American Commonwealths.

EDITED BY

HORACE E. SCUDDER.

American Commonwealths

VERMONT

A STUDY OF INDEPENDENCE

BY

ROWLAND E. ROBINSON

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1892

Copyright, 1892,
By ROWLAND E. ROBINSON.
All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

CONTENTS.

VERMONT.

CHAPTER I.

THE HIGHWAY OF WAR.

Champlain, in the account of his voyage made in July, 1609, up the lake to which he gave his name, mentions almost incidentally that, "continuing our route along the west side of the lake, contemplating the country, I saw on the east side very high mountains capped with snow. I asked the Indians if those parts were inhabited. They answered me yes, and that they were Iroquois, and there were in those parts beautiful valleys, and fields fertile in corn as good as any I had ever eaten in the country, with an infinitude of other fruits, and that the lake extended close to the mountains, which were, according to my judgment, fifteen leagues from us."

It was doubtless then that the eyes of white men first beheld the lofty landmarks and western bounds of what is now Vermont. If the wise and brave explorer gave more thought to the region than is indicated in this brief mention of it, perhaps it was to forecast a future wherein those fertile valleys, wrested by his people from the savagery of the wilderness and the heathen, should be made to blossom like the rose, while the church, of which he was so devout a son that he had said "the salvation of one soul was of more value than the conquest of an empire," should here build its altars, and gather to itself a harvest richer by far than any earthly garner. But this was not to be. His people were never to gain more than a brief and unsubstantial foothold in this land of promise. The hereditary enemies of his nation were to sow and reap where France had only struck a furrow, and were to implant a religion as abhorrent to him as paganism, and a form of government that would have seemed to him as evil as impracticable, and he was only a pioneer on the warpath of the nations.

Although the Indians who accompanied Champlain on his inland voyage of discovery told him that the country on the east side of the lake was inhabited by the Iroquois, there is no evidence that it was permanently occupied by them, even then, if it ever had been. There are traces of a more than transient residence of some tribe here at some time, but their identity and the date of their occupancy can only be conjectured. The relics found give no clew by which to determine whether they who fashioned here their rude pottery and implements and weapons of stone were Iroquois or Waubanakee,[1] nor when these beautiful valleys were their home.

A fact affording some proof that the Iroquois abandoned it very long ago is, that not one stream, lake, mountain, or other landmark within the limits of Vermont now bears an Iroquois name. Of all the Indian names that have been preserved, every one is Waubanakee; and though many of them are euphonious, and those least so far better than our commonplace and vulgar nomenclature, none of them have the poetic significance of those so frequently bestowed by the Iroquois on mountain, lake, rock, and river.

It does not seem probable that the warlike nation that conquered all tribes with which it came in contact, having once gained complete possession, should relinquish it. A more reasonable conclusion is, that the country lying east of Lake Champlain was a debatable ground of these aboriginal tribes in the remote past, as it was more recently of civilized nations and states.

Quebec, the town which Champlain had founded in 1608, did not begin to assume much importance till eighteen years afterward, when its wooden fortifications were rebuilt of stone. Nor was the place strong enough three years later to offer any resistance to the English fleet which, under the command of Sir David Kirk, then appeared before the city and presently took possession of it. The conquest was as lightly valued by King Charles I. of England as it had been easily made; and in 1634, by the treaty of St. Germain, Canada, Acadia, and Cape Breton were restored to France. Thenceforward, for more than a hundred years, these regained possessions of the French were a constant menace and danger to the English colonies in America.

Advances toward the occupation of the country lying between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River were made slowly by both French and English, though the tide of predatory warfare often ebbed and flowed along the borders of the region and sometimes across it, along the courses of the larger tributary waterways, navigable almost to their narrow and shallow sources by the light birch of the Indian while there was open water, and an easy if crooked path for the snowshoe and toboggan when winter had paved the streams with ice.

One of the earliest of such French incursions into New England was made after the failure of the attempt of De Callieres, the governor of Montreal, to capture New York, and all the English colonies in that province, when less important expeditions were organized against the New York and New England frontiers and the Sieur Hertel went from Trois Rivières against the English fort at Salmon Falls in New Hampshire. At about the same time, in February, 1690, the expedition under Sieurs Helene and Mantet set forth by the way of Lake Champlain to destroy Schenectady. Both expeditions were organized by Count Frontenac for the purpose of inspiriting the Canadians and their Indian allies, who were sadly disheartened by the recent descent of the Iroquois upon Canada when Montreal had been sacked and destroyed, and most of the frontier settlements broken up.

The wide expanse of pathless woods that lay between the outposts of the hostile colonies gave a false assurance of security to the English settlers, while to their enemies these same solitudes gave almost certain immunity from the chance of a forewarned prey. In the wintry wastes of forest, through which these marauding bands took their way, there ranged no unfriendly scout to spy their stealthy approach, and bear tidings of it to the doomed settlements.

Unburdened by much weight of provision, or more camp equipage than their blankets and axes, these wolfish packs of Canadians and Indians (the whites scarcely less hardy than their wild allies nor much less savage, albeit devout Christians) marched swiftly along frozen lake and ice-bound stream, through mountain pass and pathless woods, subsisting for the most part on the lean-yarded deer which were easily killed by their hunters. At night they bivouacked, with no shelter but the sky and the lofty arches of the forest, beside immense fires, whose glow, though lighting tree-tops and sky, would not be seen by any foe more dangerous than the wolf and panther. Here each ate his scant ration; the Frenchman smoked his pipe of rank home-grown tobacco, the Waubanakee his milder senhalenac, or dried sumac leaves; the Christian commended his devilish enterprise to God; the pagan sought by his rites to bring the aid of a superhuman power to their common purpose. The pious Frenchman may have seen in the starlit sky some omen of success; the Waubanakee were assured of it when dread Wohjahose[2] was passed, and each had tossed toward it his offering of pounded corn or senhalenac, and the awful guardian of Petowbowk[3] had sent no voice of displeasure, yelling and groaning after them beneath his icy roof; and each lay down to sleep on his bed of evergreen boughs in an unguarded camp. Not till, like panthers crouching for the deadly spring, they drew near the devoted frontier settlement or fort, did they begin to exercise soldierly vigilance, to send out spies, and set guards about their camps.

Assured of the defenseless condition of the settlers or the carelessness of the garrison, they swooped upon their prey. Out of the treacherous stillness of the woods a brief horror of carnage, rapine, and fire burst upon the sleeping hamlet. Old men and helpless infants, stalwart men, taken unawares, fighting bravely with any means at hand, women in whatever condition, though it appealed most to humanity, were slaughtered alike. The booty was hastily gathered, and the torch applied by blood-stained hands, and out of the light of the conflagration of newly built homes the spoilers vanished with their miserable captives in the mysterious depths of the forest as suddenly as they had come forth from them.

So were conducted the expeditions against Salmon Falls and Schenectady. By the first, thirty of the English were killed, and fifty-four, mostly women and children, taken prisoners and carried to Canada. The success of the other expedition spread consternation throughout the province of New York. Sixty persons were killed, and nearly half as many made captive.

In the same year, 1690, the colonies of New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut organized a formidable expedition by land and sea against Canada, in which they hoped to be aided by the mother country. Having waited till August for the hoped-for arms and ammunition from England which were not sent, the colonies determined to undertake it with such means as they had, Massachusetts to furnish the naval force against Quebec, New York and Connecticut the army to march against Montreal.

The New York and Connecticut troops, commanded by John Winthrop of the last named colony, marched early in August to the head of Wood Creek, with the expectation of being joined there by a large number of the warriors of the Five Nations, but less than a hundred of them came to the rendezvous. Arrived at the place of embarkation on the lake, not half boats enough had been provided for the transportation of the army, nor sufficient provisions for its sustenance. Encountered by such discouragements, the army returned to Albany.

Captain John Schuyler, however, went forward with twenty-nine Christians and one hundred and twenty savages whom he recruited at Wood Creek as volunteers. In his journal[4] he gives an account of his daily progress and operations; mentions, by names now lost, various points on the lake, such as Tsinondrosie, Canaghsionie and Ogharonde. "The 15th day of August we came one Dutch mile above Crown Point. The 16th ditto we advanced as far as Kanondoro and resolved at that place to travel by night, and have that night, had gone onward to near the spot where Ambrosio Corlear is drowned, and there one of our savages fell in convulsions, charmed and conjured by the devil, and said that a great battle had taken place at Quebeck, and that much heavy cannon must have been fired there." About midnight of the 18th, "saw a light fall down from out the sky to the South, of which we were all perplexed what token this might be." On the 23d, having drawn near to La Prairie, he attacked the people of the fort, who had gone forth to cut corn. "Christians as well as savages fell on with a war-cry, without orders having been given, but they made nineteen prisoners and six scalps, among which were four womenfolk," and "pierced and shot nearly one hundred and fifty head of oxen and cows, and then we set fire to all their houses and barns which we found in the fields, their hay and everything else which would take fire." Setting out on their return, "the savages killed two French prisoners because they could not travel on account of their wounds," and on the 30th arrived at Albany.

At nearly the same time the fleet sailed from Boston under command of Sir William Phipps, governor of Massachusetts. It consisted of nearly forty vessels, carrying a force of two thousand men. It was not till the 5th of October that it reached Quebec. Precious time was lost in deliberation while the place was defenseless, and then Frontenac, released by the retrograde movement of Winthrop's army from the necessity of defending Montreal, marched to the relief of Quebec with all his forces. After an unsuccessful attack by land and water on the 9th of October, the troops were reëmbarked on the 11th and the storm-scattered fleet straggled back to Boston. Such were the poor results of an enterprise from which so much had been expected.

To remove the unfavorable impression of the English which these failures had made on the Indians of the Five Nations, Major Schuyler of Albany, in the summer of 1691, went through Lake Champlain with a war party of Mohawks, and attacked the French settlements on the Richelieu. De Callieres opposed him with an army of eight hundred men, and, in the numerous encounters which ensued, Schuyler's party killed about three hundred of the enemy, a number exceeding that of their own.

In January, 1695, winter being the chosen time for the French invasions, Frontenac dispatched an army of six hundred or more French and Indians by the way of Lake Champlain into the country of the Mohawks, and inflicted serious injury upon those allies of the English. Retreating with nearly three hundred prisoners, they were pursued by Schuyler with two hundred volunteers and three hundred Indians, and were so harassed by this intrepid partisan leader that most of the prisoners escaped, and they lost more than one hundred of their soldiers in killed and wounded, while Schuyler had but eight killed and fourteen wounded.

Thus, across and along the border of this yet unbroken wilderness, the hostile bands of English and French and their Indian allies carried their murderous warfare to many an exposed settlement, and kept all in constant dread of attack.

Different routes were taken by the predatory bands in their descents upon the frontiers of New England. One was by the St. Francis River and Lake Memphremagog, thence to the Passumpsic, and down that river to the Connecticut, that gave an easy route to the settlements. Another was up the Winooski and down White River to the Connecticut. Another left Lake Champlain at the mouth of Great Otter Creek; then up its slow lower reaches to where it becomes a swift mountain stream, when the trail led to West River, or Wantasticook, emptying into the Connecticut. And still another way to West River and the Connecticut was from the head of the lake up the Pawlet River. Of these routes, that by the Winooski was so frequently taken that the English named the stream the French River; while that of which Otter Creek was a part, being the easiest and the nearest to Crown Point, was perhaps the oftenest used, and was commonly known as the "Indian Road."

All these familiar warpaths to every Waubanakee warrior, with every stream and landmark bearing names his fathers had given them, led through Vermont, then only known to English-speaking men as "The Wilderness."

