Thomas Chittenden must have known the knock was coming. Weeks earlier, on May 20, 1797, a federal judge had issued a summons for him to appear in court in Windsor to face trial. Word of the indictment likely reached Chittenden quickly. Vermont was, after all, a small place, with only a quarter of its population today, and Chittenden was among the best connected people in the new state. He was, indeed, its governor.
The summons finally arrived on July 21, when Deputy U.S. Marshal Samuel Fitch left the document at Chittenden’s Williston farmhouse. It ordered the governor to appear in court on Aug. 7 to face charges of violating federal liquor laws, which were a major flashpoint during the final decade of the 1700s.
If you have never heard of this incident, cut yourself some slack. The dramatic case, involving a sitting state governor being charged with breaking federal laws, doesn’t appear in histories of Vermont; intriguingly, it wasn’t even covered in newspapers at the time.
Almost as soon as the court documents were created in 1797, they were filed away. For more than two centuries, the case was forgotten. Then, recently, historian Gary Shattuck, who focuses on legal cases in the early years of Vermont, noticed Chittenden’s name on a list of defendants in federal cases.
This winter, Shattuck traveled to the National Archives at Boston, where he examined the actual court documents, which amounted to only a dozen pieces of paper. There was no transcript of the trial, but Shattuck, a former Vermont State Police commander, assistant state attorney general and assistant U.S. attorney general, was able to piece together the fascinating story. His article on the case appears in the current edition of the Vermont Bar Association’s journal.
Thomas Chittenden’s legal troubles help illuminate a fraught period in the early history of the United States. When Vermont joined the Union as the 14th state in 1791, with Chittenden as its governor, one of the biggest transitions people faced was getting used to paying federal fees and taxes. Those funds were necessary. If the states were going to act collectively, particularly in creating infrastructure for the new nation and paying off its war debts, the federal government needed money. The federal government established a legal system, including the hiring of customs collectors, U.S. marshals and deputies, judges, bailiffs and clerks, to facilitate the collection of those fees and taxes.
One way the government sought to raise funds was by taxing distilled liquor. It didn’t go over well. An insurrection erupted in western Pennsylvania after Congress passed a tax on liquor in 1791.
It is difficult today to grasp how important distilled liquor, mostly whiskey, was in remote areas of America during an era when farmers were extremely short on cash but rich in grain. Unfortunately for the farmers, the grain was bulky to transport to market, and often spoiled along the way. Liquor, in contrast, was much more valuable by weight and didn’t spoil. So it became a valuable tool for barter.
In July 1794, Pennsylvania farmers shot at a federal tax collector and a U.S. marshal who were trying to deliver a summons to a farmer who had not paid the tax. Then a mob of more than 500 armed men surrounded the tax collector’s fortified home, demanding he quit his position. The rebel leader was shot and killed when he stepped forward from the crowd, apparently believing a truce had been declared. The enraged mob attacked the home and burned it to the ground. Everyone inside managed to escape.
President George Washington had had enough. He led a militia force of 13,000 men to quell the so-called Whiskey Rebellion.
Examining federal court records, Shattuck found no evidence of similar violence breaking out in New England during this period — except in Vermont. In December 1792, while the Whiskey Rebellion was taking place, a group of six armed men attacked the U.S. Customs House at Basin Harbor in Ferrisburgh and stole two 37-gallon casks of illegally imported spirits that had been seized by federal officials.
Vermont officials were alarmed by the incident, fearing they might have their own tax revolt on their hands if they didn’t act quickly. Federal judge Nathaniel Chipman convened a special court term in Burlington during which a grand jury indicted three men from Vermont, as well as three others who lived in New York and Massachusetts, for the attack. The Vermonters were convicted and ordered jailed until they paid fines. The out-of-state men apparently fled and were never captured.
Congress strengthened the federal government’s control over other types of alcohol in 1794 with a new law requiring that sellers of wine and spirits be licensed. Laws are only effective if people obey them. Evidence suggests that few Vermonters were bothering to purchase licenses. Shattuck found that statewide only 187 licenses for selling spirits, and another 49 for selling wine, were issued in 1796. That’s definitely not enough licenses to quench the thirst of a population of roughly 150,000, particularly since Vermont was “notorious for its alcohol consumption,” Shattuck writes.
It was against that backdrop that Samuel Hitchcock, a federal district court judge in Vermont, exhorted a grand jury gathered in Windsor to rein in this flouting of federal laws. Though he acknowledged that Vermonters as a whole were not unruly — “there has been little business before this court,” he said — Hitchcock was concerned that things could change. He called for “exemplary punishment” to ward off the sort of violence and mayhem Pennsylvania had recently experienced. “Let no character feel himself above the law,” the judge said.
Law enforcement stepped up its prosecutions for unlicensed liquor sales, charging 49 defendants between 1797 and 1799, Shattuck found. Among those named was Thomas Chittenden.
