vermont

What we now know as Vermont is believed to have had an ABENAKI Indian presence since 9000 B.C., peaking in population during the sixteenth century. Even before direct contact with Europeans, however, Vermont's inhabitants, western Abenakis, were depleted through wars with the Iroquois and by pathogens introduced by Europeans and transmitted through eastern Abenakis from Canada. In 1609, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain became the first European to reconnoiter Vermont, sailing up the lake that bears his name and initiating an alliance between the French and the Abenakis against the English and the Iroquois Confederacy that persisted until the French were driven from North America in 1763.

During that time the struggle for North America kept the region in turmoil, and Vermont attracted few European settlers. The Abenakis, augmented by a southern New England diaspora after KING PHILIP'S WAR (1675–1677), joined with the French to raid southern New England settlements in the Connecticut River valley during the colonial wars. In 1724, to protect settlers from these attacks, Massachusetts erected Fort Dummer, the first British settlement in Vermont, situated near present-day Brattleboro and west of the Connecticut River. The French were simultaneously occupying the Lake Champlain valley, building forts from Isle La Motte (1666) south to Ticonderoga (1755), but, focusing on the fur trade, they made relatively little effort at colonization. By 1754, New France numbered 75,000 European settlers contrasted with 1.5 million in British America.

Land Disputes and the Revolutionary Era

The FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR (1754–1763), the North American counterpart to the Seven Years' War in Europe, ended with a British victory, and what was to become Vermont fell totally under British sovereignty. The region, inaccurately mapped and sparsely settled, was plagued with conflicting charters and overlapping land claims. Royal decrees at times compounded the confusion. Shortly after a boundary dispute between Massachusetts and New Hampshire was resolved in New Hampshire's favor, New Hampshire was ordered to maintain Fort Dummer or have it restored to Massachusetts jurisdiction. Seizing upon this as having established New Hampshire's border west of the Connecticut River, New Hampshire governor Benning Wentworth claimed his province's boundary extended to Lake Champlain and in 1750 issued a grant for the town of Bennington at the westernmost edge of his claim. At the outbreak of the French and Indian War he had chartered fifteen additional towns, and in 1759, after the French were driven from the Champlain valley, he resumed issuing New Hampshire patents until by 1763 they totaled 138. Meanwhile New York Province, brandishing a 1664 grant by King Charles II to his brother the Duke of York (later James II), maintained that its eastern border extended to the Connecticut River and began issuing patents more remunerative to the crown and occasionally overlapping New Hampshire's.

In 1764 a king's order in council ruled the New York border to be the west bank of the Connecticut River, placing all of modern-day Vermont under New York jurisdiction. New Hampshire titleholders interpreted "to be" to mean from the date of the order in council, thus validating land titles issued before 1764. New York contended the ruling was retroactive and attempted to eject settlers on New Hampshire grants. In 1770 the issue was argued before an Albany County court at which Ethan Allen served as agent for the Wentworth titleholders. The court dismissed New Hampshire claims, and the Wentworth title-holders responded with the GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS, unofficial military units led by Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, and others from western Vermont that used force and intimidation to frustrate New York's efforts at ejection. Many of the Green Mountain Boys held heavy investments in New Hampshire titles. East of the Green Mountains, where smaller landholders dominated, title disputes were resolved through payment to New York of reconfirmation fees, but other issues, particularly high court costs and debt proceedings, precipitated a March 1775 courthouse riot in Westminster that left two dead and collapsed New York authority in the Connecticut Valley.

In April, with Concord and Lexington sparking the American Revolution, New York lost any chance of reclaiming Vermont, especially when Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, along with Benedict Arnold, stormed the British Fort Ticonderoga in New York that May, capturing cannon for the Continental army in Boston and closing the Champlain-Hudson corridor to invasion from Canada until it was recaptured by the British. Shortly afterward the Continental Congress authorized an army regiment of Green Mountain Rangers that fought under the command of Seth Warner. In January 1777 representatives from New Hampshire Grant towns declared their independence from New York and Great Britain and in July drafted a constitution, scheduled elections, and established a government for the state of New Connecticut (estimated population 10,000), later renamed Vermont.

