INTRODUCTION.
line
Some one has truthfully remarked that the character of a people is largely determined by the natural features of the country they inhabit. The peasantry of mountainous Switzerland are proverbial for their bravery and hardihood, their strong and innate love of liberty, and their pure and exalted patriotism. Accustomed from infancy to danger, dependent upon their own resources, mingling day by day among the sublimest works of Creation, their aspirations acquire a buoyancy, and their spirits an independence, that leaves an impress on their lives amounting to a national characteristic.
Thus the brave pioneer, inured to hardship, and depending on his ax for shelter, and on hisrifle for food and protection from wild beast and lurking Indian, will acquire a fertility of resource and vigor of limb, as in a measure to remunerate him for the privations he endures.
The original settlers of the New Hampshire Grants,—that territory now known as the State of Vermont,—were of this sturdy, fearless, and independent sort. It seemed as though they had drawn inspiration from the snow-clad, storm-riven mountains, at whose base their lowly thatched cabins were nestled. The long and hard winters taxed the energies of the new settlers for the necessaries of life, and precluded the introduction of luxuries that only degenerate. The stubborn wilderness was to be felled; the latent productiveness of the soil developed; hand to hand encounters with wild beasts were not infrequent; common safety demanded a unity of strength against the crafty foe, and necessity begat friends at the same time it rendered friendship a mutual safeguard; and this unity of purpose, thus nurtured and sustained, afterward displayed itself inone of the most unique chapters in the annals of American history.
The people of these Grants, known to the world as the Green Mountain Boys, were worthy the wild and romantic country in which they lived, and the stirring times in which they acted. Vermont was never organized as a separate colony under England, and from the first that plucky little community refused to submit to the domination of the older colonies on her borders. Her people seemed to imbibe a spirit of independence from the free air and the everlasting mountains.
New York claimed a jurisdiction over her soil, and a like demand was put forward by New Hampshire and Massachusetts. But the brave Green Mountain Boys, under the guidance of such natural leaders as the Allens, Baker, Warner, and others of like invincible spirit, kept the greedy land-grabbers at bay. In short, Vermont never had a government other than the supreme will of her own people, nor acknowledged the authority of any earthly potentate, until she was admittedon an equal footing into the Union of States, as the Fourteenth luminary in the blue field of the nation’s emblem.
Yet had this people no inconsiderable share in the work of achieving that independence which made the present of our country a glorious possibility. They secured what they believed to be their own rights, at the same time they contributed to the adjustment of the claims of her sister communities.
There is no pretension, in the present pages, to giving what will be new to specialists in Vermont history. But to the general reader, and to the student of the philosophy of human events, there is much, we hope, both new and instructive. The firm bearing of the brave and hardy settlers of the Hampshire Grants, and the important part they played in the War of the Revolution, give to the material of this little book somewhat of a national interest. Indeed, but for timely services of the Green Mountain Boys, it is more than possible the cause of America might have been lost.