CHAPTER III.

While Rogers's expedition was in progress, a sloop of sixteen guns and a raft carrying six guns were built at Ticonderoga. With these and a brigantine, Captain Loring sailed down the lake and engaged the French vessels, sinking two of them and capturing a third, which was repaired and brought away after being run aground and deserted by its crew, leaving to the enemy but one schooner on these waters.

Amherst at the same time embarked his whole army in batteaux, and began his advance against Isle aux Noix, but, being delayed by storms and adverse winds, deemed it best to abandon for this season the attempt, and returned to Crown Point, arriving there on the 27th of October. He now began the erection of a new and larger fortress andthree new outworks there; completed the road between Crown Point and Ticonderoga, and began another from the latter fort to Number Four.

Meanwhile events of great moment had occurred elsewhere. In July, after the death of General Prideaux, who commanded the army besieging Niagara, Sir William Johnson had defeated the French army sent to its relief, and the fort had surrendered to him. On the 13th of September Wolfe, on the Heights of Abraham, had given his life for imperishable renown; and six days later Quebec, the most impregnable stronghold of the French in America, was surrendered to the enemy, whose attempts to reduce it had for seventy years been unsuccessful.

All the English colonies in America rejoiced in its fall, for the conquest of Canada was now assured, and the day of their deliverance from French and Indian invasion had dawned.

Levis's attempt to recapture Quebec had failed, though sickness and death had sorely weakened Murray's garrison, and now at Montreal the French were to make the last stand against English conquest. Amherst was to advance upon it down the St. Lawrence, Murray from Quebec, and Haviland from the south, to break the last bar of the "Gate of the Country," held by Bougainville at Isle aux Noix.

On the 15th of July Murray embarked with nearly 2,500 men. He met no great opposition from the superior forces of Bourlamaque and Dumas, which on either shore of the river withdrewslowly toward Montreal as the fleet advanced. He issued a proclamation promising safety of person and property to all the inhabitants who remained peaceably at home, and threatening to burn the houses of all who were in arms. He kept his word to the letter in the protection and in the punishment, and the result was the rapid dwindling away of Bourlamaque's army.

Toward the end of August he encamped below the town on the island of Ste. Therese, and awaited the arrival of the other English armies. A regiment of New Hampshire men commanded by Colonel Goffe opened the road which Amherst had ordered to be made from Number Four to Crown Point, and performed the labor in such good time that on the 31st of July they arrived, and, turned drovers as well as pioneers, brought with them a herd of cattle for the supply of the army there.[20]This road ran from Wentworth's Ferry, near Charlestown, up the right bank of Black River to the present township of Ludlow, thence across the mountains to Otter Creek, and down that stream to a station opposite Crown Point, to which it ran across the country. That part of the road across and on the west side of the mountains was begun and nearly completed in the previous year, under the supervision of Colonel Zadok Hawks and Captain John Stark; Stark and 200 rangers being employed on the western portion.[21]

Haviland embarked at Crown Point on the 12th of August with 3,400 regulars, provincials, and Indians in whaleboats and batteaux, which, under sunny skies and on quiet waters, came in four days to Isle aux Noix. Cannon were planted in front and rear of Bougainville's position. The largest vessel of his naval force was cut adrift by a cannon-shot and drifted into the hands of the English; and the others, endeavoring to escape to St. John's, ran aground and were taken by the rangers, who swam out and boarded one, tomahawk in hand, when the others presently surrendered.[22]

