USA > Vermont > Vermont in quandary, 1763-1825 > Part 6
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Furthermore, the isolation of the inhabitants of the Grants from seaboard New Hampshire tended to make them still more aloof. Settlers in the upper Connecticut Valley on both sides of the river found it more convenient to trade with towns down the river than with Portsmouth on the seaboard.36 The Wentworths knew that the commercial ties of the seaboard with the upper Connecticut Valley were not such as to draw them together. To bind together the various sections of the colony, Wentworth had planned to build four roads to divert trade from the lower Connecticut Val- ley to Portsmouth.37
The accumulation of grievances against seaboard New Hamp- shire no less than against seaboard New York provided the set- ting in which the Allens could exercise their skill in democratic and sectional politics. The Westminster Riot and the writing of the conservative New Hampshire Constitution, both of which occurred in the same year, convinced the inhabitants of the Grants that it was impossible to associate further with New York and impolitic to combine with New Hampshire and that they should declare their independence.
34. Upton, Richard F., Revolutionary New Hampshire ( Hanover, 1936), 25, passim.
35. Ibid., 177.
66. Mayo, John Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire, 1767-1775, 32-42.
37. Ibid., 39-42.
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The Allens were not content to be passive spectators of polit- ical cross-currents in the Grants. On the contrary, they were de- termined to help the inhabitants achieve independence while at the same time serving their own interests. They aimed to repudi- ate all ties with New York and to establish an independent state which would validate the New Hampshire titles. They would take part in the American Revolution either in association with the Continental Congress, if possible, or as co-belligerents, if necessary, in order to conquer the Province of Quebec. Then, come what might, they would deal with whatever other sovereign authorities emerged from the contest in terms of their natural economic interest, that is, an advantageous commercial outlet to the world by way of the St. Lawrence.
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CHAPTER FIVE
War and Independence
From 1775 to 1780 the Allens fought a war and made a revo- lution. The purpose of the war was the overthrow of British con- trol of the St. Lawrence; the purpose of the revolution was the establishment of an independent state. If both had been success- ful, the Allens would have solved, in part at least, their political and economic problems.
After the affrays at Lexington and Concord the Allens were busy laying plans to liquidate British control of the valley. Every- one who has read any American history whatever recalls the stir- ring words alleged to have been spoken at Ticonderoga. Few persons, however, are acquainted with the stratagem by which the Allens seized the forts. Because Ticonderoga had burned in 1773 and was manned in the spring of 1775 by only a handful of British troops, it could be easily assaulted and captured. As early as March 29, 1775, John Brown, the Montreal agent of the Con- tinental Congress, wrote Samuel Adams that it must be kept a profound secret that the New Hampshire Grants people were determined to seize Ticonderoga.1
Too circumspect to hazard a frontal attack on the fort, the Allens hatched a scheme by which the fort fell with a minimum risk to life and limb. It would appear from what Lord Dartmouth has said that the Allens approached the British officer in charge of Ticonderoga and in effect suggested to him that the disturb- ances at Boston should not disrupt the peace and good feeling between the representatives of British authority in the valley and the inhabitants of the Grants. After arranging a truce, the Allens hastened away, assembled the Green Mountain Boys and, with the cooperation of Benedict Arnold, just arrived from Massachusetts, swooped down upon the fort, taking it by surprise on May 10, 1775.
The British never forgave the Allens for this duplicity. Dart-
1. Vermont, Office of the Secretary of State, Stevens Transcripts, John Brown to Samuel Adams, I, 51-54; Pell, Ethan Allen, 74-75.
