William French was dead. That much was obvious. How he died was also beyond debate; he’d been shot five times.
But the significance of his death remains open to interpretation. To some, French was one of the first martyrs to the cause of American liberty and one of the earliest Revolutionary heroes to come from what is now Vermont. To others, he was merely the victim of a public disturbance that turned violent.
This much is sure: French was shot at about 11 p.m. on March 13, 1775, while he and about 100 others were occupying the county court in Westminster. French and the others were trying to keep the court from opening its session. The men camped in the courthouse were mostly farmers who feared losing their lands because of debts.
Three days earlier, a delegation of 40 men from Rockingham had approached Judge Thomas Chandler, who ran the court for the Colony of New York, which claimed control of what is today Vermont, though New Hampshire did too. The men noted the large number of debt cases on the docket and asked Chandler to delay the session until after the harvest, so farmers could clear their debts.
The judge said he would consider delaying the foreclosures, though he had to open the court to try a murder case.
But many people didn’t trust Judge Chandler to keep his word. So on March 13, roughly 100 men marched along muddy roads from nearby towns to occupy the courthouse, which they found empty.
The blocky, two-story building with a hipped roof was one of the newest structures in a town still being settled. Downstairs, the courthouse contained a wide hallway. On one side was a pair of jail cells. On the other stood a kitchen for the jailer and a room for lawyers and litigants. Upstairs was the still-unfinished courtroom. The men later said they were armed with nothing more than clubs.
Sheriff William Paterson of Hinsdale (now the town of Vernon) gathered a posse of about 25 men in Brattleboro and marched them north. As they came, others joined. Paterson armed his men with wooden staves. But some of those who joined along the route carried muskets. By the time the posse reached Westminster, it numbered about 50 men.
Arriving to find the courthouse occupied, Paterson read aloud a proclamation from King George III, a standard document calling for the court session to begin. He gave the occupiers 15 minutes to quit the courthouse. If they didn’t leave, Patterson warned, his men would “blow a lane” through them and anyone who survived the volley would have another hole through which to exit the building.
The occupiers said the sheriff and his men could enter the building, provided they were unarmed, and one of the protesters asked if the posse had “come for war?” because he and his friends had “come for peace.” To that, Samuel Gale, the clerk of the court, declared: “damn the parley with such damned rascals as you are. I will hold no parley with such damned rascals but by this,” brandishing a pistol.
The two sides exchanged more insults, but no one left the building. Perhaps hoping to avoid violence, Paterson withdrew his men to the comforts of the nearby Norton’s tavern to wait.
‘Courage reinforced by potations of flip and fiery rum’
At this point — it was about 7 o’clock — Judge Chandler entered the courthouse and tried to talk the protesters into leaving. He promised to hear their complaints in court, but they must let it open, he said. The protesters were unmoved, so Chandler left.
About four hours later, they learned that “(t)he sheriff and his men were coming, with courage reinforced by potations of flip and fiery rum,” according to Rowland Robinson in his 1892 history, “Vermont: A Study of Independence.”
Perhaps they meant to sneak up on the occupiers as they slept, but they were too large, and perhaps too inebriated, a group to move quietly. Instead of stealth, Paterson chose a more direct approach, climbing the stairs and demanding to be let in.
What happened next is unclear. Patterson later said he was clubbed by sentries and pushed down the stairs. Those inside the courthouse claimed Patterson was so drunk that he had fallen down the stairs on his own.
Whatever happened, someone ordered the posse to shoot into the courthouse. Supporters of the posse later said it had merely fired three warning shots, and the protesters (who, according to the posse, were armed) fired back. Only then, posse supporters claimed, did Paterson’s men shoot to kill.
Ten protesters were hit by musket balls. The posse stormed the courthouse. As protesters fled, the posse grabbed nine or ten men and locked them in the cells. Among those seized was French, whom, according to one account, “they dragged as one would a dog, and would mock at (him) as he lay gasping.”
Some claimed French, who was a 21-year-old farmer from Brattleboro, was left untended, but another version of the story says two doctors were summoned. Either way, he was beyond saving. His death was recorded by the county coroner, Timothy Olcott, on March 15.
Olcott apparently viewed French’s body and then took testimony from local residents about what had happened. His report, preserved in the vault at the Vermont Historical Society, is a fascinating document both for its contents and its peculiar appearance.
Seventeen witnesses signed their names and attested to the validity of their signature by leaving their seal in blood-red wax, as was the custom of the day. But the men lacked signet rings. The wax marks that remain on the nearly 250-year-old document contain the distinctive whorls of fingerprints.
Those men testified to what they had seen, which Olcott summarized, with idiosyncratic spelling and minimal punctuation: “William Paterson Esqr Mark Langdon, Christopher Orsgood, Benjamin Gorton Samuel Night and others unknown to them assisting with force and arms made an assault on the Body of the Said Wm French and Shot him Through the Head with a Bullet of which wound he Died and Not Otherways…”
In addition to being shot just behind the ear, which was judged the fatal wound, French was also hit in the calf, thigh, mouth and forehead. A second protester, Daniel Houghton of Dummerston, would die more than a week after French. But his death was largely overlooked; people were already rallying to avenge the first victim’s death.
Enter Ethan Allen
Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys pounced on the incident for political advantage. Their power base was in southwestern Vermont, around Bennington, and they had long clashed with settlers in the Brattleboro area. The point of conflict was over who each faction believed had the right to grant land charters. Allen and his followers owed their land grants to New Hampshire, while people around Brattleboro got their land from New York. But now New York, in exerting its authority, had caused the death of a local man.
Allen dispatched about 40 men to Brattleboro to defend local opponents of Yorker rule. The “Westminster Massacre,” as it quickly became known, helped galvanize some Brattleboro-area residents into opposing the colonial government of New York.
The incident unnerved New York’s acting governor, Cadwallader Colden, who understood that it could help unite the Bennington and Brattleboro factions. “I make no doubt they will be joined by the Bennington Rioters who will endeavour to make one common cause of it, tho they have no connection but in their violence to Government.”
Colden wrote British Gen. Thomas Gage, asking for help ensuring that the court could be opened. But Gage could offer no assistance. Things were getting hot in Boston.
The Westminster court opened the next day in what was still nominally Cumberland County, New York. The judges sat nervously as outside local militia members, who opposed both British and New York colonial power, began to gather in town. Units from New Hampshire and Massachusetts soon joined them. Sensing danger, members of Paterson’s posse began to slip away.
The judges postponed the murder trial, which they had originally deemed too important to delay, and began asking questions about had happened the previous night, before adjourning shortly after 3 p.m. It would be the last act of New York authority in what is today Vermont.
The next day, militiamen, drawing authority from the coroner’s report, arrested Paterson and a few stragglers from his posse, then marched them to Massachusetts, where they were jailed.
Also that day, French was buried. He was no longer a young man misfortunate enough to be killed during a protest that was violently suppressed. He was now a martyr — the “proto-martyr” of the Revolution, in one writer’s estimation — whose name was invoked to rally people to the cause of liberty. French was killed five weeks before the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
Buried with honors, French lies in a Westminster cemetery beneath a stone inscribed with a bit of doggerel that proclaimed his new status:
“Here William French his Body lies,
For Murder his Blood for Vengeance cries.
King George the third his Tory crew
Tha with a bawl his head Shot threw.
For liberty and his Country’s Good,
he Lost his Life his Dearest Blood.”