Bougainville, abandoning the island, made a difficult night retreat to St. John's, and from thence fell back with Roquemaure to the St. Lawrence. Haviland was soon opposite Montreal, and in communication with Murray, and both awaited the coming of Amherst's army. This force had assembled at Oswego in July, and numbered something more than 10,000 men, exclusive of about 700 Indians under Sir William Johnson, and had embarked on Lake Ontario on the 10th of August, and within five days reached Oswigatchee. After the capture by five gunboats of a French armed brig that threatened the destruction of the batteaux and whaleboats, the army continued its advance to Fort Levis, near the head of the rapids. Amherst invested the fort, and opened fire upon it from land and water; and when for three days rocky islet and wooded shore had been shaken bythe thunder of the cannon that splintered the wooden walls, the French commandant, Pouchot, was compelled to surrender the ruined works and his garrison. Johnson's Indians were so enraged at not being allowed to kill the prisoners that three fourths of them went home.[23]There was no further resistance from the French, but there was yet a terrible enemy to be encountered in the long and dangerous rapids that must be descended. Several were passed with but slight loss; but in the most perilous passage of the last three, forty-seven boats were wrecked, several damaged, some artillery, ammunition, and stores lost, and eighty-four men drowned in the angry turmoil of wild waters. When these perils were past, an uneventful and unopposed voyage ensued, till on the 6th of September the army landed at Lachine, and, marching to the city, encamped before its walls.

The defenses of Montreal were too weak to resist a siege; the troops, abandoned by the militia, too few to give battle to the three armies that hemmed them in; and there was nothing left for Vaudreuil but surrender. Some of the terms of capitulation proposed by him were rejected by Amherst, who demanded that "the whole garrison of Montreal and all the French troops in Canada must lay down their arms, and shall not serve again during the war." In answer to the remonstrances of Vaudreuil and his generals he said: "I am fully resolved, for the infamous part the troops of Francehave acted in exciting the savages to perpetrate the most horrid and unheard-of barbarities in the whole progress of the war, and for other open treacheries and flagrant breaches of faith, to manifest to all the world, by this capitulation, my detestation of such practices."[24]

Vaudreuil yielded, as perforce he must, and on the 8th of September signed the capitulation by which Canada passed into the possession of England. The French officers, civil and military, the troops and sailors, were to be sent to France, and the inhabitants were to be protected in their property and religion.

The Indian allies of the English, and those who had lately been the allies of the French but were now as ready to turn against them as they had been to serve, were held in such firm restraint that not a person suffered any injury from them more than from the soldiers of the victorious armies.

The long struggle was over, the conquest of Canada was accomplished, and great was the rejoicing of the people of all the English colonies, especially those of New England. The toilsome march through the savage forest, the cheerless bivouac on remote and lonely shores, were no longer to be endured; nor the deadly ambuscade dreaded by the home-loving husbandman, who for love of home had turned soldier; nor was his family to live in the constant fear of the horrors of nightly attack, massacre, or captivity that had made anxious every hour of day and night.

[7]Massachusetts gave 107,793 acres of land to Connecticut asequivalentfor as many acres she had previously granted that were found to be south of the boundary between the two provinces, and which she wished to retain. One section of these "Equivalent Lands" was on the west bank of Connecticut River, within the present towns of Putney, Dummerston, and Brattleboro'. (Colonial Boundaries Mass, vol. iii.) This fell to the share of William Dummer, Anthony Stoddard, William Brattle, and John White. "The Equivalent Lands" were sold at public vendue at Hartford, in 1716, for a little more than a farthing per acre. The proceeds were given to Yale College. (Hall'sHistory of Eastern Vermont.)

[8]Light pieces of ordnance mounted on swivels, and sometimes charged with old nails and like missiles, or, upon a pinch, even with stones; hence sometimes called "stone pieces."

[9]This fort was situated in what is now Williamstown.

[10]Dr. Dwight'sTravels, vol. ii. p. 82.

[11]Williams'sHistory of Vermont.

[12]Captain Stevens's letter to Colonel Williams.

[13]Stevens's bravery was so much admired by Sir Charles Knowles, an officer of high rank in the British navy, that he presented him a handsome sword, and in honor of the donor the township was named Charlestown. For Captain Stevens's account of this siege seeHistory of Charlestown, p. 34.

[14]This fight took place on Sunday, June 26, 1748, about twelve miles northwest of Fort Dummer, in the present township of Marlboro'.

[15]Johnson's "Account of Battle of Lake George,"Doc. Hist. N. Y.vol. ii. p. 402.