Despite its assertions of independence, Vermont's existence was in immediate jeopardy. That July, British general John Burgoyne, leading an army from Canada to the Hudson River, recaptured Fort Ticonderoga and sent Vermont settlers scurrying south. A rear guard detachment commanded by Seth Warner to cover the retreat from Ticonderoga was defeated at Hubbardton (the only Revolutionary War battle fought in Vermont), but in August the tide turned. New Hampshire and Vermont troops under General John Stark defeated a British force near Bennington. In September, Burgoyne surrendered his army at the Battle of Saratoga (see SARATOGA CAMPAIGN).

New York's opposition to Vermont's independence and the failure of Congress to admit it as a state until 1791 induced Vermont to assume initiatives associated with a sovereign nation, most notably coining its own currency and maintaining a foreign policy. The Haldimand Negotiations (1781) were dealings with the governor-general of Canada that involved Vermont's return to the British empire in return for British promises not to invade Vermont or New York. The negotiations collapsed after General Cornwallis' defeat at Yorktown. They are still debated as either sincere negotiations or ploys by Vermont to obtain military security. Another Vermont initiative was to annex amenable border towns in western New Hampshire and eastern New York, so-called east and west unions, which aroused considerable New Hampshire, New York, and congressional displeasure. Vermont relinquished control of the towns, anticipating this would promote admission into the United States, but it was not until 4 March 1791, after Vermont "bought itself free" by paying New York $30,000 to settle disputed land titles, that it was admitted as the fourteenth state.

Statehood and Nineteenth-Century Vermont

Statehood marked the eclipse of Vermont's first generation of leaders. Thomas Chittenden, who, save for one year had served as governor from 1778, continued to serve until 1797, but his political allies were succeeded by younger men, legally trained Revolutionary War veterans and more recent settlers who poured into the state from southern New England. The census of 1791 recorded a population of 85,341 and the 1810 census 217,895. The War of 1812 put an end to Vermont's prosperity and population growth. It was the first state without an ocean port, and western Vermont was dependent upon trade with Canada down Lake Champlain. The suspension of this trade in 1808 and then by the war stimulated popular support for smuggling and political opposition to the party of Jefferson as well as the war itself. East of the Green Mountains, the Connecticut River was the principal commercial artery, linking Vermont with southern New England, but the war was no more popular in that area.

A modest prosperity was restored by the mid 1820s after the American consul in Lisbon returned to Vermont with 200 head of merino sheep. By 1840 the state boasted almost 1,690,000 merinos and preeminence among wool-producing states. Sheep grazing, which was possible on rocky uplands and less labor intensive than most other forms of agriculture, stimulated land clearing and emigration. It declined after 1840, the victim of western competition and the lowering of the protective tariff, and dairying began a steady growth. Before 1840 daughters of farm families frequently left the homesteads to work in textile mills, some as far away as New Hampshire or Massachusetts, never to return. After 1840 immigrants increasingly staffed textile mills in Vermont and elsewhere.

The Vermont economy had also been transformed by the Champlain-Hudson cut off to the Erie Canal that opened in 1823. Promoted for its potential to provide access to a wider market for Vermont produce, it instead opened Vermont to western wheat and helped redirect the state's economy toward sheep farming, textile mills, and dairying. The Champlain-Hudson cutoff also loosened western Vermont's ties to Canada and, by reducing the cost and difficulty of immigration, opened the West for settlers from Vermont.

Railroads reached Vermont in 1848, and by 1855 there were over 500 miles of track. Designed to carry freight between Atlantic ports and the Great Lakes rather than to serve Vermont, the railroads nonetheless had a tremendous impact on the state and were the largest Vermont enterprises until the twentieth century. Thousands of Irish entered the state as construction workers, and, along with French-Canadians who worked in textile mills and on farms, constituted almost the entire immigrant population. These new immigrants, mostly Catholic, were often viewed by the almost exclusively Protestant natives as threatening American values. Their apprehensions were heightened in 1853 when the Burlington Catholic Diocese was established.

Economic and demographic disruptions spawned ferment. Vermont became virulently anti-Masonic, electing an Anti-Masonic Party governor and in 1832 becoming the only state to vote for the Anti-Mason presidential candidate (see ANTI-MASONIC MOVEMENTS). By 1836 the Anti-Masons gave way to the newly formed Whig Party, and workingmen's associations thrived alongside religious revivals that included Millerites, whose founder was sometime Poultney resident William Miller, and John Humphrey Noyes's Perfectionist Society, founded in Putney. Mormon founders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were Vermont natives. Temperance and antislavery, both church-rooted movements, had widespread appeal. Temperance societies dated from the 1820s, and in 1853 the state banned the manufacture and sale of liquor by a narrow vote. Not always rigidly enforced, it remained law until 1902. Antislavery enjoyed even broader support. Vermonters, evincing pride that their 1777 constitution was the first to prohibit slavery and provide universal male suffrage, championed congressional antislavery resolutions, state acts to annul fugitive slave laws, and gave rise to the LIBERTY PARTY and then the FREE SOIL PARTY, which along with the feeble Democratic Party were able to deny the Whigs popular majorities and left the election of governor to the legislature.

