Vermont — Established 1791. Emblazoned on countless shirts and other apparel, it passes without a thought of its inaccuracy, or of what is whitewashed out of Vermont’s identity as a result. Fundamental elements of Vermont’s history, culture and heritage were formed in the three decades before 1791, as well as the foundation of law and politics forged in an embattled independent republic, stranded on the northern frontier of the fledgling United States. To understand the Vermont character, it is crucial to have an appreciation of why it was that in 1777, during a convention in the town of Westminster, independence was declared on Jan. 15, a date which of right ought to be celebrated.

For over a century, the area that is now Vermont was a no man’s land in a global war for colonial supremacy between Great Britain and the kingdom of France. Following the British conquest of Canada in 1760, a flood of settlers moved north into the wilderness. New York and New Hampshire were at odds over which colony controlled the region, and both began issuing overlapping grants of land in the Green Mountains.

Most of those who moved into the territory did so on grants from New Hampshire, and the towns they founded were sold to settlers in plots and run democratically through town meetings. By contrast, New York granted land based on the old patroonship system dating back to the Dutch settlement. The royal governor would grant massive tracts of land to connected aristocrats who rented the land out to settlers and ran their grants like feudal lords.

When King George III settled the dispute between New York and New Hampshire in 1764 by ruling in New York’s favor, the people in the Grants were greatly distressed. Some of them had bought up multiple plots to hold or to trade as investments, but many had sold all they had when they moved north. The land on which they built crude cabins was the equivalent of their life savings. The nullification of grants from New Hampshire meant that the settlers stood to lose everything they owned if New York granted their lands to wealthy patricians. Many of the towns successfully applied to New York for grants of the exact same boundaries already granted by New Hampshire, but much of the land west of the Green Mountains had already been earmarked by New York’s governor for specific grantees. The settlers there were faced with two options: flee their land in destitution, or remain and be peasants living by the leave of their new landlords.

Some of the settlers formed an outlaw band under Ethan Allen to resist New York authority by force. They called themselves the Green Mountain Boys, and for a decade thwarted every attempt to establish dominion over the Grants; chasing off surveyors, tax collectors and a sheriff leading a large party of militia. For the settlers in the Green Mountains during the controversies leading up to the American Revolution, New York authority and royal authority were two sides of the same coin. When the Green Mountain Boys captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British on May 10, 1775, it had as much to do with New York as it did with Great Britain.

But the political environment within the Grants was deeply divided. A western faction was motivated by a strong desire to be separate from New York and to have some level of autonomy. An eastern faction favored reunion with New Hampshire, or the extension of New York’s claims to the White Mountains, or the creation of an independent “valley state” between the Green and White mountains, any means of preventing the Connecticut River from becoming a boundary. These two factions agreed about very little and often worked against each other, but each seemed willing to compromise its most salient priorities if doing so prevented the other faction from gaining control of the Grants.

In 1776, the Continental Congress exhorted the states to form new governments to fill the vacuum left by the rejection of British authority. New York and New Hampshire each created constitutions that put almost all of the power in the hands of the population centers along the Atlantic coast and the Hudson River. Upstate New York (including the Grants) and the backcountry of New Hampshire were to be essentially powerless. The political factions in the Grants then fell into each other’s lap, and both were united in a desire for independent status.

On Jan. 15, 1777, independence was declared from New York, New Hampshire and Great Britain. Since the Grants were not among the 13 states, the Green Mountains were an independent republic. The Republic of Vermont fought a parallel war for independence from Great Britain. The Green Mountain Boys were recruited into Seth Warner’s Extra-Continental Regiment, the “extra-continental” indicating that it was a continental army unit that was from outside of the United States. Warner’s regiment and a collection of local militia regiments participated in the invasion of Canada in 1775-76, the Saratoga campaign of 1777, and in defending the northern frontier from repeated British attacks and raids from 1778-82.

The Vermont Constitution was ratified on July 8, 1777. It was a groundbreaking document. It abolished slavery for the first time in North America, established the vote for all men regardless of whether or not they owned land, and it included America’s first provision for public education. Its legislature was not proportional; each town had one representative regardless of population, an arrangement that would not change until 1965. The Constitution of 1777 established freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, of assembly and petition, and the right to bear arms.

