Vermont: A Study of Independence

by Rowland Evans Robinson

Vermont has given him the first place among her heroes, has set his marble effigy in the national capitol, in her own, and on the monument that marks his grave; yet to that brave and modest soldier, Seth Warner, the knightliest figure in her romantic history, the State he served so well has not given so much as a tablet to commemorate his name and valorous deeds. It is as if, in their mouldering dust, the character of the living men was preserved, the one still self-asserting, the other as unpretentious in the eternal sleep as he was in life. Though Governor Chittenden's age was not beyond that in which modern statesmen are still active, infirmity and disease were upon him, admonishing him that he could no longer bear the fatigues of the office which for eighteen years he had held. In the summer of 1797 he announced that he would not again be a candidate for the governorship. He had seen the State, which he had been so largely instrumental in moulding out of the crude material of scattered frontier settlements, and which his strong hand had defended against covetous neighbors and a foreign enemy, in the full enjoyment of an honorable place in the sisterhood of commonwealths, and felt that his work was done. While still in office, a few weeks later, his honorable life closed at his home in Williston, among the fertile fields that his hand had wrought out of the primeval wilderness, and his death was sincerely mourned by the people whom he had so long ruled with patriarchal care.

At the next election, Isaac Tichenor was chosen governor. He was a native of New Jersey, and, becoming a resident of Vermont in 1777, he presently took an active part in the affairs of the State. For several years previous to his election to the first place in its gift, he had served it as a member of the council, chief justice, and United States senator. No choice was made by the people, though he received a plurality of the popular vote, and the election devolved upon the assembly. The Federalist party predominating therein, he was elected by a large majority. He was ten times reëlected, and, such faith had the people in him, several times after his party was a minority in the State, although the acrimony of party strife had begun to embitter its politics.

In the early part of Tichenor's administration, while the legislature was in session at Vergennes in the autumn of 1798, five chiefs of the Cognahwaghnahs presented a claim of their people to ancient hunting grounds in Vermont, bounded by a line extending from Ticonderoga to the Great Falls of Otter Creek, and in the same direction to the height of land dividing the streams between Lake Champlain and the river Connecticut, thence along the height of land opposite Missisque, and then down to the bay, and comprising about a third of the State. The Indians were handsomely entertained during their stay, and dismissed with a present of a hundred dollars, "well pleased with their own policy," says Williams, "and with that of the Assembly of Vermont, hoping that the game would prove still better another season."

An investigation of this claim resulted in a decision that, if any such right ever existed, it had been extinguished by the cession of the lands in question to the United States by Great Britain, whose allies these Indians were in the late war.

When, upon the passage of the alien and sedition laws by Congress, the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky, in 1798, passed resolutions, which were sent to the legislatures of all the other States, declaring these acts null, the Assembly of Vermont made a firm, dignified, and forcible reply, denying the right of States to sit in judgment on the constitutionality of the acts of Congress, or to declare which of its acts should be accepted or which rejected. Considering the almost recent antagonism which had existed between Congress and the State of Vermont, the one by turns vacillating or threatening, the other boldly defiant and denying the right of interference with her affairs, it might be thought that the new commonwealth would be found arrayed among the extreme defenders of state rights rather than so stoutly opposing them.

Party spirit had begun to embitter the politics of the State, and the growing minority of Republicans was hotly arrayed against the still predominant Federalists. The Federal strength was further weakened by the imprisonment, under the sedition law, of Matthew Lyon, one of the Vermont members of Congress. His free expression of opinion concerning the conduct of the administration of President Adams would not now be considered very extravagant, but for it he was sentenced to four months' imprisonment, and to pay a fine of $1,000.

While in prison at Vergennes, he wrote letters which it was thought would cause his re-arrest before he could leave the State to take his seat in Congress, to which he had been reëlected while in prison. Measures were taken for the payment of his fine in indisputably legal tender, one citizen of the State providing the sum in silver dollars, and one ardent Republican of North Carolina coming all the way from that State on horseback with the amount in gold. But Lyon's many political friends desired to share the honor of paying his fine, and it was arranged that no person should pay more than one dollar. No sooner had he come forth from prison than his fine was paid, and he was placed in a sleigh and driven up the frozen current of Great Otter to Middlebury, attended, it is said, by an escort in sleighs, the train extending from the one town to the other, a distance of twelve miles. With half as many, he might boast of a greater following than had passed up the Indian Road under any leader since the bloody days of border warfare when Waubanakee chief or Canadian partisan led their marauding horde along the noble river.

Lyon was of Irish birth, and came to America at the age of thirteen under an indenture for his passage money. This was sold for a pair of steers to one of the founders of Danville, Vermont, and Lyon was wont to swear "By the bulls that redeemed me." He served in the Vermont troops in the Revolution, and for a time was paymaster in Warner's regiment. He was a member of the Dorset convention, and for several years took a prominent part in the politics of the State, of which he was an enterprising and useful citizen. His second wife was the daughter of Governor Thomas Chittenden. In 1801 he removed to Kentucky, and was eight years a member of Congress from that State. He died at the age of seventy-six, in the territory of Arkansas, soon after his election as delegate to Congress.

Four years after the arbitrary measures against Lyon by a Federalist majority in the legislature, the opposite party gained the ascendency in that body, though Tichenor had been reëlected by a majority of the freemen of the State.

The customary address of the governor, and the reply of the house thereto, was the occasion of a hot party debate, which was kept up for several days, and it was expected that the Republicans would use their newly acquired power to place adherents of their party in all the offices at their disposal. But the wise counsel of the first governor still prevailed, and there were but few removals for mere political causes. Though party spirit was rancorous enough, the elevation of men to office, more for their political views than for their fitness, did not obtain in the politics of Vermont till the bad example had for some years been set by the party in power at the seat of national government.