[16]From John Wadno, an intelligent Indian of St. Francis.

[17]For some reports of his scouts, seeDoc. Hist. N. Y.vol. iv. p. 169et seq.

[18]Awahnock, = Frenchman.

[19]Rogers's Journal.

[20]Belknap'sHistory of New Hampshire.

[21]Sanderson'sHistory of Charlestown, p. 87.

[22]Parkman'sMontcalm and Wolfe.

[23]Parkman'sMontcalm and Wolfe, vol. ii. p. 370.

[24]Parkman.

Now that Canada was conquered and the French armies withdrawn from Ticonderoga and Crown Point, all the country lying between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut, commonly called the Wilderness, was open to settlement.

In 1696, long before the granting of French seigniories on Lake Champlain, Godfrey Dellius, a Dutch clergyman of Albany, had purchased of the Mohawks, who claimed all this territory, an immense tract, extending from Saratoga along both sides of the Hudson River and Wood Creek, and on the east side of Lake Champlain, twenty miles north of Crown Point. The purchase was confirmed by New York, but three years later was repealed, "as an extravagant favor to one subject."

In 1732 Colonel John Henry Lydius purchased of the Mohawks a large tract of land situated on "the Otter Creek, which emptieth itself into Lake Champlain in North America, easterly from and near Crown Point." The deed was confirmed by Governor Shirley of Massachusetts in 1744. This tract embraced nearly the whole of the present counties of Addison and Rutland. It was dividedinto townships, and most of it sold by Lydius to a great number of purchasers,[25]some of whom settled upon it. The township of Durham was originally settled under this grant, but the settlers, finding the title imperfect, applied for and obtained letters patent under New York.[26]

The French colony at Point à Chevalure vanished with the shadow of the banner of France. The young forest soon repossessed the fields where almost the only trace of husbandry was the rank growth of foreign weeds. House walls were crumbling about cold hearthstones and smokeless chimneys, and thresholds untrodden but by the nightly prowling beast or the foot of the curious hunter. There was no remembrance of the housewife's hand but the self-sown lilies and marigolds that mingled their strange bloom with native asters and goldenrods above the graves of forsaken homes. From where the sluggish waters of the narrow channel are first stirred by Wood Creek, to where the waves of Champlain break on Canadian shores, there was not one settlement on its eastern border, nor any inhabitant save where some trapper had built his cabin in the solitude of the woods, anddwelt hermit-like for a time while he plied his lonely craft.

The Wilderness had not long rested in the silence of peace when it was invaded by a throng of pioneers, who came to wrest its soil from the ancient domination of the forest, and upon it to build their homes. Farmers and sons of farmers, while serving in the colonial armies, had noted during their painful marches through it what goodly soil slept in the shadow of this wilderness; keen-eyed rangers, chosen from hunters and trappers for their skill in woodcraft, when on their perilous errands had penetrated its depths wherever led an Indian trail or wound a stream to float a canoe, and knew what it held for men of their craft, and each had planned, when peace should come, to return to the land that gave such promise of fruitful fields or the easier garner of peltry. Lumbermen, too, knew its wealth of great pines; and speculators were casting greedy eyes upon the region, and plotting for its acquisition.

As the soldiers who guarded its posts, or crossed and recrossed the savage wilderness, were of New England origin, it naturally followed that most of the actual settlers came from the same provinces. Thus, from the very first, each little community of hardy and industrious pioneers was clearly stamped with the New England character. Such inspiration, such love of home, as glows in the hearts of all mountaineers, they drew from the grand companionship of the stern and steadfast mountains,the Crouching Lion, Mansfield, Ascutney, whose heavenward-reaching peaks shone white with snow when winter reigned, or summer came or lingered in the valleys,—landmarks enduring as the world, that stand while nations are born and flourish and pass away.

