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appendix b The Vermont Historical and Antiquarian Society: Documenting and Promoting a Hero Created by an act of the Vermont legislature in 1838, the Vermont Historical and Antiquarian Society (VHS) for more than two decades remained a small, elite organization dominated by an inner circle led by Henry Stevens. Beginning with Massachusetts in 1791, by 1825 the five other New England states had established historical societies. State historical organizations had also formed in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana before the creation of the VHS. The Society was born in an era when Vermonters organized around causes like the Anti-Mason Party, anti-slavery, the Vermont Bible Society , temperance, school and prison reform, and others. It sought to preserve the historical record, especially during “that transition state,” as former Congressman William Czar Bradley observed, “when the men who can furnish the facts connected with the establishment of the State have nearly all passed away and those who by intimacy with the founders have received their information from the first sources are passing likewise.”1 Stevens, a compulsive and indefatigable collector who had worked for decades to assemble the records of Vermont’s founding generation and to promote their veneration, lobbied for the legislation . He sought an institutional framework and support to house his collection and to forward his agenda of celebrating Vermont’s founders in general and Ethan Allen in particular. The act of incorporation charged Stevens of Barnet and Oramel H. Smith, Daniel P. Thompson, and George B. Mansur, all from Montpelier, with “collecting and preserving materials for the civil and natural history of the State of Vermont.” The act vested the incorporators with the responsibility of electing a president and “other officers as they shall judge necessary,” and it authorized Stevens to call the first meeting of the organization. Section 3 prescribed that “the library and cabinet of the said corporation shall be kept in the town of Barnet,” Stevens’s home.2 The initial library and cabinet consisted of Stevens’s collection. The incorporators waited until October 1840, when the legislature and other state officers gathered in Montpelier, to hold the first meeting. With nine other well-respected “Associate Members,” including former two-term Governor Silas Jension, they named Stevens president and librarian, a position that later be- Documenting and Promoting a Hero { 219 came keeper of the cabinet, and Thompson and Mansur secretaries, one “Recording ,” the other “Corresponding.” They adopted a constitution and by-laws that provided for a committee of three to consider proposed members “for their approbation”; if approved by the committee, “the names of the candidates, with the names of the members who proposed said candidates, shall be entered into the book of nominations,” to “be balloted for at the next meeting of the Society .” The officers with the associate members probably constituted themselves as the nominating committee and elected twenty-three members whose names appeared on the rolls in 1841, “very probably without their knowledge or consent .”3 The following year another twenty-two entered the membership rolls. By the end of the 1840s VHS membership had grown only slowly and numbered fewer than seventy. Stevens and his colleagues loaded the membership list with the state’s political and intellectual elite.4 The roster did not include many Democrats or those who had espoused Jacksonian positions. Forty-eight of the members held or had held political office, with most holding more than one office during their careers. The membership included seven governors, five of whom held office consecutively from 1835 through 1844, and one lieutenant governor. Nineteen served in the Vermont Assembly, three as members of the Council abolished in 1836 when Vermont established the state Senate to which nine VHS members won election. Two worked as the secretary to the Vermont Senate, including the influential DeWitt Clinton Clarke who would own the Burlington Free Press which supported the Whigs. Three of the VHS members served in Washington as U.S. senators and another eleven as congressmen. At least 25 percent of the members had legal training, and nine served as state’s attorney for their county. Eighteen sat on various benches, including five on the Vermont Supreme Court where two became chief justice. Because Vermont statutes did not establish qualifications, including legal training or membership in the bar to serve as a judge, and the assistant (side) judges won office in partisan elections, the number of VHS members with legal training remains uncertain.5 Other politically active members of the...

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