The Cow War begins

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 75 for his account.

In 1779 Vermont was a republic that no other state recognized. New York and New Hampshire both claimed it, and the farmers of its southeast, around Brattleboro and Guilford, held with New York and were called Yorkers. In February Vermont passed a militia law with a draft. Rothbard points to the irony: a state that claimed the right to govern itself would not grant it to its own southeastern towns. When Yorkers refused to serve, Vermont’s officers seized their cows instead. In April a crowd of Yorkers, about a hundred according to local histories, led by Eleazer Patterson, a colonel in the New York militia, took the cows back and returned them to their owners. The Cow War was on. Patterson begged Governor Clinton of New York for help and got promises. Vermont sent Ethan Allen with a hundred men, and no one resisted. He arrested Patterson and his officers, who were tried under a law against disregarding constituted authority and let off with light fines. The fighting over cows broke out again in 1782, over the conscription of Joel Bigelow’s cow, and it went on in that way until 1784, when Charles Phelps of Marlboro, the leader of the Yorker revolt, died.