The treaty of peace between England and France in 1697 gave the colonists a brief respite, till in 1702 war was again declared, and in the summer of the next year five hundred French and Indians assaulted in detachments the settlers on Casco Bay, and that part of the New England coast. In the following winter a force of three hundred French and Indians commanded by Hertel De Rouville, a skilled partisan leader, as had been his father, was dispatched by Vaudreuil, the governor of Canada, against Deerfield, then the northernmost settlement on the Connecticut. It was February, and Champlain was frozen throughout its length. Along it they marched as far as the mouth of the Winooski, and took this their accustomed path through the heart of the wilderness toward the Connecticut. Marching above the unseen and unheard flow of the river, over whose wintry silence bent the snow-laden branches of the graceful birch, the dark hemlock, and the fir, or along the hidden trail, an even whiteness except to the trained instinct of the Indian, seldom a sound came to them out of the forest save the echo of their own footsteps and voices. Sometimes they heard the resonant crack of trees under stress of frost, or the breaking of an over-laden bough, the whir of startled grouse, the sudden retreat of a deer or a giant moose tearing through the undergrowth; and sometimes they heard the stealthy tread of their brothers, the wolves, sneaking from some point of observation near their path, but in this remoteness from human haunts, and this deadness of winter, never a sound to alarm men so accustomed to all strange woodland noises. Then they came to the broad Connecticut, an open road to lead them to their victims, upon whom they fell in the early morning when the guards were asleep. Winter, the frequent ally of the Canadian bands, aided them now with snowdrifts heaped to the top of the low ramparts about the garrison houses, and upon them the assailants made entrance. All the inhabitants were slain or captured, the village plundered and set on fire, and an hour after sunrise the victorious party was on its way to Canada with its booty and wretched captives.[5]

Such warfare was waged for years, the French and Indians making frequent attacks on the most exposed settlements of the English, and they, at times, retaliating by invasions of the Canadian frontier. In 1709 another grand expedition was planned to operate against Canada in the same manner as that undertaken in 1690. But the troops, which under Nicholson were to advance by the way of Lake Champlain, got no farther than Wood Creek, where Winthrop's advance had ended nineteen years before, for while they were there awaiting the arrival at Boston of the English fleet, with which they were to coöperate, a terrible mortality[6] broke out among them, the fleet never came, and the undertaking was abandoned. In 1711 a still more formidable attempt was made to conquer Canada. But the fleet, commanded by Sir Hovenden Walker, with nine thousand troops on board, met with disaster in the St. Lawrence, and the land force, which again under Nicholson was to invade the French province by Lake Champlain, was not far beyond Albany when news of the fleet's disaster reached it and it was disbanded. Thus, as miserably as had the two preceding ones, this third attempt to conquer Canada failed, and a heavier cloud of humiliation and discouragement overcast the English colonies. But after the treaty of Utrecht the eastern Indians made a treaty of peace with the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire which gave some assurance of tranquillity to the long-suffering people of those provinces.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Indians themselves pronounce the word as here given. It signifies The White Land. It has been thought better to follow this, than the more common spelling, Abenaki, which has come to us from the French.

[2] Wohjahose, signifying The Forbidder, is the Waubanakee name of Rock Dunder, which was supposed to be the guardian spirit of Petowbowk. Some dire calamity was certain to befall those who passed his abode without making some propitiatory offering.

[3] Petowbowk, interpreted by some "Alternate Land and Water," by others, "The Water that Lies Between," is the Waubanakee name of Lake Champlain.

[4] Doc. Hist. N. Y. vol. ii. p. 160.

[5] White's Incidents in the Early History of New England. See The Redeemed Captive returning to Zion, by Rev. John Williams, who was one of the Deerfield captives.

[6] In Summary, Historical and Political, by William Douglass, M. D., this is said to have been yellow fever.

CHAPTER II.

THE WILDERNESS DURING THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WARS.

By the easiest path, in summer and winter, of the larger streams, the English settlements were pushed into the wilderness, and where the alluvial land gave most promise of fertility the sunlight fell upon the virgin soil of new clearings, the log-houses of the pioneers arose, and families were gathered about new hearthstones. They were soon confronted by the old danger, for the Indians, jealous of their encroachments and covertly incited by the governor of Canada, presently began hostilities, and the gun again was as necessary an equipment of the husbandman afield as his axe or hoe or scythe, and his wife and children lived in a besetting fear of death, or a captivity almost as dreadful. Though England and France were at peace during the time for the five years beginning with 1720, a savage war was waged between the eastern Canadian Indians and the provinces of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

It was in these troublous times that the first permanent occupation was made in the unnamed region which is now Vermont. In 1723 it was voted by the General Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, that "it will be of great service to all the western frontiers, both in this and in the neighboring governments of Connecticut, to build a block-house above Northfield, in the most convenient place on the lands called the 'equivalent lands,'[7] and to post in it forty able men, English and western Indians, to be employed in scouting at a good distance up the Connecticut River, West River, Otter Creek, and sometime eastwardly above great Monadnock, for the discovery of the enemy coming toward any of the frontier towns, and so much of the said equivalent lands as shall be necessary for a block-house be taken up with the consent of the owners of the said land, together with five or six acres of their interval land to be broken up or ploughed for the present use of the western Indians, in case any of them shall think fit to bring their families hither."

Accordingly a site was chosen in the southeastern part of the present town of Brattleboro, and in February, 1724, the work was begun under the superintendence of Colonel John Stoddard of Northampton, by Lieutenant Timothy Dwight, with a force of "four carpenters, twelve soldiers with narrow axes, and two teams." At the beginning of summer the fort was ready for occupancy, and was named Fort Dummer, in honor of the lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts. The fort was built of hewn logs laid horizontally in a square, whose sides were one hundred and eighty feet in length, and outside this was a stockade of square timbers twelve feet in length set upright in the ground. Within the inner inclosure, built against the walls, were the "province houses," the habitation of the garrison and other inmates, and themselves capable of stout defense, should its assailants gain entrance to the interior of the fort. In addition to the small-arms of the garrison, Fort Dummer was furnished with four patereros.[8] There was also a "Great Gun," used only as a signal, when its sudden thunder rolled through leagues of forest to summon aid or announce good tidings. On the 11th of October following its completion, the fort was attacked by seventy hostile Indians, and four or five of its occupants were killed or wounded.

Scouting parties frequently went out to watch for the enemy, sometimes up the Connecticut to the Great Falls, sometimes up West River, and thence across the Wilderness to the same point. Sometimes they were sent to the mountains at West River and the Great Falls, "to lodge on ye top," and from these lofty watch-towers the keen eyes of the rangers scanned the mapped expanse of forest, when it was green with summer leafage, or gorgeous as a parterre with innumerable autumnal hues, or veiled in the soft haze of Indian summer, or gray with the snows of winter and the ramage of naked branches, "viewing for smoaks" of hostile camp-fires. In July, 1725, Captain Wright, with a volunteer force of sixty men, scouted up the Connecticut to Wells River, and some distance up that stream, thence to the Winooski, which they followed till they came within sight of Lake Champlain, when, having penetrated the heart of the Wilderness farther than any English force had previously done, the scantiness of their provisions compelled a return.

By the authority of the General Court of Massachusetts, a "truck house," or trading house, was established at Fort Dummer in 1728, and the Indians finding that they could make better bargains here than at the French trading-posts, flocked hither with their peltry, moose-skins, and tallow.

When, seventeen years after the erection of Fort Dummer, the boundary line was run between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the fort fell within the limits of the latter State, whose government was appealed to by Massachusetts to maintain it, but declined to do so, on the ground that its own frontier was better protected by a stronger fort at Number Four; also that it was more to the interest of Massachusetts than of New Hampshire to continue its support. Governor Wentworth urged upon a new assembly the safer and more generous policy, but to no purpose, and such a maintenance as Fort Dummer continued to receive was given by Massachusetts.

After pushing their fortified posts up the Richelieu and to Isle la Motte, where they built Fort St. Anne in 1665, the French made a long stride toward the head of the lake, where in 1730 they built a small fort and began a settlement on Chimney Point, called by them Point à la Chevalure, and the next year began the erection of a more considerable work on the opposite headland of Crown Point, a position of much greater natural strength. In the building of this fortress of St. Frederic, which was for many years to remain a close and constant menace to the English colonies, they were opposed only by feeble protest of the government of New York, though that of Massachusetts urged more active opposition. The fort was completed, and the French held the key to the "Gate of the Country," as the Iroquois had so fitly named Lake Champlain. Seigniories were granted on both sides of the lake, and in that of Sieur Hocquart, which extended three leagues along the lake and five leagues back therefrom, was this settlement on Point à la Chevalure. Northward from the fort the habitants built their cabins of logs in close neighborhood along the street, and sowed wheat, planted corn and fruit-trees on their narrow holdings. Flowers new to the wilderness bloomed beside doorways, and the fragrance of foreign herbs was mingled with the balsamic odors of the woods. Where only the glare of camp-fires had briefly illumined the bivouac of armed men, the blaze of the hearth was kindled to shine on happy households; where had been heard no sound of human voice but the sentinel's challenge, the stern, sharp call of military command, or the devilish yell of the savage, now arose the voice of the mother crooning to her babe, the prattle of children at play, the gabble of gossiping dames, and the laughter of the gay habitant; while from the protecting fort flaunted the lilies of France, an assurance to these simple people of the permanency of their newly founded homes. Here the Canadians tilled their little fields, and shared of the lake's abundance with the fish-hawks and the otter, hunted the deer and moose, and trapped the fur-bearing animals in the broad forest, and at the bidding of their masters went forth with their painted allies, the Waubanakees, on bloody forays against the English.

When in 1744 war was again declared between England and France, the English frontier settlements soon began to suffer from the advantage their enemies possessed in a stronghold from which they were so easily reached. During the next year they were frequently harassed by small parties, and in August, 1746, Vaudreuil set forth from Fort St. Frederic with an army of seven hundred French and Indians to attack Fort Massachusetts, then the most advanced post in the province, whose name had been given it.[9] There were but thirty-three persons in the garrison, including women and children, but Colonel Hawkes bravely defended the place with his insignificant force for twenty-eight hours, when the supply of ammunition was exhausted and he surrendered, with the stipulation that none of his people should be delivered to the Indians. Yet in spite of this, soon after the capitulation, Vaudreuil gave up one half of them to the savages, who thereupon at once killed a prisoner who was unable to travel.

After the capture of Louisburg by the force of New England troops which he had organized, Governor Shirley of Massachusetts proposed a plan for the conquest of Canada, in which a fleet and army promised by the mother country were to attack Quebec, while the colonial troops were to march against Fort St. Frederic.

While active preparations for this enterprise were being made, the colonies were alarmed by news of the arrival at Nova Scotia of a French fleet and army so formidable as to threaten the conquest of all their seaboard, and all their efforts were turned toward defense. When storm and shipwreck had scattered and destroyed the fleet and frustrated its objects, Shirley proposed a winter campaign in which the New Hampshire troops were to go up the Connecticut and destroy the Waubanakee village of St. Francis, and the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York troops, advancing by the way of Lake George, were to attack Fort St. Frederic; but Connecticut declining to take part in it, the project was abandoned.

The English had continued to extend their settlements upon the Connecticut, and had built several small forts on the west side of the river. These so-called forts were block-houses, built of hewn logs, with a projecting upper story and pierced with loopholes for muskets. Such was Bridgman's fort in what is now Vernon, and which was twice attacked by Indians, and in the second attack was destroyed. Some years afterward, in July, 1755, a party of Indians, who were lurking near the fort, now rebuilt, waylaid three settlers as they were returning from their work, and killed one Caleb Howe. Another was drowned in attempting to cross the river, and one escaped. The Indians gained entrance to the fort, whose only inmates were the wives and children of the three men, by making the customary signal, which they had learned by observation. After plundering the fort, and taking the helpless inmates captive, they proceeded through the wilderness to Crown Point, and from thence to Canada. Their prisoners suffered there a long captivity, but were at length mostly redeemed.[10]

The most northerly settlement now on the river was at Number Four, on the east side of the Connecticut. Three years after its settlement, in 1743, a fort was built under the direction of Colonel Stoddard, the builder of Fort Dummer. It was similar to that fortification in size and construction, but was stockaded only on the north side. It inclosed, as "province houses," the dwellings previously built by five of the settlers, and one built at the same time with the fort. The settlers continued here for three years thereafter, during which they suffered frequent assaults from marauding bands of Indians, in which eight of the soldiers and inhabitants were killed and three taken prisoners. When the Massachusetts troops which for a while had garrisoned the place were withdrawn, the helpless people abandoned their newly made homes, and for months the divested fort remained as silent and desolate as the wintry wastes of forests that surrounded it. In response to representations made to him of the expediency of such a measure, Governor Shirley ordered Captain Phineas Stevens, with thirty men, to march to and occupy the fort at Number Four. Arriving there on the 27th of March, 1747, Captain Stevens found the place in good condition, and was heartily welcomed to it by an old dog and cat which had been left behind in the hurry of the autumnal departure. The garrison had been in possession but a few days when they were attacked by French and Indians commanded by M. Debeline, who opened a musketry fire upon the fort on all sides. Failing to take it in this way, the enemy attempted to burn it by setting fire to the fences and houses near it, by discharging flaming arrows upon the roof, and then by pushing a cart loaded with burning brush[11] against the walls.

