USA > Vermont > Vermont in quandary, 1763-1825 > Part 5
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CHOROGRAPHICAL MAP OF THE PROVINCE OF NEW YORK By Claude Joseph Sauthier. 1779, as copied by David Vaughan, 1849
This is by far the most de- tailed map of land grants in the northeastern New York counties, and shows the New York grants as few others do.
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THE GREEN MOUNTAINS!
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Landholders to oppose a Project so alarming to their interests."9
The failure of New York either to use force or to adopt Smith's or Dartmouth's proposals had the effect of emboldening the Allens on the one hand, and, on the other, of keeping the inhabitants in the Grants in a state of uncertainty. If New York could not enforce its authority nor secure the aid of the British government, what was to hinder the Allens from taking governmental authority in their own hands, and with the support of the exasperated settlers separate the Grants from New York? The idea of the independ- ence of the Grants did not originate with the Allens. As early as 1769, a number of land-speculators had petitioned the British government to establish the Grants as a separate colony. They contemplated making Ford Edward the seat of government and were said to be very sanguine that the petition would be granted.10
Although their petition was not granted, the idea of a separate jurisdiction for the Grants was not forgotten. The Allens professed to believe that on the eve of the Revolution Philip Skene had been made Governor of a new province confined to the Cham- plain Valley. The facts are that Skene had been appointed by Gage "Lieutenant-Governor" of Crown Point and other forts in the valley; but that he had been made governor of a new province has not been proved. The Allens, however, placed much store in their belief that a Champlain Valley province had been estab- lished. They reported that Skene had been seized in Philadelphia in June of 1775, and that a commission as Governor of Crown Point, Ticonderoga, the Lakes, and Surveyor of the Woods had been found on his person. "Had he succeeded," wrote Ira, "the people who settled under the royal grants of New Hampshire would have been quiet and relieved from the oppressive conduct of New York."11 In the Germain Papers in the W. L. Clements Library there are two unsigned communications which hint of such a pro- ject. One, dated 1775, suggests that Quebec and the region as far south as Lake George should be established as a separate prov- ince. The other, dated 1776, recommended that Scotch High-
9. Smith Papers, Tryon to Dartmouth, July, 1773.
10. Vermont, Office of the Secretary of State, Manuscript State Papers, III, 133.
11. V. H. S., Collections, I, 361. See also Burnett, E. C., The Continental Congress (New York, 1941), 72-73.
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landers be settled in the Champlain Valley. These settlers, the writer said, would cooperate whole-heartedly with the French Canadians and the Indians against the New England settlers and thereby help "preserve an extensive Country under the influence of the Crown," which otherwise in a short time might be filled with disaffected New Englanders. The writer concluded by stat- ing that the Yankees must not be permitted to spill over the Green Mountains into the Champlain Valley.
The desire of the Allens to free themselves from the jurisdic- tion of New York could not be realized until after the outbreak of the Revolution. The overthrow of British authority in the Amer- ican colonies provided a magnificent opportunity for the Allens to use their political techniques. We shall see that the Allens, by erecting a state independent of New York, showed themselves to be statesmen. Their success was due in part to the alienation of the rank and file of the settlers from New York, and to the in- telligent and resourceful manner in which they guided these dis- affected settlers towards the goal they had set-independence.
In the sixties and early seventies the Grants inhabitants con- sidered themselves greatly exploited by New York. Could they expect a change of attitude after New York joined the Revolu- tion? Would New York now support peaceful change which would redress the popular grievances, or would the provincial govern- ment, while attempting to overthrow British authority, maintain its former attitude towards the Grants? In anticipation, it can be said that in New York neither the faction which became loyalist nor the faction which became rebel adopted measures of reform during the critical year of 1775. The failure of either faction to adopt reform measures was undoubtedly due to the fact that Yorkers holding land in the Grants under New York title were prominent in both factions. For example, Colden, Smith, Kemp and other land-owners became loyalists; but George Clinton, prominent lawyer and first governor of the state of New York, and John Morin Scott of the Sons of Liberty and others became rebels. The attitude of residents of New York owning lands under New York title in the Grants was seldom, if ever, changed by the Revolution. Loyalist and rebel Yorkers fought and killed one an-
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other on the battlefields of the Revolution; but these same York- ers were united in their hostility towards the revolution against New York which was occurring simultaneously in the Grants.