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mouth, who was outraged, warned General Gage, "we must never trust to appearance, or give Credit to Declarations, and the Con- duct of the People of Connecticut, who, in the Moment of their meditating and preparing for an expedition against Ticonderoga had the Affectation to propose a Suspension of Hostilities, is an instance of such consummate duplicity as ought to put us very much on our guard against such proposals."2
The day after Ticonderoga fell, Seth Warner seized Crown Point. Ethan then hastened to the New York Provincial Congress, hoping that his coup would so ingratiate his brothers and himself with patriotic Yorkers that their difficulties would evaporate in the ensuing outburst of satisfaction at their military triumphs. Prior to leaving the valley, he wrote the New York Provincial Congress that he indulged fond hope of a reconciliation with New York in resisting the common enemy, and suggested that the Con- gress form the Green Mountain Boys into a battalion.3 Although New York agreed to pay and equip a regiment, it did not act. Indeed, the province was charged by one Asa Douglas with hav- ing recommended to the Continental Congress that the artillery and stores at the forts be moved to the south end of Lake George to keep them from falling into the Allens' hands.4
The suspicions of the Allens that the Yorkers were still hostile to them were seemingly confirmed when in July Major-General. Philip Schuyler, a Yorker land-owner, arrived in the valley on orders from the Continental Congress to take command of the New York and New England troops and to prepare them for an invasion of the Canadian province. When it was launched in the first week of September, Ethan, alone of the Green Mountain Boys, participated. The boldness of his descent upon the prov- ince in advance of Schuyler's troops was due primarily to his con- viction that Quebec's inhabitants would not defend themselves. Ethan, as well as the Continental Congress, believed that three groups there might help or acquiesce in its capture: the Indians, particularly the smuggling Caughnawagas, the merchants, and the
2. Carter, Clarence E., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage (New Haven, 1931-1933), 2 vols., II, 199.
3. Office of the Secretary of State. Stevens Transcripts, I, 303-307, 413.
4. Ibid., II, 257-258.
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disgruntled French Canadians. He was aware that all save about eight hundred soldiers had been sent to reinforce General Thomas Gage in rebellious Boston. The province was inadequately de- fended and was occupied by groups potentially hostile to British control of Quebec; so reasoned Ethan.5 As a prime revolter him- self he unwisely drew comparisons between the situation in Que- bec and that in the American colonies.
It is true, of course, that all was not well in the Province of Quebec. The Quebec Act of 1774 had displeased the merchants by withdrawing the promise to erect an Assembly. Furthermore, they were angered by the refusal of the government to adopt the practices of English commercial law. Despite their anger, the merchants were hardly ready to join the Allens, for they were jealous of their American competitors in the fur trade and besides they feared that a revolution within the province would so dis- organize it that the French would monopolize the trade of the Mississippi Valley. Among French Canadian groups, the noblesse and the church gained by the Quebec Act such notable privileges as to place their influence at the disposal of the British. As the French Canadian lower classes resented the support given by Great Britain to these more privileged groups, they remained neutral in their attitude towards the British and the Americans. Quebec wavered, but it did not have within it the impulse to revolution which prevailed south of the forty-fifth parallel.
Acting upon a misapprehension as to the precise situation exist- ing in the province, many Americans, including the Allens, be- lieved that it could be easily captured, thereby destroying the hated Quebec Act and swinging the province into the main stream of the Revolution. The Allens, closest to the province, determined to be the first to attempt to capture it. Ethan swooped down on St. Johns on May 17, rallying on the way fourteen French Cana- dians who escorted him to Chambly at the foot of the Richelieu rapids. He reported them extremely friendly but he soon became aware that the "policy of the Canadians is neutrality."6 From Chambly, he advanced recklessly to the St. Lawrence River, trust-
5. Ibid., I, 293-297.
6. Wilbur Library, Wilbur Transcripts, no. 3214.
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ing that the merchants of Montreal would capitulate as meekly as his Yorker opponents in the Grants. While at St. Johns, he dis- patched a letter to Montreal merchants in which he announced that Lake George and Lake Champlain were now in the hands of the colonists and that he expected "English merchants as well as vertious Gentlemen will be in the interest of the Colonies," and asked that they would supply him with provisions, ammunition and liquors to be delivered at St. Johns.7
As a Quebec newspaper reported, Ethan secured the necessary provisions and gathered about him a nondescript band of about one hundred; "this party was to have had thirty coppers a day, and the town of Montreal for plunder. .. . " Then he moved westward towards Montreal. Some of its inhabitants were prepared to sur- render, for the town could marshall only three score soldiers for its defense. Yet Ethan failed to capture Montreal because on September 25, a force of thirty-four soldiers, eight English vol- unteers and one hundred and twenty townsmen captured him.8 He was later taken via New York to England as a prisoner of war and was not exchanged until May, 1778. Not until General Rich- ard Montgomery arrived in the province with sizeable American forces did Montreal fall in November, 1775. During the winter and spring, the Americans made every attempt to win over the merchants and the French Canadians. For a time in 1776, it ap- peared that even the city of Quebec would be captured, thereby completing American conquest of the province.