Stevens thus describes the ingenious device by which he prevented the firing of the wooden walls by the enemy: "Those who were not employed in firing at the enemy were employed in digging trenches under the bottom of the fort. We dug no less than eleven of them, so deep that a man could go and stand upright on the outside and not endanger himself; so that when these trenches were finished we could wet all the outside of the fort, which we did, and kept it wet all night. We drew some hundreds of barrels of water, and to undergo all this hard service there were but thirty men."[12] All the attempts of the enemy were baffled, fair promises and dire threats alike set at naught by the brave defenders of the fort.

On the third day of the siege Debeline offered to withdraw if Stevens would sell them provisions. Stevens refused, but offered to give them five bushels of corn for every hostage that should be given him to be held till an English captive could be brought from Canada, whereupon, after firing a few more shots, the besiegers withdrew to Fort St. Frederic.[13]

No other expeditions were afterward undertaken by the French while the war lasted, but the Indians in small parties continued to harry the settlements till after its close in 1748. To guard against these incursions, scouting parties, led by brave and experienced partisans, frequently went out from the frontier forts to watch the motions of the enemy, when oftentimes their perilous adventures and heroic deeds were such that the story of them is more like a tale from an old romance than like a page of history. One memorable incident of this service took place on Vermont soil in the summer of the next year after the gallant defense of Number Four, when Captain Humphrey Hobbs, Stevens's second in command at that post, being on a scout toward Fort Shirley in Massachusetts, with forty men, for four hours held at bay and finally beat off an Indian force more than four times outnumbering his own. It was a brush fight, wherein the scouts had no shelter but such forest cover as their assailants also took advantage of. But three of the scouts were killed; the loss of the Indians, though great, was never known, as when one fell his nearest comrade crept to the body and attached a line to it, by which it was withdrawn to cover. During the fight, the scouts frequently beheld the ghastly sight of a dead Indian gliding away and fading from view in the haze of undergrowth, as if drawn thither by some superhuman power.[14]

Until the beginning of another French and English war in 1754, and while the colonies were endeavoring to form a union for their better defense, while elsewhere were occurring such events as Braddock's Defeat and Monckton's and Winslow's Conquest of Acadia, there is little of consequence to record of affairs in this quarter till Colonel William Johnson, with an army of 4,000 or more, began an advance against Fort St. Frederic. The French had occupied Ticonderoga, and begun to fortify the point, which soon became far more important than the older fortress of St. Frederic; and their army of 2,000 regulars, Canadians and Indians, under Baron Dieskau, taking the offensive, moved against Johnson and attacked his fortified camp at Lake George in September, 1755. The French were defeated with severe loss;[15] but Johnson did not follow up his success, and the enemy retreated to Ticonderoga unmolested but by the impetuous attack of Captain McGinnis of New Hampshire, with a force of 200 men. Yet in England his barren victory seemed of such importance that he was honored with a baronetcy.

Now, while an army of more than two thousand regulars, under Lord Loudon, was lying at Albany, and Winslow was at Lake George with 7,000 provincial troops, Montcalm besieged Oswego, which presently surrendered with all its garrison, arms, stores, and munitions of war. Montcalm continued actively on the offensive, and in March, 1757, undertook the capture of Fort William Henry, which was held by Colonel Monroe with a garrison of 2,500 men. His surrender was at once demanded, but he refused, and defended the fort with great bravery, being confident General Webb would presently send him relief from Fort Edward. But though frequently entreated, no help came from Webb, only a letter protesting his inability to aid him, and advising him to surrender on the best terms obtainable. This fell into the hands of Montcalm, and with renewed demands of surrender was sent by him to Monroe. Thus abandoned, after holding out for more than a week, he signed the articles of capitulation, by the terms of which his paroled army was to be escorted to Fort Edward, his sick and wounded to be cared for by Montcalm, and given up when sufficiently recovered. The story of the perfidious violation of these terms, and the horrors of the carnage when the defenseless prisoners, of whatever age or sex, or sick or wounded, were butchered by the savage allies of the Frenchmen, some of whom stood passive witnesses of the massacre, raising neither hand nor voice to stay it, is a dark and blood-stained page of American history, and an ineffaceable blot on the name of Montcalm. Webb, with increased alarm for his own safety, sent swift messengers to the provinces for reinforcements, which were at once raised and forwarded to him; but Montcalm did not return from Ticonderoga to attack him, and the recruits were not long kept in service.

Loudon at New York was engaged in a controversy with the government of Massachusetts concerning the quartering of British troops, and threatening to send an army to that province if his demands were not speedily complied with, and so the campaign ended without honor or advantage to the English. Its poor results were chiefly due to the inefficiency of the British ministry, and the incapacity of the British commanders to carry on this unaccustomed warfare of the wilderness, and their unwillingness to avail themselves of the experience of the colonial officers, whom they despised, thus leaving to their alert and active enemy all the advantage of familiarity with its methods. So universal was the complaint in England and her American colonies caused by this and the preceding campaigns that the formation of a new ministry became necessary, and William Pitt was appointed secretary of state.

In his plan of the American campaign, which was soon to be vigorously undertaken, one army of 12,000 men was to attempt the conquest of Louisburg; another, still larger, that of the French forts on Lake Champlain; and a third, that of Fort Du Quesne, at the head of the Ohio River. The expedition against Louisburg was commanded by General Amherst, under whom were Generals Wolfe, Whitmore, and Lawrence. The naval force, commanded by Admiral Boscawen, sailed for America early in the spring, and in May, 1758, the whole armament of 157 sail was gathered at Halifax. Sailing thence on the 28th, a part of the transports arrived near Louisburg, and on the 8th of June the troops, under General Wolfe, disembarked and invested the city. Louisburg was garrisoned by 2,500 regulars, 300 militia, and later by a reinforcement of 350 Canadians and Indians, and the harbor was defended by 11 French ships of war. After a siege of several weeks, during which the French warships were destroyed, the place surrendered to General Amherst on the 26th of July. In the beginning of the same month General Forbes set forth from Philadelphia on his difficult march to Fort Du Quesne. Obstacles which delayed and reverses which checked his progress did not discourage him, although he was so debilitated by a mortal sickness that for much of the distance he was carried on a litter; and in November he took possession of the fort, which had been dismantled and abandoned by the French, and gave it the name of Fort Pitt.

While these undertakings of Amherst and Forbes were progressing, General Abercrombie began his movement upon Ticonderoga with a well-appointed army of more than six thousand regular and nearly ten thousand provincial troops. The army embarked on Lake George in more than a thousand batteaux and whaleboats; and as the flotilla moved down the lake, with glittering arms and gaudy uniforms and flaunting banners shining in the July sunshine, their splendor repeated in innumerable broken reflections on the ruffled waters, this wilderness had never seen such pomp and circumstance of war; nor had its solitudes been stirred by such martial strains as now burst from trumpet, fife, drum, and Highland pipe, and echoed from shore and crag in multitudinous reverberations. Having landed next day without opposition at the lower end of the lake, the troops began their advance in four columns. An advanced guard of one battalion of the enemy, after firing their tents, retreated from their fortified camp on the approach of the English, but afterward engaged in a skirmish with the left column, when the troops had fallen into some disorder in their march through the dense woods. It was in this engagement that the English suffered its first severe loss in the death of Lord Howe, a gallant young general, who had especially endeared himself to the provincials by his kindly manners, by sharing their hardships and perils, and by easily accommodating himself to the exigencies of this new service. Israel Putnam, then a major of the rangers, in which branch of the service he had distinguished himself by his coolness and daring, was a conspicuous actor in this affair. After the death of Howe, Putnam and the troops with him attacked the French with such fury that more than four hundred of them were killed and taken prisoners. But the army having fallen into great disorder in its passage through the woods, it was deemed advisable to withdraw it to the place where it had disembarked. Next day, the sawmill on the outlet of Lake George was taken possession of by a detachment under Colonel Bradstreet, the bridge there which the enemy had destroyed was rebuilt, and the army again began its advance on Ticonderoga.

Montcalm had strengthened his position by throwing up a breastwork across the neck of the peninsula on which the fort stood, and by hedging this with an almost impenetrable abatis. Yet the engineer whom Abercrombie had sent to examine the enemy's position was of the opinion that it might be successfully stormed; and as the prisoners taken reported that large reinforcements were likely to arrive soon, it was determined to assault the works at once. The attacking columns were met by a scathing fire of artillery and musketry, but rushed on to the abatis, through which they vainly endeavored to make their way, Murray's regiment of Highlanders hewing at the bristling barrier of pointed branches with their claymores, while a murderous fire from the breastworks thinned the ranks of the brave clansmen. Again and again the assailants were swept back by the pelting storm of bullets, and again they returned to the assault; the few who struggled through the abatis were slain before they reached the intrenchments, or only reached them to be made prisoners, and of the Highland regiment twenty-five of the officers and half the privates fell. With persistent but unavailing valor, the attack was continued for more than four hours, and then a retreat was ordered, and the defeated army sullenly fell back to the camp which it had occupied the night before. Early next morning it was reëmbarked, and the torn and decimated regiments continued their retreat up the lake.

General Abercrombie's defeat did not discourage him from making further efforts against the enemy. He sent General Stanwix to build a fort at Oneida and dispatched Colonel Bradstreet with 3,000 men against Fort Frontenac on the St. Lawrence, and both successfully performed their allotted duties.

General Amherst returned from Louisburg, assumed command, and in the summer of 1757 began a movement for the reduction of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, which was a part of this year's campaign. Moving forward by the same route that Abercrombie had taken, he reached the neighborhood of Ticonderoga without encountering any opposition from the enemy, and made preparations to besiege this fortress; but the French made only a brief defense, in which, however, Colonel Townshend and a few soldiers were killed, and then, leaving the French flag flying and a match burning in the magazine to blow up the fort, evacuated it and retired to Crown Point the night of the 27th of July. An hour after their departure came the thunder of the explosion, which destroyed one bastion and set the barracks on fire. They presently abandoned Crown Point and retired to the Isle aux Noix, while Amherst was repairing and strengthening the fortifications of Ticonderoga.

So at last, with but slight resistance to the tide of conquest that was now overwhelming their northern possessions in America, the French abandoned the strongholds that guarded the "Gate of the Country."

For more than a quarter of a century Fort St. Frederic had been the point from which marauding bands of Indians and their scarcely less ferocious white associates had set forth on errands of rapine and murder, which had made as dangerous and insecure as a crater's brink every frontier settlement of a wide region. Here had been plotted their forays; here they had returned from them with captives, scalps, and plunder; here found safety from pursuit. The two forts had held civilization at bay on the border of this land of "beautiful valleys and fields fertile in corn," and to all the inhabitants of the New England frontier their fall was a deliverance from an ever-threatening danger.

The French held the Isle aux Noix, their last remaining post on Lake Champlain, with a force of 3,500 regular troops and Canadian militia, and had also on the lake four large armed vessels, commanded by experienced officers of the French navy. The presence of this naval force made it necessary for Amherst to build vessels that might successfully oppose it, and while this work was in progress the British general dispatched a body of rangers against the Indians of St. Francis, who for fifty years had been active and relentless foes of the New England colonies.