Sometimes the pioneer left his family in the older settlements while he, with a neighbor or two, or often alone, went into the wilderness to make the beginning of a new home. A pitch was located, and the herculean task of making a clearing begun, the apparently hopeless warfare of one puny hand against a countless army of giants that towered above him. Yet one by one the great trees toppled and fell before his valiant strokes. The trunks of some were built into a log-house, with a puncheon floor and roof of bark; more were rolled into heaps and burned, and the first patch of cleared soil was planted with corn or sown with wheat. After weeks and months of this toil and hardship and loneliness, perhaps not once broken by the sight of a fellow-being, when the tasseled corn and the nodding wheat hid the blackened stumps of the scant clearing, the giants still hemmed him in, their lofty heads the horizon of his little world, the bounds of his briefly sunlit sky. When his crops were housed, and the woods were gaudy with a thousand autumnal tints to where the glory of the deciduous trees was bounded by the dark wall of "black growth" on the mountains whose peaks were white with snow, he shoulderedaxe and gun and went southward, following the army of crows that raised a clamor of amazement at this intrusion on their immemorial domain. While the little clearing slept under the snow, and the silent cabin made the wintry loneliness of the forest more lonely, he spent a winter of content among old friends and neighbors, and in the spring set forth on horseback, or with an ox-team, with wife and children or newly wedded bride, and scant outfit of household stuff, to take permanent possession of the new home, where, if the burden of loneliness was lightened, the weariness of toil, privation, and anxiety was not lessened. Nature was the only neighbor of the new-comers, kind or unkind, according to her impartial mood to all her children, now a friend and consoler, with sunshine and timely shower, flowers and birdsong and hymns of wind-swept pines, now relentless, assailing with storm and bitter stress of cold. Miles of weary forest path marked only by blazed trees, or miles of toilsome waterway, lay between them and their kind, or help or sympathy in whatever trouble might befall them. Such consolation as religion might give must be sought at the fountain-head of all religion, since church and gospel ministrations were left behind.

The old warpaths became the ways of peace, and on lake and river, that before had borne none but warlike craft, now fared the settler's boat, laden with his family and household goods, skirting the quiet shore or up the slow current of a stream,through intervales whose fat soil as yet nourished only a luxuriant verdure of the forest. From afar the eternal roar of a cataract boomed in swelling thunder along the green walls of the lane of waters, foretelling the approaching toil of a portage. But no foeman lurked behind the green thicket, and the voyagers were startled by no sound more alarming than the sudden uprising of innumerable waterfowl, the plunge of an otter disturbed in his sport, or the mellow cadence of the great owl's solemn note.

The granting of lands, which had been interrupted by the war, was again begun by the governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, and in different parts of the region surveyors were busy running the lines of townships and lots. There was a flavor of discovery and adventure in their weary toil that gave it zest, as, with no guide but the compass, they were led through sombre depths of the primeval forest, where the footsteps of civilized man had never before fallen, and set the bounds of ownership where had never been sign of possession but the mark of the patient beaver's tooth, bark frayed by the claw of the bear, the antler of the moose, and the brands of the brief camp-fire of the savage. At night they bivouacked where with the fading of daylight their labors ended, prepared their rude supper by the fire that summoned a host of weird and grotesque shadows to surround them, and slept to the grewsome serenade of the wolf's long howl and the panther's scream.

The conditions of the grants or charters were, that every grantee should plant and cultivate five acres within five years for every fifty acres granted; that all white and other pine trees fit for masting the royal navy should be reserved for that use, and none felled without royal license; that after ten years a yearly rent of one shilling for each hundred acres, also for a town lot of one acre, which was set to each proprietor, a yearly tribute of one ear of Indian corn, both to be paid on Christmas Day. In each township that he granted, the thrifty governor had five hundred acres set apart to himself, still known as the governor's lot, and marked on the old township maps, drawn on the backs of the charters, with the initials "B. W." In each township one share of two hundred acres was set apart for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, one for a glebe for the Church of England, one for the first settled minister, and one for a school in said town.

The isolated townships constituted little commonwealths, with governments of their own, every inhabitant and freeholder having liberty to vote in the town-meetings, and the three or five selectmen being invested with the chief authority.

