RELATIONS BETWEEN AMERICAN COLONISTS and British colonial officials had been worsening for more than a decade. Unemployment was running high in the port towns, and poorly paid Redcoats garrisoning the town were competing for whatever cash-paying odd jobs they could find. Street fights between colonists and soldiers were becoming commonplace. Under a full moon on the icy night of March 5, 1770, unemployed sailors and young boys gathered on the waterfront near the customshouse. A young boy taunted an eighteen-year-old Redcoat on guard duty. The soldier struck the boy with his gun. The boy yelled out to some nearby Bostonians and pointed out the sentry: “There is the son of a bitch that knocked me down!” From the crowd came shouts of “Kill him, kill him, knock him down!” More Redcoats reinforced the sentry detail. A larger crowd, apparently led by a giant mulatto workman named Crispus Attucks, pelted the soldiers who retreated up the customshouse steps under a barrage of chunks of ice, hard-packed snowballs, oyster shells, and cudgels. The Redcoats loaded their muskets. The crowd drew closer, lashing out with cutlasses and clubs, screaming at the guards, “Come on, you rascals, you bloody-backs, you lobster scoundrels! Fire if you dare, God damn you! Fire and be damned! We know you dare not!” After a series of commands from their sergeant, the troops fired a volley at point-blank range. Attucks and two others dropped dead; six others were dragged away, leaving bloody trails in the snow. Nothing in colonial America would ever be the same after this, the Boston Massacre, and nothing would be the same again between English royal officials and Americans on the frontiers.1
In the spring of 1771, the stunned American colonies recoiled short of revolution in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre. The years of pent-up tensions that exploded in the killing of five rioters by beleaguered British sentries eased somewhat as seven British soldiers were tried for murder. The Patriot lawyers John Adams and Josiah Quincy agreed to take the case, their able defense leading to five acquittals and the branding on the foreheads of the two regulars found guilty of manslaughter. In a lull in the protracted colonial crisis, as soon as travel became possible, Ethan Allen rode from Salisbury, Connecticut, up to Sheffield, Massachusetts, signed a contract to buy a farm in present-day Sunderland, Vermont, and on May 30 moved his family onto the disputed Grants. In the sixteen years since his father, Joseph, had died, Ethan had never ceased to act as the paterfamilias, or, as Levi Allen later put it, his brother acted like “a dictator among the younger brethren.” Levi had come back from fur trading northwest of Detroit to join Heman and Ira in the family’s deerskin-curing business in Salisbury, freeing nineteen-year-old Ira to devote more and more time each year to survey land that Ethan had explored by canoe and snowshoe over the past four years. As part of building up his own surveying business, Ira ran boundary lines for New Hampshire Grant proprietors far into the northern Champlain Valley. Ira had carried out Ethan’s order to purchase several land rights in Poultney, barely inside the Grants and less than two miles from the New York boundary line. Then Ethan turned over the house he had bought in Massachusetts for brother Heber to live with his wife and infant son.2
Ethan’s wife, Mary, had given birth to two more children, a son, Joseph, and a daughter, Lucy, during their years of living at close quarters with Heman and his wife above the general store in Salisbury. Now she was expecting their fourth child. Ethan had taken them to brother Zimri’s farm in the Berkshire Hills in Sheffield. Ethan’s mother had lived with his sister, Lydia, in Goshen, Connecticut, until Lydia had died in 1770. At the funeral, Ethan’s mother, age sixty-two, no doubt grief-stricken over the loss of her beloved daughter, suffered a stroke that paralyzed her left side. Ethan took her back to Salisbury to live with Heman. It had been four years since Ethan’s expulsion from Northampton. Each spring, he had returned to Salisbury, but now he was finally ready to provide a permanent home for his long-suffering wife as soon as their fourth child was born. Mary had more than one reason to rejoice when they headed for their new farm in the Valley of Vermont, not far from the hilltop in Poultney where Ethan had first looked out over the new land.
Many of the Allens’ relatives and old Connecticut neighbors were already settled on the Grants. Mary’s less fractious brothers, Timothy and Gideon, had moved to hilly Sunderland. Less than a day’s ride away, Cousin Remember Baker had built up a prosperous surveying business in Pownal before moving north to the more cosmopolitan town of Arlington. The British government had drawn the Proclamation Line of 1763 down the crest of the Allegheny Mountains, banning all settlement to its west, but many New Englanders like the Allens were openly flouting the decree. Its principal effect was to force migration north from overcrowded colonies farther south: between 1765 and 1775, the population of the future Vermont increased tenfold, from seven hundred to seven thousand, most of it west of the Green Mountains proclamation line. The rapid population increase was watched with mounting anxiety by the New York oligarchy.
Alternately orchestrating his family’s various business endeavors and organizing the growing resistance to New York “landgrabbers” and “monopolizers,” as he now called them, Allen rode through the hills and forest clearings, training and inspecting the militia companies of twelve towns. All the while, he also looked for choice parcels of land he could buy up at a bargain. His outspoken championing of the New England settlers on the Grants promised to pay handsome dividends. His newfound prestige contributed to the substantial profits he could expect to make from his early investments in Vermont.
Returning from his first visit to Governor Wentworth in the spring of 1770, he had stopped long enough to buy the “right” to 350 acres of Castleton real estate from the bricklayer Zenas Person for £6; he sold it a year later for £24, a 300 percent profit. Allen did not overlook any opportunity, and it was apparent he would make money without resorting to venality. Wisely, he formed a lifelong partnership with his youngest brother, Ira. They bought up thirty-two rights, nearly 12,000 acres, of hardwood forest in Hubbardton near Castleton, for £60, about $12,000 or a dollar an acre in today’s money. Each brother then bought four rights, some 1,356 acres of land, in Castleton. Often, they bought land for a few shillings per hundred acres from erstwhile speculators who had lost their nerve and given up in the face of New York intimidation.
For four winters since his banishment from Northampton, Ethan Allen had made himself the self-invited guest in the cabins of relatives and friends on the Vermont frontier. In addition to brothers and cousins, he annually visited Paul Moore’s tavern in Shoreham, just across Lake Champlain from Fort Ticonderoga; and, farther north, in New Haven, he visited the McIntoshes. In between, he slept wherever he dropped after the day’s hunt or trading session for furs and pelts with Mohawk Indians he had met and with whom he hunted and explored. For much of the past year since the attempts at evicting the farmers from the Grants had begun, he had rented a gambrel-roofed, one-and-a-half story house on Bennington’s main street between the Catamount Tavern and the Congregational meetinghouse. This would be his home for most of the next two decades, and now it became the headquarters of the Green Mountains resistance movement.
AS SOON AS ALLEN returned to Bennington in June of 1771, he learned that a New York surveyor was running lines in Pittsford, fifty-five miles to the northeast. Allen galloped off, his handpicked squad snowballing as he went, settlers eager to help him to overtake the intruding Yorkers, as they were called, in Clarendon. He loved disguises: dressing as Indians, faces blackened with soot, he and his militia found the Albany surveyor William Cockburn working with linesmen in the woods. Like James Duane, Allen did not shrink from strong-armed tactics if he thought them necessary. He rode up to Cockburn and told him that, if he wanted to return to Albany alive, he would cease. When Cockburn appealed to neighbors for help, they warned him he would be murdered unless he stopped surveying and went home. As Cockburn later testified, Allen told Cockburn that, if he promised never to return, he would be allowed to leave. Cockburn and his crew fled.
As Allen and his victorious company rode back toward Bennington, a rider pelted up to them with the news that the sheriff of Albany with a posse of three hundred men had surrounded James Breakenridge’s farm and was demanding that he surrender it. So many of the “Bennington mob,” as Sheriff Ten Eyck described them in an affidavit, had turned out with their muskets, that he had decided to leave without even serving the writ of possession on Breakinridge. This fiasco by New York’s authorities provided the first significant opportunity for Allen’s outnumbered followers to assemble in force against a more numerous foe and stand their ground without any killings. Allen and his men simply rode up, muskets at the ready, and, after engaging their enemies in eyeball-to-eyeball intimidation, refused to disperse. One advantage they enjoyed was the oppressed sensibility of New York sheriffs’ posses, almost invariably made up of Dutch farmers who detested their British overlords and who refused to fight or drive anyone off their land. At Breakenridge’s farm, when Sheriff Ten Eyck ordered forty Dutchmen to advance, they refused to budge.
It was this raid that finally jolted many Vermonters off their fences. By now, it was increasingly difficult to remain neutral. Without doubt, there would be more surveyors, larger posses. Assuming New York authorities would persevere, emergency town meetings of eleven communities in southwestern Vermont voted to elect a standing committee of safety made up of each town’s more prominent citizens to organize the resistance. Committees of safety then chose militia captains. By the time of a meeting late in 1771 in the Catamount Tavern, it was obvious that Ethan Allen had emerged as the natural leader of all the militias. The committees agreed to create the Green Mountain Boys and to constitute the paid post of colonel commandant. The committeemen, many of them veterans of the French and Indian War, unanimously elected Allen to the post and instructed him to organize and train militia units that were to be ready on a moment’s notice to respond to incursions from New York anywhere west of the Green Mountains.
By autumn of 1771, the New York raids and Vermont reprisals were becoming more violent. Companies of Green Mountain militia were patrolling day and night along the New York–New Hampshire Grants borderlands. By way of warning reluctant New York patentees, they pulled down and burned fences and haystacks of reluctant Yorkers. When that tactic failed, after councils of war of the militia captains at the Catamount Tavern, sterner measures followed. In October, Colonel Commandant Ethan Allen and Captain Remember Baker led a handpicked company to the farm of a New Yorker settled in Rupert. When he refused to leave, this time, evidently for the first time, as a warning never to return, they burned down his cabin. Allen and his militia of roughshod Vermont settlers were, to be fair, exerting an eighteenth-century vigilanteeism that would repeat itself on the Far West frontier in the nineteenth century. Coupled with the tactics of intimidation used by ten thousand Sons of Liberty in the period before the Revolution, it raises an unsettling question: was America founded, at least in part, on terrorism?
