Samuel Wells of Brattleboro

The Life of a Loyalist in Vermont

This is the story of my Loyalist ancestor, Colonel Samuel Wells.

He ran an underground courier network, in the final years of the American Revolutionary War, that provided a vital communication link between the British commands in the cities of Quebec and New York.

Since I began researching Samuel’s life about a half-dozen years ago, I’ve become more and more fascinated by him. I even became a little obsessed with the surprising history of Vermont’s role in the war, which made the life of a Vermont Loyalist different, in some ways, from what Loyalists were experiencing elsewhere.

This article is based on a talk I was honoured to give recently to two branches of the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada. I shared Samuel’s story with the Hamilton Branch in February 2024 and with the Governor Simcoe Branch in Toronto in March 2024.

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Contents

Samuel’s Story — An Introduction
The Vermont Republic
The Haldimand Negotiations
Alexander Hamilton Writes to George Washington
Samuel’s Early Life
The Move to Brattleboro
The Wells Family Prospers
Samuel’s Appearance and Public Life
Persecution During the War
A Loyalist in the General Assembly
The Haldimand Negotiations Begin
Samuel Wells Serves King and Empire
Samuel’s Network is Exposed
The Escape to New York
A Note on Samuel’s Escape Route
Samuel’s Last Years
The Family Settles in Farnham Township
Footnotes
Works Cited
Additional Resources
Genealogical Note
Related Post
Acknowledgements

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Samuel’s Story — An Introduction

I’d like to begin, just as I began those talks, with two questions for you.

The first question is this. My ancestor died three years after the war ended. Unlike most Loyalists, he never settled in Canada, but neither did he live in the United States after the war.

So, how is this possible?

The Vermont Republic

It’s a trick question. After the war ended in 1783, Samuel lived and died on his farm in Brattleboro, Vermont. But Vermont wasn’t part of the United States. It had declared its independence, from both Great Britain and the United States, on January 15, 1777, and it would remain independent until March 4, 1791, the day it became the fourteenth state of the Union. Samuel’s farm was in a third country, the independent Vermont Republic.

From 1777 until the end of the war six years later, Vermont’s independence was a source of frustration for the Continental Congress and for the Commander in Chief, George Washington. Though still an ally of the United States, its support wavered. At some points its conflicts with neighbouring states, and with Congress, seemed to dwarf Vermont’s quarrel with the British. That’s why Samuel Wells’s experience as a Vermont Loyalist was unlike that of a Loyalist anywhere else.

The Haldimand Negotiations

My second question is this. What do you know about the “Haldimand Negotiations?” They’ve also been called the “Haldimand Affair” or the “Vermont Negotiations.”

The negotiations took place from 1780 until the end of the war in 1783. On one side was Sir Frederick Haldimand, Governor General of the Province of Quebec. On the other was a group of Vermonters headed by Ethan Allen and his brother Ira Allen. Ethan Allen had earned fame and honour in the first months of the war, when he led the so-called “Green Mountain Boys” to capture Fort Ticonderoga, in the Americans’ first victory of the war.

What the Allens and Haldimand were negotiating now, five years later, was the possible reunification of Vermont into the Empire, as a province that would have had a status similar to that of Quebec or Nova Scotia. If the negotiations had been successful, Canada would have eleven provinces, and you could go skiing in Vermont without a passport.

My ancestor played a clandestine role in all of this, a role that was ultimately exposed by the Continental forces, and a role for which he narrowly escaped arrest and probable hanging.

Alexander Hamilton Writes to George Washington about Samuel Wells

One of the most satisfying moments I’ve experienced in my family history research was when I discovered, in the U.S. National Archives, a letter from Alexander Hamilton to George Washington about my ancestor.¹ It’s dated March 5, 1783, and it expresses, in the elegant language of the day, the urgency of capturing the dangerous Samuel Wells and his colleague, Luke Knowlton. Here are Hamilton’s words:

The bearer [of this letter] thinks he can point out the means of apprehending Wells & Knowleton [sic] the two persons whom Your Excellency was authorised to have taken into custody. I have desired him to call upon you to disclose the plan. I will not trouble Your Excellency with any observation on the importance of getting hold of those persons. The surmise that Mr. Arnold a member of Congress gave intelligence to them of the design to take them makes it peculiarly important.

In fact, Hamilton’s surmise was correct. Samuel had been warned that his cover was blown, and that arrest was imminent.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before I tell you how Samuel served King and Empire during the war, I should tell who he was and some of the reasons he got away with it.

