Arnold reined his exhausted horse to a halt when he caught sight of the Green Mountain Boys. There were nearly ninety of these “Boys,” along with volunteers from Connecticut and Massachusetts on their way to seize the very fort Arnold had been commissioned to capture. The final group was about to set out when he reached them. Unfortunately their leader, Ethan Allen, had already gone on ahead, leaving Arnold to explain his commission to Allen’s men. At this stage in the expedition the Boys and other men were not about to put themselves under the command of a perfect stranger. Captain Edward Mott, the leader of the Connecticut contingent in their midst wrote of their anger that Arnold “presumed to contend for the command of those forces which we had raised . . . which bred such a mutiny amongst the soldiers, as almost frustrated our whole design.” After three days of hard riding to catch up with the group, Arnold had little choice. He mounted his weary animal again and dashed off to overtake Ethan Allen.
Their meeting was tense. Arnold, the sturdy, successful seafaring merchant, was three years younger than the tall, lanky backwoodsman. Both men were feisty and cocksure. Allen, a land speculator and sometime entrepreneur, had also been born in Connecticut, first child of Puritan parents, Joseph and Mary Allen. The Allen family moved from Litchfield, where Ethan was born, to Cornwall on the Connecticut frontier. His parents were spared the sad experience of Benedict’s mother and father, the deaths of their small children. All seven Allen youngsters survived to adulthood. Like Benedict’s father, Ethan’s was successful, in his case his wealth was in farmland. But unlike Benedict’s father, Joseph Allen ended his life a prosperous and respected member of the community. Like Arnold, though, Ethan’s education was cut short, in his case when his father died in 1755. Ethan managed to continue studying informally. He was especially fond of philosophy and later wrote a book on the subject.
During the French and Indian wars both Arnold and Allen had answered the call to save Fort William Henry. Both served short enlistments in the Connecticut militia. Neither had seen combat. Since then Arnold had built a fortune in the Atlantic trade. Allen had tried his hand at various enterprises, including running an iron foundry. In 1770 he had moved to present-day Vermont, then the New Hampshire Grants, and had gotten involved in the dispute over land claimed by both New Hampshire and New York, land actually intended to reward soldiers who had fought in the French and Indian Wars. Both New York and New Hampshire claimed jurisdiction over the land between the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers. After London decided in favor of New York in 1764 that colony insisted those who held grants from New Hampshire had to pay for their land again. Allen helped the New Hampshire grantees defend their rights in a New York court, aided by Arnold’s own friend and attorney, Jared Ingersoll. At some point in the process Allen laid down $50 to purchase some one thousand acres of the grants. The New Hampshire grantees lost in the New York court, a result that was hardly unexpected, but refused to give up. Allen returned to Bennington and helped found the Green Mountain Boys. The Boys then chose Allen as their leader. He turned out to be a great propagandist, and he and the Boys were soon heroes to the farmers and landholders in the disputed New Hampshire grants. Their methods of intimidation and evasion of New York claims, however, also made them vigilantes to New York officials, who branded Allen and the Boys the “Bennington mob,” a “collection of the most abandoned wretches that ever lived.”1
Now that war with Britain had started the Boys were patriots. But their interest in the New York forts was not merely patriotic. They hoped it would strengthen their claims against New York. As Allen later wrote, they hoped by seizing the fort “to annihilate the old quarrel with the Government of New York by swallowing it up in the general conflict for liberty.”2 With Benedict’s arrival the two proud, combative men, bent on the same military errand, met, one armed with a commission, the other with men.
The situation was a perfect example of the confusion that reigned in the frantic days just after Lexington and Concord. The idea of an attack on Fort Ticonderoga had occurred to the Green Mountain Boys among others. They were plotting such an expedition when they gathered in early May in their usual haunt, the Catamount Tavern in Bennington. The tavern, where they had been founded, was named for a local wildcat. A member of the species was stuck on a pole outside the tavern, its dead gaze pointing toward the New York border.3 As they were preparing for the expedition sixteen men from Connecticut and another forty from Massachusetts appeared bent on the same goal. The Connecticut contingent had been dispatched and privately financed by General Parsons and his friends, apparently on their own authority. Parsons had been convinced of the wisdom of Arnold’s suggestion to him and put the idea into motion. The Massachusetts men had come with the same idea, inspired by John Brown. The three groups agreed to coordinate their efforts, and with Allen as their field commander and James Easton of Massachusetts as second in command they set off to surprise Fort Ticonderoga.
