On July 8, 1777 Vermont became the first state to abolish slavery when it adopted its Constitution. That was the constitution of the newly
created Commonwealth of Vermont—a
completely independent republic.
Due to its unique history, the state
was not only fighting a Revolution for
independence against the British Crown,
but against the claims of New Hampshire and
especially New York.
The rugged land west of the Connecticut River and east of Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River,
split by the Green Mountains had
been claimed by Samuel de Champlain as a part of New
France, but it was unsettled by them. As
early as 1690 a handful of Dutch from New York established a settlement in
the Eastern part of the area giving that colony a claim. In 1724 the first British settlers from Massachusetts
and
Connecticut arrived in the river valley.
It
was definitely frontier territory with only a few hundred European settlers. During the French and Indian Wars the natural invasion route of Lake Champlain made the area a bloody
battleground in which local militia,
including Ethan
Allen, joined Jeffrey Amherst’s campaigns
against the French. Raids by French allied native tribes terrorized isolated farmsteads and
caused a retreat of much of the population back to more settled areas of New England.
After the Treaty of Paris in 1763 the region was officially ceded to the
British. Even before the wars, starting
as early as 1743, New Hampshire Governor Benning
Wentworth began issuing land grants in the area which became known as the Hampshire Grants. The town of Bennington was laid out based on those grants in 1743 but not
settled until fighting in the region stopped in 1761. Wentworth made 14 other town grants,
including those west of the Green Mountains,
some less than 40 miles from Albany.
Settlers began pouring into the region from New England. But George
III issued a decree in 1764 giving New York possession of land up to the
Connecticut River making the whole region a portion of Albany County. New York
declared the Wentworth’s grants null and periodically dispatched the Sheriff and judicial officials to
assert its claim. Allan organized the Green Mountain Boys to defend the New
England settlers and resist New York. A
low grade conflict continued for years, even into the first years of the
Revolution with open fighting breaking out at Winchester in March 1775.
On January 18, 1777, representatives of the New Hampshire Grants convened
in Westminster and declared their
independent republic called New
Connecticut. On June 2, 1777 delegates at the Winchester Convention changed the name to Vermont, a corruption of
the French for Green Mountain and set a second meeting for early July to draft
a constitution.
The document was drawn up on July 4 and adopted by the delegates on July
9. It reflected the radical
egalitarianism of the pioneer stock best described by Ethan Allen. It not only abolished slavery, but extended
suffrage even to men who did not own land, and provided for support of public
schools.
Vermont had its Republic, but it was not recognized by the British, its
neighbors, or by any of the other 13 states.
Its continued existence was tenuous at best.
The first challenge came from General
John Burgoyne’s invasion
from Canada during which raids by British troops and their native allies swept
the Champlain valley sending residents fleeing.
Hearing that there was a large cash of arms and provisions plus horses
and Bennington, Burgoyne dispatched
2,600 troops—nearly a third of his force—to seize the town.
On August 16 a force cobbled
together from the New Hampshire Militia under General John Stark, the Vermont
Regiment of the Line of the Continental
Army under Colonel Seth Warner,
and local Vermont militia attacked the larger British force across the river
from Bennington at Hoosick, New York. The day
long Battle of Bennington, fought
during a rare heat wave with temperatures in the ‘90’s, resulted in almost the
entire British force being killed or captured.
The rout left Burgoyne’s whole offensive weekend and contributed to his
decisive defeat in October at the Battle
of Saratoga.
The fight led to respect for Vermont which continued the war as an ally,
but not a part of the United States.
Worries that New York might march on the state after victory in the
Revolution led Allan and others to enter into secret talks with the Governor of Quebec about becoming a
British province with autonomy. These
talks, which drew charges of treason against Allan, got nowhere after the
surrender of Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown.
After the war Vermont continued as an independent republic until 1791. With Kentucky
pressing for admission to the Union as
a slave state, New York and New Hampshire renounced their claims on Vermont so
that it could be admitted with Kentucky keeping a balance between northern and
southern states.
The new state Constitution reinforced the anti-slavery clause of the
republican document. By 1804 all states
north of Delaware followed Vermont’s
lead and provided for the outright or gradual abolition of slavery.
Modern scholars have wondered about how effective Vermont’s abolition
was. Certainly it affected very few
people. The state was largely a rugged
frontier with subsistence farms unsuited to slave labor. Even the larger settlements had few residents
wealthy enough to own slaves as personal servants, which was how slavery
persisted in the rest of New England.
Only a handful of slaves would have been freed, assuming that the
Constitution was enforced.
Some scholars believe that slave owners could have ignored the provision
with impunity given the scant law enforcement and court system of the
Republic. Others point out that only
adults were directly manumitted. Minor children of freed slaves might have
been “bounded out” to service until they reached adulthood. But this followed a common New England
practice for the minor children of all debtors without property, who could be
“bound out” to prevent them from become “burdens on the tax payer.” Any freed slaves capable of supporting themselves—and
evidence suggests that was virtually all of them, would be able to keep their
families in tact.
A controversy has arisen because an 1870 official history of Census reports listed 90 slaves in
Vermont in the year of the first Census, 1890.
This appears to be an error by a compiler who assumed that all blacks
reported were slaves. Vermont Gazette of September 26, 1791
reported the Census return for Bennington
County with well over half of the state’s total population included 21
black males and 15 black females, “…and the marshal’s assistant’s boast, ‘To
the honor of humanity, NO SLAVES.’”
Vermont remained a bastion of
opposition to slavery. In 1854 the
Vermont Senate issued an official
report on slavery affirming the equal rights of “all men” and questioning how any government could favor the
rights of one people over another. The
report fueled the debate about
abolition across the country and caused the Georgia General Assembly to pass a resolution calling for
land-locked Vermont to be “towed out the Atlantic
Ocean.”
Vermont was one of the first states to abandon its old Whig loyalties in favor of a more forthrightly anti-slavery Republican Party. In 1860 it gave Abraham Lincoln his biggest majority in any state. Vermonters flocked to the Union banner in
highly disproportionate numbers during the Civil
War. 166 Black Vermonters, out of a
total of only 700 Black men, women, and children in the state, served in the Union Army including 66 in the famous
The 54th Massachusetts Infantry
(Colored).
Vermont has continued its tradition of radical egalitarianism. In 1880 it became the first state to
authorize women to vote in town elections and shortly thereafter for the state
legislature. In 2000 the state became
the first to provide state-sanctioned benefits of marriage to gay and lesbian
couples in civil unions.
With the highest death rate per-population of any state in the Iraq war due the extensive deployment
of National Guard troops, three
quarters of the population opposed the war in polls taken in 2007 and many
towns passed resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal. Under former Governor Dr. Howard Dean, the state pressed forward with medical care
reform.
During the current economic crisis, Vermont has
suffered one of the steepest declines of per-capita income in the country. The state remains a liberal bastion and is
represented in the U.S. Senate by Independent Bernie Sanders, avowed socialist,
and liberal Democrat Patrick Leahy. Way to go, Vermont
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