Samuel’s Early Life

Samuel Wells, my fifth great grandfather, was born in 1730 in the town of Deerfield, in the most northern part of Massachusetts (see the map below). His father was Jonathan Wells, and his mother was born Mary Hoyt. Both his father, who was a trader, and his grandfather (also named Jonathan) were among Deerfield’s leading citizens. His father, who died when Samuel was about five, had been a selectman (what we would call a town councillor), and was an Ensign in the militia. His grandfather was a selectman for thirteen years, and he was the town’s first justice of the peace and later its military commander, holding the rank of Captain.

I was dismayed to learn recently that Samuel’s mother, Mary, and his grandfather, Jonathan Sr., were both slaveholders. My sixth great grandmother had an enslaved man named Cesar, and my seventh great grandfather had at least two. Their names were Adam and Pompey.²

The Move to Brattleboro

We know, based on his later accomplishments, that Samuel received a solid education, but that’s all we know about his youth. As a young man he kept a tavern in Deerfield, and Deerfield is where he married Hannah Sheldon in 1751. They were both twenty years old.

Eleven years later, Samuel sold the tavern and he and Hannah, with their six young children, moved about twenty-five miles north to become some of the first settlers of Brattleboro, in what is now Vermont, but was then known as the “New Hampshire Grants.”³

The map shows how close the family’s new home is to the old one, and I’ve added a pin for Farnham, Quebec, because that is where Samuel and Hannah’s children would eventually settle.

The territory was called the New Hampshire Grants because, beginning in 1749, the Governor of the Province of New Hampshire had made extensive land grants in the territory. The problem was that the same territory was also claimed by the Province of New York.

The Crown resolved the formal dispute in 1764, ruling that all of what is now Vermont was part of New York, but that only worsened the problem, because New York went ahead and granted much of the same land to different owners. The resulting conflict, which sometimes turned deadly, lasted another quarter century. It was at the root of Vermont’s decision to declare independence, and it shaped the policy and conduct of Vermont’s leaders during the Revolution.

The Wells Family Prospers

When he first arrived in the southeastern corner of the New Hampshire Grants, in 1762, in the part that would soon be known as Cumberland County, Samuel built a log cabin and then cleared and began to farm an 800-acre parcel on the west bank of the Connecticut River.⁴

Over the next fifteen years he would build and operate a sawmill, and replace the cabin with this impressive home.⁵

He would father six more children and generally cement his position as Brattleboro’s leading citizen. A history of Brattleboro, written in 1922 by Mary Cabot, says this…

Samuel Wells was an active and consistent Tory throughout his life, and the chief military man in the southern part of the county. The persecution which befell other men of his allegiance was meted out to him in scant measure because of his recognized superiority of character and remarkable tact.⁶

Ms. Cabot echoes another historian, Benjamin Hall, who had written in his 1858 History of Eastern Vermont about Samuel’s social superiority. Hall says…

The condition of Colonel Wells was […] superior to that of most of the early settlers of Vermont, and the influence of his character and position was for many years extensively acknowledged.⁷

Samuel and Hannah would have thirteen children in all. Two died in infancy, a boy in Deerfield and a girl in Brattleboro.

Samuel’s Appearance and Public Life

There appear to be no surviving portraits of Samuel Wells, but Ms. Cabot described him as “a large man, above medium height, stern in bearing and countenance, but affable in manner. His dress was in the style of the landed gentry of the period, half military, half yeoman.”⁸

Another source suggests that my ancestor was more than just a “a large man.” It quotes a letter from one of Samuel’s contemporaries who, in a veiled way, calls him a “corpulent person” while recounting an unflattering anecdote about how Samuel fell off his horse on a rough and muddy mountain road and, hampered by his bulk, struggled and slipped while trying to get back on.⁹

In 1766, Samuel Wells was appointed a judge and justice of the peace.¹⁰ In 1773, he was elected to the General Assembly of the Province of New York.¹¹ By early 1775, according to one source, he was counted among “the principal officers in the courts of the county.”¹²

Persecution During the War

Then the war came. We have only a handful of glimpses of Samuel and his family during the early years of the war, but they all support the view that he never wavered from his Loyalist principles. He suffered for them, but he was respected enough, savvy enough, and influential enough, to weather the storm.

