Conceived in Liberty (201 page)

Such was... the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labor, slavery, and wretchedness....

From the State also flowed perpetual wars: struggles between the ruling classes of each state, employing and exhausting the lives and labors of the ruled.... The most distinguished men hence learned to consider cutting each others’ throats a duty; at length men massacred their fellow-creatures by thousands without so much as knowing why, and committed more murders in a single day’s fighting... than were committed in the state of nature during whole ages over the whole earth.

In
Emile,
Rousseau properly criticized Montesquieu for evading discussion
of the philosophical and moral validity of the existing state, turning instead to elaborate treatment of currently established systems. Yet, when Rousseau later turned to such a philosophic inquiry in his own
Social Contract,
he developed two contradictory positions, for individual liberty, and for a popular collectivism.
*
On the existing ruling class, however, Rousseau stood firm for a libertarian view. Criticizing Hobbes’ curious conclusion that the right of the rulers to govern
stems from
the fact that only the rulers can benefit from political power, Rousseau scornfully remarked, “On this showing, the human species is divided into so many kinds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them.” On existing states, Rousseau’s famous verdict was unambiguous: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Above all, Rousseau was concerned, in his proposed commonwealth in the
Social Contract,
that democratic forms be as pure and direct as possible so that the specter of oligarchy could never more rear its ugly head. The more direct and continuous the control of the body of the people over state officialdom, the less likely would be the state to surmount the checks of popular vigilance and reestablish the despotism of oligarchy. Thus, for Rousseau, the necessary checks on state power were to be found not, as in Montesquieu, in legalistic forms within the state, but in popular forces coming from outside the state apparatus.

*
Hollis’s crucial role has in recent years been rescued from ill-deserved oblivion by Caroline Robbins. See her “The Strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(July 1950): 406–53; and
The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 262–68.

*
Clinton Rossiter,
The Political Thought of the American Revolution
(New York: Harcourt Brace, & World,
1963),
pp. 73–74.

*
On the influence of French ideas and writings in America, see Howard Mumford Jones,
America and Trench Culture, 1750—1848
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927);
idem.,
“The Importance of French Books in Philadelphia, 1750–1800,”
Modern Philology
(1934), 157—77;
idem.,
“The Importance of French Literature in New York City, 1750–1800,”
Studies in Philology
(1931), pp. 235–57; and Mary M. Barr,
Voltaire in America, 1744–1800
(Baltimore, 1941). On the influence of Wolff, see Julius Goebel, “Christian Wolff and the Declaration of Independence,”
Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblatter
(1918–19).

*
The collectivist, or at least the antiindividualist, strain in Rousseau may be partly attributed to the conservatizing influence of Montesquieu. See Kingsley Martin,
French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century
(New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 208ff.; and C. E. Vaughan,
Studies in the History of Political Philosophy Before and After Rousseau
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1960), 1:296.

While the American colonies were moving inexorably toward a final break with Great Britain, and the winds of revolutionary doctrine blew in from overseas, a local but intense revolutionary conflict was developing in the North. As in the case of so many internal conflicts in the American colonies, the struggles centered around the disposition of land.

Western New Hampshire (now Vermont), though still sparsely populated, was being settled throughout the 1760s, under land grants parceled out by New Hampshire’s governor, Benning Wentworth, and these lands quickly devolved by purchase upon the actual settlers. To attract settlers, the prices charged for the land were not very onerous. But New York, goaded by its land speculators, aggressively continued to assert its own arbitrary claims to all the land of the region. In 1771, this western region (which also included part of current New York east of the Hudson) contained some seven thousand settlers.

In 1764, however, the Board of Trade dealt a rude blow to the settlers of western New Hampshire. It decreed that New York’s land claims to the area were valid. New York’s governor, Cadwallader Colden, hastened to proclaim his rights and, true to the New York tradition of venal land oligarchy, to sell those rights to the land to a handful of land speculators from New York. By the end of 1765, Colden had sold to a few speculators rights to 36,000 acres of the best land in the area, centered around Arlington and Manchester in what is now southwestern Vermont. Leading these speculators were James Duane and John T. Kempe. New Hampshire tried desperately to halt or nullify these grants, but the Crown’s pressure left enough loopholes for New York to continue granting western New Hampshire land on a large scale. By
the late 1760s, Colden had sold over 535,000 acres in grants, and had sold well over 2.1 million acres of military land grants to veterans, virtually all of which were transferred to large land speculators. By 1776 the total had reached 2.1 million acres of regular, and 2.4 million acres of military, land granted by New York. The great New York oligarchs were featured on this new gravy train of land monopoly; among the grantees were James Duane, Philip Skene, William Livingston, Robert R. Livingston, Pierre DePeyster, Augustus Van Cortlandt, William Smith, and John Morin Scott.

Claims mean little unless enforced, and trouble began as soon as New York tried to oust the New Hampshire settlers in behalf of its newly asserted “owners.” In 1769, New York’s aged Cadwallader Colden, back as governor after a three-year gap, brought proceedings against James Breakenridge of Bennington, to try to eject him from his farm. When they arrived at the farm, the New York authorities were driven off by armed friends of Breakenridge. The next step was for New York to order the arrest of Breakenridge and his rioting friends, who were led by the Reverend Jedediah Dewey and Samuel Robinson. New York was not able to make any arrests, however, and Colden, with mounting horror, complained that these settlers of the Green Mountain area proclaimed their allegiance to New Hampshire—as if they would hasten to salute a New York power that was trying its best to seize their lands and turn them over to a few privileged favorites!