While the city of Quebec was besieged by the Americans, while British authority had sunk to a low ebb, Ethan's brothers and their associates were given a breathing spell during which they could turn their attention to the second major objective of their revolutionary program- independence from New York. Two alter- natives faced them. One would be to establish a state confined wholly to the Champlain Valley. It would be solely their creation and would have the advantage of being a geographic unit. But this alternative would isolate the Bennington faction, and it would tend to show that land speculation was the sole cause for inde-
7. P. A. C., Q, XI, 190-191.
8. Quebec Gazette, October 5, 1775.
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pendence. Such a state would be puny and weak because the Champlain Valley was relatively small and contained few inhabit- ants. The other alternative would be to secure popular support for independence throughout the length and breadth of the area in which New Hampshire had granted lands. This alternative was thought more practicable because it was believed that the settlers east of the mountains would cooperate with the Westerners be- cause they were disturbed by the struggle over land-titles and also by New York's refusal to meet their demands for reform. Their support was soon forthcoming. By the end of July, 1777, the Allens had committed themselves to defend a new state, bounded on the south by Massachusetts, on the east by the west bank of the Connecticut River, on the north by the forty-fifth parallel and on the west by a line drawn from the northwestern corner of Massachusetts to Lake Champlain so as to incorporate within the new state all the New Hampshire Grants.
The first step toward independence was taken on December 10, 1775, when a call was issued by the principal leaders on the west side of the Green Mountains for a convention to determine whether the laws of New York concerning land titles should be enforced, whether a way of suppressing their opponents in the Grants could be agreed upon, and whether to send an agent to the Continental Congress as well as to determine "whether the Convention will consent to Associate with New York, or by themselves in cause of America."?
In response to this call, forty-nine men, representing thirty-two towns in the Southwest and the Champlain Valley met in Dorset at Kent's tavern on January 16, 1776. The membership included many settlers and speculator-residents of the Grants; but some present had never lived there, others "represented" towns not yet settled. It is, therefore, not difficult to conclude that the Dorset Convention was composed of a revolutionary and self-appointed group, disaffected from New York largely because the land titles of its members were not recognized by that province. The con- vention addressed a "Remonstrance and Petition" to the Con- tinental Congress in which it stated once more the local version
9. Vermont Historical Society, Collections, I, 1-18.
A
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of the royal decision of 1764, pointed an accusing finger at the New York land-jobbers and declared that, although the con- vention would do all in its power to aid the colonies against Great Britain, it was not willing to place its members under New York "in such manner as might in future be detrimental to our private property." The petition closed by stating that the peti- tioners wished the land title dispute to "lie Dormant until a gen- eral restoration of Tranquility. . . . "10
The chief result of this convention was to make clear to the revolutionaries in the other colonies that this body drew a sharp distinction between the cause of the Grants in the dispute with New York and the cause of the colonies in their dispute with Great Britain. The convention resolved to make application "to the inhabitants of said Grants to form the same into a separate District," and "voluntarily and solemnly to Engage under all the ties held sacred amongst Mankind at the Risque of our Lives and fortunes to Defend by arms the United American States against the Hostile. attempts of the British Fleets and Armies, until the present unhappy Controversy between the two Countries shall be settled." Lastly, the convention requested the inhabitants of the Grants to subscribe to this resolution on pain of being "deemed enemies of the Common Cause of the New Hampshire Grants."11
The most far-reaching significance of the Dorset Convention, however, was not its hostile attitude towards New York nor the distinction it drew between this attitude and its attitude towards the other revolutionary provinces, but its decision to appeal for aid east of the Green Mountains. In the Connecticut Valley, re- bellion against New York had long been simmering. The griev- ances of that region were caused in part by the land controversy, but more particularly by the inequalities between seaboard and backcountry. The speculators west of the Green Mountains could use these grievances and inequalities with great effect against New York.
