Vermont History
Summer 2005
Key words and phrases:
Timothy Follett
Patrick Bryan
William Miller
The Embargo Act (1807-08)
The War of 1812
The Champlain Canal (opened 1823)
Anti-Masons
Henry Stevens/Barnet
Thaddeus Fairbanks/St. Johnsbury
The Champlain Canal
George Wyllys Benedict
William Palmer
The Anti-Masons
William Lloyd Garrison
James Marsh
Eras:
Early Republic: 1791-1823
Market Revolution: 1823-1853
Crisis of Union: 1853-1865
Gilded Age 1865-1890s
The Early Republic: the Revolutionary generation is dying off, moving on and fading away. As their ranks are replaced by a new generation, who will inherit ownership of the founders’ legacies?
When the founders’ vision is more open to interpretation (by people who weren’t there then), will it become easier to unify or harder?
Would dramatic change coming from outside forces strengthen or weaken the imagined community of Vermonters?
Was the idea of Vermont strong because it’s rigid or because it’s flexible?
Was Vermont as an idea one thing or many things? Is it Vermont’s problem, or its strength, that it’s about one thing or many things?
The fight: 1812
The trial: 1819
Key actors:
Russell Colvin: the missing man
Sally Colvin: Russell’s wife, S & J’s older sister
Jesse & Stephen Boorn: the accused
Barney Boorn: their father
Thomas Johnson: the Boorns’ neighbor
The canals dramatically accelerate the rate at which people, goods and ideas travel.
The “market revolution” is not just about a new economy; it’s about a wholly new kind of society. This change is an equation, with winners and losers. Either way, it produces among those immersed in it a period of ferocious “ultraism” (a single-minded devotion to an issue or cause)
àwhat Western Europe experiences over decades, and the East Coast over decades, Vermont experiences overnight: capitalist transformation.
The Champlain Canal initiated the era of “ultraism”: A fervent, single-minded devotion to an issue or cause.