Friday, July 29, 2016

An Animadversory Address to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont, Part V: Within and Without

Further evidence of the convention-defying complexity described by An Animadversory Address can be found in the both the seventh and twenty-fifth paragraphs of the same. The former contains a brief recounting by Allen of the events that led up to the Battle of Bennington (1777), in which the Green Mountain Boys were said to have acquitted themselves admirably. “The Council of our new state,” he wrote,

Was very busy and zealous in forming the militia into regiments, under brave officers, to face Mr. Burgoyne: At the same time General Schuyler ordered our militia to march to Sarataga [sic]; but the Council would not allow it, as they viewed Bennington, and the adjacent country, to be the object of destruction by the enemy, at least, if no so, by their old adversaries.

Though simply phrased, this passage actually describes a rather convoluted scenario. Vermont, whose government had been established scant months earlier, was requested in the summer of 1777 to send its militia force to Saratoga in neighboring New York by Continental Army General Phillip Schuyler. The government of Vermont, however, declined to do so out of fear that their territory would be left vulnerable to attack by the British or, barring that, “their old adversaries.” This vague designation was almost certainly intended to refer to the government of New York, which had persisted throughout the Revolutionary War in maintaining its right to the territory falling between itself and New Hampshire. Phillip Schuyler was himself a New Yorker, one of the wealthiest landowners in the state, and had commanded the Green Mountain Boys since their incorporation into the Continental Army in 1775. Vermont’s refusal to obey his request thus represented an intersection of the American Revolution and that state’s own pursuit of independence.

In that moment in 1777, Schuyler was both an ally who had commanded the respect and obedience of Vermont’s fighting men since the invasion of Quebec and a potential adversary who may have been more inclined to serve the interests of his home state and its powerful landowning interests than the greater American cause. By the same token, New York was both an enemy to fear, eager as ever to assert its arbitrary claim to land it had no right to, and a friend to protect, who had sacrificed as well as any state for the cause of American independence and was facing yet another invasion of its borders. Yet more fascinating, Allen further described in paragraph seven that Vermont, “Sent an express to the Council of the state of New-Hampshire, acquainting them with the distressed situation […] and imploring their assistance, which New-Hampshire generously afforded [.]” By appealing to New Hampshire for aid partly out of fear of becoming “the object of destruction” of their “old adversaries” Vermont was evidently eager to both led its aid to the greater war effort and protect itself against the depredations of neighboring New York. This effectively positioned the state both within the Revolution and without.

On one hand, Vermont was suspicious of its long-time adversary, jealous of its own territory, and seemingly unconcerned with the needs of the larger struggle with Britain. On the other hand, it was fully enmeshed in the American struggle for independence, willing to reach out to neighboring states, and eager to cooperate in blunting the force of an imminent British attack. For Allen, the Green Mountain Boys, Phillip Schuyler, and New Hampshire General John Stark – sent to take command of the defence of Bennington – this tangle of loyalty and suspicion was simply the reality of that moment in the Revolutionary War. The relationship between Vermont and the United States was complicated and often tenuous, but by 1777 it could not have been a source of surprise for anyone involved. To a 21st century observer, however, particularly one unfamiliar with the origins of the state of Vermont, the jumble of intentions and doubts Allen described in An Animadversory Address cannot help but fracture the popular understanding of the American Founding. Below the surface of the struggle between the United States and Britain, an internecine conflict simmered that pitted Americans against one another in a struggle over nothing less than self-determination.   

The aforementioned twenty-fifth paragraph of An Animadversory Address further complicates the commonly-accepted narrative of the Revolution, and even the narrative offered by Allen himself, by demonstrating his ability to compartmentalize the struggle between Vermont and New York from that between the United States and Great Britain. Having concluded a series of arguments aimed at the proclamation issued by Governor George Clinton in 1778, Allen decided to round out his denunciation of the position taken by the government of New York by making reference to a concurring judgement rendered by the British Board of Trade. A committee within the Privy Council – itself an advisory body to the Crown – the Board was the London office responsible for administering British overseas territories and often functioned as a mediator between separate colonies during occasions of dispute. “Such grants made by the government of New York,” the pamphlet quoted the Board as having declared, “However unwarrantable, cannot be set aside by any authority from his Majesty, in case the grantees shall insist in their title.” Putting aside the position Allen intended to emphasize with this citation – to be discussed shortly – the fact of it demonstrates something rather curious.

New York, An Animadversory Address attempted to make clear more than once, was effectively perpetuating the royal favoritism it had enjoyed during the colonial era by pressing forward with its claim to the former New Hampshire Grants in spite of the resistance offered by the region’s settlers. In light of New York’s simultaneous desire to assert its independence from Britain as part of the United States of America, drawing attention to the continuity between the goals and actions of the state’s colonial past and republican present was doubtless intended to be a source of embarrassment. At the same time, however, Allen was himself willing to draft an arm of the British government into his own argument against the efforts of New York to assert what he considered an outmoded royal prerogative. Not only that, but the Board of Trade, a body whose judgement Allen evidently perceived as particularly authoritative, was not especially popular with residents of the American colonies. In the 1680s the Board fused several colonies together to form the exceedingly unpopular Dominion of New England, an entity whose short life ended in rebellion and dissolution in 1689. More recently, the committee had ruled against New Hampshire in its original dispute with New York in 1764 and set in motion the events that led to the founding of the Green Mountain Boys in 1770. Allen’s willingness to endorse the decree of such a body would seem to demonstrate yet further the complexity of the conflicts in which Vermont and the United States were respectively engaged.

Though the notion of an American revolutionary endorsing the verdict of a British ministerial body in the midst of a war with the government of the same might now appear contradictory or hypocritical, Allen doubtless took a more nuanced view of the issue. The American Revolution had come about in part because the actions undertaken by Parliament in the 1760s and 1770s were perceived as, among other things, a threat to the traditions of British common law. Far from repudiating such culturally-rooted concepts as habeas corpus or trial by jury, American critics of British policy were eager to protect and promote their shared legal heritage from increasingly arbitrary Parliamentary prerogatives. It would not therefore have seemed contradictory for a supporter of American independence to regard some aspects of British law as still possessing weight and authority. Because the specific verdict of the Board of Trade he cited touched upon a matter of law rather than ideology, Allen therefore may not have perceived any inherent contradiction between his support for American independence and his evident respect for a venerable source of British legal expertise. New York’s attempt to simultaneously support independence and perpetuate royal favoritism was dissimilar in that the prerogative An Animadversory Address accused it of promoting was of a partisan character. Britain, Allen claimed, had supported New York in the past out of a sense of partiality and in order to sow discord among the colonies. Because this motivation ran counter to the ideals of the Revolution, New York should have abandoned its concomitant claim to the disputed New Hampshire Grants. The Board of Trade’s opinion on property in common law jurisdictions conversely did nothing to threaten or undermine American independence. 

Allen was also likely sensible that though the American Revolution and Vermont’s struggle for independence from New York were linked, they nevertheless sprung from separate events and touched upon separate sets of issues. The conflict between New York and New Hampshire that gave birth to the Green Mountain Boys and their campaign of insurrection began in the 1740s and 1750s. The root cause was a disagreement over colonial boundaries, no doubt spurred by existing rivalries, and at stake was the property of a relatively small population of settlers living in the disputed New Hampshire Grants. Though Vermont’s declaration of independence in 1777 and its adoption of a constitution to some degree shifted the essence of the conflict from property rights to self-determination, the Vermont struggle remained until its conclusion fairly limited in scope and fairly pragmatic in nature. The Revolution was conversely grounded in a disagreement in principle. It was not, as many American critics of the British government attempted to point out, that the taxes Britain had levied in the colonies were too high, but rather that Parliament had violated the principle behind the right to tax. Agitation over the importance of this principle began in the 1760s, played out across almost all of the future United States, and if anything became more abstract and philosophical as time went on.

