This commentary is by Justin Neuman, who is a professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School and a developer of philosophical software.  Some mornings I put my wooden canoe in the Connecticut River north of Bellows Falls and paddle out onto water that isn’t Vermont’s. The line between Vermont and New Hampshire doesn’t run down the middle of the river, the way river borders traditionally do. It runs along the low-water mark on the Vermont side. New Hampshire owns the river. Vermont owns the bank. Paddle where a dam has slowed the current into a lake, and every stroke you take is in New Hampshire, all the way back to the Vermont shore. Almost everywhere else, the states split the difference. The thread of the channel, the middle of the river — that’s the usual rule. It’s how Vermont and New York share Lake Champlain. So why, on this one river, does the whole thing belong to New Hampshire? This isn’t a story about Vermont getting shortchanged. It’s a story about the state giving something up on purpose, and its late entry to the nation. In the winter of 1782, with the Revolution still unfinished, George Washington sat down in Philadelphia and wrote Vermont’s governor a letter. He couldn’t quite bring himself to address Thomas Chittenden as a governor, telling him he could not “address you in your public Character” because in Washington’s eyes there was no official to address. Vermont wasn’t a state; it was a recalcitrant mountain republic that had reached across the river and annexed a fistful of New Hampshire towns, and the commander in chief wrote to Chittenden to negotiate a solution, man to man. His counsel was plain: If Vermont wanted to join the Union, it had best pull its claims back across the water. So it did. Vermont let the towns go, chose a country over a river, and joined the nation, fashionably late, in 1791. A century and a half later, Vermont tried to take it back. The fight started over a tax bill on a mill at Bellows Falls. Vermont sued; the case crawled on for 18 years. In 1933, the Supreme Court held Vermont to its 1782 word and fixed the border at the low-water mark on the western shore. Vermont didn’t lose the river by showing up late. The state had exchanged land for peace, and the courts kept it. And here’s the part that should make Vermonters smile. If New Hampshire owns the river, New Hampshire owns what spans it. The bridges over the Connecticut are, by and large, New Hampshire’s to paint and plow and maintain — and eventually replace — at its expense. Vermont gave up the river and gained the Union. New Hampshire took the river and the bills that come with it. My own family came late to Vermont. Sixty years ago my father and his brothers bought a farm in Wilmington. A generation later my brothers and I built a cabin on the high pasture, with a panoramic view across Vermont’s Green Mountains. Vermont has always felt to me slightly outside of time, a place where the hustle of the present slows down enough that you can see the links of a family chain etched into the land. I can see generations of labor there, and just as clearly, I can envision my children sharing this place with their children. Six decades on, it’s where three generations of our family gather. Daniel Webster — a 19th-century U.S. senator and orator — also came to Vermont’s high pastures sideways. He was born on the New Hampshire side of the river, in 1782, the very year Vermont was bargaining its riverbank away to buy a place in the Union. And he grew up to become the great American apostle of that Union, belonging by conviction to something far larger than the state in which he happened to be born. Standing in the Senate in 1830, debating opponents who argued a state could simply ignore the country it belonged to, he closed with a line schoolchildren would memorize for 100 years, and should memorize again: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” And 10 years after that speech, in July of 1840, Webster came to Vermont for a political rally. In the week of the Fourth of July, an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people gathered in a field to hear Webster speak at a time when Vermont’s largest settlement, Burlington, had a population of just over 4,000. A New Hampshire man, in a Vermont meadow, filled with citizens who traveled for days to listen and congregate and debate with their countrymen about what they wanted the country to be.  READ MORE Vermont got to the nation late and gave up the river to gain something larger. And in the end, whatever the deeds and the decrees say, the water belongs to no one. It won’t hold still long enough to be owned. The line on the map stays put; the river doesn’t. Every drop is already gone, flowing south, sliding toward the sea. This Fourth of July I won’t be on the water, though I hope the river is shared by those who love it. I’ll be up at our cabin on the ridge, with the whole extended family, watching fireworks bloom in the valley below. Read the story on VTDigger here: The river Vermont traded for a country. ...read more read less