The story of Vermont

Preface

If that land only is happy which has no history, then has Vermont been most unfortunate. In the brief period since white men first made their homes within sight of the Green Mountains, their lives have been menaced by savages, their lands coveted by robbers clothed with law and power, their families driven forth in terror when invading armies came among them, while the decisive battles of three great wars were fought on the lake of their glowing sunsets. Their State was the first admitted to the Union, after a forty years’ struggle for its rights which happily has had no parallel in this country. And when, years later, slavery was crushed and the Union saved in the cruel war whose wounds time has not yet healed, no soldiers of the North won so great glory or paid for it so heavy a price in suffering and in loss as did the grandsons of the Green Mountain Boys.

Poets, romancists and historians who have caught their inspiration from Vermont’s annals have confined their attention to the eighteenth century, as if after those years of storm there was no more to tell. But tales of war are not the only ones worth hearing. The record of a century of Statehood, with its peaceful victories and industrial accomplishments, the life of its people and the part they have played in the vaster history of the Republic — this as well as the old stirring days of war and outlawry, must be studied if one would know what claim the Fourteenth State has upon the gratitude and respect of the country.

PI^EFACE.

To tell the story of the State’s early trials — which can never be too often rehearsed lest her sons should forget to be grateful for their ancestry ; to add to this an account of the more recent events that have escaped the attention they deserve ; and to include so far as possible in this brief recital the growth of arts and learning, the development of industry and the evolution of laws, customs and institutions to meet the needs of a gracious, temperate and valiant people — such has been the purpose of the writer. Not only to the people of Vermont, but to the citizens of every state in our broad land, is the story of the Green Mountain State offered as a help, an inspiration and a record of sturdy endeavor.

Chapter I

ir

1609-1763

Chapter II. 1776-1791

CHAPTER V.

• • 115

1798-1824.

HOMESPUN FOLK .

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

1825-1850.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VIII.

HOME HAPPENINGS ....

1830-1850.

CHAPTER IX.

THE TEMPERANCE REFORM .

CHAPTER X.

1840-1860.

CHAPTER XI.

1861-1865.

CHAPTER XII.

1865-1889.

THE CHRONOLOGICAL STORY

THE people’s covenant

BOOKS RELATING TO VERMONT

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS.

Green Mountain Boys on the march .

“ Slowly and cautiously they floated on.” Initial “ The first white man ”...

The service of the captives ....

“ It is the bell ” . *

The “ beech seal.” Initial ....

Dr. Adams’s stool of repentance The outlaw’s proclamation ....

The judges judged .....

“ Molly Stark ” cannon. Initial

Parson Allen’s appeal

In hiding from the Hessians ....

Allen and Runnals

A Hessian. Initial

Ethan Allen explains the delay

An old-time election .....

Ethan Allen monument, Burlington .

Macdonough’s medal. Initial

In the Green Mountains. Mt. Mansfield

The prophecy of victory ....

Statue of Lafayette, Burlington, Vt.

The spinning-wheel. Initial ....

The singing-school ......

At the tavern .

Borrowing fire .......

A quilting bee

The railway coach of our fathers An old-fashioned hand-loom ....

The State House. Initial ....

Lake Memphremagog

Sugar-making : the critical moment

Page.

Frontis.

lOI

ILL USTRA TIONS.

Page.

“ When every man was his own cobbler” 203

An old-time tipple. I}iitial 208

Signing the pledge 21 1

A raid on the rumseller 215

A Bloomer 219

Eagle Bay, Lake Champlain. Initial 223

Dinah Morris’s certificate of freedom , . . . . . . 227

A base-ball club volunteering for service 233

In a marble quarry 239

The sleeping sentry ......... 246

The Vermonters at Gettysburg : Stannard’s Charge . . . 253

For the soldiers .......... 263

At a creamery. Initial 269

University of Vermont 273

On Lake Champlain 281

Ice yachting on Lake Champlain ....... 293

THE STORY OF VERMONT

CHAPTER I.

