Allen’s ability, and inclination, to perceive the conflicts
in which he and his countrymen were engaged in a sophisticated way is also
reflected in perhaps the most intriguing aspect of An Animadversory Address.
In spite of his rather limited formal education, the various arguments Ethan
Allen brought to bear against the government of New York in his 1778 pamphlet
demonstrate a shrewd intelligence and a nuanced understanding of law,
philosophy, and politics not usually associated with the “middling sort” of the
Revolutionary era. Granting that this mass of men and woman – the farmers,
petty merchants, soldiers, and small-scale manufacturers – were instrumental to
the success of the American Founding, they have not been subject to the same
kind of myth-making as the statesman, gentleman philosophers, and military
officers that continue to dominate the historical pantheon of the Revolution.
The net result would seem to be that casual 21st century observers
have essentially replicated the perspective of their 18th century
forebears – the common people were undeniably important to the success of
America’s independence, but their individual intelligence or agency is largely
inconsequential. Allen’s Animadversory
Address conversely gives the lie to this notion by demonstrating that a
backwoods farmer was as capable as his plantation owning, law-practicing
countrymen of seeing the world around him complexly.
The evidence of Allen’s defiant perspicacity takes a number
of forms in An Animadversory Address,
both offhand and deliberate. Examples of the former can be seen most clearly in
paragraph three, wherein the founder of the Green Mountain Boys held forth as
to the virtues of Vermont’s independent government. “To live in a state of
anarchy,” he wrote in the third paragraph,
Has been
found to be inconsistent with the wisdom and practice of mankind in all ages
and nations […] Indeed, the state and condition of men urgeth, nay,
necessitates them to adopt some form of government for their mutual protection
and defence [.]
Allen embellished this general
declaration by adding that,
The
government of New-York never desired to exercise jurisdictional authority over
the inhabitants of [Vermont], for any other purpose but to oppress and deprive
them of their lands and labours; therefore, it is our duty and interest to
yield them no subjection.
Though communicated with a good deal
more concision than was usual among contemporary American pamphleteers, Allen’s
contention that government was a natural outgrowth of the human desire for personal
security, and that a government which failed in this purpose was thereby
illegitimate, was unmistakably rooted in the social contract theory articulated
by Enlightenment philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704),
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
In the American context, the primacy of the social contract,
and Britain’s violation thereof, was referenced time and again – perhaps most
notably in the works of Thomas Jefferson – as justification for the American
colonies’ attempts to seek a redress of their situation by force of arms. Britain,
so the argument went, had rendered its authority over the American colonies
null and void by making the preservation of their accustomed relationship
actively damaging to the latter. Throwing off British hegemony via insurrection
was therefore entirely justified. Allen appeared to agree with this basic
formulation and applied it to the ongoing dispute surrounding the New Hampshire
Grants. Because the government of New York, in his estimation, had shown itself
to be manifestly unconcerned with the wellbeing or security of the residents of
Vermont, its claim of jurisdiction over them was rendered illegitimate. This
distinctive interpretation of a well-worn philosophical principle speaks well
of Allen’s shrew grasp of the political discourse of the Revolutionary era and
his ability to perceive relationships between abstract principles and practical
situations. While it is nearly impossible to determine whether he had read the
original works in which the social contract was first explained and explored –
as the likes of Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and John Dickinson most
assuredly did – his use of this vital philosophical concept in his own work makes
it clear that European political theory was not solely the domain of 18th
century America’s social elite.
Other examples, far more overt, of Ethan Allen’s
surprisingly calculated and incisive approach to political rhetoric can be
found in the manner An Animadversory Address set about countering
an official declaration authorized by New York governor George Clinton in
February, 1778. Said document, issued under Clinton’s hand and addressed to the
residents of the counties New York claimed in Vermont (Albany, Charlotte,
Cumberland, and Gloucester), offered a number of concessions to the holders of
disputed land grants while maintaining a general antagonism towards, “The
pretended state of Vermont, the pretended government thereof, or to any power
or authority, pretended to be held or exercised thereunder.” Among said
concessions, the state of New York was evidently willing to forgive, “All
prosecutions, penalties and forfeitures” incurred by residents of the disputed
region, acknowledge the legitimacy of land grants made by the government of New
Hampshire prior to 1764, and nullify all interfering grants made by the
government of New York after 1764. Confirmation of New Hampshire grants by New
York was to come at the cost of five pounds for three hundred acres, with
sixteen shillings added for every additional hundred, and quit-rents – a
traditional form of land tax – were to be commuted at the rate of six-pence for
every penny owed.