Arnold was a Connecticut native but his commission was from Massachusetts and was as official as anything at that time and place could be. Yet he hadn’t had time to recruit the men he was authorized to raise. His lieutenants were busy doing that in western Massachusetts. Allen had the Boys as well as the Connecticut men sent by Parsons and the Massachusetts volunteers. In these circumstances Arnold’s insistence that his commission gave him authority to take command was not persuasive. The time was late. The attack was planned for the very next day. Proud as Arnold was of his honor and rank, he was also a realist. He had little option at this point, only the expectation that his own recruits would appear soon and would follow him. But he had a commission and expertise and Allen had neither. A compromise was struck up. Arnold would go along with the group. It would be a joint command, Allen would lead but Arnold would march at his side.
They were now quite close to their destination. There was no time to waste. The command being settled, off they went hoping to reach the fort before the British realized their danger and reinforced its garrison. It was May 9, and the attack was planned for dawn on May 10.
Forts Ticonderoga on the eastern shore of Lake George and Crown Point, on Lake Champlain twelve miles to the north, guarded the American colonies’ inland water route from French Canada. Ticonderoga, formerly Fort Carillon, had been built by the French in 1755 to protect the water passage from Lake Champlain to Lake George. The fort stood on a rise of land. It was constructed of stone in classic French military style, with four angular bastions protruding from its walls, and even a moat and drawbridge. Although the French had fought off a British attack on the fort they surrendered it in 1759 after an explosion destroyed its powder-house. General Amherst, who accepted the surrender, repaired the damage and renamed the fort with the Indian word, Ticonderoga, “place between two waters.” Crown Point had also experienced a devastating explosion, in that case in the spring of 1773 when its powder magazine blew up, destroying much of its earthworks. After the fire the British headquarters there was moved south to Ticonderoga. As relations between Britain and the American colonies worsened the acting Governor of Canada, Major General Frederick Haldimand, and the Earl of Dartmouth at the Colonial Office in London both stressed the importance of rebuilding Crown Point, or at least bringing a couple of regiments from Canada to Crown Point and Ticonderoga to strengthen the small garrisons holding the two forts. If the forts were strengthened, Haldimand advised, they would provide “an easy access to the back settlements of the northern colonies and may keep them in awe should any of them be rash enough to incline to acts of open force and violence.”4 Good advice but resources were needed elsewhere. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1774 Lord Dartmouth ordered Gage to strengthen both forts. General Gage was busy keeping Boston under control but in any case he did not receive Dartmouth’s orders before winter snows blocked the valleys and Lake Champlain lay covered in ice. By the time the Spring thaw occurred it was too late. Happily for the Americans hoping to conquer the fort that May, only fifty British soldiers held Ticonderoga.5
Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point were strategically placed on what the Native Americans called the Great Warpath. And Great Warpath it was destined to be in the American Revolution. Arnold’s participation in the attack on Ticonderoga would be only the first of a series of crucial battles he would fight along that warpath in the years ahead, battles that shaped his career and determined the fate of the American cause.
The expedition to Ticonderoga also brought Arnold into contact with two men who would join other expeditions of his and who quickly became lifelong enemies. The first was John Brown. The two met when Brown was attending Yale College in New Haven. He went on to become a lawyer and moved to Pittsfield in the western corner of Massachusetts. In February, 1775, two months before shooting began, a group of Boston activists sent Brown to Canada on a secret mission to find out whether Canadians would join the American colonists in protests or an eventual revolt. On his way north Brown spent some time in Albany and reported back on the importance of Fort Ticonderoga and its weapons. As for his mission to Canada, in what was to become an oft-repeated and always counterproductive American approach, Brown first tried appealing to their common grievances against the Mother Country. He then switched from good will and blandishments to the threat that “if a man of them should dare to take up arms and act against the Bostonians thirty thousand of them will march into Canada and lay waste the whole country.”6 Brown made a botch of his mission in other respects as well. The British quickly caught on to his plot and carefully tracked his movements. Brown pretended he was in Canada to deal in horses, but during his two months there never bothered to purchase a single animal.7 Now Captain Brown, along with other Massachusetts men, was part of the expedition against Ticonderoga. For reasons best known to himself, possibly resentment against the pretensions of the New Haven “shopkeeper,” Brown would become Arnold’s most bitter and relentless enemy.
James Easton was also from Pittsfield, where he kept a tavern and was deep in debt. He was a boastful man, and head of the local militia who gave himself the title of colonel.8 In Easton’s case the enmity to Arnold can be traced to Arnold’s impatience with the militia colonel. Arnold had chided Easton because during the attack on the fort he lagged behind, claiming to be worried about wet powder in his musket. Tempers flared and Arnold challenged him to a duel, which Easton declined. Arnold could not brook cowardice and gave Easton a couple of swift kicks.9 This was sufficient to make Easton, like Brown, a long-standing enemy. Despite Easton’s laggardly behavior, or perhaps to sooth his hurt feelings, Easton was given the honor of bringing the tidings about the outcome of the assault to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.
