Vermont Part 18

When the acreage of meadow land and grain field had broadened beyond ready harvesting by the resident yeomen, swarms of Canadian laborers came flocking over the border in gangs of two or three, baggy-breeched and moccasined habitants, embarked in rude carts drawn by s.h.a.ggy Canadian ponies. After a month or two of haymaking and harvesting, they jogged homeward with their earnings, whereunto were often added some small pilferings, for their fingers were as light as their hearts. This annual wave of inundation from the north ceased to flow with the general introduction of the mowing-machine; and the place in the meadow once held by the rank of habitants picturesque in garb, swinging their scythes in unison to some old song sung centuries ago in France, has been usurped by the utilitarian device that, with incessant chirr as of ten thousand sharded wings, mingling with the music of the bobolinks, sweeps down the broad acres of daisies, herdsgra.s.s, and clover.

Many Canadians returned with their families to live in the land which they had spied out in their summer incursions, and so in one way and another the influx continued till they have become the most numerous of Vermont's foreign population.

For years the State was infested with an inferior cla.s.s of these people, who plied the vocation of professional beggars. They made regular trips through the country in bands consisting of one or more families, with horses, carts, and rickety wagons, and a retinue of curs, soliciting alms of pork, potatoes, and breadstuffs at every farmhouse they came to, and pilfering when opportunity offered. In the large towns there were depots where the proceeds of their beggary and theft were disposed of.

They were an abominable crew of vagabonds, robust, lazy men and boys, slatternly women with litters of filthy brats, and all as detestable as they were uninteresting. They worked their beats successfully, till their pitiful tales of sickness, burnings-out, and journeyings to friends in distant towns were worn threadbare, and then they gradually disappeared, no one knows whither.

Almost to a man, the Canadians who settled in Vermont were devout Catholics when they came; but after they had been scattered for a few years among such a preponderant Protestant community, most of them were held very loosely by the bonds of mother church. Except they were residents of the larger towns they seldom saw a priest, and enjoyed a comfortable immunity from fasting, penance, and all ecclesiastic exactions on stomach or purse. On New Year's Day, perhaps the members of the family confessed to the venerable grandsire, but after that suffered no religious inconvenience until the close of the year. Now and then one strayed quite out of the fold and took his place boldly among the heretics, and apparently did not thereby forfeit the fellows.h.i.+p of his more faithful compatriots. But when the flock had become large enough to pay for the shearing, shepherds of the true faith were not wanting. With that steadfast devotion to the interests of their church which has always characterized the Catholic priesthood, these men began their work without ostentation, and have succeeded in drawing into the domination of their church a large majority of the Canadian-born inhabitants of Vermont and of their descendants, as completely as if they were yet citizens of the province, which Parkman truly says, is "one of the most priest-ridden communities of the modern world."

What this leaven may finally work in the Protestant ma.s.s with which it has become incorporated is a question that demands more attention than it has yet received.

The character of these people is not such as to inspire the highest hope for the future of Vermont, if they should become the most numerous of its population. The affiliation with Anglo-Americans of a race so different in traits, in traditions, and in religion must necessarily be slow, and may never be complete.

No great love for their adopted country can be expected of a people that evinces so little for that of its origin as lightly to cast aside names that proudly blazon the pages of French history for poor translations or weak imitations of them in English, nor can broad enlightenment be hoped for of a race so dominated by its priesthood.

Vermont, as may be seen, has given of her best for the building of new commonwealths, to her own loss of such material as has made her all that her sons, wherever found, are so proud of,--material whose place no alien drift from northward or over seas can ever fill.

FOOTNOTES:

[106] "The first president of this a.s.sociation was Guerdon S. Hubbard, a Vermonter, who was instrumental in founding and establis.h.i.+ng the city of Chicago, who went there in 1819, and later, ten years afterwards, when Chicago only had a fort and one house."--George Edmund Foss.

[107] S. E. Howard.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"THE STAR THAT NEVER SETS."

There is little to interest any but the politician in the political history of the State during the uneventful years of three decades following the War of 1812. At the next election after the close of the war the Republican party proved strong enough to elect to the governors.h.i.+p its candidate, Jonas Galusha, who was continued in that office for the five succeeding terms. When, in consequence of the abduction of Morgan, the opposing parties were arrayed as Masonic and anti-Masonic in the battle of ballots, the Masonic party of Vermont went to the wall.