Vermont’s struggle and America’s struggle were intertwined, in that the people of Vermont were Americans themselves, were as concerned as any of their countrymen about perceived British tyranny, and were willing to take up arms in defense of the liberties they felt were at risk. But the battle-lines of the respective conflicts were disparate enough for a person like Ethan Allen to perceive Britain as an ally in one case and an arbiter in another. His campaign against New York had, after all, commenced five years prior to the beginning of the Revolutionary War. If the conflict between Britain and its colonies had not boiled over into armed insurrection, the Green Mountain Boys may very well have continued to agitate and harass indefinitely, until their demands were met or New York succeeded in imprisoning the lot of them. In such a scenario, appealing to the Board of trade for mediation would not have seemed unusual or out of place. New York had done as much in 1764, and it would have been perfectly in keeping for the residents of the New Hampshire Grants to petition the same authority for redress in the future. Though the opening of the armed phase of the American Revolution in 1775 did affect the outcome of Allen and the Green Mountain Boy’s campaign against New York, it did not wholly supersede it. The residents of Vermont may have been willing to postpone their ongoing struggle for the recognition of their property in the face of British ruthlessness, but they never consented to give it up altogether. Ethan Allen gave evidence of this conviction in An Animadversory Address by freely and unselfconsciously citing the legal expertise of the Board of Trade. Though in the context of the Revolution the Board was one of the mechanisms of British tyranny in America, between Vermont and New York it was simply an adjudicating body whose authority and expertise were not to be dismissed. 

Friday, July 22, 2016

An Animadversory Address to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont, Part IV: Complications and Assumptions

            Ethan Allen wrote An Animadversory Address with a purpose in mind. Identifying that purpose, and how it flowed into and out of contemporary events, is essential to understanding why the document in question was written, why it was significant at the time it was written, and why it continues to be significant today. That being said, there are also aspects of An Animadversory Address that communicate a great deal about the time and place it was created, and the nature of its creator, which are largely incidental to whatever it is Allen hoped to communicate. They would not have been obvious, or even intelligible, to an 18th century audience, but cannot fail to strike a 21st century reader as informative of the context in which the piece was written. Take, by way of comparison, Benjamin Franklin’s use of the phrase “Revolution Principles” in his 1773 satire Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One. A contemporary reader would likely have grasped the allusion without thinking it terribly remarkable. A 21st century reader, meanwhile, would require some degree of background research to be able to conclude that the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) was a major touchstone of 18th century British political culture that was raised frequently in publications critical of perceived government tyranny. Surely Franklin did not intend the use of the phrase – a kind of shorthand for a set of common political ideals – to be particularly significant, but outside of its native context it cannot help but be so.

            Though these kinds of unintended facets have formed a part of the discussion in this series for about as long as it’s been going on, the way they manifest themselves in An Animadversory Address drew them to my attention in a way I felt compelled to remark upon. This is because a great deal of what Ethan Allen’s 1778 pamphlet communicates was surely not intended by its author and would almost certainly have escaped the notice of its original audience. This is not because people in the 21st century are on average more intelligent than people in the 18th century. Rather, it is a consequence of the divide between what someone living in 1778 would have taken for granted and what an equivalent individual in 2016 would take for granted. For a farmer living outside of Bennington, Vermont during the Revolutionary War, the ongoing conflicts with Britain and New York doubtless exerted a strong influence on their everyday life, helped define their sense of political awareness, and shaped what they understood as the status quo in their corner of the 18th century world. We can see, by reading accounts over two hundred years later, all of these things, how they moved people to act, and the patterns in behavior that took shape as a result, but there will almost always be certain details that a modern observer will fail to grasp. My understanding of the American Revolution has been shaped by what I have read, and what I have been told, and to some extent by what I have seen. I think I know what it was about, and what people thought it was about at the time it was happening. But I must also acknowledge that as a consequence of how I acquired this knowledge I may not always see, to turn a phrase on its head, the trees for the forest.    
   
            Part of what a historian does is try to see, pick apart, and understand the assumptions of historical actors. That Bennington farmer makes for a potentially fascinating subject because the nature of his profession likely ensured that all he saw was the world immediately in front of him. He cared about having a market for his produce, and having enough hands to bring in the harvest, and making enough money to pay for seed next season, and supporting his local community by reporting for militia duty. More interesting still, his understanding of the events that were playing out around him were entirely free of the biases, assumptions, and convictions about the Revolutionary Era that two centuries worth of historians have since spent their careers cultivating. He didn’t subscribe to an established school of thought as to why the Revolution began when and where it did, and he brought to a consideration of the events of the 1770s and 1780s no pre-made conclusions about what was happening in America and what was causing it. In short, he saw the trees, even if he didn’t understand what the forest looked like. Delving into his perspective can potentially bring to light a veritable cornucopia of details that can greatly enrich the modern understanding of life, and commerce, and local politics in late 18th century America.

            With this in mind, it is also the job of the historian to be mindful of their own assumptions about an era, person, or event, and be willing to have them challenged by new information. Someone who is already convinced that the Revolution was wholly and unquestionably about the triumph of English Enlightenment philosophy would likely be willing to gloss over or ignore information that suggests commerce, or religion, or class antagonism played a significant role in the American founding. They would be poorer for their certitude. The Revolution represents a very complex moment in history. Many different people living many different lives and acting for many different reasons somehow gave rise to a strange and improbable nation unlike any that had come before. How they did this, or who they were, or what that process can tell us about human nature, or politics, or trade, or philosophy requires continual analysis, reinterpretation, and reflection. But what it requires first, and perhaps foremost, is the ability to recognize the assumptions of those involved in it and a willingness to question the assumptions that we hold ourselves. An Animadversory Address, without intending to, challenges a number of commonly-held assumptions about the Revolutionary Era, and for that reason is particularly worthy of study and contemplation.

            For one thing, Ethan Allen’s understanding of the Revolutionary War, as demonstrated in his 1778 pamphlet, paints a somewhat more complicated picture than that which persists in the popular imagination. While documents like the Declaration of Independence and events like the Constitutional Convention of 1787 – both subjects of widespread public memorialization – embrace moments of unity and solidarity among the thirteen original states, an examination of the events of the Revolution and its immediate aftermath reveals how often and how violently the various constituent members of the United States of America disagreed. Rivalries, particularly among larger states like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Massachusetts, were often quite bitter, and George Washington’s tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army was fraught with quarrels between his office, Congress, and stubborn state governments who refused to contribute supplies and men to the war effort out of a conviction that they had given too much while others had given too little. An Animadversory Address enhances and gives texture to this complex understanding of the relationship between the various states by suggesting that interstate rivalries were in fact a legacy of the colonial era.

            Recalling that the origins of the state of Vermont lay in a territorial dispute between New York and New Hampshire, Allen declared in the aforementioned thirteenth paragraph that said dispute was the result of both existing attitudes and intentional manipulation. New York, he wrote somewhat cryptically, “Has ever been [Britain’s] favourite government [.]” Accepting that no further detail was given as to what he meant by this, aside from a string of abuses attributed to colony and Crown alike, Allen’s implication is nonetheless significant. If a perception of New York as the royal favorite was commonly held, it doubtless flowed out of and into existing tensions between the various American colonies. Having come to resent whatever privileges New York possessed in its relationship with the mother country, the citizens and governments of neighboring colonies may have come to relish the chance to deny New York any further advantage or erode those it already enjoyed. The decision made by New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth in the 1740s to begin selling land grants in territory that was claimed by New York may have partly flowed out of this reasoning. Without dismissing the possibility that Wentworth truly believed his colony had a right to the region that would become the state of Vermont, an opportunity to thwart the favoritism that Allen described in An Animadversory Address may have provided a further incentive to begin selling the land under dispute.

            Such a desire for provocation may also have partly guided the actions of Allen himself. Spurned by the New York Supreme Court in 1770, it is telling that he and his associates chose not to submit further petitions to Parliament, the Board or Trade, or the Crown for a more satisfactory resolution of the New Hampshire Grants dispute. Perhaps conscious of what they perceived as Britain’s unshakable faith in the government of New York, and eager to foil the efforts of that government in whatever way they could, Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, and their fellow settlers instead formed an armed militia with the intention of denying New Yorkers access to the land they claimed between the Hudson and Connecticut rivers. Granting that Allen’s tendency to defy authority may have left him predisposed to such an outcome, the fact that so many men followed him into a life of outlawry and agitation may lend further credence to the claim advanced by An Animadversory Address that New York was the colony best liked and most rewarded by the British government in the decades preceding the Revolution. Certainly the petitioners who had approached Allen in 1770 would have been frustrated by the verdict against them, and thus had reason enough to be ill-disposed towards New York, its government, and its agents. That being said, it was not customary in colonial America – up to that point in the 18th century – for property disputes to give way to lengthy campaigns of armed resistance. There was something unusual about the dispute between New York and the New Hampshire Grants settlers, and it may well have been that the latter were spurred to insurrection by the perception of their opponent’s persistent and unshakable institutional advantage.

