The Republic of Vermont

The Republic of Vermont is a constituent polity of the United Kingdom of America, occupying the mountain country between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River in the northeast of the Realm. It is one of three polities holding a republican form within the Union, alongside the Republic of Texas and the Republic of Florida, and the oldest of the three. Vermont declared itself an independent republic in 1777, governed itself separately for fourteen years, and entered the Union in 1791 by a compact that preserved its republican constitution. Its capital is Montpelier and its largest city is Burlington. With a population of approximately 650,000 it is among the least populous polities of the Realm, and it returns three members to the federal House of Commons.

Vermont’s public life is organised around a deliberately weak executive and a strong tradition of local self-government. The President of the Republic of Vermont is head of state and head of government in a single elected office, but the office is constrained by the General Assembly and by long convention, and the substantive business of Vermont government begins in the towns, which meet in person each March to set their own budgets and elect their own officers. The economy rests on dairying, maple, forest products, quarrying, light manufacture and a large visitor trade.

The republic acknowledges the King as sovereign of the Union and is bound by federal law, but no Crown representative sits at Montpelier, no royal assent is required for a Vermont statute, and its own constitution makes no provision for the monarchy at all. Under Article XVII.9 of the Charter of Union the form of government of a polity cannot be altered without that polity’s own consent, which places the republican constitution of Vermont beyond the reach of the federation.

History

The Western Abenaki and the country before the Grants

The hills, the lake and the river valleys were the homeland of the Western Abenaki for thousands of years before any surveyor’s chain crossed them. The largest villages stood on the water, at Missisquoi on the northern bay of Lake Champlain, along the Winooski and on Otter Creek, and the people lived by a seasonal round of maize horticulture in the river intervales, spring fishing, upland hunting and late-winter sugaring in woods the settlers would later claim to have discovered.

Epidemic disease and the long colonial wars ran through the Champlain corridor and made the Abenaki homeland a route of armies. Many families withdrew north to the mission villages on the St Lawrence, chiefly Odanak, in what is now the Quebec province of New Albion; many did not, and remained in the Missisquoi country and the eastern hills in communities that colonial and later republican authority preferred not to see. When New Hampshire began granting the land out in the 1740s and 1760s, it granted a country that was occupied, and the grants recorded no such fact.

The Grants and the Green Mountain Boys

Vermont was born of a land quarrel. The hill country between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain had been granted out to settlers by New Hampshire and then claimed, grant and all, by New York, and the men who held the New Hampshire Grants had no intention of buying their own farms twice. Out of that grievance came Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, an irregular militia that harried New York’s surveyors and sheriffs off the disputed land and turned a property dispute into a cause. When the wider war between the Crown and the colonies broke out in 1775, the Green Mountain Boys marched on Fort Ticonderoga and took it, and a band of frontier land-rioters became, overnight, soldiers with a country in mind.

The constitution of 1777

They declared that country in 1777. The constitution of the Vermont republic was, for its moment, a radical document: it abolished adult slavery outright, decades ahead of the Realm that would one day take it in, and it gave the vote to men without regard to property, trusting the ordinary freeholder rather than the man of means. Vermont has never let the Realm forget either first. A republic that began by declaring that no man could own another, and that every man’s voice counted the same, made a permanent habit of moral precedence, and the habit has outlasted the century that earned it.

It was adopted at Windsor in July 1777. Legislative power went to a single elected House, the executive to a Governor and Council whose power over legislation extended no further than delay, and a Council of Censors was elected every seven years to inquire whether the constitution had been preserved inviolate and to summon a convention if it had not. The abolition clause, however, was narrower in practice than in language: it freed nobody automatically and was enforced by individual suit rather than by any officer of the republic, so slavery in Vermont ended by attrition over a generation, with households still holding people in long indenture into the 1790s.

The long independence and the compact

While the colonies became the United Kingdom of America, Vermont stayed itself. Claimed by New York, courted by the new Union, and answerable to no one, the Green Mountain republic governed its own affairs through the founding years, coined its own money, ran its own post, and negotiated as an equal with powers far larger than itself. It was not admitted to the Union so much as it agreed to join one, and it did so, in 1791, only by a compact that fixed the terms: Vermont would enter as a Republic and remain one, keeping its elected government, its town democracy, and its name, and giving the Crown its loyalty at the federal level and nothing of its republican form below it.

