William French and the Westminster Massacre

On a late Winter morning in 1775, William French woke up for the last time. The lively 22-year-old lived in the Town of Bennington—itself scarcely older than he was.

Self-named by Benning Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire, Bennington became—in 1741—the first township granted west of the Connecticut River. It was a fact that would soon matter far more than anyone expected.

French headed to Westminster, a small hamlet on the west side of the Connecticut River, nestled in the broad curve of the oxbowing waterway, in the fertile eastern valley beneath the Green Mountains.

That afternoon, French walked along King’s Highway to the farmhouse of Capt. Axariah Wright, an eccentric old patriot. There he met Daniel Houghton and nearly 100 other men. They were there to confront a problem they believed could no longer be avoided.

Before the clock struck midnight, an armed confrontation took shape at the courthouse doors. There—on the northerly end of the lower street, on the brow of the terrace overlooking the upper street—the New York sheriff read the formal warning, what one account called “the usual proclamation against riotous assemblies.”¹ Demands were refused. Shots were fired into the night. On March 13, 1775, blood was shed—weeks before open war formally began.

The causes were layered, legal, and deeply contested. And they did not originate at Westminster.

The confrontation at Westminster did not arise suddenly. Its roots reached back more than a century—to overlapping charters, distant kings, and boundaries that existed more confidently on paper than on the ground.

It began in earnest in 1664 when Charles II of England granted his brother, the Duke of York, (later to become James II) possession of all lands from the Connecticut River to the Delaware River.²

Apparently, Charles wasn’t bothered by the fact this land included the entirety of New Netherland, a thriving Dutch colony.

This matter was resolved on September 3, 1664, when the British ousted the Dutch from the New World and seized control of the financial mecca of New Amsterdam, extending through the Hudson Valley up to Fort Orange. While the King’s men renamed the mecca “New York” and the fort “Albany,”³ his overseers kept elements of the highly efficient Dutch patroon system.

Meanwhile, in New England, the Province of New Hampshire had an on-again/off-again existence. It became a permanent colony in 1689, although its actual borders remained fuzzy.

Of course, nothing much happened until the next century. It seemed the area was rife with conflicting land claims, dating back to the pre-Colonial cultures of the Mohawk and Mahican who fought endlessly over hunting grounds.

The French and the British only made the situation worse. It wasn’t until the Tories triumphed over their cross-Channel challengers that things began to calm down. The conclusion of the French and Indian War made the Connecticut River valley and the Green Mountains safe for settlers.

Which brings us back to those fuzzy borders. Known as the “20-Mile Line between New York and New England after the English conquest of New Netherland,”⁴ New York asserted that its eastern boundary reached the Connecticut River. New Hampshire saw its western border as being in line with the western border of Massachusetts.

This left a vast tract—roughly the size of modern Vermont—of disputed territory. Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire and Governor George Clinton of New York exchanged letters detailing their respective positions.⁵ Neither paid attention to the other.

Benning Wentworth was the Governor of New Hampshire from 1741 to 1766. He wanted the land west of the Connecticut River to be part of his colony. And he wasn’t afraid to act on his ambitions.

Ignoring a claim dispute over which colony owned the land west of the Connecticut River, the New Hampshire governor issued land grants to New Englanders looking to settle the fertile terrain. These towns were called the New Hampshire Grants.

Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden often filled in as Acting Governor should his superior die in office, return to England, or otherwise leave his post. He was an aggressive loyalist and well-suited to follow in the footsteps of the patroons that preceded him.

Immediately following the cessation of the French and Indian War, Lieutenant Governor Colden began authorizing and confirming land patents to groups of settlers to start towns. The settlers who had patents from New York were called Yorkers.

Colden continued to press the Crown to settle the dispute. In December of 1763, he ordered the Sheriff of Albany County, which then extended all the way to the Connecticut River, to collect all the names of the New Hampshire “squatters.”

On July 20, 1764, King George III ruled in favor of the colony of New York’s claim that it owned the land up to and including the western banks of the Connecticut River.

On July 20, 1764, King George III ruled that the western banks of the Connecticut River would mark the boundary between New Hampshire and New York.⁶ The order settled the dispute in London—but it left unanswered how that line would be measured, enforced, or accepted by those already living west of the river.

It seemed Wentworth had overstepped his authority when he gave away those New Hampshire Grants.

The King’s edict emboldened Acting Governor Cadwallader Colden, but his correspondence makes clear that royal authority did not translate cleanly into obedience.⁷ The Crown-aligned administrator steeped in patroon assumptions issued more land patents to Yorkers for the disputed territory. Furthermore, he declared New Hampshire Grantees had to pay New York to keep their farms.

Still, settlers continued to farm, organize, and resist as if the line drawn in London carried little practical force on the ground. Colden’s tactics narrowed the Grantees’ options, pushing many toward organized resistance. On October 24, 1764, the first organized band later known as the Green Mountain Boys was mustered in Bennington.