Early in the century many members of the different tribes of Waubanakees in the eastern part of New England had been induced by the governor of Canada to remove to that province, and since then had lived on the St. Francis River, and were commonly known as the St. Francis tribe, though they gave themselves the name of "Zooquagese," the people who withdrew from the others, or literally "the Little People."[16]

Their intimate knowledge of the region, which had been the home of many generations of their people, and their familiarity with every waterway and mountain pass that gave easiest access to the English frontiers, made them as valuable instruments, as their hatred of the English made them willing ones for the hostile purposes of the French. From none of their enemies had the frontier settlements suffered more, and toward none did they bear greater enmity.

The wrongs which these tribes had suffered from the English, since their earliest contact with them, gave cause for vengeful retaliation, and its atrocities were such as might be expected of savages accustomed by usage and tradition to inflict on their enemies and receive from them the cruelest tortures that could be devised, and whose religion taught no precept of mercy; but for those Christians, boasting the highest civilization of the world, the French, who encouraged the barbarous warfare and seldom attempted to check its horrors, there can be no excuse.

Amherst chose Major Robert Rogers to lead the expedition against St. Francis, and he could not have chosen one better fitted to carry out the scheme of vengeance than this wary, intrepid, and unscrupulous ranger. To him it was a light achievement to creep within the lines of a French camp, and he could slay and scalp an enemy with as little compunction as would an Indian,[17] while the men whom he led had seen or suffered enough of Indian barbarity to make them as unrelenting as he in the infliction of any measure of punishment on these scourges of the border.

Rogers left Crown Point on the night of the 12th of September with a detachment of 200, embarked in batteaux, and went cautiously down the lake. His force was reduced by one fourth on the fifth day out by the explosion of a keg of powder, which wounded several of his men and made it necessary to send them with an escort back to Crown Point.

Arrived at the head of Missisco Bay, the boats and sufficient provisions for the return voyage were concealed, and left in charge of two trusty Indians, when the little army began its march across the country through the wilderness toward the Indian town. Two days later it was overtaken by the boat guard, bringing to Rogers the alarming news of the discovery of the boats by a force of French and Indians, four hundred strong, fifty of whom had been sent away with the batteaux, while the others, still doubly outnumbering his force, were following him in hot pursuit. Rogers kept his own counsel, and alone formed the plans that he at once acted upon. He dispatched a lieutenant with eight men to Crown Point to acquaint General Amherst with the turn of affairs, and ask him to send provisions to Coos, on the Connecticut, to which place it now seemed that soon or late he must make his way. The only question was, whether he should do so now, or attempt to strike the contemplated blow before his pursuers could overtake him. It was characteristic of the man to decide upon the bolder course, and he marched his men, as enduring as the enemy and as accustomed to such difficult marching, with such celerity that the pursuing force was left well behind when, on the evening of the 4th of October, the neighborhood of the town was reached.

While his men halted for rest and refreshment, he, disguised as an Indian and accompanied by two of his officers, went forward and entered the village. The Indians, unsuspicious of danger, were celebrating some rite with a grand dance, which quite engrossed their attention while Rogers and his companions thoroughly reconnoitred the place. Returning to his troops some hours before daylight, he marched them within a few hundred yards of the town, and at daybreak, the dance being over and the Indians asleep, the onslaught was made.

Amherst's orders to Rogers, after reminding him of the "barbarities committed by the enemy's Indian scoundrels," and bidding him to "take his revenge," had enjoined that "no women or children shall be killed or hurt;" but if this command was heeded at first, it was presently disregarded. If there was any touch of mercy in the hearts of the rangers when the assault began, the last vestige of it was swept away when daylight revealed hundreds of scalps of their own people displayed on poles, silvered locks of age, tresses of women's hair, golden ringlets of childhood, all ghastly trophies of New England raids.

Old and young, warrior, squaw, and pappoose, alike suffered their vengeance, till of the three hundred inhabitants two thirds were killed and twenty taken prisoners, fifteen of whom were soon "let go their way." The church, adorned with plate and an image of silver, and the well-furnished dwellings, were plundered and burned, and the morning sun shone upon a scene of desolation as complete as these savages themselves had ever wrought.

When the work of destruction was finished, Rogers assembled his men, of whom only one had been killed and six slightly wounded, and after an hour's rest began the return march with the prisoners, five recaptured English captives, and what provisions and booty could be carried.

The route taken was up the St. Francis and to the eastward of Lake Memphremagog, the objective point being the Coos Meadows, where it was expected that the relief party with provisions would be met. They were followed by the enemy, and had lost seven men by their attacks, when Rogers formed an ambuscade upon his own track, into which they fell and suffered so severely that they desisted from further pursuit.

When ten days had elapsed, and Rogers and his men had come some distance within the bounds of what is now Vermont, they began to suffer much from lack of food, and it was thought best to divide the force into small parties, each to make its way as best it could to the expected succor at Coos, or to the English settlements farther down the Connecticut.

While its autumnal glories faded and the primeval forest grew bare and bleak, the little bands struggled bravely on over rugged mountains, through tangled windfalls, and swamps whose miry pools were treacherously hidden beneath the fallen leaves, fighting hour after hour and day after day against fatigue and famine, foes more persistent, insidious, and unrelenting than Awahnock[18] and Waubanakee. Such small game as they could kill, and the few edible roots that they found, were their only subsistence; and they would gladly have bartered the silver image and the golden candlesticks brought from the church, and all their booty, for one day's supply of the coarsest food. They buried the treasure, with scant hope that they might ever unearth it, and cast away unheeded the useless burdens of less valuable plunder.

At night they cowered around their camp-fires and shivered out the miserable hours of darkness, then arose unrefreshed, and staggered on the way that each day stretched more wearily and hopelessly before them. Some could go no farther, but fell down and died, and were left unburied by comrades too weak to give them the rudest sepulchre, and some in the delirium of famine wandered away from their companions to become hopelessly lost in the pathless wilderness and die alone.

The officer whom Rogers had dispatched to Crown Point performed the difficult journey in nine days, and General Amherst at once sent a lieutenant with three men to Number Four, to proceed thence up the Connecticut with provisions to the appointed place. The relief party embarked in two canoes laden with provisions, which they safely landed on an island near the mouth of the Passumpsic; but though ordered to remain there as long as there was any hope of the coming of those whom they were sent to succor, when only two days had passed they became impatient of waiting, or were seized by a panic, and hastily departed with all the supplies.

Rogers and those who remained with him, following the Passumpsic down to the Connecticut, came at last to the place where they hoped to find relief, but only to find it abandoned, and that so recently that the camp-fire of the relief party was still freshly burning. These men were yet so near that they heard the guns which Rogers fired to recall them, but which, supposed by them to be fired by the enemy, only served to hasten their retreat.

Rogers says: "It is hardly possible to describe the grief and consternation of those of us who came to the Cohasse Intervales."[19] Sorely distressed by this shameful desertion but not discouraged, the brave commander left his worn out and starving men at the Passumpsic in charge of a lieutenant, whom he instructed in the method of preparing ground nuts and lily roots for food, and set forth down the river on a raft with Captain Ogden, one ranger, and a captive Indian boy, in a final endeavor to reach Number Four and obtain relief. At White River Falls the raft was wrecked, and Rogers, too weak to cut trees for another, burned them down and into proper lengths, while Ogden and the ranger hunted red squirrels for food. A second raft was then built, and, after a voyage that would have been perilous to men in the fullness of strength, they at last reached Number Four. Rogers at once dispatched a canoe with supplies to his starving men, which reached them on the tenth day after he had left them, as he had promised. Two days later he himself went up the river with canoes, manned by some of the inhabitants whom he had hired, and laden with provisions for those who might come in by the same route, and he sent expresses to towns on the Merrimac that relief parties might be sent up that river.

On the 1st of December he returned to Crown Point with what remained of his force, having lost, since beginning the retreat from St. Francis, three lieutenants and forty-six non-commissioned officers and privates. Notwithstanding its losses and dire hardships, the expedition was successful in the infliction of a chastisement that the Indians of St. Francis never recovered from and never forgot, and which relieved the New England frontier from the continual dread of the bloody incursions that it had so long suffered. Throughout the whole of it, in leading it to victory and in retreat, in sharing their hardships and in heroic efforts to succor and save his men, Rogers's conduct was such as should make his name honorably remembered in spite of the suspicions which tarnished it in after years.

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 and three 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 withdrew slowly 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 by the 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 France have 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Massachusetts gave 107,793 acres of land to Connecticut as equivalent for 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's History 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's Travels, vol. ii. p. 82.

[11] Williams's History 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 see History 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, see Doc. Hist. N. Y. vol. iv. p. 169 et seq.

[18] Awahnock, = Frenchman.

[19] Rogers's Journal.

[20] Belknap's History of New Hampshire.

[21] Sanderson's History of Charlestown, p. 87.

[22] Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe.

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

[24] Parkman.

CHAPTER III.

OCCUPATION AND SETTLEMENT.

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 divided into 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, and dwelt 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 shouldered axe 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 dollars bounty 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 torrential source 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, with slow 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[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.

CHAPTER IV.

THE NEW HAMPSHIRE GRANTS.

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 twenty miles 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 councils continued 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 New Hampshire, 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. To this 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 of Charlotte, 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 by his 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 at Bennington, "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 in the 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 and Bullets 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Doc. Hist. N. Y. vol. iv. pp. 331, 332.

[28] Williams's Hist. of Vt. vol. ii. pp. 12, 13.

[29] Doc. Hist. N. Y. vol. iv. p. 332.

[30] Ibid. p. 333.

[31] Doc. Hist. N. Y. vol. iv. p. 353.

[32] Slade's State Papers, p. 62.

[33] State Papers, p. 20.

[34] The fees to the governor of New Hampshire for granting a township were about $100. Under the government of New York, they generally amounted to $2,000, or $2,600. Williams's Hist. Vt. vol. ii. p. 9.

[35] Governor Moore sneers at him as "a driver of an ox-cart for the sutlers." Doc. Hist.
N. Y.

[36] Thompson's Vermont, part ii. p. 21.

[37] Slade's State Papers, p. 21.

[38] Doc. Hist. N. Y. vol. iv. p. 422.

[39] Thompson's Vermont, part ii. p. 22.

[40] Thompson's Vermont, p. 22.

CHAPTER V.

THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS.

A military force was organized, of which Ethan Allen was colonel commandant, and his active coadjutors, Warner, Baker, Cockran, Sunderland, and others, were captains. Of the name which they assumed, and which Vermonters are always proud to bear, Ira Allen says: "The governor of New York had threatened to drive the military (his opponents) into the Green Mountains, from which circumstance they took the name of Green Mountain Boys."[41]

The necessities of backwoods life accustomed every man of this force to the use of the musket, the long smooth-bore, or the rifle, and most were expert marksmen with any of these weapons, while many, from ranger service in the late war, were accomplished bush-fighters. Inured to hardship and toil, they could not but be enduring, and, to face the dangers that ever beset the pioneer, they must be brave. Rough but kindly and honest backwoods yeomen, they were of the same spirit, as they were of the same race and generation, as the men who fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill.

They were occasionally mustered for practice and drill. Esquire Munro informed Governor Tryon in 1772 that the company in Bennington, commanded by John Warner,[42] was on New Year's Day "received and continued all day fireing at marks," and again that "the Rioters had brought to Bennington two pieces of Cannon and a Mortar piece from the small Fort at East Hoseck with powder and Ball."

Ethan Allen was the chosen as well as the self-appointed leader of the people in their resistance to the claims of New York and its attempts to enforce them. Early in the controversy, he, with four of his brothers, came from Connecticut, and taking up lands under grants from New Hampshire in the southern part of the territory, west of the Green Mountains, very naturally espoused the cause of the New Hampshire grantees. His rude eloquence was of the sort to fire the hearts of the uncultivated backwoodsmen, whether he harangued them from the stump of a clearing, or, addressing a larger audience in the gray pages of his ill-printed pamphlets, he recited their wrongs and exhorted them to defend their rights. His interests and sympathy, his hearty good-fellowship and rough manners, though upon occasion he could assume the deportment of the fine gentleman, brought him into the most intimate relations with them; while his undoubted bravery, his commanding figure, and herculean strength set this rough-cast hero apart to the chieftaincy which his self-asserting spirit was not slow to assume.

