WHILE ETHAN ALLEN’S DEATH was undramatic and lacked ceremony, Vermonters were determined not to let go quietly. His funeral, as a result, was enormous. The Green Mountain Boys, his friend Governor Thomas Chittenden, the assembly, and 10,000 of the roughly 80,000 citizens of the republic of Vermont glided over the icy roads to Ira Allen’s house in Colchester, across the river from his homestead, for a civil funeral that contrasted with the religious ceremonies of so many of his Revolutionary peers. Allen had helped to make the United States an independent nation and Vermont an independent republic. He had fought off anyone who tried to weaken it, and now a stunned Vermont populace braved a frigid winter wind to escort his body through a tattoo of cannon and musket salutes to the cemetery atop Colchester Hill, overlooking a frozen Lake Champlain and his beloved Winooski Valley. There, Ethan Allen was buried in what has become a shrine for travelers for more than two centuries. A plain marble slab resting on a granite foundation bore an inscription, long since obliterated, testifying to the enigma so many had found in him:
The corporeal part of General Ethan Allen rests beneath this stone, the 12th day of Feb., 1789, aged 51 years. His spirit tried the mercies of his God, in whom alone he believed and strongly trusted.
On a hilltop overlooking the Winooski River, in Burlington’s Green Mountain Cemetery, stands a pillar that supports a statue bearing his likeness. It depicts him looking much like a Napoleonic-era hussar. At its base, these words are etched in stone:
Wielding the pen as well as the sword, he was the sagacious and intrepid defender of the New Hampshire Grants and the master spirit in the arduous struggle which resulted in the sovereignty and independence of this state.1
Four years later, as the Age of Reason came to its sanguinary climax during France’s Reign of Terror, the Reverend Nathan Perkins, echoing the imprecation of the Reverend Stiles, stopped by the hilltop graveyard in Burlington and denounced Ethan Allen as he stomped on his grave. From their pulpits, the New England clergy—from Chestnut Hill to Bennington—attacked Allen and his rational religious views, making no distinction between deism and atheism as they demonized him. The obloquies continued, year after year, acting only to ensure Allen’s elevation to the status of frontier rebel and folk hero, a man who spurned the siren call of America’s new aristocracy, its upper classes, despite being offered a seat at their table, instead preferring a farm and a cabin on its fertile frontier.
Five years after Allen died, the Reverend Lemuel Hopkins, the pastor of the Congregational Church in Bennington, penned a second epitaph for him, which he titled “On General Ethan Allen,” ending with this punchline:
One hand is clench’d to batter noses,
While t’other scrawls ’gainst Paul and Moses
With Allen’s death, a rapprochement of sorts between Vermont and New York finally seemed more likely. Accordingly, commissioners from the republic of Vermont, selected by the Bennington lawyer Isaac “Jersey Slick” Tichenor, met with commissioners selected by New York’s Governor Clinton. After thirty-five years of acrimony, after the longest border war in American history had kept Vermont out of the Union and almost driven it back into the smothering fold of the British Empire, the commissioners negotiated a final settlement. Vermont agreed to pay $30,000 to buy off the New York land claimants. Among them was James Duane, the first mayor of New York City, a U.S. district court judge at the time of settlement. In the end, Duane relinquished any claim to Vermont lands. His heirs received $2,629.21.2
The way was then clear for Vermont statehood. In 1791, two years after Allen’s death, in a special session called by President George Washington, the U.S. Senate admitted Vermont to the Union. And two months later, already weary of the new nation’s politics, Thomas Jefferson, the man who, as the first secretary of state, wrote the necessary documents for Vermont’s statehood, came to Vermont on vacation with his closest friend, James Madison, more celebrated as the author of the Bill of Rights. They drove through New York in a tall black glass-enclosed carriage made at Monticello by Jefferson’s slaves and driven by his French-trained slave, chef, and body servant, James Hemings, the half brother of Jefferson’s dead wife, Martha.
In his journal, Madison noted sharp differences between the citizens of the two neighboring states. On the New York side of the border, threadbare tenant farmers still living in seedy rented cottages tilled the soil on the great manors of Philip Schuyler and other Hudson River magnates, whose acreage was increased by the addition of lands confiscated from the departed Loyalists. The New York tenant farmers still were afraid to improve their farms for fear the landlord would evict them and re-rent at higher rates. Coming into the valley that Ethan Allen first saw a quarter of a century earlier with his cousin Remember, Madison noted in his palm-sized journal that now there were houses that were larger, more substantial, more “closely settled” than he had seen in New York, handsomely situated on 50- to 200-acre tracts that were owned outright by farmers whose “fields were full of corn and potatoes, flax to make linens, wheat and closer and half a dozen grass crops for feeding livestock.” The settlements in the Valley of Vermont, Madison wrote, filled “seven or eight [miles] of a fine fertile vale separating two ridges of low mountains…rich and covered with sugar maple and beech.”
The Virginia travelers discovered that a young couple could emigrate from Massachusetts or New Jersey to the Vermont frontier, buy land and clear it, build a house and barn, and be mortgage-free within five years. In a hundred-mile north–south swath between Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains, they discovered a “champagne country,” the fields of wheat waving in the shore breeze. According to the first U.S. census, Vermont had the highest yield per acre of wheat.3
Lake Champlain, they observed, was full of commerce, with sloops carrying barrels of potash, and enormous rafts, made of timbers to be dismantled and sold in Montreal. Although the British were still boycotting all trade with the original thirteen states, thanks to Ethan Allen’s subtle diplomacy, only Vermont was benefitting from America’s first free exchange of trade with its northern neighbor. Allen did not live to show off the state that he had fought to carve out of the British Empire. The republic of Vermont was, in fact, so much his handwork. But Jefferson and Madison clearly noted the progress, admiring what they saw.
Resilient and irrepressible, Ethan Allen was a determined populist and creative leader. A man possessing more contradictions than folklore has suggested, he was both a successful and self-serving businessman and a farmer. A philosopher on horseback, he was, however, resolute in his belief in building a new kind of state on the intrinsic value of the land owned and worked by people of modest means. He fought all his life the tyranny of intolerance, insisting on the separation of church and state and championing the right to speak out freely against both. His reputation as the original Green Mountain Boy survived the counterattacks of an enraged Puritan clergy. He left no portrait from life: no portrait painter could make a living on the New England frontier. Eventually, family members described him to an artist, or there would be no image of him today.
There was no statue to honor him until the Civil War, and then a swashbuckling granite figure finally graced the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington and the foyer of the Vermont capitol in Montpelier as well as his hilltop family graveyard in Burlington. His prisoner narrative, which chronicles his rank sufferings, kept on selling, going through sixty editions before the Civil War. It even remains in print today. Invoking his memory, twice as many Green Mountain Boys per capita went south and died as in any other state in the North. They streamed down from their hill farms and crowded onto trains and steamboats to go south and fight and die at Gettysburg and Andersonville in their struggle to preserve the Union. While no one could equate their suffering to that of the slaves, their numbers strongly suggest that they were sensitive to the sufferings of others, memorializing their own flights to New England’s, and America’s, first frontier.