The compact is the reason Vermont is what it is. Texas would strike a similar bargain half a century later, and Florida later still, but Vermont was first, the original proof that the Union could hold a republic inside it without either one dissolving the other. What Vermont brought to the bargain was not power, of which it had little, but precedent, of which it had a great deal, and a temperament that has never entirely stopped regarding the Union as a club it consented to join rather than a Crown it was born beneath.

The instrument itself is short. Vermont enters as a Republic and keeps a constitution alterable only by Vermont and by Vermont’s own process; no Crown officer is resident, and no Vermont statute requires assent from outside. In exchange Vermont gave up the attributes of a separate state, its coinage, its post, its independent command and its capacity to treat with foreign powers, and a separate article settled the New York claims by a cash payment out of the Vermont treasury. Whether the whole is a treaty between sovereigns that Parliament merely received, and so beyond lawful repudiation, or an ordinary act binding only until Parliament says otherwise, has never been settled. Vermont lawyers argue the first, federal lawyers the second, and nothing has forced the point to judgment.

✎ Editor's Note · A republic inside a monarchy, on purpose

Vermont is the setting’s cleanest statement of a recurring idea: that the United Kingdom of America is capacious enough to contain forms that ought, by rights, to contradict it. A constitutional monarchy holds, as full and equal members, three self-declared republics, and Vermont is the oldest and the most pointed of them. The design choice is to make its republicanism a matter of conviction rather than grievance. Vermont is not a captive nation straining at the leash; it is a willing member that happens to believe, sincerely and vocally, in a different form of government from the one at the Realm’s head, and finds the arrangement not intolerable but faintly, permanently amusing. The motto does the work: Freedom and Unity, in that order, both meant.

Sheep, stone and the century of departure

The first half of the nineteenth century made Vermont a wool country and then unmade it. Merino sheep were brought in from Spain in 1811 and multiplied astonishingly, and by the 1830s the hills had been cleared to pasture on a scale that left much of the republic treeless. Then the western ranges opened, the railways carried their wool east more cheaply than Vermont could grow it, and the whole edifice collapsed inside two decades. Hill farms were abandoned by the thousand, the pasture went back to birch and then to hardwood, and Vermonters left in numbers the republic has never made up. The cellar holes and stone walls now found deep in the woods are the foundations and field boundaries of that vanished agriculture.

Stone partly filled the gap. The granite beds at Barre, the marble at Proctor and Rutland and the slate of the Poultney valley were worked at scale once the railways reached them, drawing the first substantial immigration the republic had received: Scots and Italians to the granite sheds, Irish and French Canadians to the quarries and mills, Welsh to the slate. The stone towns were industrial, crowded, Catholic and politically radical, and Barre sustained a socialist and anarchist labour movement that startled the countryside around it. The work was also lethal: stonecutters breathing granite dust in badly ventilated sheds died of silicosis in their forties in numbers the industry and the republic’s own inspectors understood well before either acted.

Flood, road and the modern republic

Vermont’s antislavery politics embarrassed more cautious polities, its regiments served heavily in the American Civil War, and its General Assembly welcomed the Emancipation Measure of 1 January 1865 with a resolution noting, in terms its neighbours found insufferable, that the republic had reached the same conclusion in 1777. The twentieth century arrived as water. In November 1927 several days of rain on saturated ground produced the worst flood in the republic’s recorded history, destroying the Winooski valley and putting Montpelier and the Assembly’s own chamber under several feet of water, and teaching Vermont that there are undertakings a polity of its size cannot pay for by itself.

The lesson was learned selectively. In the 1930s the federal government proposed a scenic parkway along the ridgeline of the Green Mountains, bringing construction wages into a republic that badly needed them; the Assembly referred the question to the towns, and at town meeting in 1936 the towns voted it down. The motorway came anyway, thirty years later and through the valleys, and changed the republic more than the parkway would have. Vermont was suddenly within a morning of Boston, New York and Montreal, and the ski industry, the second-home market and the leaf traffic followed the road. So did people: from the late 1960s young, educated and politically radical newcomers arrived from the cities to the south, bought cheap hill land, and within a decade were writing the republic’s environmental statutes.

