Just examine a map, and you’ll see that Vermont and New Hampshire should get along. They look like two peas in a pod, or better yet, a yin-yang symbol.
Or perhaps we should think of them as conjoined twins in need of separation because despite their nestling appearance, the states seem uncomfortable with their proximity. Whether joking or not, many Vermonters claim they don’t like New Hampshirites as a general rule, and the feeling seems to be mutual.
Comedian Paula Poundstone noticed this dispute some years ago while performing in Burlington. When she mentioned New Hampshire, the audience hissed. She was shocked, or at least she pretended to be. (Poundstone grew up in Massachusetts, so she probably has more than an inkling about New England rivalries.)
She tried to get to the bottom of things. “How can you hate New Hampshire?” she asked. “The people there seem so nice.”
“Because it’s upside down and backwards,” offered one audience member, who clearly wouldn’t appreciate my peas-in-a-pod/yin-yang imagery.
Then an audience member in the balcony offered another possible reason: “Because of Ethan Allen and the New Hampshire Grants!” she shouted.
“Ma’am, I have no idea what you are talking about,” Poundstone replied. Laughter rippled through the theater. “It goes way back,” the woman said. That brought the house down.
Was the woman in the balcony onto something? The Vermont-New Hampshire relationship does go way back, to more than 40 years before there was a Green Mountain State.
The New Hampshire Grants business she was referring to started 275 years ago. On Jan. 3, 1749, New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth issued his first grant for a town in what we know today as Vermont but during the mid-1700s was widely known as the New Hampshire Grants.
The British government had just given New Hampshire independence from the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whose governors had always ruled that colony as well. New Hampshire carried a large debt, which it owed the Crown for defense during a series of recent wars with the French and their Indian allies.
Wentworth, the first governor New Hampshire could call its own, realized that by selling grants to the land between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain — an area that overlapped the homelands of the Abenaki and Mahican people — he could make his colony solvent. But Wentworth wasn’t just looking out for his colony’s financial interests. It was in his self-interest, too.
The grants were a way for Wentworth to enrich himself and reward his supporters. Between 1749 and 1764, he issued land grants that included 65,000 acres for himself and even more for his relatives and political allies. They had no intention of settling the land themselves. They planned to sell it to others who would settle there, and pocket the profits. The governor also kept part of the fee grantees paid for the right to settle.
Wentworth didn’t exactly hide the fact that this land grant business was largely about himself and his interests. He named many of the towns — including Colchester, Pomfret, Dorset and Guilford — after English nobles from whom he wanted to curry political favor. And he named the first town he granted after himself, which is why we have a Bennington. The name might also be a nod to his mother’s family, the Bennings.
These grants, however, were legally suspect. Colonial officials in New York believed they themselves had the sole right to grant permission to settle the land between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River.
The two colonies took their land dispute to the British Board of Trade, which administered colonial matters.
The issue was hardly the most pressing one for the board, given that Britain was locked in a conflict with the French for control of North America. So the dispute languished unresolved for years. In the meantime, Wentworth kept issuing grants. During one two-and-a-half-year period he granted 116 new towns.
Officials from the two colonies not only differed over which of them controlled the region, but also over how it should be settled. New Hampshire created towns by issuing grants to groups of about 60 people for land covering roughly 30,000 acres. These original proprietors were expected to settle the land, though in reality many tried to make a profit by reselling their rights to the land.
In contrast, New York issued land patents to much larger tracts — often three or four times the size of a typical Vermont town. Control of this land would go to one proprietor, or at most a small group, who would in turn rent the land to tenant farmers. Many holders of New Hampshire land titles felt a sense of superiority. After all, they were landowners, whereas New Yorkers were either land barons or tenant farmers eking out a living on rented land.
When it comes to land speculation, prices can indicate the likelihood a title claim will be upheld. Few investors apparently believed New Hampshire would win this dispute. Land in the Grants cost less than 1% of the price of comparable land in Maine and less than a quarter of 15 of land in well-established western Massachusetts. Those regions were clearly considered safer bets.
This is where Ethan Allen enters the story of Vermont and New Hampshire, as the woman in the balcony mentioned. Allen, his brothers and many other out-of-state speculators thought the low prices justified the considerable risk, and so bought up vast acreage in Vermont.
Wentworth was violating the Crown’s wishes by selling to speculators. Colonial governors were only supposed to issue a land grant once 50 men had agreed to settle there immediately. Also, no single landowner was supposed to receive more than 1,500 acres. Wentworth’s land grants were blatantly about enriching speculators rather than about expanding the empire.
In 1764, the Board of Trade finally issued its opinion: It sided with New York. The boundary between New York and New Hampshire, the board declared, was the Connecticut River, not Lake Champlain.
New York officials reacted swiftly to the news, trying to catch up with New Hampshire in doling out land grants. Soon they had issued grants covering 174,000 acres. Not coincidentally, most of that land had already been granted by New Hampshire. New York was calling New Hampshire’s bluff.
New York offered to let New Hampshire grant holders keep their titles, if they paid a fee for their land to New York. The fee was 10 times what the titleholders had already paid New Hampshire for the land.
In 1767, New Hampshire grant holders hired an agent in London to appeal their case to the Crown. While the case was being reconsidered, the king’s Privy Council ordered New York officials to stop granting land: “(D)o not upon pain of his majesty’s highest displeasure, presume to make any grant whatsoever” until “his majesty’s further pleasure shall be known.”
New York officials obeyed, initially. But when a decision seemed unlikely anytime soon, they decided to risk the king’s displeasure, and resumed issuing grants with abandon, eventually selling titles to nearly 2 million acres.
So, shouldn’t Ethan Allen and his allies have hated New Yorkers instead of New Hampshirites? Well, they did. The term “Yorkers” was among the worst insults in Ethan Allen’s salty lexicon.
Things turned particularly ugly in October 1769, when roughly 60 Bennington settlers terrorized a team of New York surveyors, sending them fleeing. Such intimidation of surveyors and settlers became common. Allen and the Green Mountains Boys used threats, kidnappings and arson to drive out New York titleholders.
New York’s legislature responded in 1774 by passing an anti-rioting law and giving officials the right to kill to enforce it. The fight over Vermont seemed to be coming to a head. But the territorial struggle was soon overshadowed by outside events. The American Revolution had erupted.
Taking advantage of the disruption, New Hampshire Grant titleholders declared independence in 1777 not just from British rule, but also from New York, and New Hampshire for that matter. The preamble to the Vermont Constitution, written largely by Allen’s youngest brother, Ira, dwelled far more on the perceived injustices inflicted by Yorkers than by the British.
In 1790, following the Revolution, New York agreed to stop using its political clout to block Vermont’s admission to the United States — only after Vermont paid it the then-hefty sum of $30,000. Vermont officially became the 14th state the following year.
Today, Vermont has many differences with New Hampshire. We can argue over which state has the better approach to government — New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” versus Vermont’s “Freedom and Unity” – about who has the better quality of life or who has to suffer through the tougher winters.
But sorry, woman in the balcony, whatever Vermont’s issues are with New Hampshire, they don’t spring from the Grants. This state might never have existed, if not for New Hampshire’s cunning and self-serving governor, Benning Wentworth.
If you want to talk about colonial grudges, take a look at how Vermont settlers were treated by New Yorkers, and vice versa. Now there is a rivalry among neighbors that goes way back.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Then Again: Vermont and New Hampshire, a long rivalry.