Vermont remained an independent republic for 14 years, maintaining its own postal service, minting its own currency, and carrying on diplomatic relations with the United States, the Netherlands, France and even British Canada. But the eastern faction continued to resist the Connecticut River becoming a boundary. In 1778, and again in 1781, they were able to get large parts of New Hampshire to join Vermont. The admission of the Hampshire towns left the western faction outnumbered in the assembly, and they actively undermined and then terminated the first of these unions. But their response to the Second Eastern Union was to annex a large portion of upstate New York to maintain the balance of power. Both New York and Vermont sent armed forces into the disputed territory, and the possibility of a war between them in the midst of the American Revolution hung in the balance. When the US threatened to invade Vermont in 1782, the annexed portions of both states were returned.

New York refused to recognize Vermont independence, and repeatedly urged the United States to invade and turn the Green Mountains over to New York control. After prolonged negotiations, New York finally agreed to vote in favor of Vermont statehood, provided Vermont paid it $30,000 in gold. Thus was the 14th state permitted entry into the union in 1791. The divide between the political factions continued, and led to the adoption of the unwritten “Mountain Rule,” that the side of the state from which the governor hails ought to alternate. This practice was alive and well into the 1960s.

As a state, Vermont has been recalcitrant at times, and a trailblazer at others. When Vermont Sen. Matthew Lyon was jailed for violating the Alien and Sedition Acts, he was re-elected to his seat while he was still in jail. Vermonters were unenthusiastic about the War of 1812, and carried on active smuggling operations with British Canada. The Green Mountains were an early hotbed of radical abolitionism. When a slave owner from New York went to court to get return of a runaway in 1804, and presented the Vermont Supreme Court with bills of sale to prove ownership, he was told by the chief justice that he would need “nothing short of a bill of sale signed by God Almighty Himself,” and the slave was set free. Vermont lost a higher proportion of its state population during the Civil War than any northern state. In 1941, the Legislature in Montpelier effectively declared war on Nazi Germany three months before Pearl Harbor.

Vermont can boast the first college for women, the first absentee voting law, the first female lieutenant governor, the first teacher’s manual, the first bottle refund bill, the first U.S. postage stamp, the first copper penny, the first civil union law, and the first billboard ban. The first African-American to graduate from college graduated from Middlebury College in 1823. He went on to become the first African-American to hold public office when he was elected to the Vermont Legislature in 1836.

Vermonters were responsible for the discovery of the X and Y chromosomes, the velociraptor, and snowflake photography. Vermonters invented sandpaper, Lee jeans, the platform scale, the Stafford college loan, the John Deere plow, the carpenter’s square, the medical use of nitrous oxide, the electric motor, the fly-fishing lure, the Cadillac and Lincoln automobiles, the ski tow, the Church of Mormon, the paddle-wheel steamer, the snowboard, and Alcoholics Anonymous.

Thousands left the Green Mountains and settled in the West. There were Vermonters in the Donner Party and at the Little Bighorn. Others moved to the great cities, where many made important contributions in art, science, philosophy, business and entertainment. New peoples have come to Vermont in waves; first the Irish and the Germans, then the French Canadians. A large influx of Italians was accompanied by smaller groups of people from a collection of Eastern European and Scandinavian countries. They have been increasingly joined by newcomers from all over the U.S., and by immigrants and refugees from Canada, Spanish-speaking North America, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

The Vermont identity and heritage has been forged in conflict between patriots and the crown, between Green Mountain Boys and Yorkers, between eastern and western political factions, between Catholic French-Canadians and Protestant New Englanders, between old-timers and newcomers, and between the orthodox and the heterodox. This unending crucible has forged a people keenly aware of the necessity of maintaining as coexisting attributes values that are often treated as mutually exclusive elsewhere: individualism and communalism, justice and rebellion, idealism and pragmatism, hospitality and frugality, equality and liberty, freedom and unity; and not as opposites between which some balance must be struck, but as genuinely co-occurring virtues, both of which ought to celebrated in their own right and together. That is what Vermont Independence Day is about.

Today’s OP/ED penned by Burlington, Vermont’s Skyler Bailey.