Already the western groups which had met at Kent's Tavern had shown their sympathy for the outraged inhabitants of the
10. Ibid., 18-19.
11. Ibid., 22.
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Connecticut Valley. At the Westminster Riot in 1775, they had sent over to the Connecticut River town Robert Cochran who, it may be supposed, did little to quiet the inhabitants.12 Instead; his presence there demonstrated to the poorly organized but violent mob that it did not stand alone in its hostility to the authority exer- cised by New York. Colden had made a clear distinction between the cause for rebellious behaviour in the east and west, and had rightly predicted that east and west would merge their causes, hitherto separately waged, into one cause. Colden's prediction was fulfilled in the Dorset Convention of July 24, 1776. This con- vention appointed Heman Allen, William Marsh and Jonas Fay, in conjunction with Samuel Fletcher and Joshua Fish, to treat with the inhabitants of the New Hampshire Grants on the east side of the Green Mountains, for the purpose of securing their cooperation in the objectives of the convention.13
East of the Green Mountains, four distinct factions had emerged, each having its own reasons for opposing New York. The strategy of the western leaders was to draw them into the common fold of a separate state.
The first to be won whole-heartedly into the separatist project was the one composed of the redoubtable Reuben Jones and his followers. This faction had for some time been hotly agitating against New York. The burden of its grievances was largely eco- nomic, but the chief support for its rebellious behavior came from its attachment to the Bible which, it declared, provided all laws necessary for the good governance of a commonwealth. But the western leaders appear to have discovered that although the Jones faction was seemingly opposed to all earthly government, it would support a more democratic form of government than that of New York.
The second faction in the Grants was led by Leonard Spauld- ing. His grievances, like those of the Jones faction, were largely economic, but the Spaulding protest was couched, for the most part, in the language of political radicalism. It was he who had been tossed into jail for discourteous remarks concerning George
12. Jones, Vermont in the Making, 273.
13. V. H. S., Collections, I, 21-22.
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III and the Quebec Act; it was he who had been for some time in grave difficulties over money matters in courts established by New York in the Grants.
The third faction in the east, Jacob Bayley and his supporters, might be termed conservative revolutionaries. Bayley was a sub- stantial property owner, sympathetic towards New Hampshire, but hopeful that New York would meet the sectional grievances of the Connecticut Valley by granting substantial political conces- sions. He, significantly, never participated in the more radical excesses associated with the factions of Jones and Spaulding.
The fourth faction was composed of opportunists among York- ers living in the Grants. They knew that New York's authority in the Connecticut Valley had been weakened and that private prop- erty was perhaps endangered by the more radical factions. Could not the Allens as substantial property owners, so they must have reasoned, be depended upon to set limits to the ambitions of the more radical factions in the Grants? If all political authority were destroyed, the only alternatives might be flight to New York or cooperation with the Allens. This faction was represented by Thomas Chandler, Jr., son of Judge Chandler of the Cumberland County Inferior Court of Common Pleas, who flirted with all the factions at one time or another.14
The history of events between the close of the first Dorset Con- vention and the establishment of a separate state is the history of the welding of the eastern and western factions into a coalition which was in agreement upon only one objective-independence. In the formation of this coalition and in its activities, the Allens played a covert role because they knew that their swift amassing of property had engendered jealousies in the minds of members of the coalition.
The group appointed to confer with the eastern factions ful- filled its mission successfully and forged the coalition which eventually brought into existence a new state. At the third con- vention held at Dorset, September 25, 1776, gathered the most radical of the anti-New Yorkers: Reuben Jones, Leonard Spauld- ing and one Benjamin Carpenter on whose tombstone is engraved
14. . Records of the Governor and Council of the State of Vermont, 1, 241n.