            Also worth noting, for how it adds complexity to the recognized narrative of the American Revolution, is the other accusation Allen levelled in the thirteenth paragraph of An Animadversory Address. Beyond the favorable opinion Britain supposedly nurtured toward the government of colonial New York, he claimed that the former was motivated to decide the dispute over the New Hampshire Grants in New York’s favor out of a desire to weaken the colonies by sowing dissent among them. “At the time of the alteration of this jurisdiction,” he wrote,

Jealousies had fir’d the minds of King and Parliament against the growth and rising power of America, and at this time they began to advance men and governments into power, with a political design to crush the liberties of America.      

This same accusation, or one very much like it, was also directed against Britain by English political philosopher and American émigré Thomas Paine (1737-1809) in his 1776 publication Common Sense. Paine, hardly alone among critics of contemporary British policy, believed that Britain was threatened by the resource and demographic potential of the American colonies. Fearful of being eclipsed in preeminence and power by their former dependencies, the British government supposedly concocted a campaign of economic sabotage in the form of ruinous taxation and commerce laws with the intention of keeping America subservient. Allen, it would seem, subscribed to this theory, and likewise attributed the dispute that had emerged between New York and the residents of the New Hampshire Grants to deliberate British meddling.

            Whether Paine of Allen were correct in their assessments of Britain’s intentions is difficult to say for certain. The arguments of contemporary pamphleteers like Alexander Hamilton would seem to have disagreed; the unwavering love of profit he ascribed to the administrators of the British Empire appears ill-adapted to complex schemes designed to protect said empire’s perceived global standing. Modern scholars have similarly found it difficult to reconcile the conspiratorial allegations levelled at Britain by certain among the Revolutionary Generation with what has since come to light about the political and economic priorities of the late 18th century British government. Rather than confirm the existence of any plot intended to constrain the ability of the American colonies to challenge British economic or military standing, accounts from the period instead depict successive governments in the 1760s and 1770s as being chiefly motivated by base financial concerns. The Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765) were passed with the intention of helping to pay down the debt Britain had accrued during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) and fund the continued employment of ten thousand regular soldiers – many of whom were related to families too powerful for Parliament to risk displeasing – in American garrisons. Granting that the measures enacted in an attempt to meet these goals by the government of Prime Minister George Grenville (1712-1770) were both self-interested and short-sighted, there did not appear to be any kind of conspiracy at play.

            That being said, it’s certainly conceivable that commentators like Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen were correct in assigning some degree of calculation to British policy in late 18th century America. The public debates of Parliament aside, the British government of the day may well have decided via private and unrecorded consultations that the American colonies indeed had the potential to grow too strong for Britain to control them indefinitely. The open discussions that followed, with legislators, government ministers, and agents of the various colonies, may thus have been strictly pro forma, and the intention of the Grenville ministry to implement a series of colonial taxes settled in advance. Without saying how probable or improbable this scenario may have been, it must be admitted that it was at the very least not impossible. More important than validating what Ethan Allen may have believed about the conflict between New York and Vermont, however, is the fact that he believed it at all.

            Whether or not his assessment of what had pitted New York and New Hampshire against each other was accurate, Allen’s conviction that it was speaks volumes about his understanding of the nature of the American Revolution and the intentions of the various states. If, as he seemed to claim in An Animadversory Address, Vermont’s independence was an outgrowth of the same machinations that had resulted in the independence of the United States as a whole, then no government in America (New York’s most certainly included) could dismiss the cause of Vermont as a trifling matter over land that was incidental to the larger Revolution. Furthermore, if the government of the state of New York was willing to acknowledge that the conflict between the colonies and Great Britain was the consequence of British intrigue – a far from uncommon sentiment – it would have been thereafter forced to confront the possibility that the position it sought to enforce against Vermont was a product of the same. This would have placed New York, Allen doubtless hoped, in the unenviable position of attempting to decry and defeat Britain’s attempt to suppress its American subjects while also seeking to benefit from that attempt by embracing and perpetuating Britain’s manipulation of inter-colonial affairs. Supposing that the residents of the New Hampshire Grants who had followed Allen in establishing the Green Mountain Boys in 1770 were of the same or similar opinion, it would seem apt to conclude that the American Revolution, for a least a portion of its participants, was far more complicated than is often remembered.

Friday, July 15, 2016

An Animadversory Address to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont, Part III: Parallels

            Putting aside whatever personal or professional goals Ethan Allen might have hoped to achieve with the publication of An Animadversory Address, its obvious purpose was to further the cause of Vermont and its residents against the contrary assertions of neighboring New York. While Allen attempted this in a number of ways, varying in approach, stress, and emphasis, perhaps the most striking, then as now, were the parallels he perceived linking the conflict between Vermont and New York to that between the United States and Great Britain. Though New York was evidently amenable to the participation of Allen and the Green Mountain Boys within the context of the wider Revolutionary War, this did not equate to a settlement of the dispute between the two parties. Though they had found common cause in the struggle against Britain’s claimed prerogatives in America, the revolutionary government of New York was evidently no more willing to admit the illegitimacy of its claim to the New Hampshire Grants than Parliament was to its right to tax the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Allen accordingly seized upon New York’s apparent intransigence, and its haughty assumption of an inherited prerogative, in order to make it clear to any that read An Animadversory Address that Vermont’s neighbor and ally was guilty of hypocrisy in the extreme.

            The manner by which Allen attempted to make clear the circumstances of New York’s misconduct were various, though linked by the general theme of portraying the state as possessing particularly un-revolutionary sensibilities. In the thirteenth paragraph, for example, he sought to explain the root of New York’s claim to the territory of Vermont by making reference to recent royal judgements as to the extent of the former colony’s governing charter. It was not until 1764, Allen asserted, “When the now English King, for certain political reasons […] extended the jurisdiction of New-York over the premises, by his special royal authority.”  This was not a matter of good fortune, he maintained, but a consequence of persistent favoritism. “New-York has ever been [the Crown’s] favourite government [,]” he continued. “They could almost vie with Great-Britain in the art of vassalaging common people, and in erasing every idea of liberty from the human mind, by making and keeping them poor and servile.” New York, Allen evidently believed, was guilty of perpetuating a legacy of royal preference, and sought to take advantage of judgements handed down by an authority they had themselves repudiated by declaring their independence. At a time when the people of New York – soldiers, sailors, farmers, merchants, and ordinary townspeople alike – were engaged in a struggle whose stated ideals were “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” this was a damning accusation indeed.

            The implication of New York’s behavior vis-à-vis Vermont was made worse by what Allen described in paragraph fifteen of An Animadversory Address as its wholly voluntary nature. In response to the offer made by Governor George Clinton of a general pardon for all those involved with the “pretended state of Vermont,” Allen claimed that recent events should have rendered the issue moot. “It was a matter which formerly respected Governor Tryon,” he wrote, “The old Legislature of New-York, and the Green Mountain Boys [.]” The state of New York, an entity which had only come into existence in the summer of 1776, was not a party to the dispute in question, and the connotation of its claiming to inherit the position of the former Province of New York were, to Allen, troubling. The people of Vermont, he avowed,

Resent it, that the Legislature of the state of New-York have, so late in the day, undertook to give an Unconditional discharge and remission of all penalties and forfeitures incurred, under an act, which had been long dead; and which, when alive, served only to discover to the world, the wickedness and depravity of that legislative body which enacted them.