When the two great parties of the nation rallied under their distinctive banners as Whigs and Democrats, Vermont took its place with the first, and held it steadfastly alike through defeats and infrequent triumphs of the party until its dissolution. So constantly was its vote given to the state and national candidates of the Whigs that it gained the t.i.tle of "The Star that never sets."

From the adoption of its Const.i.tution[108] in 1777, which prohibited slave-holding, Vermont has been the opponent of slavery. The brave partisan leader, Captain Ebenezer Allen, only expressed the freedom-loving sentiment of the Green Mountain Boys when he declared he was "conscientious that it is not right in the sight of G.o.d to keep slaves," and set free those taken prisoners with the British troops on Lake Champlain.

It was natural that among the descendants of those people, the inhabitants of a mountain land such as ever nourishes the spirit of liberty and wherein slavery has never found a congenial soil, there should be found many earnest men ready to join the crusade which, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Garrison, began in 1833 to a.s.sail the great national sin with a storm of denunciation.

They denounced the scheme of African colonization, which had a respectable following in Vermont, as a device of the slave power to rid itself of the dangerous element of free blacks, under pretense of Christianizing Africa while here gradual emanc.i.p.ation should be brought about; and thus they aroused the antagonism of the body of the clergy, who had been hoodwinked by the pious plausibility of the plan.

A line of the Underground Railroad held its hidden way through Vermont, along which many a dark-skinned pa.s.senger secretly traveled, concealed during the day in the quiet stations, at night pa.s.sing from one to another, helped onward by friendly hands till he reached Canada and gained the protection of that government which in later years was to become the pa.s.sive champion of his rebellious master.

The star-guided fugitive might well feel an a.s.surance of liberty when his foot touched the soil that in the old days had given freedom to Dinah Mattis and her child, and draw a freer breath in the State whose judge in later years demanded of a master, before his runaway slave would be given up to him, that he should produce a bill of sale from the Almighty.[109]

The abolitionists were no more given than other reformers to the choice of soft words in their objurgations of what they knew to be a sin against G.o.d and their fellow-men; yet they were men of peace, almost without exception,--non-resistants,--and freedom of speech was their right. It is humiliating to remember that there was an element in this State base enough to oppose them by mob violence. An anti-slavery meeting convened at the capital in 1835 was broken up by a ruffianly rabble, who pelted the speakers with rotten eggs, and became so violent in their demonstrations that it was unsafe for the princ.i.p.al speaker, Rev. Samuel J. May of Boston, to leave the building, till a Quaker lady quietly stepped forward, and, taking his arm, walked out with him through the turbulent crowd, which, though noisy and threatening, had decency enough to respect a lady and her escort. There were like disturbances in some other Vermont towns where the abolitionists gathered to advocate their cause, but the intensity of bitterness against them gradually wore away, and they continued to gain adherents, till the question of the extension of slave territory became the all-absorbing subject of political controversy.

In 1820 the representatives of Vermont in Congress opposed the admission of Missouri as a slave State, though her senators were divided. In 1825 the legislature pa.s.sed resolutions deprecating slavery as an evil, and declaring, "This General a.s.sembly will accord in any measures which may be adopted by the general government for its abolition in the United States that are consistent with the right of the people and the general harmony of the States." Ten years later, in the same year that the anti-slavery meeting was broken up by the rabble in the very shadow of the capitol, the legislature a.s.sembled there declared, that "neither Congress nor the state governments have any const.i.tutional right to abridge the free expression of opinions, or the transmission of them through the public mail," and that Congress possessed the power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.

In 1841 the anti-slavery sentiment had so far increased in the State as to take political form, and votes enough were cast for the candidate of the Liberty party for governor to prevent an election by the people. Two years later the a.s.sembly enacted that no officer or citizen of the State should seize or a.s.sist in the seizure of "any person for the reason that he is or may be claimed as a fugitive slave," and that no officer or citizen should transport or a.s.sist in the transportation of such person to any place in or out of the State; and that, for like reason, no person should be imprisoned "in any jail or other building belonging to the State, or to any county, town, city, or person therein." When Congress in 1850, after a fierce storm of debate, pa.s.sed the odious Fugitive Slave Law, which made United States marshals, and at their behest every citizen of the republic, servants of the arrogant slave power, and withheld from whoever might be claimed as a slave the right of testifying in his own behalf, Vermont was faithful to freedom and the spirit of her Const.i.tution. Her legislature of the same year pa.s.sed an act requiring States' attorneys "diligently and faithfully to use all lawful means to protect, defend, and procure to be discharged, every such person so arrested or claimed as a fugitive slave," and judicial and executive officers in their respective counties to inform their State's attorney of the intended arrest of any person claimed as a fugitive slave.