In 1854 state government was paralyzed by party fractionalization after passage of the nationally divisive KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT, occurring as it did on the heels of the temperance contest and the 1853 election of a Democratic governor by a legislative coalition of Free Soilers and Democrats. In July 1854, Whigs and Free Soilers convened, agreed upon a common platform and slate of candidates, referred to themselves as Republicans, won a large popular majority, and in 1856 and 1860 led the nation in support of Republican presidential candidates. Vermont's overwhelming support for Lincoln and the Union cause accommodated a wide range of attitudes toward slavery along with an anti-southern bias. In addition to resenting such pro-southern measures as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Vermonters blamed southern opposition for their failure to obtain a higher tariff and national banking legislation. What most united Vermonters, however, was their support for the Union.

Almost 35,000, one of four adult males, served in the army during the Civil War, and casualty rates were among the highest of any state. The war brought economic prosperity while shifting much of the burden of farm work and financial management to women. In some instances war casualties cost towns almost their entire male populations. The northernmost action of the war occurred in October 1864 when Confederate soldiers crossed the Canadian border to rob St. Albans banks. Although the St. Albans raid provoked heated diplomatic negotiation between Britain, Canada, and the United States, it had no impact on the war.

After the war, the Republican Party dominated Vermont politics. Having saved the Union and enacted a protective tariff and national banking act with critical support from Congressman Justin Morrill, Republicanism became a civic religion, escaping meaningful challenge until the second half of the twentieth century. The state frequently returned over 200 Republicans to a Vermont house (with 246 members) and all 30 of its state senators. Agriculture remained the state's major economic pursuit, with dairy farming shaping its landscape. With the advent of the refrigerated railway car, shipping cream, butter, and cheese gave way to the more lucrative marketing of fresh milk. Sustained by a treaty with Canada, the lumber industry built Burlington into one of the busiest inland ports in the nation. The machine-tool industry in the Connecticut River valley, the platform-scale works in St. Johnsbury, independent marble companies in the Rutland area (consolidated into the Vermont Marble Company by Redfield Proctor), and independent Barre granite operations along with the railroads constituted the bulk of Vermont industry.

Vermont governors, who invariably served a single two-year term, were almost always business-oriented industrialists, some of whom presided over reform administrations. Vermont's political agenda, however, was usually dominated by the legislature. With one representative from each town irrespective of population, farmers were often a legislative majority and always the largest occupational category despite declining numbers. Vermont farms could seldom support large families, and emigration was so common that by 1860 over 40 percent of native-born Vermonters lived in other states. European immigration barely kept the population constant, and while the larger communities gained population, the smaller communities declined to where it became increasingly difficult to amass the personnel and other resources to meet municipal obligations. Soon after the Civil War the legislature began voting to shift expenditures from towns to the state on a need basis. From 1890 until 1931, when a state income tax was enacted, state levies on town grand lists were applied to bolster educational, welfare, and highway resources among the poorer communities.

The Twentieth Century

Efforts to stimulate the state economy through tourism, initially undertaken by the railroads, became a government operation. As the railroad gave way to the automobile, Vermont's transportation network proved inadequate for either tourism or its internal needs. In the fall of 1927 the state suffered a disastrous flood that cost lives, wiped out homes and industrial sites, and destroyed much of the state's transportation network. Within weeks a recovery effort, planned and financed with federal support, ushered Vermont into the era of hard-surfaced roads and state debt to support improvements. Even the Great Depression, however, could not seduce Vermont from its Republican Party allegiance, although the state was an enthusiastic participant in many New Deal programs. Until 1958, Democratic challenges were usually ceremonial. The real contests were Republican primaries.

