On the 13th he engaged the enemy; on the 16th the battle was fought. If there had been no battle at all, such celerity and precision of movement, with an irregular force, in the face of such difficulties, would alone have been generalship of the highest order.

At Manchester he was met by a peremptory order from Congress to march at once to join Schuyler, leaving the Grants to their fate. He refused to obey it. The cause was more to him than Congress, and he understood its necessities better than they did. On the 19th, three days after the battle, but before the news of it had reached them, that body adopted a resolution that his conduct was prejudicial to discipline, and injurious to the common cause, and demanding of New Hampshire to revoke the orders under which he was acting. Three days later, they sent him a vote of thanks, their only contribution to the victory that caused the destruction of Burgoyne.

Meanwhile the men of the Grants had not been idle. Every nerve had been strained in their own behalf. The Council of Safety, improvised for the occasion, sat continuously at Bennington, assuming all the powers of government. Every available man turned out. No woman bid husband, son, or brother stay. Such scanty supplies as by the utmost exertion could be collected, were thrown into the common stock. The very day before the battle, expresses were sent out through the farm-houses to gather lead, "urgently needed," said the Council. The woods were on fire. Not with the transient blaze that sweeps through the dry leaves and is gone, but with the deep, unquenchable combustion that burns in the roots and the earth. Of the stores that had been previously gathered at

Bennington, much has been said, and but little is known. Their importance has probably been exaggerated. That Burgoyne needed them, such as they were, and desired still more to deprive his enemy of them, may be true. But they were by no means the principal object of the expedition he sent out, altogether disproportioned to so small a matter. He saw as clearly as Stark did that his left was the dangerous quarter. It was not the feeble resistance before him that he was afraid of, which had not yet fired an effectual shot. It was what he well called "the gathering storm that was hanging on his left." He perceived that he must strike a blow in that quarter which would put down opposition, and make safe his flank and his rear. He meant to mount his dismounted dragoons on horses obtained in the Grants, and to occupy and secure that ground. The troops he sent out were therefore choice and well commanded, and followed by a strong support. And their orders were, not merely to capture Bennington, but to cross the country to Rockingham, and thence march to Albany.

The British commander proceeded with the caution the importance of his expedition demanded. When he found that he must fight, and perceived the resolute and thorough soldiership of Stark's movements, he chose a position with excellent judgment, intrenched himself strongly, and placed his troops and his guns to the best advantage. Stark could not wait, as he would have done, for his enemy's advance. He was unable to subsist his ill-provided forces long, nor could he keep them from homes that were suffering for their presence. His only chance was to attack at once, and his dispositions for it, most ably seconded by

Warner, his right-hand man, were masterly beyond criticism. He had no artillery, no cavalry, no transportation, no commissariat but the women on the farms. Half of his troops were without bayonets, and even ammunition had to be husbanded. He lacked everything but men, and his men lacked everything but hardihood and indomitable resolution. Upon all known rules and experience of warfare, the successful storming, by a hastily organized militia, of an intrenched position at the top of a hill, held by an adequate regular force, would have been declared impossible. But it was the impossible that happened, in a rout of the veterans that amounted to destruction. History and literature, eloquence and poetry have combined to enshrine in the memory of mankind those decisive charges, at critical moments, by which great battles have been won and epochs in the life of nations determined. I set against the splendor of them all that final onset up yonder hill and over its breastworks of those New England farmers, on whose faces desperation had kindled the supernatural light of battle which never shines in vain. That field was the last hope of the Hampshire Grants. They were fighting for all they had on earth, whether of possessions or of rights. They could not go home defeated, for they would have had no homes to go to. The desolate land that Burgoyne would have left New York would have taken. Not a man was there by compulsion, or upon the slightest expectation of personal advantage or reward. The spirit which made the day possible was shown in that Stephen Fay, of Bennington, who had five sons in the fight. When the first-born was brought home to him dead,

"I thank God," he said, "that I had a son willing to give his life for his country."

Such, in merest and briefest outline, was Bennington. Its story, imperfectly preserved, comes down to us only in flashes, but they are flashes of glorious light. Its consequences were immediate and far-reaching. It was the first success of the Revolution which bore any fruit. Its guns sounded the first notes in the knell which announced that the power of Great Britain over the colonies she had created and had sacrificed was passing away. Burgoyne heard it, and knew what it meant. Washington heard it, and, hearing, took heart again. Confidence replaced despair. Gates succeeded Schuyler in command at Saratoga, and the militia poured into his camp. The invincibility of the British commander was gone. He fought desperately, but in vain. On the 17th of October he surrendered.

If Bennington had not been fought, or had been fought without success, the junction between Clinton and Burgoyne could not have been prevented, and his surrender would not have taken place. "If I had succeeded there," he wrote to his government, "I should have marched to Albany."

But Bennington was only an episode in the early life of Vermont. Striking, heroic, conspicuous, yet still but an episode. The outbreak of the Revolution found the people of the Hampshire Grants already engaged in a contest with the powerful Colony of New York, which had for ten years taxed their utmost resources. The first to occupy the unbroken wilderness which is now Vermont, they had taken and paid

for their titles to the lands, as a part of the Colony of New Hampshire, under regular grants from its governor as vicegerent of the British Crown. They had organized townships, built roads, cleared forests, and established their homes. Up to that time the territory had been universally regarded as a part of New Hampshire, and the early maps so laid it down. New York, for more than a hundred years from the date of her charter, had attempted no jurisdiction over it. But after the New Hampshire grants had been made and occupied, New York set up the claim that her eastern boundary was the Connecticut River. The line between that province and New Hampshire was so loosely defined in the charters, issued when the geography of the country was almost unknown, that it was impossible to be determined by their language. The charters were, in fact, conflicting. The greater influence of New York, and her better means of prosecuting her case before the Privy Council, obtained from the Crown, in 1764, an order establishing the Connecticut as the dividing line. But this was only the arbitrary adjustment of a boundary, incapable of other settlement. Its legal effect was prospective, not retroactive. It established jurisdiction, it did not invalidate titles previously vested, under which a prior and adverse possession existed, and which had been derived from the common source of title, the King, of whom the contesting governors were alike the agents, and while the territory was de facto a part of New Hampshire. Nor was it the intention of the Crown or of the Privy Council that it should have such an effect. When in 1767, three years later, the settlers, resisting the efforts of New York to confiscate their lands, suc