In many of the Northern States slave-hunting waxed hot and eager under the national law, but the hunters never attempted to seize their prey in the land of the Green Mountain Boys, though there were fugitive slaves living there, and an occasional pa.s.senger still fared along the mysterious course of the Underground Railroad.

Consequent upon the annexation of Texas came war with Mexico,--a war waged wholly in the interest of slavery extension, and forced by the great republic upon her younger sister, weak and distracted by swiftly recurring revolutions.

Having a purpose so opposite to the interest and sentiment of the people of Vermont, no possible appeal to arms could have been less popular among them. Yet upon the call of President Polk for volunteers, a company was soon recruited in the State. Under Captain Kimball of Woodstock, it formed a part of the 9th regiment, whose colonel was Truman B. Ransom, a Vermonter, who had been a military instructor in the Norwich University, and in a similar inst.i.tution at the South. The 9th was attached to the brigade of General Pierce, in General Pillow's division, under General Scott. The army of Americans, always outnumbered, often three to one, by the enemy, could not have fought more bravely in a better cause; and the little band of Green Mountain Boys gave gallant proof that, in the more than thirty years which had elapsed since they were last called forth to battle, the valor of their race had not abated. Colonel Ransom fell while leading his regiment in a charge at Chepultepec; and the Vermont company was one of the foremost at the storming of the castle, it being claimed for Captain Kimball and Sergeant-Major Fairbanks that they hauled down the Mexican colors, and raised the stars and stripes above the captured fortress.[110]

Upon the dissolution of the Whig party, the least subservient to the slavery propagandists of the two great political parties in the North, Vermont at once took her place under the newly unfurled banner of the Republicans,--a place which she has ever since steadfastly maintained through victory and defeat. In 1856 her vote was cast for Fremont, and four years later, by an increased majority, for Lincoln. Few who cast their votes at this memorable election foresaw that its result would so soon precipitate the inevitable conflict. But five brief months pa.s.sed, and all were awakened to the terrible reality of war.

FOOTNOTES:

[108] E. P. Walton, in _Governor and Council_, vol. i. p. 92, says, "This was the first emanc.i.p.ation act in America."

[109] Theophilus Harrington.

[110] Dana's _History of Woodstock_.

CHAPTER XXIV.

VERMONT IN THE WAR OF THE REBELLION.

The dreariness of the long Northern winter was past. The soft air of spring again breathed through the peaceful valleys, wafting the songs of returning birds, the voice of unfettered streams, and the sound of reawakened husbandry. Though far off in the Southern horizon the cloud of rebellion lowered and threatened, men went about their ordinary affairs, still hoping for peace, till the tranquillity of those April days was broken by the bursting storm of civil war.

With the echo of its first thunder came President Lincoln's call for troops, and Vermont responded with a regiment of her sons, as brave, though their lives had been lapped in peace, as the war-nurtured Green Mountain Boys of old. The military spirit had been but feebly nursed during many tranquil years, yet, at the first breath of this storm, it blazed up in a fervor of patriotic fire such as never before had been witnessed.

At the outbreak of the Rebellion, no Northern State was less prepared for war than Vermont. Except in the feeble existence of four skeleton regiments, her militia was unorganized, the men subject to military service not being even enrolled. Some of the uniformed companies were without guns, others drilled with ancient flintlocks; and the State possessed but five hundred serviceable percussion muskets, and no tents nor camp equipage; while the Champlain a.r.s.enal at Vergennes, like other United States a.r.s.enals in the North, had been stripped by Floyd, the Secretary of War, of everything but a few superannuated muskets and useless cannon. The continual outflow of emigration had drawn great numbers of the stalwart young men of the rural population to the Western States, in whose regiments many of them were already enlisting, and she had not the large towns nor floating population which in most other States contributed so largely the material for armies.

