(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) (upbeat drum music) - From a traditional sense or from a tribal sense, you know, Vermont is a very new idea.

(wind howling) (upbeat drum music continues) - I'm from Vermont, that's where we're living.

They call it Vermont, I have a Vermont license plate on my car.

Pick a day of the week and ask me, "Are you a Vermonter?"

Yes.

"Are you an American citizen?"

Yes.

"Are you an Abenaki?"

Yes.

So, yes to all those things.

- Vermont was very sacred to our people, and I know that's all Abenaki territory.

And I have visions, I just imagine that our people are still here.

And I just get into a feeling.

It's not sad, it's just very special.

I feel their presence here.

(gentle music) - People were always moving up here, away from someplace else.

Guilford, Connecticut was the feeder of Guilford, Vermont.

And I guess Guildford back in the old country, was a feeder of Guilford, Connecticut.

- The people who came to Vermont came from the older colonies.

Not so much refugees, but independents who wanted to do their own thing and not be under, I guess you'd say, management of the old timers.

(birds chirping) - All my friends like tan hides and slaughter animals and hunt, you know?

But they're also these like hippie kids, you know?

- So getting away from rules made by other people is probably why most people have moved even today.

- But before that, there was a life here for our people with many different groups, with many different names, but all identifying themselves as Abenaki people or Wabanaki people.

- A lot of the core foods that we eat here come right straight from Native agriculture.

Native American agriculture, Indigenous agriculture.

- There's always a silent appreciation for whatever you're harvesting.

Even when I harvest in the garden, there's kind of a silent, you know, thanks for letting the onions grow so big, or whatever.

- [Alanis] It's nature that taught our people how to live.

- [Bea] Corn beans and squash, the three sisters garden.

- And it's the same people that were in Vermont and in Maine, in New Hampshire and Quebec.

It's the same culture.

And, you know, there's a border now.

But that's not how our people even think today.

- The Abenaki people have been here since the beginning of time, because our creation stories tell us that.

I hate the word myth because the word myth denotes something that's not real, something that's made up.

- [John] Most every historian had suggested there were no Indians in Vermont, period.

Even in fifth grade, little Vermont history texts.

- But how can you argue with the archeologists, the historians, the anthropologists, the geologists even?

I mean, they all say that there's evidence and proof that the Abenaki were here and there's village sites all over Vermont.

- Even as a fourth grader, I thought it was odd because they said the Indians would come in and hunt and fish and then leave at night.

So they never lived here.

I think that was where I started mistrusting history books.

- I want to hear your story, because it's not until that occurs can we really be on the same level, the same playing field, a sense of understanding and empathy.

- I kept reading and none of my people were there.

There weren't any French, there weren't any Irish, there weren't any Lebanese, there weren't any Italians.

There weren't any women.

So I'm sitting there just thinking, my people never did anything important.

(upbeat music) - [Protestor] Show me what democracy looks like.

- [All] This is what democracy looks like.

- Forward ever, backward never.

(protestors) Hey, hey, whaddya say?

(protestors) We say Vermont can lead the way (upbeat music) (stirring music) (gentle music) (birds chirping) - This is basically the grocery store, the pharmacy, the drug store.

And the hardware store for Native peoples.

- To the native people, it's the common pot.

It's the place where you find all your food.

- It's a little bit of wetlands, that the beavers decided to move in and flood my ash grove out.

- It's where the chestnuts and the butternuts and the acorns grew, and it's where all the berries grew, the elderberries and the strawberries.

And it's also the place where the medicinal plants were and still are.

- This material here would be not worthwhile taking because it's been laying around and rotting too long.

There is the beaver house.

- [Dorothy] Oh, yeah.

- They've moved in and basically pushed me out.

But they're only doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is flood the planet.

So they're doing a good job here.

- They're doing what beavers do, they're eating.

If you don't allow the predators to live in the wild garden, then the cultivated garden will never be healthy.

(bark rustling) - Here we go, what I'm gonna do is walk down here and borrow some of the beaver's handy work.

And get a little water on this, and show you how to make a quick and dirty basket.

(gentle music) - An awful lot of folks would make baskets all winter, and then they'd sell to the tourists all summer.

- People would say, "Oh, I want a basket to fit the corner this high, this color."

- [Bea] They did that right around Lake Memphremagog, and they would travel around and sell.

- But a whole generation of people that didn't do baskets, but now it's come back.

So it's very encouraging.

- Growing up as a child, we never said, "Well, we do this because we're Indian, or we do this because we're Abenaki."

But then I can remember many, many summers going into Burlington to do the monthly shopping.

And people stopping and saying, "Oh my god, look at the Indians."

We were very, very tan.

We'd been out running out in the woods and the fields and on the beach all day long.

And I even recall as a child being called the N word.

(stirring music) - But there are lots of family secrets.

You know, every family has their secrets.

The Indianness was a family secret on my mother's side of the family.

It was never talked about in front of anybody from outside the family.

And my grandmother used to say to me, "My grandfather was full blooded Indian."

And I said, "So you are?"

And she said, "Well, I'm French."

So that's how, I mean, that's how ingrained it was.

- Before we started school, my mother would make us scrub our elbows and our knees and our knuckles to take the brown away.

And my mother still to this day, tells me to cut my hair, somebody might think I'm an Indian.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) - [Jesse] There, like a clothes pin, so to speak.

- My aunt was in her 90s before she said, "Well, yes, we are."

Out in public, she finally would say, "Yes, I'm Abenaki."

Or she would go up to somebody and said, you know, "Are you Abenaki?"

"Yes.

Well, so am I."

- Abenakis meld or blend in.

Over the generations, we've married French people, hence my last name is Larocque.

- The French were the better of two evils.

They married into our families, they treated us like equals.

What they had to say behind closed doors about us was, you know, who knows?

(gentle music) - There it is, that's our little tea basket.

That was too easy.

Now, what you do is put some water in here, which it will hold water.

And you can heat up a hot rock about that big.

Take two sticks, pick the hot rock up, throw it in there.

Faster than a microwave, boils instantly.

And when you're done, you can throw this in the fire and be on your way.

(hammer thudding) (bark creaking) Yep.

(bark creaking) - [Dorothy] What do you do, Jesse, when you're not making baskets?

- Computers, anything from website development to finding out why their email doesn't work.

To recovering data off from hard drives that have basically died.

(upbeat music) (engine purring) (upbeat music continues) - [Customer] Well, it's good to see you 'cause I have a sick drive.

- We'll fix it right up.

Okay, hex bolts.

- That's a perfect example of balance in your life.

He spends half his time in the woods, and half his time in technology.

- But Vermont has never been an island.

Vermont has never been out of the mainstream.

Vermont has always been a crossroads for money and people and ideas.

It has never been a rural backwater in the way that people sometimes imagine it.

It's been poor, for sure.

But it's never been a place that was cut off from the world.

- The only thing I know, Vermont is Ver Mont, the Green Mountains.

It's French, right?

