This is my law

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 71 for his account.

In the 1760s settlers poured into the country west of the Green Mountains on land grants from New Hampshire, and paid for them. New York claimed the same ground, and its governor sold the claims to a few speculators, among them James Duane. When New York’s courts ordered the settlers off, they chose Ethan Allen to lead them, and he formed the Green Mountain Boys. Allen had watched the tenant rising of 1766 fail when farmers marched out in a mass to fight trained troops, and he drew the lesson: fight on your own ground, among people who will hide you, strike and fade away. In 1773 Colonel John Reid, a New York claimant, brought Scottish immigrants back to the land, built a wall and began a village. In mid-August Allen, Remember Baker and Seth Warner came down with a hundred men to pull it down. Asked for his warrant, Baker raised his hand, and Allen raised his gun and shouted that this was his law. Rothbard admires the method. Coercion was kept to the minimum so the people would stay on the rebels’ side, and in five years of this war nobody was killed on either side: a few men were whipped, pushed about and had their houses burned, and one of the Boys was wounded. By 1775 New York’s officials had been driven out of the western Grants.