The governor, Erastus Fairbanks, immediately issued a proclamation, announcing the outbreak of rebellion, and the President's call for volunteers, and summoning the legislature to a.s.semble on the 25th of April. His proclamation bore even date with that of the President, and is believed to have antedated by at least a day the like proclamation of any other governor.[111]

In the brief interval between the summoning and the a.s.sembling of the legislature, in all parts of the State men were drilling and volunteering. Banks and individuals tendered their money, railroad and steamboat companies offered free transportation for troops and munitions of war, and patriotic women were making uniforms of "Vermont gray" for the ten companies of militia chosen on the 19th of April to form the 1st regiment.

The train which brought the legislators to the capital was welcomed by a national salute from the two cannon captured at Bennington. Without distinction of party, senators and representatives met the imperative demands of the time with such resolute purpose that in forty-eight hours they had accomplished the business for which they were a.s.sembled, and had adjourned. A bill was unanimously pa.s.sed appropriating one million dollars for war expenses. Provision was made for raising six more regiments for two years' service, for it was forecast by the legislature that the war was not likely to be confined to one campaign, nor an insignificant expenditure of money. Each private was to be paid by the State seven dollars a month in addition to the thirteen dollars offered by the United States. If his aged parents or wife and children should come to want while he was fighting his country's battles, they were not to become town paupers, but the wards of the commonwealth.

The ten companies were rapidly filled, their equipment was completed, and they a.s.sembled at Rutland on the 2d of May, with John W. Phelps as colonel, a native of Vermont, who had served with distinction in the Mexican War as lieutenant, and captain in the regular army. No fitter choice could have been made of a commander for the regiment than this brave and conscientious soldier, who, though a strict disciplinarian, exercised such fatherly care over his men that he won their love and respect.

After some delay the regiment was mustered into the United States service on the 8th. It was the opinion of the Adjutant-General that there were troops enough already at Was.h.i.+ngton for its defense, and that the 1st Vermont might better be held in its own State for a while. But when General Scott learned that a regiment of Green Mountain Boys, commanded by Phelps, was awaiting marching orders, he wished them sent on at once. "I want your Vermont regiments, all of them. I remember the Vermont men on the Niagara frontier," and he remembered Captain Phelps at Contreras and Cherubusco. A special messenger was dispatched to Rutland with orders to march, and on the 9th of May, the eighty-sixth anniversary of the mustering of Allen's mountaineers for the attack of Ticonderoga, this regiment of worthy inheritors of their home and name set forth for Fortress Monroe. There were heavy hearts in the cheering throng that bade them G.o.dspeed and farewell,--heavier than they bore, for to them was appointed action: to those they left behind, only waiting in hope and fear and prayer for the return of their beloved. On its pa.s.sage through New York, the regiment attracted much admiration for the stature and soldierly bearing of its members, each of whom wore in his gray cap, as proudly as a knight his plume, the evergreen badge of his State.

Each succeeding regiment bore this emblem to the front, to be drenched in blood, to be scathed in the fire of war, to wither in the pestilential air of Southern prisons, but never to be dishonored.

"Who is that tall Vermont colonel?" one spectator asked, pointing to the towering form of Colonel Phelps.

"That," answered another, "is old Ethan Allen resurrected!"

The 1st was stationed at Fortress Monroe, and remained there and in the vicinity during its term of service. At Big Bethel, in the first engagement of the war worthy the name of a battle, it bore bravely its part, though the ill-planned attack resulted in failure. The throngs of fugitive slaves who sought refuge with Colonel Phelps were not returned to their masters, but allowed to come and go as they pleased, and thereafter were safe when they had found their way into the camps of Vermonters, though they were given up by the officers of other volunteers and of the regulars. General Butler, in command at Fortress Monroe, a.s.suming that they were contraband of war, refused to return them to slavery, and put them to efficient service in the construction of fortifications. The regiment returned to Vermont early in August, and was mustered out, but of its members five out of every six reentered the service in regiments subsequently raised, and two hundred and fifty held commissions. Their colonel, now appointed brigadier-general, remaining at Fortress Monroe, greatly regretted their departure. "A regiment the like of which will not soon be seen again," he said to Colonel Washburn.

Yet, before the leaves had fallen that were greening the Vermont hills when the 1st regiment left them, five other regiments in no wise inferior had gone to the front, to a more active service and bloodier fields.