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Early history
Little is
known of the pre-Columbian
history of Vermont. The western part of the state was
originally home to a small population of
Algonquian-speaking tribes,
including the Mohican and
Abenaki peoples. Between 8500 to 7000
BCE, glacial activity created the Champlain Sea, and
Native
Americans inhabited and hunted in Vermont. From 7000 to
1000 BCE was the Archaic Period. During that era, Native
Americans migrated year-round. From 1000 BCE to 1600 CE was
the Woodland Period, when villages and trade networks were
established, and ceramic and bow and
arrow technology was developed. Sometime between 1500
and 1600, the Iroquois drove many of
the smaller native tribes out of Vermont, later using the
area as a hunting ground and warring
with the remaining Abenaki. The population in 1500 is
estimated to have been around 10,000 people.
European settlement
The first
European to see the area that is now Vermont is thought to
be Jacques Cartier, in 1535.
On July 30, 1609,
French
explorer Samuel de
Champlain claimed the area of what is now
Lake Champlain, giving to the
mountains the appellation of les Verts Monts (the
Green Mountains). However, as in the french language
adjectives come after the noun, the correct structure of
this name would be "les Monts Verts." A possible alternative
name was "Vers Monts," meaning "towards mountains." In light
of the fact that Champlain was coming from the relatively
flat plains south of Quebec towards mountainous Vermont (towards
mountains), this explanation of the name seems to make
more sense.
France
claimed Vermont as part of New France,
and erected Fort Sainte Anne
on Isle La Motte in
1666 as part of their fortification
of Lake Champlain. This was the first European settlement in
Vermont and the site of the first
Roman Catholic
mass.
During the
later half of the 17th century, non-French settlers began to
explore Vermont and its surrounding area. In 1690, a group
of Dutch-British settlers from
Albany under Captain Jacobus
de Warm established the De Warm Stockade at
Chimney Point
(eight miles west of Addison).
This settlement and trading post was directly across the
lake from Crown Point,
New York (Pointe à la Chevelure).
In 1731,
the French arrived. Here they constructed a small temporary
wooden stockade (Fort de Pieux) on what was Chimney Point
until work on Fort St. Frédéric
began in 1734. The fort, when completed, gave the French
control of the New France/Vermont border region in the Lake
Champlain Valley and was the only permanent fort in the area
until the building of Fort Carillon more than 20 years
later. The government encouraged French colonization,
leading to the development of small French settlements in
the valley. The British attempted to take the Fort St.
Frédéric four times between 1755 and 1758; in 1759 a
combined force of 12,000 British regular and provincial
troops under Sir
Jeffrey
Amherst captured the fort. The French were driven out of
the area and retreated to other forts along the
Richelieu River. One year
later, a group of Mohawks burnt
the settlement to the ground, leaving only chimneys and
giving the area its name.
Colonial history
The first
permanent British settlement was established in 1724 with
the construction of Fort Dummer
in Vermont's far southeast under the command of Lieutenant
Timothy Dwight. This fort protected the nearby settlements
of Dummerston and
Brattleboro in
the surrounding area. These settlements were made by the
Province of
Massachusetts Bay to protect its settlers on the western
border along the Connecticut
River. The second British settlement was the 1761
founding of Bennington in
the southwest.
During the
French and Indian War,
some Vermont settlers, including
Ethan Allen, joined the colonial militia assisting the
British in attacks on the French.
Fort Carillon on the
New York-Vermont border, a French
fort constructed in 1755, was the site of two British
offensives under Lord Amherst's command: the
unsuccessful British
attack in 1758 and the
retaking of the
following year with no major resistance (most of the
garrison had been removed to defend Quebec,
Montreal, and the western forts).
The British renamed the fort
Fort Ticonderoga (which became the site of two later
battles during the
American Revolutionary War).
Rogers' Rangers staged their
attack against the village of
Saint-Francis, Quebec
from Lake Champlain in 1759.
Separating afterwards, they fled the angered
Abenakis through northern Vermont
back to safety in Lake Champlain
and New Hampshire.
Following
France's loss in the French
and Indian War, the
1763 Treaty of Paris gave control of the land to the
British.
New Hampshire Grants and the
Vermont Republic
The end of
the war brought new settlers to Vermont. A fort at
Crown Point had been
built, and the Crown Point Military Road stretched from the
east to the west of the Vermont wilderness from
Springfield to Chimney
Point, making traveling from the neighboring
British colonies easier than ever
before. Three colonies laid claim to the area. The Province
of Massachusetts Bay claimed the land on the basis of the
1629 charter of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. The
Province of New York
claimed Vermont based on land granted to the Duke of York
(later King James II) in
1664. The Province of
New Hampshire also claimed Vermont based upon a decree
of George II in
1740. In 1741, George II ruled that Massachusetts's claims
in Vermont and New Hampshire were invalid and fixed
Massachusetts's northern boundary at its present location
(except for Maine, which remained part of Massachusetts
until it entered the Union in 1820 as the 23rd state). This
still left New Hampshire and New York with conflicting
claims to the land.