Naturally the proprietors to whom the township was granted were the most potent factors in its welfare and government, and, if actual settlers, took the most prominent part in its affairs.

Frequently they offered bounties for the building of gristmills and sawmills, and the forty dollarsbounty offered induced the building of such mills, that in their turn failed not to attract settlers; for it was not unusual for pioneers to go twenty miles on foot with a grist to the nearest mill, or to make as tedious journeys for a load of boards, the more tedious that all the environing forest was full of unattainable lumber.

Many of the towns now most populous and important were then uninhabited and unnamed. Bennington, the first township granted by New Hampshire, had its hamlet, its principal building, the Green Mountain Tavern, conspicuous for its sign, a stuffed catamount. Here the fathers of the unborn State often sat in council, moistening their dry deliberations with copious mugs of flip served by their confrère, landlord Stephen Fay. Brattleboro, within whose limits Fort Dummer was built and the first permanent settlement made, although it boasted the only store in the State, was of less importance; while Westminster, with its court-house and jail, assumed more. But at Vergennes, then known as the First Falls of Otter Creek, where the beavers had scarcely quit building their lodges on the driftwood that choked the head of the fall, there lived only Donald McIntosh, the stout old soldier of the Pretender's futile array and of Wolfe's victorious army, and half a dozen other settlers, whose cabins clustered about the frequently harried mills. Where now is the beautiful city of Burlington, the unbroken forest sloped to the placid shores of Petowbowk; and the Winooski, from its torrentialsource to where its slow current crawls through the broad intervales to the lake, turned no mills, and, but for its one block-house and the infrequent cabins of adventurous pioneers, was as wild as when its devious course was but the warpath of the Waubanakee. Thence to Canada stretched the Wilderness, its solitude as supreme as when, a century and a half before, the French explorer first beheld its snow-clad mountain peaks.

Oftener than human voice, the sonorous call of the moose, the wolf's long howl, the panther's cry, awoke its echoes, and the thud of the axe was a stranger sound than the rarest voice of nature. The eagle, swinging in majestic survey of the region, beheld far beneath him to the southward, here and there, a clustering hamlet and settlements creeping slowly upon his domain; here and there a mill, where a stream had been stayed in its idle straying; and here and there on the green bosom of the forest the unhealed wound of a new clearing, the bark roof of a settler's cabin, and the hazy upward drift of its chimney smoke; then to the northward, as far as his telescopic vision ranged, no break in the variegated verdure but the silver gleam of lake and stream, or the rugged barrenness of mountain tops.

Although the settlement of the newly opened region did not progress with anything like the marvelous rapidity that has marked the occupation of new Territories and States in later times, yet it was remarkable, in consideration of the tedious journeys that must be made to the new pitch, withslow ox-cart or sled, or on horseback, where, if there were roads at all, they were of the worst, or they were made by weary oar or waft of unstable wind. Furthermore, there was but comparatively slight overflow of population from the older provinces, or influx of immigration to American shores.

The settlers in the Wilderness soon found their peaceable possession obstructed by an obstacle which they had scarcely foreseen,—not by the harassments of a foreign or savage foe, which now seemed hardly possible, nor by the inert and active forces of nature that had always to be taken into account, but by the jealous rivalry and greed of two provincial governments, both claiming the same territory, and both deriving their authority from the same royal source.

This controversy between New Hampshire and New York, concerning their respective boundaries, began with the first English settlement of the region, and continued till after the close of the Revolution. It constitutes the most unique feature of the history of the commonwealth; and though it retarded its settlement, and afterward for years its admission into the Union, it was the real cause of its becoming an independent State. For undoubtedly, if the claims of either province had been undisputed by the other, the region would have quietly taken its place as part of that, and have had no individual existence. But the aggressions which the people were compelled to resist schooled them to a spirit of independence that most naturally led them to establish a separate government.