New Hampshire is Duke of Hampshire, and New York is Duke of York.

So these two dukedoms were fighting over this place, and this place became more independent and separated itself from the Duke of Hampshire and the Duke of York.

And the French and Indians came down and it became Vermont.

I just made that up.

(upbeat music) - [Dorothy] And here was Champlain, somebody who traveled across the ocean 27 times, was raised in the household of the king of France, subject to all these terrible wars in Europe.

Somehow managed in big boats to get to the mouth of the Saint Lawrence.

And then in littler boats, explore all the nooks and crannies of the Saint Lawrence.

And then to be stopped by the waterfalls.

(water gushing) He just couldn't go any further unless he got out of his European mode, out of his boat and into a canoe, a birch bark canoe.

(pleasant music) - If we follow this river here, this one, maybe we can get to China through the west on the road.

(pleasant music) - Champlain actually studied all the different branches of the seafarer's arts.

So, for example, he was very up on the latest technology in terms of the astrolabe for figuring out what your latitude was.

And one of the things that a consummate mariner has to be, of course, is keep good records.

(Samuel speaking French) So that any ship following them will know where the safe harbors are, what all the depths of the water is, where the different breakers are.

- I'm a bit anxious about going through the Sceaux and the fall, the waterfalls with this canoe.

You just hope that you don't break your canoe on a rock, because then, you know?

I don't know how to swim.

But the sauvage did know how to handle it.

They handle it very well, and they're very brave in it.

It's amazing how they make it.

Yeah, we learned it.

- But there is also an artistic side to Champlain as well, because much of the vegetation in the Indian villages have a lot more detail than you see on other maps of the period.

- Now I'm waiting for this guide, yeah.

He's a Huron probably, and I hope he comes soon because they don't have a calendar as we have.

But most of the time the sauvage, they do what they say.

(birds chirping) (actors greeting in foreign language) - Champlain.

- Champlain.

- Champlain.

- Champlain.

- Paskunok.

- Paskunok.

- [Dorothy] The Abenaki really respect the warrior culture.

And George was in the Airborne during the Korean War.

He's Indian and he's American.

- [George] Grandfather went up to Canada, what they called Canada and married.

And the rest of us on my father's side came from her.

- [Dorothy] So, the blue eyes?

- Yeah, well, my mother was Polish.

And probably there's blue eyes on her father's side.

There was Irish and Yankee and French and all that in there too.

(Paskunok and Samuel speak French) - [Dorothy] So I could see Champlain was very skilled at his people relationships, and making the Indians feel comfortable and respecting what they wanted.

And it's dramatic how much knowledge Champlain was able to extract from the various Indians that he met.

- You see this?

The Indian use it as sugar during the winter, yeah.

They boil it until there's no water in it, and it produces like a leather, huh?

And then they chew it, they eat it, and it gives them everything they need to avoid the, (speaks French).

- Yeah.

- How you call it?

- Scurvy?

- Scurvy, yeah.

Oh, it's fine.

(Dorothy laughs) - [Dorothy] He had his own relationship with his own God, and he had his own belief system.

And he didn't really wanna have that tampered with, but he was very open to other people's ways and was not judgmental of them.

(Paskunok and Samuel speak French) (pleasant music) - [Dorothy] He was willing to go wherever the Indians would take him.

He had his astrolabe, he had his compass, he had his drawing supplies, he had all his gear.

So he was basically beholden to the Indians.

And the Indians wanted him because he had a gun.

That was the deal.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (water lapping) - It's all about the waterways.

The waterways were the super highways, the interstate, the way that people moved armies, navies, and commerce for the thousands of years that the Native folks were here.

For the 400 years after Champlain until very recently.

And in some of our interconnected waterways, still being done.

(Samuel singing in French) (choristers singing in French) - The solution to going from any one place to another is the string of beads.

It's from one lake with a thread to the next lake.

And then from that, you can go in four different directions from there.

And you can see that in maps.

If you ever take a look at Champlain's maps, what you'll see is a line with a bead aligned to the next lake.

The way that you thought of them were originally what were called looks, how far you can look.

- What is the name for white pine?

This tree?

- Coah, Coah.

- Coah.

- Coah.

- What Champlain wanted to do, in a purely practical sense, not necessarily a humanitarian sense, was to always be as friendly as he could with the Natives.

Never steal Indian people to take them back, to show off.

And always to be an ally if they asked for alliance.

(Paskunok and Samuel speak French) - [Dorothy] Once Champlain stepped into the canoe, he was outside his own spiritual frame of reference.

He was traveling with people who were telling their dreams every night.

Who did they see?

What did they say?

They were asking him every morning, what about his dreams?

Clearly, his energetic field was being affected by it.

- One of Champlain's main dreams was for, (speaks French), Amity and conquered, right?

France was war-torn.

And the king and Champlain and other dreamers had that utopian vision.

Come to a new land and make something that we don't have at home, peace.

(water gushing) (gentle music) (water gushing continues) (gentle music continues) - I dreamt that I saw the, (speaks French), in the distance.

- Yeah.

- They were in the water and they were all drowning.

I rushed to help them, but my friends told me, "No, no, don't go let them die, they must die."

- [Dorothy] Once he told them his dream, the Indians he was traveling with packed up all their gear and said, "Fine, we're ready to go."

And all they were waiting for was for Champlain to have the right dream, and then they knew that Champlain was on their side and that they had their man.

(gunshot blaring) (gentle music) - The first time they heard or saw a firearm was with him.

I mean, that's profound introduction of technology.

It's like bringing a ray gun from Mars down to Earth and, you know, irradiating a planet.

I mean, the devastation, the noise, the smoke, the fatal consequences must have been traumatic and devastating.

(choristers singing in French) - [Dorothy] Champlain got his name stuck on that lake, but he set a pattern for French relations with Indians.

The kind of respect and diplomatic back and forth that was very different from the English way.

- Yeah, the French and the English both were the same.

And the wars that they had in Europe was transferred here.

And it was, who was gonna get more land and more control and take over everything our people had?

(choristers singing in French) - Choice white pines and good land.

These white hills appear like bright clouds above the horizon.

It's a map of Vermont that was done for the king.

And it was really, the theater of the French-English conflict.

There's only a few little rectilineal parcels carved out of the bottom corner of the state.

But when they finally signed the peace treaty with the French, short time later, they had chopped up the whole state into parcels.

(stirring music) - And that's when everything changed.

(stirring music) (pages shuffle) - Land records are very complex.

And there's a lot of information to be found studying those old land records.

Whether it was pasture or what kind of pasture, whether it was cleared, whether it was occupied by a family.

(feet shuffling) Before the French left Canada, this was the boundary land between New France and New England.

One of the reasons the revolution occurred was the colonies, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Mass, and New Hampshire, those colonies were filled up.

Every inch of ground was being farmed.

They were producing too many babies.

They needed territory to expand.

They knew there was land up here, they knew there was wilderness, but that was all they knew.

They didn't know whether it was steep or level or good or bad, they just knew there was land here.