By offering a pardon to the accused Green Mountain Boys and their supporters, Allen argued, the state of New York effectively validated the charges laid against them by the administration of Royal Governor William Tryon. These charges being particularly draconian, Allen was understandably concerned by the willingness of New York’s revolutionary government to uphold them. “I verily believe,” he thereafter concluded, “That the King’s Commissioners would now be as willing to pardon me for the sin of rebellion, provided I would afterwards be subject to Britain, as the Legislature abovementioned, provided I would be a subject to New-York [.]”

            Such a blatant association of the positions maintained by the British government and the state of New York was doubtless intended to sting those residents of the latter who read it, and reinforce to those in Vermont the justness of their continued resistance. Allen drew similar comparisons between the governments of colonial and post-independence New York within the pages of An Animadversory Address, and ascribed to both an undue royalist character. In the third paragraph, for instance, he claimed that Cumberland County, one of the four that colonial New York had established in the disputed New Hampshire Grants after 1764, was full of Tories. These royalists, he asserted, “Though the whole state, are using their influence and intrigues against our new state, in favour of the government of New-York, which, for certain motives they prefer.” The implication that Allen attempted to draw with this sentence was subtle, but no less critical. If the Tories of Cumberland County appeared favorable to the government of New York, it might reasonably have been argued that this was because New York was either controlled by Tories itself or was sympathetic to their aims (i.e., stymying the Revolution and reasserting royal authority). This connection was made clearer in the twenty-ninth paragraph of An Animadversory Address. While expressing sympathy for the suffering his countrymen in Vermont had experienced in the 1770s at the hands of New York’s colonial government, Allen declared, “It is manifest, that the new government are minded to follow nearly in their steps.” Considering, again, how much New Yorkers had themselves suffered since the Revolution began in 1775 – the men who had fought and died at Long Island, White Plains, and Saratoga, and the residents of New York City who had lived under occupation since 1776 – this would surely have seemed a bitter accusation. 

            The truth of the matter – shockingly – was somewhat more complicated than Ethan Allen made it out. George Clinton, Governor of New York from 1777 to 1795 and the state official upon which Allen seem to foist the balance of his suspicion, was just about the last contemporary American statesman to whom the label “royalist” could be said to apply. Noted during his first term in office as a bitter opponent of his state’s sizable Tory population, he took to seizing the property of those openly supportive of the Crown in order to keep taxes low and help pay for New York’s share of the war effort. Furthermore, the nature of the dispute between the residents of Vermont and the government(s) of New York was in certain key aspects unlike that which had emerged between the American colonies and Great Britain. The complaints nurtured by the various colonists, distilled by their representatives in the First and Second Continental Congresses, were at their core philosophical. It was not the fact of taxation that heaped such ire upon the Sugar Act (1764), the Stamp Act (1765), and the Tea Act (1773), but rather the principle under which Britain attempted to enact it. By seeking to apply direct taxes to their American dependencies, an act customarily reserved to the elected representatives of those taxed, British ministers in the 1760s and 1770s threatened to overthrown over a century of precedent and establish in its place the principle of arbitrary, unlimited taxation. The peril under which colonial Americans accordingly labored in the years immediately preceding the Revolution was thus more prospective than immediate – they feared what might be rather than what was.

            The residents of the New Hampshire Grants, and later the State of Vermont, were faced during this same period with a somewhat more urgent threat. The administrations of colonial Governor William Tryon and state Governor George Clinton did not attempt to assert the legitimacy of a principle which they may or may not have chosen to apply in the future. Rather, both governments declared their authority over the lands falling within the New Hampshire Grants and attempted to extort the submission of all property owners within that territory. Those residents of the disputed region who paid to have their land claims validated (the charges often exceeding the original purchase price) were left in peace. Those who refused, or were simply unable to comply, were dispossessed of what had formerly been their property. At issue, then, was not the validity of an abstract philosophical principle, but the right of people who had purchased land legally to enjoy its benefits freely and without harassment. In this sense the “Vermont Revolution,” to coin a phrase, was at its core a struggle based on a much more pragmatic principle than the larger American Revolution. Certainly the people of Vermont were concerned about the claimed right of Britain to tax its unrepresented American subjects – their willingness to participate in the Revolutionary War attests to the fact – but their conflict with New York was about something much simpler. What Vermonters like Ethan Allen and Seth Warner had crusaded for since 1770, and New York had called into question, was the right of an individual to purchase private property and dispose of it however they wished, free of the interference of a third party. This was not a discussion that really formed a part of the larger American Revolutionary narrative, and attempting to draw parallels between the two (as with An Animadversory Address) is more than a little problematic. 

            That being said, Allen’s attempt to juxtapose Great Britain and New York as equals in tyranny was not wholly without substance. While Britain’s motives in attempting to supress an American insurrection were arguably economic and political, and New York’s vis-à-vis Vermont perhaps more a matter of reputation, both entities seemed to draw their sense of authority from a similar source. Each claimed a prerogative to do whatever they wished to do, and manifested a comparable resistance to seeing that prerogative questioned or diminished. For their part, British authorities claimed that the sovereignty of the Crown and Parliament over the American colonies was absolute, owing to the manner by which those colonies had been established. By granting charters to groups like the Virginia Company or individuals like William Penn, the Crown had thereby delegated a portion of its sovereignty without necessarily abandoning the claim to which it applied. This meant, in the eyes of the British government, that though colonies like Pennsylvania were unique, self-governing political entities, they were not sovereign. Consequently, Britain was at liberty to dispose of its American dependencies as it wished, needing no more permission than that granted by Parliament as the sole legislature of the realm. This principle – that Crown and Parliament were respectively sovereign and supreme – was rooted in the hard-won British ideal of constitutional monarchy. To question its application in the American context would doubtless have been construed by many in government as a fundamental threat to the underpinnings of the contemporary British state.

            New York, though a colony of Britain itself, seemed to adopt a similar tack in its dealings with residents of the disputed New Hampshire Grants. The authority under which it claimed ownership of the region, and the concomitant right to sell land within it, was rooted into the original 1664 letters patent that granted the land lying between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers to James, Duke of York (1633-1701). The resulting Province of New York (named in honor of its proprietor) became a Crown Colony in 1685 when the Duke ascended the throne as James II, and was thereafter subdivided numerous times over the century that followed. Governors William Tryon and George Clinton both maintained, however, that none of these subdivisions included the territory falling roughly between the Hudson and Connecticut rivers to which New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth laid claim in the 1740s. The disputed region, the government of New York asserted consistently between that time and the 1770s, was and always had been under its particular authority. Consequently, if said government chose to invalidate the land grants made by another colony that had no right to do so and make sale of further grants to those willing to render payment, there was no power under the sun save perhaps that of Parliament which could stand in their way. Because this stance was taken in reference to the “ancient and original” grant of land that had given birth to New York in the 17th century, resistance to it – as offered by the Green Mountain Boys – could potentially have been construed in some circles as a threat of the legitimacy of New York itself. Though the colonial Province of New York was subsequently replaced by an independent state whose very existence was a in some ways a repudiation of the entity that had preceded it, the government of the latter appeared similarly disinclined to allow what it perceived as a partition of its territory. Colony or state, New York was New York; the borders of the two were theoretically identical, and to allow any violation thereof was no doubt perceived as a potential threat to the sovereignty of the whole.

            Against such seemingly intractable claims as Great Britain and New York offered against America and Vermont, the United States and Ethan Allen put forth strikingly similar solutions. To British claims of sovereignty over the American colonies, the colonists themselves asserted that sovereignty could only derive from the consent of the governed. Having been refused the opportunity to give their consent by being denied representation in Parliament, the united colonies instead asserted their sovereign right to declare themselves independent of any higher authority than what they themselves chose to acknowledge. This essentially served to designate the Kingdom of Great Britain and its former colonies as legally separate and equal entities, none of which could claim authority over any other. Ethan Allen made much the same assertion in An Animadversory Address by making reference to the legal and sovereign equality of Vermont and the members of the United States. In the sixth paragraph, for example, he claimed that the constitution Vermont had adopted in 1777 was well-regarded, “In such parts of the eastern states, where it has been circulated [,]” and that, “There is little, I may say less dissatisfaction in the state of Vermont, as to matters of government, as in any of the eastern states [.]” By comparing Vermont and the “eastern states” in terms of how their respective constitutions had been received – constitution-making being among the most significant expressions of sovereignty a given community can undertake – Allen thereby implied a fundamental equality between them. If New York, or New Hampshire, or Pennsylvania had felt themselves in a position to create constitutions, then the fact that Vermont had done the same would seem to indicate that it was independent in the same way as any one of the thirteen United States.