The following year, New York proceeded again in earnest, launching ejectment suits against Breakenridge, Isaiah Carpenter, and other Green Mountain settlers. At this point, one of the great figures of American revolutionary history emerged, to be chosen to lead the defense of the beleaguered settlers: the redoubtable Ethan Allen. The trial of Breakenridge, Carpenter, et al. took place in the New York courts. The impartiality of the court may be gauged by the fact that its chief justice was Robert R. Livingston, himself a leading New York grantee of New Hampshire land, and the prosecutors were Attorney General Kempe and James Duane, the leaders of the speculative ring in the granted land. Not surprisingly, the New York court ruled for New York, in June 1770.

At first, Duane and Kempe tried to bribe Ethan Allen into submission, but the latter scornfully rejected their offer. Allen and the settlers resolved to hold their positions, by force if necessary. Banding together, the settlers formed a committee of safety to oppose the court’s decision, as well as an armed band to resist New York’s aggression against their properties. The band was called the Green Mountain Boys and Ethan Allen was chosen its leader. Soon each town west of the mountains had selected its own committee of safety. Delegates from the local committees convened regularly at Bennington.

Moving from attempted bribery to physical violence, the New York government, now headed by its ever more grasping governor Lord Dunmore, sent sheriffs several times to arrest Breakenridge, but each time they were violently
repelled by armed farmers of the neighborhood. New York responded by escalating its coercion, ordering the arrest of the rioters, including the leaders, Silas Robinson and Simon Hathaway. The farmers refused to be intimidated, and violent armed defense continued.

The Vermont region is bisected by the Green Mountains. Although the heart of the settler resistance was located west of the mountains, the eastern region erupted also. There, while the Breakenridge turmoil continued in the west, a band of armed settlers, headed by Joseph and Benjamin Wait and by Nathan and Samuel Stone, rebelled against New York authority, denied its jurisdiction, captured the sheriff who had tried to arrest them, and forced the New York courts to adjourn. But the revolutionary movement there did not command the mass support that it did west of the Green Mountains. For the eastern side was more remote and New York’s yoke was felt more lightly there. The town of Guilford even went so far as ardently to advocate allegiance to New York. Rioters were therefore routed by four hundred pro-New York inhabitants, and the settler revolution was stilled in eastern Vermont by the end of 1770.

But in the west, the revolutionary struggle intensified. From defending the property of Breakenridge and the other settlers, the rebels went on the offensive to oust by force all New York authority in the area. When New York appointed a pliant ally as judge, the judge’s home was burned down and he was driven off. Robert Cochran led an armed band and forced out of the territory two leading New York officials. Surveyors from New York were threatened and beaten and their surveying tools confiscated. Settler defense continued as well: when the New York sheriff put a tenant of his in place of Isaiah Carpenter on the latter’s farm, Carpenter’s neighbors forced the intruder to leave.

The New York government next tried the soft sell, wooing the angry settlers by promising to confirm their grants from New Hampshire and reduce official fees. But the settlers could no longer trust their enemy. And so New York, now led by Governor William Tryon, fresh from his triumph in crushing the North Carolina Regulation, soon returned to the policy of coercion. In July 1771, Sheriff Henry Ten Eyck gathered a huge posse, numbering in the hundreds, at Bennington, in the southwest corner of Vermont, to bar Breakenridge from his farm. Now, at last, these insolent rebels were to be taught the lesson of obedience.

Setting out confidently on their easy mission, the New York posse was ambushed, surrounded, and forced back by a heroic band of ardent revolutionaries, members of the Green Mountain Boys, led by Captains Robert Cochran and Seth Warner, a cousin of Ethan Allen. This stirring victory of a private band of irregulars over organized New York power raised the hearts and spirits of the settlers of western New Hampshire.

The Green Mountain Boys now launched a systematic campaign to drive off
the settlers who had been brought in by New York to enjoy the property created by the New Hampshire settlers. Charles Hutcheson, a transplanted New Yorker on Cochran’s property, saw his cabin burned and was ordered off by Ethan Allen: “Go your way now and complain to that damned scoundrel, your governor. God damn your Governor, Laws, King, Council, and Assembly.”

Governor Tryon of New York, in consequence, offered a reward for the capture of Allen, Cochran, and another leader, Remember Baker, to which Allen and the Green Mountain Boys retorted sardonically by offering counterrewards for the capture of their arch-enemies Duane and Kempe. In high spirits, Allen wrote mockingly to Philip Skene that “by virtue of a late law in the province they are not allowed to hang any man before they have ketched him.” Boldly, Allen rode into Albany unharmed and was welcomed by a sympathetic populace.

Allen did not even let himself be fazed by the desertion of the Green Mountain cause by the New Hampshire authorities. By the end of 1771, Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire had abandoned support of the rebels, hoping indeed to acquire some of the New York-claimed land for himself. The best the settlers could now hope for from New Hampshire was neutrality, which they gained when Wentworth refused to issue a proclamation against the Green Mountain Boys.

The Green Mountain Boys now stood alone. How could these very loosely organized and individualistic irregulars hope to stand up to the overwhelming might of the New York government backed by British regular troops? The answer lies in the authentic genius of the undaunted Ethan Allen. Allen perceived the potential of a new form of warfare on the scene of world history. Allen had watched with interest and sympathy the Prendergast tenant rebellion of 1766 and the rapid debacle of the rebel cause. From this carnage Allen and Allen alone learned the proper military and revolutionary lessons.

Allen saw that the grave mistake of Prendergast and the tenants was to rush out, an unorganized and untrained mass, to do formal battle with the well-trained and far more heavily armed British troops. The ensuing slaughter was inevitable. But why must all battle be waged in formal ranks on open fields? Just because all European military lore said so? Allen did not see why these hidebound rules should not be transcended. In particular, he saw that a revolutionary war, a people’s war, was best waged in a far different and a far more revolutionary manner.