The
situation resulted in the
New Hampshire Grants, a series of 135
land grants made between 1749 and
1764 by New Hampshire's colonial governor,
Benning Wentworth. The
grants sparked a dispute with the New York governor, who
began granting charters of his own for New Yorker settlement
in Vermont. In 1770, Ethan Allen—along with his brothers
Ira and Levi, as well as Seth
Warner—recruited an informal militia, the
Green Mountain Boys, to
protect the interests of the original New Hampshire settlers
against the new migrants from New York. When a New York
judge arrived in
Westminster with New York settlers in March 1775,
violence broke out as angry citizens took over the
courthouse and called a sheriff's
posse. This resulted in the deaths of Daniel Houghton and
William French in the "Westminster Massacre."
On
January 18, 1777,
representatives of the New Hampshire Grants convened in
Westminster and declared their land an independent republic.
For the first six months of the republic's existence, the
state was called New Connecticut.
On
June 2, a second convention of 72
delegates met at Westminster, known as the "Westminster
Convention." At this meeting, the delegates adopted the name
"Vermont" on the suggestion of Dr. Thomas Young of
Philadelphia, a
supporter of the delegates who wrote a letter advising them
on how to achieve statehood. The delegates set the time for
a meeting one month later. On July 4,
the Constitution of
Vermont was drafted at the
Windsor Tavern owned
by Elijah West during a violent thunderstorm, and was
adopted by the delegates on July 8
after four days of debate. This was among the first written
constitutions in North America
and was the first to constitutionally provide for the
abolition of
slavery,
suffrage for men who did not own
land, and public schools. The tavern has been preserved as
the Old Constitution House,
administered as a
state historic site.
On
August 16, 1777, the
Battle of Bennington
took place, not at Bennington but just across the New York
border. However, Vermont men played the most important role
in the battle and were led by General
John Stark and Colonel Seth
Warner of Vermont. Ordered to retreat by
Continental Army leaders,
Stark had refused and instead led his men to fight the
British troops and Hessian
mercenaries. Stark prepared his men to fight to the death,
telling them that: "There are your enemies, the
redcoats and the
Tories. They
are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!" With
reinforcements from the Vermont militia, American forces
routed the British, leading to the surrender of
John Burgoyne's 6000-man force
at Saratoga on
October 17. The battle is seen as
the turning point in the Revolutionary War because it was
the first major defeat of a British general and it convinced
the French that the Americans were worthy of military aid.
Stark became widely known as the "Hero of Bennington" and
the anniversary of the battle became a legal holiday in
Vermont, known as "Bennington Battle Day."
Vermont
continued to govern itself as a sovereign entity based in
the eastern town of Windsor for 14 years.
Thomas Chittenden, who came
to Vermont from Connecticut in
1774, acted as chief magistrate of Vermont from 1778 to 1789
and from 1790 to 1791. In 1791, Vermont joined the federal
Union as the fourteenth state–becoming the first state to
enter the union after the original thirteen colonies, and as
a counterweight to slaveholding Kentucky,
which was admitted to the Union later the same year.
Statehood and the nineteenth
century
Because of
the proximity of Canada, Vermonters were somewhat alarmed
during the War of 1812. Five thousand troops were stationed
in Burlington at one point, outnumbering residents. About
500 of these died of disease. An expeditionary force of
Quebec Eastern Townships’
volunteers destroyed a barracks built at Derby with no
personnel casualties. The war, fought over what seemed like
obscure maritime considerations to landlocked Vermont, was
not popular.
Vermont had
a unicameral legislature until
1836.
In 1853,
Vermont passed a strict law prohibiting the consumption of
alcoholic beverages. Some towns followed the law, others
ignored it.
French
migration started before the Civil War and accelerated
during the 1860s.
Civil War era
An 1854
Vermont Senate report on
slavery echoed the Vermont Constitution's first article, on
the rights of all men, questioning how a government could
favor the rights of one people over another. The report
fueled growth of the abolition movement in the state, and in
response, a resolution from the Georgia General Assembly
authorizing the towing of Vermont out to sea. The mid to
late 1850s saw a transition from Vermonters mostly favoring
slavery's containment, to a far more serious opposition to
the institution, producing the
Radical Republican and
abolitionist Thaddeus
Stevens. As the
Whig party shriveled, Vermont changed its allegiance to
the emergent
Republican Party. In 1860, it voted for
President Lincoln, giving
him the largest margin of victory of any state.
More than
28,100 Vermonters served in Vermont volunteer units. Vermont
fielded 17 infantry regiments, 1 cavalry regiment, 3 light
artillery batteries, 1 heavy artillery company, 3 companies
of sharpshooters, and 2 companies of frontier cavalry.
Instead of replacing units as they were depleted, Vermont
regularly provided recruits to bring the units in the field
back up to normal strength.
