Vermont: A Study of Independence

by Rowland Evans Robinson

The rapidly growing cities, the immense sheep and cattle ranches, and all the new enterprises of the whole West, have drawn great numbers of ambitious young Vermonters to every State and Territory of the wonderful region. Indeed, there is not a State in the Union in which some Vermonters have not made their home; but however far they may have wandered from the land of their birth, they cherish the mountaineer's love of home, and a just pride in the goodly heritage of their birthright.

Wherever in their alien environment they have congregated to any considerable number, they are associated as Sons of Vermont. Chicago boasts the largest society, as its State does the greatest number of citizens, of Vermont birth.[106] St. Louis has a large association of the kind, as have other Western cities. Even so near their old home as Boston,[107] Worcester, Providence, and Brooklyn, the Sons of Vermont gather annually to refresh fond memories, and celebrate the virtues of their beloved State.

To fill the place left by this constant drain on its population, the State has for the most part received a foreign element, which, though it keeps her numbers good, poorly compensates for her loss.

Invasions of Vermont from Canada did not cease with the War of the Revolution, nor with the later war with Great Britain. On the contrary, an insidious and continuous invasion began with the establishment of commercial and friendly relations between the State and the Province. Early in the century, a few French Canadians, seeking the small fortune of better wages, came over the border, and along the grand waterway which their noble countryman had discovered and given his name, and over which so many armies of their people had passed, sometimes in the stealth of maraud, sometimes in all the glorious pomp of war. At first the few new-comers were tenants of the farmers, for whom they worked by the day or month at fair wages, for the men were expert axemen, familiar with all the labors of land-clearing, and as handy as Yankees with scythe and sickle; while their weather-browned wives and grown-up daughters could reap and bind as well as they, and did not hold themselves above any outdoor work.

After a while some acquired small holdings of a few acres, or less than one, and built thereon log houses, that with eaves of notched shingles and whitewashed outer walls, with the pungent odor of onions and pitch-pine fires, looked and smelled as if they had been transplanted from Canada with their owners.

When the acreage of meadow land and grain field had broadened beyond ready harvesting by the resident yeomen, swarms of Canadian laborers came flocking over the border in gangs of two or three, baggy-breeched and moccasined habitants, embarked in rude carts drawn by shaggy Canadian ponies. After a month or two of haymaking and harvesting, they jogged homeward with their earnings, whereunto were often added some small pilferings, for their fingers were as light as their hearts. This annual wave of inundation from the north ceased to flow with the general introduction of the mowing-machine; and the place in the meadow once held by the rank of habitants picturesque in garb, swinging their scythes in unison to some old song sung centuries ago in France, has been usurped by the utilitarian device that, with incessant chirr as of ten thousand sharded wings, mingling with the music of the bobolinks, sweeps down the broad acres of daisies, herdsgrass, and clover.

Many Canadians returned with their families to live in the land which they had spied out in their summer incursions, and so in one way and another the influx continued till they have become the most numerous of Vermont's foreign population.

For years the State was infested with an inferior class of these people, who plied the vocation of professional beggars. They made regular trips through the country in bands consisting of one or more families, with horses, carts, and rickety wagons, and a retinue of curs, soliciting alms of pork, potatoes, and breadstuffs at every farmhouse they came to, and pilfering when opportunity offered. In the large towns there were depots where the proceeds of their beggary and theft were disposed of. They were an abominable crew of vagabonds, robust, lazy men and boys, slatternly women with litters of filthy brats, and all as detestable as they were uninteresting. They worked their beats successfully, till their pitiful tales of sickness, burnings-out, and journeyings to friends in distant towns were worn threadbare, and then they gradually disappeared, no one knows whither.

Almost to a man, the Canadians who settled in Vermont were devout Catholics when they came; but after they had been scattered for a few years among such a preponderant Protestant community, most of them were held very loosely by the bonds of mother church. Except they were residents of the larger towns they seldom saw a priest, and enjoyed a comfortable immunity from fasting, penance, and all ecclesiastic exactions on stomach or purse. On New Year's Day, perhaps the members of the family confessed to the venerable grandsire, but after that suffered no religious inconvenience until the close of the year. Now and then one strayed quite out of the fold and took his place boldly among the heretics, and apparently did not thereby forfeit the fellowship of his more faithful compatriots. But when the flock had become large enough to pay for the shearing, shepherds of the true faith were not wanting. With that steadfast devotion to the interests of their church which has always characterized the Catholic priesthood, these men began their work without ostentation, and have succeeded in drawing into the domination of their church a large majority of the Canadian-born inhabitants of Vermont and of their descendants, as completely as if they were yet citizens of the province, which Parkman truly says, is "one of the most priest-ridden communities of the modern world."

What this leaven may finally work in the Protestant mass with which it has become incorporated is a question that demands more attention than it has yet received.