The legislative burst around 1970 gave Vermont the regulatory character it still has. The other structural change came from the courts: in 1997 the Supreme Court of Vermont held that schools funded from town property taxes delivered unequal education according to the accident of local property wealth, contrary to the republic’s own guarantee of a competent education. The General Assembly answered with a statewide education property tax and a redistributive formula, which made the wealthiest resort and lakeside towns permanent net contributors to the schools of the poorest. The judgment is accepted; the formula is resented every March, at the meeting, in the towns that pay it.

Geography

Vermont is a small country of hard beauty. The Green Mountains run its length like a spine, dividing the state and defining it, and to the west the land falls to Lake Champlain and to Burlington, the republic’s largest city and its window on the world. The capital is Montpelier, the smallest seat of government in the Realm, a town so modest that the republic seems almost to have chosen it as a rebuke to the idea of a capital at all. The Connecticut River marks the eastern edge, and between the rivers and the ridgelines lies a landscape of small farms, deep woods, white villages, and weather that does not forgive the unprepared.

The republic is landlocked, roughly 260 kilometres from north to south and nowhere more than about 145 across. Snow holds on the high ground from November into April, and the thaw turns the unpaved roads to axle-deep mud each spring, a period known as mud season. About three quarters of the land is forested, almost all of it grown back since 1900 on ground that was open sheep pasture.

The Green Mountains

The range runs the whole length of the republic, rising to Mount Mansfield at about 1,340 metres, with Camel’s Hump and Killington Peak the other summits every Vermonter can name. The mountains are old, rounded and thickly wooded rather than alpine, and their significance is less their height than their continuity: the spine is crossed by only a handful of gaps and notches, which for most of the republic’s history made east and west Vermont two distinct countries. The Long Trail, a footpath running the crest from border to border, was cut in the 1910s and 1920s and is kept by a volunteer club that has become one of the republic’s more effective lobbies.

The high ground carries the ski areas, the headwaters of nearly every Vermont river, and most of the land held in public forest. It also carries the argument: ridgeline development of any kind, resort, transmission line or wind turbine, meets an opposition that cuts across the ordinary alignment of Vermont politics, setting climate-minded Vermonters who want the turbines against conservation-minded Vermonters who want the skyline, and the towns concerned against both.

The Champlain Valley and Burlington

West of the spine the land falls into the broad clay lowland of the Champlain Valley, the warmest and most fertile ground the republic has and the site of most of its remaining commercial agriculture. Lake Champlain runs some 190 kilometres north to south along the border with the Province of New York, deep, cold, and large enough to moderate the climate of its shore. Burlington holds about 45,000 people and the built-up area around it close to 180,000, something over a quarter of the republic. It is the seat of the University of Vermont, the largest hospital and the principal refugee resettlement centre, and Vermont’s only city in the ordinary sense. The rest of the republic regards it with the standard mixture of dependence and irritation, and the phrase used in the hill towns for policy made there is that it came down from the lake.

The lake is also the republic’s largest environmental failure. Phosphorus running off farmland, from manure spread on frozen ground and from tile-drained fields, together with stormwater from the built-up shore, has produced recurrent cyanobacteria blooms in the shallow northern bays that close beaches and drinking-water intakes through much of the summer. The republic has been under a federal water-quality order for years, has spent heavily, and has declined to impose on its dairy farmers the mandatory limits its own agency says would be required, because the farms are marginal and the regulation would close them.

The eastern towns and the Northeast Kingdom

The Connecticut River forms the entire eastern boundary, and forms it in a manner that still rankles: the line runs not down the channel but along the low-water mark on the Vermont bank, so the river itself, its bed and its fishing licences all lie in the Province of New Hampshire, a settlement Vermont attorneys-general have probed without success for a century and a half. The eastern towns face the river rather than the lake and trade toward New Hampshire and Boston: White River Junction the transport knot, Windsor the constitutional pilgrimage, Springfield the machine-tool town, Brattleboro the cultural front door.