In September 1775, the Committee of Safety for Cumberland County questioned him on suspicion of bringing arms into the county on behalf of the Crown. No charges were laid.¹³

In February 1776, Samuel’s son-in-law, Samuel Gale, who was married to his daughter Rebecca, was arrested and imprisoned.¹⁴

A few months later, Samuel himself was arrested but he was promptly released. In fact, the Committee of Safety reprimanded the arresting officer “for his Conduct in Taking Colonel Wells by military force; that mode of proceeding Being Contrary to the minds of this Committee.”¹⁵

Things got worse the following year. I’ll quote again from the History of Eastern Vermont:

In the New York Gazette under date of June 23d, 1777, it is stated that “Judge Wells of Brattleborough had been lately confined to his farm and otherwise ill-treated,” and it is known that, for a long time, permission was granted to anyone to shoot him, should he be found beyond the bounds of his acres.¹⁶

Vermont had declared its independence by now, but it was still, for the time being at least, a solid ally of the United States. In February 1779, the Vermont General Assembly passed a law that mentions, by name, Samuel’s son Oliver Wells, my fourth great grandfather. The law was entitled An Act to Prevent the Return to This State of Certain Persons Therein Named, and Others, Who Have Left This State, or Either of the United States, and Joined the Enemies Thereof, and it lists ninety-nine men and one woman who, by leaving, had manifested “an inimical Disposition to said States, and a design to aid and abet the Enemies thereof.”

The punishment that Oliver could have suffered was severe. If he were found guilty of returning to Vermont, he would be “whipped on the naked Back, not more than forty, nor less than twenty Stripes [and] ordered to quit this State immediately.” If he persisted in staying, he would be put to death. Fortunately for him, the Assembly repealed the law in November 1780.¹⁷

A Loyalist in the General Assembly

And then something truly remarkable happened. On March 27, 1781, Samuel Wells was elected to the General Assembly of Vermont! ^{18 19 20}

Does that seem strange to you? Four years earlier, in 1777, Samuel was under house arrest, facing the death penalty if he had set foot outside his farm. Only a year earlier, in 1780, his son would have been flogged if he had shown his face in Vermont. And now Samuel is a member of Vermont’s supreme legislative body?

It’s clear, from all my sources, that it was no secret that Samuel Wells was a Loyalist. Elsewhere Loyalists were being persecuted, tarred, feathered, and hanged, their land and possessions confiscated, and in Vermont a Loyalist is elected to the legislature! Can you imagine that happening in John Adams’s Massachusetts or George Washington’s Virginia?

Samuel hadn’t changed over the years, but it certainly seems that Vermont’s commitment to the war had changed.

In fact, for more than a year, at that point, Vermont’s leadership had toyed openly, if perhaps not very seriously at first, with the idea of abandoning the revolutionary cause. They were frustrated with Congress’s unpromising position on Vermont’s possible future statehood, and with land claims from neighbouring states that had never recognized Vermont’s independence.

The Haldimand Negotiations Begin

That’s where the Haldimand Negotiations come into play. As an historian, I’m the rankest of amateurs, but I’ll try to sum up the negotiations in a couple of paragraphs.

In March 1780, on behalf of Governor Haldimand, a Loyalist named Beverley Robinson wrote a letter to Ethan Allen, offering the possibility that Vermont could “obtain a seperete [sic] Government under the King & constitution of England.”²¹ It was four months before the letter arrived in Allen’s hands, in July 1780.

That same month, July 1780, Thomas Chittenden, who was the Governor of Vermont, wrote to Congress, stating the position that Vermont was free, unilaterally, “to offer, or accept, terms of cessation of hostilities with Great Britain.”²² No doubt he had Robinson’s letter in mind.

The discussions continued until the final months of the war, and you already know how they turned out. Vermont never became a province of Canada. But hostilities between Vermont and Great Britain largely did cease from the time that Haldimand’s proposal was presented until the end of the war three years later. Vermont didn’t achieve the “separate Government” that Haldimand offered, but it did achieve a three-year ceasefire.

Let’s get back to Samuel because this is when he gets involved in the Haldimand Negotiations.

Samuel Wells Serves His King and the Empire

On May 8, 1781, someone in British-occupied New York wrote to Governor Haldimand about Samuel Wells. Some historians believe it was the same Beverley Robinson who had authored the letter to Ethan Allen the year before. Whoever he was, here is what he wrote:

Colonel Wells of Brattleboro has sent his son-in-law with verbal information that throws great light upon the conduct of Vermont. We take him to be a friend, and he says by this messenger that you know him to be so. Is it true? He offers his services for a monthly interchange of letters between Canada and the coast of Connecticut, where we are to find a friend to give and receive dispatches. Do you approve of this confidence?²³

It was true, and Haldimand did approve. Samuel Wells, in effect, became part of His Majesty’s Secret Service, and organized an underground network of couriers who travelled through enemy territory to facilitate communication between the British Command in Quebec City and Headquarters in New York City. His location in Brattleboro, almost equidistant between Montreal and New York City, was ideal for it.

