WHEN I MOVED to Vermont a quarter century ago to begin to write biography, a name I encountered almost immediately was Ethan Allen. His name was on ships, schools, a military firing range, and furniture, but he was almost never mentioned alone: it was usually “Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.” He was depicted as a hard-drinking, brawling, hair-triggered, uneducated country bumpkin: part Davy Crockett, part Paul Bunyan, and two parts Jack Daniels. Gradually, I met people who had a more complicated view of the state’s founding father, and I want to thank a few of them. The late John Buechler, special collections librarian at the University of Vermont, told me right away I should look into the Haldimand negotiations: they were the key not only to Allen but to the early history and character of the state. Ethan Allen Hitchcock Sims, Allen’s great-great-great-grandson, came to a talk I gave and told me his ancestor was a serious philosopher. My son, Christopher, wrote his senior thesis at Princeton University on the links between the treatment of prisoners of war in the American Revolution and the Civil War, citing the brutal treatment of Allen by the British. That led me to read Allen’s own narrative of his thirty-four-month captivity. Studies I had already made of Benedict Arnold, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Chittenden all seemed to touch on this elusive mountain man.
The path soon led to archival research. I wish to thank the late Whitfield J. Bell, librarian of the American Philosophical Society; Peter Carini at the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College; Jeffrey D. Marshall, research director in the Wilbur Collection at the University of Vermont; Vermont State Archivist Gregory Sanford; Nick Westbrook at Fort Ticonderoga; Kevin Graffagnino, director of the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan; and the patient library staffs at St. Michael’s College and at Champlain College, especially Marie Kascus and Tammy Poquette. My student assistant, Samantha Snow, gave invaluable help. Visits to the manuscript reading rooms of the Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and Princeton University Library all yielded important pieces for the emerging mosaic of Allen’s life and times on the Revolutionary War–era New England frontier. The courtesy of librarians makes the biographer’s work feasible. I want to thank the staff at St. Anne’s College at Oxford University for granting me a corner in which to continue my research on the British ministry’s decisions on how to deal with Allen and his captured comrades on English soil. But without the generous hints of vigilant fellow researchers of the period, I would have missed important leads: Thomas Fleming told me about Washington’s reaction to Allen when the released prisoner came to Valley Forge, and he vetted my account of the Battle of Bunker Hill; John Nagy told me the British secret service rank of Allen’s go-between in the Haldimand negotiations and helped identify the spies Allen sent into Fort Ticonderoga the night before the famous attack. David Donath, director of the Woodstock National Historic Park, dusted off his graduate school notes on the Reverend Solomon Palmer. For years Professor David Bryan as well as Joyce Huff and Daniel O’Neil, directors of the Ethan Allen Homestead in Burlington, Vermont, gave me valuable help. Beal Hyde, descendant of Remember Baker, guided me to the site of Baker’s brutal death.
I owe special thanks to the late Professors Lawrence Stone and Arthur Link of the graduate faculty of Princeton University, who encouraged and aided me as I made an awkward transition from investigative journalist to historian, and to Professor Edmund Sears Morgan of Yale University, who urged me to carry on with my first attempt at biography during a colloquium at Princeton.
My daughter, Lucy, helped me find key documents at Dartmouth and in the New York Public Library, then acted as reader as she used her fine editorial skills to help me weed and prune my first draft. My wife, Nancy Nahra, lent me her poet’s ear for language as I read to her, as I always have, long passages of the all-too-rough draft. This book has been a six-year undertaking that might never have been completed without her help and encouragement and that of my close friend, Dr. John W. Heisse Jr., who first read the entire manuscript and found a way to tell me what he didn’t like about it. Several eminent historians closely read and generously commented, among them Thomas Fleming, John Ferling, Thomas Wermuth, and Randolph Roth. I am in their debt.
But all of my research would remain in notebooks if Deborah Grosvenor, whom I am fortunate to have as my literary agent, had not brilliantly vetted my proposal before delivering me to the hands of the editorial master craftman who knows more American history than I ever will, and how best to express it—my editor at Norton, Robert Weil. His patient and capable assistant, Philip Marino, has helped to make it possible for me to meet all Bob’s deadlines, and the incomparable copyediting of Otto Sonntag has polished the pieces of the mosaic until, I hope, the real Ethan Allen emerges from the shadows where he has too long dwelled.