The struggle between the Grants inhabitants and New York entered its final phase after the passage of the Intolerable Acts in 1774. The beginning of the overthrow of New York's authority was occasioned by the protests of its merchants against these acts. These merchants held conventions to demand redress of griev- ances and to demonstrate intercolonial solidarity by coercing Great Britain with non-import and non-consumption agreements.12 By seeking the cooperation of the inhabitants of the Grants in these retaliatory measures, seaboard New York gave them oppor- tunity to protest not only against Great Britain, but also against itself. Yorkers in the Grants who remained loyal to New York perceived this clearly. They feared that a demonstration against Great Britain could be transformed into a demonstration against New York. When Isaac Low of the New York Committee of Cor- respondence dispatched a letter to Cumberland County Yorkers urging the inhabitants as a whole to protest against the Intol- erable Acts, they moved heaven and earth to keep the letter from the public.13 By some means, Reuben Jones, the religious "fanatick," discovered its presence and forced it out of hiding. Jones was angry at the secretiveness of the Yorker conservatives and demanded an explanation. As he later recorded, some pleaded ignorance, "some one thing and some another ... but most of them did seem to think that they could send a return to committee at New York, without ever laying it before their constituents; which principle, at this day, so much prevails that it is the un- doing of the people."14
As a result of Jones' activities, the conservatives were forced to call a convention in Cumberland County which met on October 14, 1774. Since Reuben Jones and other opponents of New York were unable to dominate it, the reply to Low's letter of the com- mittee appointed by the convention was naturally conservative
12. See Schlesinger, A. M., The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (New York, 1918).
13. Hall, History of Eastern Vermont, I, 197-198.
14. Ibid., 197.
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in tone. While deploring the British acts and voicing the patriotic doctrines of the moment, it advised against the use of violence. The proper mode of resisting the British, the committee declared, consists "in a uniform, manly, steady, and determined mode of procedure." It concluded by stating that "we will bear testimony against and discourage all riotous, tumultuous and unnecessary mobs which tend to injure the persons or property of harmless individuals."15
A hint of the eventual downfall of the conservative Yorkers in the Grants was given in the instructions which the inhabitants of the town of Chester sent with their delegation to this convention. They mirror local grievances which agitated the debt-ridden in- habitants, rather than the imperial grievances which set Yorkers elsewhere against Great Britain. The Chester instructions lumped together grievances against Great Britain and those against the operation of the New York Courts in the Grants. "People of Amer- ica are Naturally intituled to all priviledges of Free Borne Sub- jects of Great Britain ... " declared the instructions, "that Every Man's Estate, Honestly acquired, is his own, and no person on earth has a Right to take it away without the Proprietor's Con- sent, unless he forfeit it by some crime of his committing .... "16
Soon after this convention, the inhabitants of the town of Dum- merston demonstrated their great dissatisfaction with the Que- bec Act of 1774. This act was the British solution for the grave problem of governing the Province of Quebec. The problem was a dual one, racial and economic. How were British institutions to be adapted to Roman Catholicism and to the alien speech and social institutions of the French inhabitants? How was the mer- chant community, largely British, to cooperate in solving this problem? Governor after governor wrestled with it but with only slight success. Furthermore, the regulation of Quebec's fur trade in the interior affected the interests of the seaboard colonies whose inhabitants were deeply concerned, not only with the fur trade, but also with the lands of the Great Lakes basin and the Mississippi Valley.
15. Records of the Governor and Council of the State of Vermont, I, 318-319.
16. Hall, op. cit., 197-198.
.