            An Animadversory Address reinforced this idea in its eighth paragraph, wherein Allen declared quite plainly that Vermont’s assumption of an independent government, “Puts us on an equal footing with our old New-York adversaries, and will enable us to baffle all their schemes.” By tying independence to resisting the “schemes” perpetrated by neighboring New York, the purpose of Vermont’s self-declared autonomy would seem to have been mainly pragmatic. Allen further expanded on this idea in paragraph twenty-eight. As a practical measure, he claimed, independence and self-government permitted Vermont to better oppose both the depredations of invading British armies and the meddling of a jealous regime in New York bent on reclaiming what it continued to regard as the New Hampshire Grants.  Maintaining, “inviolable the supremacy of the legislative authority of the independent state of Vermont,” Allen accordingly argued, represented the, “Shortest, best, and most eligible […] way of vacating those New-York interfering grants [.]” “This,” he continued, “At one stroke, overturns every New-York scheme which may be calculated for our ruin, makes us free men, [and] confirms our property [.]” The same justification could easily have been applied to the United States as a whole; the legislative authority asserted by the various states, in addition to satisfying a larger philosophical argument, served the practical purpose of helping to frustrate Britain’s attempts to reaffirm its claimed authority. If Vermont had arrived at independence via the same basic route as the states represented in Congress, the ability of any one of those states to declare Vermont’s autonomy illegitimate would seem thereby somewhat constrained.

            Even if this were not the case – even if the former New Hampshire Grants had arrived at independence by entirely different means than the other states – Allen maintained that the people of Vermont had earned their sovereignty all the same. They had, he wrote, “Fought, bled, and hitherto conquered, and are as deserving these good fruits of [their] valor, hazard and toil, as any people under heaven.” This too drew a favorable comparison to the trajectory and experiences of the other states. The Green Mountain Boys, raised from among the communities of the New Hampshire Grants, had fought in the Revolutionary War since its inception in 1775. They had helped capture a number of British outposts, marched to Quebec and back, and helped soften the blow of a British invasion of New York in 1777. If the citizens of New York, or Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, or Virginia could claim to have earned their independence by the blood they had spilled in its defence, there could accordingly be no argument that the people of Vermont were deserving of the same prize. By calling attention to this, and other, parallels between the positions occupied by Vermont and the United States, Allen no doubt intended to make it as hard as possible for a given reader of An Animadversory Address to deny that Vermont was indeed as much a sovereign entity as any of the thirteen states its citizens were laboring beside. Furthermore, if Allen managed to convince his audience of the legitimacy of Vermont’s independence, they would have been thereafter forced to confront the other parallel that he seemed determined to draw; that between Great Britain and New York. If there was no basis for Britain’s claim of authority over the United States, both being sovereign entities, it would therefore seem irrational to argue that New York could legitimately make the same claim over a sovereign Vermont.

Friday, July 8, 2016

An Animadversory Address to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont, Part II: Chasing the Narrative

            If the biography which was presented in the previous entry in this series managed to make anything clear at all, hopefully it was that the life and experiences of Ethan Allen were not usual by the standards of the Founding Generation. He was not a self-made polymath and natural scientist like Benjamin Franklin, an ambitious and indefatigable administrator like Alexander Hamilton, or a steadfast and unimpeachable statesman like John Adams. These men were some of the brightest minds of their generation, and they came to support the cause of the united colonies (later the United States) by engaging, publically and privately, with the intellectual and philosophical issues of the day. What was the nature of the relationship between Great Britain and its American dependencies? What rights were the colonists entitled to? Did people owe their loyalty to a sovereign who treated them cruelly and refused to consider their petitions? Questions like these were at the centre of the debate that gave birth to and sustained the American Revolution. The manner in which men like Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams encountered and attempted to answer them forms a central part of their personal legacies and the legacy of the American Founding as a whole.  The pamphlets, polemics, treatises, and satires they drafted helped form the vocabulary of the Revolution, and continue to shape and inform how the events of that era are understood.

            Ethan Allen was not like men cited above. He was not a statesman, a philosopher, or an administrator, though he dabbled in all three of these vocations. Rather, he might best be described as a kind of professional incendiary. Whereas Thomas Jefferson seemed ever to be motivated by philosophical conviction – however misplaced at times – and George Washington by a deep-rooted sense of moral imperative, there seemed to be something core to Allen’s character that inclined him to buck authority wherever he found it. He was, in many ways, an egotistical, overconfident, glory-seeking man. Much the same could be said of many other Founders – those already named perhaps chief among them – yet few among that cohort seemed quite as incapable of moderating their impulses as Allen, and as a consequence few of them were as often at their mercy. In his native Connecticut, in Massachusetts, in New York, and in Quebec, Allen’s headstrong nature paid him back time and again with prosecution, exile, outlawry, and imprisonment. When the delegates to the Continental Congress signed their names to the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, they knew they were exposing themselves to potential capture and prosecution by British authorities. It is terribly significant that Ethan Allen, at that same moment, was already being held prisoner and had been branded a criminal for over five years. Accordingly, though Ethan Allen should most certainly be recognized as an American Founder, it must also be made clear that his path through life and through the Revolution was very much his own.  With this in mind, it should also be acknowledged that Allen’s Animadversory Address was similarly unusual among the political pamphlets one usually associates with the American Revolution.

            In general, Allen’s pamphlet seemed to take its rhetorical cues more from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense than Thomas Jefferson’s Summary View. Excusing the occasional linguistic flourish – notably including the term “animadversory,” derived from the Latin phrase animum advertere, to turn the mind to – An Animadversory Address is not overly verbose, delivers its arguments succinctly, and leans on logic more than language as its chief mechanism of persuasion. Allen seemed less given to self-conscious vulgarity or appeals to religiosity than Paine, but it is plain enough that his writing was intended to speak to and for a relatively unpretentious audience. That being said, the pamphlet’s author was certainly not above the occasional bout of hyperbole or self-promotion. In particular, Allen’s portrayal of the contributions of Vermont towards the larger Revolutionary struggle appears especially strident. The Battle of Bennington, a relatively small engagement in the summer of 1777 that helped blunt the force of the British invasion of upstate New York, was described in the second paragraph as an, “Ever-memorable battle and victory,” and, “The Forerunner and grand typical figure of the destruction of the northern army [.]” Much the same sentiment was expressed in the seventh paragraph – “The memorable and twice glorious battles and victories of Bennington” – and Allen seemed particularly intent on making his audience aware of the importance of the encounter and the role his Green Mountain Boys played in it.

            In point of fact, however, the regiment that Allen had founded in 1770 accounted for only three hundred fifty men to the Continental Army’s two thousand. Though his former subordinate and collaborator Seth Warner was present at the battle, and by all accounts acquitted himself admirably, it was New Hampshire General John Stark’s successful attempt to raise fifteen hundred militiamen in six days and march them across the state to meet the British advance that almost certainly determined the outcome. In addition, though the engagement was known, then as now, as the Battle of Bennington, the action actually took place ten miles distant in Walloomsac, New York. By reinforcing the association between the battle that helped make possible the surrender of British General John Burgoyne (1722-1792) after his defeat at Saratoga (1777), the town in Vermont that gave birth to the Green Mountain Boys, and the Boys themselves, however, Allen no doubt hoped his audience would come away with a suitable appreciation for what Vermont had contributed to the American cause. Duly impressed, former critics of the Green Mountain Boys might have seen their way clear to granting their case a fairer hearing once the outcome of the Revolution had been decided. Similar attempts to promote a sense of gratitude for his own efforts towards and importance to Vermont’s struggle for independence can also be found in An Animadversory Address.