The three counties of the northeast, Essex, Orleans and Caledonia, are known throughout the republic as the Northeast Kingdom, and they are colder, emptier, poorer and more heavily forested than anything else in Vermont. Incomes there run well below the republic’s average, itself well below the Realm’s, and the Kingdom is the part of Vermont least visited, least served and most sceptical of Montpelier. Its northern boundary is an international frontier with the province of Quebec in the sister realm of New Albion, crossed casually for shopping, hockey, family and work. It has not always been quiet: under the Seventh Amendment of 1919 the back roads of the northern tier carried Quebec liquor south for fourteen years with the amused cooperation of much of the population. At Derby Line the boundary passes through buildings, including a library whose reading room stands in one realm and whose books stand in the other.

Economy

The living is made at a small scale, and Vermont insists on it. Dairy is the old backbone, the milk and the cheese of a thousand hillside farms; maple runs in the spring and is boiled down into the republic’s sweetest export; granite is quarried from the hills and cut into the Realm’s monuments and gravestones. Modern Vermont adds skiing and the long processions of autumn leaf-peepers to the account, and a proudly artisanal economy of small breweries, small creameries, and small everything, built on a settled hostility to the large, the corporate, and the chain. Vermont would rather have a hundred small things it knows than one big thing it does not, and it has organised its whole economy, and much of its law, around the preference.

The aggregate is a small economy of roughly A£43 billion, with output per head near A£66,000 against a Realm figure of about A£80,000. Employment concentrates in health care and education, the visitor trade, public administration and a handful of manufacturing plants.

Dairy and the working landscape

Milk remains the largest agricultural product by value and the industry that keeps the fields open. The republic licensed more than eleven thousand dairy farms after the Second Great War and licenses fewer than six hundred today, the herd falling far less than the farm count because the survivors are much larger. Most Vermont milk leaves as fluid milk for the Boston market or goes into cheese and butter through the farmer cooperatives, at prices set on markets Vermont does not influence, and many farms operate at or below break-even.

The republic’s answer is the doctrine of the working landscape: the open fields and hillside barns that draw the visitor trade exist only because someone is milking cows behind them, so public money spent to keep marginal farms in business is an investment in the scenery as much as in agriculture. It has never persuaded the farmers, who would prefer a price for milk to a subsidy for the view.

The industry’s labour is the part of the account the republic discusses least. Vermont dairy runs on migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, many without secure immigration status, living on the farms because the work is there and because federal border enforcement along the New Albion line makes travelling any distance a risk. They milk in shifts around the clock for wages the farms could not raise without closing, and their position has been documented repeatedly by the republic’s own agencies without change.

Maple, stone and manufacture

Sugaring is the oldest continuous industry and the most seasonal, running a few weeks between late February and early April when the nights freeze and the days thaw. Tubing, vacuum lines and reverse-osmosis equipment have replaced most of the buckets and made a capitalised business of a farm sideline, though the smallest sugarhouses still boil as their grandfathers did. The Quebec sugarbushes across the border produce many times the Vermont crop and set the world price, which Vermont producers meet by competing on grade and origin rather than volume. Beyond the sugar woods the forest carries a modest timber economy and much land enrolled in the use-value programme, under which farm and forest land is taxed on what it yields rather than on what a developer would pay, in exchange for keeping it undeveloped.

The quarries still work, at a fraction of their old volume but with the trades and the families intact. The valley around Springfield was a machine-tool centre of real consequence, supplying the Realm’s arsenals in both Great Wars, and its collapse through the 1970s and 1980s left the eastern towns with an industrial ruin they have never replaced. Against that, the Champlain Valley carries a semiconductor works among the republic’s largest private employers and by a wide margin its largest exporter by value, a single plant whose fortunes matter more to the Vermont revenue than the entire dairy sector.

