IN THE STORM-TOSSED hours since midnight, only two waterlogged workboats had managed to cross the narrow neck of wind-whipped Lake Champlain. Just eighty-nine of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys had been able to get from the tree-shrouded shore of Vermont to the steep protuberance of New York less than a mile away. Now the protective darkness was fading as a white morning fog cast a faint glow on the massing rebels. Soon that would burn off, exposing Allen’s amateur assault force to British sentinels patrolling Fort Ticonderoga’s looming ramparts. All night, Allen had waited for more commandeered vessels to arrive, for more of the two thousand men he’d promised he could muster for the attack, but by five o’clock on the morning of May 10, he realized he could wait no longer. Without even the two hundred chosen men waiting to join him from their hiding place behind a screen of spruces on the Vermont shore, he would have to assault the most formidable British fortress in the American colonies.
Only two weeks earlier the shocking news had reached Ethan Allen that the first shots of the American Revolution had been fired. Reports wrapped in rumors of massacre had spread like a crown fire over the forests and mountains of New England. Initially, few details could be confirmed, but at least one conclusion was indisputable: on April 19, 1775, in a deadly clash of arms between Massachusetts militia and British regulars in the outskirts of Boston, a decade of ideological ferment and partisan protests over England’s fumbling attempts to formulate imperial policies had finally turned into open rebellion.
The announcement of the birth of the United States at Lexington and Concord quickly reached the thousands of transplanted New Englanders on the Vermont frontier. From the minutemen on the village green of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Lexington to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “shot heard round the world” at the “rude bridge that arched the flood” in Concord, the strands of patriotic embroidery were already being laced from town to town by the volunteer couriers of Massachusetts’ revolutionary movement.
Acrid blue clouds of musket smoke still hung over the bayoneted corpses of the Revolution’s first casualties when the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, in hiding in Watertown, summoned its most trusted courier, twenty-three-year-old Israel Bissell, and handed him a single document. Bissell was to ride west first to Springfield, on the Connecticut River, then south as far as New York City, spreading the news of the British invasion. At every town, he was to obtain the counter-signature of the chairman of the Committee of Safety to this missive:
Wed. morning near 10 of the Clock
Watertown,
To all friends of American liberty: let it be known that this morning before break of day a British brigade consisting of about 1000 or 1200 men landed at Phips farm at Cambridge and marched to Lexington where they found a company of our colony militia in arms, upon whom they fired without any provocation and killed six men and wounded four others. By an express from Boston we find another brigade are now upon their march from Boston supposed to be about 1,000. The bearer, Israel Bissell, is charged to alarm the country, and all persons are desired to furnish him with fresh horses, as they may be needed. I have spoken with several who have seen the dead and wounded.1
Recent historical research, however, suggests that the British raid was no surprise. The forewarned Patriots had prepared carefully to confront and eagerly exploit it. For ten years, radical Bostonians, self-described Patriots, had clashed sporadically with British colonial officials. In a town of 16,000, a garrison of 4,000 British troops seemed powerless to enforce the tax levies and new trade restrictions emanating from Parliament in London. As American protests against British rule and occupation escalated, the Patriots sometimes responded with excruciatingly painful and invariably fatal tarring and feathering of British sympathizers but more commonly with a torrent of propaganda in a pamphlet war between Patriot and Loyalist apologists.
In the year before the clashes at Lexington and Concord, a network of thirty “observers” coordinated by the Boston Committee of Safety provided intelligence of British movements. Alerted by postriders led by Paul Revere, townspeople all over the Bay Colony stood silently, sullenly by, watching while columns of the detested Redcoats, locally styled “bloody lobsterbacks,” sortied from Boston to seize the colony’s supplies of gunpowder and weapons from magazines in Charlestown, Cambridge, and Salem. In September of 1774, some 40,000 alarmed New England militia, many of them combat-seasoned veterans of the French and Indian War, mobilized when British troops marched out from Boston to Medford and Charlestown to seize the colony’s militia depots. Some militiamen, primed to fight raw British recruits, rode or marched one hundred miles or more that day from every direction, only to turn back in disappointment when they learned that, since the British had drawn no blood, there was no legitimate provocation to shoot them. In December of 1774, 2,000 British regulars marched to the coastal port of Portsmouth to seize New Hampshire’s gunpowder, but Revere had already warned the local Sons of Liberty, who seized the powder. In February of 1775, 150 troops marched again, this time to Salem, but a crowd blocked the road and raised the drawbridge leading to the powder stores in the harbor. In March, the month before the Battle of Lexington, when Lord Percy rode out at the head of some 3,000 regulars, on a march out into the countryside, postriders sounded their tocsins, and, as thousands of militia turned out, Percy turned back. In effect, the Patriots of Massachusetts had successfully blockaded the British inside Boston.
THE JUSTIFIABLY NERVOUS British commander in chief in America at the moment was Sir Thomas Gage, and he refused to launch an unauthorized attack on the recalcitrant revolutionaries. A sober, persistent man, the aristocratic Gage, the second son of an English viscount, had been nicknamed “Honest Tom” by American provincial troops who had served under him in the French and Indian War because of his habitual caution, perhaps a product of his propensity for being wounded. He had sustained serious wounds in the British debacle against the French at Fontenoy, again while blindly leading the vanguard of General Edward Braddock’s army into a forest ambush at the Monongahela and then was wounded somewhat less seriously in a foolhardy British frontal attack on the entrenched French in the unfinished Fort Ticonderoga on July 8, 1758. In the space of an afternoon, more than 3,000 British troops perished. The next year, the French, carrying out a scorched-earth strategy as they retreated toward Canada, blew up their prized fortresses around Lake Champlain. The conquering British spent upwards of £4 million to rebuild them. The costly British failure at Ticonderoga made martyrs of the dead, heroes of its survivors. For Ethan Allen even to think of desecrating this shrine to British valor would have horrified and undoubtedly outraged Gage.
A COMMANDING FIGURE in his forest green greatcoat and sheared beaver tricorn hat, the thirty-seven-year-old Ethan Allen, described by a contemporary as a “robust, large-boned man,” had served for five years as colonel commandant of his creation, the Green Mountain Boys, the largest paramilitary force in North America. He founded the volunteer militia regiment to defend some twenty-nine frontier settlements between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River in a border war over conflicting land grants made by royal officials in New Hampshire and New York. For five years, Allen systematically and with remarkably little bloodshed thwarted the Crown officials in the provincial capital of New York City who claimed that New Hampshire had no right to have sold settlers some three million acres of hardwood forests in the Green Mountains. Consequently, New York declared that the thousands of frontier settlers who held New Hampshire deeds were squatters, subject to eviction. New York based its claim on a century-old charter granted by King Charles II stating that New York extended east to the Connecticut River; New Hampshire, on the fact that it had built forts and protected the territory from the French. (Until the American Revolution, Vermont did not actually exist.)
Frustrated by pro forma eviction orders issued after cursory hearings in a New York court composed of corrupt lawyers and wealthy Hudson Valley land speculators, Ethan Allen, at the behest of selectmen in Vermont settlements, organized and trained a regiment of settlers. With his vigilant militiamen, Allen was able to intercept and repeatedly repulse sheriff’s posses attempting to seize frontier homesteads for resale by New York’s royal officials to major land speculators and high-ranking British military officers. So successful were Allen and the Green Mountain Boys in their turn at evicting New York magistrates and posses from Vermont that, little more than a year before Allen’s expedition against the Lake Champlain forts, the New York Provincial Assembly, dominated by major landholders, passed seven acts declaring Allen and five of his officers outlaws. New York’s royal governor, Sir William Tryon, posted a hefty £100 reward for Allen’s capture and decreed a sentence of death, summary execution to take place without the nicety of a trial by jury.
Like so many immigrants then and since, the man who founded and defended what became the state of Vermont left behind half a life of boom and bust. Ethan Allen was well over six feet tall, a rarity in eighteenth-century America. As a Puritan, he possessed the upbringing of a genteel Puritan family. One of eight children of a town-founding farmer, Allen was largely self-educated; his only formal schooling was eight months of classics and mathematics he imbibed at seventeen to prepare him for a Yale College education that never materialized. His relatives and in-laws included prosperous merchants, ministers, a miller, and the owners of extensive landholdings. Several had attended Yale at a time when to attend college at all was the privilege of a high echelon of colonists. While Allen frequently wielded biblical quotations to his advantage, he abjured organized religion: in fact, the Pope he admired was a poet named Alexander. The disputatious Allen wrote fluidly and copiously, spelling out in widely read newspaper articles and book-length pamphlets the plight of the smallholder on the frontier who was being victimized by a feudal English legal system that favored the landed aristocracy and granted few rights to the British yeoman class transplanting itself en masse to find refuge in the backcountry forests of America.
Dark-miened, thick-bodied, and rugged from years of grueling work as a farmer, as a working partner in Connecticut’s first successful iron foundry, and as a professional hunter, Allen had grown wealthy in his twenties yet impoverished in his thirties. Outspoken in the face of New England’s rigid theocracy, he had been “read out” of Puritan-dominated towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut. His use of profane language in the workplace made laborers love him and clergy and magistrates prosecute him. Refusing to tolerate corrupt business practices, he used bullwhip and bare knuckles when he felt he was being exploited by the tight-knit commercial society of New England towns. In order to support a large family, he spent winters hunting alone in the Green Mountains, exploring the uncharted land recently evacuated by the French and their Indian allies. Each spring, he brought back hides to family businesses—a tannery, a factory for manufacturing buckskin clothing, a general store in Connecticut. Forming the Onion River Land Company (known widely as the Ethan Allen Land Company), he purchased large tracts of rich hardwood wilderness, often on credit, and then sold small parcels for modest sums to impecunious families who became his loyal followers in the Green Mountain Boys.
TO FULLY APPRECIATE what motivated Allen, one must examine the political and economic currents that so dramatically transformed the colonies in the dozen years following the end of hostilities between the British and the French. For most of the years since the French surrender in 1763, the commander in chief of all British forces in North America was General Gage. He recovered from his war wounds sufficiently to marry Margaret Kemble, a beautiful American heiress. The daughter of wealthy New Brunswick, New Jersey, Loyalists, she was related to the aristocratic Livingston family of Hudson Valley land barons, archenemies of Ethan Allen and the Vermont settlers. Because of his heroism under fire, Gage became a favorite of King George III, who personally promoted him and sought his advice on America. His status at court brought him considerable riches, including 18,000 valuable acres in Oneida County, New York, a large tract in New Brunswick now called Gagetown, and a West Indian plantation yielding an income of £600 annually. Gage’s vested interest in America may help to explain his desire, not shared by all of his countrymen, to keep the peace in Boston, a feat that would prove beyond his, or perhaps anyone’s, abilities. He was repeatedly caught off guard by the town’s Patriots. After the Peace of Paris ended the French and Indian War in 1763, England faced a crushing war debt, heavy taxes at home, and the expense of supporting a large army in America. As a worldwide postwar depression set in, Parliament chose this inopportune moment to pass the American Revenue Act, the first law ever enacted for the specific purpose of raising money in its colonies for the Crown. The law extended an existing duty on molasses, a staple produced in Boston from West Indian sugar, and imposed new import duties that affected almost every American: on non-British textiles, coffee, indigo, and Madeira and Canary Islands wines. It also banned the import of French wines and foreign rum and doubled the duties on goods imported from other countries or their colonies. The list of goods that Americans could export only to the mother country or her colonies was expanded to include iron, hides, whale fins, raw silk, potash, and pearl ash, promising to stifle nascent American industry. When Parliament also decreed that it would for the first time strictly enforce the higher imposts, Samuel Adams, a malt brewer and lawyer whose father’s fortune had been wiped out by British currency regulations, foresaw the consequences of taxing of American colonists without granting them representative seats in the House of Commons. He regarded new royal regulations as the resounding tocsin of an alarming parliamentary infringement of colonial rights:
If our trade may be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the product of our lands and everything we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our charter rights to govern and tax ourselves. It strikes at our British privileges which, as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our fellow subjects who are natives of Britain. If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable status of tributary slaves?2
Perversely, Parliament responded to initial American objections by imposing the Stamp Tax, which required almost all Americans to pay a sizable tax on paper, as the English had for almost a century. Items taxed included bills of lading, dice and playing cards, mortgages and liquor licenses, printed pamphlets, newsprint and newspaper advertisements, almanacs, calendars, surveying documents, and college diplomas. At a time when cash was sparse and unemployment high, the taxes had to be paid in silver or gold. Some were outrageously steep. The stamp for a college diploma cost £4 (equivalent to about $600 in 2010) at a time when half the students at Harvard were studying for the ministry on scholarships. But the burden fell heaviest on lawyers, printers, tavern owners, merchants, and shipowners, broadening the base of opposition to growing parliamentary power. Merchants, lawyers, and sailors rioted all up and down the Atlantic seaboard. All the lawyers in New Jersey refused to conduct any business requiring the obnoxious stamps, which put a stop on all legal business in the colony. In Boston, crowds chased the stamp commissioner through the streets, sacked the home of the royal governor, and literally pulled it down with blocks and tackles as he escaped out a window. The Boston town meeting denounced taxation without representation in Parliament and proposed intercolonial action. The colony’s House of Representatives authorized forming a committee of correspondence to coordinate protests with other colonies. In August of 1764, America’s first trade boycott materialized. Boston merchants agreed to forgo importing English lace and ruffles, and the town’s mechanics followed suit by pledging to wear only leather work clothes made in Massachusetts.
Gage wrote home to the ministry in London, “I have never been more at a loss.” To him, it was obvious that the protests were well organized:
The plan of the people of property is to raise the lower class to prevent the execution of the Law…. The lawyers are the source from which these clamors have flowed…. [M]erchants in general, assembly men, magistrates, &c have been united in this plan of riots, and without the influence and instigation of these the inferior people would have been quiet…. The sailors who are the only people who may be properly styled Mob, are entirely at the command of the Merchants who employ them.3
As the protests intensified, Gage rotated his forces from frontier posts to build up a garrison at Boston: by late 1768, into a town of 16,000 he injected 4,000 Redcoats. Gage chose his troops unwisely, as the historian David Hackett Fischer points out, selecting “for that difficult assignment the 29th Foot, a regiment notorious for poor discipline, hot-tempered officers, and repeated violent clashes with civilians in Canada and New York.” Among these troops were the men who shot and killed six protesters in the so-called Boston Massacre of 1770. As the home government “yielded by bits” to unpopular demands, Gage’s attitude stiffened. In 1772, he wrote to his superiors in London, “Democracy is too prevalent in America, and claims the greatest attention to prevent its increase.” New England’s laws were bizarre, the people litigious. “Every man studies law, and interprets the laws to suit his purposes.” An important element in the problem, Gage grew convinced, was the abundance of cheap land. “The people themselves have gradually retired from the coast” and “are, already, almost out of reach of Law and Government.”4
AFTER AN INTERVAL of relative calm, some 7,000 Bostonians gathered at Old South Church on December 16, 1773, to protest the arrival of three shiploads of tea by the British East India Company, a monopoly that was undercutting prices charged by Boston merchants. That night, somewhere between 30 and 130 Sons of Liberty, thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the ships and dumped 342 lacquered Chinese chests of the hated cargo into the harbor. (The ships and their cargoes were the investments of £1,000-a-share stockholders in the East India Company, many of them members of Parliament; its consignees were the sons of the royal governor.) Gage was on home leave in England when reports reached him. King George summoned him and solicited his advice. Gage had come to despise town meetings as “democraticall despotism.” As early as 1770, he had urged the king and his councillors to annihilate Massachusetts’s royal charter and abolish town meetings: “No peace will ever be established in that province, till the King nominates his council, and appoints the magistrates, and all town-meetings are absolutely abolished; whilst those meetings exist the people will be kept in a perpetual heat.”5
The Boston Tea Party convinced the king that Gage’s assessment was correct: he ordered his first minister, Lord North, to push through Parliament a set of Coercive Acts. When Gage, now the royal governor as well as commander in chief, returned to Boston, he promulgated what Bostonians called the Intolerable Acts. Henceforth, town meetings could be called only with his permission. The king would henceforth appoint an executive council that effectively stripped the general assembly of its crucial taxing and spending authority. All judges would be appointed and paid by the Crown. Until Bostonians repaid the East India Company the £10,000 value of the tea, Parliament had effectively cut off all trade by land and sea with the port town. Perhaps even more devastating, Parliament rescinded Massachusetts’ fishing rights in the Atlantic. On June 1, 1774, the Port Act took effect, and normal business came to a standstill. Other colonies kept Bostonians supplied, driving donated flocks of sheep and herds of pigs across the narrow neck connecting Boston and the mainland—between British cannon.
In the months that followed, Gage encountered unabated resistance during raids on nearby powder magazines as he attempted to disarm the colonists. The situation was growing out of hand. Early in 1775, he wrote to London for further instructions. In Massachusetts, each town that tense winter was organizing crack units of seventy rapid-response minutemen to turn out on a moment’s notice. The resistance movement not only was spreading throughout New England but was winning growing sympathy in other colonies, especially among the merchant class. In Connecticut, the general assembly commissioned two new independent military companies, each recruited, outfitted, and paid by wealthy shipowners. In coastal Norwich, Benedict Arnold, owner of thirteen merchant ships and a thriving apothecary and luxury goods store, received the assembly’s commission as captain of the Second Connecticut Foot Guards, recruited Yale College students, and outfitted them in scarlet. Connecticut also coined six new regiments of militia, upwards of 6,000 men in a colony of 100,000 citizens. The Connecticut Assembly dispatched fast ships to the Caribbean to purchase weapons and gunpowder and ordered all militia to train for twelve days, double the normal term of service, before May 1, 1775, paying them six shillings a day, double the wages of a skilled artisan. In March 1775, a purge of leaders of old militia units, including any suspected of being Loyalists, swept a dozen top officers from their posts. Invariably, their offices went to the most radical Patriots, the Sons of Liberty. Intimidated by Patriot crowds, more than 1,100 Loyalists from all over New England fled that winter from their homes into Boston, seeking British protection.
ON APRIL 14, 1775, as drilling militia practiced the manual of arms on town greens, General Gage opened fresh orders from Lord Dartmouth, the colonial secretary. Gage now received authorization to march into the countryside, as he had requested, “with large detachments to secure obedience through every part of it.” Both Massachusetts and Connecticut were to be stripped of their seventeenth-century royal charters, and Boston’s radical leaders, preferably Samuel Adams and John Hancock, were to be arrested and shipped in irons to London to be tried for high treason. What actually occurred only four days later quickly became shrouded in folklore and would be transformed into a story that has been repeated from poet, parent, and teacher to child and new citizen ever since. It was a cool, windy day. At three o’clock on the morning of April 19, seven hundred handpicked British light infantry and grenadier guards marched to the south end of Boston Commons and boarded launches from the men-of-war that took them up the Charles River to Cambridge. There they stepped off, without rations or bedrolls, for what they expected to be a twelve-mile sortie to Lexington, where, according to Loyalist informants, the Patriots were known to be stockpiling munitions. At first light, Major John Pitcairn and the British advance guard rounded a bend in the Great Road where it approached Lexington Green and discovered a crowd of several hundred Patriots, including seventy militiamen formed in two neat ranks. It instantly struck Pitcairn that the Minutemen were not posted where they could fire from behind cover but were out in the open, in daylight, exposed within a hundred yards—the maximum range of the British muskets—away from the road the British would have to follow to Concord. For several days in the preceding week, Samuel Adams and John Hancock had been guests at Hancock’s childhood home, now the parsonage of the Reverend Jonas Clark, the political as well as the spiritual leader of Lexington.
Adams apparently already knew of British plans to march on Lexington and Concord. Many historians believe that his informant was the wife of the British commander. David Hackett Fischer writes that “it was none other than Margaret Kemble Gage, the American wife of General Gage…[who] had long felt cruelly divided by the growing rift between Britain and America.” Mrs. Gage reputedly informed her close personal friend Dr. Joseph Warren, the president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, that her husband’s troops planned to raid armories in Lexington and Concord: her warning led to Paul Revere’s famous ride. In fact, Gage himself suspected his wife and shipped her off to his estate in England to avoid further embarrassment.6
According to Gage’s personal papers, the British commander had his own spy close to Adams: Dr. Benjamin Church, a Harvard-educated poet and a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, the extralegal governing arm of the radical movement. Dr. Church, hedging his bets to be on the winning side of the struggle, was reporting the intimate details of the radicals’ meetings and passing along his acute analyses of the revolutionaries’ moods and problems to the British commander through one of his mistresses. Church had told General Gage that Samuel Adams was under intense pressure because of the adverse effects to trade that the closing of the Boston port had and was receiving only tepid support from other colonies. Adams, according to Church, worried that the Patriot cause was losing momentum and needed a fresh infusion of martyrs.
Informed by Samuel Adams and Hancock of the imminent British attack, Captain John Parker, leader of the Lexington militiamen, summoned his men at midnight. The majority of the men decided that they did not want to try to obstruct the British march. Captain Parker reported their decision to Parson Clark, Hancock, and Adams. Whatever arguments Hancock and Samuel Adams mustered to persuade Parker to overrule his men, he reassembled the militiamen three hours later, just before dawn and ordered them to form up on the green.
MAJOR PITCAIRN WOULD always insist he gave his men positive orders not to fire unless fired upon. Later, he told an American prisoner of war that he did not see who fired first. According to the written account of his prison interview, which was passed on many years later to the Reverend Ezra Stiles, by then the president of Yale College, the British major rode up to the militiamen and ordered them to disperse. When they did not immediately heed his command, they crossed an invisible line that made them rebels in arms against the king. Wheeling his horse and giving a command to his men to surround and disarm the militiamen, Pitcairn saw a gun in the hands of “a peasant” behind a stone wall “flash in the pan without going off.” Then two or three more guns, also being fired from cover, went off. Instantly, without orders, “a promiscuous, uncommanded but general Fire took place,” which Pitcairn later insisted he could not stop even when he swung his sword downward, the signal to cease firing. Pitcairn’s official report to General Gage is more nuanced and self-serving:
I gave directions to the troops to move forward, but on no account to fire or even attempt it without orders. When I arrived at the end of the village, I observed drawn up upon a green near 200 of the rebels, and when I came within about 100 yards of them, they began to file off toward some stone walls on our right flank. The light infantry, observing this, ran after them. I instantly called to the soldiers not to fire but to surround and disarm them and after several repetitions of those positive orders to the men not to fire etc., some of the rebels who had jumped over the wall fired four or five shots at the soldiers, which wounded a man of the Tenth [Regiment], and my horse was wounded in two places…. At the same time several shots were fired from a Meeting House on our left. Upon this, without any order or regularity the light infantry began scattered fire and continued in that situation for some little time, contrary to the repeated orders of both me and the officers that were present.7
When the British firing stopped, eight Americans lay dead and ten more, badly wounded, were carried to nearby houses as the British regrouped for the march to Concord. Among them was Captain Parker. After he fell wounded by a musket ball, a British soldier ran him through with a bayonet. He survived.
DOGTROTTING THE FIVE miles from Lexington to Concord, the British vanguard encountered unexpected resistance from hundreds of Patriots who refused to retreat when the two forces fired across Concord’s North Bridge. Guided by Loyalists, the grenadiers battered down doors with the brass-jacketed butts of their heavy muskets in their precisely targeted quest for concealed weapons and munitions. Dragging terrified families into the street, the grenadiers ransacked and looted houses, shooting and bayoneting anyone who resisted. One squad of grenadiers uncovered a pair of ancient cannon, one of them capable of lobbing 24-pound cannonballs down on British ships at anchor in Boston Bay. The soldiers sheared off the guns’ trunions, making it impossible to mount and fire the cannon. Able to evacuate most of their munitions to the ponds and basements of nearby farms, the Patriot leaders had left the vital cannon buried, thinking they were hidden well enough. The British raiding parties, more importantly, failed to ferret out their principal targets, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who had escaped to nearby Woburn and were hiding in the cellar of a Puritan parsonage.
ANY VENEER OF civility between occupiers and colonists vanished within the span of a week, replaced by a savagery formerly ascribed only to Indians. As the British column reformed to countermarch to Boston, a swelling mass of well-officered militia galled them from rooftops, firing accurately out of windows, from trees, from behind stone walls. Moving rings of skirmishers continually surrounded the retreating Redcoats, firing into their thinning ranks, sometimes with long guns meant for duck gunning. By the time the regulars reached Metonomy, they were responding savagely to any resistance by individual householders. Giving no quarter at defended buildings, they put to death everyone they found inside. They did not spare noncombatants. More than one hundred bullet holes riddled one tavern where the proprietor, his wife, and two topers were found bayoneted, their skulls crushed. The Redcoats carried away anything they could fit into a knapsack, even communion silver. In a bloodlust saturnalia, marauding British soldiers set fire to the buildings and slaughtered livestock. One young boy responded to the carnage by running out and scalping a wounded Redcoat with a hatchet and hacking off his ears.
In all, seventy-three British soldiers died and two hundred more were critically wounded before they managed, reinforced by a brigade of one thousand regulars belatedly sent from Boston to relieve them, to fight their way back to the launches they’d left bobbing in the Charles River and the protection of the cannon on British men-of-war. Overnight, more militia poured in from all over New England. Militia officers trained by the British in the French and Indian War laid out siege lines and organized work parties to build a thin line of earthworks from Roxbury all the way north through Cambridge and east to Chelsea on the north shore of the Mystic River. The morning after the battles, John Adams left his home in Braintree and rode along the makeshift American lines, concluding that “the Die was cast, the Rubicon crossed.”8
For a dozen increasingly confrontational years before it boiled over on a mild spring morning, the clash between the British imperial government and its American colonists had been simmering. In London, the neophyte architects of the first British Empire seemed capable only of designing legislation and administrative policies that provoked American protests, which, in turn, precipitated ever more repressive—and equally unenforceable—British edicts. Now, in the long-awaited days of springtime, a mass of twenty thousand infuriated New England militiamen abandoned their farms, their shops, and their shipyards and rushed to avenge years of British arrogance, escalating taxation, and overbearing government regulation.
AT HIS PLANTATION atop Monticello overlooking Charlottesville, the thirty-two-year-old lawyer Thomas Jefferson, a newly elected delegate to the Continental Congress, lamented that force, not wisdom, was prevailing. Jefferson was sending off a gift of three cases of Madeira that had aged for eight years in his wine cave to his close friend William Small, the Scottish-born professor at William and Mary College who had taught him how to write and to reason. Small had returned to the British Isles just as the imperial crisis erupted. Saddened, Jefferson wrote a letter he assumed would he opened and read by British officials before it reached his mentor:
We have received the unhappy news of an action of considerable magnitude between the king’s troops and our brethren in Boston, in which it is said 500 of the former with Earl Piercy are slain. That such an action has happened is undoubted, tho’ perhaps the circumstances may not yet have reached us with truth. This accident has cut off our last hopes of reconciliation, and a phrenzy of revenge seems to have seized all ranks of people.
Jefferson blamed the “accident” at Lexington and Concord on Lord North, the anti-American first minister to King George III and England’s principal policymaker. Instead of attempting to reconcile British and colonial American leaders, Jefferson decried Lord North’s “blowing up the flames as we find him doing in every speech and public declaration”:
This may perhaps be intended to intimidate into acquiescence, but the effect has been most unfortunately otherwise. A little knolege of human nature and attention to it’s ordinary workings might have foreseen that the spirits of the people here were in a state in which they were more likely to be provoked than frightened by haughty deportment.9
AT HIS HEADQUARTERS on the ground floor of the sprawling, square, unpainted Catamount Tavern on the poplar-canopied Post Road in Bennington, Ethan Allen was huddling with the chairmen of Committees of Safety from surrounding towns and officers of the Green Mountain Boys, when an express rider breathlessly handed him the first report of Lexington and Concord. Anger quickly turned to exhilaration as Allen and his adherents set to work formulating a strategy that he believed would not only aid the Patriot cause but thrust him to the fore-front of the struggle. By mustering his regiment of nearly two thousand frontiersmen—the largest paramilitary force in colonial America—which he had trained and disciplined through four years of armed resistance to royal officials in New York, Allen believed he could quickly seize control of the strategic British fortresses dominating Lake Champlain and forward hundreds of cannon to the primitively armed Patriots investing Boston.
From his base at the northwest corner of New England, Allen could also see the strategic importance of occupying the British forts controlling Lake Champlain. The 116-mile-long lake drove a wedge between the Adirondack Mountains of New York and the Green Mountains. At either end and in the middle, the British maintained decaying forts built on the sites of former French settlements but now garrisoned collectively by a meager sixty Redcoats and their families. From an advanced base at Fort Ticonderoga, at the foot of the lake, Allen envisaged a lightning summer invasion of weakly defended Quebec Province that could make it the fourteenth state of a new North American union before the British could send reinforcements from faraway England.
Strategically inclined, Allen believed that the lake forts had to be seized before they could be reinforced by British Redcoats based in Montreal and before an opposing force of Loyalist militiamen, many of them Scottish Highlanders combat-seasoned in the French and Indian War, could be mobilized by New York’s royal government to reinforce the forts. One leading Loyalist was Allen’s erstwhile mentor, Colonel Philip Skene, a Scottish veteran who had built blockhouses on his 30,000-acre forest manor just ten miles south of Lake Champlain. There, his family, his slaves, and the workers in his sawmills and shipyard had prepared to defend his manor with cannons and with his own armed schooner, Betsey. As Allen prepared his attack on Fort Ticonderoga, he thought that Colonel Skene was still on the high seas returning from England with instructions to raise a regiment of Loyalist troops to hold the forts. In fact, Skene’s ship was being blown off course and, instead of anchoring in safety in New York harbor, landed in Philadelphia where a jeering crowd of Patriots escorted him to the city jail.
To Allen, seizing the key Champlain forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point was an inevitable preemptive act. He later wrote that he was not one to cower and wait for the British and their Indian auxiliaries to descend from Montreal and attack the scattered settlements around the mountain lake and in the Green Mountains. Acting in secret, