The Westminster Massacre: Vermont's First Blood

On the night of March thirteenth, seventeen seventy-five, nearly four weeks before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, something happened at the courthouse in Westminster, Vermont, that some historians have called the first bloodshed of the American Revolution.

The land that would become Vermont was, in seventeen seventy-five, disputed territory. New York claimed jurisdiction over the region called the New Hampshire Grants, but the settlers who had carved farms out of the Connecticut River valley had little patience for New York courts, New York judges, or New York sheriffs. When a New York-appointed judge arrived in Westminster to hold court, local farmers organized. A crowd numbering somewhere between eighty and ninety men occupied the courthouse the night before the session, determined to prevent it from opening.

Sheriff William Patterson rode to Brattleboro, a stronghold of New York loyalists, and returned with some sixty to seventy armed men. In the darkness, with no warning, the posse opened fire into the crowded courthouse. William French, twenty-two years old, was shot in the head and killed. Another man, Daniel Houghton, died of his wounds shortly after. Others were wounded. The survivors were dragged out and imprisoned.

The reaction was swift. More than four hundred people from across the region converged on Westminster within days. They freed the prisoners, seized the judge and his staff, and took control of the building. French was buried with honors, and the fury his death generated rippled through the Connecticut River valley for months.

The following year, the settlers chose that same Westminster courthouse as the site of their declaration that Vermont was now an independent republic, no longer a New York county, no longer a colonial grant, but a free state. Vermont's constitution, adopted in Windsor in seventeen seventy-seven, became the first in the Americas to abolish adult slavery.

French's gravestone in Westminster reads that he was killed by a number of rioters in the service of the king. Whether Westminster or Lexington deserves the title of first battle, the blood shed here helped make Vermont possible.