VTVermont History

For fourteen years Vermont struck its own copper coinage, ran its own post offices, naturalized its own citizens and carried on a discreet correspondence with the British command in Quebec. It was neither a colony nor a state. It was a republic that nobody in London or Philadelphia had asked for, declared by farmers who had already bought their land twice and refused to buy it a third time.

The Missisquoi, the Mohawk, and a lake named after its visitor

Western Abenaki communities held the country on both sides of the Green Mountains: the Missisquoi at the northern end of the lake, the Sokoki along the Connecticut River, the Cowasuck in its upper valley. The Mohawk of the Haudenosaunee used the same hunting grounds from the west, and the two claims collided for generations. Samuel de Champlain reached the lake in July 1609, attached his name to it, and left France with a claim it defended for 154 years. The first European settlement in Vermont was Fort Sainte Anne, built on Isle La Motte in 1666. Because the lake was the natural invasion road between Montreal and Albany, the region was fought across rather than farmed until the Treaty of Paris handed it to Britain in 1763.

Wentworth's grants and the quarrel with New York

Benning Wentworth, royal governor of New Hampshire, sold more than 130 township charters west of the Connecticut River between 1749 and 1764, reserving a block of acreage in each one for himself. New York claimed the identical ground. In 1764 the Crown ruled for New York, whose courts then voided the New Hampshire titles and instructed the settlers to purchase their own farms again from New York patentees. They declined. The Green Mountain Boys organized in 1770 under Ethan Allen to intercept New York sheriffs and surveyors, and New York put a bounty on Allen's head. When the wider war began, the same militia acted first: Allen and Benedict Arnold took Fort Ticonderoga at dawn on May 10, 1775, and its captured artillery was hauled to Boston that winter by Henry Knox and used to force the British out of the harbor.

The Windsor constitution of July 1777

Delegates meeting at Westminster in January 1777 declared independence from both Britain and New York, first under the name New Connecticut and from June as Vermont. That summer, with a British army moving south down the lake, a convention at Windsor adopted a constitution on July 8, 1777. It prohibited slavery for adults, the first constitution in North America to do so, and gave the vote to every adult man without any property or income requirement. Enforcement was imperfect and a handful of people remained held in bondage in Vermont households for years afterwards, but the text was a genuine break with every other American government of the moment. Five weeks later, on August 16, 1777, militia broke a foraging column from Burgoyne's army at the Battle of Bennington, fought a few miles across the line at Walloomsac in New York, and the loss contributed directly to the British surrender at Saratoga in October.

Fourteen years a republic, then the fourteenth state

The republic behaved like a country. Reuben Harmon minted Vermont coppers at Rupert from 1785, and between 1780 and 1783 Ethan and Ira Allen conducted the Haldimand negotiations with the British governor of Quebec, partly a genuine hedge and partly a device to remind Congress that Vermont could go elsewhere. Admission stayed blocked as long as New York pressed its land claim. In October 1790 Vermont paid New York $30,000 to drop it, and on March 4, 1791 Vermont entered as the fourteenth state, the first admitted after the original thirteen. Kentucky followed on June 1, 1792, and the sequence held the count of free and slave states even, an arithmetic that would govern American admissions for the next seventy years.

Sheep, then cows, then everybody leaving

William Jarvis, the American consul at Lisbon, shipped roughly 4,000 merino sheep home in 1811 and pastured them at Weathersfield. Wool prices and protective tariffs did the rest. By 1840 Vermont carried something close to six sheep for every person in it, and the hills had been cleared until only about a quarter of the state was still wooded. Cheaper western wool and the tariff reduction of 1846 ended the boom inside a decade. Railroads reaching the valleys in the 1840s offered the replacement, since milk could now reach Boston, and Vermont became a dairy state instead. The people, though, kept going. For most of the second half of the nineteenth century more Vermonters left than arrived, farms were abandoned, and the pastures grew back into the forest that now covers about three quarters of the state. The Civil War touched Vermont directly once, on October 19, 1864, when some twenty Confederate soldiers based in Canada robbed three banks in St. Albans and rode north, the northernmost land action of the war.

A flood, a road refused, and a political reversal

On November 3 and 4, 1927, nine inches of rain fell on ground already saturated and every major river in Vermont came up at once. Eighty four people drowned, among them Lieutenant Governor S. Hollister Jackson, swept away near his home in Barre, and more than a thousand bridges were destroyed. The state borrowed heavily and rebuilt, and the rebuilt roads changed how it worked. Nine years later Washington offered to pay for the Green Mountain Parkway, a scenic highway running the length of the ridgeline, and at town meeting in March 1936 the voters turned it down, a decision that kept the spine of the state empty and shaped Vermont land politics ever after, through the Act 250 development law of 1970 and beyond. Politically the state reversed itself completely. Vermont voted Republican in every presidential election from 1856 through 1960 and was one of only two states Franklin Roosevelt never carried, yet the newcomers who arrived with the interstates, the IBM plant that opened at Essex Junction in 1957 and the ski economy turned it into one of the most reliably Democratic states in the country. In 2000 Vermont became the first state to recognize civil unions for same sex couples. Two presidents were born in it, Chester Arthur at Fairfield and Calvin Coolidge at Plymouth Notch, where Coolidge was sworn in by lamplight in 1923 by his father, a notary public.

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