Conceived in Liberty (202 page)

In brief, what were the advantages and disadvantages of the Green Mountain Boys in their armed struggle with the organized power of New York? Their disadvantages were all too evident: the superior arms, and the formally trained, specialized troops of the enemy. But the military advantages of such a zealous people’s revolutionary movement had too often been overlooked. Two advantages were that the rebels dwelt among an admittedly friendly and sympathetic
population, and operated on a thoroughly friendly terrain. As settlers themselves, the rebel forces were
of
that population and could blend quickly and easily with it. This itself greatly offset the specialization of the enemy; these part-time rebels, so camouflaged, just could not easily be spotted, isolated, or captured. Therefore, able to move among the people and on familiar terrain as fish in water, the rebel band had the great advantage of mobility and speed. It also had the advantage of surprise, for the support of the surrounding populace gave it an enormous intelligence advantage over the enemy. The rebels came to know where the enemy was, but the enemy knew virtually nothing about the rebels. The rebels, therefore, could and must hit and run, hit and run, strike and fade away, harassing and weakening and demoralizing the enemy while keeping it always off balance. These advantages, and others, the farsighted Allen had come to see. In short, he perceived that the proper path to victory for a people’s revolution against a well-armed state force is
guerrilla warfare,
not a foolhardy rush to open confrontation and instant defeat.

To organize guerrilla warfare, the rebels needed knowledgeable and brilliant leadership and high morale, both in the fighting force and in the supporting population. The Vermont settlers possessed these requisites: in the high-quality leadership of Allen and his lieutenants and in the zeal of the settlers fighting for their homes and land against aggressors. By 1772, a successful and continuing guerrilla war was being waged in the Green Mountains.

The astuteness and farsightedness of Ethan Allen’s grasp of the principles and tactics of guerrilla war may be seen by his highly restrained use of coercion. Since it is crucial to the success of a revolution to keep the active support of the masses, coercion must be held to the necessary minimum, both for daily mass support and so as not to provoke enemy reprisals against the people. Therefore, only as necessary, and then but minimally, were threats and terror employed by the Green Mountain Boys in achieving their aims of driving out the New York officials and interlopers, and of rescuing settlers and their own members from the New York enemy. So remarkable was their minimizing of coercion that in all their battles and skirmishes the Green Mountain Boys never killed a single man.

Allen sensed that revolutionary practice cannot successfully proceed without revolutionary theory and he proceeded to supply the latter as well. Lusty, militant, candid, and roughhewn Allen may have been, but he was far from an unlettered oaf. Though lacking a college education, Allen studied at the feet of the notable Boston radical Dr. Thomas Young. From Young, Allen imbibed deism, Newton, and French rationalism.

Allen used his ardently held Lockean natural-rights theory to justify the settler revolution. In his
Brief Narrative
(1774), written at the behest of a convention of westside towns, Allen rested the settlers’ rights to their land on the Lockean natural right of possession and cultivation, which “is of itself
abundantly sufficient to maintain the right in the possessor,” and to gain him a “title, sealed and confirmed with the sweat and toil of the farmer....” In short, as Darline Shapiro puts it, “Allen’s argument, then, is that he who occupies and works the land has a natural right to it, a right sufficient to confer legality.”
*

In true Lockean fashion, Allen proceeded to demonstrate the limits of government: “Laws and society, compacts, were made to protect and secure the subjects in their peaceable possessions and properties, and not to subvert them. No person or community of persons can be supposed to be under any particular compact of law, except it presupposeth that the law will protect such person or community of persons in his or their properties.” Therefore, no government or king may force a man to give up his rightful property: “The
supreme power cannot take
from any man any part of his
property
without his own consent.” When a government transcends its proper limits and invades private property, then power reverts to the people, who resume their original liberty. In this way, reasoned Allen, the settlers of western New Hampshire had returned to a state of nature. By the default of the governments of New York, New Hampshire, and Great Britain, the Green Mountain Boys had become the means by which the settlers assumed the task of defending their property.