AS WORD OF his exploits rippled through the Vermont hills, Ethan Allen took on almost mythic proportions. He traveled the New Hampshire Grants with a band of chosen men, exhorting settlers to resist their unwanted New York overlords. Settlers and Yorkers alike spread stories of his prodigious physical prowess. He was a Paul Bunyan before Bunyan ever existed. He could seize a bushel bag full of salt in his teeth and throw it over his head, they said. He could grasp two Yorkers, one in each hand, lift them off the ground, hold them at arm’s length, and slam them together until they begged for mercy, they said. Allen had tackled a New York sheriff and his posse of six burly deputies, they said, leaving them flat on the ground. He even rescued children lost in the wilderness when all hope for them had been abandoned. No stranger to hyperbole, Allen may have started some of the stories himself, ever conscious of his image as part of his influence. What is true is that, in a time when every settler knew the Bible, he was becoming a reverse Moses, driving the infidel out of the promised land. He was Moses the lawgiver, using Old Testament–like formulations as he cursed the oppressors of the virtuous frontier pioneers.
Early that autumn, word reached Allen at his Catamount Tavern headquarters that a Scottish veteran of the French and Indian War, Charles Hutcheson, had built a cabin and was clearing land at New Perth on a military grant he had received from New York for his wartime services. According to the deposition Hutcheson later swore before James Duane at Albany, Allen and a squad of Bennington militia surrounded his cabin and ordered them to tear it down. When the Scot asked the Vermonters to stop, Allen responded, “They would burn it, for that morning they had resolved to offer a burnt sacrifice to the gods of the world in burning the logs of that house.”
Then, while Allen held his collar and Remember Baker brandished a club over his head, Hutcheson asserted, Allen harangued him: “Go your way now and complain to that damned scoundrel, your governor. God damn your governor, laws, King, Council and Assembly.” According to Hutcheson, when he protested Allen’s swearing, Allen retorted, “God damn your soul, are you going to preach to us?” At the conclusion of Hutcheson’s testimony, he added, he heard that Allen “denies the being of a God and that there is any infernal spirit.”3
WHILE ETHAN ALLEN was relocating his family to a farm in Sunderland, Vermont, North Carolina’s royal governor, William Tryon, learned of his appointment in the spring of 1771 to become the fifth royal governor of New York in half a dozen years. Tryon accepted the most coveted colonial office in North America. Like most high-level British appointees in the lucrative colonial service, Tryon kept getting promotions because of his connections in London. Tryon’s wife’s cousin was Lord Hillsborough, the secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations, which administered all of England’s colonies. Tryon, a captain in the First Regiment of Foot Guards, had served thirteen years in the British army before being appointed lieutenant governor of North Carolina at the end of the French and Indian War. His unequivocal support of the hated Stamp Act brought business in the province to a halt even as he built a grand capital building in New Bern with an opulent redbrick Georgian palace with formal gardens for himself, modeling it after his estate in England. He raised the money for “Tryon’s Palace” by streamlining techniques for collecting quitrents from farmers. In fact an officer without troops, he was actually helpless to quell the Stamp Act protests in the colony’s port towns, but he effectively hinted at the use of force as soon as he could obtain a detachment of Redcoats.
No sooner was the Stamp Act repealed in 1766 than western North Carolinians revolted. Settlers charged that sheriffs and treasurers were ruthlessly wringing heavy taxes from hard-pressed farmers, embezzling much of the money, and charging extortionate fees. Calling themselves Regulators, settlers protested lack of representation in the provincial assembly, a common problem in colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia that straddled the Allegheny Mountains. (In New Hampshire, fewer than one-third of the towns were represented in the colony’s assembly, most of them east of the mountains.)
When the North Carolina Regulators demanded abolition of taxes and debts, Tryon declared it a rebellion, called out the colony’s militia, and led it into the backcountry twice, first in 1768 and again in 1771. In April of 1768, 70 armed Regulators rode into Hillsborough, freed a horse that had been seized by the authorities for back taxes, and fired into the house of the Crown official Edmund Fanning. Fanning called out the militia and arrested two Regulator leaders. When 700 Regulators surrounded the jail, Fanning released his prisoners. Tryon came to the fall court session with some 1,400 troops to prevent further disruptions. He faced down 3,700 Regulators, who dispersed. They later came back to whip Fanning, tear down his fine house, and run him out of town.
In January of 1771, the North Carolina Assembly, at Tryon’s urging, passed the “Bloody Act,” making rioters guilty of treason. That spring, Tryon again took the field and crushed resistance in the Battle of the Alamance on May 16. Tryon ordered James Few, the leader of the insurgents, hanged on the battlefield at about the same time he was reading his new instructions to become New York’s governor. Twelve Regulators were subsequently convicted of treason and six of them hanged.
Tryon soon proved to be the wrong man to be New York’s governor at the wrong time. A military governor with a paternalistic philosophy, he promptly set about establishing a New York provincial militia in which only “gentlemen of the first families and distinctions” could receive officers’ commissions. He used large land grants to himself and his supporters to augment his own fortune and to reinforce the social hierarchy that Ethan Allen had first seen during the Albany ejectment trials. When the Board of Trade upbraided Tryon for granting to himself and his cronies more than the officially acceptable one thousand acres, he argued that such grants promoted “the subordination which arises from a distinction in rank and fortune.” It acted as a “counterpoise against a leveling and republican spirit” he found prevalent in several colonies, especially on the New Hampshire Grants. Tryon’s reputation for retribution had preceded him to Vermont. While more timid leaders went on circulating petitions and sending them to London, Allen knew he could lose no more time organizing armed resistance.4
FORMING THE EXTRALEGAL MILITIA of the New Hampshire Grants was Allen’s first act of open rebellion. No militia could be formed legally without the approval of the royal governor of a province. All officers had to receive written commissions from the royal governor, the king’s personal representative. Yet boy and man, from fourteen to seventy, now flocked to join Allen’s new militia. Looking on from New York City, Cadwallader Colden, again the acting governor of New York as he awaited Tryon’s arrival, was incensed at Allen’s raids. It was when, during an earlier incumbency, Colden had warned that he would send in Redcoats and drive the settlers back into the Green Mountains that the Grants militiamen had proudly given themselves the nickname Green Mountain Boys. Only Allen wore a distinctive uniform. The Boys, as they were instantly known, simply stuck a fir twig in their hats to identify themselves. In a dozen towns, then a score, the ranks of the nearest company of Boys swelled to scores, sometimes hundreds, whenever Allen and his squad of men rode through. And because of their vigilance, the farmers on the Grants now were able to harvest their hay and corn and sow their winter wheat without fear of predation by sheriffs’ posses.
THIS MILITARY SHOW of arms came in direct defiance of the latest proclamation from New York. Because of the rout of the New York surveyor at Clarendon and the raid on Hutcheson’s farm at New Perth, King’s Counsel James Duane believed he had enough evidence to take up the case of Allen and the Green Mountain Boys with the new royal governor as soon as he arrived in New York City. Furious, Governor Tryon declared that Allen and eight of his lieutenants were to be officially outlawed, with rewards on their heads. Tryon ordered the arrest of Allen and his militia captains, including Remember Baker, Robert Cochran, and half a dozen others. Certain that his sheriffs would be reluctant to pursue them, Tryon placed a reward of £20 (about $3,000) on each leader of the Boys and ordered New York officials to report to him for severe punishment the name of every individual protester. Such a list would surely have helped him discover that some of the New Hampshire Grant settlers had been active in the tenant rebellions in Dutchess County, New York, in the 1760s. Many of the squatters on Livingston Manor who had been driven back into New England were now eagerly serving under a new leader, Ethan Allen.
As the year 1772 began, Allen conducted a defiant New Year’s Day review of his troops in Bennington. Many of the companies were led by his kinsmen, including his cousin Remember Baker of Arlington, his cousin Seth Warner of Bennington, and his cousin Ebenezer Allen of Poultney. Someone had somehow scrounged a rusty old French cannon from an abandoned fort on the Hoosick River. Reviewing his Boys, Colonel Allen wore his new, dark-green provincial militia uniform with gold buttons and epaulets, his sword and brace of pistols, and his by now legendary beaver tricorn hat. The forest green he chose provided an appropriate contrast to the scarlet favored by New York. After the military review on the Bennington common ended, an Albany man named Benjamin Buck stopped by the Catamount Tavern, where he found Allen and his friends reading Governor Tryon’s proclamation. Somebody asked Buck what he thought the outcome of the land dispute would be. Buck replied, “My opinion is that the York government will hold all the lands.”
Apparently recognizing the man, Allen came up behind him and hit him three times. “You are a Damn Bastard of old Munro’s,” he said, alluding to the New York justice of the peace. “We shall make a hell of His House and burn him in it, and every son of a bitch that will take his part.” Echoing the line that Allen had first heard at Albany after the eviction trial, Buck insisted, “If it should be the right of New Hampshire, might would overcome right.”