- 'Cause you really couldn't get into Vermont.

It was blocked by the waterfall at Bellows, it was blocked by the waterfalls at Chamblee.

And it was blocked by the waterfalls over at Fort Ticonderoga, La Chute.

So in order to get into Vermont, you had to be willing to either travel by canoe or by moccasin or by snowshoes.

- Now, you got to remember, the United States wasn't here, Canada was, Canada claimed this land.

England claimed this land, everybody claimed this land.

You know, that's like me fighting over your stuff.

And actually, you're still living there.

- There were 13 family bands living south of the Canadian border in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.

And they had what was traditional territories for their family bands.

And that land was divided into quarters.

So they would only live on one quarter of that land for a certain amount of time to not use all the resources.

- Certain things would be ripe at a certain time throughout the whole country.

So they'd have to walk.

We may be back in this forest for a while early in the spring, then go across the valley over the next hill or the next bridge.

- [Alanis] Our people traveled these distances constantly.

- So we would be taught by our parents and grandparents, these routes.

- I mean, granted, they were just paths, but they were already marked out.

- So you didn't hunt on that land.

You didn't cross that land, unless the family knew you were coming.

- [Bea] You didn't own it, this is what caused so much trouble with the English.

- When these people came along, it was like the land is yours for the taking if it is not improved.

So it appears to be not improved, and not recognizing a form of conservation.

- So they would clean out a few trees, put up a house and stuff, and they would start.

(drum beating) - [Dorothy] Everybody had a wife, and then when that one died, they had another one.

- So the Native people, they would come back to that quarter of the land and it would be settled.

- And as things started coming further and further north, it got up into about Springfield area and the Abenaki said, "Enough is enough."

(stirring music) - One night at my home in Fort 4, Charleston, my husband had just come back from three months away.

I was heavily pregnant.

We had a large, large party, and we feasted that night.

We feasted on watermelon and flip.

(men speaking foreign language) - And early in the morning, there was a knock at the door.

A beat, knock, knock, knock at the door.

And my husband put on his clothes, ran downstairs, and opened the door, and it was pandemonium.

And we were pulled out into the yard and pushed from the fort and onto the road.

We'd been captured, we were prisoners.

And then they made us walk.

(men speaking foreign language) - And about three hours after we set out, we stopped for breakfast and I suddenly felt the first pangs of childbirth.

And I knew them well.

They made me a little booth like that for shelter, gave me a blanket, and I slept well that night.

In due time, the baby was born, she was a girl.

And we called her Elizabeth Captive Johnson.

And she was the third child, third white child, born in what is now Vermont.

(pleasant music) - Of course, in her narrative, she talks about them as savages.

And that was a common usage at that period of time.

But she was continually surprised about the compassion they showed her.

They stopped, they cared for the child, they cared for her, they made sure she was properly fed.

- I can't say it was as good as a good cup of tea, but it was nourishing nevertheless.

So, new spirits, we moved forward and arrived at the shores of Lake Champlain.

And once we were there, we entered a new school.

We were going to be welcomed by the people there, and we had to answer their welcome with a song.

So our captors taught us.

(foreign language singing) (drum beating) (foreign language singing) (drum beating continues) (Susannah laughs) (captor screaming) - It was a long and bloody history and legacy.

And that frontier moved very slowly from northern Mass up into Vermont, when the Abenaki fought to keep we Yankees, very successfully by the way, out of Vermont and central and northern New Hampshire.

- But when our numbers got low from disease and war with some of our traditional enemies like the Mohawk, the English always made their moves and pushed in on us.

- In that time period, I had many ancestral family members killed by Abenaki people, captured by Abenaki people.

- In some cases, it was to replace people who had died to incorporate into your tribe and to build your people up again.

Especially when you have massive diseases and wars that are killing people left and right.

- My mother and many Yankee people still considered the Saint Francis Indians as the epitome of the enemy.

And Saint Francis Indians is another word for Abenaki.

- We would give them a little bit of land in the very beginning, and they would just keep taking and taking and taking.

- There's a lot of tension still.

And the trauma of substantial breadth and depth, which in my opinion needs to be healed up.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) - They were carried up through Vermont to Saint Francis, which was where many of the Indians, Abenaki, and others actually had regrouped.

- St. Francis at the core is the Odanak Reserve in Canada, the capital of the Abenaki, if you will, their hideout.

- Odanak is a village or a town.

Odanak is the place where we come from.

- [Susannah] After we'd been in Saint Francis, what the Indian people call Odanak, my master put two wampum belts on me, which increased my value.

And I was bought by a member of the community called Gill.

- Louis Gill was a white captive and so was his wife.

He ended up becoming chief of the Abenaki at one point.

And today, the Gills are still part of the Abenaki people from Odanak, what you guys would call Saint Francis.

- And I guess in later years, I've come to realize how very like us they are.

Sometimes cruel, sometimes kind.

(pleasant music) - [Dorothy] What happened to your children?

- Well, my son Sylvanus was kept by the Indians.

And four years after all of this happened, I heard he was in the area and I went to see him and he didn't know who I was.

He didn't speak English, he spoke a little French, but he'd become an Indian warrior.

And gradually he became part of our lives again.

But he never really let it go, let the Indian way go.

He was always prone.

- You have to understand that it wasn't the Abenaki who changed.

It was we, Yankee, Vermonters and Franco Americans, French Canadian people who changed.

We're wearing moccasins, we're wearing leggings, using skills and techniques.

In the farming and hunting and fishing and trapping, everything is Abenaki or Native to the core.

- [Susannah] So we put the stones up to commemorate it, and I think they're very beautiful.

- [Dorothy] Your mother played a large role in your life as well.

- Oh yes, and in fact, one day she said to me, "Susannah, it's very rare that you can say to someone," and this was my aged mother speaking, "Daughter, go to your daughter because your daughter's daughter has had a daughter."

We were everywhere in the Connecticut River Valley, beautiful place to settle.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) - [John] So the rule that governed everything was to take all this virgin land and get it so it could be deeded to individual people and they could own it.

And that was done with a system called the town proprietors.

- Many of the people that bought the towns, the proprietors of the towns, never moved to Vermont.

- They lived down in colonial New England somewhere.

They had to obtain a charter for a township, then they had to get it surveyed.

Not only the farm lines and the town lines, but the roads.

The roads are basically step one.

(feet shuffling) - Here we go, proprietor's records 1752 to 1761.

You know what's really wonderful?

Is we have the grant from the king of England.

(gentle music) - So what you see here is called a chain, crude surveyors chain.

But it was a unit to measure distance.

It took several men to carry it, because you can't let it touch the ground.

And distance measurement was so important, that the chain bearers had to swear under oath that they were going to do it honestly and not the other way.

Townships were laid out in a checkerboard fashion on paper.

And when a settler came up here to settle, he had to settle on one of these squares of the checkerboard.

And that was wherever it happened to be.

- When Benning Wentworth chartered the towns, if you look at that old map, it was cookie cutter.