Governor Tryon, the stern extirpator of the Regulators, had never encountered such opponents as the Green Mountain Boys. In the spring of 1772, he asked for negotiations, although he refused to talk with the top leaders. The rebels sent as negotiators Captain Stephen Fay, the veteran tavernkeeper of Bennington, where the rebels often gathered, and his son Dr. Jonas Fay. In the rebel messages to Tryon, it was trenchantly pointed out who the
real
rioters and wielders of violence were: “Though they [the sheriff and posse] style us rioters, for opposing them, and seek to catch and punish us as such, yet, in reality,
themselves
are the rioters, the tumultuous, disorderly... faction, or, in fine, the land-jobbers....”

A lull now appeared in the New York conflict. In the west, the governor obeyed royal orders to leave the New Hampshire settlers alone. In the east, the revolutionary spirit died down; Guilford formally proclaimed itself part of New York, and two pro-Yorkers were elected to the New York Assembly. Tryon and the Fays readily concluded a truce on the basis of letting the settlers alone.

But the Vermont lull was destined to be short-lived. Continued pressure by Yorkers on western New Hampshire lands led to determined armed resistance by the rebels. Full-scale conflict resumed more intensely than ever, and a futile arrest order was sent out for Remember Baker and Ira Allen. Governor Tryon vainly asked for British troops to crush the Green Mountain Boys, but
the British wanted no repetition of their role in suppressing the New York tenant rebellion of 1766. During 1773, guerrilla terrorism by the Boys intensified. The major irritant was the Scottish colonel John Reid, a New York land claimant who had been ejected from his claimed land by the settlers a year before. In early 1773, Reid led a party of Scottish immigrants back to settle on the invaded land; he built a wall, and even began to construct a village on the land. But in mid-August, Ethan Allen, Baker, and Seth Warner, leading a hundred Green Mountain Boys, swept down to demolish this nascent settlement and to drive the intruders off the land. When asked by a settler for his legal warrant for this raid, Baker lifted his hand to declaim, “Here is my warrant,” and Allen then raised his rifle high and dramatically shouted, “This is my law!”

As the guerrilla war continued to rage, Ethan Allen and his band, in the autumn of 1773, kidnapped one of New York’s top officials in the area, Judge Benjamin Spencer. Allen, Cochran, Warner, and Baker then conducted a public trial of Spencer, finding him guilty of allegiance to New York at the expense of the settlers. Allen and Baker informed Spencer that “they valued not the government [of New York] nor even the kingdom... they had force and power sufficient to protect themselves against either.” As punishment, Spencer’s roof was pulled off; after this salutary warning, Spencer pledged himself to be a loyal citizen of New Hampshire thenceforth. Thus was a leading royal official in the western area mildly but firmly removed from the fray. The request of the unhappy Tryon for British troops was again scornfully turned down; General Frederick Haldimand in Boston, a Prussian-trained officer totally unfamiliar with Allen’s new-style guerrilla warfare, indignantly wondered how Tryon could possibly claim to need His Majesty’s troops to vanquish a few miserable bandits.

Finally, Governor Tryon moved to a stance of maximum toughness, violating the canons of Anglo-Saxon law in the process. In early March 1774, he put through the New York legislature the “Bloody Law,” which proclaimed that Allen, Warner, Baker, Cochran, Breakenridge, and three other Green Mountain Boys were to be regarded as convicted felons and were to suffer death without trial unless they surrendered themselves within seventy days. Rewards for the capture of these leaders were also greatly increased.

In the face of this awesome sentence of outlawry, Ethan Allen never faltered. Instead, he leaped to counterattack in a magnificently revolutionary manner. In a slashing remonstrance, Allen blasted the New York officials of “insatiable, avaricious, overbearing, inhuman, barbarous blood-guiltiness of disposition and intention.” Allen dared the New Yorkers to come and get the Green Mountain Boys: “Come on, we are ready for a game of scalping with them, for our martial spirits glow with bitter indignation and consummate fury to blast their infernal projections.” Allen concluded with sweeping counter-death threats, promising death to anyone who dared to arrest a single
Green Mountain Boy. And a west-side convention of settlers in mid-April branded any person in the area holding a commission from New York an “enemy to their country.”