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All efforts since the fall of New France to reconcile these con- flicting interests had failed. As early as 1763, the British issued the Royal Proclamation forbidding settlement west of the Alleghenies and regulating the fur trade; but it was unsatisfactory. Earlier in 1754 the Albany Congress had endeavoured to provide an inter- colonial solution for these problems; but it failed. Since 1763, no satisfactory compromise of these conflicting interests had been made.17 Not until 1774 did the British Parliament pass an act de- signed to solve them. The Quebec Act of that year annexed the lands lying between the Ohio and the Mississippi to Quebec, granted the free exercise of the Catholic religion to the French Canadians and withdrew the promise contained in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to establish an assembly. If this promise had been kept, the unenfranchised French Canadian majority would have been subjected to the British minority which alone could exercise the right of suffrage.
The larger significance of this act lay in its impetus to revolu- tion among the inhabitants of the American seaboard. The sec- tion of the act allowing French Canadians freedom of Catholic worship was denounced by the American colonists as catering to Roman Catholicism, the sections which withdrew the promise of an assembly they deemed arbitrary and oppressive, and the sec- tion annexing the lands between the Ohio and the Mississippi to Quebec they regarded as destroying the charter rights of the sea- board colonies to western lands. The commotion which the act aroused was in part due to misrepresentation of its purposes by propagandists among the American colonists. The act expressly declared that "nothing herein contained relative to the boundary of the Province of Quebec shall in any wise affect the boundaries of any other colony."18
Accepting the colonial interpretation of the act, one inhabitant of Dummerston, Leonard Spaulding, declared that George III had broken his coronation oath by establishing Roman Catholi- cism in Quebec. He was immediately accused of lèse majesté and
17. See Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution, V, 113-166; Alvord, C. W., The Mississippi Valley in British Politics ( Cleveland, 1917), 2 vols .; Creigh- ton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 42-59.
13. Morison, S. E. (ed.), Sources and Documents illustrating the American Revolution ( Oxford, 1923), 104.
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pitched into jail.19 One of his jailers was Crean Brush, the conser- vative Yorker. The next day, the inhabitants of the town formed a committee in order to protect themselves from the exactions and usurpations of their tyrannical king and his Yorker supporters. Eleven days later, members of this committee opened the jail and released Spaulding, later justifying their action in the follow- ing manner:
The plain truth is, that the brave sons of freedom whose patience was worn out with the inhuman insults of the imps of power, grew sick of diving after redress in a legal way, & finding that the Law was only made use of for the Emolument of its Cretures & the immessaires of the British Tyrant, resolved upon an Easyer Method, and accordingly Opened the gaol without Key or Lockpicker, and after Congratulating Mr. Spaulding upon the re- covery of his freedom, Dispersed every man. . .. The afforgoing is a true and short relation of that Wicked affair of the New York Cut throatly, Jacobitish, High Church, Toretical minions of George the third, the pope of Canada & tyrant of Britain.20
The next occasion for a test of radical strength in the Grants came on November 30, 1774, when another convention was called by Cumberland County conservatives to adopt non-importation and non-consumption of British goods in retaliation for the Intol- erable Acts. Although the convention voted to support economic coercion of Great Britain it refused to adopt adequate measures to enforce it. One conservative deemed it "impertinent" for radi- cals to attempt even to secure the appointment of a committee of inspection to enforce non-import and non-consumption.21
This conservative victory was the last one in or out of any con- vention in the Grants. Henceforth, the radicals gained strength rapidly. On February 7, 1775, they were able to control a Cum- berland County convention for the first time and, as might be expected, they lodged greater protests against the Yorkers than against the British. Among their complaints were the great ex- pense placed upon the inhabitants by the courts; the large in-
19. Records, I, 1544n.
20. Ibid., 320.
21. Hall, op. cit., I, 204.
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crease in the number of lawsuits tried in these courts, the incon- venience and expense of attending from afar to serve as grand and petty jurors; the excessive salaries paid to their representa- tives in the New York Assembly and the extravagantly large fees demanded by and paid to attorneys-all of which were "very burthensome and grievous."22 Whether by design or neglect, this list of grievances never reached the proper authorities in New York.