His brother Ira afterwards became a man of great note and influence in the young commonwealth, but was more distinguished for civil than military service, though he was a lieutenant in Warner's regiment, and afterward captain, colonel, and major-general of militia.

Seth Warner was of a commanding presence, "rising six feet in height, erect and well-proportioned, his countenance, attitude, and movements indicative of great strength and vigor of body and mind," says Daniel Chipman, who in his boyhood had often seen him.[43] But he was cast in a finer mould than was his more renowned compatriot, Ethan Allen. Modest and unassuming, he was no less brave, and with no lack of firmness, energy, and promptness to act, his bravery was tempered with a coolness, deliberation, and good judgment which made him a safe and trusted leader. He was no pamphleteer. In the public documents to which his name is appended with those of his associates, Allen's peculiar style is most apparent, yet his letters show that he could express himself with ease, clearness, and force. He too was of Connecticut birth, and removed with his father to Bennington in 1763, when he was twenty years of age. The abundant game of the region gave a first direction to his adventurous spirit, and he became a skillful hunter, expert in marksmanship and woodcraft. The same spirit presently led him to take an active part in the controversy respecting the Grants, and he soon took his place among the leaders of the opponents of New York. Remember Baker, the kinsman of both, was a native of Connecticut. He was killed early in the War of the Revolution while with the army invading Canada he was reconnoitring the enemy's position at St. John's. Ira Allen says: "He was a curious marksman, and always kept his musket in the best possible order," which was the cause of his death, for he had so over-nicely sharpened his flint that it caught, and prevented his firing so quickly as did the Indian who killed him. Robert Cockran was another of the border captains, and made himself particularly obnoxious to the government of New York by his active resistance to its encroachments. He served during the Revolution first in a Connecticut, then in a New York regiment, and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel.[44] Peleg Sunderland, who in peaceful times was a wood-ranger, hunting moose in the loneliest depths of the Wilderness and setting his beaver-traps on streams that were strange to the eyes of white men, was another leader of the Green Mountain Boys, prominent enough to suffer outlawry.

When, under the encouragement of the New York claimants, settlements were made on the western border of the Grants, though armed to defend themselves, the new-comers were driven away, their log-houses torn down and burned by Allen, Baker, Cockran, and six others. For their apprehension as rioters, warrants were thereupon issued. But the justice who issued them gave it as his opinion that no officer could arrest them, and recommended that a reward be offered to induce "some person of their own sort" to "artfully betray them." Accordingly Governor Tryon offered a reward of twenty pounds each for their apprehension.[45] Thereupon Allen, Baker, and Cockran issued a proclamation offering a reward of fifteen pounds and ten pounds respectively for the apprehension and delivery at the Catamount Tavern in Bennington of James Duane and John Kemp, two New York officials who were conspicuously active in pushing their claims to lands in the disputed territory. And one proclamation was as effective as the other.

However, some months later Esquire Munro was impelled to undertake the capture of Remember Baker at his home in Arlington, and in the early morning of March 22, 1772, with a dozen of his friends and dependents at his back, forcibly entered Baker's house. In the fray that ensued, Baker and his wife and boy were all severely wounded by sword-cuts, and he being overcome and bound was thrown into a sleigh and driven with all speed toward Albany. But the triumph of his captors was brief, for before reaching the Hudson they were overtaken by a rescue party that followed on horseback in swift pursuit upon the first alarm, and abandoning their bleeding and exhausted prisoner, they fled into the woods, and Baker, after being cared for by his friends, was triumphantly carried to his home. Munro also attempted the arrest of Seth Warner, who while riding with a friend was met by the squire and several adherents. Seizing the bridle of Warner's horse, Munro called on the others to aid him. When, in spite of all entreaty, he would not desist, Warner struck him to the ground with a blow from a dull cutlass delivered on his head, and went his way. The pugnacious squire had now had enough of the barren honors of his magistracy. "What can a justice do," he asks, "when the whole country combines against him?" and begs Governor Tryon to excuse his acting any longer. He gave his neighbors of the Green Mountains no further trouble, and in 1777 fled to the army of Burgoyne. His property was confiscated, and he was one of those who were forever proscribed by the Vermont act of February 26, 1779.[46]

The Green Mountain Boys were ready to resist more formidable attempts to bring them to submission. When news came to Bennington that Governor Tryon was ascending the Hudson with a considerable force to invade their territory, the Committee of Safety and the officers convened and resolved that it was "their duty to oppose Governor Tryon and his troops to the utmost of their power." Accordingly the fighting men of Bennington and the neighboring towns were assembled. The cannon, mortar, and ammunition were brought out. Sharpshooters were to ambuscade the narrow passes of the road by which Tryon's force must approach, and cripple the invaders by picking off his officer.

While this warlike preparation was in progress a messenger, who had been sent to Albany to gain information of the strength and intended march of the enemy, returned with the news that the troops, which were wind-bound somewhere below that town, were not coming to invade the Grants, but to garrison the lake forts. In fact, during this season of alarm, Governor Tryon was contemplating a milder policy than had so far been pursued, and presently dispatched a letter "to Rev. Mr. Dewy and the inhabitants of Bennington and the adjacent country on the east side of Hudson's River."

Though he censured their acts of violence, and warned them that a continuance of such acts would bring the "exertions of the Powers of Government" against them, and reasserted the claim of New York to the Connecticut as its eastern boundary, his tone was conciliatory, and he invited them to lay before his government the causes of their illegal proceedings, which should be examined with "deliberation and candor," and such relief given as the circumstances would justify. To accomplish this, such persons as they might choose to send to New York were promised safe conduct and protection, excepting Ethan Allen, Warner, Baker, Cockran, and Sevil. This was briefly replied to by those to whom it was addressed, and at more length by Allen, Warner, Baker, and Cockran.[47] In both replies the validity of the titles given by New Hampshire was maintained, and Allen and his associates declared their resistance had not been to the government of New York, but to land-jobbers and speculators who were endeavoring to deprive them of their property.

These were delivered by the settlers' appointed agents, Captain Stephen Fay and his son, and were laid before his council by Governor Tryon. Upon due consideration, the council recommended that all prosecutions in behalf of the crown, for crimes with which the settlers were charged, should be suspended till his Majesty's pleasure should be known, and that owners of contested lands under grants from New York should stop all civil suits concerning the same during the like period, and agree with the settlers for the purchase thereof on moderate terms, on condition that the inhabitants concerned in the late disorders should conform to the law of New York that settlers on both sides in the controversy should continue undisturbed, and such as had been dispossessed, or forced by threats or other means, to desert their farms, should in future enjoy their possessions unmolested.

This report was approved by the governor. When the agents, returning with it, laid it before the Committee of Safety and the people assembled in the meeting-house at Bennington, there was great rejoicing over it. There was a universal expression of a desire for peace. The "whole artillery of Bennington, and the small arms," thundered and rattled salutes in honor of the governor and council of New York, and healths to the king, to Governor Tryon, and to the council were drunk "by sundry respectable Gentlemen."

Unfortunately for the continuance of this promising condition of affairs, news had come before the return of the agents that a surveyor employed by the New York claimants was surveying lands for them in some of the townships to the northward. Thereupon Ethan Allen, with a small party, went in pursuit of him, took him prisoner, and returned with him to Castleton, where he was tried and sentenced to banishment, under pain of death if again found within the limits of the Grants. Upon learning the favorable progress of the negotiations with New York, his judges revoked the rigorous decree and set him at liberty. Making the most of their time while in pursuit of the surveyor, Allen and his men halted at the First Falls of Otter Creek, in the present city of Vergennes, to dispossess the tenants of Colonel Reid, who had himself previously dispossessed persons who, under a New Hampshire grant issued in 1761, had settled there and built a sawmill. Allen's party drove the intruders away, burned their log-houses, and broke the stones of the gristmill Reid had built, and reëstablished the New Hampshire grantee in his sawmill.

Governor Tryon was soon informed of the summary proceedings of the mountaineers, and in a letter dated August 11, 1772, he sharply reprimanded the people of the Grants for "so manifest a breach of public confidence," and, to "insure a continuance of his friendly intentions," required their assistance to reinstate in their possessions the persons who had been ejected. To this an answer was returned by the Committees of Safety of Bennington and ten other towns, in which they denied that any breach of faith had been committed in the seizure of the surveyor, or the dispossession of Reid's tenants, as at that time the proposals of Governor Tryon had not been accepted or even received, and asserted that not they but Reid and the surveyor who was acting for the land-jobbers were the aggressors, and they declined giving any aid in reinstating Reid's tenants in possession so unjustly obtained.[48] They respectfully asked a reply, but it does not appear that any was vouchsafed them, or that further advances were made by the government of New York.

Colonel John Reid, who had been lieutenant-colonel of the Forty-Second or Royal Highland Regiment, held to the purpose of maintaining his settlement on Otter Creek, and in the summer following he repaired thither with a company of his countrymen lately arrived in America. The New Hampshire settlers were again ousted, the gristmill was made serviceable by hooping the stones, and the Scotchmen were installed in their wilderness home, with orders to hold possession against all claimants. Ira Allen chanced soon after to come that way, at nightfall of a stormy day, on his return from an exploration of lands on the Winooski with a view to settlement there. The wet and weary traveler sought admittance at a log-house, whose cheerful firelight promised such welcome as had before been given him there. He was met instead by the savage thrust of a Highlander's skene dhu, delivered through the scarcely opened door, and was questioned, not in the familiar drawl of his compatriots, but in such broad Scotch dialect as unaccustomed ears could scarcely comprehend. He was grudgingly permitted to enter, and then discovered who his unwilling hosts were. He was given shelter for the night, and then went his way to Bennington with the news of this latest intrusion of the "Yorkers."

Ethan Allen and Seth Warner then mustered a force of sixty Green Mountain Boys, and set forth for Otter Creek. Arriving there after a march of four days, they at once set about dispossessing the Scotchmen and their families, burned their houses after their effects had been removed, and destroyed their corn by turning their horses loose in the fields. Allen's party was joined next morning by Remember Baker, with a force nearly as large, when they completed the work of destruction by tearing down the mill, breaking the millstones past all mending, and throwing the pieces into the river. With his sword Baker cut the bolt-cloth into pieces, which he distributed among his men to wear in their hats as cockades. When the sturdy miller, John Cameron, demanded by what authority or law he and his men committed such acts, Baker answered, "We live out of the bounds of the law," and, holding up his gun, said, "This is my law."[49] Cameron told him that with twenty good men he would have undertaken to defend his house and mill, though there were a hundred and ten of them, and was answered that he and his countrymen were all for the broadsword, but they were for bush fighting! Perhaps it was in admiration of his brave Scotch spirit that they offered him a gift of land if he would join them, an offer which he rejected, while it may be that Donald McIntosh, who had fought at Culloden and under Wolfe at Quebec, at least took the proposal into canny consideration, for his house was not molested, nor he forced to leave it.

Cameron deposed that he was informed some three weeks later by one Irwin, who lived on the east shore of the lake not far from Crown Point, that Baker and eight others had lain in wait a whole day near the mouth of Otter Creek, with the intention of murdering Colonel Reid and his boat's company on their way to Crown Point, and would have done so, had not Reid departed a day sooner than expected. The story seems unlikely, as the Green Mountain Boys, who had come so far to enforce their laws of the green wood, could have had no means of gaining information of Colonel Reid's intended movements, even had they desired to take his life. They retaliated with hard and unrelenting hand the oppressive acts and the encroachments of New York, but never, though the opportunities were frequent and the chances of retribution few, did they, in all the course of this bitter feud, take the life of one of their opponents,[50] even when their leaders were outlawed and a price set upon their heads. Having destroyed six houses, the mill, and most of the growing and harvested crops, the "Bennington Mob" departed from the desolated settlement, Thompson says to build a block-house at the lower falls of the Winooski, to prevent the intrusion of New York claimants there, but it was not reported to the New York government that such fortifications had been built at that place and at Otter Creek till September of the next year.

