Part 7 of 17
In 1767, there was trouble in the “Hampshire grant.” Ownership of the land that would eventually become Vermont was in contention between northwest Connecticut men and “Yorkers” from upper New York. Enter, once again, Ethan Allen, who after being kicked out of Northampton, Mass., settled in Sheffield with his wife, children, and younger brother Zimri, who managed the farm while Ethan explored the possibilities of making a fortune in those northern lands. Ethan soon persuaded two meetinghouses of citizens, in Sharon and in Canaan, to send him north to manage their legal case for ownership.
Just then, seacoast settlers were racing toward open rebellion and embracing a variety of religions; but 14th Colonists did neither, rural conservatism combining with the area’s remoteness and independence to foster unwillingness to alter the status quo. Even so, conditions were worsening. When Parliament repealed the Stamp Act of 1765, it passed the harsher Townshend Acts, which sited British courts on colonial soil and made colonists pay for them and for the upkeep of standing armies. Concurrent attempts to impose more Anglican bishops rankled the Puritans; as a contemporary pamphlet put it, the purpose of installing new Anglican bishops was to further the “great design of episcopizing all New England.” In Boston, New York and Hartford, irate Colonists formed merchants’ associations and committees of correspondence.
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Many people in the upper Housatonic Valley would eventually metamorphose from Tory to Rebel. Few such conversions were as important as that of Colonel John Ashley of Ashley Falls. His father’s early purchase of a one-eighth share in the best Salisbury iron ore bed, and his own fortuitous marriage to a Hogeboom of New York, plus his enterprise, made Ashley the richest man around; in his store he sold locally made and imported British products ranging from hardwood ashes for making soap to ivory combs and spelling books. His forge produced iron-reinforced wheels for wagons and runners for sleighs. He owned several slaves.
Ashley donated modestly to the church — the era of tithing to town and church combined having ended — but mostly spent to increase his influence, for instance, paying to construct the Great Barrington courthouse so he could sit as a judge.
In 1767, Samuel Adams of Boston sent around to such courts, for approval, a letter to Parliament stating that Crown taxes could not be levied without representation. The Sheffield-based General Court members, including Ashley, approved it — but immediately afterwards Ashley rescinded his approval, as did 16 other of the Court’s 109 members. In June of 1769, Ashley was condemned for this “repugnant” action.
His political isolation increased until the arrival in Sheffield of lawyer Theodore Sedgwick, son of a Cornwall farmer. He and Ashley shared similar Puritan ethics, Tory sentiments and patrician distaste for those whom Sedgwick called “the shoeless ones.”
In myths, when the right question is asked, the answer unlocks the future. That is what happened to John Ashley, and it forced his conversion from Tory to rebel.
On Jan. 4, 1773, the town council of Sheffield asked Ashley to chair a committee and write a document spelling out “the Grieeviances which Americans in general and Inhabitants of this Province in particular labor under.” In his parlor, Ashley and Sedgwick, joined by nine others, hammered out the document.
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The “Sheffield Resolves,” although pledging “Regard and Attachment” to the king, harped on such outrages as that a Sheffield man had been transported by force to Albany for a crime supposedly committed in Berkshire County; that the British were threatening to take land from local farmers; and that there were continuing attempts “to deprive us of invaluable rights and previledges, which were transmitted to us by our worthey and independent Ancestors.” Those rights and privileges, the document stated, were seated in the Bible and thus inalienable: “Mankind in a State of Nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed Enjoyment of there Lives, there Liberty and Property.”
Each paragraph of the Sheffield Resolves was unanimously approved at a Sheffield town meeting, a year before the Virginia Colony wrote its similar resolution.
Prior to Sheffield’s January 1773 document, Sam Adams and the Boston firebrands despaired of inducing the Berkshire conservatives to rebellious sentiment. The promulgation of the Sheffield Resolves, and its wide reprinting in big-city newspapers, helped convince Adams that the colonies as a whole were finally prepared to revolt. He was correct. On Aug. 18, 1774, a mob of 1500 prevented a court of common pleas from sitting at Great Barrington and chased the justices out of town. British Gen. Thomas Gage wrote home to London that “a flame sprang up at the Extremity of the Province,” and warned that it would spread.
Next week, Part 8: Green Mountain Boys, Ticonderoga’s cannon and the vale of tears.
Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries. Reach him at www.tomshachtman.com.
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