            In the first and second paragraphs of his 1778 pamphlet, Ethan Allen made a point drawing the attention of his audience to the sacrifices he had made for the cause of Vermont. “Many times have I hazarded my life for you, as well as for my own property [,]” he declared, “and if occasion shall in future require, I will freely do it again.” The sentence that immediately followed reiterated this idea, in the apparent guise of accounting for Allen’s recent whereabouts. His imprisonment at British hands was described as, “A barbarous captivity,” to which he added parenthetically, “part of which extraordinary sufferings was for your sakes [.]” Doubtless these assertions were intended to garner the favor of readers in Vermont, some of whom may have forgotten Allen during his three year absence, at the same time that it asserted his legitimacy as the mouthpiece of Vermont’s ongoing struggle for independence. No errant rabble-rouser was he, but a man who had suffered for his cause and would do so again. This too, as it turns out, was something of an overstatement. The conflict that had persisted between the Green Mountain Boys and the government of colonial New York, though lengthy, had not been particularly violent. Granted, Allen had been branded an outlaw as a result, and a cash reward was offered for his capture, but it would have been an exaggeration to say that his life was ever really in danger as a result. His participation in the Battle of Ticonderoga also transpired without bloodshed, and the two occasions during which he was exposed to enemy fire – his failed attempts to capture Fort Saint John and Montreal – were both the product of his own desire for personal glory. His resulting captivity between 1775 and 1778, if his own written accounts are any indication, was indeed often unpleasant and painful. But it was the result of his own attempt at self-aggrandizement rather than any efforts he might have made on behalf of Vermont and its residents.
       
            In spite of this evident impulse to talk up his own achievements, Allen also demonstrated a degree of self-awareness in certain sections of An Animadversory Address. In the fourth paragraph, for instance, he seemed to adopt a somewhat measured perspective of the role he and his followers played in Vermont’s early history. “In those days,” he wrote,

A sort of mob government, in the now county of Bennington took place, which, however deficient in most respects, was nevertheless the terror of the government of New-York, and the only means by which we could possibly maintain the possession of our lands.

In spite of the power and importance Allen herein attributed to the regime his Green Mountain Boys inaugurated in the New Hampshire Grants, his language was otherwise remarkably self-effacing. Even during an era of revolution and the widespread overthrow of the established order, “mob” wasn’t really a word with positive connotations. Allen’s use of it to describe the insurgency he initiated would seem to denote a slightly more reflective and more humble outlook than was normally his wont. Indeed, by referring to his rebel militia as a “mob government,” he appeared to echo the complaints of New York’s last colonial government, which referred to the Green Mountain Boys as the “Bennington Mob” in a 1774 law that targeted their members. Having had three years to consider, among other things, the value of his efforts in the Grants and the fortunes of the community he had been forced to leave behind, perhaps Allen had come to a more acute understanding of his own shortcomings than his younger self would have been capable. His admission that the administration of the Green Mountain Boys was “deficient in most respects” would seem to square with this conclusion. However crucial he still felt that the insurgency he had founded was to the success of Vermont’s eventual independence, time had evidently allowed him to see that his role in the state’s formation was not beyond reproach.   

            Whatever newfound sense of perspective he may have acquired, however, didn’t necessarily stop Allen from attempting reassert his own importance to Vermont’s struggle for self-determination. The second paragraph of An Animadversory Address furnishes a particularly subtle example of this. In it, Allen took account of and analysed the prospects of Vermont’s newly-formed government in a way that suggested his opinion on the matter was particularly weighty or sought-after. “I have,” he wrote,

On mature deliberation, expatiated on the goods effects which cannot fail of redounding to the inhabitants, in so extensive a frontier country, from the blessings of a well established civil government; and think it worth my trouble to communicate my sentiments and reflections to the public, with a view of encouraging the good and virtuous inhabitants of this State, to persevere and be happy in the further confirming and establishing the same.

            Though there is no reason to doubt that Allen was sincere in his desire to promote self-government in the State of Vermont, in which he owned property and of which he remained a resident, his manner of expression and his timing suggest a possible ulterior motive. Allen’s captivity came to an end at some point shortly before May 14th, 1778, and An Animadversory Address was published in August of the same year. Vermont, meanwhile, had declared its independence in January, 1777 and adopted a constitution in August, 1777. Therefore, by the time Allen saw fit to address the utility of self-government in Vermont, the territory in question had been governing itself for at least a year. With this fact in mind, several questions arise. Why did Allen feel the need to weigh in on and pronounce his approval of something which was already fairly well-established? Furthermore, would anyone living under the government of Vermont in the summer of 1778 have cared much for his opinion one way or the other? The people of Vermont had a government as of August 1777, created of their own efforts, and which would sustain them for the better part of the next fifteen years. Did they really require the encouragement of a man who had just spent three years in captivity, the victim of his own stubborn pride? In attempting to answer these questions, it appears that An Animadversory Address may have been intended to serve a dual purpose.

    While on the surface seeking to counter the pronouncements of a New York government still intent on exerting its authority over the territory claimed by Vermont, the pamphlet may have also been calculated to help resurrect Allen’s public career. He had missed a great deal during his three year absence. The movement that he had helped instigate, intended to protect and promote the claims of people living in the disputed New Hampshire Grants, had taken on a life of its own, and the militia he had founded was flourishing under the leadership of another man. It would thus have been entirely natural, upon learning of all that had transpired in the fateful years between 1775 and 1778, for Allen to have felt a mix of elation and disconnection. The campaign he instigated against the government of New York in 1770 had achieved rare and unprecedented success, yet it had done so wholly absent of his input.  Having no doubt become accustomed to notoriety, he would have been forced to confront his own apparent irrelevance to the fortunes of Vermont and its residents. Without him, they had created a state for themselves, were governing themselves, and had helped achieve a significant military victory for the cause of American independence. Surely a man like Allen, who seemed so often to glory in the role of attention-grabbing non-conformist, would have felt stung by the implication that he was no longer necessary. A document like An Animadversory Address may well have been his answer. By confronting, as he had been doing since 1770, the belligerence of Vermont’s more powerful neighbor, he could reinsert himself into the narrative of his adopted community. Those who had forgotten him would thus to be reminded of his sacrifices. Those who had learned to get along without him would be the beneficiaries of his unsolicited counsel. And the state that had come into being without his input would be the beneficiary of his protection all the same.

Friday, July 1, 2016

An Animadversory Address to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont, Part I: Context

            It strikes me that it may appear, judging from how often certain names appears within these pages, that I am only interested in shining a light on the work of the more famous members of the Founding Generation – the Jeffersons, Adams’, Franklins, and Hamiltons of it all. I wish to make it clear to my dear readers (who are so few they ought to be classified as a precious resource) that I am very conscious of the need to give attention to some of the lesser known participants in the American Founding. While I hope that my attempts to examine the writings of certain Ant-Federalist pamphleteers, among them Melancton Smith, Robert Yates, and Mercy Otis Warren, have gone some distance toward that goal, I yet feel I would be remiss if I delved no deeper into the rich literary cannon of the Revolutionary era and persisted until the end of my days in memorializing the same half-dozen men who are in no further need of memorialization.

The American Revolution was not carried off solely by a roomful of lawyers, merchants, and amateur philosophers in Philadelphia. Across thirteen states, hundreds of legislators, diplomats, financiers, statesmen, and soldiers worked tirelessly to transform the lofty ideals embodied by the Declaration of Independence into functioning governments. Of those hundreds, a mere handful is yet remembered. This is understandable, given the relatively limited scope of their individual contributions, and unfortunate, given that many of them endured significant hardship in their attempts to give substance to the promise embodied in the phrase “The United States of America.” If it is in my power, however meagre it may be, to draw the attention of some small number of people to the life and accomplishments of even one of these neglected patriots, then I feel it is something that I should do.

            To that end, let us turn now to the story of the fourteenth state and one of its own redoubtable founders.