Allen’s decision to reproduce the New York declaration in
full in the middle of An Animadversory Address, though seemingly
offering free publicity to his adversaries, likely represented a canny attempt
on his part to permit Clinton’s administration to damn itself in the eyes of
Allen’s audience. Rather than attempt to editorialize or parse the words
approved and signed by New York’s formidable governor, and thus run this risk
of being accused of taking quoted passages out of context, he presented his
audience with the full and unabridged text. Though he proceeded thereafter in An Animadversory
Address to dissect certain sections of the same, it would seem he was keen
that his readers first gain a clear and unbiased understanding of exactly what
the government of New York had offered the people of Vermont and the manner in
which that offer was phrased. The foresight required of such a determination –
the patience and restraint – reflects favorably on Allen’s skill as a debater,
and flies in the face of the indiscretion that seemed to otherwise define his
life and career. Indeed, prudence of this kind is not usually attributed to the
“common people” of the 18th century, by contemporary authorities or
later observers alike. Doubtless authorities in colonial and post-independence
New York had come to understand Allen and his compatriots as little more than rustic,
backwoods rabble-rousers, and in fairness they had done everything to deserve
that reputation. What men like colonial Governor William Tryon or his successor
George Clinton might not have expected, however, was for these same men to be
capable of offering carefully considered rebuttals to New York’s written
declarations. An Animadversory Address showed, by taking a very measured approach to
refuting one of these declarations, how short-sighted such an expectation was,
and is.
Having repeated, in its entirety, the provisions for redress
offered by the state of New York to the people of Vermont in February, 1778,
Allen next proceeded in An Animadversory Address to dissect certain
clauses thereof. The resulting counterarguments, rendered in paragraphs sixteen
through twenty-four, sought to expose the emptiness of the promises put forward
by the government of New York, and did so in a manner that left no doubt as to
the acumen of their author. The first such rebuttal concerned the manner in
which certain offers contained in the New York declaration were phrased. In the
first and second articles therein, Allen recounted, the government of New York
stated that all persons possessing land in the disputed territory who had
purchased that land from authorities in New Hampshire, or had acquired it by
some other means, and had not had that same land re-granted by New York were to
have their property confirmed under the authority of the same. Though this
might have appeared, in light of the almost decade-long struggle that had
persisted between New York and the New Hampshire Grant holders, to have been a
remarkably generous offer, Allen perceived that it was anything but. The
articles in question, he wrote in paragraph eighteen, “Cannot be considered of
any material consequence, inasmuch, as among almost the whole possessions
referred to […] there are but very few, if any, but what are covered with
New-York grants.” “This being the case,” he concluded in paragraph twenty,
“What has been hitherto proposed, does not reach the essence of the
controversy, as the New-Yorkers very well know [.]”
With a remarkable economy of words, and a touch of causal
disdain, Allen thus showed the magnanimity of the New York declaration to be
little more than smoke and mirrors. The issue at hand, he reminded his
audience, was the disposition of the lands granted by New Hampshire and New York. Grants that fell outside
of this overlap – that had been granted by New Hampshire, or by some other
party, and not by New York – formed no part of the controversy, and indeed
could hardly be said to exist at all. By behaving as if this was not the case,
the government of George Clinton had evidently attempted to project an air of
liberality and kindness vis-à-vis the residents of the disputed territory. The
success of this attempt, Allen suggested in paragraph twenty-four of his
pamphlet, hinged on the people in question being too ignorant, short-sighted,
or dull-witted to perceive a hollow bargain when it was put to them. Without
making any claims or observations as to the mental acuity of the average
Vermonter in 1778, and supposing that the government of New York had indeed
counted on the population it sought to address being so easily swayed, it may
at least be fair to say that Ethan Allen at least was possessed of a degree of
insight not usually attributed to a man of his background, vocation, or social
standing. The depth of Allen’s ability to perceive the contradictions or
fallacies in the arguments of his opponents was demonstrated to even greater
effect in paragraphs twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four of An Animadversory
Address.
The third article of the New York declaration, which offered
to confirm the grants of land made by the government of New Hampshire that had
been subsequently re-granted by New York, was declared by Allen to be as
lacking in substance as the two that preceded it, for reasons that were both
grammatical and legal. The former explanation occupied the better part of the
twenty-second paragraph, and presented a takedown of New York’s outwardly
generous offer that was syntactically and logically complex even by the
standards of the 18th century. The issue, Allen explained, revolved
upon the use by the government of New York of the phrase, “And being so
possessed, were afterwards granted by New-York [.]” While the overt intention
of this clause was seemingly to denote that some portion of the land grants
made by New York that fell within the disputed territory were already the
possessions of the original New Hampshire grantees, Allen claimed to perceive a
far less beneficent rationale at work. His accordant response is worth citing
at length, if only so that the full effect of it can be enjoyed. “After such
possession was actually made,” he wrote,
And the
possessor being so in possession, at the time the grant took place, such
possession shall be confirmed, but any later possessions cannot be included in
the condition of “being so possessed;” for, a later possession was no
possession at all at the time the condition of possession took place; and
consequently, every possession which has been begun in the state of Vermont,
since the lands were granted by New-York, must be lost to the possessor, and
fall into the hands of the New-York grantees [.]
