Vermont Declares Independence from the British

Vermont Declares Independence from the British

Vermont did not exist as a separate entity before 1776. In the colonial period both New Hampshire and New York claimed the Green Mountain region which now comprises Vermont, and speculators from both these provinces invested in Vermont lands. In 1764 the British royal government granted the disputed area to New York, but this action did little to resolve the question. The coming of the American Revolution allowed Vermonters to settle their own fate; the people of the Green Mountains took advantage of the chaos created by the dissolution of the British Empire in America and on January 15, 1777, declared their independence.

Vermont's difficulties in the mid-18th century arose from the problems of settling the area. The first European to explore the region was the Frenchman Samuel de Champlain, who arrived in 1609. As a result of his discovery, France controlled the Green Mountains region for the next 150 years. During that time the French established several forts in present-day Vermont to protect French Canada from invasion by the hostile Iroquois Indians, and Roman Catholic missionaries ventured into the rugged Green Mountains to attempt to Christianize the natives. However, the French were not interested in actually settling the area, and they built only a few small towns along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain.

Although the French had little intention of colonizing Vermont, they soon realized that the geographical position of the Green Mountain area provided them with easy access to the English settlements in northern Massachusetts. Repeatedly during the first half of the 18th century, the French or their Indian allies in Canada passed through Vermont and without warning fell upon the vulnerable English towns along the Massachusetts frontier. These raids terrorized the inhabitants of the remote settlements: During the 1704 attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, alone, roughly 50 English colonists were killed and more than 100 were taken captive.

To protect the colonists in northern Massachusetts, the British launched a number of retaliatory raids against the French and their Native American allies in the area of present-day Vermont. They also constructed a series of forts just north of the settlements that were in danger of enemy attack. Fort Dummer, begun in 1724 just north of the Massachusetts border near what is now Brattleboro, is significant because it was the first permanent English settlement in the Green Mountains region; but Fort Number Four, built at Charlestown, New Hampshire, in 1740 afforded the greatest protection to the English settlements in the Connecticut River valley.

The English victory during the French and Indian War of 1754 to 1763 ended the threat of enemy attack on the remote Massachusetts settlements and assured British control of the Vermont area. However, even before 1763 the royal governors of New Hampshire and New York had involved themselves in the affairs of the Green Mountain region. As early as 1750 Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire realized that great profits could be made by making grants of land in the Vermont area to speculators. Wentworth's authority to dispose of the Green Mountain region was questionable, for New Hampshire's western boundary had never been established. Wentworth merely assumed that New Hampshire's jurisdiction, like that of neighboring Connecticut and Massachusetts, extended to a line 20 miles east of the Hudson River, and proceeded to grant substantial areas in present-day Vermont to New Hampshire investors.

Between 1750 and 1764, Wentworth made grants of land for 138 towns in the Vermont area to New Hampshire speculators. The governors of New York believed that their own colony rightfully controlled the Green Mountain region, and repeatedly protested to the Crown about Wentworth's “New Hampshire Grants.”

In 1764 the Crown acknowledged New York's claim to Vermont by declaring the western bank of the Connecticut River “to be the boundary between the said two provinces of New Hampshire and New York.” Unfortunately, this proclamation made no reference to jurisdiction over the Vermont area prior to 1764. Therefore, controversy continued: New Hampshirites argued that political authority over Vermont had shifted to New York in 1764 but that the land titles previously given by Wentworth were still valid, while New Yorkers insisted that they had always controlled the Vermont area, and the governor of New York proceeded to make his own land grants to speculators.

For more than a decade the dispute over Vermont raged. The governor of New York was willing to confirm the land titles of those persons who had actually settled in the Vermont areas granted by New Hampshire, but he would not validate the much larger claims held by the colony's absentee speculators. The New Hampshire speculators looked for assistance to John Wentworth, who had succeeded his uncle as governor of New Hampshire. Both as governor and as “Surveyor General of the King's Woods,” Wentworth befriended the land investors, but his contribution in the fight against New York authorities could not match that of the most famous of the speculators, Ethan Allen.