And that is how Samuel Wells served his King during the revolutionary war.

Samuel’s Network Is Exposed

It worked for about a year and a half, until the fall of 1782 when it all came tumbling down. One of Wells’s couriers, a man named Christopher Osgood, was arrested and tried. His testimony implicated Samuel Wells and an associate, and the incriminating information was sent to Congress. Congress then passed a resolution, on November 27, 1782, directing George Washington “to take immediate measures for apprehending and securing Luke Knowlton of Newfane, and Samuel Wells of Brattleborough […] and such others […] as there may be good reason to apprehend have been concerned with the said Knowlton and Wells in a dangerous correspondence and intercourse with the enemy.”^{24 25}

That was the final week of November 1782. The letter from Alexander Hamilton that I read earlier was dated the first week of March 1783. That means that Samuel was still at large, and still a high priority, three months after Congress had ordered his arrest. In fact, they never did catch him.

The Escape to New York

The story of Samuel’s flight sounds too good to be true. Without adequate proof, I’d be tempted to leave it out, but it’s been memorialized in writing by a prominent historical figure who was there, and who even played a role in the escape. I was doubtful at first, but I’ve become convinced that it did happen.

Here’s how Ira Allen, the brother of Ethan Allen and himself a principal figure in the Haldimand Negotiations, told the story in his History of Vermont. His exact words are on the page below, but I go on to paraphrased it, updating the language and adding a few bits of context.²⁶

So, it’s January 1783 and Samuel gets word that a Captain of the Continental army, along with a company of soldiers, is coming from Albany to Brattleboro to arrest him. He leaves his house, in the dead of winter, intending to take refuge in Canada. He heads northwest and makes it as far as Bromley, Vermont, forty miles away, where he puts up for the night at the home of William Utley and his wife Sarah.²⁷

This map shows Samuel’s route in red, and that of his pursuers in blue.

This is where the story starts to strain belief. Who shows up at that same house, that same evening, but the soldiers who were sent to arrest him! Of course, the Captain in charge doesn’t know what Samuel looks like, and Samuel doesn’t identify himself, so the two of them end up sleeping under the same roof (although Samuel probably didn’t get much sleep). The next morning, the soldiers, none the wiser, continue their march to Brattleboro. Once they’re gone, Samuel sets out through the snow, and travels the fourteen miles southwest to Sunderland, Vermont, where he meets with Ethan and Ira Allen.

And that’s another example of how strange things were in Vermont in the later years of the war. A Loyalist plot against the United States is uncovered and who does the fugitive ringleader run to? To two of the top leaders of Vermont, while Vermont is still an ally of the United States! To two men that historians will later call co-founders of the State of Vermont.

The illustrious brothers tell him not to go to Canada. They say he’d be better off to head for New York. They arrange a sleigh and, at midnight that night, Samuel clambers into it and sets out for New York City, where he arrives safely a few days later.

A Note on Samuel’s Escape Route

I’m going to go off on a brief tangent for a few paragraphs, to clear up a doubt that I raised when I first wrote and talked about Samuel’s miraculous escape.

If you happen to watch the video of my talk in Toronto, you’ll notice that I was skeptical. The route that the Continental soldiers took from Albany to Brattleboro didn’t seem to make sense, Wouldn’t going through Bromley take them way out of their way? Wouldn’t it have made sense to take a more direct route through Bennington? But one member of the audience, a former truck driver familiar with the region, pushed back on that idea. He told us how extremely mountainous the area was and said it wasn’t surprising that there might have been no shorter way to get to Brattleboro in the eighteenth century.

That prompted me to do more research, and what I found supported the veracity of Ira Allen’s account. Historian Reuben Clark Benton says that the road Samuel took was, in fact, the only pass through the mountains within a hundred miles north or south. Here are his words:

In 1771, [Judge Thomas Chandler] stated that during the preceding year a route had been traced from Chester which showed the best pass within one hundred miles on either side. He stated that this route could easily be made passable for carriages, and that there was no other road from Cumberland County [where Brattleboro was located] to Albany within one hundred miles of that pass, except one in Massachusetts over the Hoosic mountain which he claimed was not a convenient route for travel. It does not appear just when this road from Chester to Manchester was made; but it was for many years the most convenient road across the mountains […]. It was also, as late as January, 1783, the usually traveled road from Brattleboro to Albany, because it was on that road that Col. Wells met the company sent to arrest him.²⁸

It was reading those words that finally convinced me that the story of Samuel’s escape to New York was true.

