dispute between New Hampshire and New York. These grants, while in form
much like other town grants, were disposed of for cash, chiefly to
speculators who hastened to sell their rights to the throngs of
land-seekers who, after the peace, began to pour into the Green Mountain
region.

It is needless to point out how this would affect the movement of
Western settlement in respect to individualistic speculation in public
lands; how it would open a career to the land jobbers, as well as to the
natural leaders in the competitive movement for acquiring the best
lands, for laying out town sites and building up new communities under
"boom" conditions. The migratory tendency of New Englanders was
increased by this gradual change in its land policy; the attachment to a
locality was diminished. The later years showed increasing emphasis by
New England upon individual success, greater respect for the self-made
man who, in the midst of opportunities under competitive conditions,
achieved superiority. The old dominance of town settlement, village
moral police, and traditional class control gave way slowly. Settlement
in communities and rooted Puritan habits and ideals had enduring
influences in the regions settled by New Englanders; but it was in this
Old West, in the years just before the Revolution, that individualism
began to play an important role, along with the traditional habit of
expanding in organized communities.

The opening of the Vermont towns revealed more fully than before, the
capability of New Englanders to become democratic pioneers, under
characteristic frontier conditions. Their economic life was simple and
self-sufficing. They readily adopted lynch law (the use of the "birch
seal" is familiar to readers of Vermont history) to protect their land
titles in the troubled times when these "Green Mountain Boys" resisted
New York's assertion of authority. They later became an independent
Revolutionary state with frontier directness, and in very many respects
their history in the Revolutionary epoch is similar to that of settlers
in Kentucky and Tennessee, both in assertion of the right to independent
self government and in a frontier separatism.[78:1] Vermont may be
regarded as the culmination of the frontier movement which I have been
describing in New England.

By this time two distinct New Englands existed--the one coastal, and
dominated by commercial interests and the established congregational
churches; the oth