WARS.

UST as the sun was sinking in the west one summer afternoon long ago a band of Indians paddled their canoes along the edge of a beautiful lake in the heart of the woods.

Slowly and cautiously they floated on, stealing their silent way under the shelter of the shore as if expecting the approach of an enemy. Yet though their course was cautiously chosen, there was less of apprehension than of curiosity in the gaze with which they scanned the horizon to the northward ; for this was a strong war party of tried and chosen braves, who bore themselves with the air of men used to victory.

THE OLD

THE OLD WARS.

The scene was one of wild and singular beauty. On either hand the shore rose, now abruptly, now with gentler slopes leading the eye back from the water’s edge, into rounded mountains covered to their very tops with the virgin forest save where the glistening walls of cliffs peeped through the foliage. The shore was irregular, curving out at times into points and headlands and partly shutting off the view where, to north and south, yet more blue water gleamed in the distance. The lake’s surface mirrored many a leaning tree or jutting crag or clinging wreath of ivy; but nowhere on all its surface did it give back the reflection of any human habitation. Nor path, nor house, nor clearing, nor rising film of smoke met the traveler’s eye. But for the little fleet in the foreground, the wilderness was apparently unseen and untenanted by any human soul.

The sun had passed behind the western mountains, the cool shadows of evening were beginning to gather, when suddenly another fleet of canoes swept round a point of land ahead and came into full view. There was a moment of indecision and then the new-comers swerved outward from their course and retreated an arrow’s flicfht from the

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shore; the first party was already landing in hot haste, making the woodland echoes ring with savage yells of defiance.

THE OLD WATS.

The day was too far spent to fight the battle for which both sides were eager ; the night was passed in singing the war songs of their tribes, in preparing their weapons for the fray which would begin with the dawn, and in shouting threats and boasts from fleet to shore now scarce a bow-shot apart. When the morning broke, the second band secured their canoes upon the shelving beach and advanced to meet the foe. During the night the latter had been busily at work with their rude stone axes and had built from slender poles held together with twisted withes a rude palisade to serve as a slight defence in case of need. Yet they hardly seemed to require such means of shelter, for they outnumbered their assailants three to one; scorning to take refuge within the enclosure, they eagerly pressed forward on the level space without.

And then a strange thing happened. For out of the canoes of the smaller party, where till now they had remained unseen, stepped three mysterious figures clad, each, from head to foot in steel. The sun rising over the lake shone full on their burnished cuirasses and tipped their helmet crests with dazzling light. One who seemed the leader boldly advanced till he stood midway between the lines, carrying his arquebuse at rest ; the other two, similarly armed, took up their position on the flank of the astonished savages. Never before had the

THE OLD WARS.

red-men looked upon such a sight as the three steelclad warriors ; but their superstitious awe of the strangers quickly deepened into abject terror when they saw the fire flash from the leveled arquebuses and heard the thunder of their discharge, and when one after another of their chiefs and leaders fell before the unseen missiles. Of what use was resistance against these mysterious visitors who wielded the lightnings to strike dead those who dared oppose them and upon whose charmed bodies arrows could not prevail } It was not long before the frightened braves fled in the utmost confusion, leaving many of their number dead upon the shore, and others as prisoners bound for the torture.

Such was the battle which, on the thirtieth of July, 1609, Samuel de Champlain, Lieutenant-Governor of New France, waged with the Iroquois upon the western shore of the lake which bears his name. Thousfh but three white men and less than three hundred Indians were engaged in it; though for months Europe did not hear of it and even then did not deem it of much consequence in comparison with more engrossing warfare nearer home, it is no exaggeration to call it one of the world’s decisive engagements, upon whose issue the fate of a continent may have rested. For if France, whose power in America Champlain represented, was then the foremost nation in Europe, the Iro-

THE OLD WARS.