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the significant inscription, "an able advocate to the last for Democ- racy and the equal rights of man." 15 Another faction represented at the convention was composed of conservative Yorkers who had reluctantly resigned themselves to independence because, for a number of years, even they had not been wholly satisfied with New York's attitude towards the Grants. This faction, made up of many who had acted in revolutionary committees established in the Grants by New York, was represented by Ebenezer Hois- ington, Edward Aiken and James Rogers. The latter was a sub- stantial land-owner in Londonderry who later became a loyalist.
The instigator of independence was Reuben Jones. Years later, when he was old and indigent, he petitioned the Vermont Assem- bly for financial aid and in this petition he lifted the curtain, for a moment, from the history of the movement which made the Grants independent of New York.16 He declared that after the Westminster Riot, his "fellow-Labourer," Alijah Lovejoy, induced him to go to General Washington to secure the court martial of the men responsible for that outrage. Washington, wrote Jones, referred him to Joseph Hawley, the Massachusetts radical, who told him that he favored the independence of the Grants, that the Continental Congress would soon declare independence, that the Grants must play their part in the struggle which was bound to result and, when Congress recommended the States to form new governments, that the Grants' inhabitants should establish a new state. After Jones had returned to the Grants, he went immedi- ately to the Dorset Convention to report his conversation with Hawley.
By a process still unknown, arrangements were made to pro- vide a united front against New York and to cooperate with the "General Cause." The convention voted on September 25 "that suitable application be made to form that District of Lands, com- monly called and known by the name of the New Hampshire Grants, into a separate District .... " In the afternoon session, a committee recommended that the convention adopt measures to regulate the militia in order to defend the liberties of the Amer-
15. Ibid., 118.
16. Vermont, Office of the Secretary of State, Manuscript State Papers, LV, 31.
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ican states, to dispatch a petition to the Continental Congress, to regulate Tories and to declare "that any Law, or Laws, Direction or Directions we may (for the time being) receive from Sd. State of New York will not in future be accepted neither shall we hold ourselves bound by them."17
On the twenty-seventh, a covenant was entered into by those present. It declared that because of the oppressive conduct of New York, "together with the distance of road which lies between this District and New York," that further connection with New York was impossible and that all members should bind themselves to obey all future resolves decreed by the convention or future conventions and to secure the support of all the Grants people to this covenant.18 This convention was significant, for it enabled the separatists to determine who was and who was not in favor of independence by asking the inhabitants to subscribe to the covenant. Henceforth, the covenant operated in much the same fashion as the Association of the Continental Congress operated in separating those loyal to Great Britain from those loyal to the Continental Congress.
As yet, however, the conventions had acted circumspectly, hav- ing only tentatively approached the question of a declaration of independence. This attitude was due largely to the failure of many delegates to attend the convention held at Westminster on October 30, 1776, because the American naval force on Lake Champlain had been destroyed and Guy Carleton was expected to attack Ticonderoga.19
As a result, the Allens and their supporters did not consult until January 15, 1777, when the second Westminster Convention met. It was attended by twenty-two persons, including Leonard Spauld- ing, and its members elected Reuben Jones clerk, "P. Tempore." After deliberating the question of independence, the convention voted the independence of the Grants from New York and Great Britain. In recognition of the Connecticut origins of a large pro- portion of Grants inhabitants, it was decided to call the new state New Connecticut. The delegates justified their revolutionary acts
17. Records of the Governor and Council of the State of Vermont, I, 28-29. 18. V. H. S., Collections, I, 26-27.
19. Ibid., 34-35.
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by stating that they were following the instructions of the Con- tinental Congress when, on May 16, 1776, it had instructed the revolting provinces "where no government, sufficient to the exi- gencies of their affairs, has been heretofore established, to adopt such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their con- stituents in particular, and of America in general." After voting independence, the convention recounted its version of the history of the dispute with New York, pointed to the acts of outlawry passed against its members by New York and the failure of revolu- tionary New York to abolish quitrents. A petition outlining these grievances was drawn up to be dispatched to the Continental Con- gress.20
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