Every town was square.

If you look at that, you think, my god, they violated every notion of bio-regional boundaries.

- When they got enough settlers to issue the first deeds, they'd say, "We're going to have a division of the land."

And the first division was the slip the paper they drew out with a number on it.

The word draw means to pull.

When they came to my name on the list, they'd reach in and pull out number 13, and they call it my lot, my destiny.

So the people that are going to come up here in the wilderness and settle.

To do the actual work are going to be the young men.

The older generations are gonna stay down there, but they backed him financially.

So the plan is that he has to come up here and start his clearing for his first log cabin.

He naturally comes as early in the spring as he can.

Maybe a couple young men spend that summer here and they can get that done by fall.

And then they get out of here.

Probably when he comes back the second spring, he has his bride with him and they stay on.

(gentle music) - [Amanda] It's a primal New England like desire to beat back the forest, you know, and maintain open land.

I mean, that's definitely a passion.

- Young people are getting into farming again, and many of these people have the same kind of love for working the land that the early settlers of Vermont had.

Now, they're different from the early settlers because in many cases they're very highly educated.

- I love farming, I love forestry, I love animals.

So I wanted to make the farm a place that represented that love.

And fortunately, I met Amanda, who embodied all of those things and more.

- He was so like bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

And he was two years younger than me.

And so, my friends called him the paper boy because he really sort of was the paper boy.

Now he's aged, now he's the paper man.

- I grew up with three sisters, and the question of farming was directed towards me.

"Ross, are you going to take the farm over?"

My first year of college, it all sort of came together as far as sustainable agriculture.

- Well, we were pleased naturally.

But our children all went to college with their own minds of what they were going to be doing after school, there was no pressure.

- [Ross] I came back to the farm with a pretty strong vision as far as how I saw it.

And I didn't necessarily know it was going to be an organic dairy.

- I think he wanted to do something different.

I mean, everybody has to leave their mark on the farm.

So that's okay.

- From my perspective now, I can imagine, like he must have had to brace himself whenever I came home, because he was managing the farm, paying the bills.

I was making his life more complicated by bringing up new ideas.

- [Amanda] We work in these little postage stamp fields filled with their fair share of rocks.

- You know, she started the garden and we moved on to having Isabella, Henry, and Willem, and ended up building a beautiful barn.

That still kind of amazes me sometimes.

(pleasant music) (birds chirping) - Yeah, the settlers lived everywhere, many different places.

(leaves rustling) - So once you had cleared so many acres and raised a crop, been there a year or two, then they had to give you a deed.

It was considered benefiting both sides and everybody.

The settler was doing the work and getting ownership of his homestead in return, but it was making it possible for the proprietors to develop the town and sell other land nearby.

When they had the second division, land would be much more valuable.

And later on, they'd every third division and a fourth division.

So this process may have gone on from the first day, right up till maybe 1810, when the last empty land was proportioned.

(pleasant music) - My ancestors logged off the old growth forest, must have been just beautiful majestic trees, probably four feet around.

And they just piled 'em up, lit 'em on fire and dribbled water through the ashes to make lye, which was then used to make soap.

That was how a person made a living.

- I mean, Vermont represented freehold land ownership.

You owned your property outright.

And that was very important to the Vermonters because, in New York, many of the middling people were leaseholders.

- They simply were called tenants, and had the obligation to till that soil and firmament.

But the actual profits went to the wealthy class at the top.

Vermont is very different, the closest to democratic anything could be.

(gunshot blaring) (crowd arguing) About the time the revolution started, they got into a land title dispute because New York wanted to claim Vermont.

But Vermont had been settled as part of New Hampshire.

- Vermont was born under a cloud, and the cloud was, who owned the land?

- There was a battle in Packer corners, right up by the corners between the forces of Ethan Allen and the Yorkers who wanted this part of Vermont to be part of New York.

- To me, I equate it to gang warfare.

You know, it's the Ethan Allen Green Mountain boys gang versus the Yorkers gang over territory.

- Ethan Allen was quoted as saying that if Guilford people, the Yorkers weren't ready to give up their land and become part of the Republic of Vermont, he would lay waste to Guilford as Sodom and Gomorrah by God.

And there's a dispute about whether there's a comma before the by God, whether it's an exclamation or a prepositional phrase, according to the town history anyway, so.

- I mean, this was kind of a wild and crazy guy, as they used to say on Saturday Night Live.

- He was a big guy and he outnumbered them more often than he was outnumbered.

But he took the more sort of gentle giant approach, which is to scare the hell out of 'em and make 'em not want to come back.

- The great event was Ethan Allen's capture of Fort Ticonderoga.

It was the first offensive action of the Revolutionary War.

It scared the daylights out of Congress because they weren't ready to move that strongly against Great Britain.

But there was that fort sitting over there, and Vermonters were displeased with British rule.

And so, they went over there and captured it.

You know, it wasn't much of a military operation.

- And New Hampshire and New York both claiming Vermont, we said we'd go to war if need be, to make sure we kept our own independence.

Thomas Jefferson told George Washington, "I know those people would Vermont, they'll do it."

- The Vermont towns were here, were thriving with their own town governed.

They got right on the stick immediately, and sent word around that every town had to send a representative to what they called a general assembly.

In other words, they were forming a union.

So they got together and said, we've got to have a name to call this.

And somebody came up with the idea of Vermont, so they formed themselves as the state of Vermont.

The towns formed the state.

- It was not part of the British Empire any longer, and it was seceded from that.

But also it was not part of the United States, nor was it certainly not part of New York.

- There wasn't one single college graduate among the 60 some people who attended the Constitutional convention.

They were all common men.

And what the founders of Vermont needed to do in crafting the constitution was to come up with a document that was gonna be really exciting, that was gonna capture people's imagination.

That in an age of print revolution could be something people could physically see and read and become excited about.

(pleasant music) - This state was the first state in the country to abolish slavery, and people knew what they were doing.

- [Paul] The first clause is the freedom clause, but the second clause establishes eminent domain.

That if the state needs private property for some good reason, that the state has the right to take it.

- I think the founders, and they were, of course, all men at that time, had a sense of democracy, a strong sense of democracy with a small D. - Vermont was the first state to establish universal manhood suffrage, and to establish compulsory education.

- That's this idea that at least the basic education, the elementary education, should not be reserved to the little children of people wealthy enough to hire tutors, to hire a governess.

Thomas Jefferson writes on that at length.

And Jefferson, by the way, loved Vermont.

He saw Vermont as a possible way to go, that this was where it seemed to be happening.

This democratic society of yeoman farmers who go out and do their chores in the morning and then come in and write their letters to the editor.

And then do their afternoon work, and then spend the evening reading Cicero.

I mean, he really sort of had this image.

- I mean, you could even argue, I mean, people do argue that the whole attempt to create Vermont as an independent community that was not part of New York, that was not part of New Hampshire, that perhaps was not even part of the United States, reflects that impulse to be different, to be really on the edge of what everybody else is doing.

