The Green Mountain Boys — the colonial militia of Vermont — seem to be the one group that got it right. They helped defeat the British at Ticonderoga ... and then 18 months later the Continental Congress was pushing Gen. Washington to take an army up there to suppress them. They had no interest in joining the U.S. and wanted to remain an independent state. That’s why Vermont was conspicuously absent among the original thirteen states.
And yet was admitted as the 14th state while Washington was president, and would therefore have been part of the U.S. when Washington made his remarks.