“How can you be such a damn fool?” Allen asked. “Have we not always overcome them, here and one hundred miles to the northward? If they shall ever come again, we shall drive them two hundred miles and send them to Hell.” At that, one of Allen’s captains loudly read the governor’s name on the proclamation. As if addressing the absent official, Allen boomed, “So your name is Tryon, tri on and be Damn.”5
SO DEEPLY ENSCONCED was Allen now in the Vermont backcountry that he gave less and less attention to his native Connecticut. He sold the rest of his interests in Connecticut, including some 177 acres in Cornwall, all that was left of his paternal inheritance. With the £23 (about $4,600 in today’s currency) in hard money he realized, he galloped back to the Grants to pay off lands he had under deposit in Hubbardton and Castleton. Then, at his cousin’s house at Poultney, he huddled with his trusted lieutenants, his cousin Remember and Robert Cochran. Far from being shaken by the reward on their heads, the three-some decided to make up a wanted poster of their own:
£25 Reward.—Whereas James Duane and John Kempe, of New York, have by their menaces and threats greatly disturbed the public peace and repose of the honest peasants of Bennington and the settlements to the northward, which are now and ever have been in the peace of God and the King, and are patriotic and liege subjects of Geo. the 3rd. Any person that will apprehend these common disturbers, viz: James Duane and John Kempe, and bring them to Landlord Fay’s at Bennington [the Catamount Tavern] shall have £15 reward for James Duane and £10 reward for John Kempe, paid by
ETHAN ALLEN
REMEMBER BAKER
ROBERT COCHRAN
Dated Poultney
Feb. 5, 1772
Offering lower rewards than the £20 price for each of their captures, Allen and his lieutenants were mocking the New York officials as worth less than a Vermonter. Allen was also lampooning the idea of a reward by suggesting that royal officials had to be kidnapped and dragged to a barroom in the woods for justice to be rendered. Taking the poster off to be printed in Hartford, he spread copies all over the Grants. He was already used to the trip: more and more, he was appealing to a largely literate Congregational constituency through their favorite print medium, the Courant, which was widely read and respected on the Grants as well as all over Connecticut.6
IN MARCH OF 1772, as Allen prepared to leave for Connecticut, he sent Remember Baker to his new home in Arlington and Robert Cochran back to Bennington to watch for trouble. It came soon enough. When New York Justice Munro heard from a pro– New York neighbor of Baker’s that he had come home, Munro decided he would collect the £20 reward for Baker’s arrest himself. Rounding up fifteen other Scottish veterans living on New York grants, Munro’s posse surrounded Baker’s house at night, broke down the front door with an ax, and captured Baker in his bed. Fighting back, both Remember and his wife, Desire, were wounded as they were dragged out of their bed. Munro chopped off Remember’s thumb with his ax. He left Desire lying naked and injured on the floor as he dragged Baker off in a sleigh toward Albany. Only slightly hurt, Desire rushed to the cabin of a neighbor who, in turn, roused one of the local Boys. In minutes, a company of the Boys was riding after the sleigh. They overtook it after a thirty-mile chase through the snow. As soon as Munro’s men saw the Boys approaching, they fled, leaving Munro and his deputy to be captured and a semiconscious Baker to be taken home in the sleigh. When Allen learned of the attack, he wrote it up as “this wicked, inhuman, most barbarous, infamous, cruel, villainous and thieving act.” He sent his account off to Hartford to be printed in the Courant, where he now launched a one-man newspaper campaign against New York’s “massacring G——Tryon” and his council, those “mercenary, intriguing, monopolizing men, an infamous fraternity of diabolical plotters.”7
AT A TIME when colonists throughout British America were riveted to the latest weekly installments in the pamphlet wars over British policies between radicals and loyalists, Allen devoted much of the spring and summer of 1772 to winning a wide readership on the Grants, at the same time gaining a following throughout Connecticut. In strong, dramatic prose, he penned five essays and paid to have them published in the Courant. He asked his readers basic questions that touched on landownership and the extent of royal authority and could have been construed by British officials as seditious:
When New York, by the handle of jurisdiction, aims at the property of the inhabitants, and that flagrantly, can they expect obedience? Can the New York scribblers, by the art of printing, alter wrong into right? Or make any person of good sense believe that a great number of hard laboring peasants, going through the fatigues of settlement, and cultivation of a howling wilderness, are a community of riotous, disorderly, licentious, treasonable persons?
Allen summed up before the jury of his readers with an emotional appeal to his fellow New Englanders. He had become the voice of the oppressed “women sobbing and lamenting, children crying and men pierced to the heart with sorrow and indignation at the approaching tyranny of New York.” His Courant essays, signed “Land of Truth and Reason” and “Friend of Liberty and Prosperity,” were immensely popular, providing underpinning for the extralegal actions of the Green Mountain Boys with political argument and justification. The instant popularity of Allen’s forceful, if bombastic, prose prompted him to begin writing his first book-length work of political propaganda, the 201-page A Brief Narrative of the Proceedings of the Government of New-York Relative to Their Obtaining the Jurisdiction of That Large District of Land to the Westward from Connecticut River.
Neither brief nor a narrative, Allen’s tome introduced a sophisticated new argument while refuting New York’s claim to the Grants in detail. Since the disputed lands had not been settled after King Charles II granted them to the Duke of York in 1664, Allen maintained, they reverted to the Crown. Thus, the Crown’s representative, New Hampshire’s royal governor Benning Wentworth, had every right to grant the land west of the Connecticut River all the way to the New York border, twenty miles east of the Hudson River. This was made manifest when the Crown asked New Hampshire to take over maintaining and garrisoning the only fort between the Connecticut and the Hudson rivers, Fort Dummer at present-day Brattleboro, to defend the region. If New Hampshire had the responsibility of defending these lands, it also had the right to grant them to a protective mantle of settlers who bought and occupied them in good faith. “Common people are not capable of judging upon a higher principle,” he wrote. They should not be punished for trusting the authority or the legality of the royal governor of New Hampshire to sell those lands.
No one had ever put the case for leaving the settlers unmolested on the New Hampshire Grants more clearly. But, for the first time, Allen was going beyond jurisdictional arguments. He was demonstrating publicly and in print his resentment of self-serving gentlemen of money and power who were using their influence to take advantage of the powerlessness of the common people. Hardworking farmers on the Grants, he averred, should not be exploited by greedy aristocrats who controlled the laws and courts. The settlers had no choice but to resist:
The inhabitants being thus drove to the extremity of either quitting their possessions or resisting the sheriff and his posse. In this state of desparacy they put on fortitude and…defended their possessions; and the sheriff with his posse returned to their own land without any bloodshed….
The struggle on the Grants pitted a large number of ordinary “families settled upon the land” against “that crafty, defying and monopolizing government” of New York. In letters to the editor of the Courant between late March and early July of 1772 and, in a pamphlet too long to be considered anything but a book, Allen unabashedly projected himself into the front rank of resistance to British imperial policy in New England—without firing a single shot.8
IN EARLY MARCH OF 1772, Allen still found time to compose a long and careful letter to a New York justice of the peace, Colonel Philip Skene. He sent it to Skene’s palatial manor, Skenesboro, at present-day Whitehall, the head of navigation of Lake Champlain. A Scots major in the British army during the French and Indian War, Skene had received a direct Crown grant of thirty thousand acres. His indentured servants had built Skene a stone mansion, sawmills, docks, and stores that supplied the five hundred New York settlers living in the region. Skene cruised the lake in an armed schooner, the George, delivering lumber and ironwork all the way to Quebecois settlements on the Richelieu River. Skene and his family lived in baronial splendor. He had asked New York to designate Skenesboro the seat of newly created Charlotte County, with Skene as its justice of the peace. The county’s leading citizens dined at his table. Ethan Allen, obviously a rising leader, had also dined there frequently.
To both men, it was clearly Skene’s duty to arrest anyone who was declared an outlaw by New York, but Skene liked Allen and, under the code of honor of the time, found it difficult to arrest a guest. Late in 1771, he sent him a note by way of his cousin Ebenezer: Allen must leave the Grants and “repair to Connecticut” or Skene would have to arrest him. From Salisbury, where he had gone to sell his holdings, Allen fired back a letter to Skene:
I Now Inform You that I Cannot flee to Connecticut. I have a Spirit above that. I shall stay in Your Neighbourhood I hope Till I Remove to the Kingdom of heaven. Your Generous & sotiable treatment to me when at Your house Prompts me to write to You Tho Your Station in Life is Honourable and Commands Submition from Those of an inferior rank Yet it is your Personal Merit that Demands esteam.
Allen was tipping his hat here, not doffing it: he was self-assured and no flatterer. To answer Skene at all was bold. Allen was making it plain that he was writing not for himself but as head of the settlers. Calling Skene “the Most Consummate politician” yet one who “acts from Generous and brave principles,” he “Infer’d [Skene] would Not be an Adversary to the Setlers.” Allen had never had “Ground to Distrust Your friendship Either to me or them.” Writing as an equal, he was refusing deference:
I Do Not esteam You Merely Because You are Col Skane but Because You act the Honourable part. [A] man is Either famous or Infamous in Proportion as Either Brave or Mean are the principles of his Conduct. [B]y this Rule Undoubtedly You Will pass Sentence on my Past and future Conduct. [I]f by this Rule I shall be Denominated Disorderly and Riotous I Desire You would be my adversary but if Otherways my friend sr, the law of Self preservation Urges me to Defend my Property.
In his most courageous exposition to date, Allen, by risking to appear arrogant, actually was strengthening his friendship with Skene, who could see that Allen was maturing into a man of stature, a leader of his people. Allen ended on a confidently jocose note:
You have heard many accounts of my Conduct Called by the Name of Riatous Disorderly &ce and it is probable before Next Campaign is out You may hear more Such Sort of News. I am Informed Governour Tryon has Advertised me and some Others and Offered Considerable Reward to have us Delivered at New York But a Late account from there Informs me that by virtue of a Late Law in [that] Province they are Not Allowed to hang any man before they have ketched him.9
AS SOON AS the snows had abated and the road was dry enough, Allen opened the 1772 campaign with a beating and a bet. He rode from Bennington to Arlington, gunning for Benjamin Spencer, a New Yorker who lived in Clarendon. Spencer later wrote to James Duane in Albany that Allen had ridden into Arlington with “twelve or fifteen of the most blackguard fellows he can get double armed in order to protect him.” Soon after Allen’s arrival in Arlington, as New York Justice of the Peace Munro reported in another affidavit to Duane, “the rascally Yankees spoiled my best hat and sword coat with their pumpkin sticks.” While they were thrashing him, they were also swearing: “It is shameful to hear the sentiments of the wicked ones amongst them. They even go so far as to deny a Divine Being and will not suffer a Bible in their houses. Whatever can be expected from such men but to serve the Devil.” More alarming to New York authorities was Munro’s afterthought: “They have great many friends in the County of Albany and particularly in the City of Albany, which encourages them in their wickedness.”10
The accuracy of Munro’s intelligence became evident a few weeks later when, in April of 1772, Allen accepted a wager with his lieutenants at the Catamount. Someone dared Allen to leave a copy of his poster advertising rewards for the capture of Duane and Kempe in a well-known Albany tavern. Forthwith, Allen rode the sixty miles from Bennington to Albany, hitched his horse in front of Benedict’s Tavern, strode into the taproom, and ordered a bowl of punch. The patron instantly recognized him as a crowd gathered around Allen, who downed the punch, handed the poster to Benedict, bade him farewell, and galloped away unscathed. But there were New York sympathizers present who coveted New York’s reward money, and Allen narrowly escaped capture soon afterward. While he and a friend, Eli Robards, visited a tavern in Bridport on the Vermont shore, a squad of Redcoats from nearby Fort Amherst, tipped off by an informant, burst into the tavern to search for him. But first they ordered dinner. Apparently, they had no idea what Ethan Allen looked like. After the meal, Allen, an expert at mixing punch, offered the soldiers a bowl, then regaled them with stories. Toasting the king and queen, among others, he helped them forget their mission. Once they were deeply into their cups, the landlord’s daughter, who was enamored of Allen, helped him and Robards out a back window and handed them their muskets and pistols. They rode through the forest, avoiding the shore road, until they reached the safety of the house of a friend, Paul Moore, in Shoreham—opposite Fort Ticonderoga.
