How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [23]
Ethan Allen (ca. 1738-1789) (photo credit 8.1)
New York before the Revolution
In order to validate a deed, New York required that a fee be paid for registering it in New York. The fee was based on the current value of the land, which, following occupation and settlement, was far higher than when it had been purchased as uncleared property. Consequently, registration fees were often as much as the original purchase price. This did not set well with the settlers. To make matters worse, New York frequently sold land titled in New Hampshire but not in New York. When surveyors appeared to stake out these lands, they began to face increasingly large groups of hostile New Hampshire-based settlers. Among those settlers was Ethan Allen.
Allen was the eldest of eight children, born and raised in Connecticut. His plans for a college education were derailed by the death of his father, which obliged Ethan to become a farmer while continuing his education informally. In time he added lead mining and iron manufacturing to his endeavors. With his profits he began purchasing land, often in partnership with his brothers, in what would eventually become Vermont. By the time New York declared the “New Hampshire Grants” invalid, Allen had extensive holdings throughout the region, including the 45,000 acres advertised in the Connecticut Courant.
When, in 1770, the owners of land titled by New Hampshire were named in lawsuits being brought by New York claimants to their lands, the defendants turned to Ethan Allen to take the lead in coordinating their defense. Allen collected official documentation of New Hampshire’s deeds and, for the trial, secured the services of Jared Ingersoll, a prominent attorney who later served in the Continental Congress and participated in the writing of the Constitution. The trial was presided over by Judge Robert R. Livingston, who himself owned 35,000 acres of Vermont land deeded, in his case, by New York. Livingston refused to admit into evidence the documents Allen had gathered, and the subsequent verdict in favor of the New York plaintiffs surprised no one.
Before returning to his home in Bennington, Allen was visited by the attorney general of New York, John Taber Kempe, and James Duane, attorney for the New York plaintiffs in the case. They told Allen that if he and other leaders in Vermont could understand New York’s view, and convey the justice of that view to the people in Vermont, Kempe and Duane could arrange for Allen and the other Vermont leaders to acquire considerable amounts of land in the region on highly favorable terms. Allen did not say no. He said, “The gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills.” When Kempe asked what that meant, Allen suggested he accompany him to Bennington, where he’d find out.
The following summer, New York’s deputy surveyor general, William Cockburn, arrived in Rutland to divide it into lots. As his crew commenced work, he was approached by two property owners with New Hampshire deeds. In a letter to the land’s New York proprietor (none other than attorney James Duane), Cockburn related that, “Your acquaintance Nathan [sic] Allen was in the woods with another party [of men], blackened and dressed like Indians.… By all accounts, we should not have been very kindly treated.”3
The incident was the first of many that would ensue between New York surveyors or property claimants and Allen’s Green Mountain Boys. It took place against a backdrop of increasingly violent confrontations. What had begun as spontaneous