quois were no less prominent among the savage tribes of the New World. They held the mountain passes which were the key to the continent. They were the acknowledged masters of the route which led by Lake Champlain and the Hudson from the St. Lawrence to the sea, dividing the Eastern from the Alleghany tribes — that route which was then

“the first white man.*^ the scene of bloody warfare between Indian and Indian and which was to witness even more deadly conflict between white man and red, Frenchman and Englishman, Tory and Colonist. By their strength, their military sagacity and their commanding position they had almost silenced oppoi6

THE OLD WARS.

sition to their sway over a region extending from the lakes to the sea and from the St. Lawrence to the Chesapeake. Their friendship would have been invaluable to France in the long struggle which followed for the possession of the western world. Their resentment was implacable and dearly did the French pay for having incurred it.

But all this Champlain, fresh from the gay courts of Europe and ignorant of forest politics, could not be expected to know. He had come sailing up the St. Lawrence River from far-away France. He had made firm friends of the Indians of Huron or Montagnais blood and willingly went at their request to chastise the Iroquois who had driven them from their ancient hunting-grounds and even now pursued them with relentless hostility. He was the first white man who ever saw what is now the State of Vermont, and his published narrative of his adventures contains the best account which we possess of that commonwealth as it existed nearly three hundred years ago.

Champlain ascended the Sorel River to the falls in his shallop and then pressed on with sixty Indians and twenty-four light bark canoes. He passed from the river into the lake, whose beauty awoke in him, as it still does in each fresh observer, delight and admiration. “ There are many pretty islands here,” he says, “low and containing

THE OLD WARS.

very fine woods and meadows with abundance of fowl and such animals of the chase as stags, fallow deer, fawns, - roebucks, bears and others which go from the mainland to the islands. We captured a large number of these animals. There are also many beavers, not only in this river, but also in numerous little ones that flow into it. These regions, although they are pleasant, are not inhabited by savages on account of their wars ; but they withdraw as far as possible from the rivers into the interior not to be suddenly surprised.”

Through this beautiful but desolate region Champlain with his Indian guides proceeded for some time, traveling southward from evening until well into the night; lying concealed by day the better to avoid surprise, and taking, constantly, keen note of his surroundings. He saw ahead of him the high peaks of the Adirondacks and on his left the lower hills of Vermont. The white gleam of the limestone rocks that tinged these latter heights he mistook for snow.

But though Champlain was thus the first white man to see Vermont even he never set foot upon its soil. His mission upon the lake was war and not exploration, and for nearly its whole length he skirted the western bank until he found the Iroquois near Ticonderoga. And when the Montagnais braves had chased the flying remnants of i8

THE OLD WARS.

the defeated force to their hearts’ content, it was still upon the New York shore that they camped for the night and recalled the ecstasies of combat in the savage delights of the torture. When the dusk of evening came the lurid light of the campfire fell upon a scene which must have seemed strange indeed to Christian eyes.

Champlain tells us that, when all was ready for the torture and an Iroquois captive was bound to the stake that the barbaric revel might begin, he was urged to take a torch and, as became a brave commander, taste first the joy of burning the poor victim’s flesh. Till then he had never witnessed the full enormity of the tortures which the Indians practiced upon their captured enemies and, unable to bear the sight, he seized his arquebuse and shot the uncomplaining savage dead.

All this happened in 1609, some weeks before Hendrik Hudson sailed up the North River to Albany and eleven years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth ; yet even before that early date France had entered upon her struggle with Great Britain and Spain for the possession of the New World, and her representative had nearly a century earlier claimed for the most Christian king an empire on its untrodden shores as large as all Europe, the boundaries and extent of which indeed were at the time unknown.

THE OLD WARS.

It was in the year 1534 that Jacques Cartier, a bold sailor commissioned by the king of France to undertake the work of exploration, discovered partly by accident the bay of St. Lawrence and spent the brief Northern summer in exploring its shores. Returning the following year, he reached the mouth of the mighty river St. Lawrence. This he at first hoped might prove to be the long-looked-for westward channel to the East Indies, but the native dwellers along the river assured him that its water was fresh and that it came from inland seas, descending rapids in its course.

