cornwall. The brothers probably attended the local schools, and one of them, Ethan, was a soldier for a short time during the French and Indian War, but did not fight in any battle. Their chief intellectual stimulus was provided by Dr. Thomas Young, an interesting man whose views on politics and religion were decidedly unorthodox. Their chief business activities centered in a variety of money-making schemes-buy- ing and selling deerskins and supplies, operating an iron forge and buying and selling land.
But their business abilities were never really tested until they began to speculate in the lands in the New Hampshire Grants. They had the choice, among others, of remaining in Connecticut in comparative obscurity, fitting themselves into a relatively static economy, or moving to the New England frontier in the hope of becoming business men on a much larger scale. By 1770 Ethan was in the Grants buying rights to land held under New Hamp- shire title. His brothers soon followed. Before long they were reckoned the most enterprising, if not the most scrupulous, men in the Grants.3 Timid land speculators had petitioned New York to confirm their New Hampshire titles and in other ways. had demonstrated that they were disposed to settle down quietly under the jurisdiction of New York. The Allens were not so dis-
5. Pell, J., Ethan Allen (New York and Boston, 1929), 20-21; Wilbur, James B., Ira Allen, Founder of Vermont (New York and Boston, 1928), 2 vols., I, 1-59.
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THE COMING OF THE ALLENS
posed, because they believed that backcountry leaders could be more than a match for those of the seaboard. They lacked the capital to secure grants from New York and even funds sufficient to secure confirmatory patents. Instead, they decided to buy New Hampshire titles, the price of which had rapidly declined after the Privy Council decision of 1764. They hoped that something would turn up which would transform their bold speculation in New Hampshire titles into a solid and substantial investment.
Although the Allens had embarked upon what seemed an un- wise business venture, they were far-seeing enough to center their activities along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain. The western shore offered only a relatively small strip of arable land between the lake and the Adirondacks. The eastern shore, how- ever, had a broad strip of tillable land between the lake and the Green Mountains. "All ye towns upon ye Lake Champlain and for three teer back," declared Nathan Perkins in 1789, "[are] ye best sort of land."" Furthermore, the Allens recognized that the Champlain Valley, far from being isolated from a good and con- venient market, was connected by the lake and the Richelieu with the St. Lawrence and its river ports. Of the three sections of the Grants, the Champlain Valley was the least remote from tide- water. Lumber, potash, grain and other articles produced on the frontier could be slowly rafted or transported by sloop down the lake to the Province of Quebec, where they could be exchanged for British or European manufactures which in conformity with the Navigation Acts had to be imported first to the British Isles.
Ira refuted in 1776 the arguments advanced by Lieutenant- Governor Colden of New York that the Grants would find New York a more convenient trading center than any other. Colden had informed the British authorities, he said, that the inhabitants of the New Hampshire Grants would greatly benefit by being under New York's jurisdiction and that the river would afford a natural boundary line between New York and New Hampshire. He had represented further that the Hudson River "was navigable a great way into the country, and the situation of the New Hampshire
6. Perkins, Nathan. A Narrative of a Tour Through the State of Vermont, from April 27, to June 12, 1789 ( Woodstock, 1920), 17.
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THE COMING OF THE ALLENS
Grants was such as would naturally constitute that river the center of trade and commerce." As a result, it would be more convenient from the point of view of commerce for the inhabit- ants to be attached to New York. Ira declared that Colden's rep- resentations "were fallacious as any person acquainted with the geographic situation of the New Hampshire Grants would agree." He acknowledged that the Hudson would be the center of trade for the Southwest, but for the greater part of the New Hamp- shire Grants, " ... their remote situation from Hudson's River, navi- gation in Connecticut River and the eastern sea-ports ... the con- tiguousness thereof to Lake Champlain, Chamblee, Montreal on the River St. Lawrence, etc., will naturally constitute them the center of trade for the inhabitants hereof." 7
On the same occasion Ira stated that self-interest was the major reason for the reassertion by Yorkers of their authority in the Grants. If it had not been for the "sake of profit to themselves, it is not likely they would have ever troubled his Majesty on this subject, and if they had done it in the simplicity of their hearts, to accommodate the inhabitants in general as to trade, etc., they would have solicited his Majesty to annex said district to the Province of Quebec."8 Even the Missisquoi Indians living in the Champlain Valley opposed New York's jurisdiction. They did not welcome traders from New York because they were close enough to Montreal for all their needs and they opposed their transfer from the jurisdiction of Quebec to New York, complaining "they will then be obliged to go to Albany the nearest Court of Justice to obtain redress of any grievance, which will be a very new scene to them, besides the Length of the Journey."9
The Allens, like the Indians, responded to geography. They decided to make the east shore of Lake Champlain the center of their landed and commercial activities because it lay conveniently near the commercial marts of the long-settled Province of Quebec. Ira advised his brother, Heman, to abandon the region near Skenesborough for the vicinity of the present site of Burlington.10
7. Records of the Governor and Council of the State of Vermont, I, 383.
8. Wilbur, op. cit., II, 466.
9. P. A. C., Governor General Papers (Q), III, 393.
10. Wilbur, op. cit., I, 53.
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THE COMING OF THE ALLENS
Upon Ira's arrival in the Grants he had invested in lands in the interior, but as the advantages of the lake became clear, he made haste to abandon these lands for others on the shore of the lake. He wrote to his brother, Zimri, to sell the lands in Poultney, Castleton and Hubbardton, "the whole, or in any part that will command ready pay, or that could be realized early the next winter, to apply to the purchase of lands contiguous to Onion River and Lake Champlain; for that was the country my soul de- lighted in and where, at all events, I was determined to make settlement." 11
In settling near the Onion River, now the Winooski, the Allens had shown that they saw the advantages afforded by the river to the speculator, the merchant and the timber and potash dealer. The Onion, rising east of the Green Mountains and flowing west through a gap north of Camel's Hump, provides access to the Champlain Valley and by Lake Champlain and the Richelieu to the St. Lawrence. A port near the mouth of the Onion could therefore be established as the leading center for the collection of raw materials from the Grants for shipment to Quebec and as a center of distribution in the Grants of manufactures purchased in Quebec.
To make real these possibilities, the Allens joined their cousin, Remember Baker, in forming the Onion River Land Company in 1773. The company could be so designated only by ignoring the fact that it had "no written capital or stated contract."12 Soon the Allens had under their control a large acreage under New Hampshire title in the Champlain Valley. Exaggerated rumors were circulated as to the extent of their land-holdings. It has been estimated that they secured one third of all land lying be- tween the lake and the Green Mountains and it has been said that hardly a town in the valley was not controlled in one way or an- other by the ramifications of this so-called company. Until an historian makes an exhaustive examination of the many records of Vermont towns, the extent of their holdings cannot be accu- rately determined. It appears clear, however, that these estimates
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