- But there's also recognition that you need to work together to make sure there's a school or a church or a community building or roads.

And when you're raising the roof on the barn, you need more than just your family, you need your neighbors also.

So Vermont's state motto, fabulous state motto is, freedom and unity.

(gentle music) - We wanted to join the union, but they wouldn't let us in.

There was all kinds of politics going on, including the politics of slavery.

- And Vermont's constitution outlawed slavery.

Well, it outlawed adult slavery.

Children could be held until they were of maturity.

But as an institution, as an economic force, it never existed in the state of Vermont.

- Slavery in New England was always called servants.

They never used the word slave.

- [Elise] But the society as a whole looked at people of color as people who should be serving white people.

- And so as some of those people are moving into the grants, some of them are bringing slaves with them.

- We know of Vermonters who had people working and living with them on their property.

Ethan Allen, I think had six guys on his property.

You don't hear about slaves being bought and sold in Vermont, but you certainly hear about servitude.

- A lot of the Blacks living in these households were little girls who were probably indentured or maybe enslaved.

- [Ray] Slaves show up in town documents, they show up in obituaries, they show up in personal recollections and diaries and journals.

And they show up in bills of sale for the actual transaction of human property.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) - The Storms family in Vergennes, they were a family of five enslaved in the household of Platt Rogers.

Platt Rogers knew, when he came here with Primus, Pamelia, and their three children, that they could not be held as slaves by Vermont law.

And the next thing you know, the Storms family are free, living on their own land.

Now, how did that transition happen?

- There's a hill in Hinesburg called Lincoln Hill.

It's still a dirt road, it goes from Hinesburg over to Huntington.

And it was settled in the 1790s by Blacks from lower New England.

- My relatives, the Clarks and the Langleys, used to own this property back in the late 1700s, just after the end of the Revolutionary War.

They cleared the forest, built houses, joined a community of three families that were all free Blacks that lived on the hill.

And this is where most of 'em were buried.

We believe there were about 13 graves, based on some of the headstones that have been found.

- Yeah, and it's typical back then that there were these family cemeteries on the property that they owned.

- How do they come to own land?

How did it feel to be a Black person in 18th century Vermont?

- They chopped down all the large trees, and really just made huge pastures and had oxen and sheep and some cows and just farmed the land.

And bartered and traded with the town's folks and really lived life up here.

- There's another one right here.

- Unfortunately, the cemetery was vandalized during the late 50s, early 60s, by a local Huntington person.

- Well, really sad.

- Yeah.

- Smashed everything.

- Right.

- [Langley] I just wish I knew which one was Shubael.

It would've been amazing to understand why he picked here to put a farm together.

- When they got their freedom, they tended to move right to the cities.

So those few people who came to Vermont were doing something against the grain.

- They really thrived up here.

Shubael Clark, when he first moved up here, he owned 150 acres.

- [Jane] They were going to biracial schools, they belonged to churches in the area.

They went to town and they voted.

So they were practicing their civic responsibilities, wherein most of the places in the United States they could not do that.

- They lived what we would call the American dream here in Vermont, owning a piece of property, raising families, living and dying and standing up for what you believe in.

- They were farmers, they were barbers, they were fiddlers, they were manual laborers, they were intellectuals, they were writers, they were preachers.

Lemuel Haynes was one of the most influential early Vermont preachers, and he was of African descent.

- [Elise] There was a larger percentage early on, the first few decades of statehood, than there is now.

- And one reason these folks came to Vermont is Vermont was well known as a place where people of color could perhaps find sanctuary from the slave trade or the enslavement down south.

Or even enslavement in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where slavery was still legal before the Civil War.

(gentle music) - [Edmund] One of our more famous African Americans coming into the area, because he leaves a record of his experience, is a guy named Jeffrey Brace.

(pleasant music) - He said, "Read that."

I says, "No."

I said, "I want to talk to you, see."

He says, "Read the paper."

I said, "I'll read it later."

He says, "Read that damn paper."

I opened it up and I see this picture and they put my name under it.

And I dropped it because I have the same name as a slave.

(crowd applauding and cheering) - Myself, I've always wondered why I was so light skinned.

(crowd laughing) And also, others in my family are light skinned.

But also we have the dark skinned folks in our family also.

You never asked why you were light skinned, you never asked why they were dark skinned.

You lived with it, you went on.

That's the way life was.

- There was a lot of interracial marriage in Vermont at this time.

They were all marriages between Black men and white women.

Or there were some really interesting cases where you would see one white man and one Black woman living as the housekeeper.

And in those cases, I always wonder if she really was.

I mean, I'm sure she was keeping house, but was she also, were they living as husband and wife?

I don't know.

- You say to yourself, how can that be?

How can a Black man marry a white woman in them days?

Unheard of.

- In the other northern states, they all outlawed interracial marriage.

- Wyren Brace, which was one of the grandsons, Wyren, Ethan, they married Abenaki women, okay?

My wife, and this is how revelation goes back, my wife is Tina Saint-Francis of the Abenaki tribe.

Okay, so that just showed you how full circle things in life can come.

- And Vermont is the whitest state in the union.

- My mother called one day and said, "Did you know there was a Black man who'd lived right where you live a couple of hundred years ago?"

And I said, "No, I thought I was the first person in Guilford of color."

And she said, "No, afraid not."

So I looked into it and hadn't realized at that moment that he was a Baja prince who was married to Lucy Terry.

And Lucy Terry was someone I certainly knew a lot about.

She's the stuff of legend.

- Well, Lucy Prince was a slave, she was living in Deerfield, Massachusetts.

She was a house servant, and had gained quite a reputation as an orator actually, a poet.

And when Deerfield had been raided by Abenaki Indians, she had made up a very famous story about the raid.

Lucy ended up marrying a free man, a guy named Abijah, and they came up to Guilford to live and to create a homestead.

- He taught her in some ways, to stick to their rights, to use this judicial system that nobody really paid attention to, at a time when Black people couldn't testify in court in the South.

- But the Braces in Poultny, the Princes in Guilford, these settlement families will find that they have trouble with their white neighbors.

- They were reported to have pulled down their fences and burnt their hayricks, making it very difficult for the Princes to survive.

- You know, you just ended the Revolutionary War.

America's just becoming a country.

(horses neighing) Had to be a lot of conflict at that time.

It's amazing that they thrived as well as they did.

- And they do seem able to seek legal recourse.

The Vermont legislature is seeing its Black citizens as worthy of protection.

- Abijah and Lucy I think, for all the depredations and things that they underwent, were probably very beloved.

And they died very beloved by people in their communities.

- So this field actually is part of their property.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) - [Dorothy] So what happened to all these people of color who were here?

- Abijah's grandchildren were half white, 'cause his son married a white woman.

- You can look down in the next generations, if the children of these interracial marriages also married white people, pretty soon you'll find them showing up in the census as white, not Black.

- [Gretchen] And it could well be that their descendants are walking around, not realizing that they too perhaps are mixed race and part of Vermont's history in a way we can't imagine.

