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 17^th 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.