VERMONT

January in Vermont has a way of stripping things down to essentials. The hills are bare, the air has teeth, and anything not firmly rooted tends to get blown off or frozen into place. It was in that season, on January 15, 1777, that a loose collection of farmers, surveyors, tavern keepers, speculators, and militia officers gathered at the courthouse in Westminster and did something that still sits awkwardly in the American story. They declared independence, not only from the British Crown, but from New York as well. They did it without permission, without recognition, and without much assurance that anyone would thank them for it later. History has been arguing about it ever since .

To understand why Vermont declared independence, one has to begin not with lofty rhetoric but with land, paper, and bruised knuckles. The place was known for decades as the New Hampshire Grants, a borderland claimed by competing colonial authorities who were quite certain of their rights and not especially interested in the people already living there. New Hampshire governors, most famously Benning Wentworth, issued town charters by the dozen, sometimes by the hundred, often to friends, allies, and themselves. Settlers cleared forests, built homes, planted fields, and did the hard work that turns wilderness into something resembling a community. Then, in 1764, the Crown ruled that the territory belonged to New York. New York authorities responded with the subtlety of a tax collector who knows he has the law on his side. They declared the New Hampshire grants void and demanded that settlers repurchase their own land at inflated prices.

This was not a philosophical disagreement. It was men being told that the deeds they had lived and bled for were suddenly worthless. It was sheriffs arriving with writs, surveyors marking lines that cut through barns and fields, and courts that answered only to distant interests. Resistance followed naturally. The Green Mountain Boys, led by Ethan Allen and others who understood both the rhetoric of liberty and the practical use of a cudgel, emerged as a kind of frontier enforcement agency. They ran off New York officials, burned property, and administered what they called the Beech Seal to those who refused to leave. It was crude justice, but to many settlers it felt like the only justice available.

By the time shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, the Grants were already half-revolutionary and fully angry. The Westminster Massacre in March 1775, when New York loyalists killed two protesters at a courthouse, hardened opinions on the eastern side of the territory and convinced many that New York rule was not merely inconvenient but dangerous. The language of resistance spread quickly. When the Continental Congress encouraged colonies lacking effective government to form new ones in May 1776, the Grants paid attention. They had been living without meaningful protection for years. The resolution sounded less like advice and more like recognition of reality.

So they met in January 1777. The Westminster Convention brought together delegates from roughly two dozen towns, some from west of the Green Mountains, some from the east. They declared themselves a free and independent jurisdiction or state. At first they called it New Connecticut, which was less poetic than practical, a nod to where many of them came from and a reminder of familiar political habits. That name would not last. Within months, following the suggestion of Dr. Thomas Young, a radical physician and pamphleteer in Philadelphia, they chose Vermont, from the French for green mountains, a rare moment when branding and geography aligned neatly.

The declaration itself borrowed heavily from the tone and structure of the national Declaration of Independence, but its grievances were intensely local. New York was accused of a long train of abuses, particularly the retroactive invalidation of land titles and the passage of what settlers called the Bloody Act, which allowed for execution without trial in land dispute cases. The delegates argued that New York had effectively placed them outside the protection of law, returning them to what Enlightenment thinkers called a state of nature. From that condition, they claimed, flowed the right to establish a government suited to their safety and happiness.

The names on the document were not accidental. Thomas Chittenden, Ira Allen, Jonas Fay, Reuben Jones, and others pledged themselves by all ties held sacred among men to maintain independence. These were not abstract words. Signing meant risking property, reputation, and possibly one’s neck. The British Army was still very much in the field. New York was not inclined to forgive. Congress was noncommittal at best.

Ethan Allen looms large in the mythology, but his role was more complicated than the frontier demigod of popular memory. He was a man of action who read widely, argued fiercely, and believed that labor conferred moral title. In his writing, influenced by Enlightenment ideas, Allen insisted that land gained its value from the people who worked it, not from distant grants stamped with wax seals. This was radical thinking in a world still organized around aristocratic claims. It also happened to align neatly with the interests of those already settled on the Grants.

Behind Allen stood others, particularly the Arlington Junto, a Bennington-centered group that included Ira Allen and Thomas Chittenden. They were radicals in some respects and cautious men in others. They pushed independence, but they also protected speculative land interests when it suited them. Idealism and self-interest were not mutually exclusive. They rarely are.

Independence in January was only the beginning. By July 1777, as British General John Burgoyne marched south from Canada, Vermont’s leaders met again, this time in Windsor, to frame a constitution. The sound of artillery from the north reportedly echoed through the meeting. It was not a peaceful backdrop for constitutional theory. The result, however, was one of the most radical governing documents of the era.

The Vermont Constitution abolished adult slavery outright, the first in North America to do so explicitly. It established universal manhood suffrage without property qualifications, trusting that citizens did not need land deeds to possess judgment. It created a unicameral legislature and deliberately weakened the executive, reflecting deep suspicion of concentrated power. These were not gestures designed to impress Congress. Congress was not impressed. They were choices rooted in local experience, shaped by men who had seen how distant authority could be used as a weapon.

For fourteen years, Vermont existed as an independent republic in all but recognition. It minted its own currency, ran its own postal service, raised militias, and negotiated carefully with its neighbors. Congress refused admission largely because New York continued to press its claims. Massachusetts and New Hampshire had their own interests. Kentucky’s looming statehood complicated the balance between free and slave states. Vermont became a piece on a board where national priorities mattered more than local justice.

In the early 1780s, Vermont’s leaders engaged in secret negotiations with British officials in Canada, known as the Haldimand negotiations. This episode has been painted alternately as treason or clever diplomacy. In truth, it was leverage. Congress would not act, New York would not yield, and Vermont needed options. The British offered protection and trade. Vermont listened, without committing. The talks prodded Congress to reconsider, which may have been their point all along.

Statehood finally came in 1791, after Vermont agreed to pay New York $30,000 to settle land claims. It entered the Union as the fourteenth state, balancing Kentucky’s admission as a slave state. The long delay had left its mark. Vermont arrived wary, independent-minded, and unwilling to pretend that the road to union had been paved with idealism alone.

Vermont’s declaration of independence mattered because it exposed the untidy reality beneath the American Revolution. Not all struggles fit neatly into the story of colonies versus crown. Some were fights between neighbors, provinces, and competing visions of authority. Vermont forced the young nation to confront questions it preferred to postpone. Who had the right to form governments. How far local consent extended. Whether liberty could survive without recognition.

Today, Vermont’s brief independence is often treated as a charming footnote, a curiosity for trivia nights and license plates. That does it a disservice. The men who met in Westminster were not trying to be unique. They were trying to survive with their dignity intact. They made decisions under pressure, with imperfect information and mixed motives. They left behind a record that is both inspiring and uncomfortable.

That is usually where the truth lives. In the cracks of the plaster, in the worn banister where too many hands have passed, leaving behind fingerprints that no amount of polishing can erase. Vermont’s independence reminds us that the American experiment was not born fully formed. It was argued into existence, sometimes shouted, sometimes whispered, often improvised. It was shaped as much by stubborn farmers defending their fields as by statesmen drafting declarations. That does not make the story messier. It makes it honest.