The attack against Ticonderoga was to take place at dawn. A force of thirty men was dispatched to capture Major Philip Skene and his schooner docked nearby, while the rest of the men marched to a point of embarkation known as Hand’s Cove, across the lake just northeast of Ticonderoga. There they were to await the boats. Some 250 men reached the embarkation point by dark but the boats were slow to arrive. Apparently no one had assembled the boats needed to ferry them across the lake.10 By sunrise only two boatloads carrying eighty men had made the crossing. With the morning fog about to lift, revealing their presence to the soldiers in the fort looming above, Allen decided to act. “We must this morning either quit our pretensions to valor, or possess ourselves of this fortress in a few minutes,” he exhorted the little group, “and, in as much as it is a desperate attempt (which none but the bravest of men dare undertake) I do not urge it to any contrary to his will. You that will undertake voluntarily, poise your firelocks.”11
That said they set off in silence on the road that ran past their landing site and up to the base of the fortress. Once inside they entered a tunnel in one of the barracks that led up a flight of stairs to the parade ground at the center of the fort. The sentry guarding the entrance tried to shoot at them but his gun misfired. He turned and fled up the stairs. A second sentry dashing from the guardhouse charged at them with his bayonet. Allen coolly smashed him on the head with the flat of his sword but spared the desperate man on condition he point out his commander’s quarters. Following his directions Arnold and Allen led the way racing up another flight of stairs to the top of another barracks with shouts of “no quarter.” Allen would later claim that he had demanded the British captain surrender “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.”12 Witnesses reported that he actually shouted, “Come out of there you old rat.” The “old rat” had little option but to surrender his garrison of forty-four men, two dozen civilians, and its eighty heavy cannon, twenty brass cannon, and other military supplies.13 The next day while the Green Mountain Boys were busy pillaging the fort, enthusiastically breaking into the ninety barrels of rum stored there, Allen wrote the Massachusetts Provincial Congress at Watertown of the triumphal capture of Ticonderoga, omitting any mention of Benedict Arnold and effusively praising his men.14 Arnold was busy writing to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety who had commissioned him, giving a very different picture of the present scene. “There is here at present near one hundred men, who are in the greatest confusion and anarchy, destroying and plundering private property, committing every enormity, and paying no attention to publick service.”15 He had no harsh words for Allen as leader of the Green Mountain Boys, but deplored the lack of discipline.
The confusion over commissions continued after the capture of the fort, with Allen assuming command of the fort, and the Massachusetts Congress demanding to see copies of Arnold’s commission from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety and “every paper containing the appointment of Colonel Benedict Arnold” including “the instructions given him by you; of your engagements to him on behalf of this Colony, if any such authority was given him by you; his orders respecting the ordnance at Ticonderoga, and places on Lake Champlain, and every thing necessary to give the Congress a full understanding of the relation Colonel Arnold then stood, and now stands in to this Colony.”16 John Brown was a busy actor in this inquiry. The response of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety and the documents requested of them were to be delivered to the Congress by Brown himself. None of this was Arnold’s fault, of course. He had presented his plan to the Committee of Safety and been commissioned and funded by them. But the sheer confusion of authority left him in a difficult position in the capture of Ticonderoga and the aftermath.
That position was to change. Arnold’s recruits finally began to appear while some of Allen’s Boys, having achieved their goal, began to turn toward home. Both Arnold and Allen were eager to build on their achievement. Neither was prepared to await further instructions or the results of deliberations by the competing Massachusetts bodies. This was entirely understandable. The British could be expected to reinforce their troops on Lake Champlain at any time. Any further efforts to wrest control and supplies from them could not stay for bureaucratic niceties, especially when tempting opportunities lay close at hand.
One of these tempting targets was at Skenesborough. Near the southern end of Lake Champlain lay the vast estate of Philip Skene. Although Skene was active in the Indian Wars, he was visiting London and while there had been granted the lieutenant governorship of Ticonderoga and Crown Point. His estate and village just south of Ticonderoga were not that important, but there was a schooner berthed at Skenesborough. A schooner was just what was needed. Allen sent a group of men to seize the ship. They captured it and planned to sail it to Ticonderoga where it would be renamed Liberty. As it happened the first group of men recruited for Arnold began to appear and arrived at Skenesborough just in time to take command of the Liberty. Although Allen’s own men had no experience with such vessels, some of Arnold’s did. They were given command of the Liberty and sailed it safely to the fort. Allen also sent a group led by Seth Warner, his second in command, north to capture Crown Point, where a garrison even smaller than that at Ticonderoga yielded without firing a shot.