THE GAME WAS obviously becoming more dangerous. Not everyone on the Grants was amused by Allen’s escapades. Some settlers and speculators had decided that, sooner or later, mighty New York with its Redcoats and sheriffs’ posses was bound to prevail. Tryon, the latest royal governor, was offering a half-price sale on the fees for confirmatory grants. The owners of some fifty-six townships, predominantly on the east side of the Green Mountains in the lower Connecticut River valley, sought confirmation of their grants under Tryon’s half-fee plan. At the same time, Tryon, in direct defiance of the king’s Privy Council order of 1767 order to await further study by the Crown, began making major New York grants that overlapped existing New Hampshire grants. Of the six grants he made, one was to himself. He pocketed the customary fees from patentees of the other five.
GOVERNOR TRYON DANGLED an olive branch in front of the town fathers of Bennington. In March of 1772, he invited them, with the express exclusion of Ethan Allen and the other outlawed officers of the Green Mountain Boys, to come to New York City to present their case personally to him and his council. Some Grants settlers in and around Bennington had become jittery. They welcomed Tryon’s overture, especially since rumors were flying that Tryon was on his way up the Hudson with a regiment of Redcoats. Many of the Bennington settlers were refugees from confrontations they had lost to a New York governor and Redcoats during the Hudson Valley land riots half a dozen years earlier. As tensions mounted, the Grants committees of safety met at the Catamount Tavern with Allen and his captains. There were evident signs of growing friction between town elders on the committees and Allen over his aggressive tactics. Some of the white-haired committeemen wanted to send a flag of truce to Tyron. Allen accused them of timidity in the face of force. He insisted that Tryon would respect only a show of strength. Allen finally prevailed. The majority of committeemen pledged to go on supporting the Green Mountain Boys, but several of the Bennington elders did not want to be connected with any military preparations. They walked out.
Expecting an attack, Allen and his captains brought two cannon, a mortar, and ammunition they had found in an abandoned fort from Williamstown, Massachusetts, and reorganized their companies to defend Bennington. Worried, the town leader James Breakenridge rode to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to implore Governor Wentworth to resolve the crisis short of violence, to intervene with the king to confirm their titles and return the Grants to New Hampshire jurisdiction. Like Breakenridge, Bennington’s conservatives could not know that Wentworth had already abandoned them in return for favors from Tryon. But support for the Grants settlers now came from a new quarter. The Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, founder and president of Dartmouth College, had embraced the settlers’ cause when he moved his Indian mission school to the new town of Dresden (today’s Hanover) on the east bank of the Connecticut River. When Wheelock heard that Governor Wentworth, instead of appealing to London on behalf of the settlers, now was telling them to appeal directly without his help or his influence at court, he dispatched a letter to Wentworth demanding an explanation. Wentworth sent him a copy of his obsequious letter to Tryon in which he criticized the settlers for being “so indolent and backward in their own affairs, so covetous in money matters, & so unconnected with one another.” He told Wheelock in this private letter that he “saw no prospect of success.” The Grants jurisdiction would remain with New York. But he still contended that, in “propriety,” the settlers already farming the Grants should remain unmolested.11
At a June 1772 meeting at the Catamount Tavern, as Allen urged preparations for defense, Bennington’s conservative committeemen decided on a two-pronged strategy. They would accept Tryon’s invitation to travel to New York City and make their case before him; at the same time, they would send two emissaries to London to appeal directly to the king. On June 19, Stephen Fay and his son, Jonas, left Bennington in a rainstorm for the back country ride to the Hudson to sail down to New York City on the sloop Albany. Emblematically, the sloop ran aground three miles south of Albany. As the Fays waited to sail on, they visited Sheriff Ten Eyck, who had led the 1770 raid on Breakenridge’s Bennington farm. After a six-day passage marked by thunderstorms, they reached New York City and, on the morning of June 26, visited Governor Tryon at his country house. They presented him with papers that included a long letter signed by Allen and three of his outlawed captains, Seth Warner, Remember Baker, and Robert Cochran. Tryon and his councillors must have writhed as they had to sit and listen while Stephen Fay read aloud Allen’s letter to them.
Allen went far beyond a perfunctory recitation of the Grants dispute. He enlarged on his Connecticut Courant essays, stressing his growing belief that the increasingly violent struggle on the Grants was part of a wider clash between a small group of wealthy landowners and a much larger community of industrious farmers and their families. It was a struggle between hardworking yeomen and socially and politically prominent aristocrats. This “certain number of designing men” used political connections to secure patents from New York’s governors for lands on the Grants that were already settled and then, without any labor, used the courts to dispossess settlers “who had already spent their meager savings” in bringing their farms out of a wilderness state into one of fruitful fields, gardens, and orchards. Such evictions as he had seen in court in Albany a year before would lead to “universal slavery, poverty and horror.” New York’s officials were shattering the social compact, which promised protection in exchange for the allegiance between the people and their rulers that was the essence of civilization.
Here, Allen was enunciating John Locke’s social contract theory, much as Jefferson would in the Declaration of Independence some four years later. In a simplified version of seventeenth-century philosopher Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, Allen argued that no individual or group of men could be “supposed to be under any particular compact or Law, except it pre-supposeth that Law will protect such person or community of persons in his or their properties.” Otherwise, the citizen “would, by Law, be bound to be accessary to his own ruin and destruction, which is inconsistent with the Law of self-preservation.”
Shifting from Locke to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Allen argued that this law was “natural as well as eternal” and could “never be abrogated by the Law of men.” On the Grants, “law has been rather used as a tool rather (than a rule of equity) to cheat us out of the country, we have made vastly valuable by labour and expence of our fortunes.” Accusing some of the men now listening to his words of being “a set of artful, wicked men seeking our ruin to enrich themselves,” Allen charged that “under colour of punishing rioters,” and posing as zealous upholders of “loyalty and veneration for good government,” the New York landlords were out to “rob the inhabitants of their country.” Concluding with a burst of Rousseauian rhetoric, he demanded,
Can any man, in the exercise of reason, make himself believe that a number of Attorneys and other gentlemen, with all their tackle of ornaments, and compliments, and French finesse, together with their boasted legality of law,…have just right to the lands, labours and fortunes of the New-Hampshire settlers?12
Even as the Fays were sailing to New York City, Allen unleashed another editorial salvo in the Connecticut Courant. His writings were now being read aloud in taverns and homes all over the Grants. He sharply contrasted settlers with the “wicked, inhuman, most barbarous, infamous, cruel, villainous and thievish agents of New York.” He detailed Justice Munro’s capture of Remember Baker in his bed in March, describing in lurid detail how the Yorkers had smashed down the Bakers’ door and hacked off Remember’s thumb while “ruffians” were busy “mauling, beating and bruising his children.” By overtaking the New Yorkers who had strapped Baker to a sled, Allen and the Boys were being “loyal and faithful subjects to the Crown of Great Britain, whose banner they mean evermore to live and die under.”13
But when the Fays returned from New York City, Allen’s impassioned inveighing seemed pointless. At a July 15 mass meeting in Bennington’s Congregational meetinghouse, the Fays reported that Governor Tryon had sworn he had never seen a copy of their petition to the king, had never intended to raise an armed force against them, and had no desire to dispossess anyone from his farm. The Fays read aloud a report from Tryon’s council detailing New York’s claim to the Grants and expressing “great tenderness to a deluded people who are in danger of forfeiting the favor of the Crown by resisting the authority of the laws.” The council, the Fays said, had recommended that Tryon cease prosecutions for eviction until the king made a final decision. Meanwhile, settlers could quietly possess their farms. To Allen’s dismay, the Bennington settlers voted unanimously to accept Tryon’s terms. In celebration of what appeared to be a peaceful victory, Seth Warner and his Bennington militia, who had sided with the town’s more conservative elders in recent months, fired salutes with their muskets and their twin cannon. Everyone drank toast after toast to the king, to Tryon, to the New York council, to “universal peace and plenty, liberty and property.” The long crisis appeared to be over.14
PEACE LASTED LESS than a month. While the Fays were negotiating with Governor Tryon and his council in New York, Allen discovered that Tryon’s promises did not match his actions. He learned that Tryon’s rumored attack, which had the effect of cooling Bennington’s enthusiasm for armed resistance, was merely a deployment of Redcoats up the Hudson on their way to reinforce the British fort in Detroit. The delegates to the Bennington meeting of July 15 had scarcely decided to call a convention of ten towns, this time at Manchester, when Ethan heard that New York’s surveyor, William Cockburn, chased out of Clarendon a year earlier, was back on the Grants, this time running lines along the Winooski River. Captains Baker and Warner rode north at once at the head of a company of the Boys. Along the way, they discovered that a settlement of New Yorkers had taken root along Otter Creek for the second time in a year. Presenting a New York patent, Colonel John Reid’s Scots armed tenants had driven off New Hampshire settlers already farming the land. This time, when Remember Baker arrived, one of the New York tenants asked him by what authority he acted. Baker said the Scots “lived out of the bounds of the law.” Brandishing his musket, he added, “This is the law,” and then held up the hand without a thumb. “This was his [Munro’s] law.” After allowing the tenants to carry off their belongings, the Boys set fire to the cabins, pulled down the gristmill, broke the millstones, and threw the pieces into Otter Creek, then trampled the corn with their horses’ hoofs. Then they hurried north in time to capture the surveyor Cockburn. As they prepared to punish him, they learned of the truce with Tryon and released him. Governor Tryon was not so forgiving. On August 11, he fired off a letter to Bennington accusing the town’s leaders of being “disingenuous and dishonorable.” He ordered them to reinstall Reid and the Scots tenants or face the “fatal consequence that must follow so manifest a breach of public confidence.”15
At a second Manchester convention, on August 27, at Allen’s urging, the delegates approved a letter pointing out to New York officials that the incidents had taken place before word of the Grants had reached them but insisting that New York’s latest encroachments were “a manifest infringement on [their] property,” like so many that had been “all along a bone of contention.” This was a stronger stance than the Bennington convention had risked, but Allen still saw it as straddling when the delegates from ten towns to the Manchester convention pledged to protect their property without “insult[ing] government authority.” The convention then voted to send two delegates to London to lobby for confirmation of their grants.