In targeting Chittenden, prosecutors were trying to make an example of one of the most revered and influential men in Vermont. Like Ethan and Ira Allen, and many other European settlers in what would become Vermont, Chittenden was from Connecticut. He purchased land from the Allens’ Onion River Land Company and moved his family to Williston, where they became the first white inhabitants. During the Revolution, he and his family moved to the safer town of Arlington, where he served as a moderating influence, countering the more heated approach taken by members of the Green Mountain Boys. He served in the 1777 convention that wrote Vermont’s declaration of independence and its constitution.
Chittenden was elected as the first governor of the Vermont Republic in 1778 and, except for one year, served in that role for the rest of his life. He was governor in 1791, when Vermont joined the United States, and was governor on the July day in 1797 when a deputy U.S. marshal delivered the summons to his Williston home, which was located in what was even then known as Chittenden County.
The charges against Chittenden stemmed from an incident on March 1, 1796, during which he is said to have sold 10 gallons of wine and two gallons each of brandy, rum and gin for consumption on his unlicensed premises. The court papers don’t say the reason for what sounds like a rather large event. Shattuck writes that the timing suggests it might have been related to the heavily contested runoff for a U.S. House seat representing western Vermont. Chittenden’s son-in-law Matthew Lyon ultimately won the seat.
For some reason, federal prosecutor Charles Marsh didn’t file charges until nearly 15 months after the event. Shattuck wonders if the charges bore an “undertone of political payback.” Both Marsh and Judge Hitchcock, who would oversee the trial, were Federalists. For his part, Chittenden always ran as an independent. His son-in-law Lyon was a Democratic-Republican, the party started several years earlier by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
The Democratic-Republicans wanted a more limited federal government and for the United States to develop as an agricultural society. In contrast, the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, sought a more powerful federal government and believed the country’s future lay in industry and business.
Chittenden had many reasons to feel chagrined by the prospect of a trial, which was set for Aug. 7. Although he would only face a fine if he were found guilty, the governor must have worried how the public would react to the news. There was also the matter of the ride to Windsor, which was a not-inconsiderable 100 miles away from his Williston home. To call Vermont’s road poor at the time would be charitable. Travelers’ journals from the period are full of complaints of roads being slick or reduced to thick mud if wet, or extremely dusty if dry.
Whether on horseback or in a wagon or carriage, it was a long ride for anyone, but would have been particularly exhausting for someone like Chittenden, who had been in ill health in recent months. Just that February, the 67-year-old Chittenden had informed his lieutenant governor, Paul Brigham, that he would not be attending the upcoming legislative session. The governor wrote that for the past two weeks he had been stuck at home with “an extraordinary cold.”
Sometime in July, Chittenden wrote a letter to the public, which started “Impaired as I am, as to my health” and ended with his announcement that he would not seek re-election in the coming election. He made no mention of the looming trial.
We know little about the actual trial. We do know that it lasted only one day and that Chittenden was represented by Daniel Buck, a Federalist. We also know how it ended. A jury of Vermonters found their governor guilty of one count, selling the 10 gallons of wine without a license, and not guilty of the second count, relating to the sale of spirits. Judge Hitchcock fined Chittenden $50, as prescribed by statute, plus the cost of prosecution, which came to another $61.79. At this point, Chittenden, citing ill health, asked if he might leave the proceedings, and he departed.
In his client’s absence, Buck moved for a new trial, arguing that the jury believed that the U.S. Treasury Secretary could negate the finding of guilt and the fine. Hitchcock denied the request. The verdict stood.
One of the mysterious parts of the story, Shattuck found, was that the news of the governor’s conviction went unreported. Vermont was a highly literate society in the late 1700s, and had numerous newspapers. Why wouldn’t one of the highly partisan papers of the time use the case as proof of either the integrity of the federal government or of its arrogant overreach? Furthermore, the motivation in the case, according to Hitchcock, seems to have been that no citizen was above the law. But it is difficult to make an example of someone if their case is never made public.
By the time the trial came about, the man who federal authorities and journalists saw before them was clearly a very ill man. If Hitchcock was showing any sympathy for Chittenden, he didn’t show it. On Aug. 12, he ordered Fitch, the U.S. marshal, to collect the fine from Chittenden. And if the governor could not pay it, the marshal was instructed to “take the body of the said Thomas and him commit to the keeper of the goal in the City of Vergennes.” In other words, Chittenden would be jailed until he could pay the fine.
Fitch was never able to collect the funds, nor did he take the ailing Chittenden into custody. Less than three weeks after he was found guilty, the governor died in his sleep, or as Fitch more poetically put it, “Thomas Chittenden departed this life.”
(Note: While criminal charges against a Vermont governor are rare, Chittenden was not the only one ever charged with a crime. In 1918, Gov. Horace Graham was charged with embezzlement when money went missing while he was serving as state auditor of accounts. Graham was convicted, but his successor pardoned him. And Gov. Charles M. Smith, who was also president of the Rutland Marble Savings Bank, was arrested in 1936, on charges that he concealed embezzlement from his bank by a bookkeeper. Smith was arrested in his bank office and escorted to the courthouse to be arraigned. A jury ultimately acquitted Smith.)
Read the story on VTDigger here: Then Again: The trial of Thomas Chittenden.