The Vermont Republic and the First Constitution to Ban Adult Slavery

On January fifteenth, seventeen seventy-seven, while the Revolutionary War was going badly on every major front, delegates from the New Hampshire Grants settlements gathered at a tavern in Westminster and declared themselves a free and independent state. They called it the Republic of New Connecticut at first, then changed the name. Vermont. The French word for green mountain. The Green Mountain state, declaring itself a nation by the votes of men whose legal standing to do so was, to put it charitably, contested.

Six months later, in July of seventeen seventy-seven, delegates met at the Old Constitution House in Windsor to draft a governing charter. What they wrote was unlike anything else produced in the founding era.

The Vermont Constitution of seventeen seventy-seven prohibited the enslavement of adults. The exact language stated that no person born in this country or brought from over sea ought to be holden by law to serve any person as a servant, slave, or apprentice after arriving at the age of twenty-one. This was not aspirational. It was a legal prohibition, enforceable under Vermont law. The same clause set freedom at eighteen for women, and enforcement was uneven. Vermont was also among the first governments to drop the property requirement for voting, extending the franchise to adult men regardless of what they owned.

The Continental Congress refused to recognize the Vermont Republic. New York still claimed the territory. New Hampshire had competing interests. Vermont spent fourteen years as a functioning, self-governing republic, minting its own copper coins, running its own courts, operating its own postal service, and negotiating separately with the British in a way that alarmed the Continental leadership.

In March of seventeen ninety-one, Vermont formally became the fourteenth state of the United States. The price of admission included paying thirty thousand dollars to New York to settle the disputed land claims. Fourteen years of independent governance, and in the end, the entry fee was cash.