The failure of New York to remedy these grievances helped to cause more outbreaks. On March 13, 14 and 15, 1775, a mob as- sembled to prevent the regular session of the Cumberland County Inferior Court of Common Pleas at the town of Westminster. In the ensuing mêlée, blood was shed.23 The effect of this riot was disastrous. Such supporters of the court as the conservative Yorkers, Samuel Wells, Crean Brush, Luke Knoulton, the Lovells, and many others were henceforth to be execrated as the "Court Party." The radicals were now encouraged to adopt a more defiant tone towards New York, where the political situation had been confused in the meantime by the election of an anti-British Pro- vincial Congress to oppose the pro-British Assembly which was predominantly conservative. The Assembly, instead of adopting measures to quiet the inhabitants of Cumberland County, re- solved to punish immediately the Westminster rioters. At the prompting of Brush and Wells, it voted a thousand pounds "to enable the inhabitants of the County of Cumberland to reinstate and maintain the administration of justice in that county, and for the suppression of riots."24 The effect of this act upon the Grants inhabitants was to intensify their resistance to the pro-British authority of New York. The collapse of the conservatives' prestige and control was imminent in the Grants.
At the Cumberland and Gloucester Counties Convention which was held on April 11 at the scene of the riot, Westminster, the radicals were in control. The moderator of the convention was none other than Reuben Jones. The religious "fanaticks," who.be- lieved that no government except that provided by the Bible was
22. Ibid., 205.212.
23. Ibid., 212-226.
24. Ibid., 237-238.
.
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necessary, had emerged as local leaders. They vowed to resist New York until it should provide protection for their lives and more adequate protection for their property or until the Crown could send an answer to their petition that the Grants be separated from New York and either annexed to another colony or estab- lished as a new province. Ethan Allen was appointed a member of the committee to prepare this petition to the Crown.25
These actions frightened the local conservatives who professed to believe that the Grants were now sunk in anarchy. The "Hor- rors of the people," declared Charles Phelps, "are Easier Con- ceived than expressed." He declared that the "Sober part of the County will not interfere Knowing that their Interference would occasion Murder and bloodshed." The other Yorker conservatives rallied anew to the support of the New York Courts, declaring them to be "the grand and only security of the life, liberty and property of the public," without which "persons and properties of individuals must at all Times be exposed to the Rage of a Riot- ous and Tumultuous Assembly." 26
Nevertheless, some of the partisans of New York in the Grants continued to object to its treatment of the Grants people. Mem- bers of one of the Committees of Safety set up by Yorkers in Cumberland County boldly drew up a list of their grievances against New York. They declared in a letter to the New York anti- British Provincial Congress that they hoped it would not be angry at them because they were so jealous of their liberties, "especially when they consider that in times past, this County had been much imposed upon in having certain foreigners put into high places of emolument and honor in this County, to the great grief of virtuous and honest men." 27
After the Westminster Riot, some of the formerly loyal Yorkers were willing to join the Yankee settlers in the Connecticut Valley and the settlers and speculators in the Southwest and in the Champlain Valley in opposition to New York. The support given by the conservative New York Assembly to the Court Party and
25. Records, I, 338-339.
26. Vermont, Office of the Secretary of State, Stevens Transcripts, II, 105-109; Records of the Governor and Council of the State of Vermont, I, 338.