- I think we're gonna find out that Vermont is much more diverse than we've known.

(upbeat music) - Get out of my way, 6th grader.

- I rarely go anywhere in Vermont now where I don't see someone of color, and wonder what it's like for them.

- I am mad because racism still exists in this school.

- Yeah!

- I am mad.

- My idol, Martin Luther King Jr, has said, "I have a dream one day our children will be judged by their quality and not by their skin color."

- People of color account for 20 to 25% of our population growth.

New Americans from over 30 countries in Africa are calling Vermont home.

- I think when I moved to Vermont, I have one desire, is to find a peaceful place.

A place where I could actually sleep without the fear of being, you know, attacked or something.

And I feel like Vermont is a place to lay foundation for a new life in the United States.

- But that's an enormous struggle for people to operate in a new culture, to learn a new language.

And to start a new life, having left behind everything that is dear to them.

- We as Africans have come through so many brutal situations.

It's very unfair because of our lack of education, because we've only been here for two, three years, that we're categorized as idiots pretty much.

- They say ignore it.

How far do they want to push me to say ignore?

How far do they want me to ignore?

(lady speaking in foreign language) - So she's saying, the pain that these students are feeling, we're feeling as well as parents.

- A woman approached me in a supermarket and asked me if my name was the same as one of her sheep, because we had the same hair.

And she said it was a compliment.

And I just looked at her and I thought, I can hit her.

I can feel bad for her 'cause she could think this outrageous thing could be possible.

But mostly I looked up and saw people taking their shopping carts out of the way as fast as they could.

So, you know, I thought, okay, this is Vermont.

She's wearing her Birkenstocks and her socks, and she probably thinks it's a great compliment.

She sort of shouted out to me, "I assure you it's a prized color and texture."

- We dress different, we look different, we speak different.

I want people to know us, I want them to see.

- We're small state, we're a small community.

And we're gonna have to make some really important choices on which way we wanna go.

Are we gonna have strife in the community, or do we do something different?

- You guys brought us here, we're learning your ways.

Why can't you guys understand our way?

(audience applauding) - [Hal] You know, we're all kind of on the same journey.

We're just at different points along the journey.

(gentle music) (children indisticntly chattering) (gentle music) - This Vermont now was not part of the 13 colonies.

It was at republic to itself, the Vermonters hadn't planned it that way.

- It wanted to be the 14th state throughout most of that time period, but it wasn't accepted till after the Revolution.

- Our people had fought well in the Revolution.

We thought we had earned a place in the new nation, but it took us 14 years to get in.

- Congress had to approve this area becoming a state.

Now, you're gonna hear an argument.

One of the requirements for statehood was that there was no other claim on the land.

Meaning that any Native people, any Indigenous people, any Indian people, that were living in that state had to have treatied over or been bought out.

The land had to have been bought.

- It's never been purchased, it's never been surrendered, and no aboriginal title or rights has ever been surrendered.

- So how did Vermont become a state?

Well, these upstanding Allen boys went to Congress and said, "There are no Indians that live there, they just pass through."

- And we know now that was a convenient myth for the Allen Brothers and the Indian River Land Company in terms of promoting settlement.

- And Congress went, your estate.

So the entire concept of the state of Vermont is illegal and built on a lie.

- It was pretty much decided the best thing to do is not fight, blend into the community.

- But within their homes, oftentimes they would keep the family stories or the traditions.

Like when I was a kid, we used to go butter nutty.

We ate woodchuck, for Pete's sake, you know?

I mean, it's just things like that.

(gentle music) - There was some families in town that looked down on us, you know?

And they just called us poor people.

They never knew we were Native American, so that's okay.

(pleasant music) In the maple, you peel the bark, the outside bark off, and on the inside, there's a little thin layer.

All you do is scrape that layer, and that has all the nutrients that's going into that tree.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) That's the part you eat.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) And you will live.

It will go back, it will stay.

(birds chirping) - And Abenakis really weren't pushed out of Vermont because they were all here living here.

Oh, yeah, what we'll do is put on like farmers outfit and actually work the land.

Hey, there's an idea.

Now we're viable members of the community and we're not really Indians anymore, because we get along with everybody in town.

So the Indians are still here, and they always have been.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) (Native language singing) (Native language singing continues) (Native language singing continues) - You have to think of Vermont as being a frontier society, even into the 19th century.

Most settlers were young men on the make, in many ways, desperate or poor.

- You simply couldn't kowtow a Vermont pioneer based on religious principle because that guy was too tough.

- Vermont communities were filled with Baptists and with what were called dissenters, people who dissented from the dominant churches in Southern New England.

And they had a tradition of that in their families.

- That really created, you see, a very strong, nascent belief in one's personal freedom.

And this was a very American reaction to religion.

- Joseph Smith, he's the craziest spiritual character that America produces ever in its history, I think.

And he's a Vermonter.

- Joseph Smith is an example of one extreme, leaning toward all sorts of belief in miracles and magic almost.

It was very popular among the less analytic people of the time, and they just loved these miracles.

And they were always watching for signs from heaven.

People just lapped it right up and got carried away.

- It was a magical, mysterious time, being distant from the traditions and mores of Boston of New Haven, the developing towns at the time, and cities, New York.

- But as the state made a transition from its frontier period to a more settled society, the state began to change politically and culturally.

People from the east began to come to Vermont because Vermont had a reputation as being a place where fortunes could be made.

- People started mining minerals, large iron mining and smelting operation.

Those kinds of people certainly became wealthy, and those people tended to become political leaders as well.

(gentle music) - The development of Vermont runs through Masonic channels from the 1770s up into the 1830s.

And you have the Masons as the governor of the state.

They're really the old boy network that comes through the Green Mountain Boys culture.

The early grant period.

- And Vermont, by the early 1780s, had become a politically divided place, really between the people who lived in the hills and the people who lived in the valleys.

- And if you go across the state, lots of the leadership would be Masonic.

They were the groups that brought together capital to create banks and get post offices placed in areas.

So later, they build railroads.

They have this really intoxicating mix of philosophy and claims to antiquity.

And the continuation of those ancient rituals are happening behind closed doors that not everybody can participate in.

- Well, it's not a secret organization.

In fact, we march in parades and are very proud of our Masonic lodges.

We open those buildings to the public from time to time.

We do have secrets, as other fraternities do.

(gentle music) (gavel thudding) - But something very specifically happened between the 1820s and 1830s.

And what had happened is a market revolution had taken place, transportation, right?

Construction of the Erie Canal, the Champlain Canal, thrust capitalist imperatives and the capitalist economy into that region.

And the result is that the people who live there have to adjust to that new order, essentially overnight.

And very quickly, Vermonter's witnessed increasing disparity between the wealthy and the poor, the increasing feeling of alienation from decision making.

And the Masonic lodge itself seemed to crystallize for them what was going wrong with modern times, which is that a small number of increasingly wealthy elite people were going behind closed doors to a place where decisions were being made that they had no access to.