A native of Connecticut, Ethan Allen first emerged as a leader of the New Hampshire grantees in 1770. After an unsuccessful attempt to defend the validity of New Hampshire land titles before a New York court in that year, Allen rather ambiguously announced that “the gods of the hills are not the gods of the valleys.” Then he returned to Vermont, where he worked to align the actual settlers of the Green Mountain area with the absentee speculators who held New Hampshire grants.

Allen argued that the lands of the settlers would be safe only if all New Hampshire titles were confirmed. He also urged those who lived in what is now Vermont to oppose New York authorities, with force if necessary. The efficacy of this strategy was demonstrated in the fall of 1770 when a group of about 100 Vermonters successfully turned back a New York posse that had come to the Green Mountains to oust a settler. Within a short time, 11 towns in the western part of the Green Mountains had raised military companies, and Allen was appointed to be their “Colonel-Commandant.”

In the early years of their existence, the Green Mountain Boys, as the band led by Allen was known, counted among their membership only a small portion of the residents of what is today western Vermont. Nevertheless, the organization was able to block New York's efforts to extend its authority over the Vermont area. The resistance was so successful that in 1774 the New York assembly ordered the leaders of the Green Mountain Boys to be tried, convicted, and executed if apprehended. This so-called Bloody Act did nothing to curtail the activities of Allen and his followers; indeed, it served to gain them additional popular support.

Deteriorating relations between England and the American colonies in the 1770s added a new dimension to the politics of the struggle of the Green Mountain Boys. Allen and his cohorts quickly reevaluated the situation and made England the primary target of their wrath. The mother country was the authority to which both New York and New Hampshire looked for support in their claims on Vermont. England's departure from the American scene would deprive New York of the Crown's 1764 decision as a cudgel to use against the Green Mountain Boys, and it would also destroy any pretensions that New Hampshire would have to control of Vermont. Allen began to dream of a completely independent Vermont, which (if England lost Canada, too) might even enjoy access to the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence River.

Shortly after the first skirmishes of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Allen proposed a campaign against the British Fort Ticonderoga at the head of Lake Champlain. The plan was well received, and troops from Massachusetts and Connecticut joined Allen and 100 Green Mountain Boys for an attack on Ticonderoga. The British fort fell on May 10, 1775. Two days later, the British contingent at nearby Crown Point likewise surrendered to the Green Mountain Boys under Seth Warner.

After the capture of Ticonderoga, Allen urged pressing the northern campaign, for, as he wrote to the Continental Congress, “advancing an army into Canada will be agreeable to our friends, and it is bad policy to fear the resentment of an army.” Congress approved the expedition against the province of Quebec, and Allen served without a commission in the campaign. He was captured outside Montreal, but the Americans, assisted by a regiment of Green Mountain Boys, captured Montreal in November 1775. Their success in Canada was short-lived, however. Near the city of Quebec, British forces repulsed the colonists' subsequent attack of December 31, 1775, and forced them to retreat to the safety of Fort Ticonderoga.

While British forces in Canada prepared to launch a counter-invasion southward, the inhabitants of present-day Vermont struggled with the difficulties of their political status. In January 1776, 49 leading citizens, still angered by what they considered to be New York's “land-jobbing,” issued a declaration in which they refused to join with New York “in such a manner as might in the future be detrimental to our private property.” Eight months later, after New York and the other 12 colonies had declared their independence from Britain, the same group decided to poll the residents of the New Hampshire Grants, as Vermont was then known, about the feasibility of forming a “separate district.” In time, the decisive step of declaring independence from New York was taken. On January 15, 1777, at a meeting at Westminster, the Green Mountain Boys and others disenchanted with both New York and New Hampshire announced the formation of the state of New Connecticut. A district in Pennsylvania had already taken the name New Connecticut, however. Thus, by June 1777 the rebels in the “Grants” decided to call their lands Vermont, from the French words vert and mont, meaning “green” and “mountain.”

By the time a convention met at Windsor in July 1777 to formulate a constitution, British forces had overwhelmed the American defenders at Ticonderoga and threatened to invade. But the American victory over British general Burgoyne's forces at the battle of Bennington late in the summer of 1777 saved the fledgling state. Vermont would face other crises before it ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1791 and became the 14th state, but the Green Mountain Boys had survived their first trials.