This latest attempt at moderation fell apart on September 29, less than a month later, when Remember Baker and Ira Allen, at the head of a surveying team of the Boys, found Benjamin Stevens, New York’s deputy surveyor of lands, with a team of his fifteen armed men violating the agreement by again trying to run survey lines near Waterbury on the Winooski River. Ira’s version of what next transpired differed from the affidavit James Duane prepared for Stevens. According to Ira Allen,
There being a truce…we thought it would not be politic to inflict corporial punishment on Stevens. He and his men were dismissed, on pain of death never to come within the district of the New Hampshire Grants again.
According to Duane’s document, Ethan Allen was part of the punitive party: Duane had never heard of any other Allen. He quoted the surveyor’s description of “the gang,” depicting Remember Baker as “a tall slim fellow with a sandy complection.” On October 21, Duane took the affidavit before Governor Tryon and his council. Duane averred that Baker, Allen, and five other persons had held Stevens and two assistants, who were “without any provocation stript by them of their property and Effects, insulted and threatened and [one assistant] thrown into the Fire, Bound and Burned and otherwise beat and abused in a Cruel manner.” Governor Tryon immediately issued a warrant for the arrest of Allen and Baker and offered a £100 reward for their capture.16
AS THE BORDER WARFARE resumed and intensified in the summer of 1773, Ethan Allen led one hunderd Green Mountain Boys to New Haven Falls, five miles north of the Middlebury Falls, and erected what Ira Allen described as a “block fort”—a blockhouse—to discourage Scottish settlers from New York from penetrating one of the few known passes into the central valleys of the Grants. Then, “for personal safety,” he continued,
Capt. Baker and I thought proper to erect a block fort near the falls of the Onion [Winooski] river, twenty by thirty two feet, every stick of timber was at least eight inches thick. In the second story, were 32 port holes for small arms. The roof was so constructed, in case of fire, we could throw it off—the second story jutted four inches over the other, so that we could fire down, or throw water to put out fire; and the fort was built over a boiling spring for certainty of water. We made double doors, blocks, for the windows, and every part proof against small arms.17
THE SEESAWING LAND WAR would go on forever unless someone came up with a more constructive solution. Ethan Allen thought he had one. The Crown could create a new province between New York and New Hampshire. This was not a far-fetched possibility. At Whitehall Place in London, the Board of Trade and Plantations was pondering half a dozen such schemes for creating new provinces out of the spoils of the French and Indian War. At the southern end of Lake Champlain, Colonel Skene was urging the creation of Skenesboro as the seat of a new county. It was Allen who proposed to Skene that he enlarge the scope of his undertaking, go to London and petition for the creation of a new province based at British forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. On their way back from the Manchester convention, Allen and Jehiel Hawley of Arlington, who had been chosen at the meeting to go to London with James Breakenridge to present the settlers’ latest petition, stopped off at Amos Bird’s house in Castleton. The three men all knew Skene well. He had asked them to help circulate his own petition to make his manor the county seat of the new county of Charlotte, named after the queen.
From Bird’s house, Allen wrote Skene to tell him he was reluctant to help New York create the new county on the Grants because it would conflict with the settlers’ petition for annexation to New Hampshire. Skene liked Allen’s idea to create a new province. As a result, Allen, Bird, and Skene met at Skene’s manor to draw up their proposal. The province of Ticonderoga and Crown Point was to encompass all of New York north of the Mohawk River on both sides of Lake Champlain, including the New Hampshire Grants. Three years later, the Crown approved Allen’s scheme, but the bureaucratic wheels in London had turned too slowly. Skene was on the high seas with his commission as royal governor of the new province when the American Revolution broke out. A storm diverted his ship. Instead of landing in New York, Skene landed in Philadelphia during the Second Continental Congress. He was promptly jailed.
WHILE COLONEL COMMANDANT Ethan Allen stayed close to his headquarters at the Catamount Tavern in Bennington, his youngest brother, Ira, roamed the west side of the Green Mountains with their cousin Remember. A skilled surveyor, Baker taught Ira all he had ever learned about the craft in only one week. Yet his transit and compass and chains gave Ira the tools he needed to pursue something like a pyramiding scheme of acquiring large tracts of land with little or no money.
Small, wiry, and wily, Ira Allen had sold his share of his father’s Cornwall, Connecticut, farm when he was only nineteen. With the cash, he went to the New Hampshire Grants, just weeks after the Albany ejectment trials and the first meeting of the Green Mountain Boys. While he astutely sensed the jitteriness of absentee speculators and settlers alike, he was still a minor. He was ignoring the advice of his businesslike brother Heman when he purchased his first proprietor’s rights in over one thousand acres in hilly Poultney, where Ethan and Remember already owned rights to considerable land. In the course of the next year, Ira made shoestring purchases, borrowing and making small deposits as he wheeled and dealt. He put deposits on more than 10,000 acres of Hubbardton land owned by Isaac Searl of Williamstown, Massachusetts. Ira’s silent partner in the deal was probably Remember. The purchase price was only £64, about $10,000 today. Then Ira purchased four more rights, another 1,400 acres, in Castleton. After buying these lands, Ira and Remember decided to go north and survey the Winooski River valley. They had heard so much about it from Ethan and from Salisbury neighbors who had pursued French and Indian hostage takers nearly ten years earlier. Heman warned his younger brother not to take too much of a speculative plunge into the river valley, worried that Ira was operating on rather shaky credit. Ignoring him, Ira bought fifty-two more proprietary rights on credit and tied up another six rights in the region.
But Ira needed cash. To keep his land schemes solvent, he persuaded his brother to form the Onion River Land Company, organized by Ethan and including Heman, Levi, Zimri, and Ira Allen and Remember Baker as partners. The partners would, at one time or another, own fully 200,000 acres of the land between the Green Mountains and Lake Champlain. While the family members that led, first, the revolt against New York jurisdiction and then against the British in the opening weeks of the American Revolution were actually cash poor, they were rich in nerve, operating on badly strained credit and amassing land, on paper at least, by clever tactics and, on one occasion, by outright trickery.
Along with Remember, Ira made a contract to survey the township of Mansfield, in present-day Lamoille County, which, at the time, included little more than the steep slopes of 4,400-foot Mount Mansfield. In the autumn of 1772, against the brilliant gold backdrop of the sugar maples on the mountain slopes, the two cousins set to work dragging their chains up and down the steep slopes. Ira by this time owned about one-third of Mansfield Township, but their surveying revealed there was not enough arable soil on his tract to make one good farm. With Remember’s jokes about his prowess at choosing farmland ringing in Ira’s ears, the cousins explored south along the mountain range through Waterbury, Middlesex, and Moretown, where Ira had bought other land. By December of 1772, they returned to Poultney to find Ethan, and, as winter set in, Ethan and Ira set out on a hunting trip, tracking deer through the fresh snows. Even then, Ira was keeping a sharp eye out for vacant land near Tinmouth at the headwaters of the Poultney River. He now decided to sell his land around Hubbardton in the south to concentrate his efforts in the north. Returning to Heman’s store in Salisbury, Connecticut, he drew up the survey notes and map of Mansfield Township and went on to Sharon, Connecticut, where most of the Mansfield proprietors lived. He shaded the truth of the township’s land values by misnaming the varieties of trees growing there. Disguising the poor quality of the soil for farming, he was leaving the impression that there were valuable forests that would yield profitable timber and potash. He later wrote that he sought and found slow-witted investors, persuading them he wanted to buy more Mansfield land from them. Then, when his rights were talked up around Sharon, he agreed to sell back the twenty rights he had acquired and was eager to dump—in addition to £90 (about $17,000) for the surveying work he had done.
Ira Allen, before turning twenty-one, owned outright or had placed deposit on thirty-six rights, nearly 13,000 acres, including about 1,000 acres of mountainous land in Bolton, Moretown, Duxbury, and Middlesex townships that he wanted to unload so that he could buy more fertile lands along Lake Champlain. He had tied up this hill country land from one Samuel Averill of New Milford, Connecticut, paying with a promissory note for £150 (about $30,000). To carry out this maneuver, he paid a call on relatives of Averill’s, who lived near Milford. Averill learned from his sons that young Allen was in town and summoned him to tell him about the Winooski Valley lands. Ira had been busy talking up the rocky mountain lands. Averill said he would tear up the £150 debt if Ira would reconvey the mountainous lands to him. Ira refused because he wanted to make a profit, he said.