Two years later, when Ethan Allen attempted to defend the cause of the Grantees in Albany court, he found that neither precedent nor argument persuaded the courts. As the Albany speculators proceeded to stake their questionable claims, the Green Mountain Boys lay in waiting. On July 29, 1771, at the Northern Portal of Henry Bridge, Irish Corners, West Bennington, Allen and his regulars offered one of the earliest instances of armed resistance.

Allen continued to annoy the Albany leaders until, on March 9, 1774, the legislature passed the dubious Act of Outlawry. It has been called the “most mandatory and despotic of anything that had ever appeared in the British Colonies.”⁸ Ethan Allen and nine others were convicted of felony without trial. Allen threated to scalp any “authorities of New York” should they attempt to carry out the sentence.⁹

Such was the landscape in March of 1775: a region claimed by New York, settled under New Hampshire grants, and governed in practice by neither with confidence.¹⁰ When French and the men gathered at Westminster, they were not rejecting law itself—but disputing whose law had the right to sit in judgment.

French and his so-called “Liberty Men” believed the King’s judge, on behalf of New York Colony, would likely evict many of long-time residents from their homesteads at the court meeting the next day. The Grantees had tried to convince the judge not to hold the session, but the judge refused. To the Grantees, the judge’s refusal left few acceptable options. They had to get into the courthouse before the judge arrived the next day.

At 3:00pm that afternoon, they gathered some wood from a nearby woodpile and headed for the courthouse. They entered the building, content to wait through the night for the judge.

But Sheriff William Patterson found out and gathered a small posse of armed deputies. They confronted French and the Liberty Men at the courthouse, ordering them to leave. The rebels refused and barricaded themselves behind the solid wood door. Tensions escalated.

No one knows for sure what precipitated it, but at 11:00 that evening, the Sheriff and his men stormed through the door and, in the chaos that followed, shots were fired into the essentially unarmed men.

William French died instantly as a bullet blew through his 22-year-old brain. Houghton lay mortally wounded.

Incensed by what many regarded as an unjustifiable killing, the Green Mountain Boys showed up the next day and captured the Sheriff and his men. The nervous judge adjourned without opening the court and fled.

In the months that followed, petitions, committees, and armed patrols increasingly treated New York authority as void in practice. No English official ever again successfully presided over that courtroom, but, within two years, it would host an historic event…

On January 15, 1777, the General Council of Safety of the Green Mountain Boys met inside that same Westminster courtroom. There, they voted in favor of what they described as “a declaration setting forth the right the inhabitants of said New Hampshire Grants have to form themselves into a separate and independent state…”¹¹

Originally called “New Connecticut,” it was quickly discovered that the name had already been claimed by “a place in Pennsylvania.”¹² By April of 1777, the new republic began referring to itself as “Vermont,” from the French Verd (green) and mont (mount).¹³ While aligned with the original thirteen colonies, Vermont would remain a separate and independent state until 1791, when it would be admitted to the union as the fourteenth state of the United States.

First, we must answer the question…

Why did Vermont choose independence instead of remaining part of New York State?

Neither imperial authority nor colonial administration had earned their allegiance. Caught between British power and the New York City–Albany axis, the inhabitants of the Grants chose to trust neither. Instead, they asserted their right to establish an independent republic of their own.

If something as basic as a boundary line could remain unsettled—claimed by one authority, rejected by another, and lived differently by those in between—then independence in the Green Mountains was less a rupture than a consequence of prolonged uncertainty.¹⁴

If defiance, violence, and legal ambiguity could produce an independent republic in the Green Mountains, what conditions made that possible—and were those conditions present elsewhere?

Interested? Have you joined the 1786 Project yet? Go to http://1786project.com/ to access cool stuff about the history of the Greater Western New York Region! (And find out how to participate in the hidden treasure hunt!)

 

1 “Westminster,” Essex Gazette, March 21, 1775; reprinted in Frank Moore, comp., Diary of the American Revolution, vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner, 1859), pp. 15–17.
² Bicentennial History of Albany, George Howell & Jonathon Tenney, Munsell, New York, 1886, p. 3.
³ Ibid.
⁴ The Hoosac Valley, Grace Greylock Niles, The Knickerbocker Press, NY & London, 1912, p. viii.
⁵ Ibid., p. 271.
⁶ Great Britain, Privy Council, Order in Council, July 20, 1764, in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. IV, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1854), pp. 954–956.
⁷ Cadwallader Colden to the Lords of Trade, December 1763, and related correspondence, in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. IV, ed. O’Callaghan, esp. correspondence dated December 1763–1765.
⁸ The Hoosac Valley, p. 288.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Grace Greylock Niles, The Hoosac Valley: Its Legends and Its History (New York & London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 250–290; Jesse Haas, Revolutionary Westminster: The Struggle for Independence in Vermont (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2011), pp. 90–120.
¹¹ Proceedings of the General Council of Safety of the New Hampshire Grants, January 15, 1777, quoted in Jesse Haas, Revolutionary Westminster, p. 105.
¹² Revolutionary Westminster, Jesse Haas, The History Press, Charleston, 2011, p. 105.
¹³ The Hoosac Valley, p. 326.
¹⁴ Great Britain, Privy Council, Order in Council, pp. 271–288.