We have recently journeyed through a portion of this free
state, and it is not all imagination in us, that sees, in its bold scenery,
— its uninfected, inland position, its mountainous, but fertile and
verdant surface, the secret of the noble and antislavery predisposition of its
people. They are located for freedom. Liberty's home is on their Green
Mountains. Their farmer-republic no where touches the ocean — “the highway of
the” world's crimes, as well as its “nations.” It has no seaport for the importation
of slavery, or the exportation of its own highland republicanism.
Vermont is accordingly the earliest anti-slavery state, and should slavery ever
prevail over this nation to its utter subjugation, the last, lingering
footsteps of retiring liberty will be seen — not, as Daniel Webster said, in
the proud old commonwealth of Massachusetts, about Bunker hill and Faneuil
hall, (places long since deserted of freedom) — but wailing, like Jephtha's
daughter, among the “hollows,” and along the sides of the Green Mountains.
Vermont shows gloriously at this autumn season. Frost has
gently laid hands on her exuberant vegetation, tinging her rockmaple woods,
without abating the deep verdure of her herbage. Every where along her peopled
hollows and her bold hill-slopes and summits is alive with green, while her
endless hard-wood forests are uniformed with all the hues of
early fall — richer than the regimentals of the kings that glittered in the
train of Napoleon on the confines of Poland, when he lingered there on the last
outposts of summer, before plunging into the snow-drifts of the North — more
gorgeous than the “array” of Saladin's lifeguard in the wars of the Crusaders —
or of “Solomon in all his glory” — decked in all colors and hues, but still the
hues of life. Vegetation touched, but not dead, or if killed, not bereft yet
of “signs of life.” “Decay's effacing
fingers” had not yet “swept the ‘hills,’ where beauty lingers.” All looked
fresh as growing foliage. Vermont frosts don't seem to be “killing frosts.”
They only change aspects of beauty. The mountain pastures, verdant to the
peaks, and over the peaks of the high, steep hills, were covered with the
amplest feed, and clothed with countless sheep; — the hay-fields heavy with
second crop, in some partly cut and abandoned, as if in very weariness and
satiety, blooming with honey-suckle, contrasting strangely with the
colors on the woods — the fat cattle and the long-tailed colts and close-built
Morgans wallowing in it, up to the eyes, or the cattle down to rest, with full
bellies, by ten in the morning. Fine but narrow roads wound along among the
hills — free, almost entirely, of stone, and so smooth as to be safe for the
most rapid driving — made of their rich, dark, powder-looking soil. Beautiful
villages or scattered settlements breaking upon the delighted view, on the
meandering way, making the ride a continued scene of excitement and animation.
The air fresh, free and wholesome, — no steaming of the fever and ague of the
West, or the rank slaveholding of the South,—the road almost dead level
for miles and miles among mountains that lay over the land like the great
swells of the sea, and looking, in the prospect, as though there could be no
passage. On the whole, we never, in our limited travel, experienced any thing
like it, and we commend any one, given to despondency or dumps, to a ride, in
beginning of October, chaise-top back, fleet horses tandem, fresh from
the generous fodder and thorough-going groomage of Steel's tavern, a forenoon
Tide, from White-river Sharon, through Tunbridge, to Chelsea Hollow. There's
nothing on Salem turnpike like the road, and nothing, any where, a match for “the
lay of the land” and the ever-varying, animating landscape.
We can't praise Vermonters for their fences or their barns,
and it seems to us their out-houses and door-yards hardly correspond with the
well-built dwellings. But they have no stones for wall — no red oak or granite
for posts, or pine growth for rails and boards in their hard-wood forests, and
we queried, as we observed their “insufficient fences” and lack of pounds,
whether such barriers as our side of the Connecticut we have to rear about an occasional
patch of feed, could be necessary in a country where no “creatures” appeared
to run in the road, and where there was not choice enough in field and pasture,
to make it an object for any body to be breachy, or to stray — and where
every hoof seemed to have its hands full at home. Poor fences
there seemed to answer all purposes of good ones among us, where every blade of
grass has to be watched and guarded from the furtive voracity of hungry New
Hampshire stock.
The farmers looked easy and care-free. We saw none that
seemed back-broken with hard work, or brow-wrinkled with fear of coming to
want. How do your crops come in, sir? “O, middlin’.” — How much wheat? “Well,
about three hundred. Wheat han't filled well.” — How much hay do you cut? “Well,
sir, from eighty to one hundred ton.” Corn? “Over four hundred; corn is good.”
How many potatoes? “Well, I don't know; we've dug from eight hundred to one
thousand.” How many cattle do you keep? “Only thirty odd head this year; cattle
are scarce.” Sheep? “Three hundred and odd.” Horse kind? “Five,” and so on. And
yet the Vermont farmers are leaving for the West.