New York was stunned to find maximum threats answered in kind. No one surrendered, and the Green Mountain Boys redoubled beatings and insults to New York officials and transplants, and they proceeded to seize, try, and sentence the New Yorkers. Acting Governor Colden (replacing Tryon, who had been called to England to explain this curious phenomenon in the New Hampshire grant area) soon was forced to call again for British troops, which were again sternly denied.

Meanwhile, the east-siders, those east of the Green Mountains, were being galvanized by the passage of the Coercive Acts and the British crackdown on Massachusetts. The east side met at a (Cumberland) county convention in Westminster late in October to consider its course. The east-siders replied rather ambivalently, if unsurprisingly, hailing American liberty
and
devotion to the king. Going beyond this stance, Leonard Spaulding of Dummerston cursed King George for establishing the Roman Catholic church in Canada, so vehemently that he was arrested for high treason. Soon armed men gathered and marched to Westminster, freeing Spaulding without meeting any resistance. The town clerk of Dummerston hailed this liberating act by the “brave sons of freedom,” and concluded his account of the affair by denouncing the “cut-throatly, Jacobitish, High Church, Toretical minions of George the Third, the Pope of Canada and tyrant of Britain.” No conservative hanging back or ambiguity here!

The west-siders, always leading in the Revolution, were not to be caught napping. After the removal of Benjamin Spencer, the Baptist minister, Judge Benjamin Hough, was the only major New York official remaining in the area. Finally, at the end of January 1775, Hough was seized by the Green Mountain Boys and taken to Sunderland to be tried by the leaders of the rebels. Hough was charged with allegiance to New York and acting as a New York magistrate. Admitting the charges, Hough was sentenced by the judges to 200 lashes with a rope scourge and exiled from the New Hampshire grant area. Before sending Hough out on foot, Allen and Warner capped their triumph by issuing the judge a “passport” for safe conduct to New York.

Thus, Ethan Allen had led the Green Mountain Boys in five years of outstandingly successful guerrilla war against mighty New York to a smashing conclusion. In sum, New York officials and planted settlers had been ejected from the area, and New Hampshire settlers had been defended—with no one killed on either side during the entire period. Indeed, only one Green Mountain Boy was wounded, and a few New Yorkers were whipped, pushed around, and had their homes burned—the full catalogue of casualties of this remarkable conflict under a remarkable and brilliant leader.

Matters were also coming to a head on the east side of the Green Mountains.
A convention of Cumberland County had endorsed the actions of the First Continental Congress. Nonimportation, however, was rejected by the New York Assembly, thus widening further the rift with the east side. A third county convention in early February petitioned Governor Colden against the tyranny of the county court, which was appointed from above rather than chosen by the people of the county. Moreover, the court was too expensive and burdensome: it inconveniently dragged local farmers in to sit on juries, and was too prompt in enforcing collection of debts. Despite warnings of approaching tension, the Cumberland County court opened on March 13. A group of about a hundred men met at Rockingham, north of the county seat at Westminster, and, armed only with clubs, marched down to the county courthouse and engaged in a sit-in. That evening, marching up from the south came Sheriff Billy Paterson at the head of fifty men, many of them equipped with firearms. That night the sheriff’s posse shot its way into the courthouse and killed two of the sit-ins, in what soon was dubbed the “Westminster Massacre.” The first one to die was young William French, who was fittingly saluted as the martyr of the fray.

The Westminster Massacre aroused and galvanized the people of the east-side New Hampshire grants. The following day, militia companies of the people formed and kept tramping into Westminster. The Paterson posse hastened to flee. The county court, reading the handwriting on the wall, hastily adjourned. The radical elements in the assembled mob proposed to burn the courthouse and shoot the sheriff, the judges, and all their retinue, but they were held back by the more restrained militia commanders. Instead, the militiamen released the sit-in prisoners and arrested the sheriff, judges, county clerk, and members of the posse that could be rounded up. As militiamen continued to pour into Westminster to fend off any New Yorker or British counterattack, a climactic moment came when there arrived from across the mountains a detachment of Green Mountain Boys, led by Captain Robert Cochran. Their arrival was a living symbol of the emerging unity between the two halves of the New Hampshire grant territory.