In his first advertisement in the Connecticut Courant, Ethan called the family venture “Ethan Allen and Company.” They had to move quickly now. Ethan, Heman, and Ira, with the proceeds of their collective business ventures, Heman’s collateral and Ethan’s clout as colonel commandant of the Green Mountain Boys giving them strong credit, rode nearly two hundred miles and back again to White Plains, New York. The Onion River Land Company had acquired the entire thirty-mile-long Winooski Valley as well as other prime Lake Champlain front lands in present-day Shelburne and Colchester. Did the Allens know that their nemesis in New York, Attorney James Duane, also claimed much of this same land, including a township Duane called Deerfield (present-day Williston), about 35,000 acres lying on a river called Onion River?
TO CROSS OVER into New York with rewards on their heads, Ethan, Ira, and Remember traveled disguised as British officers, armed with pistols and swords, supposedly on their way from Canada to New York City to sail home to London. To people they passed on the road south, Ira later wrote, they made “no small parade.” Heman, for whom it was safe to travel in New York, went separately as if to buy goods for his store, as he often did: he was well known and trusted in the region. At an inn in White Plains, Heman contacted Samuel Burling, the Quaker merchant whose group had bought the rights to the lands at the mouth of the Winooski from Benning Wentworth a decade earlier, and asked now to set up a meeting. Meanwhile, Ethan, his brother, and cousin took rooms in the tavern. At their meeting, Burling sold the Allens 45,000 acres along with shares several of his Quaker friends were happy to unload. After three days, Ethan and the two “officers” were ready to leave, but Heman could only persuade the tavern owner to let him approach the would-be officers by buying them a “liberal” bowl of punch. Revealing their identities as they left, they hurried back to Connecticut while a peddler rode pell-mell to New York, hoping to get a reward for them.
After dashing to the safety of Connecticut, on their way home to Salisbury, they rode north until they were opposite Quaker Hill, then galloped into New York again to visit an old family friend, the Quaker preacher Benjamin Ferris. Surprised that the Allens were packing pistols, Ferris asked, “What doth thee do with these things?” “Nothing amongst our friends,” Ethan answered, explaining that they had formed the Green Mountain Boys to protect their property, their neighbors, and themselves from the New York authorities. Entertaining the Allens with a splendid dinner, Ferris hired Ira to locate and survey rights he owned near the Winooski River. He sold one of the parcels of land to Ethan and paid Ira seven of his fourteen rights in Shelburne for his surveying services. When word of the Allens’ bold intrusion reached Albany, as Ira later reported,18 James Duane dutifully made out one more affidavit but discouraged the sheriff from pursuing the Vermonters:
James Duain Esqr. observed that we were daring fellows, and no doubt well mounted, & had given this alarm to raise a party to pursue us, and had gone directly out of the colony in hopes of being pursued, to laugh at our pursuers, & that it was in vain to pursue Green Mountain Boys on their guard.
Flushed with the success of their mission, Ethan, Heman, and Remember rode back to Salisbury to begin selling their company’s most valuable land. But Ira, still determined to dispose of his hardscrabble Mount Mansfield acreage, rode on to New Milford for another crack at Samuel Averill. He found only Mrs. Averill at home. He told her he was planning to build a road along the Winooski River and he expected Averill to “bear his share of the expense.” Pretending to be exhausted from his travels, he accepted her offer to show him to a bedroom before Averill came home. The room shared a thin unplastered wall with the Averills, and he could hear Mrs. Averill tell her husband about the expensive road-building project. The next morning, he brought up the road again over breakfast, offering to settle if Averill would tear up the £150 note and deed him ten rights to Middlesex he owned. Ethan would later boast that this was “the very town I chose—thus by two contracts I got ten rights of land [about 3,500 acres] without paying one shilling for a wide, fertile swath along the Winooski River, all his own.”19
The Middlesex lands eventually turned Ira a handsome profit, selling for £500 (about $100,000 today), but not until the Revolution was over and he could produce a clear title. While Ira was bamboozling Averill, his partners in the new land company were busily selling the choicest section of the Winooski Valley to several of the leading investors of Salisbury. Once again a respectable citizen in the town where he had had his first business success as an iron foundry owner and then been so unceremoniously expelled eight years earlier, Ethan must have relished one particular transaction there. To Colonel Thomas Chittenden, head of the Litchfield County militia, and to his second-in-command, Major Jonathan Spafford, and Abijah Pratt, the Onion River Land Company sold 1,236 acres along the Winooski River, at present-day Williston, “for the sum of £500 current money of the Province of New York.” (Connecticut would not have its own currency until the 1770s.) One-half of the land was to be prime intervale land; the rest, wooded upland. Later, Chittenden bought another 2,000 acres. He already owned some 350 acres across the river in Jericho. Chittenden had made good his vow of a decade ago to someday acquire his “paradise.” The upland, the intervale, with the magnificent view of Camel’s Hump, was now at last his. “Here I will build my home and my sons shall be settled around me,” he had sworn. Chittenden and his friends bonded themselves to start clearing the land within a year and to hire three men to work, except in winter, until the land was cleared. Within a year, with his wife and ten children, he would leave Connecticut and trek to the Winooski Valley, home ever since to his descendants in the county that now bears his name. That name and his purchase then gave Ethan Allen and his land company a new kind of credit and respectability, as well as a quick return on their best investment ever.20
AFTER SELLING THE Chittenden group such a large share of his land company’s choice acreage, Ethan Allen was in an expansive mood. He hurried south to Hartford to his printer’s shop, something of a second home by now, to place his first real estate ad. Calling his enterprise “Ethan Allen and Company,” he declared that the tract contained 45,000 acres. The Winooski was a bountiful river, “with a diversity of sorts of excellent fish particularly the salmon,” Allen wrote, in his best real estate prose. The river was bordered by wide, lush littoral intervales of deep soil with “little or no timber” to clear, except a “scattering [of] buttonwood, elm, and butternut trees. The land rises from the intervale, in graceful oval hills, and spreads into swailes of choice mowing ground.” This was, Allen believed, the finest farmland he had ever seen, and he knew how to appeal to farmers, even if in Lockean terms:
There is no tract of land of so great quantity between New York and the government of Canada, that in a state of nature can justly be denominated equally good…. A number of men are already gone to cut a road to the premises from Otter Creek which is about twenty miles, and a settlement will forthwith be carried into execution. The land will be sold at a moderate price.21
In this ad, Ethan directed potential buyers to contact himself (listed first) or Ira or Zimri or cousin Remember “on the premises” or Heman or Levi at their store in Salisbury. Ethan, Ira, Zimri, and Remember, Ira wrote in his autobiography, had hurried north to build a blockhouse at the falls of Winooski, the highest waterfall in New England. Then they canoed south again:
We took some provisions in our packs, and returned to Middlebury falls, and proceeded to mark a road to Onion river. This road was soon after cut out so as to make a bridle road…. My brother Heman and others visited Onion river by the way of that road in 1773.
In many places the “road,” the first road of any kind on either shore of Lake Champlain before the Revolution, was only four or five feet wide with blaze marks hacked on trees flanking its seventy-mile length and just wide enough for an ox pulling a sledge or a sleigh to pass through. The Chittendens and their Salisbury neighbors followed the road one year later in the summer of 1774. Ira Allen viewed this project as one of his signal accomplishements: “Thus in a short time, I led a people through a wilderness of 70 miles about the same distance that took Moses 40 years to conduct the children of Israel.” The Allens saw this accomplishment in biblical terms. Ira, who never seemed to like to use the first-person plural personal pronoun “we,” took full credit in his autobiography, often downplaying Ethan’s contributions. But self-absorbed Ethan didn’t seem to notice: as patriarch, he was proud to offer, as surety for titles to his promised land, “The Great Seal of the Province of New Hampshire.”22
WITH THE WESTERN frontier officially closed off by the British government and Redcoats patrolling between some two hundred stockades to keep settlers from encroaching on Indian lands, the population was being forced farther and faster northward. Almost immediately, New Englanders began pouring north toward the new settlement. The Chittendens with their ten children came north in the summer of 1774, following a familiar pattern. To perfect their claims, the men came first to cut down trees, make a rude cabin, called a “possession house,” then dam a stream for a pond. One or two hired men spent the winter planting and harvesting winter wheat for the livestock. The next spring, the entire family migrated north, all their belongings pulled by the invaluable team of oxen. Women and children rode the family horses. The men walked, shouldering their muskets, guiding the oxen with light flicks from their bullwhips.
AS THE BORDER war with New York intensified in the summer of 1773, to prevent settlements under New York jurisdiction from taking root, the Allens went beyond the bounds of any lawful authority and carried out attacks on anyone between the mountains and the lake who accepted the authority of New York Province. By now, New York had organized the region into a new county, Charlotte, and appointed royal officeholders for it. Ethan Allen’s first target was a newly appointed New York justice of the peace, Benjamin Spencer, who lived in modern-day Clarendon, its name under the New Hampshire grant. Holding New York deeds, its residents insisted on calling their town by its New York–patented name of Durham. The settlement was governed by New York–commissioned officials—a judge, two justices, a coroner, and an Anabaptist minister. Allen finally could no longer tolerate such a “hornet’s nest” of New Yorkers, as he put it. On Saturday night, November 20, at about eleven o’clock—a month before the Boston Tea Party—he attacked the village with a large contingent of the Boys. In much the same scenario as the New York raid on Remember Baker’s bedroom, Allen, resorting to bald violence, ordered the front door of Judge Benjamin Spencer’s house shattered with a single blow of an ax. Allen and Baker burst into the room where Spencer, his wife, and, according to their affidavits, “some others of his family were sleeping.” Allen, armed with a musket, cutlass, and pistols, ordered Spencer to get up, telling him
that he had been a damned old offender and the Township of Durham a Hornets Nest in their way and they were now determined to put an End to it by making them concede to take and hold their Lands under New Hampshire and submit to the Rules of their Mobb, or by destroying their property and making them quit the Country.