Samuel’s Last Years

That’s all we know about Samuel’s work during the war. He would return to Brattleboro once it was safe, and he would die there, on August 6, 1786, at the age of fifty-five. Once one of the richest men in Brattleboro, he died bankrupt, having given all for his Loyalist beliefs. His estate was valued at £1,577 6s 2½d and his debts amounted to £5,880 2s 7½d.²⁹

The Family Settles in Farnham Township

And now all that’s left is to tell you is how Samuel’s children and grandchildren came to Canada. It was largely the work of this man, Samuel Gale, the son-in-law I mentioned as having been imprisoned in 1776. He was a surveyor and a former paymaster in the British army who moved to Quebec City in 1791 where he would be named principal assistant to the Surveyor General, and later private secretary to Governor General Robert Prescott.³⁰

In his spare time, Gale worked assiduously at lobbying the authorities to grant the Wells family land in the Eastern Townships. There’s a microfilm reel in the national archives, containing transcriptions of more than four years of correspondence between Samuel Gale and whatever senior official would listen to him.

Perhaps the most important is this letter, dated October 4, 1794 and addressed to Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester, who was the Governor in Chief of Lower Canada. It was fortuitous that, a dozen years earlier, Lord Dorchester had commanded the British forces in New York City during the war, and so had first-hand knowledge of Samuel’s important work.

The letter starts by reminding Dorchester “of the late Colonel Wells (whose Sufferings and Services during the late War in America were […] well known to Your Lordship at New York).”

After a little more preamble, it goes on to say…

Your Petitioner […] humbly prays That Your Lordship will be favourably pleased to grant to him and to the Surviving Parts of the Family of the said late Colonel Wells the undermentioned Quantities of Land in the Tract ordered to be laid out by the Name of the Township of Farnham on the River Yamaska, or such Parts thereof as may in Your Lordship’s Wisdom appear meet –

The request was approved in principle in 1795, but it was 1798 before the land had been surveyed, the paperwork had been completed, and Samuel’s children and grandchildren were able to travel north.

And that’s how the Wells family, the Loyalist branch of my family tree, came to Canada.

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Footnotes

For full citations, see “Works Cited” below.

1. “From Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, [5 March 1783].” ↩︎
2. Sheldon, History of Deerfield, Vol. 2, pp.893-894. ↩︎
3. Ibid, pp.357-360. ↩︎
4. Cabot, Annals of Brattleboro, Vol. 1, p. i. ↩︎
5. Ibid, photo opposite p. 105. ↩︎
6. Ibid, p. 36. ↩︎
7. Hall, History of Eastern Vermont, p. 719. ↩︎
8. Cabot, Op. Cit., p. 36. ↩︎
9. Ibid, p. 179. ↩︎
10. Ibid, p. 59. ↩︎
11. Ibid, p. 130. ↩︎
12. Hall, Op. cit., p. 208. ↩︎
13. Ibid., p. 749 ↩︎
14. Ibid, p. 645. ↩︎
15.  Ibid, p. 720. ↩︎
16.  Ibid, p. 720. ↩︎
17. State Papers of Vermont, Vol. 6, pp. 38-39. ↩︎
18. Cabot, Op. cit., p. 123 ↩︎
19. Burnham, Brattleboro Windham County, Vermont, early history with biographical sketches of some of its citizens, p. 57. ↩︎
20. Hall, Op. cit., p. 413 ↩︎
21. Bennett, A few lawless vagabonds, p. 178. ↩︎
22. Ibid, p. 179. ↩︎
23. Cabot, Op. cit., p. 132. ↩︎
24. “Notes on Debates, 27 November 1782,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-05-02-0143. ↩︎
25. Ibid, p. 133. ↩︎
26. Allen, History of Vermont, p. 245. ↩︎
27. The town of Bromley was renamed in the nineteenth century and is now Peru, Vermont. William Utley’s house, however, wasn’t actually in Bromley. Utley was the first settler in the area and thought he had settled in Bromley, but later surveying showed that he had built his home just east of there, in what is now Landgrove, Vermont. ↩︎
28. Benton, Reuben Clark. The Vermont settlers and the New York land speculators, pp. 119-120. ↩︎
29. Hall, Op. cit., p. 724. ↩︎
30. Little, “Gale, Samuel (1747-1826),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography ↩︎

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Works Cited

Allen, Ira. The natural and political history of the State of Vermont. London: J. W. Myers, 1798.