Though somewhat disappointed by this information, Cartier persevered and by the end of October had reached the Indian village of Hochelaga, which he rechristened Mount Royal, now Montreal, in honor of his king. He had been for the most part well treated by the Indians, though Donnacona, the great chief who had his headquarters at Quebec and lorded it over the tribes of the middle river, was opposed to his further explorations. The natives at/Hochelaga were especially kind to the French adventurer. They showed him their village, a strongly fortified place with a single gate, and the “ stones and pebbles for the defence of it ” which they had heaped up within. They supplied his ships with fresh stores of corn and fish. On the second day they

THE OLD IVAES.

led Cartier to the top of the hill and, looking out for miles around upon the dense forest, threaded here and there by streams narrowing in the distance until they were lost to view, they told him of the country that lay beyond. Westward, they said, were great fresh water seas and a mighty river flowing through fair and rich regions to the ocean. To the north was a wilderness full of game and pierced by numerous rivers. Due south, following the smaller stream which lay before their eyes, was a lake shut in by hills. The great river of the Southwest was the Mississippi, the nearer lake was Lake Champlain, and all about them lay the land which Cartier had claimed for the king.

Had the Indians known of Cartier’s purpose, had they foreseen the anxieties and hardships in which the coming of the whites would involve their race, and the doom which was to be the end of all, they would not so kindly have received the first white men who ventured into their land. But not for many years thereafter were the Indians seriously troubled by French aggressions. It is true that Cartier and other captains came again to explore the northern waters, a little discouraged by the fact that they had found neither the passage to India nor any sign of precious metals ; it is true that private enterprise supplemented the efforts of the Crown by sending every year small vessels filled

THE OLD WARS.

2 I

with hardy seamen to prosecute the fisheries on the Newfoundland banks; but it was not till well within the next century that the exploration of the regions lying about the St. Lawrence was continued with much vigor or success. The generation that had welcomed Cartier had vanished before the day of Champlain, and even the village of Hochelaga had utterly disappeared when he arrived upon its site.

With the coming of Champlain the history of French conquest and exploration in America fairly begins. That brave and prudent commander made at the outset the fatal mistake of attacking the Iroquois instead of seeking to conciliate them. Had he adopted the latter course France might have occupied the continent so securely as to defy the efforts of the British to dislodge her. The Hudson and the Mohawk might have been hers as well as the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries, and her armies might have hemmed the English colonies in upon the seacoast, thrown against them the full power of the Indian nations and finally left them not a foothold. But it was not to be expected that the haughty Iroquois would soon forgive or forget the intruders who had compassed their defeat before the very eyes of the despised Hurons and caused the song of victory to be raised by every tribe of

Algonquin blood along the St. Lawrence and the lakes. It was not long before they were enabled to obtain firearms from the Dutch settlements about Albany, paying the thrifty burghers, we may be sure, dearly for them in peltry. Thus armed they menaced for many years the very existence of the French settlements.

For the present, however, there was no fear of reprisals by way of Lake Champlain. The Canadian colonies passed through years of alternating prosperity and adversity, gradually extending their grasp westward and gaining more and more influence with the tribes of Huron blood, but never succeeding in placating the Iroquois. French missionaries and French explorers had threaded and mapped the great lakes and the sources of the Mississippi before it became necessary again to lead a war party down Lake Champlain.

By 1665 the Iroquois had become so formidable and so threatened and harassed the feeble colonies along the St. Lawrence that two regiments were sent from France to reduce them. Courcelles, governor of Canada, made the mistake of sending south a winter expedition for this purpose. Unused to the rigors of the climate, the troops reached the frontier town of Schenectady half dead with cold and hunger and would have fallen an easy prey to the Indians had not a Dutch burMier named Arendt

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THE SERVICE OF THE CAPTIVES.

THE OLD WARS.