27. Hall, op. cit., I, 258-259.
1
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the failure of the radical New York Provincial Congress to take time from more pressing matters to concern itself with the plight of either the speculators or the settlers destroyed most of New York's prestige in the Grants. Governor Colden, who predicted that settlers and speculators would combine against New York, was careful to draw a distinction between the interests of these two groups. In writing a full account of the Westminster affray to Dartmouth, he declared, "it is proper that your Lordship should be informed that the inhabitants of Cumberland County have not been made uneasy by any dispute about the Title to their land ..... the Rioters have not pretended any such pretext for their conduct yet. ... I make no doubt they will be joined by the Ben- nington Rioters, who will endeavour to make one common cause of it, though they have no connection but in their violence to Government." 28
While the riotous settlers in the vicinity of Westminster were thinking more and more in terms of independence, other Grants inhabitants were seeking the solution of their particular problems. To the north of the region wracked by the Westminster riot lay the Coos Country, which was dominated by Jacob Bayley. The people of this region favored New Hampshire rather than New York. They had supported in the late seventeen-sixties a project to secure the annexation of all the Grants to New Hampshire. This project failed, largely because John Wentworth, by petition- ing New York for the confirmation of the title to the lands held by his uncle had apparently abandoned the cause for which the elder Wentworth had labored.29 In these circumstances, Bayley and his neighbors could not decide whether to affiliate with New York or with New Hampshire.
The outbreak of the Revolution might have afforded New Hamp- shire an opportunity to offer them better terms than those dic- tated to them by New York. These terms would have had to in- clude, at a minimum, recognition of what the Coos Country peo- ple considered their political rights, particularly in regard to repre- sentation. New Hampshire political leaders, however, had no
28. Hall, op. cit., I, 239-240.
29. Jones, Vermont in the Making, 218-219.
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intention of meeting these terms. Indeed, Payne Wyngate, a cor- respondent of Jeremy Belknap, stated that the leaders of conser- vative coastal New Hampshire were glad to see the Grants under the jurisdiction of New York because "they feared the transfer of political power from east to west." 30
This fear demonstrated that the relationship between seaboard and backcountry New Hampshire was as unhappy as that be- tween seaboard and backcountry New York. For a generation before the outbreak of the Revolution, the leaders of seaboard New Hampshire had piled one grievance after another upon their backcountry settlers. A major grievance arose from the fact that seaboard owners of backcountry lands contributed little if any- thing to the settlement of the towns. Consequently, settlement of these lands, both costly and arduous, fell upon the settlers. As early as 1760, they had presented a petition to the Governor's · Council of New Hampshire asking for the passage of a bill that would force absentee land-owners to pay their taxes because "many of said Proprietors not having drawn Lots others in arrears for back taxes and some Resting on their Oars leave the burthen of settling said Township [ Chichester] to those who are Voluntary in doing the duty Knowing that their Estates there will be raised in Value by the Settlement tho' they Contribute nothing towards it."31 On another occasion, other settlers actually quoted a gover- nor of New York who stigmatized those grantees who had refused to contribute to the expenses of surveying, laying out and alloting lands as "Rider's Rights, meaning and intimating, that they Rode upon the Backs of the Poorer Settlers, and unreasonably expected their Lands exempted from taxes."32 So angry were residents of Chester at Governor Wentworth and other absentee-owners of Chester lands for their failure to pay their taxes, that they sold at auction all but one hundred acres of their lands.33
Hostility to absentee proprietors was only one of the grievances of backcountry inhabitants against the seaboard. Like seaboard New York, seaboard New Hampshire exercised sovereign sway
30. Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections (6th Series), IV, 461-462.
31. New Hampshire Provincial and State Papers, IX, 126-127.
32. New Hampshire Gazette, July 24, 1767.
33. Jones, op. cit., 52.
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over the political and economic life of the entire province. It was determined not to admit the backcountry people into their equit- able share of political influence. In the sixties, the backcountry wished to erect four new counties to increase its representation in the legislature. In the ensuing struggle with the seaboard, the backcountry was worsted. The uncompromising attitude of the seaboard made it anathema to the backcountry.34 After the colony joined the Revolution, the seaboard leaders wrote in 1775 so con- servative a constitution that they alienated the backcountry still more. This document was intended to perpetuate seaboard con- trol. Real estate valued at twenty pounds was the qualification for the suffrage, candidates for the Continental Congress had to own property to the value of two hundred pounds, and, above all, the backcountry people thought they were not equitably repre- sented in the legislature.35
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