Granting that by
1778 Allen was like to find fault in just about anything the government of New
York said or did, the esoteric avenue of attack he chose in paragraph
twenty-two of An Animadversory Address would seem to indicate that his contempt for
said government was something more than knee-jerk. And considering that his
response to being branded an outlaw in the early 1770s by Governor William
Tryon was to declare members of Tryon’s administration outlaws in turn – the 18th
century equivalent of “no, you are” – a revelation to this effect is no small
thing. Ethan Allen, after all, never attended any of the institutions of higher
learning (Harvard, Yale, Kings College, the College of New Jersey, etc.) whose
collective student body formed the nucleus of the Founding Generation. He was
not, consequently, a formal student of rhetoric, logic, oratory, or composition
as the likes of Jefferson, Madison, and Adams most certainly were. The course
of his life – from farmer, to small businessman, to community activist, to
soldier – seemed to reflect this general lack of intellectual refinement, and
gave little indication that there was more to the founder of the Green Mountain
Boys than a hot temper and a loose tongue. As An Animadversory Address demonstrated,
however, education is not always a condition of intellect. A conventionally
uneducated person can still possess wit, insight, and intuition, as Allen
plainly did. By dissecting the language used by the government of New York in
its 1778 declaration so carefully, critically, and subtly, Allen demonstrated
that he was capable of piercing the rhetorical veil of ministerial munificence
that attended the faux generosity therein, recognizing a contradiction between
tone and substance, and drawing the attention of his audience to it. Similarly
impressive – and in its way confounding – is the rebuttal Allen brought to bear
against the government of New York’s offer to nullify the land grants it had
made in cases of overlap with existing property.
In such cases of overlapping claims, Allen quoted from the
relevant section of New York’s declaration, the original grants made by the
government of New Hampshire, “Shall be confirmed, the posterior grants under
New-York notwithstanding.” Though, again, this clause may have been intended to
present the Vermont disputants with as generous an offer as possible – so
generous that they would think twice before refusing it – the founder of the
Green Mountain Boys saw mischief in its implications. “For the legislative authority
of the state of New York,” he declared in the twenty-third paragraph of An Animadversory
Address,
To pretend
as they do in their proclamation, to vacate any grants made by their own
authority, in favor of any possession, and to confirm such possessions, by
nullifying and defeating their own grants, is the height of folly and stupidity
[.]
Land, he explained, passed from one
possessor to another legally and without any terms or conditions to the
contrary becomes the property of the second party notwithstanding the desires
of the first party. The grants made by New York in the disputed territory west
of New Hampshire, though perhaps ill-advised, were nonetheless legal and valid
under the laws of New York. It would thus have been no more legitimate for New
York to claim the power to unilaterally nullify said grants than for a man selling
a plot of land to a friend to claim at some future moment that the sale was no
longer valid simply because he wished it so. If the residents of Vermont
accepted such a claim and submitted to the authority of the state of New York
the government thereof might feel it had licence to, “Give a grant to-day, and
vacate it to-morrow, and so on, ad infinitum. This would destroy the very
nature of and existence of personal property [.]” Only by maintaining their
independence from New York – and thus refusing to recognize the legitimacy of
the New York grants – could Vermonters protect their property from the
arbitrary whims of an authority so empowered.
Though
this may seem on its face to be a contradictory argument – New York being
unable to nullify its own land grants and Vermont being obliged to – the
distinction Allen was attempting to draw was between New York’s claim of
legitimate authority in the New Hampshire Grants and his claim to the contrary.
If the people of Vermont accepted New York’s offer to have the interfering
grants nullified and their own grants confirmed, they would have been tacitly
acknowledging that New York had held sway in the disputed region from the start.