Arnold fully appreciated these moves and the need to control the Great Warpath. Control required not only possession of key forts but of armed ships. He had believed the one armed vessel on the lake, the Betsy, was at Ticonderoga. When he got to the fort he learned the ship was berthed at St. Johns on the Richelieu River north of Lake Champlain and just over the border into Canada. Crossing that border did not deter him. He installed guns on the Liberty and loaded his fifty men on board her and two bateaux. Off they sailed on May 14, just four days after the capture of Ticonderoga. At dawn four days later his men attacked the small garrison at St. Johns and seized the Betsy. There were also nine bateaux docked at St. Johns. Arnold knew he and his men could not handle that many boats as well as their own vessels. Rather than leave them to the British he ordered four bateaux immediately sunk and with the Betsy and the other five sailed away. The entire operation had taken only three hours. Speed was important because Arnold learned that British reinforcements were already on their way. He and his men were now in possession of the only armed vessels on Lake Champlain. While the Massachusetts committees were sorting out his credentials, Arnold had vastly improved their military position without a shot being fired.
As Arnold and his flotilla were sailing toward Ticonderoga they met Allen and one hundred of his men rowing north in four bateaux hoping to conquer St. Johns itself. The competition between the two leaders may be what induced Allen to make the attempt. Arnold tried to convince Allen that capturing the city was almost certain to fail, but Allen would not be dissuaded. Too late he learned that Arnold had been right. By the time Allen and his men docked across the river from St. Johns, British reinforcements had arrived and began preparations to open fire on Allen and his men. The vastly outnumbered Americans retreated in disgrace.
The Continental Congress was worried about these exploits. The capture of British forts and seizure of weapons, and the foray into Canada, gave the American uprising a more serious cast. True, they were prudent military measures and achieved without bloodshed. But at Lexington and Concord the Americans insisted that the British were the aggressors, the colonists merely defending their homes and families. The hope remained, and would persist until the vote for independence a year later, that there would be a negotiated settlement with the British and a peaceful resolution of the tensions. But there was no way to argue that seizing forts and even invading Canada were defensive measures.
Arnold was intent on military results and had little skill or interest in ingratiating himself with the men sitting on the provincial bodies in Massachusetts or in the Continental Congress. His detractors, however, especially Allen, Brown, and Easton who had no specific authorization to take Ticonderoga, were keen to advance their own reputations and diminish his. In fact it was necessary to diminish Arnold’s if their less official behavior was to be seen as responsible for the triumph. Arnold had criticized the disorder and plunder that followed the capture of the fort of course, while Allen was keen to praise all those who had looked to him as their leader and anxious to make sure the Green Mountain Boys came away with glowing reputations. John Brown and James Easton, both of whom were praised in Allen’s report for their bravery at Ticonderoga, were intent on vilifying Arnold to Congress and making it appear that he had no real role in the capture of the fort. Congress decided to give Allen control of Ticonderoga and ordered Arnold to fulfill his original commission, delivering the artillery from Ticonderoga to the army at Cambridge. Later when Allen left Arnold was given command and until properly relieved of his commission, was determined to maintain his post and carry out the plan to move the fort’s artillery to Cambridge.17 But the Provincial Congress was also insistent that he provide a detailed accounting of how he had used the money and supplies he had been allotted. Arnold was keen to hand over command to an appropriate officer, having accomplished the military tasks he had set himself. He had a family and business to get back to. He was ready to leave but there was still much confusion among the revolutionary committees and the three colonies involved.
On May 31st Arnold was informed that the Connecticut General Assembly had appointed a Colonel Benjamin Hinman to take command of the two forts, a mild man younger than him, whose military capabilities he did not rank very high.18 A day later the Massachusetts Provincial Congress finally gave long overdue recognition to Arnold assuring him that “They highly approve of and take great satisfactions in the acquisitions you have made at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, on the lake, & c.”19 They were “sorry to meet with repeated requests from you that some gentleman be sent to succeed you in command, they assure you that they place the greatest confidence in your fidelity, knowledge, courage, and good conduct and they desire that you at present dismiss the thought of quitting your important command of Ticonderoga, Crown Point, Lake Champlain.” Could he please remain and take command of the additional troops Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York were to send. They added that, now that the Continental Congress was involved, he could only be relieved of his command by the Congress sitting in Philadelphia.