(stirring music) - The anti-Masonic movement really caught fire in Vermont.

There were town meetings held throughout the state by people opposed to the Masonic order.

- It was an effort on the part of the so-called common person to make sure that the social institutions were not controlled by an oligarchy, or an elite group of men.

- I think it was an instinctual response against anything that smacked of exclusivism or of aristocracy.

And it was easy in a rural state like Vermont for people to see the linkages, the networks of power, and how those networks work.

- This grew quickly into a real political movement.

In 1831, Vermont elects an anti-Mason governor.

Palmer not only gets reelected governor, but we send an anti-Mason congressman to Washington, William Slade.

Slade goes to Washington as an anti-Mason, but he soon will emerge as a major opponent of slavery.

(gentle music) - The slave chains for the hands and the back chains and the head chains, where they pull their heads back behind them.

All for the cruel, critical, unbelievable things right here in this United States.

- [Ray] What happens is that as the anti-slavery struggle heats up, the Vermont legislature will pass law after law that attacks the National Fugitive Slave Act, that makes it illegal to capture a slave in this state or to take them out of state.

- It became pretty well known that Vermont did not permit slavery, and did not ever allow the return of a single fugitive slave.

- Father was born on August the 10th, 18:45 at Port Royal on the old Golden Plantation.

And so, this little misses were teaching my father ABCs and R-A-T and things like that.

She told father that up north in Vermont was a place where if he could get up there, the white people would let him be free.

- We took it very strongly, no man may own another.

- Senators, Congressman stood up in Congress and complained about this and said that this was an outrage that Vermont should flaunt the law.

- An unnamed slave makes it from New York to Vermont, is captured by his owner.

But because of Vermont constitution, he has to go through a court hearing with a judge, the Honorable Theophilus Harrington, who was a real character, he held court barefoot.

He didn't like down country lawyers, for instance.

He refuses to accept a bill of sale from the owner as proof that he owns the slave.

And famously the incredulous owner says, "Well, what proof would you accept?"

And Harrington supposedly retorts, "A bill of sale from God Almighty."

There is a fellow who was there in that courtroom and he says, "I shall never forget the wrapped attention with which the proceedings were followed by the several rows of ebony faces that lined the back of the courtroom."

- But it kept going worse.

My father said such a terrible situation was existing, that no one could imagine it at all.

- Now, be careful because we're gonna go into the old section of the house.

We have letters documenting fugitives who were here.

Every single one of these letters says the same thing, Vermont is a safe haven.

- [Ray] There was a tide of more and more runaways and fugitives coming into Vermont from outside the state, and this becomes known as the Underground Railroad.

- [Elisa] Rowland Thomas and Rachel Gilpin Robinson were the heads of household here.

They were devout Quakers and they were radical abolitionists.

- Not only do we know that the slaves were harbored, but we also know that they worked in the fields on the farm and were paid for it.

- They are concerned and frightened certainly, but they are also formidable people.

Rowland Robinson is a Quaker boy.

The first weapons that this Quaker boy sees growing up are Bowie knives and Colt revolvers in the belts of fugitive slaves who are passing through.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] I may as well tell the truth, I was frightened to take a long journey.

I did not know the country.

I did know that if my master caught me and brought me back, I should get scourged daily to death.

I was always on the lookout for a fair chance of escaping.

And treasured up in my memory such scraps of information as I could draw out of the people that came to the plantation.

I have no knowledge of distance or direction, but the hour was now come.

And the man must act and be free, or remain a slave forever.

Hope, fear, dread, terror, love, sorrow, and deep melancholy were mingled in my mind together.

(stirring music) (leaves rustling) I had but four pieces of clothing about my person.

I was a starving fugitive without home or friends.

I went up the Northern Canal into one of the New England states.

When I reached Vermont, I found the people very hospitable and kind.

They seem opposed to slavery, so I told them I was a runaway slave.

I hired myself to a firm in Sudbury.

After I'd been in Sudbury some time, I was advised to leave by some of the people around who thought the gentleman I was with would write to my former master.

Fearing I should be taken, I immediately left and went into the town of Ludlow where I met with a kind friend.

I was then conducted into a safe retreat, where there was a bed provided for me.

(pleasant music) I felt so singularly happy.

At last, I became alive to the truth, that I was in a friend's house and that I really was free and safe.

- You hear these words, and they're so not that legendary Underground Railroad where the slaves are packages that white people pick up and hand to each other.

Where there are people with no agency, no courage, no fortitude.

- [Dorothy] I wanted to know the route that they took.

- No, they didn't.

The Underground Railroad is a metaphor.

Any Underground Railroad book you read will have a map and it'll show these arrows going up from the south into the north.

And it's as though the fugitive just had to go like this, "Okay, I'm on the Underground railroad now," whoosh.

You read the narratives, they went in a circle five times.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) - [Narrator] I am glad to say also that numbers of my colored brethren now escape from slavery.

They suffer many privations in their attempts to reach the free states.

They subsist only on such wild fruit as they can gather.

And as they are often very long on their way, they reach the free states almost like skeletons.

- [Ray] What happened is that African Americans pass through Vermont, some of them on itineraries that are developed by white abolitionists, but many on their own.

Some of them are going along a network of safe houses.

Others are relying on random acts of kindness.

- [Narrator] In these dangerous journeys, they're guided by the North Star, for they only know that the land of freedom is in the north.

(gentle music) - Some people really oversimplified Vermont's history, 'cause at the very same time that you had Underground Railroad, you have this other flip side of the anti-slavery movement, the Vermont Colonization Society, which was popular in Vermont.

The VCS was a local branch, where they were dedicated to sending Black people out of the United States.

- And the idea was we're gonna ship free Blacks to Africa back home.

They didn't think of that as home.

They were three generation, four generation Americans.

They didn't wanna go back to Africa.

- In other words, people that supported the VCS, they were anti-slavery, but they were also anti-Black.

Which was not, please don't think this was peculiar to Vermont, this was a very common trend in the United States among anti-slavery people, okay?

- Abolitionists is another story though.

Abolitionists were the more radical fringe.

And they believed in the total equality of people, regardless of color, regardless of gender.

- And it wasn't very long before people saw the Colonization Society for what it was.

And it was really the Black leaders who started to organize against it, and they really had a profound effect.

- [Howard] The abolitionists were all over Vermont.

Frederick Douglass comes here.

- Little towns, you know, Jamaica, Vermont had an abolition society with 200 people in it.

- They weren't always welcomed well.

Frederick Douglass gets insulted up in Ferrisburgh, and one abolitionist gets snowballed in Montpelier.

- [Jane] People thought they were gonna destroy the country, and they would've happily destroyed the country if it would've ended slavery.

I mean, William Lloyd Garrison had been calling for no union of slaveholders since the 1830s.

- [Howard] He raises a petition with about 2,300 Vermont signatures on it and sends it to Congress in support of an effort to outlaw slavery in the District of Columbia.

- It got people out, sort of neighbor to neighbor, and it was very much done by women.