Snow, leaves and the visitor economy

The visitor trade is the republic’s second economy and in some towns the only one. The ski areas strung along the spine carry the winter, the foliage season from late September into mid-October fills every inn for a fortnight, and summer brings walkers, cyclists and lake traffic. The trade is lucrative, seasonal, low-waged and increasingly precarious. Warming winters have shortened the natural snow season and pushed the resorts into heavy dependence on snowmaking, which requires water and electricity in quantities that raise their own arguments. Second homes and short-term letting have transformed the resort towns, so that a place of two thousand residents may hold four thousand beds and be unable to house the people who make them up.

The small-scale doctrine and what it costs

Vermont’s preference for the small is written into law and not merely into habit. Roadside advertising has been prohibited since 1968 and the republic’s highways carry no billboards at all. Development above a modest threshold requires a permit assessed against criteria including water, traffic, scenic effect and the burden on local services, which any interested party may contest. Large-format retail has been constrained for decades, so the chain stores common elsewhere in the Realm are few and mostly confined to a handful of highway corridors. A deposit on beverage containers has been in force since 1973.

The costs are as clear as the benefits. The same regime that kept the ridgelines empty has suppressed housebuilding for fifty years in a polity that now cannot house its own workforce, and housing costs relative to Vermont incomes are among the least favourable in the Realm. Wages are low, the working-age population is shrinking, and the republic depends on federal transfers to a degree its rhetoric of self-reliance rarely acknowledges.

Government and politics

Vermont’s constitution is its own, is amended only by Vermont, and owes nothing to the Crown. There is no Governor and no Lieutenant-Governor in the vice-regal sense the rest of the Realm uses, no letters patent, and no assent from outside the republic, the President performing that function personally. Federal law applies on exactly the same terms as elsewhere, and Vermont sends its members to the House of Commons and its two to the polity chamber like anyone else.

The President of the Republic

Vermont distrusts concentrated power so thoroughly that it distrusts even its own. The President of the Republic of Vermont is the elected head of state and government, but the office is weak by design, hemmed in by the General Assembly on which it depends and by a political culture that regards a strong executive as a contradiction of everything the republic is for. A Vermont President governs by persuasion and consent, not command, and a President who forgets it does not govern long. The republic would rather be run badly by its neighbours than well by a chief, and it has arranged its constitution to make sure it usually is.

The mechanics reinforce the intention. The President is elected by the whole republic for a term of two years, and so campaigns almost continuously. If no candidate takes a majority of the votes cast, the election passes to the General Assembly in joint session, which chooses among the leading candidates by secret ballot, an outcome rare but not unknown and which has more than once produced a President who did not lead the popular vote. The President appoints the ministry, presents a budget, may veto a bill and may be overridden. There is no official residence: Vermont Presidents live in their own houses and are expected to be found there.

The General Assembly

The General Assembly of Vermont is bicameral. Its House of Representatives seats 150 members from single-member and two-member districts, and its Senate seats 30 from the counties and county groupings, which gives the thinly populated Northeast Kingdom a weight in the upper house it has nowhere else. The Assembly is deliberately part-time, sitting from January into the spring, and its members are paid a weekly sum during the session only, so that service is compatible with farming, teaching or a small business and very nearly incompatible with a career.

The amendment procedure is among the most restrictive of any polity constitution in the Realm. A proposal may originate only in the Senate and only in alternate biennial sessions, must pass two successively elected Assemblies, and must then be approved by the voters at a general election, so no amendment can be made in less than four years. The Council of Censors was abolished in 1870 after a century of summoning conventions and denouncing governments, which was the office working as designed.

The town meeting

The real weight of Vermont’s democracy sits below the state entirely, in the town meeting. On the first Tuesday of March the towns gather, as they have since before there was a Union to join, and the citizens themselves, in person and by voice, set the town’s budget, elect its officers, and argue its business to a decision. The town meeting is not a formal layer above the government so much as the bedrock beneath it, cherished past reason and defended past sense, the living proof of Vermont’s founding faith that a room full of neighbours is the truest sovereign there is. The President and the General Assembly sit atop that base and never quite forget that it could, if sufficiently annoyed, do without them.

