The Colony That Wasn't Invited

Jan. 15, 1777

If you look at a map of the 13 colonies, you may notice something rather odd. Between New York and New Hampshire, there is a sliver of land that wasn’t included. It looks like Vermont was simply not invited to the party — but that’s not exactly what happened.

To understand why Vermont got left out, you have to find a map from 1777. Fortunately, we have plenty of them (the colonists were quite interested in cartography), and William Faden’s map works quite well. Just north of New York, there’s a large yellow block of land named “New England.” It’s the modern home of many of our small states on the eastern seaboard — and a way for Faden to ignore the politics of the day.

On Jan. 15, 1777, 72 men met in the town of Westminster. Revolution was in the air around them and they had a choice. They could join the colonists in the South, declare independence from Great Britain, and send their militia to join George Washington’s forces; but there was a rather large problem with that option. Both New York and New Hampshire believed Westminster and the land around it was their territory. These men wanted to be considered part of a separate state, something the 13 colonies would never recognize.

So they didn’t join the 13 colonies. They declared independence from Great Britain and also from New York and New Hampshire and, feeling creative, they named their new colony “New Connecticut.”

That name lasted all of six months. When they reconvened in June in Windsor, they decided it was time to adopt a constitution, create an independent republic, and name their sliver of land Vermont.

There was quite a bit of plagiarism going on in Vermont. The constitution was closely modeled on Benjamin Franklin’s constitution for Pennsylvania. It abolished slavery, extended voting rights to males who didn’t own land, and established a currency, a postal service, and a public school system.

The new country also benefited quite a bit from the American Revolution. Great Britain was more concerned about the large mass of land it was losing than it was about a tiny sliver of land that both New York and New Hampshire claimed. Meanwhile, the colonies themselves were distracted by their efforts to get the British troops to leave and were not as concerned by the tiny revolution happening around Lake Champlain.

But when the British had gone home, Vermont became an issue again. The Continental Congress simply refused to recognize that there was an independent country between New York and New Hampshire — as far as they were concerned, the land was part of New York. Vermont’s government, apparently feeling threatened, turned back to Great Britain and asked to be readmitted as part of Canada. That did the trick.

In 1790, New York swallowed its pride and consented to drawing a boundary through the middle of Lake Champlain for $30,000. A year later, Vermont finally joined the Union (its anti-slavery position made it a political counterweight to Kentucky) and got the recognition it wanted.