Furthermore, having effectively sanctioned New York’s right to invalidate
grants of property made under its own authority, landholders in Vermont would
have been helpless in face of claims that the grants they possessed were themselves
invalid. Only by asserting that the parcels of land New York had doled out had
never been valid or legal, as the Green Mountain Boys had long argued, could
Vermonters protect what was theirs. In spite of his lack of formal legal
training, Allen’s argument to this effect in An Animadversory Address
demonstrated a level acumen uncommon among the middling sort to which he
belonged. To George Clinton and Robert Livingston – Governor and Chancellor,
respectively, of New York in 1778 and lawyers both – this would doubtless have
been both unexpected and unwelcome. As Allen would have it, they were intent on
duping the people of Vermont out of their land by given forth with honeyed
words and high-minded promises. While it is not clear if this was indeed the
case, what cannot be disputed is that Ethan Allen’s written refutation of the
trickery he perceived was sophisticated, shrewd, and penetrating.
The founder of the
Green Mountain Boys was evidently aware that the reasoning he deployed in An Animadversory
Address was set to confound expectations, and made a point of taking his
adversaries in New York to task for underestimating the intelligence of the
residents of Vermont. “FROM what has been said on the subject,” he wrote in the
twenty-fourth paragraph, “It appears, that the Overtures in the Proclamation
set forth, are either romantic, or calculated to deceive woods people, who, in
general, may not be supposed to understand law, or the power of a legislative
authority.” Though Allen almost certainly did not intended for this admonition
to address any audience beyond that of his particular time and place, a 21st
century reader could quite easily construe it as being pointed directly at
them. Because there continues to exist, even within the high-toned atmosphere
of academia, a perception that “the masses” or “the people” or “the commons” of
history were little more than an undifferentiated mass of superstition and
religiosity whose value lies chiefly in the statistics and patterns they
provide for sociologists, demographers, and other theorists. Studies to the
contrary – of particularly perspicacious peasants or lay preachers or folk hero
agitators – notwithstanding, the restoration of agency to the laboring and
middling classes of history (not to mention woman and minorities) has come very
slowly and very inconsistently.
The American Revolution, in spite of the populist language
most often used to describe it, continues to exist in the popular imagination
as an event and an era dominated by the words and deeds of the social and
cultural elite. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton have been
memorialized, and studied, and deified to an extent commonly afforded saints in
traditionally Catholic countries. Books have been written, and plays, and
television miniseries with lavish budgets and all-star casts; people know who
the Founders are, and quote them liberally, even if they don’t always
understand what they were trying to say. The great mass of citizen-soldiers who
made up the colonial militias, or the men who enlisted in the Continental Army,
or the sailors gave life to the Continental Navy, or the farmers who fed the
lot of them have been remembered as well, but as a kind of faceless blank. They
didn’t give voice to the Revolution, create the vocabulary of American citizenship,
or even given pundits a handy phrase or two to throw around during moments of
high partisan tension. They fought, and bled, and worked, and if they had
thoughts as to what it was all for, they didn’t see fit to write them down.
Perhaps as a result, their descendants have come to see them as unthinking,
dull, or ignorant. They were farmers, and merchants, and soldiers, after all;
what did they know about liberty, or natural rights, or the social contract?
How intelligent could they have been if they didn’t go to Harvard, and write
pamphlets, and draft constitutions, and spew forth brilliant oratory at the
drop of a hat?
Ethan Allen defies such easy dismissal. He was not very
well-educated, lived primarily as a farmer and small-businessman, and served not
one day of his life as a legislator. He was also hot-tempered, possessed of a
distinctly insubordinate streak, and seemed as concerned about his own
reputation as about the course of the Revolutionary War. He was not the scion
of a vast family fortune (like Jefferson), the beneficiary of patronage (like
Hamilton), or a self-made man (like Franklin), thus placing him outside the
major archetypes of the Founding Generation. He appears, in short, to be
everything that the sanctified Founders are not. What An Animadversory Address
makes clear, however, is that he was nevertheless highly intelligent,
perceptive, shrewd, and calculating. He understood law, and philosophy, and
rhetoric in a way that defied his lack of formal academic experience, and
demonstrated that he was eminently capable of bringing his knowledge and
ingenuity to bear against those who would presume to underestimate him. This
same pamphlet also demonstrated that his antagonism towards the colony and
state of New York was not simply a function of a knee-jerk disdain for
authority, but appeared instead to spring from a thorough consideration of the
legal and philosophical implications of their claim to Vermont. Parallels were
drawn between New York and Great Britain, causes were examined, and offers of
clemency were dissected and refuted clause by clause. These were not the
actions of a thoughtless, dull-witted commoner, but of a thoughtful, rational,
intelligent individual. That Allen was also a middling farmer and entrepreneur
should not be excused or diminished, but rather taken as cause to re-examine
the perceptions nurtured by 18th century and 21st century
observers alike of the common people of the Revolutionary era.
As ever, do please
take the opportunity to judge for yourself: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N12446.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
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