Nearly
5,000 others served in other states' units, in the
United States Army or the
United States Navy. The
54th Massachusetts Infantry (Colored) included 66 Vermont
blacks; a total of 166 black Vermonters served out of a
population of 709 in the state. Vermonters, if not Vermont
units, participated in every major battle of the war.
Vermonters
suffered a total of 1,832 men killed or mortally wounded in
battle; another 3,362 died of disease, in prison or from
other causes, for a total loss of 5,194. More than 2,200
Vermonters were taken prisoner during the war, and 615 of
them died in, or as a result of, their imprisonment.
Among the
most famous of the Vermont units were the
1st Vermont Brigade, the
2nd Vermont Brigade, and
the 1st Vermont Cavalry.
A large
proportion of Vermont’s state and national-level politicians
for several decades after the Civil War were veterans.
The
northernmost land action of the war, the
St. Albans Raid, took place
in Vermont.
The twentieth century
In 1902,
Vermonters approved a law for local option on the sale of
alcholic beverages, countermanding the prior law of 1853
which banned them entirely. That year 94 towns approved the
sale of alcoholic beverages locally. The number of approving
towns fell each year until there were only 18 in 1917,
shortly before
national prohibition became law.
A political history
The political scene 1791-1830
Vermont
preferred the Jeffersonian Party in its early existence,
which became the Democratic Party in the early 1820s. Along
with many other dissidents Vermont stopped voting
Democratic, reacting to the personality of Andrew Jackson,
and not for objective reasons. The state voted Anti-Jackson,
Whig, then Republican. It did so consistently until 1962.
The Vermont
legislature chose presidential electors through the general
election of 1824. Vermont citizens first started voting
directly for presidential electors in 1828.
Politically upward mobility
1830-1916
Politicians
aspiring to statewide office in Vermont normally had to be
nominated at a state convention or “caucus.” Factions
dominated these caucuses. Some of these were family. A look
at the list of Governors, Senators and Representatives over
time shows the Chittendens, Fairbanks, Proctors, and Smiths.
Nomination was tantamount to election. The state legislature
chose US senators until 1913. Governors normally served just
one term of two years. Up to six seats in the US House of
Representatives gave ambitious politicians an ample stage
for their talent.
The Green
Mountains effectively split Vermont in two. Culturally the
eastern Vermonters were often descended from immigrants from
New Hampshire. Western Vermonters often had their roots in
New York. Recognizing this as a source of potential
problems, politicians began following an unwritten “mountain
rule,” rotating the Lieutenant Governor and Governor
residing in opposite sides of the state.
The first
election in which women were allowed to vote was on December
18, 1880, when women were granted limited
suffrage and were allowed to vote in
school board elections.
Primaries 1916-1946
General
annoyance with this system of selecting leadership by a few
people, led to statewide primaries in 1916. Down to only one
congressional seat to compete for, Governors started trying
to serve two terms, beginning with Governor Weeks in 1927.
This worked until World War II.
Senator
Ernest Gibson died in
1940. The governor appointed his son,
Ernest W. Gibson, Jr.to
fill out the remainder of his term. With little prior
political experience on his own merits, Gibson did not run
for reelection. Instead he devoted himself to preparing the
state for war. He served in the South Pacific and emerged as
a colonel. There was a tsunami that year in American
politics. Returning veterans were popular. Gibson ran an
unprecedented campaign against the incumbent Governor and
ousted him in the primary.
Interregnum - Liberal Republicans
prevail 1946-1962
Gibson was
the first of the liberal Republicans. While conservatives
like Harold Arthur and Lee Emerson were able to get elected
to Governor, they seem, in retrospect, to be transitory
figures.
A "normal"
path to the top became: Representative, Speaker of the
House, Senator, Speaker Pro Tem, Lieutenant Governor,
Governor, US Representative, and US Senator.
In 1962,
Phillip Hoff was elected Governor, the first Democrat since
before the Civil War.
Democratic dominance 1962- current
The
demographics of the state had changed. In 1960, 25% of the
population was born outside the state. Most of these
immigrants were from Democratic states and brought their
voting inclinations with them. Anticipating this change, the
Republicans conducted a massive free-for-all in 1958, the
last good chance many of them saw to capture a congressional
seat. They were wrong. Democrat
William H. Meyer won, the first from his party in 102
years.
While the
climate had changed, the legislature had not. With one
representative per town and two senators per county, the
rural areas dominated and set the agenda much to the
frustration of urban areas, particularly Chittenden County.
In 1964, the US Supreme Court forced “one-man, one-vote”
redistricting on Vermont, giving cities an equitable share
of votes in both houses.
Unlike
yesteryear, no party nominee can be assured of election. The
unwritten “two term” rule has been jettisoned. Governors
usually serve as long as they can, not being able to
guarantee that their policies will be continued after they
leave office. Vermonters have alternated parties in the
Governor’s office since 1962. However, Democrats have served
an overwhelming majority of that time.
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