On the western side New York had begun by claiming jurisdiction as far as the Connecticut River. She relinquished this claim in the main, as to her bounds on Connecticut, when that colony pressed her pretensions to a line which ran a score of miles from the Hudson, and when she occupied the territory with her settlers, the final adjustment being reached in 1731.[429]
On the line of Massachusetts the controversy with New York lasted longer. The claim of that province was set forth in a Report made in 1753, which is printed in Smith’s New York (1814 ed., p. 283), and Smith adds that the government of Massachusetts never exhibited the reasons of its claim in answer to this report, but in the spring of 1755 sold lands within the disputed territory.[430] In 1764 the matter was again in controversy. Thomas Hutchinson is thought to have been the author of the Massachusetts argument called The Case of the Provinces of Massachusetts Bay and New York, respecting boundary line between the two provinces (Boston, 1764).[431] Three years later (1767) a meeting of the agents of the two provinces was held at New Haven, by which the disagreement was brought to a conclusion.[432]
For the region north of Massachusetts New York contended more vigorously, and the dispute over the New Hampshire grants in the territory of the present Vermont, which began in 1749, was continued into the Revolutionary period. When, in 1740, the king in council had established the northern line of Massachusetts, the commission of Gov. Benning Wentworth, of New Hampshire, the next year (1741), extended his jurisdiction westward until it met other grants, which he interpreted to mean till it reached a line stretched northerly in prolongation of the westerly boundary of Massachusetts, twenty miles east of the Hudson, and reaching to the southern extremity of Lake Champlain. On the 3d of Jan., 1749, Wentworth made a grant of the town of Bennington, adjacent to such western frontier line. These and other grants of townships which Wentworth made became known as the New Hampshire Grants.[433] The wars prevented much progress in the settlement of these grants, but some of the settlers who were there when the French war closed assembled, it is said, with the Rev. Samuel Peters in 1763 on Mount Pisgah, and broke a bottle of spirits with him, and named the country Verd Mont.
Gov. Colden, of New York, on Dec. 28, 1763, issued a proclamation claiming the land thus held under the grants of Wentworth, basing his rights on the grants in 1664 and 1674 to the Duke of York of “all lands from the west side of the Connecticut River to the east side of the Delaware Bay.” On the 20th July, 1764, the king in council confirmed Colden’s view, and made the Connecticut River the boundary as far as 45° north latitude. When this decision reached Wentworth he had already granted 128 townships. New York began to make counter-grants of the same land, and though the king ordered the authorities of New York to desist, when word reached London of the rising conflict, it was the angry people of the grants rather than the royal will which induced the agents of New York to leave the territory. Gov. John Wentworth continued to make grants till the Revolution, on the New Hampshire side; but though Gov. Moore, of New York, had been restrained (1767), his successors had not the same fear of the royal displeasure. As the war approached, the dispute between New York and the grants grew warmer.[434] In 1773 James Duane, it is thought, was the champion of the New York cause in two pamphlets: A State of the rights of the Colony of New York with respect to its eastern boundary on Connecticut River so far as concerns the late encroachments under the Government of New Hampshire, published by the assembly (New York, 1773); and A Narrative of the proceedings subsequent to the Royal Adjudication concerning the lands to the westward of Connecticut river, lately usurped by New Hampshire (New York, 1773).[435] The next year (1774) Ethan Allen answered the first of these tracts in his Brief narrative of the proceedings of the government of New York. Allen dated at Bennington, Sept. 23, 1774, and his book was published at Hartford.[436]
The war of independence soon gave opportunity for the British authorities on the Canada side to seek to detach the Vermonters from their relations to the revolting colonies.[437] The last of the royal governors of New Hampshire had fled in Sept., 1775, and a congress at Exeter had assumed executive control in Jan., 1776. The next year (1777) a convention framed a constitution, and by a stretch of power, as is told in Ira Allen’s Hist. of Vermont, it was adopted without recurrence to the people’s vote. In March, 1778, the state government was fully organized. The dispute with New York went on. Gov. Clinton issued a proclamation. Ethan Allen answered in an Animadversary Address (Hartford, 1778),[438] and in Dec., 1778, a convention of the people of the grants was held, and their resolution was appended to a document prepared by a committee of the assembly, called A public defence of the right of the New Hampshire grants (so called) on both sides Connecticut river, to associate together, and form themselves into an independent state. Containing remarks on sundry paragraphs of letters from the president of the Council of New Hampshire to his Excellency Governor Chittenden, and the New Hampshire delegates at Congress.[439]
The same year the legislature of New York directed the preparation of a Collection of evidence in vindication of the territorial rights and jurisdiction of the state of New York, against the claims of the commonwealth of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the people of the grants who are commonly called Vermonters. It was prepared by James Duane, James Morrin Scott, and Egbert Benson, and is printed in the Fund Publications of the New York Historical Society, 1870 (pp. 277-528). On the other side, Ethan Allen published A vindication of the opposition of the inhabitants of Vermont to the government of New York, and of their right to form an independent state;[440] and in 1780, in connection with Jonas Fay, and by order of the governor and council, he published A concise refutation of the claims of New Hampshire and Massachusetts Bay, to the territory of Vermont; with occasional remarks on the long disputed claim of New York to the same.[441]
In 1782, Ethan Allen again brought out at Hartford his The present state of the controversy between the states of New York and New Hampshire on the one part, and the state of Vermont on the other.[442]
The arguments and proofs were rehearsed in 1784, when the question was to be presented to court, in a brief by James Duane, called State of the evidence and argument in support of the territorial rights of jurisdiction of New York against the government of New Hampshire and the claimants under it, and against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. An amicable adjustment prevented the publication of this document, and it was first printed in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll. for 1871.[443]