Vermont: A Study of Independence

Vermont didn't just happen. It was fought for. This late 19th-century account traces the remarkable story of a territory that refused to become another colony, instead carving out fourteen years as an independent republic before joining the Union on its own uncompromising terms. Robinson guides readers through the rugged hills and bitter winters where French missionaries gave way to English settlers, where Indigenous nations navigated between competing powers, and where a stubborn population of yeoman farmers decided they'd had enough of being debated by distant kings. The prose carries the weight of someone writing close to the events, preserving firsthand accounts and local memory before they faded entirely. What emerges is not simple patriotic narrative but a textured account of how ordinary people, squeezed between great empires, built something genuinely unusual in colonial America: a community that understood freedom not as abstraction but as hard-won self-determination. For readers drawn to the hidden threads of American history, the stories we rarely tell about how nations actually form, this remains a valuable window into a place that has always done things differently.