Van Curler foiled their purpose by sending them on a wild-goose chase after other enemies who, he said, were advancing upon them. The Indians not only forgave Curler his trick, but thought so highly of him for that and other magnanimous deeds that for many years the governors of New York were called by them “ Corlaer,” even as they styled the French governors, after the days of Frontenac, “ Onontio.” Lake Champlain itself was long known as Corlaer’s Lake, the worthy Dutchman having been drowned in its waters while on a trip to visit Courcelles in Canada.

Two years later the French were enabled to make a peace with the Iroquois which lasted for twenty years ; this interval they busily employed in cementing their friendship with the forest folks. Despite their utmost effort, they made little progress in gaining the affections of the Iroquois, but their pioneers met with more marked favor among the Indians of other tribes. Along the whole length of the chain of great lakes French missions were established, French priests baptized the red-men into the Christian church, French hunters, voyageurs and fur-traders took to themselves Indian wives and lived in comity with the people. Their interest in the moral welfare of the Indians was one secret of the French influence over them, the considerable number of intermarriages was another and still a

THE OLD WARS.

third was the never-failing politeness of the French diplomats. They carried into the forest all the arts and graces of the courts ; they treated the chiefs with the deference they imagined due to them ; they observed all the punctilios of Indian custom. They are said to have gone so far on some occasions as to sit naked in council after the Indian fashion. However this may be, they were certainly adepts in dealing with the Indians.

The peace closed in 1687 by another war so sudden and so disastrous to the French colonies that Montreal was taken and burned and a thousand people put to death by the Indians. The province was on the verge of ruin when the arrival from France of Count Frontenac with a strong body of troops put the Indians again on the defensive. A treaty had scarcely been concluded when war broke out between France and Great Britain.

The French colonies in Canada, though hardly recovered from their own danger, projected a winter raid on the settlements in New York. The raiders, following the bloody trail along Lake Champlain, fell upon Schenectady one bitter night in February, 1690, massacred sixty settlers and took prisoners twenty-seven of the Dutch burghers, who were now subjects of Great Britain, the New York province having passed under British control a quarter of a century earlier. So cold was the night that

THE OLD WARS.

twenty-five of the fugitives from the scene of fire and slaughter reached Albany with limbs so badly frozen as to require amputation. It was a poor requital of Van Curler’s kindness.

This was not the only raid made upon the English settlements in those fierce old times. At Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, thirty persons were killed and many prisoners taken. At Dover twenty-three were killed. In all these expeditions the Indians and their French allies passed southward by way of the Sorel and Lake Champlain and crossed Vermont through the valley of the Winooski and White rivers, or along the course of Otter Creek ; if the attack was to fall upon New York they passed by Lake George, Wood’s Creek and the Upper Hudson. Pursuing the same way home with reddened hatchets and the scalps of white men at their belts, the savages dyed the soil of Vermont with the blood of butchered prisoners.

It must have been by the Winooski trail that the descent on Deerfield, Mass., was made in 1704. The peace of Ryswick, patched up in Europe, in 1697, scarcely put an end to Indian ravages upon the New England settlements and when, less than six years later, war was again declared between Great Britain and France, the Canadians were prompt to take advantage of it.

There were at the time no EnoHsh towns in all

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THE OLD WARS.

the State of Vermont, but in Central Massachusetts venturesome pioneers had planted a number of towns. One of the fairest of these was Deerfield, a place of considerable size and importance. An attack upon this town was one of the first fruits of the new war. It was an attack so cruel in its nature that it may fitly be chosen to typify the brutalities of Indian warfare and to illustrate the dangers which the pioneers in the American continent encountered.

In the long, silent and secret march through the snow-laden trees of the forest, in the suddenness and fierceness of the attack, in the cruel vindictiveness and bloody deeds of the savages and in their forced march to Canada with the remnant of the colonists, the Deerfield raid was precisely like a score of others witnessed in those bad, dark days. It was exceptional only in the size of the town and the number of prisoners taken. Many persons were killed, a few escaped, but no less than one hundred and twelve were carried captive to Canada, there to be held for ransom. The Rev. John Williams, pastor of the Deerfield Congregational Church, had two of his children slain in the raid and was made a prisoner with five others.