According to Spencer, when he took his time getting dressed, hoping to stall until help could arrive, Allen hit him over the head with his gun. Other Boys were pointing their guns through the windows as Spencer got to his feet and dressed, his wife screaming and holding their children in the bed. They took Spencer away on horseback and held him in a house two miles away, guarded by four Boys. When the minister, the Reverend Benjamin Hough, came to visit Spencer the next morning, he asked Allen to explain the raid. Allen told him in biblical terms that “the day of Judgment was come when every man should be Judged according to his works.” He had warned the townspeople often enough. He was driving out the Yorker officials, and, if they ever returned, the Boys would “Lay all Durham in Ashes and leave every person in it a Corpse.”
On Monday morning, November 22, Allen gave Judge Spencer his choice of courtrooms. He chose his own doorstep. For such trials, which were becoming more frequent, Allen had devised a ritual that mocked judicial decorum. He had the Boys erect the “judgment seat,” something like an elevated portable bench that they carried on a horse. Sometimes a tree stump had to make do. Allen then mounted the bench, and three of his captains took their seats on chairs they brought from Spencer’s house. Allen announced that the proprietors of the New Hampshire Grants had delegated himself and Captains Baker, Warner, and Cochran, the other judges, to inspect the Grants and discourage any intruders. He declared that Spencer’s crimes were applying for a New York deed, accepting a New York judgeship, issuing warrants against New Hampshire settlers, and trying to influence others to accept New York’s authority. Allen and Baker decided the punishment: Spencer’s house was a public nuisance and had to be burned. When Spencer pleaded that his family would be ruined, Allen feigned pity and decreed that only the roof should be taken off and would be put back on if Spencer declared it was under New Hampshire’s authority and would buy a New Hampshire deed to his property. Spencer agreed amid “great Shouting of Joy and much noise and Tumult.”
Before he left, according to Spencer’s affidavit, Allen “damned the Government, said they valued not the Government nor even the Kingdom; That force was force in whatever Hands, & that they had force and power sufficient to protect themselves against either.”
After he rode away with his militia, Allen saw to it that the Durhamites were charged fair prices by the New Hampshire proprietors—and he didn’t try to sell them back their land. Treading a blurred line between self-aggrandizing land speculator and latter-day Robin Hood, Allen was maintaining the mantle of dispenser of justice before the Green Mountain Boys, even as he asserted uncontested power in the borderlands region and, in landownership at least, grew wealthy. After leaving Clarendon, he wrote an open letter, assuring his protection to the townsmen. Then he rode off to Salisbury to buy up, at bargain prices, land offered by absentee New York Quakers. It is an open question whether his paramilitary power wasn’t translating into intimidation that made potential sellers of these Vermont lands more liberal in the prices they were willing to accept for their properties.
In his absence, Allen’s surrogates continued their punitive evictions, next targeting Jacob Marsh, a newly appointed justice of the peace of Charlotte County. Facing similar charges before a “judgment seat” occupied, in place of Allen, by Captain Remember Baker, the New York justice was released after Baker sentenced him to a severe flogging on his bare body with “twigs of the forest,” a sentence he would commute if Marsh promised to give up his New York commission. When Marsh returned home, he found the roof torn off his house and his farm ransacked. Marsh no longer attempted to act as a New York justice. The only justice being dispensed on the Grants by late 1773 was the version practiced by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.
BEFORE ALLEN COULD return to his farm in Sunderland that winter, a provocative raid shattered the deceptive calm that had set in in the port town of Boston. On the evening of December 16, 1773, some three thousand Bostonians watched as a well-organized contingent of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three British merchant ships laden with East India Company tea and threw 342 lacquered chests valued at £10,000 overboard. Samuel Adams, the brewer and leader of the Sons had organized the “Indians”; among other leaders was Allen’s old friend Dr. Thomas Young, who refused to wear a disguise. The British Parliament promptly responded by closing the port with a naval and land blockade and, when a dispatch ship brought the news to London, by firing Massachusetts’ parliamentary agent, Benjamin Franklin, the deputy postmaster general for America, convicting him of opening the mails of royal officials. Such mutinous actions by American radicals only toughened the English ministry’s resolve and hastened imperial measures calculated to bring not only the coastal towns but the rebellious frontier to heel.
JOINING IN THE crackdown on American radicals, the New York Assembly on March 9, 1774, passed what the Grants settlers called the “Bloody Acts.” Proclaiming that a riotous state prevailed on the Grants, the acts were the direct result of the attack on the Durham settlement by Allen and the Boys in September of 1773. The New York royal government was responding to
the Petition of Benjamin Hough, in behalf of himself and many of his Majesty’s Subjects inhabiting the County of Charlotte, and the North Eastern District of the County of Albany, complaining of many Acts of Outrage, Cruelty and Oppression, committed against their Persons and properties by the Bennington Mob, and the Dangers and Injuries to which they are daily exposed, and imploring that this House will take them under its protection…. That at present prevails…a dangerous and destructive Spirit of Riot and Licentiousness, subversive to all order and good Government, and that it is become an intollerable Grievance….
The assembly resolution also alleged that the “Bennington Mob” had “seized, insulted, and terrified several Magistrates and other Civil Officers so that they dare not execute their respective Functions.” They had
rescued Prisoners for Debt; assumed for themselves Military Commands, and Judicial Powers; burned and demolished the Houses and property and beat and abused the persons of many of his Majesty’s subjects, expelled them from their possessions, and put a period to the Administration of Justice….
The chair of the legislative committee gathering evidence for the assembly and principal author of the punitive act was Crean Brush, an Anglo-Irish immigrant lawyer who, as a minor Crown official, had acquired patents to 20,000 acres of New York land grants in and around the town of Westminster in the Connecticut River valley, lands originally granted by Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire. Brush had moved to the region in eastern Vermont claimed by New York as Cumberland County and, in addition to being appointed registrar of New York deeds and clerk of the county court, was elected from Westminster to the New York Provincial Assembly. He continued to acquire land on the Grants, eventually claiming title to 60,000 acres in the Connecticut Valley. In Albany, he vigorously contested New Hampshire’s jurisdiction over Vermont lands.
In the wake of the Boston Tea Party and Ethan Allen’s ever more violent attacks on New York settlers, in February of 1774 George Clinton, chair of the legislative committee studying the upheaval on the Grants, appointed Crean Brush to write the committee’s recommendations. Clinton would become the longtime post-Revolution governor of New York and then the fourth vice president of the United States, under Thomas Jefferson. It was Brush, a major recipient of New York land grants on the Connecticut River shore of Vermont, who authored what became known in Vermont as the Bloody Acts. The acts outlawed the leaders of the Green Mountain Boys by name—Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, Remember Baker, and Robert Cochran—as well as four Bennington town leaders—Peleg Sunderland, Silvanus Brown, John Smith, and James Breakenridge. Now, if any of the eight men accused of leading “the Bennington mob” left the protection of their own extralegal militia, they faced arrest and condign punishment. Any further “riots or disturbance” would be indictable as capital offenses. If, for the offenses already charged to them, Allen and the other seven outlaws did not surrender within seventy days from the March 9 passage of the act, they would be adjudged guilty without a trial and “to suffer death.”23
On the assembly’s advice, Governor Tryon raised the rewards for Allen and Baker to £100 and £50 for each of the others. If they were captured, Allen, his subordinate officers in the Green Mountain Boys, and Bennington’s town leaders were now deemed, by extension, by the entire British government, outlaws and rebels. If they could be captured anywhere that New York claimed jurisdiction—all the lands from Lake Erie east to the Connecticut River, from the northern boundaries of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts to the Canadian border—Ethan Allen and the outlawed leaders of present-day Vermont could be arrested and returned to Albany and then shipped to England for summary execution. In England, where there were some one hundred capital offenses at the time, upwards of one thousand felons were executed each year. Outlaws from the American frontier could expect little mercy from Governor Tryon, who had hanged the leaders of the Regulators movement in the North Carolina backcountry and who, at any time, could lead British troops onto the Grants and make arrests. Ironically, now, more than ever, the Grants depended on the protection of Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.
INSTEAD OF FLEEING to the relative safety of Connecticut, as Colonel Skene had advised, Allen, evidently burning the midnight candle at his room in the Catamount Tavern where he could respond rapidly to a New York raid, coolly set to work compiling his answer to Crean Brush. In a letter dated May 19, he accused Brush of “hatred and Malice Toward the N. Hampshire Settlers” and “particularly Towards me.” Noting that Brush was one of “a Number of Learned Attorneys and Gentlemen (by Birth) Interested in the Lands” on which the settlers dwelt, Ethan accused Brush of deluding any “Honestly Disposed” members of the New York Assembly by “Beguileing them Into a false Opinion that Those People You Call the Bennington Mob are Notorious Rioters….You Know better…. They Onely Contend for their Property and…they have No Design Against the Government any further than to Protect the Same.”
Allen claimed that Brush was one of “the Land Schemers” who used the acts to lay “a Trap for the Lives” of the settlers and called him and his legislative coauthors
busie understrappers to a Number of more Overgrown Villains which Can murther by Law without remorse. But I Have to Inform that the Green Mountain Boys will Not Tamely resign their necks to the Halter to be Hanged by Your Curst Fraternity of Land Jockeys who Would Better Adorn a halter than would we, therefore as You regard Your Own Lives be Carefull Not to Invade ours for what Measure you meat, it Shall be Measured to You Again.