The first signs of recovery from the Great Depression appeared in 1939 in the machine-tool industry that created a boom in the Springfield area never achieved in the rest of the state, although World War II brought prosperity to most sectors of the economy along with an increased presence of organized labor among both blue-and white-collar workers. There were 1,200 killed or missing in action among the 30,000 men and women who served in the military, and returning veterans contributed mightily to Colonel Ernest Gibson's upset of the more conservative candidate in the 1946 Republican gubernatorial primary. Although more traditional Republican governors succeeded Gibson in office, the state retained his policy of implementing state and federal welfare, education, and construction programs. This policy was accelerated with the election of a Democratic governor, Philip Hoff, in 1962, and the implementation of Great Society initiatives.

In 1965 the Vermont legislature convened under court reapportionment orders. The house was reapportioned down from 246 to 150 delegates with districts determined by population. (Previously, the twenty-two largest cities and towns had housed over half the state's population and paid 64 percent of the state's income tax and 50 percent of the property tax, but elected only 9 percent of the house members.) The senate was kept at 30 members, but county lines were no longer inviolate. Without reapportionment it is unlikely Republicans would ever have lost control of the legislature. Since Hoff, the governor'soffice has alternated between parties, and in 1984, Democrats elected Madeleine Kunin, the state's first female governor. In 1964 it cast its electoral votes for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time, and since 1992 it has been regularly in the Democratic column. Yet the state has also demonstrated a tolerance for mavericks. In 2000, Vermont's congressional delegation was made up of one Democrat senator, one Republican senator, and one Independent House member. In 2001, Senator James Jeffords left the Republican Party to become an independent, throwing the control of the Senate to the Democrats while attaining favorable poll ratings. Elections during this period have been dogged by controversy over Vermont Supreme Court decisions leading to legislation equalizing educational resources statewide and providing same-sex couples rights similar to those possessed by married couples.

The latter, labeled the Civil Union Act (2000), was the first of its kind in the nation, and observers attributed its passage to the state's evolving demography and economy. Native-owned industries have been absorbed into conglomerates, and IBM, which moved into the state in 1957, has become Vermont's largest private employer. Economic development attracted additional growth. In 2000, Vermont's population stood at 608,827, with two thirds of the growth since 1830 occurring after 1960. The interstate highway system brought Vermont to within a few hours of over 40 million urban dwellers. Tourism grew rapidly. Skiing spread from its 1930s roots to mountains and hillsides irrespective of environmental degradation or the ability of the local government to provide essential services. In 1970, Republican Governor Deane Davis gained approval of Act 250 to mandate permits requiring developers to prove the project's ecological soundness. Despite flaws and opposition, Act 250 and subsequent modifications have proven salutary.

A related effort has been made to retain Vermont's pastoral landscape of rapidly disappearing dairy farms. From 1993 to 2000 the number of dairy farms decreased from 2,500 to 1,700, with most of the decrease among farms of fewer than 100 cows. Yet because average production rose to 17,000 pounds of milk per cow per year, production increased. Some farmers participated in a 1986 federal program to curb overproduction by selling their herds to the federal government and subsequently selling their land to developers. In 1993 the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the entire state an "endangered place." Nonetheless, farmland preservation projects that utilize differential tax rates and conservation trusts have been operating with some success.

With a population less than 609,000, Vermont is the second-smallest state in the nation, boasting the least-populated state capital and the smallest biggest city of any state. With a larger percentage of its population living in communities of fewer than 2,500 than any other state, it lays claim to being the most rural.

Bibliography

Albers, Jan. Hands on the Land: A History of the Vermont Landscape. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Anderson, Elin L. We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937. Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1967. Burlington in the 1930s.

Bassett, T. D. Seymour. The Growing Edge: Vermont Villages, 1840–1880. Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society, 1992.

Bellesiles, Michael A. Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Bryan, Frank M. Yankee Politics in Rural Vermont. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1974.

Gillies, Paul S., and D. Gregory Sanford, eds. Records of the Council of Censors of the State of Vermont. Montpelier: Secretary of State, 1991.

Graffagnino, J. Kevin, Samuel B. Hand, and Gene Sessions, eds. Vermont Voices, 1609 Through the 1990s: A Documentary History of the Green Mountain State. Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society, 1999.

Kunin, Madeleine. Living a Political Life. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Ludlum, David M. Social Ferment in Vermont, 1790–1850. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966.

Roth, Randolph A. The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Shalhope, Robert E. Bennington and the Green Mountain Boys: The Emergence of Liberal Democracy in Vermont, 1760–1850. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Sherman, Michael, ed. Vermont State Government Since 1965. Burlington: Center for Research on Vermont and Snelling Center for Government, 1999.

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