Bennett, David. A few lawless vagabonds: Ethan Allen, the Republic of Vermont, and the American Revolution. Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishers, 2014.

Benton, Reuben Clark. The Vermont settlers and the New York land speculators. Minneapolis: Housekeeper Press, 1894.

Burnham, Henry. Brattleboro Windham County, Vermont, early history with biographical sketches of some of its citizens. Brattleboro: D. Leonard, 1880.

Cabot, Mary Rogers. Annals of Brattleboro 1681–1895, Vol. 1. Brattleboro: E. L. Hildreth, 1921.

“From Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, [5 March 1783],” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-03-02-0174. [Original source: The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 3, 1782–1786, ed. Harold C. Syrett. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962, pp. 282-283.] Accessed February 2024.

Gale, Samuel and others. Lower Canada land papers. Public Archives of Canada, RG 1 L3L Vol. 89.

Hall, Benjamin H., History of Eastern Vermont. New York: D. Appleton, 1858.

Little, J. I. “Gale, Samuel (1747-1826),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/gale_samuel_1747_1826_6E.html. Accessed February 2024.

“Notes on Debates, 27 November 1782,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-05-02-0143. [Original source: The Papers of James Madison, vol. 5, 1 August 1782 – 31 December 1782, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp. 334–337.]

Sheldon, George. A history of Deerfield, Massachusetts, Vol. 2. Deerfield, Massachusetts: 1896.

Vermont, State of (Nye, Mary Greene, ed.) State Papers of Vermont, Vol. 6, Sequestration, confiscation and sale of estates. Vermont: Secretary of State, 1941. https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/431533-sequestration-confiscation-and-sale-of-estates. Accessed March 2024.

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Additional Resources

Although they haven’t been cited above, these works should be helpful to anyone interested in learning more about the Wells family and the history of Loyalists in Vermont or in the Eastern Townships.

Anderson, Benjamin. “Vermont allegiance during the Revolutionary War,” Ethan Allan Homestead, youtu.be/CDs3o_zNo8k?si=EqKPVm62Gjln4xuW. Accessed February 2024.

—. “Hedging his bets: Ethan Allen the Haldimand Negotiations, and allegiance in the American Revolution,” Borealia, earlycanadianhistory.ca/2022/02/28/hedging-his-bets-ethan-allen-the-haldimand-negotiations-and-allegiance-in-the-american-revolution/. Accessed February 2024.

Bennett, David. “The Haldimand Negotiations 1780–1782.” Ethan Allen Homestead. https://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/haldimand-negotiations-1780-1782-david-bennett. Accessed February 2024.

Chadsey, Thomas Albert. “General Haldimand and the Vermont negotiation, 1780–1783.” Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 1953. https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/21588. accessed February 2024.

Darrah, Leon J. “Samuel and Rebecca Gale Early Pioneers of Brome,” Vol. 5. Yesterdays of Brome County. Knowlton, Quebec: Brome County Historical Society.

Day, Catherine Matilda. History of the Eastern Townships. Montreal: John Lovell, 1869.

—. Pioneers of the Eastern Townships. Montreal: John Lovell, 1863.

Manson, Jimmy Wells. The loyal Americans of New England and New York Founders of the Townships of Lower Canada. Brome, Quebec: Brome County Historical Society, 2001.

Sabine, Lorenzo. Biographical sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution with an historical essay, Vols. 1 & 2. Cambridge: H. O. Houghton, 1864.

Sheldon, George. A history of Deerfield, Massachusetts, Vol. 1. Deerfield, Massachusetts: 1895.

Taylor, Ernest M. History of Brome County. Montreal: John Lovell & Son, 1908.

Van de Water, Frederic F. The reluctant republic: Vermont 1724–1791. New York: John Day, 1941 [Kindle edition, Barakaldo Books, 2020]

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Genealogical Note

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Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the following people for their help, support, and motivation in the preparation of this little history: Benjamin Anderson, Doug Grant, Bev Loomis, Stephen Trueblood, Ruth Warner, and especially Michel Racicot.

I am also grateful to the members of the Hamilton and Governor Simcoe branches of the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada for giving me the opportunity to share my ancestor’s story with them in person.

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Samuel Wells Video Available

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