Windsor: Where Vermont Was Born and Slavery Was First Banned
Near Woodstock, Vermont
Windsor, Vermont, calls itself the Birthplace of Vermont, and the claim holds up. On July eighth, seventeen seventy-seven, in a tavern owned by a man named Elijah West, delegates from across the independent-minded settlements of the Connecticut River valley signed a constitution that changed what a free society could look like.
Vermont had declared itself an independent republic in January of that year, rejecting both New York's claim to govern it and the authority of the Continental Congress that hadn't asked for its opinion. The constitution the delegates drafted and signed in West's tavern went beyond anything the other new American states had attempted. It was the first constitution in the present-day United States to explicitly abolish adult slavery. It established universal suffrage for men regardless of whether they owned property, at a time when most states limited voting to property owners. And it required the establishment of public schools.
These were radical provisions. Vermont would remain an independent republic for fourteen years, governing itself under this constitution, before joining the United States as the fourteenth state in seventeen ninety-one, the first new state after the original thirteen.
West's tavern still stands on North Main Street in Windsor, preserved as the Old Constitution House and open to visitors as a Vermont state historic site. The original furniture is gone, but the building is otherwise intact, a modest wooden structure that gives no outward sign of what was decided inside it.
A short walk away is another remarkable piece of engineering: the Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge, built in eighteen sixty-six across the Connecticut River connecting Vermont and New Hampshire. At about four hundred and fifty feet, it is the longest wooden covered bridge in the United States and the longest two-span covered bridge in the world. It carries traffic to this day.
Two things built to last, in a small river town that had the audacity to ban slavery before the country that eventually absorbed it ever got around to it.