The only thing we saw, that looked anti-republican, was
their magnificent State House, which gleams among their hills more like some
ancient Greek temple, than the agency house of a self-governed
democracy. It is a very imposing object. Of the severest and most compact
proportions, its form and material (the solid granite) comporting capitally
with the surrounding scenery. About one hundred and fifty feet long, and some
eighty or one hundred wide, we should judge, an oblong square, with a central
projection in front, the roof of it supported on a magnificent row of granite
pillars — the top a dome without spire. It looks as if it had been translated
from old Thebes or Athens, and planted down among Ethan Allen's Green
Mountains. It stands on a ledge of rock; close behind it a hill, somewhat rocky
and rugged for Vermont; and before it, descends an exceedingly fine and
extensive yard, fenced with granite and iron in good keeping with the building,
the ground covered with the richest verdure, broken into wide walks, and
planted with young trees. It is a very costly structure; but Vermont can afford
it, though we hold to cheap and very plain State houses, inasmuch as the
seat of government with us is, or should be, at the people's homes. We want to
see the dwelling-houses of the “owners of the soil,” the palaces of the
country. There the sovereignty of the country should hold its court, and there
its wealth should be expended. Let despots and slaveholders build their pompous
public piles and their pyramids of Egypt.
The apartments and furniture of the State House within are
very rich, and, we should judge, highly commodious. The Representatives' Hall a
semicircular, with cushioned seats, a luxury hardly suited to the humor of the
stout old Aliens and Warners of early times, and comporting but slightly with
the hardy habits of the Green Mountain boys, who now come there, and in brief
session pass anti-slavery resolutions, to the dismay of the haughty South, and
the shame of the neighboring dough-faced North.
Their legislature was about to sit — and an anti-slavery
friend, one of their state officers, informed us that Alvan Stewart was
expected there, to attend their anti-slavery anniversary. We should have
rejoiced to stay and hear him handle southern slavery in that Vermont State
House. — We trust yet to hear George Thompson there. It shall be our voice,
when he comes again, that he go directly into Vermont; that he land there
from Canada. Let him leave England in some man-of-war, that hoists the “meteor
flag,” and mounts guns only in chase of the slave ship, and enter the continent
by way of the gulf of St. Lawrence. Let him tarry some months among the farmers
of Vermont, and tell them the whole mysteries of slavery, and infuse into their
yeoman-hearts his own burning abhorrence of it, till they shall loathe
slaveholding as they loathe the most dastardly thieving, and with one stern
voice, from the Connecticut to Champlain, demand its annihilation. We would
have him go into the upland farming towns — not to the shores of the lake,
where the steamboat touches, to land the plague of pro-slavery — nor to the
capital, where “property and standing” might turn up the nose at the negro's
equal humanity, or the vassals of “the northern man with southern principles” veto
the anti-slavery meeting with a drunken mob — but to Randolph Hill, to
Danville Green, the swells of Peacham, and the plains of St. Johnsbury, to
Strafford Hollow and the vales of Tunbridge and Sharon — William Slade's
Middlebury, and up among James Bell's Caledonia hills. Let the South learn that
George Thompson Was Stirring The Vermonters
Up Among The Green Mountains. See if Alabama would send a requisition
for him to Anti-slavery Governor Jennison, or Anti-slavery Lieut. Gov. Camp.
And what response, think ye, she would get back? — a Gilchrist report — or the
thundering judgment rather of stout old Justice Harrington to the shivering
slave-chaser— “Show Me Your Bill Of Sale Of This Man From The Almighty!” [“]A
decision,” said a judge of the present truly upright and learned bench of that
state, “no less honorable to Judge Harrington's head than his heart, and
Good Law.”
Let George Thompson land in Vermont, and stay there,
till other states shall learn the courage to guaranty him his rights within
their own borders, if they have not learned it already for shame. He can do
anti-slavery's work, and all of it, in Vermont. He need go no farther south.
They can hear him distinctly, every word he says, from Randolph Green
clear down to Texas. John C. Calhoun would catch every blast of his bugle; and
assassin Preston startle at its note, in the rotunda at Charleston. And by and
by, when every Vermont farmer shall have heard his voice, and shaken his hand
and welcomed him to his hearth-stone, let him come down into Montpelier and
shake that granite State House; and mayhap to fair Burlington, to that
University — where the colored student can now enjoy, unrestricted, all the
equal privileges of “field
recitation;” where he may come, under cloud of night, to gaze
at the stars on the very same common with the young New-Yorker, and the son of
the rich merchant of this fair city of the lake, or accompany them, in broad
day, on an excursion of trigonometry, in the open fields. The doors of that
college chapel would open wide to George Thompson, after the Green Mountain
boys had once heard him speak.
But we are lingering too long for our readers or ourselves,
m this noble state. We hasten back to our own native, sturdy quarry of rocks
and party politics.
SOURCE: Collection from the Miscellaneous Writings
of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, Second Edition, p. 34-8 which states it was
published in the Herald of Freedom of October 20, 1838.
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