In a sarcastic postscript to “Mr. Brush sir,” Allen threatened Brush with a very personal retribution:
As a Testimony of Gratitude for the many unmerited Kindnesses, and services, you have Done us [in] the last Sessions at New York &c &c we Intend Shortly visiting your Abode, Where we hope to have the Honour of Presenting you with the beech seal [a flogging with a long, thick beech switch]—which we Beg your kind Acceptance of as a mark of the high Esteem we have of your Person….24
SETTING ASIDE HIS beech switch and sharpening his quill, Allen wrote his second book. He would not allow the New York legislature to utter its official condemnation of the leaders of the Grants movement unchallenged. Spelling out the settlers’ case in 224 pages, he penned Brief Narrative of the Proceedings of the Government of New-York. Not only did he thoroughly detail the history of the decade-long struggle, but he boldly included the New York act outlawing him, naming the names of its instigators and pointing out their conflicts of interest dating back to the 1770 ejectment hearing before the New York Supreme Court of Judicature. Then he rode off to Hartford to see it through the press. He had accumulated enough money now to pay the printer even though he had no reason to doubt that he would be reimbursed by the New Hampshire grant holders at their next annual meeting. Brief Narrative went beyond the legal case for landownership to build on conversations he had had a decade earlier with Dr. Thomas Young and his own years of readings, conversations, and experience to make a frontal attack on entrenched privilege in a hierarchical society where the rich and powerful exploited “the poor and needy.”
Then, once again translating rhetoric into action, Allen led the Boys on a retaliatory raid against the informant who had provided the details of the Durham raid that had triggered the Bloody Acts. As if in response to the harsh New York reaction to his four-year campaign of resistance, he seized, on January 26, 1775, Benjamin Hough, the Anabaptist minister who had stubbornly remained in Clarendon after his public humiliation in the September 1773 raid. This time, treatment of a New York grant holder was proportionately harsher than ever before. In a ritualized “judgment seat” trial, Allen as presiding judge, Seth Warner, and five other officers of the Boys served as the jury. With a severity that rivaled the brutality of British officers of the time, they sentenced the Reverend Hough to a flogging of two hundred lashes of the stiff beech switch, then banished him from the Grants under threat of five hundred lashes—enough to kill most men. Four Boys tied Hough, pulled off his shirt, and took turns administering the two hundred hickory lashes. In five years of enforcing control over the Grants, Hough’s harsh punishment represented the most extreme case. But now, Allen and his followers believed, they were engaged in open warfare. Condemned to death if they were captured, they were no longer satisfied with their usual resort to humiliation and intimidation. Hough was an informer and was being treated as such.
A more typical punishment befell Dr. Samuel Adams of Arlington. He insisted on exhorting his neighbors to accept New York’s terms. Allen and the Boys promptly captured him, “tried” him, and sentenced him to be tied to a chair and hoisted up to dangle beneath the stuffed catamount that served as the Bennington tavern’s signpost, where he remained the butt of taunts for several hours. While demonstrating that they would tolerate no support for New York’s authority on the New Hampshire Grants, Allen and his Boys had so far never killed anyone.25
By November 15, 1774, long after the seventy-day deadline for surrender had passed, Allen was busily sending copies of his Brief Narrative to influential figures in surrounding colonies. One copy went to Theodore Atkinson, brother-in-law of Governor Benning Wentworth and chief justice of New Hampshire’s supreme court. Allen styled Atkinson the “father” of New Hampshire’s “right of extension,” under which right Atkinson owned considerable acreage on the Grants, including the town of Grafton. Allen revealed that he had paid for printing the pamphlet and, if he had failed to cast considerable new light on the border controversy, he would “Drop into myself, and be a fool.” Here he paraphrased his favorite poet, Alexander Pope, who wrote in his Essay on Man, “Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule / then drop into thyself, and be a fool.” He struck a stronger note in writing to Oliver Wolcott of Litchfield. A future signer of the Declaration of Independence, Wolcott owned no land on the Grants but was one of the prime movers of the Susquehannah Company’s settlement in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. Allen had already consulted with Wolcott on the Grants crisis; they had been introduced by Colonel Chittenden, Allen’s former Salisbury neighbor and largest single customer of the Onion River Land Company.
For the first time, Allen confided that he and other leaders on the Grants were considering “the Expediency and Polocy of [forming] a Covenant Compact”—instituting an independent government. They were quietly talking about drawing up resolutions “Calculated with a View to be Adopted [as] a political System for the Conduct of Those Settlers.” Wolcott was sympathetic, and Allen shrewdly calculated that he would be. Even to speak, much less put anything into writing, about a plan to create a new state beyond the bounds of recognized British jurisdiction would certainly have been construed by Britain as an act of treason. Allen knew that Wolcott was active in the growing resistance to British colonial policies. He offered Wolcott a quid pro quo: “Provided the Controversy between Great Britain and the Colonies Should Terminate in a War the Regiment of Green Mountain Boys Will I Dare Ingage to Assist their American Brethren in the Capacity of Rangers.”26
What Allen was not revealing in these letters to New Hampshire and Connecticut may already have become known in neighboring New York. Two months earlier, on January 31, delegates from towns on the Grants had gathered at Manchester and taken a step toward declaring their independence from either New Hampshire or New York and creating a separate government. Responding to the “twelve acts of outlawry passed by the legislature of New York against those settlers,” they signed a covenant, formed a compact, and drew up resolutions for their future conduct. Word of this meeting undoubtedly had gotten back to Governor Tryon of New York, who promptly requested troop reinforcements from Governor-General Sir Guy Carleton in Quebec for an expedition he planned to launch in May 1775 to suppress the spreading rebellion on the Grants.
EAST OF THE Green Mountains, in settlements normally beyond the reach of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, many townships originally granted charters by New Hampshire had acceded to New York’s demands. Settlers had paid a second and much higher set of fees to confirm their grants, and they now owed higher annual quitrents. Since they had accepted the authority of New York’s courts, many of these farmers, strapped for cash and with nothing to barter, fell behind in their rents and were unable to pay other debts when three years of drought left them destitute. This natural disaster, however, proved beneficial to Allen and his adherents. By March of 1775, New York– appointed judges were carrying out foreclosures and evictions. Farmers petitioned the courts to postpone foreclosures for debt until they could gather their fall harvests. Chief Judge Thomas Chandler agreed to the delay and limited the spring term to a murder trial. But a rumor nonetheless spread that other, more hard-line New York judges were coming and that they would insist on hearing the foreclosures cases and would refuse to postpone them.
Only one month before the battles Lexington and Concord, in what may be taken as a harbinger of the American Revolution, in the southeast corner of Vermont, an angry crowd of settlers descended on Westminster and tried to seize the Cumberland County courthouse. Sheriff William Paterson, representing New York, swore in a posse and led it to the courthouse. There the posse and the protesters shouted insults at each other until the sheriff, persuading only a few settlers to leave the building, withdrew to a nearby tavern. Pouring one tankard of rum after another, the sheriff and his posse waited there until midnight and then stormed the courthouse. Twice the protesters repulsed them. When the court clerk Samuel Gale menaced the mob with a pistol, firing broke out on both sides. The posse mortally wounded two rioters and wounded several more, then jailed ten others.
The judges tried to convene the court the next day, but an even larger crowd freed the prisoners and forced the judges to adjourn the court session. As New Hampshire and Massachusetts militia poured into the town, they rounded up Sheriff Paterson and his posse and bundled them off to jail in Northampton, Massachusetts. A company of the Green Mountain Boys dispatched by Ethan Allen arrived from Bennington across the mountains in time to join the erstwhile rioters, now heroes on the Grants, for the funeral of William French, one of the rioters, on March 15. Allen called the affair the Westminster Massacre, reminding Vermonters of the first bloodletting of the revolutionary era in Boston five years earlier. The Revolutionary War and the movement for independence from British colonial government, and therefore from the British Empire, had already begun in the events on the Vermont frontier. Those events of March 1775 have been glossed over as history has memorialized the bloody days of the next month. As John Adams would say a year later at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Revolution was already complete. It had taken place in the mind and hearts of the people on the frontier as much as in the coastal town of Boston.
ETHAN ALLEN’S EFFECTIVE mix of propaganda and intimidation had kept New York sheriffs and royal governors at bay for nearly five years. During that time, he built up the loyalty of thousands of settlers. By some estimates, the population of the Grants had ballooned from scarcely 800 in 1764 to nearly 8,800 a decade later. Allen acquired legendary status when he helped find two little girls who had been given up for lost in wolf-infested woods and when he gave generously of the land he bought for himself to poor members of the Green Mountain Boys. He became Colonel Commandant Ethan Allen, but he also was becoming rich, at least on paper, with a strong vested interest in protecting the independence of Green Mountain settlers and landowners.
On March 15, 1775, only five weeks before Lexington and Concord, Ethan Allen rode north with Heman, Ira, Levi, Zimri, and cousin Remember from Salisbury to Sheffield for the second annual directors’ meeting of the Onion River Land Company. Up until then, the company had operated in an extremely informal manner, each partner buying and selling land when opportunities appeared. They bought an estimated 77,622 acres and sold 16,793 acres, leaving available some 60,829 acres, all in towns bordering Lake Champlain. Ethan accumulated enough money to pay Ebenezer Watson of Hartford nearly £550 for printing his Brief Narrative and for pamphlets he had edited out of his letters to the Courant. Even though his skill as a propagandist is rarely mentioned in history, his writing was ready-made propaganda that won over many reluctant Grants settlers from allegiance to New York. He unabashedly peddled his prose door-to-door. If Ethan Allen couldn’t sell you land when he stopped by your house for a few pounds sterling down payment, he sold you his political philosophy for a shilling. The board voted to reimburse Allen his printing costs: he was, after all, promoting the cause of all the company’s shareholders. At Sheffield, where the partners now met annually to accommodate investors in land from western Massachusetts and Connecticut, Allen also collected funds he had advanced to Levi and Ira and to the company, enough to settle a sizable tab at Landlord Dewey’s Catamount Tavern for the company’s business. He charged the company for having a clerk transcribe a pamphlet, for keeping a horse at Captain Fay’s house in Bennington for “public causes,” and for petty cash spent in the “General Cause.” But Allen, no longer strapped, didn’t take cash. The company totted up his expenses and agreed to pay him in his choice of lands. Before adjourning, as with all such meetings, the directors planned ahead. They set the date for another gathering one year later. It never happened.