            Because of course there was a fourteen state. While the narrative of thirteen colonies banding together in the face of tyranny and becoming thirteen states is doubtless as familiar as it is comforting, it has hopefully become clear by now that the Revolutionary era is one which stubbornly resists simplification. At the same time that thirteen sisters set about casting off the shackles of their distant, unfeeling, and arbitrary patriarch, a fourteenth lent its strength to the same cause while simultaneously continuing its longstanding struggle against one of its overbearing siblings. That fourteenth state was known, then as now, as Vermont. Born out a conflict over land grants between settlers and colonial authorities, the self-declared republic of the Green Mountain was a by-product both of intercolonial rivalries and the chaos that the Revolution visited upon the continent. In spite of its status as unrecognized and unofficial, however, Vermont actively participated in the Revolutionary War, possessed its own cohort of founding fathers, and drafted its own constitution in 1777. Indeed, the story of its foundation and early existence in many ways runs in parallel to that of the United States at large. In this sense, the creation of Vermont might fairly be termed the “revolution within the Revolution.”

            When one speaks of the founding of Vermont, of course, one cannot help but also mention the name of perhaps its favorite son. Ethan Allen, though born in Connecticut, become one of the most steadfast defenders of the land claims possessed by Vermont settlers once he migrated there in the early 1770s. Unsuccessful in court, he thereafter organized and led the famed Green Mountain Boys militia, and though a campaign of harassment and written criticism become a persistent thorn in the side of successive governments in neighboring New York. It was through his service to the united colonies, however, that Allen transcended from regional rabble-rouser to American folk hero. Though not a philosopher on par with Thomas Jefferson or an administrator possessed of the ambition and drive of Alexander Hamilton, Allen’s frontier sensibilities, reputation for insubordinate behavior, and self-promotion through written accounts of his military escapades helped make him one of the more popular Revolutionary figures in the 19th century United States. On par with Davy Crocket or Daniel Boone, he came to symbolize the rugged individualism, disdain for authority, and common-sense ingenuity so many Americans felt was at the core of their national identity. Though Allen’s lustre has faded somewhat since that time, his significance as an early revolutionary and a political agitator remains eminently worthy of discussion and analysis. To that end, the series that follows will focus on a pamphlet written by Allen in 1778 entitled An Animadversory Address to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont.

            Said pamphlet sought to refute the efforts of New York’s newly-established state government to persuade the inhabitants of Vermont to acknowledge its authority in exchange for recognition of their land claim, and struck a balance in tone somewhere between casual and prosecutorial. Against the power of a state government, and its formidable chief executive George Clinton (1739-1812), Allen deployed a style of debate that made use of extensive citation in order to establish and counter the arguments of his chosen opponent. To this he added a relaxed but confidant understanding of social contract philosophy, a recounting of the contributions made by Vermont to the general cause of the United States, and a number of crucial points concerning the nature of private property and the continuity of American state governments vis-à-vis their colonial predecessors. It is a brief document and proceeds at a brisk pace, yet appears under no circumstances to be the product of anything less than a sharp and incisive intellect. Allen’s penchant for rebelliousness is in evidence plainly enough, but so is his close understanding of the legal ramifications that surrounded both the claims of his fellow Vermont settlers and those of the state of New York. Consequently, An Animadversory Address can be said to offer insight into both the capacity of an American statesman who did not possess an advanced education to cultivate a nuanced understanding of contemporary political affairs, as well as the contentious and improbable circumstances that gave birth to the state of Vermont.

            Before Allen became a war hero and renegade founding father, however, he was just a man from Connecticut. Born in Litchfield in 1738, his father Joseph moved the family further west to the town of Cornwall around 1740 in an effort to escape the religious turmoil unleashed in the colony by the Protestant religious revival now termed the Great Awakening. Cornwall and Litchfield both were located in Western Connecticut, in many ways still a frontier region in the middle of the 18th century. This presented families like the Allens with hardships and opportunities in equal measure. Though far, by contemporary standards, from the colonial capital at Hartford, and lacking certain amenities enjoyed by inhabitants of more developed urban centres, the relatively undeveloped nature of Cornwall allowed Joseph Allen to purchase land cheaply and establish a fairly large and successful farm by the time he died in 1755. The first-born of seven children, Ethan was influenced as a youth by both by the rugged circumstances of his upbringing and the religious sensibilities of his pious and diligent father. Demonstrating an early interest in learning, the younger Allen set his mind on attending Yale College and in preparation began to attend studies in Salisbury (also in western Connecticut) with a local minister.

            Forced to abandon his education after his father’s demise, Allen spent the following decade moving from one venture to the next. During the Seven Years War (1754-1763) he briefly served in the colonial militia, returned to Cornwall tend his family’s farm in 1762, married a woman five years his senior named Mary Brownson, moved to Salisbury, fathered five children, became part owner of an iron works, and began what would prove to be a lengthy career as a scofflaw. Though his disdain for convention first manifested in a series of relatively benign incidents – a dispute with neighbors over errant pigs and an unauthorized smallpox inoculation that violated town regulations – the rebellious aspect of Allen’s character would come to fundamentally shape the direction of his life. Similarly foundational during this era was his acquaintance and friendship with a New York doctor name Thomas Young (1731-1777). The son of Anglo-Irish immigrants and a religious non-conformist, Young became a profound influence on Allen during their times as neighbors in Salisbury. From Young, Allen learned a great deal about philosophy, political theory, and theology and the two contrived to prepare a manuscript attacking organized religion and promoting their shared Deist beliefs. Though Thomas Young departed Connecticut for New York in 1764, taking the draft he and Allen had been working on with him, his influence on his younger colleague would prove to have been profound. Indeed, it was Young who illegally inoculated Allen against smallpox, and who suggested the name “Vermont” for the disputed territory north of Massachusetts.

            The five years that followed Allen’s parting with Thomas Young saw the continuation of the former’s now-accustomed transitory lifestyle. After moving to Northampton, Massachusetts sometime prior to 1766, and staying there long enough for his wife to give birth to their son Joseph, Allen was expelled from the town in July, 1767 for reasons which were not recorded. In all likelihood, his tendency to defy convention and his unusual religious convictions played some part in earning him the ire of his neighbors. Thereafter, Allen returned briefly to Salisbury before migrating just across the colonial boundary to Sheffield, Massachusetts. In 1770, still resident in Sheffield, he was approached by a group of men originally from western Connecticut who had purchased land grants in a disputed region to the north from New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth (1696-1770) and subsequently become embroiled in a legal dispute with the government of neighboring New York. Known by that point in his life as a man willing stand in defiance of authority, Allen agreed to take leadership of the informal association (a group which included his cousin Remember Baker and Baker’s cousin Seth Warner) and departed for New York to prepare for the impending court case.

            The land possessed by the men that Allen agreed to lead in 1770 fell within a region of British North America bounded on four sides by colonial Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Quebec. Though originally claimed in part by Massachusetts in the early 18th century, the settlement of the boundary with neighboring New Hampshire theoretically left the territory west of the Connecticut River to the disposition of the latter colony. In 1741 the aforementioned Wentworth was appointed Governor of New Hampshire, the first not to be simultaneous Governor of Massachusetts. Eager to assert his colony’s claim, Wentworth chose to interpret the region now vacated by Massachusetts as extending as far west as a line running parallel to the Hudson River at a distance of twenty miles. This conflicted with claims made by the government of New York to the same expanse of terrain, justified by reference to the original letters patent that established the colony in the 17th century. Heedless of the conflict he was about to unleash, Wentworth began to sell parcels of land within the disputed region in 1749 to settlers and land speculators in return for a small kickback on each grant.

            The government of New York, which had also begun selling land in the contested territory, demanded that Wentworth cease on numerous occasions. While claiming to have terminated any land surveys and sales while awaiting the verdict of adjudication by the Crown, the Governor of New Hampshire continued to dole out grants into the early 1760s and actively encouraged grant owners to settle on their land, cultivate it, and form communities. Upon an appeal by beleaguered authorities in New York, the Board of Trade – responsible for administering the colonies – ruled against Wentworth in 1764 by reaffirming that the Connecticut River formed the western border of the Province of New Hampshire. Considering this as a wholesale invalidation of the grants made by Wentworth – one hundred thirty-five in all – the government of New York divided the region into four counties (Albany, Cumberland, Charlotte, and Gloucester), and demanded payments often in excess of the original purchase price in exchange for recognizing the so-called “New Hampshire Grants.” Those who did not, or could not, pay had their claims nullified and the deed to their land sold. In response to the outcry by residents and grant-holders, New York authorities agreed in the late 1760s to suspend further land sales in the disputed region until the issue was settled by the colony’s Supreme Court.

