Gillies No Title

• Publication year: 2001
• Citation: Vol. 2001 No. 12

Vermont Bar Journal 2001.

December 2001. Gillies No Title

RUMINATIONS The Remains of Nathaniel Niles

Paul S. Gillies, Esq.

The body of Nathaniel Niles is buried in the West Fairlee Cemetery, his grave graced with three stones. As you climb the high bank of the cemetery, the first one you see is a granite obelisk, about fifteen feet in height, which includes no lettering or other marks. Leaning against it is a more traditional marble monument, engraved, "Hon. Nath'l Niles, Died Oct. 31, 1828 In his 88th year." At the foot of marble stone, there is a rough piece of slate about a foot high, on which someone has carved "N. Niles."

Except for these three stones, there is no marker to explain his life. No traditional Vermont Historic Site marker could do it justice. The best it could say would be, "Nathaniel Niles (1741-1828), 1(fnst) U.S. Representative from Vermont (1791-1795), settled near this spot in 1779." And the peepers, in their tour bus, would take pictures of the plaque, including the white church in the frame, and the bright yellow and red leaves, to take home as a memory of Vermont.

What else remains of Nathaniel Niles? With a few quick keystrokes, you can listen to the song he wrote (www. contemplator.com/america/bunker.html). Actually, he wrote the words, and some-body else wrote the music.(fn1) It is called "The American Hero" or "Bunker Hill." Niles wrote the words after the Battle of Bunker Hill, and after the tune was written and the song printed, it became the war song of the Revolutionary War. Sung in every church, every rally, on the march, and before battle, this song gave Americans the courage to keep up the fight.

It is not "Yankee Doodle."(fn2) The tune has a wheezing quality to it, which proba-bly traveled well when sung while march-ing. Here is the first verse:

Why Should Vain Mortals tremble at

the Sight

Of Death and Destruction in the Field

of Battle,

Where Blood and Carnage clothe the

Ground in Crimson,

Sounding with Death-Groans?

Here is the last:

Life for my country, and the cause of

freedom,

Is but a trifle for a worm to part with;

And if preserved in so great a contest,

Life is redoubled.

Certainly it has a different point of view than what you would expect from a war song, as compared with "Over There" or "White Cliffs of Dover." It gets to the point: lives must be lost to achieve free-dom. It is grim, but inspiring.

If that was all we had to go on, along with those stones up in West Fairlee, that might be enough, but there is more. Niles came to Vermont in 1779, at the age of 37. A graduate of Princeton, he had studied law and medicine. He was a Congregational minister as well, having published several sermons in Connecticut.(fn3) He had invented a wire man-ufacturing process and run several mills in Norwich and Torrington. He purchased land in Fairlee and moved his family to the wilderness.

In 1784, he ran for the Vermont House of Representatives, won, and was prompt-ly elected Speaker of the House on the first day of the session.(fn4) Within a few weeks, he had also been appointed Vermont's agent to the Continental Congress and a member of the Supreme Court. "Versatile" was the way Walter Hill Crockett described him in a short biographical note in his edition of the Assembly Journal of 1784.(fn5)

Nobody had lived in Vermont long enough in those days to have any bias against recent immigrants. Everybody was a flatlander then. Nathaniel Niles made a strong first impression. He had a history of patriotism. He wrote "The American Hero," after all, and he could talk and write. Separation of Powers

With all those offices held by one per-son, the words "conflict of interest" cannot help but come to mind. How could the same individual sit on the Supreme Court, serve as Speaker of the House, and repre-sent Vermont in Congress the same year? The following year, in 1785, Niles did not run for reelection to the House, but he was elected to another statewide office - a seat on the Council, a twelve-member body that sat with the Governor and made up the Executive Department of state govern-ment. He was also reelected to the Supreme Court that...