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 21^st 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.