            When the case finally arrived before the court in 1770, the New Hampshire Grant owners were led by one Ethan Allen and represented by Pennsylvania lawyer-in-training Jared Ingersoll (1749-1822). Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the odds were already stacked against the defendants. Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776), the Lieutenant-Governor of New York, James Duane (1733-1797), the chief prosecutor, and Robert Livingston (1708-1790), the Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court, had all purchased grants in the disputed territory and were doubtless uninterested in invalidating their own rights as property-holders. The trial thus reached a speedy conclusion. The New Hampshire Grants, seen as illegitimate by the government of New York, were ruled inadmissible as evidence, and the claims of the grant holders were brushed aside. Allen, who at some point between being contacted by the petitioners and the conclusion of the trial had purchased a series of grants from Governor Wentworth himself, soon after departed for the contested region to deliver the verdict in person. At Bennington, founded in 1749 as the first chartered town in the New Hampshire Grants, he met with a group of local settlers in the Catamount Tavern in order to discuss what options remained to them. This discussion gave birth to a militia company known as the Green Mountain Boys, led by Allen and organized with the intention of resisting the efforts of New York to assert its authority in the Grants by force of arms.

            The next several years witnessed a slowly but surely escalating campaign of intimidation, property destruction, and general agitation. For their part, the Green Mountain Boys sought to dissuade New York grant owners from settling in the disputed territory, and New York surveyors from facilitating the sale of more land. Houses were burned, people were manhandled, and a whole host of threats, polemics, proposed truces, and denunciations were exchanged with authorities in the neighboring colony. New York, under the leadership of Governor William Tryon (1729-1788), meanwhile attempted to quiet the incipient rebellion that Allen and his followers had stirred by branding several of the militia members outlaws and offering rewards ranging from £20 to £100 for their capture. Allen responded by drawing up notices of his own that labeled prominent New York grant holders criminals and tyrants, accompanied by parallel cash rewards. Unfortunately, these theatrical tactics proved insufficient on their own to maintain the enthusiasm of the New Hampshire Grant owners in the face of a struggle with no end in sight against a much larger and wealthier adversary. Thankfully for Allen and his militia followers, Governor Tryon helped renew their flagging sense of outrage by approving a law in 1774 that handed down exceedingly stiff penalties to those caught intriguing against the colonial government – meetings of three people or more “for unlawful purposes” were forbidden – or interfering with its agents – the punishment for which was death. Spurred by these harsh terms, Allen spent the following summer drafting a two hundred page polemic laying out the position of the New Hampshire Grant holders, and then in 1775 helping pen a plea to the Crown for relief from New York’s intransigent behavior. The latter effort, unfortunately, was never completed. In April of that year, in Middlesex Country, Massachusetts, the American Revolutionary War had begun.

            At this point in Allen’s life, already possessed of a rather unusual trajectory, his fortunes shifted yet again. At the request of a militia company raised in his native Connecticut, he agreed to lend the assistance of the Green Mountain Boys to the planned capture of Fort Ticonderoga in northeastern New York. Though no doubt motivated by the same philosophical, cultural, or personal impulses as any man who served in the Revolutionary War, it is likely Allen also perceived the expedition as a chance to improve the general perception of him and his fellow grant owners. The attack, led by Allen and Connecticut-born, Massachusetts-commissioned militia officer Benedict Arnold (1741-1801), was a complete success. The lightly garrisoned post surrendered without either side firing a shot, and a follow-up assault on nearby Fort Crown Point resulted in another British defeat. Allen, eager to press the advantage and secure some measure of glory for himself, pushed on against the council of the more experienced Arnold and attempted to capture Fort Saint John, on the Richelieu River in British Quebec. The effort was ill-considered and unplanned, and the one hundred Green Mountain Boys who accompanied their founder barely escaped with their lives. As commonly occurred throughout his life, Allen allowed his enthusiasm and his ego to get the better of him. Equally characteristic, however, was his determination to press forward regardless with proposals for the wholesale invasion of Quebec.

            The next several months Allen spent quarrelling with Arnold over the spoils of their joint victories, imploring the Continental Congress not to abandon the captured forts, requesting the delegates in Philadelphia authorize an attack on Montreal, and pleading for the inclusion of the Green Mountain Boys in the newly-authorized Continental Army. Strident as ever, he succeeded in the latter two appeals. In June, 1775 Congress granted General Phillip Schuyler (1733-1804) authorization to plan an invasion of British Canada while also directing him to form a regiment around the Green Mountain Boys and see that they were paid for their service at Ticonderoga. In spite of the years-long insurgency that had been waged by Allen against authorities in New York, he also managed to convince the colony’s revolutionary government to agree to support the adoption of the Boys by Congress and provide for their provisioning. In spite of these early successes, however, Allen’s headstrong nature caught up with him more than once over the next several months. Fatigued by his stalled campaign of resistance, annoyed by his egotism, and distressed by the foolishness he had displayed during his failed attempt to capture Fort Saint John, the newly-restructured Green Mountain Boys rejected him as their leader for the upcoming invasion of Quebec. Indeed, the assembled companies did not deign to assign him any role at all in the regiment, and he was forced to request its new leader Seth Warner allow him to accompany the men as a civilian scout during the coming campaign.

            When the invasion finally began in August, 1775, Allen discovered fairly quickly that his presence was cause for resentment and concern among the officers in command. Though requested by both General Schuyler and his replacement Richard Montgomery (1738-1775) to scout the area between Fort Saint John and Montreal, and help raise a force of French-speaking locals sympathetic to the American cause, Montgomery at least may have done so to ensure that the famously insubordinate Allen was kept away from the bulk of his encampment. Chastened and isolated, the former leader of the Green Mountain Boys thereafter plotted with the officer to whom he had been assigned, Major John Brown (1744-1780), to assemble a small force and capture Montreal on his own. Though Brown and his followers failed to rendezvous with Allen on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River, he pushed ahead anyway, and he and thirty of his men were subsequently captured at the disastrous Battle of Longue-Pointe (September 25, 1775). Allen spent the next three years as a prisoner of the British, first in a prison ship anchored off Montreal, and then successively in Pendennis Castle in England, Cork, Ireland, and a series of vessels off the American coast. In 1777 he was paroled in New York City, giving him limited freedom of movement, and then placed in solitary confinement for violating the terms of his release. He was finally exchanged for a British officer in May, 1778 and reported to Continental Army Commander George Washington on the 14th of that month. Granted the rank of Colonel in recognition of the hardships he had endured, Allen was given a monthly salary and told to await assignment.

            No assignment ever came, and in the interim Allen chose to return to Bennington, in what by that time was the State of Vermont. During his lengthy absence, the disputed territory had declared its independence from Britain and New York alike in January, 1777, framed and adopted a constitution in July of that year, and sent men to help successfully blunt the British invasion of the Hudson River Valley. Perhaps seeking to make up for lost time and lost glory, Allen thereafter began a zealous campaign to ferret out British sympathizers as a judge assigned to the state’s anti-Tory tribunal. In this role he once more ran afoul of the government of neighboring New York. Governor George Clinton protested to Continental authorities that many of the individuals Allen was helping to exile from Vermont were in fact New Yorkers that were being dispossessed of their lawfully purchased land in keeping with Allen’s pre-Revolutionary activities. Doubtless hoping to bring a final end to the conflict, Clinton issued a proclamation stating that all of the New Hampshire Grants would be thereafter honored by New York so long as the grant holders recognized the authority of that state over the territory claimed by Vermont. Allen, angered that the contributions of men like himself, Seth Warner, and the Green Mountain Boys to the Revolutionary War still did not warrant recognition by the government of New York of their property, drafted a pamphlet that once more attempted to make the case that Vermont was, and by rights had always been, independent of New York. This document was entitled, in full, An Animadversory Address to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont; with Remarks on a Proclamation under the Hand of his Excellency George Clinton, Esq; Governor of the State of New York, and first saw publication in August, 1778.