This is the first in a two-part series on the life of the lesser-known American founder Thomas Young, who played an important role in the formation of Vermont. Read part two here.
Thomas Young is surprisingly unknown in Vermont for someone who gave the state its name, provided the template for its constitution and served as a role model for its most famous founder.
To be fair, he isn’t famous outside the state either. It’s curious that Young doesn’t appear in more histories of the American Revolution, because he had an uncanny knack for being on the scene when things were heating up, and he had the courage to step into the fire. He was a founding member of the Sons of Liberty in New York where he fought against the Stamp Act, was on the streets of Boston calming frightened and enraged townspeople on the night of the famed “massacre” and was the first to publicly propose the protest that became the Boston Tea Party. Many of his friends and comrades, such as Sam Adams and Thomas Paine, are well known. Why not Young?
Historians who do write about Young argue that several factors conspired to keep him in relative obscurity. While most of the founders were wealthy, he was born into a family of meager means; he moved regularly during his lifetime, so no state embraces him as a native son; and he held religious views that made him unpopular with many Christians in his own time, so when the post-Revolution generation embraced a fervent religious revival, his name mostly got left out of the story. He also had the misfortune of dying young.
Obscurity would seem to have been his destiny given the circumstance of his birth in 1731 to parents who had just emigrated from Ireland. Growing up in Ulster County, in upstate New York, Young got the best education available locally, which still meant his formal schooling was limited. He was intellectually curious, however, and read voraciously. At the age of 17, Young was apprenticed to a doctor and two years later started seeing patients on his own. At the time, becoming a doctor took less training than many other trades.
He married a local woman named Mary Winegar and together they moved to a community that Young, who was also a poet, renamed Amenia (derived from Latin to mean “pleasant to the eye” or “pleasant place”). The town was located in a disputed region east of Albany known as the Oblong. Roughly two miles wide and 60 miles long, the Oblong was claimed by the colonial governments of both New York and Connecticut.
Young’s traveling medical practice carried him into western Connecticut, where in the town of Salisbury he befriended a young man named Ethan Allen, who was seven years his junior. Historians differ over when Young and Allen met. Some put the date in the mid-1750s; others say it was as late as 1763.
Whenever they became acquainted, the men discovered they were kindred spirits. They both had fiery personalities —their enemies call them loudmouthed, headstrong and impetuous — and had a way with words, which often got them into trouble. They talked together for hours about politics, philosophy and religion, with Young playing the role of mentor. They discussed the theories of philosopher John Locke, who argued that people have natural rights and that a government’s legitimacy depended on the consent of the governed — ideas that would form the philosophical foundation of the Revolution.
Young and Allen also spoke of their shared interest in Deism, the belief in a God who could be understood solely through reason and the laws of nature, not through religious dogma and supernatural acts. Deists believed in a God who created the world but did not intervene in it. They likened God to a watchmaker who created a timepiece and then left it to work according to its design. Historians debate which of the founders were Deists, but Washington, Jefferson and Paine are frequently placed in that category. So, too, were Young and Allen, who started writing a manuscript to explain their shared religious beliefs.
If anyone in Salisbury was unaware of these two zealous and voluble men, they surely heard what they did quite publicly one Sunday in 1764. Standing outside the town’s meetinghouse, Young inoculated Allen against smallpox by running a tiny thread soaked in smallpox-infected pus into a wound on Allen’s arm.
Smallpox was a scourge in New England at the time. That year, Boston was fighting an epidemic of the disease, which killed about 30% of the people who contracted it. While some colonies organized mass inoculations, Connecticut took a conservative approach, requiring people to get permission from their town’s selectmen. When Salisbury’s rejected Ethan Allen’s request, he and Young decided to perform this act of civil disobedience.
The men were never charged for the unauthorized inoculation, however, because when town leaders confronted Allen, he responded with an outburst they found so sacrilegious that they ignored the inoculation and indicted him for blasphemy instead. Allen beat the charge in court. Even in this incident, Young might have seen himself reflected in Allen. Eight years earlier, Young himself had faced a blasphemy charge.
In addition to politics, philosophy and religion, the men might also have discussed business, specifically land speculation. Several years earlier, Young had bought a small share of a land deal offered by an unscrupulous speculator named John Henry Lydius, who claimed title to large tracts in a region inhabited by members of the Abenaki and Mohican tribes. This land would later become Vermont, but at the time was being claimed by the colonial governments of both New York and New Hampshire.
Growing up in the Hudson River Valley, Young had come to despise the wealthy landowners who charged exorbitant rents to their tenant farmers. He saw this land deal as an opportunity for ordinary men like himself to secure their families’ futures. The deal fell apart, and Young lost his entire investment when New York officials ruled that Lydius had made illegal deals with Indigenous tribes for the land. Undeterred by Young’s experience, Ethan Allen would go on to purchase huge swaths of land in that disputed region, forming the Onion River Land Company with his family and friends.
In 1764, the same year as the inoculation incident, Young moved with his family to Albany, New York. The life of a traveling country doctor had proven exhausting. Settling in a city would give him easier access to patients, and perhaps more importantly, put him in touch with others who shared his conviction that the British government was oppressing the Colonies.