[25]In an indenture made 30th December, 1761, Colonel Lydius grants to Thomas Robinson, merchant, of Newport, in the Colony of Rhode Island, one sixtieth of the township No. 24, called Danvis, for the "sum of one Shilling money one peppercorn each year for seventy years (if demanded) and after twenty years five Shillings sterling annually, forever, on the Feast Day of St. Michael the Archangel, for each hundred acres of arable Land."

[26]Petition of Colonel Spencer and others.Doc. Hist. N. Y.vol. iv. p. 575.

As early as 1749, a dispute concerning the boundaries of their provinces had arisen between the governments of New Hampshire and New York, when Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire had communicated to Governor Clinton of New York his intention of granting unimproved lands within his government under instructions received from his Majesty King George Second, and inclosed his Majesty's description of the province of New Hampshire.[27]In 1740 the king had determined "that the northern boundary of Massachusetts be a similar curve line pursuing the course of the Merrimack River at three miles distance on the north side thereof, beginning at the Atlantic Ocean and ending at a point due north of a place called Pautucket Falls, and by a straight line drawn from thence due west till it meets with his Majesty's other governments."

By this decision, reaffirmed in Governor Wentworth's commission, the government of New Hampshire held that its jurisdiction extended as far west as that of Massachusetts, which was to a line twentymiles east of Hudson River. Furthermore, the king had repeatedly recommended to New Hampshire the support of Fort Dummer, as having now fallen within its limits, and which was well known to be west of the Connecticut.[28]

But it was ordered by the governor's council of New York "that his Excellency do acquaint Governor Wentworth that this Province is bounded eastward by Connecticut River, the letters Patent from King Charles the Second to the Duke of York expressly granting all the Lands from the West side of Connecticut River to the East side of Delaware Bay."[29]

Governor Wentworth had already, in January, 1749, granted one township west of the Connecticut, which in his honor was named Bennington, but he now promised for the present to make no further grants on the western frontier of his government that might have the least probability of interfering with that of New York. Later he agreed, by the advice of his council, to lay the matter before the king and await his decision, which his government would "esteem it their duty to acquiesce in without further dispute," and furthermore agreed to exchange with the government of New York copies of the representation made to the king.[30]

This the council of New York reported in November, 1753, that he had failed to do.

This wrangling of governors and councilscontinued till the beginning of the war in 1754 stopped for the time applications for grants, when the mutterings of the inter-provincial quarrel were drowned by the thunder of the more momentous contest of nations.

With the subjugation of Canada, the granting of lands in the debatable ground was resumed. Governor Wentworth had a survey made sixty miles up the Connecticut, and three lines of townships were laid out on each side of the river. During the next year sixty townships were granted on the west side of the river, and within two years 108 grants were made, extending to a line twenty miles east of the Hudson, and north of that to the eastern shore of Lake Champlain.

It was reported in New York that a party of New Hampshire surveyors, who were laying out lands on the east side of the lake in September, 1762, asserted that Crown Point was in the limits of their government. In December, 1763, Lieutenant-Governor Colden issued a proclamation reiterating the claim of New York to the Connecticut as her eastern boundary, still basing it on the grant to the Duke of York, and also on the description of the eastern boundary of New Hampshire as given in the letters-patent of his Majesty dated July 3, 1741. He commands the civil officers of his government to exercise jurisdiction as far as the banks of the Connecticut River, and the high sheriff of the county of Albany to return the names of all persons who, under the grants of NewHampshire, shall hold possession of any lands westward of Connecticut River, that they may be proceeded against according to law. This was followed by a proclamation of Governor Wentworth on March 13, 1764, in which he reviews and denies the claim of New York. He says: "At present the boundaries of New York to the Northward are unknown, and as soon as it shall be His Majesty's pleasure to determine them, New Hampshire will pay a ready and cheerful obedience thereunto, not doubting but that all Grants made by New Hampshire that are fulfilled by the Grantees will be confirmed to them if it should be His Majesty's pleasure to alter the jurisdiction." He encouraged the grantees under his government to be industrious in clearing and cultivating their lands, and commanded all civil officers within his province to be diligent in exercising jurisdiction as far westward as grants had been made by his government, and deal with all persons who "may presume to interrupt the settlers on said lands as to law and justice doth appertain."[31]