News of Arnold’s successes finally reached his family in New Haven. Hannah wrote with sisterly pride and love, congratulating Benedict on his success “in reducing Ticonderoga and making yourself master of the vessels on the lakes.”20 The men “who went under your care to Boston,” she wrote, “give you the praises of a very humane and tender officer.” Her wish was that “all your future endeavors to serve your country may be crowned with equal success.” Then in sisterly fashion she worried about “the fatigue you must unavoidably suffer in the wilderness.” Still, Hannah judged, “as the cause is undoubtedly a just one, I hope you may have health, strength, fortitude, and valor, for whatever you may be called to.” She ended with the prayer: “May the broad hand of the Almighty overshadow you; and if called to battle, may the God of Armies cover your head in the day of it.” “If we are to meet no more in time,” she hoped “a wise preparation for eternity secure to us a happy meeting in the realms of bliss, where painful separations are forever excluded.”
Arnold was now following the orders of the Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia. On Wednesday, June 14th that body agreed to take control of the hodge-podge army assembled at Cambridge. Two days later Hinman arrived, sent by Connecticut to take over Arnold’s command. He came without his official orders which took two more days to catch up with him. At the same time Hinman’s orders arrived a three man committee sent by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appeared, led by one Walter Spooner, assigned to check on the situation of the forts, their importance, supplies and to judge Colonel Arnold’s “spirit, capacity and conduct.”21 If they thought these attributes inadequate they were to order his “immediate return to Massachusetts to render an account of the money, ammunition and stores, he had received.”22 If he remained their orders were that “he was to be subordinate to Colonel Hinman.”23 The idea they were to assess Arnold was amazing since the Congress had just sent him a letter praising his work and pleading with him to stay in command. The Congress was also aware of the impertinence of Massachusetts and Connecticut organizing the seizure of forts in New York without seeking the agreement and help of New York’s patriot assemblies. All very awkward along with the issue of which colony was to pay for the effort, presumably better Connecticut than Massachusetts. The Spooner committee did write the Continental Congress in Philadelphia of the vital importance of retaining control of the Champlain forts and the lake. The Continental Congress agreed to adopt the impromptu army gathered at Cambridge and on June 15th appointed George Washington of Virginia to be its commander. He would arrive at Cambridge to assume his command on June 23rd, the same day Arnold resigned his. Arnold considered the demand of the Massachusetts Congress that he present himself to them with an exact accounting of his disbursements insulting and demeaning. His reports had consistently detailed his disbursement and needs. Moreover, he regarded as outrageous their failure to provide the final small sums needed to make good various expenses. He reminded them he had advanced more than one thousand pounds of his own money to pay various expenses. Although he had repeatedly asked to be relieved of his post, he deeply resented these requests and was particularly upset that he was now to turn over the command of the forts and his men to a younger officer of the same rank. Worse James Easton was to take command of Arnold’s men with John Brown as second in command. All this was sufficient to cause him “to decline holding my commission longer.”24 Rather than put the forts and vessels under the new commander and his men under Easton and Brown, he simply disbanded the men.25 His men were pragmatic though. As they had not been paid for their services and were far from home, many agreed to enlist under the new officers.
However disgruntled the Spooner committee was with him, the residents of the Champlain area fully appreciated Arnold’s contribution to their safety. Arnold had persuaded the Congress not to abandon the area forts and the local population. A group of residents wrote him just before he left on behalf of all the inhabitants of the region amounting, they explained “to about six hundred families.” They were deeply impressed with a sense of your merit, and the weighty obligations which we lie under to you in your military capacity.”26 They thanked him for his “humanity and benevolence” toward them “supplying them with provisions in their distress” as well as “your polite treatment of such prisoners as have fallen into your hands.” Indeed, they judged that his humane and polite manner had shown “your adversaries a bright example of that elevation and generosity of soul, which nothing less than real magnanimity and innate virtue could inspire.” This gratitude was in sharp contrast to the aspersions cast on Arnold’s conduct by Easton’s version of events and by the Spooner committee.
While Arnold was being ordered to appear before the Massachusetts Congress to “render an account of his proceedings,” John Brown, although also under investigation, was promoted to major in the Massachusetts force. On July 1 Arnold was at Albany on his way home. At the request of Major General Philip Schuyler he sent the Continental Congress a report of the situation of the army in the “Northern Department.”27 He did not mince words informing the delegates of the lack of provisions, none at all made for the growing numbers of sick men, scarcity of gunpowder and other concerns.
The lobbying against Arnold had helped convince the Continental Congress that Arnold should be recalled. It was a sober lesson learned, and it ended his military expectations for the moment. He had turned toward home, stopping at Albany to write a full report of his efforts to fulfill his commission. It was there that the news reached him. His dear wife, Peggy, was dead.