Women had no political rights, so they couldn't vote, they couldn't get involved in any other way.

So they would carry these petitions around.

Hundreds of thousands of signatures went pouring into Congress, and lots of them from Vermont.

And the South controlled Congress.

So they passed what they called the gag rule.

They were permanently tabled.

They went straight to a storage closet, which was filled with these petitions that Congress didn't wanna look at.

- So father said from that time on, he began realizing many things.

They were talking about war and slavery, and all of the talk at the tables and things.

The sons and the fathers were all fussing and quarreling, and they began talking about the Yanks and the North and cotton and so forth, until the thing finally broke.

(bombs whirring and exploding) - There was a tremendous patriotic upsurge in the beginning of the war.

You almost couldn't refuse to be drafted.

But Vermonters from the beginning were absolutely remarkable soldiers.

They obeyed orders.

They had walked all their lives.

They probably walked three, four, or five miles to school.

Probably most of them had hunted, so they were good shots.

They worked on the farm, they were in incredibly good physical condition.

And if you're on a farm, if the whole family doesn't pitch in and do what it has to do, the farm fails.

So you do what the old man tells you.

And the word got out on them and they paid a heavy, heavy price.

(upbeat music) We sent 34,238 Vermonters to war.

The official records say that 5,224 Vermonters died.

It's certainly closer to 6,000, because they didn't count the men who died after they returned home.

And so many of them did.

The great weakness was that they came from pristine Vermont.

They had not built up the immunities that city kids build up.

And so, when they got down to the encampments, they caught everything.

They died like flies from whooping cough and diptheria and measles and everything.

They were dying so rapidly in the first winter of the war, 1861 winter, that the War Department sends an investigator to try to find out what's wrong with the Vermonters.

And his report is a strange one.

He seems to conclude that some of it may have been homesickness.

(gentle music) - It was a situation that no one could really comprehend or understand, unless you had been in the midst of it with the half white slave children and the darker slave children.

And they couldn't read or write, had no clothing and barefooted.

And the white ladies that had been wearing silts and satins and the colored women fanning them and all of that, cooking.

And the plantations being burned to the ground.

It was a situation unbelievable that existed.

That existed in the South only 100 years ago.

- I think a lot of those young men went off to war to get the hell away from the farm.

They probably saw it as their only chance to see the world, to get away from father, to be their own person, you know?

- You remember there were no automobiles at the time.

And so, Morgan horses supplied the cavalry for the Civil War and afterwards.

The federal government let it be known when they were gonna be in the area, and they would have what they call the horse inspection.

They paid on the average of $160 for a cavalry horse.

(pleasant music) But there's more than one story I've heard about domestic disputes arising when the farmer sold his wife's best driving horse.

The Morgans were always in top demand.

- And it was one of those animals that had very strong genetic characteristics.

So it passed on these characteristics.

- So no matter what kind of mare they bred him to, the offspring came out looking like his father.

But it's a funny thing how genetics work, because one of the things about them is that they are naturally good harness horses, which explains why they were good at pulling the artillery.

But many of them didn't come back, and some of the best ones didn't come back, which were then lost to the gene pool forever.

- It was a terribly bloody time.

But throughout the course of the Civil War, Vermonters hold key positions.

At Gettysburg, the 2nd Vermont brigade, they've only been in nine months, they have never been in a battle.

They attack the flank of Pickett's Charge.

They go out to this no man's land of shot and shell and defeat the most important attack, probably, of the entire Civil War.

How do we know it was the Vermonters that beat him?

Because the Confederates said so.

They said it was the fire from the right, that's the Vermonters' fire.

- In the Battle of Cedar Creek, the Union troops had been overwhelmed by a Confederate surprise attack.

And General Sheridan, who was the commanding general of the Union Army, he heard cannon fire from a neighboring town.

Got on his Morgan horse, Rienzi, and rode to the battle scene, found his troops reeling back in disarray.

- [Howard] The Vermonters make a remarkable stand, they stop the attack.

- And they won the battle of Cedar Creek.

It was an enormous victory because it was shortly before the presidential election, and it helped Lincoln win reelection.

(gentle music) - Father said he was on the battlefield picking up the dead and the wounded and things at first, until '63.

And then father said that Lincoln said he would have to call in the Negroes to come in to help if they hoped to win.

- Yeah, my great-great-grandfather, Louden Langley, walked from Lincoln Hill all the way down to Brattleboro and enlisted there, signed up, and joined the Massachusetts 54th, the regiment that was for colored men.

- There were over 200,000 blacks that enlisted.

And, of course, it made a huge difference.

But they were Black, so they weren't allowed to join the white men in arms.

And the pay for the Blacks was not equal to the pay of the whites.

And the Blacks refused pay until they were paid the same.

- And this monument is dedicated to them and their attack on Fort Wagner, where a lot of them were killed.

But it actually helped to turn the tide to the war.

- Grant has been trying for 10 months to smash through the confederate lines of Petersburg.

He can't do it, but on the morning of April 2nd, he masses 12,000 men in a wedge shaped formation with a Vermont brigade at the point of that formation.

And at first light, they smash through.

A Vermonter, Charles Gould from Wyndham, is the first over the earth works.

And a week later, Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox.

- And the fields of the Southland is fertile with the blood of those Negro slaves.

And all of these men that went from Vermont to save us, the Grafton boys, the Daniels, the Duncans, and the Ballets, and the Burgesses and the Halls.

Even to the Hemingway, who went when he was 14 years old, to fight this war.

And it always ended ultimately with us being the Vermont.

And my father came up here and cleared a swamp and made us a home.

(gentle music) - The Civil War is over.

The Emancipation Proclamation, the constitutional amendments, freeing Blacks have occurred.

And you think, oh, happy day.

- But with all the issues of reconstruction, whites quickly got tired of the struggle.

- Things change when you're not a mascot, you know?

When you're not somebody who can be saved.

- Many African Americans who come up here on the Underground Railroad, who stay in Vermont, remain peripatetic.

They are bouncing around for economic reasons, for various reasons, looking for a connection.

- It's the same as any outsider, but with this layer of identifiable difference.

- And there is competition by the 1850s, 60s, 70s, instead of Black Nancy or Dina or old Caesar doing the work around the homestead, you've got Kitty Kelly.

You've got these Irish working girls, immigrant girls coming in.

And pretty soon you've got Catherine Charbonneau, you've got French Canadian women or guys coming in.

- I didn't see Blacks being hired by the railroad men or other sorts of businesses in this state.

- [Langley] So economically, it got tough.

- Especially with your family, it was the cheese factory that drove 'em out.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause once the cheese factory came in, they didn't have the opportunity to sell their cheese to the community.

So they got pushed out.

- Where are they going?

They're going to Saratoga, to Hartford, to Albany and Boston, to the cities.

And Vermonters begin to develop a kind of amnesia about Native Americans, about African Americans.

But emphatically, I wanna say that African American people have never been strangers in Vermont.

They have never been strangers in the kingdom, they have always been here.

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