The first Sunday on the march Mr. Williams obtained from his captors the privilege of holding a service at a point in the southeastern corner of Vermont.

THE OLD WARS.

The prisoners were gathered together upon the snow in a glade of the forest, a dusky fringe of red men encompassed them about and the woodland echoes gave back the unfamiliar sound as they sang the first Christian hymn that ever rose in the wilds of Vermont. Not a soul was present who had not lost friends and relatives by the axe, and all had seen their homes in flames. It must have been a solemn and affecting sermon which the good preacher gave that day. His text was Lamentations i. 18: “ My virgins and my young men have gone into captivity.”

It is a pleasure to know that Mr. Williams lived long after, to tell the story of that dreadful raid, and that the sufferings of the captives were soon terminated by their exchange. The grandson of Mr. Williams was in after years to become the historian of Vermont, and Williams himself has left a printed account of his captivity.

The French have a different version of this raid, and one which sounds much prettier in the telling. The good priest Nicholas of Caughnawaga, so they say, had urged the Indians of his mission to collect and send to France the pelts of many otters, beavers, foxes and other animals in return for a bell for their church. On the way over the ship which bore the bell was taken by the British; the bell found its way to Deerfield and there it hung, the

THE OLD WARS.

popish inscription erased from its brazen side, until Father Nicholas and the braves of the tribe, in the dead of the winter, marched to rescue it from the hands of the heretics. With infinite labor they carried it through the snow till the shore of Lake Champlain was reached ; there they buried it. When spring broke and the snow was gone, a band of young Indians brought the bell from its far hiding place to Caughnawaga. And when the people

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of the village heard the sound of the approaching bell, its clapper swinging against its sides as the young men bore it on a pole between them, they crossed themselves and cried in awed exultation, “ It is the bell.”

Whether the tale be true or no, certain it is that a little old bell, the inscription on whose side had been cut away, long hung in the belfry of the church of the Saut St. Louis at Caughnawaga, and all the Indians said no other bell had so sweet a sound.

But the stage was set for vaster scenes. The Indian depredations upon the English settlements were soon almost unheeded amid the stirring preparations made in England and seconded by the colonies for the conquest of Canada. In 1709 an expedition was projected for the capture of Quebec, but it accomplished little beyond cutting a good road from Albany to Lake George. A similar at-

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3^ tempt was made in 171 1 in conjunction with a fleet sent up the St. Lawrence. A great storm dispersed the fleet and the land force disbanded. The peace of Utrecht in 1713 put an end to the fighting, and it was more than thirty years before the stirringmusic of the fife and drum and the tramp of regiments were heard again by the shore of Lake Champlain.

It was during this interval that the first actual settlement was made in Vermont. In 1724 the State of Massachusetts built Fort Dummer in the southeast corner, near what is now Brattleborough ; one or two smaller forts or rather block-houses were afterward erected in the same vicinity. But in 1731 the French established a military post — first at Addison,

Vt., and later at Crown Point on the New York side of Lake Champlain and, the war recommencing in 1744, the presence of this post acted as a barrier to any further settlement of Vermont until the close of the last

great struggle. There “it is the bell.”

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were a few huts nestling under the walls of Fort Dummer and of Bridgman’s fort ; there were a few patches of corn, a little clearing here and there where timber had been felled for the block-houses, and that was all.

The immediate cause of hostilities in i 744 was the policy of the French who were building -a line of forts to connect the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, on land claimed by Great Britain. To humble the pride of France the great expedition to Louisbourg was undertaken. It was completely successful, but when peace was signed at Aix-la- Chapelle in 1748, the fortress was returned, and each side resumed precisely the same territorial possessions it had held four years before.