Though the claims of New York had thus far been founded on the grant to the Duke of York, she now sought to establish it on a less doubtful tenure, and made application to the crown for a confirmation of the same grant. This was supported by a petition representing that it would be greatly for the advantage of the settlers on the New Hampshire Grants to be annexed to New York. Tothis were appended the names of many such inhabitants, who afterwards asserted that it was done without their knowledge.[32]

In response came a royal order declaring "the Western bank of the Connecticut, from where it enters the province of Massachusetts Bay as far north as the 45th degree of northern latitude, to be the boundary line between the said two provinces of New Hampshire and New York."

Though this decision was not in accordance with the wishes of many of the inhabitants of the Grants, it gave them no uneasiness concerning the validity of their titles. They had obtained their lands under grants from the crown, and had no fear that under the same authority they would or could be compelled to relinquish or repurchase them. Governor Wentworth remonstrated against the change of jurisdiction, but finally by proclamation, "recommended to the proprietors and settlers due obedience to the authorities and laws of the colony of New York."[33]

But the government of New York chose to construe his Majesty's order as annulling the grants made by Governor Wentworth west of the Connecticut. It divided its newly confirmed territory into four counties, annexing the southwestern part to the county of Albany, which was termed by the New Hampshire grantees the "unlimited county of Albany." North of this was the county ofCharlotte, east of it the county of Cumberland, and north of this the county of Gloucester.

The New Hampshire grantees were required to surrender their charters, and repurchase their lands under New York grants. Some complied, and paid the excessive fees demanded by the New York officials, which were twenty fold greater than those exacted by the government of New Hampshire;[34]but for the most part the settlers were not men of the metal to submit to what seemed to them rank injustice, and they refused to comply with the demand. Thereupon New York re-granted their lands to others, and actions of ejectment were brought against them. It was an easy matter to obtain judgments in the county of Albany against the settlers, but the execution of them was met by stubborn resistance, in which the people soon associated for mutual protection.

A convention of representatives from the towns on the west side of the mountains was called, and by it Samuel Robinson of Bennington was appointed as agent to present the grievances of the settlers to the British government, and obtain, if possible, a confirmation of New Hampshire grants.

The mission of Robinson[35]was so far successful that the governor of New York was commanded byhis Majesty "to make no grant whatever of any part of the lands in dispute until his Majesty's pleasure should be further known" (July 24, 1767).

But the governor's council of New York decided that this order did not restrain the granting of any land formerly claimed by New Hampshire, but not already granted by that government; and the governor continued to make grants, and writs of ejectment were issued as before, returnable to the Supreme Court at Albany. It was decided in this court that authenticated copies of the royal orders to the governor of New Hampshire, and the grants made in pursuance thereof, should not be used in evidence.

Ethan Allen, soon to become one of the most prominent actors in this controversy, was attending suits at Albany when this decision was made. Being urged by some of the officials there to use his influence with the settlers to induce them to make the best terms they could with their New York landlords, and reminded that "might often prevails against right," Allen replied, in the Scriptural language which he was so fond of employing, that "the gods of the valleys were not the gods of the hills;" and when asked by the attorney-general to explain his meaning, answered that, "if he would accompany him to Bennington Hill, it would be made plain to him."[36]

Thus debarred from obtaining justice in the courts, the people, assembled in convention atBennington, "resolved to support their rights and property in the New Hampshire Grants against the usurpations and unjust claims of the Governor and Council of New York by force, as law and justice were denied them."[37]

A more thoroughly organized resistance was now opposed to all attempts of the New York officers to make arrests or serve writs of ejectment. Surveyors who undertook to run the lines of New York grants across lands already granted by New Hampshire were compelled to desist. A sheriff could not come so secretly that vigilant eyes did not discover his approach, nor with so strong a posse that, when he attempted to execute his duties, he did not find a formidable force gathered to resist him. If he persisted, he was, in Allen's quaint phrase, "severely chastised with twigs of the wilderness," though the "blue beech" rod, whose efficacy in reducing a refractory ox to submission had been so often proved by the rough yeomen of the Grants, and which they now applied to the backs of their oppressors, could hardly be termed a twig. This mode of punishment, with grim humor, they termed the "beech seal."

