Vermont's 1777 Constitution

In July of seventeen seventy-seven, while the Revolutionary War was still being lost in several directions at once, a group of men gathered at a tavern in Windsor, Vermont, and wrote a constitution for a state that did not yet legally exist. Vermont had declared itself an independent republic the previous January. No one in the Continental Congress had recognized it. They wrote the constitution anyway.

The document they produced at what is now called the Old Constitution House was unlike any other founding-era government document in the Western Hemisphere. Its first article on rights prohibited adult slavery, not as a compromise, not as a delayed provision, not as an aspiration. It simply stated that no person born free or coming to reside in Vermont could be held as a servant against their will after the age of twenty-one for men or eighteen for women. That was the law. Enslaved people who reached Vermont could claim freedom under it.

The framers also eliminated the property requirement for voting. Every adult man, regardless of what he owned, could vote in Vermont. This was democratic radicalism in an era when most of the revolutionary generation, men who were simultaneously writing documents about liberty, were carefully limiting political participation to the propertied. Vermont was not waiting for the theoretical version of freedom. It was enacting a specific legal one.

Vermont existed as an independent republic until seventeen ninety-one, when it became the fourteenth state. Its anti-slavery clause anticipated the Thirteenth Amendment by nearly ninety years. The tavern in Windsor where the constitution was drafted has been preserved. The document itself is the most radical piece of founding-era political writing produced in North America, and it belongs to a state that most people associate with covered bridges and fall foliage.