Seeds of Discontent
Review by Don Miller

The first book highlighted in our four-year reading program is Seeds of Discontent: The Deep Roots of the American Revolution, 1650-1750 by J. Revell Carr.

For most of us, the period between 1620 and 1770 is somewhat of a mystery. How did we get from Plymouth Rock in 1620 to the Boston Massacre in 1770?

In Seeds of Discontent, J. Revell Carr argues that in America, those seeds were sown from 1650 to 1750. And they were well-rooted many years before Vermont was settled by a small band of pioneers from Massachusetts in 1761.

Most of Vermont’s early settlers came from the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and shared the same deep roots. These colonists did not come to America in revolt against the Crown.

When independence was declared in 1776 and the American Dream was born, only a minority of Americans were ready to leave the Crown. It was yet another decade before the American Dream was embodied in the words of the U.S. Constitution.

The early settlers left England not to form a new nation, but in pursuit of religious freedom, either outside the Church of England (Pilgrims) or within it (Puritans). They were granted royal charters that laid out the terms by which they were to govern themselves as colonies.

At the same time, the Crown awarded licenses to groups of adventurers and speculators who came to the colonies seeking wealth. Their success brought extraordinary autonomy and liberties inconceivable back in England. The Crown benefited from a “hands-off” approach to colonization.

Carr describes this relationship as one of “benign neglect.” Largely left to set up their own government, the colonies struggled; making new lives unaided in remote, often inhospitable conditions fostered a strong sense of independence in these hardy immigrants. And eventually Britain’s neglect, benign or otherwise, compelled their distant subjects to a new mindset altogether: “[T]he cumulative effect of more than a hundred years of British disrespect, mismanagement, and exploitation prepared the minds of the colonists for revolution.”

Beyond that, the liberties the colonists had grown to cherish were gradually replaced by harsh government policies. Matters reached a decisive turning point when Edmund Andros was made Colonial Governor in 1686.

Over a three year-period, Andros snatched away the relative autonomy the Massachusetts Bay Colony had enjoyed. Their charter was revoked, and the election of their representative legislature suspended. The Royal Navy maintained a menacing presence in Boston Harbor. Redcoats walked the streets. The Navigation Acts undercut the free trade by which Massachusetts had gained financial strength. The Acts created a steady income for the Crown, at the expense of the colonial merchants.

Other colonies faced similar frustrations, but it was in Boston that the colonial militias faced off against the redcoats. Bostonians were ready to take up arms to expel the king’s governor and other officials.

On April 18th of 1689, the people of Boston rose up to confront Governor Andros. He had just returned from a military expedition against Native Americans in Maine, and was holding a meeting in Boston’s Town Hall.

Outside, armed mobs formed on both ends of King’s Street and headed toward the Hall. Andros narrowly escaped to the relative safety of nearby Fort Hill, then under the protection of British soldiers.

The colonists seized the hated Secretary Edward Randolph, several justices, the sheriff, and other officials, leading them off to jail. Over the next two days, with the supporting power of a large militia, Boston militias succeeded in negotiating the surrender of Fort Hill, the garrison at the Castle, the HMS Rose, and the entire force of redcoats.

The successful revolt quickly engulfed all the colonies. But this revolution was not complete, and tensions would continue to fester for another 80 years.

In the meantime, a series of European wars spilled over into the colonies.

First came King William’s War (in Europe, the “War of Grand Alliance”), which produced an unlikely heroine in Hannah Dustin, of Haverhill, Massachusetts. (Hannah is rumored to be a distant cousin of Bennington’s own Janet Fabricius, the widow of Dr. Richard Fabricius.)

Hannah was taken from her home by Abenaki Indians aligned with the French in the spring of 1697. Hannah, her week-old infant, and nurse were to be taken to Canada. About six weeks into the trek, while camped on an island in the Merrimack River, Hannah and the nurse escaped, killing all of their captives with hatchets while they slept.

Then in 1703, Queen Anne’s War (in Europe, the “War of Spanish Succession”) led to the capture of over 100 residents of nearby Deerfield, Massachusetts. The threat of attack from the native Americans put a damper on thoughts of development north of Massachusetts until the end of the French and Indian Wars (in Europe, the ”Seven Years War”).

In the mid-1700s, two important forces were set in motion that would greatly affect Vermont’s Revolutionary War history. They were spurred by two significant migrations —  one in western Massachusetts and one western Connecticut — and they occurred in the same year, 1738.

Pressured by their arch enemies the Mohawks, the Mohegans fled their homelands in the Catskills along the Hudson River, eastward toward Massachusetts. In 1738, the Congregational minister John Sargeant formed a mission to help the Mohegan and incorporated the new town of Stockbridge, making two of the Mohegans selectmen in the new town. Thirty-nine years later, a group of “Stockbridge Indians” would support the Patriots in the defeat of the British at the Battle of Bennington.

At the very same moment, thirty-five miles to the south, John Allen led a small group of Puritan settlers from Litchfield to Cornwall in Connecticut. John became the town’s first Moderator and helped recruit the town’s first minister.

John’s son, Ethan, was one year old. When his father died in 1755, Ethan, being the eldest son, took over his father’s farm and debts, giving up his plan to attend Yale. He went into business in Salisbury, Connecticut before turning to hunting and trapping in Vermont in 1767. He formed the Green Mountain Boys in 1770 and led the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775.

As readers will see, Seeds of Discontent fills in a lot of Vermont’s backstory from the turbulent years between European arrival to the forging of a new nation.