Town Meeting Day is a public holiday, and the form is prescribed by custom. A moderator elected by the meeting runs it under a manual of parliamentary order; the warning, the printed list of articles to be decided, must be posted in advance and nothing outside it may be voted; and the meeting elects the selectboard, the listers, the auditors, the constable and often the school board.

The institution is not in good health and Vermont knows it. Attendance has fallen for decades, and many towns have moved their most consequential votes, particularly school budgets, from the floor to a printed ballot cast at the polls through the day, which raises the number voting and removes the deliberation entirely. Traditionalists regard the change as the death of the thing; its defenders point out that the floor meeting has always favoured those able to spend a working Tuesday in a hall, and has always disadvantaged shift workers, tenants, single parents and anyone without a car in March. Both objections are sound, they point in opposite directions, and the republic has not reconciled them.

Parties and the federal delegation

Vermont returns three members to the federal House of Commons, from the constituencies of Burlington and the Champlain Valley and the Green Mountains, the balance filled by a top-up member under the mixed-member system. The republic votes consistently further to the left than the Realm as a whole. The Labour and Social Democratic Party and the Left and Solidarity Bloc take a large share of the vote, Alliance 90 / Green Realm polls far above its national figure, the Liberal Federal Democrats hold the professional and university vote in Burlington, and the Conservative and Crown Union keeps a base in the eastern towns, the Northeast Kingdom and the farming interest. Alternative for the Realm polls poorly here and has never come close to a Vermont seat, which the republic tends to mention more often than the figures warrant.

For a polity of three Commons seats, Vermont has a remarkably loud voice, and it likes it that way. Its politics are a distinctive blend of the progressive and the libertarian: fiercely green, protective of the land and suspicious of anyone who would develop it; socially liberal to a degree that scandalises the Realm’s more cautious quarters; and at the same time jealous of personal liberty and local self-rule in a way that resists tidy placement on any national spectrum. Vermont is a small conscience that considers itself entitled to lecture a large Realm, and does, and is tolerated in it because it is usually, infuriatingly, a little ahead of where the rest of the Realm eventually arrives.

Its great paradox stands over the whole account. Calvin Coolidge, the Twenty-First Prime Minister, the most austere and conservative premier of the modern age, the man who governed by doing as little as possible, was a son of this progressive, contrary, morally loud republic, born in its hard-country hills and shaped by its Yankee frugality. That a republic so given to green idealism and moral noise should have produced the quietest and most conservative of all the Realm’s premiers is the kind of contradiction Vermont produces without apparent effort, and it is a contradiction Vermont regards, on the whole, with pride.

Vermont and New Westminster

The republic’s practical relationship with the federal government is that of a small net recipient with strong opinions. Federal transfers fund much of Vermont’s roads, flood works, schools and its share of the National Health Service of America, which here is delivered through a few community hospitals, a single academic centre at Burlington and a network of rural practices the republic has persistent difficulty staffing. Distance, weather and a scattered elderly population make Vermont one of the harder places in the Realm to deliver the common entitlement to. Its federal quarrels are specific rather than constitutional: the Lake Champlain water order, agricultural support, the treatment of migrant farm labour, and the complaint of every small polity that formulas built for large ones do not fit.

The old independence survives now mostly as sentiment. There is always, in some tavern or town, talk of a free Vermont, a romantic notion that the republic might one day resume the sovereignty it once held, and it flares up reliably whenever the Crown or the Union does something the hills disapprove of. But it is nostalgia more than intention. Vermont keeps its republicanism as identity and heritage and needle, not as a plan, and for all its cussedness it is, in the end, the Realm’s loyal republican conscience: the member least reconciled to the Crown in principle, and among the least likely ever to leave it in fact.

Demographics and society

The people of the republic

Approximately 650,000 people live on 24,900 square kilometres, at a density low enough that most Vermont towns have fewer than 2,500 residents and several dozen fewer than 500. About a quarter live in the Burlington area and the rest among small market towns, village centres and open countryside. Montpelier, at around 8,000 people, is the seat of government of a republic in which several ski villages have more beds. The population is old and getting older: deaths have exceeded births in most recent years, all growth comes from in-migration, and the consequences run from schools with falling rolls and rising costs per pupil to a care sector that cannot recruit.