In Albany, Young helped form the local Sons of Liberty, a loosely organized, clandestine group of provocateurs. Sons of Liberty groups formed in various colonies during the summer of 1765 in response to the imposition of the Stamp Act, which required that all printed documents be printed on stamped paper purchased from Britain. Patriots opposed paying the tax because the colonies had no representation in Parliament. Young was tasked with corresponding with other Sons of Liberty groups to coordinate their actions.
A mob in Albany reacted to the Stamp Act by harassing the local stamp distributor until he resigned, and then worked to intimidate the seven most likely candidates to replace the colonial official. When one of the candidates refused to swear he wouldn’t accept the position, a mob ransacked his house and posted a sign saying he deserved to be hanged as a traitor. The man swore he wouldn’t take the job. Later he named Young as one of his tormentors. When the Albany group formalized itself with a constitution, Young was the first of 94 men to sign the document, whose adamant tone suggests he could have been one of its authors.
Young’s stay in Albany was brief. Boston was afire with rebellion in the mid-1760s and, like a moth, Young could not ignore that flame. In the fall of 1766, Young uprooted his wife and six children, only to find a cold reception in Boston. He had made a poor first impression, irking some powerful people with his brashness. Dr. Joseph Warren, a leading patriot, publicly insulted him in the pages of a Boston newspaper, suggesting that others were also mocking the new arrival. “If in the public papers, inaccuracy, malevolence, bad grammar and nonsense, are to be found, they are immediately pronounced Youngisms,” Warren wrote. “Self-conceit, vain-boasting, and invincible impudence are frequently expressed by the word Youngism.”
A second doctor, Miles Whitworth, went so far as to accuse Young of killing a patient that both men had treated. Whitworth wrote that “no pretender to medicine” had ever led “so many people prematurely to their graves.” Young challenged Whitworth to a duel, but this would be one of wits, a public test of their knowledge of arts, sciences and languages. Whitworth’s 16-year-old son responded to the challenge by assaulting Young in the street.
Miraculously, Young eventually managed to change people’s minds. Boston’s leading radicals, including Sam Adams and John Otis, came to appreciate Young’s oratorical gifts and accept him among their ranks. Even Dr. Warren confessed: “I have now a real esteem of you and hearty friendship for you.” Among Boston’s radicals, Young was considered the most aggressive. Massachusetts’ colonial governor labeled him the most dangerous man in Boston.
On the night of March 5, 1770, however, Young played the unfamiliar role of peacemaker. That night an unruly throng taunted a group of British soldiers outside the customs house, hurling insults and chunks of ice and oyster shells at them. Someone began ringing the fire bell to call people into the streets. Young was there, armed for trouble, with a sword in hand, but he urged anyone who would listen to return home. The crowd, however, continued to grow in number and in fury. The soldiers eventually fired into the crowd, killing five of them.
Young behavior on the night now remembered as the Boston Massacre was an aberration. His natural role was as an agitator. In fact, his talent for inciting revolution might be why the people of Boston, through their town meeting, appointed him to the Committee of Correspondence, whose assignment was to communicate with the rest of Massachusetts and the other colonies. Sam Adams, James Otis and Joseph Warren were among the other committee members.
Historians have identified Young’s distinctive handwriting on dozens of committee papers, including sections of the draft declaration of the “Rights of the Colonists,” which future president John Adams (Sam’s cousin) later recommended as a template for the Declaration of Independence.
In the fall of 1773, three merchant ships bearing tea docked in Boston Harbor. Local patriots vowed not to let the tea come ashore, because then it would be sold and taxed. The Massachusetts colonial governor rejected demands that the ships carry the tea away. The standoff lasted for weeks. At a town meeting in late November, Young proposed a plan no one else had publicly suggested — throwing the tea into the harbor.
On the evening of Dec. 16, dozens of men set out to do just that. With their faces darkened, and some also dressing as Mohawk warriors, the men stormed aboard the vessels and set about the laborious task of hurling 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor.
Thomas Young wasn’t there that night. He had another assignment. His job was to create a diversion to keep people away from the wharves so the mob could do its work. He delivered a talk to a crowd of thousands at the Old South Meeting House. For his topic, he cheekily chose “the ill effects of tea on the constitution.”
The British government was not amused. It cracked down on Massachusetts. On March 31, 1774, Parliament passed a series of laws that American patriots dubbed “the Intolerable Acts.” They included: imposing a Royal Navy blockade of Boston Harbor to prohibit imports other than food and fuel, replacing Massachusetts’ elected government with one appointed by the Crown, requiring the royal governor’s permission to hold more than one town meeting per year and granting the governor authority to requisition unoccupied buildings for quartering troops.
That summer, the crackdown became personal. An anonymous letter circulated in Boston, calling on British troops to “put the above persons immediately to the sword and destroy their houses and plunder their effects.” Young’s name was among 18 listed.
He decided it was time to leave Boston with his family.
Young had played a vital role, according to John Adams, who later recalled a conversation he had overheard between a pair of Massachusetts politicians.
“That Tom Young is a firebrand, an incendiary, an eternal fisher in troubled waters,” said the first politician. “Boston will never be in peace while that fellow is in it. He is a scourge, a pestilence, a judgement.”
“Come! Come! Don’t abuse Dr. Young,” replied the other. “He is a necessary man in the Town of Boston. He is in the city, what you are in the House of Rep(resentatives): a useful man.”
Thomas Young’s usefulness to the Revolution, and the future state of Vermont, was far from over.