A proclamation was issued by the governor of New York for apprehending some of the principal actors, and in the January (1770) term of the court at Albany several of the inhabitants of Bennington were indicted as rioters, but none of them were arrested.

Each party in the quarrel accused the other of being incited by the greed of the land-jobber and speculator, and no doubt there was some foundation for the charge, even on the part of the New Hampshire grantees. But with them, as against an aristocracy of monopolists, were the sympathies of the yeomen of New York, who, when called upon to enforce the authority of their own officers against their brethren of the Grants, held aloof, or feebly rendered their perfunctory aid.

Sheriff Ten Eyck, being required to serve a writ of ejectment on James Breckenridge of Bennington, called to his aid, by order of the governor, a posse of 750 armed militia. About 300 of the settlers, being apprised of his coming, assembled to oppose him. Nineteen of them were posted in the house; the others, divided in two forces of about equal number, were concealed along the road by which the sheriff and his men were advancing, and behind a ridge within gunshot of the house. Unsuspicious of their presence, the sheriff and his men marched to the house and were within the ambuscade. On threatening to make forcible entry, the sheriff was answered by those within, "Attempt it and you are a dead man." The ambuscading forces now made their presence known, and, displaying their hats upon the muzzles of their guns, made a show of twice their actual strength. The sheriff and his posse became aware of their dangerous position, and as one of the first historians of Vermont, Ira Allen, quaintly remarks, "not being interested inthe dispute," and Mr. Ten Eyck remembering that important business required his immediate presence in Albany,[38]they discreetly withdrew without a shot being fired on either side.[39]

The New York officers were not always so easily vanquished, nor so unsuccessful in their attempts. The doughty esquire John Munro, who held lands in the Grants under a New York title, and lived upon them among his tenants in Shaftsbury, was a justice of the peace for the county of Albany. He was a man of other metal than Sheriff Ten Eyck, whom he assisted to arrest Silas Robinson, of Bennington, at his own door; and though the house wherein they lodged with their prisoner the night thereafter was surrounded by forty armed men who demanded his release, they carried him to Albany. Robinson was there indicted as a rioter in January, 1771, and held in jail till the next October, when he was released on bail. Upon another occasion, Munro, accompanied by the deputy sheriff and twelve men whom he called to his aid, demanded entrance to the house of Isaiah Carpenter, to serve a writ of ejectment upon him. Carpenter threatened to blow out the brains of any one who should attempt to enter, whereupon the deputy and his men forced the door, and Munro, entering alone, seized Carpenter with his gun in his hand. Two other men were found in the house, and two guns in a corner, "one loaded with powder andBullets and the other with Powder and kidney Beans."

The New York claimants now sought to draw some of the prominent persons of the Grants to their interest by offers of New York titles on favorable terms, and by the bestowal of offices upon them, and they induced people of their own province to settle upon unoccupied New Hampshire Grants. By such means they hoped to smother the unmanageable element which had so far thwarted their attempts to gain control of the coveted region, and insidiously overcome the turbulent faction termed by them the "Bennington Mob."

Committees of Safety were organized in several towns of the Grants, and a convention of the settlers decreed that no New York officer should be allowed to take any person out of the district without permission of the Committee of Safety, and that no surveys should be made there, nor lines run, nor settlements made, under the authority of New York. The punishment for violation of this decree was to be discretionary with a court formed by the Committee of Safety. Civil officers, however, were permitted to perform their proper functions in the collection of debts, and in other matters not connected with the controversy.[40]Thus the inhabitants of the Grants established a crude but efficient civil government of their own.

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