The controversy engaged the attention of the British government in a direction favorable to the New Hampshire grantees, the Board of Trade, in a report to his Majesty's Privy Council, proposing measures[51] which, if carried out, would have confirmed the rights of settlers under the grants of New Hampshire.

It is worthy of notice that in this report the board spoke with considerable severity of the conduct of the governor of New York in passing patents of confirmation of townships before granted by New Hampshire, and in granting other lands within the district, and in like manner called attention to the exorbitant fees exacted for grants by the governor, secretary, and surveyor of New York, which were more than double those established by an ordinance of 1710. Added to these were unauthorized fees taken by other officers, making "the whole amount of these fees upon a Grant of one thousand acres of Land in many instances not far short of the real value of the Fee Simple." It was in consideration of these emoluments, the board supposed, "that His Majesty's governors of New York have of late years taken upon themselves the most unwarrantable pretenses to elude the restrictions contained in His Majesty's Instructions with regard to the quantity of Land to be granted to any one person," by the insertion in one grant of numbers of fictitious or borrowed names, for the purpose of conveying to one person a grant of from twenty thousand to forty thousand acres. They recommended that his Majesty be advised to give the most positive instructions to the governor of New York that the granting of lands should be attended by no fees to the attorney-general, the receiver-general, or the auditor; and that neither the governor, the secretary, nor the surveyor-general should take any fees but those prescribed by the ordinance of 1710, which were greater than those taken by the same officers for similar service in any other colony.[52]

That portion of the report proposing a method of settling the dispute was transmitted by Lord Dartmouth to Governor Tryon, who in a lengthy reply set forth the impossibility of an adjustment upon the plan proposed.

No further conciliatory measures were proposed or entertained by either party in the quarrel, which after this brief respite grew more bitter. New York attempted to make herself friends in the grants by appointing some of the prominent settlers to office. To prevent the success of this policy, the Committees of Safety assembled in convention decreed that no inhabitant of the Grants should hold or accept any office of honor or profit under the government of New York, and all civil and military officers who had acted under the authority of that government were required to "suspend their functions on pain of being viewed." It was further decreed that no person should take grants or the confirmation of them under the government of New York. The punishment for violation of these decrees was to be discretionary with the court, except that for the first offense it must not be capital.[53] Banishment from the Grants was a frequent punishment, and as frequent was the application of the "beech seal." As may be imagined, when the spirit of the times and the rough character of a backwoods community are considered, this was often inflicted with cruel severity. Yet it must be remembered in extenuation that the whipping-post was then a common adjunct of justice, and that, by the sentence of properly constituted courts, the scourge was mercilessly applied for the correction of very venial crimes.

The chastisement of offenders was sometimes more ridiculous than severe. A Dr. Adams of Arlington, who made himself obnoxious to the Green Mountain Boys by his persistent sympathy with their enemies, suffered at Bennington, according to his sentence, only the indignity of being suspended in an armchair for two hours beneath the famous Green Mountain Tavern sign, whereon stood the stuffed hide of a great panther, a tawny monster that grinned a menace to all intruders from the country of the hated "Yorkers."

Not long after Allen's raid on the Lower Falls of Otter Creek, he and his men appeared in Durham and Socialborough, whose inhabitants were for the most part friendly to New York, some of them having accepted office under that government. The officials sought safety within its established bounds at Crown Point and Albany, flooding courts and council with depositions, complaints, and petitions. Those who remained were obliged to recognize the validity of the New Hampshire titles.

By the advice of his council, Governor Tryon requested General Haldimand, the commander-in-chief of his Majesty's forces, to order a sufficient number of regular troops to Ticonderoga and Crown Point to aid the civil authorities in enforcing the laws, but the general declined on the ground that, in the present state of American affairs, the employment of regular troops to suppress "a few lawless vagabonds" would have a bad tendency as an acknowledgment of the weakness of the civil government; also that "Crown Point, being entirely destroyed, and unprovided for the quartering of troops, and Ticonderoga being in a most ruinous state, such troops as might be sent thither would not be able to stay a sufficient time to render them of much utility." If the request was persisted in, however, he wished to know what force would be deemed sufficient. The council thought that 200 men at Ticonderoga might be enough,—a very modest demand upon the commander-in-chief, but not on the individuals of a force so insignificant that it might as well have undertaken to level the Green Mountains as to attempt to subdue in their fastnesses these accomplished bush-fighters of the Grants. The requisition was not approved by the king, and the troops were not sent.

In consideration of the representations and petitions laid before it, a committee of the General Assembly of New York resolved that the governor be requested to issue a proclamation offering a reward of fifty pounds each for the apprehension, and securing in his Majesty's gaol at Albany, of Ethan Allen, Warner, Baker, and five others, and that a bill be brought in more effectually to suppress the riotous proceedings and bring the offenders to condign punishment. These resolutions having come to the Grants in the columns of the "New York Mercury," the committees of the towns on the west side of the mountains met at Manchester and made answer thereto. They said that in consequence of the report of the British Board of Trade, so favorable to them, they were in daily expectation of a royal confirmation of the New Hampshire grants, and declared themselves loyal and devoted subjects of his Majesty; that the government of New York was more rebellious than they, in that it had acted in direct opposition to the orders of the king; that they had purchased their lands of one of his Majesty's governors on the good faith of the crown of Great Britain, and would maintain those grants against all opposition, till his Majesty's pleasure should be known, and recommended to the governor of New York to await the same before proceeding to the harsh measures proposed, "to prevent the unhappy consequences that may result from such an attempt." They resolved to defend with their lives and fortunes their neighbors and friends who should be indicted as rioters, and that the inhabitants would hold themselves "in readiness to aid and defend such friends of ours who, for their merit to the great and general cause, are falsely denominated rioters," but they would act only on the defensive, and would "encourage execution of the law in civil cases, and in criminal prosecutions that were so indeed."[54]

But before this answer was approved by the general committee, the New York Assembly had enacted a law (March 9, 1774) as stringent as its committee could have urged, or its report had foreshadowed, and with it or following close upon its passage was issued Governor Tryon's proclamation of a reward of one hundred pounds each for the arrest of Ethan Allen and Remember Baker, and fifty pounds for the apprehension of Seth Warner and five others. Some of the provisions of this extraordinary law were, that if three or more persons, "being unlawfully, riotously, and tumultuously assembled within the counties of Charlotte and Albany," did not disperse when commanded to do so by proclamation made by a justice, sheriff, or coroner, they should upon conviction suffer twelve months' imprisonment without bail; and any person opposing, letting, hindering, or hurting the person making or going to make such proclamation, should be adjudged a felon, and suffer death without benefit of clergy. It should also be adjudged felony without benefit of clergy for an unauthorized person to assume judicial powers, or for any person to assist them, or to execute their sentences, or to seize, detain, or assault and beat any magistrate or civil officer, to compel him to resign his office, or to prevent his discharging its duties; or to burn or destroy the grain or hay of any other person; or to demolish or pull down any dwelling-house, barn, stable, or gristmill, sawmill, or outhouse within either of the said counties. When the persons named in the governor's proclamation, or any other persons, were indicted for any offense committed after the passage of this act, and made capital by it or any other law, did not, within seventy days after the publication of the governor's command to do so, surrender themselves to one of his Majesty's justices of the peace for either of the said counties, they were to be adjudged guilty of the offense for which they had been indicted; and if for a capital offense thereafter to be perpetrated, they should be convicted and attainted of felony, and should suffer death, as in the case of persons so convicted by verdict and judgment, without benefit of clergy; and it should be lawful for the supreme court of New York, or the courts of oyer and terminer or general gaol delivery, to award execution against such offenders as if they had been convicted in such courts. It was provided that, as it was impracticable to bring offenders to justice within the county of Charlotte, all persons committed within its limits should be proceeded against by any grand jury of the county of Albany, and tried in that county by a jury thereof, as if the crime or offense had been perpetrated therein.[55]

Here was indeed an "exertion of the powers of government," but it was barren of any result but to strengthen the spirit of opposition in those against whom it was directed, and, instead of terrorizing them into abject submission, as its authors had confidently expected, it served rather to unite them in more stubborn resistance.

In response, Allen and his proscribed associates put forth a manifesto and an address "to the people of the counties of Albany and Charlotte which inhabit to the westward, and are situated contiguous to the New Hampshire Grants," wherein, for the most part, the case is forcibly stated in Allen's peculiar style, and closes with the declaration that "We are under the necessity of resisting even unto blood every person who may attempt to take us as felons or rioters as aforesaid, for in this case it is not resisting law, but only opposing force by force; therefore, inasmuch as, by the oppressions aforesaid, the New Hampshire settlers are reduced to the disagreeable state of anarchy and confusion; in which state we hope for wisdom, patience, and fortitude till the happy hour his Majesty shall graciously be pleased to restore us to the privileges of Englishmen."

Not many times, if ever, thereafter, was the authority of the king invoked by those who set their names to this paper: but little more than a year had elapsed when most of them were engaged in wresting from the crown its strongholds on Lake Champlain.

Now, however, a scheme was set on foot to withdraw the Grants from the hated jurisdiction of New York by erecting them, and that part of New York east of the Hudson, into a separate royal government. Colonel Philip Skene, who lived in considerable state in Skenesborough House on his estate at the head of Lake Champlain, was engaged in it, probably with a view to the governorship of the new province, and he went to England to further the project. Whatever his success may have been, it came to nothing with the breaking out of the Revolution.[56]

The people of the Grants maintained their attitude of defiance and resistance. The stinging imprint of the beech seal was still set as relentlessly on the backs of justices who yet dared to act under the authority of New York, and their stern judges sent them "toward the City of New York, or to the westward of the Grants," with duly signed certificates that they had received full punishment for their crimes.

Lieutenant-Governor Colden, now acting governor, as Tryon "had been called home to give Lights on the Points in dispute," applied to General Gage at Boston for a force of 200 men to aid the civil officers in the county of Charlotte, but Gage declined, as Haldimand had done; and the attempts of New York to enforce its authority continued as futile as ever, while the Rob Roys of the new world Highlands as boldly went their way as if no price was set upon their heads.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] Hist. Vt. p. 345.

[42] Meaning Seth Warner.

[43] Chipman's Memoirs of Seth Warner.

[44] He died among his former enemies, the Yorkers, at Sandy Hill, N. Y., in 1812.

[45] 1771.

[46] Governor and Council, p. 149.

[47] State Papers, p. 22.

[48] State Papers, pp. 29, 30.

[49] Baker showed James Henderson the stump of a lost thumb, as his commission (possibly given by Esquire Munro), for performing this "very disagreeable work."

[50] Doc. Hist. vol. iv. pp. 512-516.

[51] Ibid. p. 488.

[52] Doc. Hist. N. Y. vol. iv. p. 493.

[53] Thompson's Vermont, part ii. p. 25.

[54] State Papers, p. 42.

[55] State Papers.

[56] Williams's History; Thompson's Vermont.

CHAPTER VI.

THE WESTMINSTER MASSACRE.

While the western portion of the New Hampshire Grants was involved in this turmoil of incipient warfare, most of the settlers to the eastward of the Green Mountains held aloof from the strife, for many of them had surrendered their original charters, taking new ones under New York and submitting quietly to its jurisdiction. Yet they were not lacking in the spirit of patriotism that was now warming all their countrymen into a new life, and presently there came an event which welded them into closer affiliation with their brethren of the western grants, and brought them into active opposition to the imperious government of New York.