Roughly a third of residents were born outside the republic, and the line between families of long residence and those who arrived later is the most persistent social division in Vermont. The vernacular terms are old and still current: a woodchuck is a native Vermonter of the working country sort, a flatlander is anyone from away. The division is not merely social. The land-use regime that defines the modern republic was largely designed by newcomers who had bought land cheaply from Vermonters who needed to sell it, and many old farming families experience it as a rule made by outsiders that prevents them realising their only asset. Newcomers reply that the landscape they protected is the reason anyone visits at all. Both accounts are accurate, and the argument between them is the real politics of a great many Vermont towns.

The republic is also overwhelmingly white, and has begun to change in one place only. Burlington has been a refugee resettlement centre for four decades, and its schools now teach children of Bosnian, Somali, Bhutanese, Congolese and Vietnamese families in numbers that make the city a plural community inside an otherwise homogeneous republic. The reception has been mixed rather than warm, and the republic’s own reporting records racial incidents in its schools and its policing at rates its self-image does not accommodate.

The Abenaki

The hills and the lake were the country of the Western Abenaki long before the Grants were surveyed, and the Missisquoi and the other Abenaki bands remain a quieter thread in the republic’s story. Their long struggle for recognition and for the land and waters of the Champlain country is not the loudest of Vermont’s causes, but it sits uneasily against the republic’s proud account of its own founding, a reminder that the freeholders who declared that no man could own another had themselves settled a country that was already someone’s home.

The republic’s twentieth-century treatment of them was worse than neglect. Between 1925 and 1936 the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, conducted from the University of Vermont with the cooperation of the republic’s welfare and health authorities, compiled family studies of households it classified as degenerate, drawing disproportionately on Abenaki, French-Canadian and poor rural families. On the survey’s recommendation the General Assembly enacted a sterilisation statute in 1931, and an unknown number of people were sterilised under it and under the institutional practice that outlived it, Abenaki and poor women most heavily represented among them. The records were dispersed and partly destroyed, so the number cannot now be established. The University acknowledged the survey in the 1990s and the General Assembly apologised formally in 2021. Neither restored anything.

Recognition came late and is limited. The Assembly recognised four Abenaki bands by statute in the years after 2010, conferring standing to be consulted, protection for burial sites and access to certain programmes, but no land, no reservation, no jurisdiction and no revenue. The bands hold no treaty with the Crown, which places them outside the machinery of Article XIV of the Charter and the Fourteenth Amendment of 1989, both of which run on treaty documents, and there is no settled route by which a people dispossessed before 1791 by a republic that was not then part of the Union can bring a claim within that machinery at all. The position is further complicated by a dispute over descent: the Abenaki council at Odanak, across the border in New Albion, has challenged the genealogical basis of some of the Vermont bands’ claims, and the question of who may speak for the Western Abenaki in the republic remains unsettled.

Culture and daily life

Religion, schooling and civic life

Vermont’s religious inheritance is Congregational and Unitarian in the old white-steepled village centres and Catholic in the quarry, mill and border towns settled by Irish, Italian and French-Canadian workers. The Church of America is present and unobtrusive. Observance is low and falling, and the practical civic religion of Vermont is conducted through the volunteer fire company, the grange hall, the rescue squad and the hundreds of unpaid town offices a republic of this size requires and fills.

Education is organised, like everything else, from the town. The peculiarity of the system is town tuitioning: a town maintaining no school of its own does not send its children to an assigned school but pays tuition to a school chosen by the family, which may be a public school in another town, one of the old independent academies, or a school outside the republic altogether. It is a nineteenth-century answer to rural distance that functions as a publicly funded choice system inside a republic otherwise committed to common provision. Above the schools sit the University of Vermont at Burlington, Middlebury College, and the military college at Northfield.

The table, the woods and the winter

Vermont eats what Vermont keeps: sharp cheddar, cream, butter, cider, apples, venison, and maple in and on more things than an outsider expects, including, in early spring, poured hot on clean snow and eaten with a doughnut and a pickle. The brewers, cheesemakers and cidermakers are numerous, small and disproportionately celebrated, and the farmers’ market is part of the food supply rather than a weekend diversion. Outdoor life is not a leisure category here but the ordinary condition of living: the rifle season in November empties schools and workplaces in the hill towns by informal custom, ice-fishing shanties appear on the bays as soon as the ice will bear them, and the sugaring weeks put half the republic in the woods after dark. Wood heat remains common, and in the Northeast Kingdom is the primary heat in a substantial minority of houses.

Symbols

The republic’s flag is a gold catamount above a low gold ridge, with a single gold star, on a pine-green field. The catamount is the older emblem, the mountain lion whose stuffed likeness hung outside the Green Mountain Boys’ tavern at Bennington, and it is now the name of every Vermont sporting side and a good many of its taverns. The green field is the mountains, the ridge is the spine, and the star stands for the years of separate sovereignty. The motto Freedom and Unity was adopted with the constitution and is understood in Vermont as two commitments rather than one phrase. The State House at Montpelier, granite-built and gold-domed under its wooded hill, is the republic’s most reproduced image.

Political tensions

Land and housing. The settlement that preserved the Vermont landscape has made housing scarce and expensive, and the republic cannot house the workers its own economy requires. Attempts to relax permitting or compel towns to allow density run into the town meeting, where the objections are made and usually prevail.

Schools. The equalising formula of 1997 is resented in the towns that pay into it, while falling rolls produce constant pressure to merge districts and close small-town schools. Consolidation makes fiscal sense and destroys the institution around which a Vermont town organises itself.

The lake and the farms. Vermont has committed itself publicly to cleaning Lake Champlain and has declined to impose on agriculture the mandatory measures its own modelling identifies as necessary, because those measures would close farms it is simultaneously subsidising to stay open. Its dependence on migrant dairy labour without secure status is likewise documented and unaddressed: immigration status is federal, but wages, housing standards and farm inspection are not, and the republic enforces them lightly for fear of the closures stricter enforcement would cause.

Age, work and the drug trade. An ageing workforce, a care sector that cannot recruit and rural practices that cannot fill posts have combined with an opioid epidemic worst in the Northeast Kingdom and the old mill towns, with treatment capacity concentrated in Burlington, two hours from much of the republic in good weather.

Trivia

In-Universe Vermont is the oldest of the Realm's three republics, and one of two polities, with the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, that were independent countries before they joined anything. It declared itself a republic in 1777, governed itself for fourteen years, and entered the Union in 1791 only by a compact that let it keep its republican form, the precedent Texas and Florida would later follow.
In-Universe Vermont distrusts concentrated power so thoroughly that its own President is weak by design. The real sovereign of the republic is the town meeting, held every first Tuesday of March, where the citizens themselves set the budget and elect the officers in person, the living bedrock of a state that believes a room of neighbours is the truest authority there is.
In-Universe The republic's founding constitution of 1777 abolished adult slavery outright and gave the vote without a property qualification, both decades ahead of the Realm that would one day take Vermont in. The republic has never let anyone forget that it got to the Realm's own conclusions first.
In-Universe Vermont's great paradox is Calvin Coolidge: the most austere and conservative Prime Minister of the modern age, born in the hard hills of the Realm's most progressive and contrary republic. That 'Silent Cal' should be a son of green, morally loud Vermont is exactly the sort of contradiction the republic produces without trying.
Real-World Vermont really was an independent republic from 1777 to 1791, coining its own money and running its own post before joining the United States as the fourteenth state. Its 1777 constitution really was among the first anywhere to abolish adult slavery and drop property qualifications for voting. The setting simply lets the republic keep the form our history retired.
Real-World The Eugenics Survey of Vermont is real. It ran from the University of Vermont between 1925 and 1936, catalogued Abenaki, French-Canadian and poor rural families as degenerate, and led to Vermont's sterilisation law of 1931. The state legislature apologised formally in 2021.
Etymology The name 'Vermont' is taken from the French 'les Verts Monts,' the Green Mountains that run the length of the republic and give it its soul, its emblem in the catamount that once prowled them, and the first half of its people's stubborn sense of themselves as mountain folk answerable to no one.