It Happened Here -- The Radical Doctor who Named a State!

Born in a log cabin in New Winsor, New York,  a precocious Thomas Young attended Yale college and apprenticed with a local physician to become a doctor in 1751 at age twenty.  On a small country crossroads which he named. Amoenia (derived from Latin, meaning "pleasant to the eye"), the youthful doctor set up his first practice. Rural Dutchess county close to the Connecticut hills was not the most advantageous region for a young doctor to begin practice but it was certainly a fortuitous choice.  For from there, after two years, he moved to nearby Salisbury Connecticut where he met another precocious youth of sixteen years, Ethan Allen.  It was there, Young, bursting with ideas from the Enlightenment became a mentor to Allen.  Young came armed  with a set of notebooks into which he had copied the writings or summaries of the ideas of writers, the likes of  Thomas Acquinas, Niccolo Machiavelli, Alexander Pope,  John Locke, and deist Charles Blount. Many of these ideas he had acquired from his time at Yale; others he acquired elsewhere, being a young man eager to be on the cutting edge of radical contemporary thought.


Allen moved away but returned to Salisbury seven years later to renew their friendship and ignite a storm of controversy by conspiring with the doctor to publicly receive a small pox inoculation. Most orthodox Calvinists were opposed to inoculations as actions that   challenged the will of god.  Furthermore, early inoculation experimentation had often gone disastrously wrong as patients inoculated with live virus actually contracted a weakened version of the disease and if they came in contact with others, while contagious, they could transmit the disease which could become full blown smallpox in others.  Together with their medical experiment, their shared deist philosophies and other enlightenment ideas they constantly flirted with wholesale community rejection.
In 1760 Young invested heavily with John Henry Lydius, a New York land speculator.  Four years later he moved abruptly to Albany. The doctor's practiced had suffered when a more orthodox and less controversial doctor had moved into town, and the move to Albany enabled Young to keep a closer watch on his investment.

In the next few years the conflict between Britain and her colonies began to heat up as Parliament devised new laws to regulate her colonies and help pay for the recent expensive colonial war. Not surprisingly Young thrust himself into the politics of the day, becoming the first to sign the constitution of the Albany Sons of Liberty in 1766. By the end of the year, inflamed by the Stamp Act controversy, Young moved his family to Boston to be at the center of the controversy!  Present at the Boston Massacre the radical doctor brandished a sword and was credited with preventing more rioters from being shot. Young became a close friend of Sam Adams, despite their differences in religious philosophy. At the Boston Tea Party he refused to wear a disguise when boarding the tea ships and was later identified and severely beaten by British soldiers.  Fearing for his life, Young moved to Newport R.I. Then, when he discovered he was still being pursued, he moved to Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia, Young soon became friends with Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, working with the two of them to draft a radical new Pennsylvania constitution, while volunteering as a surgeon to a Pennsylvania rifle company, in the opening years of the American Revolution. While in Philadelphia he met an old friend from his Amenia-Salisbury days.  Herman Allen, Ethan Allen's brother was with a delegation of farmers and tradesmen from the Hampshire Grants petitioning Congress to allow their area to become a separate state. Several of the Allen brothers had moved to "the Grants," an area between New York and New Hampshire, claimed by both former colonies. (see my post of  3/3/14.)  While his brother Ethan remained a prisoner of war, captured in the failed invasion of Canada in 1776,  Herman led the delegation seeking to create a new state they were calling "New Connecticut".  Young gave the group a copy of the constitution he had been working on. It would eventually become a model for the delegates' new political entity.  He also pointed out that "New Connecticut" was a name used by Connecticut settlers in the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania. Doctor Young suggested "Vermont," from the latin vert (green) and mont (mountain). The name would recall the area's most significant feature, the Green Mountains and also honor the "Green Mountain Boys," Ethan Allen's milita force that had captured Ticonderoga and for years had defended settlers of the "Grants" from New York officials.

Once again, Thomas Young was at the center of a storm of controversy.  James Duane, the New York representative angrily denounced Young for his meddling; the delegates were rebuffed and would return to their homes. But they would take Young's ideas to write a new Vermont constitution and form a new independent state, the Republic of Vermont.  It would not be until 1791 that Vermont would join the United States as a new state. But Doctor Young would know none of this.  Ministering to Continental troops he would contract typhus, and die suddenly in June 1777.

Few of the leaders of the Revolutionary generation are less known than Dr. Thomas Young. Perhaps his early death contributed to his obscurity, although men like Dr. Joseph Warren and Gen. Richard Montgomery died early in the war.  Perhaps it was because his early death prevented him from participating to a greater extent in the formation of the new nation, but men like Sam Adams were deeply suspicious of national governments and declined to participate in affairs outside their own states. Perhaps it was because he was an outsider, coming into an area, participating in the troubles and then leaving again. But there were many "outsiders," men like Englishman Thomas Paine and a raft of foreign generals.  Perhaps it was all these factors; but in any event Dr, Thomas Young deserves a greater degree of recognition.