On the 16th of May, 1774, a committee of correspondence was formed in the city of New York, with the object of learning the sentiments of the people concerning the measures of the British government respecting its American colonies. A letter, addressed by its chairman to the supervisors of Cumberland County, was kept secret by them, and no action taken upon it at their June session; but its receipt in some way became known to Dr. Jones of Rockingham and Captain Wright of Westminster, who notified their towns; and a committee for the purpose being appointed in each, the supervisors were called on at their September session for any papers received by them which should be laid before the towns of the county. The letter was unwillingly produced, a copy was sent to each town, and a county convention was called to meet at Westminster on the 19th of October. Delegates from twelve towns met accordingly, and passed resolutions similar in spirit to those of the Continental Congress. When the action of Congress in declaring the rights of the colonies, and in adopting the "Articles of Association," became known, another convention was called, which met at Westminster on the 30th of October, "and did adopt all the resolves of the Continental Congress as their resolves, promising religiously to adhere to that agreement or association." But a motion to choose a "committee of inspection" to observe whether any person violated the Articles of Association was defeated by the opposition of two Tory members. The town of Dummerston, however, whose good people, "tired of diving after redress in a Legal way," had set Lieutenant Spaulding free from the jail to which he had been committed on a charge of high treason for saying that, "if the king had signed the Quebec bill, it was his opinion he had broken his coronation oath," at a town-meeting held in January following chose such a committee. This body removed two assessors from office for refusing to execute an order of the town to assess a tax, payable in potash salts, for the purpose of procuring 100 pounds of powder, 200 pounds of lead, and 300 flints, for the town use; suspended another town officer till by his conduct he proved himself a Whig; and disarmed a suspected Tory. The example of this town was generally followed by others, without waiting the action of a convention.

The General Assembly of New York had refused to adopt the resolves and Articles of Association of the Continental Congress, and the courts of justice were continued in that province, while elsewhere they were almost universally suspended.

Affairs were at this pass, causing great dissatisfaction among the patriots of the Grants, when the time for the session of the King's Court of Cumberland County, to be holden at Westminster the 14th of March, 1775, drew near. A deputation of forty citizens of the county waited upon the chief judge, Colonel Chandler, at Chester, and endeavored to dissuade him from holding the court. He admitted that it would be better to hold no court in the present state of affairs, but said there was a case of murder which it was necessary to try, after which, if not agreeable to the people, no other cases should come on. In answer to the objections of one of their number, that the sheriff would be present with an armed posse and there would be bloodshed, he assured them that no arms should be brought against them, and dismissed them with thanks for their civility. After considerable discussion of methods to prevent the sitting of the court, it was decided that it should be permitted to come together, when the objections to its proceeding should be laid before it, "thinking," says the "Relation of the Proceedings," "they were men of such sense that they would hear them."[57] It presently became known that the court intended to take possession of the court-house the day before its session was to begin, and hold it with a strong guard against the intrusion of those opposed to its opening. To forestall this purpose, about 100 men, armed only with clubs that the stalwart men of Rockingham took from a neighboring woodpile, entered the court-house late in the afternoon of that day, with the intention of holding it till the judges should hear their grievances. They had not been long within it when the sheriff, with a strong posse of armed men and attended by the officers of the court, came marching up the level street of the little town. Halting near the door, he demanded entrance, but received no answer. He then read the king's proclamation in a loud voice, commanding all persons unlawfully assembled to disperse, adding with an oath that, if they did not do so within fifteen minutes, "he would blow a lane through them." They answered that they would not disperse, but would admit the sheriff and the others if they would lay aside their arms, and asked if they had come for war; declaring they themselves had come for peace, and would be glad to hold a parley with them. Upon this the clerk of the court drew his pistol, and, holding it up, swore that "only by it would he hold parley with such damned rascals," and would give no more friendly reply to any overtures. Judge Chandler, however, came to them when the sheriff's posse had gone for refreshments, and declared that the arms were brought without his consent, and said that those who held the house might continue to do so undisturbed till morning, when the court should come in without arms, and hear what they had to say before it.

With little fear of molestation now, yet taking the precaution to post a sentry at the door, the garrison of the court-house held the place. The curving crest of hills that half encircle the town, touching the river above and below it, grew dim against the darkening sky, and the last gleam of daylight faded from the ice-bound reaches of the broad Connecticut. The pallid dusk of the starless winter night blurred houses and threshold trees into indistinct forms, and fused the half-surrounding wall of forest-clad hills with the sky, till they seemed a part of it creeping down upon the little hamlet. One by one the lights went out, save where some housewife waited her husband's coming, and where the glare of the inn's hospitable fire fell in broad bars of flickering light across the snowy street. The sentinel at the door paced his short beat. Of those whose guard he kept, some fell asleep on the hard benches, some gathered in groups to listen to the discourse of oracular politicians, or discuss the all-absorbing topic of the hour. Some of the younger men crowded into the charmed circle wherein some gray and garrulous veteran of the old wars discoursed of bush fights and Indian ambuscades, the siege of Number Four or Ticonderoga's woeful day of slaughter and defeat, where he fought so hotly for the sovereign whom he now denounced. Some sat apart silently brooding, and taking no heed of the buzz of conversation, but grimly awaited the struggle they felt was impending. All became suddenly alert when, about midnight, the sentinel discovered armed men approaching, and gave the word to man the doors. The sheriff and his men were coming, with courage reinforced by potations of flip and fiery rum.

They marched to within ten rods of the door and halted. In a moment the order was given to fire, and three shots were reluctantly delivered. The order was repeated with curses, which incited the posse to a deadlier volley that killed William French almost outright, fatally wounded Daniel Houghton, and severely injured several others. The assailants then rushed in on the men, who had only clubs to defend themselves with, made several prisoners and took them to the jail. One of these was the dying man, whom "they dragged as one would a dog, and would mock at as he lay gasping," and "did wish there were forty more in the same case." Lying on the jail-room floor, his five wounds undressed, French, not yet twenty-two, died in the early morning of the 14th. Houghton survived his wounds nine days.

Thus in a remote frontier town was shed the first blood of the momentous conflict that gave birth to a nation.

In the darkness and confusion all the rest of the Whigs escaped, some fighting their way out with their clubs; one, Philip Safford, laying about him so lustily that eight or ten of the sheriff's posse went down beneath the blows of his cudgel.

The court party came out of the mêlée victorious for the present, and without serious injury to any of their number, though in the "State of the Facts," prepared next day by the judges and other officers of the court, two were reported as wounded by pistol shots, which, if indeed so, must have been fired by their friends, for the others declared that they had not so much as a pistol among them, having come with the expectation of gaining their object without violence. Some did now go home for their guns, but did not return to renew the fray. More hastened away to carry the woeful tidings of bloodshed to the Whigs of all the country around, and with such dispatch was this done that, before noon of the next day, two hundred armed men had arrived from New Hampshire. Before night every one known to have been concerned in the killing of French was seized and kept under strong guard. The next day an inquest was held, and a verdict given that French came to his death at the hands of the sheriff, and certain others of his posse. Armed men continued to come from the southern part of the county and from Massachusetts, till by the following morning five hundred "good martial soldiers, well equipped for war," thronged the one street of the little town.

On that day all the people who had come assembled, and voted to choose a large committee to act for the whole, to be composed in part of citizens of Cumberland County, and in part of those residing outside its limits. After an examination of the evidence, this committee voted to commit those most implicated in the killing of French to the jail at Northampton, Mass., there to await a fair trial, while those who seemed less guilty should be put under bonds to appear at the next court. The bonds of those admitted to bail were taken next day, and the others were conducted under a strong guard to Northampton jail, but it does not appear that any of them were ever brought to trial, these cases being lost sight of in the thickening whirl of Revolutionary events.

Such is substantially the account of the affair as given by the committee chosen by the people. The accounts given by the officers of the court in their "State of the Facts," and by members of the sheriff's posse in their deposition, make it appear that the so-called rioters were the first violent aggressors, beating the sheriff with clubs when he first attempted to force his way in; that three shots were then fired by his order above the heads of those who held the court-house, who at once returned the fire by a discharge of guns and pistols, one pistol-shot being fired at such close quarters that the powder burned a large hole in the breast of his coat, and yet the wearer was not hurt; that only four or five shots were fired into the court-house by the sheriff's party, and yet by this volley French was struck by five bullets, Houghton received a fatal wound, and several others were hurt. According to these accounts, Robert Cockran and others proposed such atrocities as burning the court-house and all within it, or firing volleys through it, and were only restrained by the New Hampshire men from doing so.[58] But there is nothing of this in the relation of the committee, which is quite as likely to impress the unbiased inquirer with its truthfulness. Governor Colden, in his report to Lord Dartmouth of what he calls this "dangerous insurrection," does not attribute it to any dispute concerning land titles, but only to the example of Massachusetts; nor does he charge the Bennington rioters with being implicated in it, though he foresaw that it would draw to the common cause of resistance to New York the people of the eastern Grants with their brethren of the western. He wrote to General Gage of this affair in Cumberland, and hoped that by his assistance he might soon be able to hold a court of oyer and terminer in that county; but the British general had weightier affairs upon his hands at Boston, and could give him no help.

In a convention held at Westminster on the 11th of April, it was voted "that it is the duty of the inhabitants to wholly renounce and resist the administration of the government of New York till such time as the lives and property of these inhabitants may be secured by it, or till such time as they can have opportunity to lay their grievances before his most gracious Majesty in council," with an humble petition "to be taken out of so offensive jurisdiction, and either annexed to some other government or erected and incorporated into a new one, as may appear best to said inhabitants, to the Royal wisdom and clemency, and till such time as his Majesty shall settle this controversy." Colonel John Hazletine, Charles Phelps, and Colonel Ethan Allen were appointed to prepare the remonstrance and petition that were to be presented.

Never again did any representative body of the Grants give an expression of loyalty to the king. Not many days later came the news of Lexington fight, and presently the mountaineers were all in as open revolt against King George as any had ever been against his royal government of the province of New York. Men grown so accustomed to resistance of the tyranny of the lesser power, as were the persecuted settlers of the western Grants, were not apt to be laggards in opposing the greater when its encroachments became as unendurable, and for a time the petty warfare of provincial bounds and jurisdiction was hidden from their sight in the over-spreading cloud of the grander struggle that involved the liberties of every American.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] Governor and Council, vol. i. p. 332.

[58] Doc. Hist. N. Y. vol. iv. pp. 547, 549.

CHAPTER VII.

TICONDEROGA.

Those ruthless destroyers, time and man, have wrought sad havoc on the once formidable fortress of Ticonderoga. One wall of solid masonry has withstood their assaults, and still rears its sharp-cut angles and massive front, gray with age and scaled with lichens of a century, as grimly now as in the days of yore, above the broad expanse of fields that stretch away to the southwest.

Across the neck of the peninsula, in the shadow of great oaks that were but saplings then, may be seen the well-preserved breastworks against which the storm of Abercrombie's assault so vainly beat, and within them green mounds show the position of old outworks. But the fort itself is a desolate ruin. Ditches choked with brambles and rubbish, grass-grown ramparts, crumbling bastion, and barrack walls, fallen-in bomb-proof and magazine, mark the sight of a stronghold once deemed worth the blood and treasure of nations to hold or gain.

Amherst's useless fort of Crown Point, built with lavish expense, has not suffered such complete decay. The barracks are in ruin, but the almost unbroken ramparts rear their walled and grassy steeps high above the long incline of the shrub-grown glacis, and the hoary walls of the outworks have stoutly withstood the ravages of almost seven-score years. The older French fort of St. Frederic; its citadel within whose walls commandant, priest, and fierce Waubanakee plotted raids on the frontier hamlets of the heretics, in whose dungeons English captives languished; its chapel, where masses were said in celebration of savage deeds, while white-coated soldier of France, rough-clad habitant, and painted Indian knelt together before the black-robed priest; its water-gate, bastions, scarps, and counter-scarps,—all have fallen into the desolation of utter ruin.

The conquest of Canada accomplished, it was no longer of vital importance that the forts on Lake Champlain should be maintained; consequently the elaborately planned fortifications of Crown Point were never completed, and they, with those of Ticonderoga, fell into such neglect that in September, 1773, the first one was reported by General Haldimand to be entirely destroyed, and the other in a most ruinous state. And though it does not appear that they were dismantled or quite abandoned, for years they were held by garrisons too insignificant to defend them against any vigorous attack. In such defenseless condition they continued, as if too remote from the great centres of revolt to be of consequence to England, while the threatening attitude of her American colonies daily grew more menacing. But while the appeal to arms was yet impending, the importance of these posts became apparent to some active patriots of the New England colonies. In March, 1775, John Brown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who had recently passed through the New Hampshire Grants on a secret mission to Canada, wrote from Montreal to Samuel Adams and Dr. Warren, the Committee of Correspondence in Boston, mentioning one thing to be kept a profound secret. "The fort at Ticonderoga must be seized as soon as possible, should hostilities be committed by the king's troops. The people in the New Hampshire Grants have engaged to do this business, and in my opinion they are the most proper persons for this job. This will effectually curb this province, and all the troops that may be sent here." Thus it appears that so early as February, 1775, the capture of the fort was contemplated by the leaders of the Green Mountain Boys, and that they were committed to the enterprise.

Yet, when confronted by the actual outbreak of war, they were sorely perplexed. Self-interest inclined them to hold aloof from a rupture with the mother country when king and privy council were considering, with apparent favor to them, their controversy with New York; while on the other hand the ties of birth strongly bound them to their brethren of New England, and every impulse of patriotism impelled them to espouse the cause of their common country.

Soon after receiving the news of the battle of Lexington, which Ethan Allen says almost distracted them, the principal officers of the Green Mountain Boys, and other prominent leaders, met at Bennington, and in the council chamber of the Catamount Tavern "attempted to explore futurity;" though they "found it to be unfathomable,"[59] they resolved to unite with their countrymen, whom they doubted not would, in the event of a successful issue of the conflict, freely accord to them the rights which they demanded.

Without any knowledge of what was already brewing in the Grants, some gentlemen of Connecticut, who on the 26th of April met Benedict Arnold on his way to Cambridge with a company of volunteers, learned from him the defenseless condition of Ticonderoga and the great number of cannon there, and at once formed a plan for its capture. To carry it out, they procured £300 from the treasury of Connecticut. This was given to Noah Phelps and Bernard Romans, who immediately set forward toward the Grants, where it was thought best most of the men should be raised. Just after their departure, Captain Mott arrived at Hartford and proposed the same enterprise, to procure artillery and stores for the people of Boston, and being apprised of what was already on foot, agreed to join in the expedition. He set forth next day with five others, and at Salisbury was joined by eleven more. Arrived at Pittsfield it was determined, by the advice of Colonel Easton and John Brown, just returned from his Canadian mission, to raise a number of men before reaching the Grants, where it was thought the scarcity of provisions and the poverty of the inhabitants would make it difficult to raise and equip a sufficient number. Accordingly about forty men were recruited and made ready to march, in Jericho and Williamstown, by Colonel Easton and Captain Mott, while the others went on to Bennington. When, after this service, Easton and Mott were on their way to the same place, they were met in the evening by an express from their people with the news that Ticonderoga was reinforced and its garrison alert, and with the advice that, as it could not be surprised, the men recruited would better be dismissed. The news was discredited, the advice unheeded, and the colonel and the captain held forward for Bennington, rejoining their companions and finding the leading men of the Grants there in conclave. Captain Mott told his hesitating friends that the "account they had would not do to go back with and tell in Hartford;" and his friends Mr. Halsey and Mr. Bull declared they would go back for no story till they had seen the fort for themselves.[60] It was decided that the attempt to capture the fort should not be abandoned.

Two agents were dispatched to Albany to purchase and forward provisions for the troops, and trusty men were sent to waylay all the roads leading from the Grants to Skenesborough, Lake George, and the Champlain forts, to prevent any intelligence of the movement from reaching those points. Then, going on to Castleton, the committee, of which Captain Mott was chairman, arranged there the plan of operations.

A party of thirty men under Captain Herrick were to go to Skenesborough and capture Major Skene and his men, and go down the lake in the night with his boats to Shoreham to transport the men assembled there across the water; while Captain Douglass was sent to Crown Point to concoct a scheme with his brother-in-law, who lived there, to hire the king's boats, on some plausible pretense, to assist in getting the men over to the New York shore.

Meanwhile Captain Phelps of Connecticut had gone to spy out the condition of Ticonderoga. In the guise of a simple backwoodsman, he easily gained admission to the fort on the pretext of getting shaved, and, after taking careful note of all that could be seen in the place, returned to Castleton and reported to his friends.

Agreeable to a promise made to the men when engaged that they should be commanded by their own officers, Colonel Ethan Allen was given the command of the force which was to attack Ticonderoga. After receiving his orders from the committee, and dispatching Major Gershom Beach of Rutland to rally the Green Mountain Boys, he went on to Shoreham, where they were to assemble.

Major Beach performed the almost incredible feat of making on foot the journey of sixty miles in twenty-four hours, over rough by-paths marked only by blazed trees, and along the wretched roads of the new country. The forest-walled highway led him to the hamlets of Rutland, Pittsford, Brandon, and Middlebury, whose fighting men were quickly summoned. Along its course, he turned aside here and there to warn an isolated settler, to whose betterments he was guided by the songs of the earliest bobolink rejoicing over the discovery of a new meadow, by the sound of axe-strokes, by the drift of smoke climbing through the greening tree-tops from log-heap or potashery. Each man, as summoned, left his task unfinished,—the chopper his axe struck deep in the half-felled tree; the grimy logger his smoking pile; the sawyer his silenced mill with the saw stopped in its half-gnawed course through the great log; the potash-maker left the fire to smoulder out beneath the big kettles; and the farmer, though hickory leaves as large as a squirrel's foot calendared the time of corn-planting, exchanged the hoe for the gun. Each took his firelock, bullet pouch, and powder horn from their hooks above the fireplace, and, bidding brief farewell to homefolk, set forth to the appointed meeting place. In little bands, by threes and twos and singly, scarred and grizzled veterans who had scouted the Wilderness with Rogers, Putnam, and Stark, men in their prime who had seen no service but in raids on the Yorkers, and beardless boys hot with untried youthful valor, took their way toward the lake. Most of them plodded the unmistakable course of the muddy highways till they struck Amherst's road leading to Crown Point; but some, with consummate faith in their woodcraft, took the shortest ways through the forest, now breasting the eastern slope of ledges whose dun incline of last year's leaves was dappled thick with the white bloom of moose-flowers and green tufts of fresh forest verdure, now scrambling down the sheer western wall of diluvian shores, now wading the mire of a gloomy morass, and now thridding the intricate tangle of a windfall.

On the evening of the 9th of May, 1775, they had come to the appointed place of meeting, a little cove about two miles north of Ticonderoga, where the mustering force was quite hidden from the observation of voyagers along the lake, and where the camp-fires might blaze behind the wide screen of newly leafing woods unseen by the garrisons of the two forts. Here the Green Mountain Boys were met by their adored leader, and awaited the arrival of the boats and their comrades coming from the southward.

Allen had just left Castleton when Benedict Arnold arrived there, and demanded the command of the expedition by authority of a colonel's commission just received from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, with orders to raise 400 men for the reduction of Ticonderoga. The committee in charge of the enterprise, in consideration of the conditions under which the men had engaged, refused to give him the command. But he persisted in demanding it, and at once set forward to overtake Allen, whom he found no more disposed to yield to his demand than the committee had been, nor would his men consent to follow another leader. Upon this, Arnold joined the force as a volunteer.

By the evening of the 9th, 270 men, all but forty of whom were Green Mountain Boys, had assembled on the shore of the little creek in Shoreham now known as Hand's Cove, which is in summer a level expanse of sedgy marsh threaded by a narrow sluggish channel, but during the spring floods is a broad cove of the lake, its waters over-running the roots of the trees that grow upon the banks. Here the force anxiously awaited transportation, for the seemingly well-laid plans for securing boats had not proved successful. It was not till near morning that the watchers, often deceived by the cries of strange waterfowl, the sudden plunge of the muskrat, or his long wake gleaming in the light of the camp-fires, at last heard the unmistakable splash of oars, and saw the boats coming in among buttressed trunks of the great elms and water-maples that stood ankle-deep in the spring flood. When scows, skiffs, dugouts, and yawls had crushed through the drift of dead waterweeds and made a landing, it was found that there were not enough of the motley craft collected to transport half the force.

Allen, Easton, Arnold, and eighty others at once embarked, and, crossing the lake, landed a little north of Willow Point, on the New York shore, when the boats returned to bring over those who, under Warner, remained at the cove. Day was now dawning, the rugged horizon line of forest and mountain becoming each moment more distinct against the eastern sky, and it became evident that, if the attack was much longer delayed, there would be no chance of surprising the garrison.

Allen, therefore, determined to move forward at once, without waiting to be joined by those who remained on the other shore. Briefly addressing his men, who were drawn up in three ranks, he called on those who would voluntarily follow him to poise their firelocks. Every musket was poised, the order was given to right face, and Allen placed himself at the head of the centre file; but when he gave the order to march, Arnold again asserted his right to take command, and swore that he would be first to enter the fort. Allen as stoutly maintained his right, and, when the dispute waxed hotter, turned to one of his officers and asked, "What shall I do with the damned rascal? Shall I put him under guard?" The officer, Amos Callender of Shoreham, advised them to compromise the untimely dispute by agreeing to enter the fort side by side, to which they both assented, and the little column at once moved forward in silence, guided by a youth named Beeman, who, living near by, and having spent many of his idle hours in the fort, was well acquainted with the entrances and all the interior appointments.

Captain Delaplace and his little garrison of a lieutenant and forty-two uncommissioned officers and privates[61] were sleeping in careless security, not dreaming of an enemy near, while two or three sentinels kept listless guard. The drowsy sentry at the sallyport, now come upon so suddenly by the attacking party that he forgot to challenge or give an alarm, aimed his musket at the leader and pulled trigger. The piece missed fire, and, Allen running toward him with raised sword, the soldier retreated into the parade, when he gave a loud halloo and ran under a bomb-proof. The Green Mountain Boys now swiftly entered the fort, and, forming in the parade in two ranks facing the east and west rows of barracks, gave three lusty cheers. A sentry made a thrust with his bayonet at one of the officers, and Allen dealt him a sword cut on the head that would have killed him, had not the force of the blow been broken by a comb which kept his hair in place.[62]

He threw down his gun and asked for quarter. Allen demanded to be shown the apartment of the commandant, and was directed to a flight of stairs leading to the second story of the west row of barracks. Mounting to the door at their head, Allen ordered Captain Delaplace to "come forth instantly, or he would sacrifice the whole garrison." The bewildered commandant came to the door with his breeches in his hand, when Allen demanded the immediate surrender of the fort, "By whose authority do you demand it?" asked Delaplace, and Allen answered, "In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." Delaplace attempted to parley, but Allen cut him short, and, with his drawn sword over his head, again demanded an immediate surrender. Having no choice but to comply, Captain Delaplace at once ordered his men to parade without arms, and Ticonderoga with all its cannon and military stores was surrendered to the Green Mountain Boys.

Warner presently arrived with the remainder of the force, and after some convivial celebration of the almost bloodless conquest was dispatched by Allen, with about one hundred men, to take possession of Crown Point, which was held by a sergeant and twelve men, and on the 12th Warner and Peleg Sunderland reported its capture on the previous day to the governor and council of Connecticut. Captain Remember Baker, who had received orders to come with his company from the Winooski and join the force, after meeting and capturing two small boats on their way to St. John's with the alarming news of the surrender, arrived at Crown Point nearly at the same time with Colonel Warner.[63] Skenesborough was taken possession of by Captain Herrick, Major Skene made prisoner, and his schooner seized. Callender was sent with a small party to seize the fort at the head of Lake George, an exploit easily accomplished, as its sole occupants were a man and woman.

Thus, by no heroic feat of arms, but by well-laid plans so secretly and promptly executed that they remained unsuspected till their purpose was accomplished, the two strongholds that guarded the passage to the head of the lake fell into the hands of the Americans, with 200 cannon, some mortars and swivels, and a quantity of military stores, all of which were of incalculable value to the ill-supplied patriot army.