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 18^th century audience, but cannot fail to strike a 21^st 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 21^st 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 18^th 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 21^st century are on average more intelligent than people in the 18^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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.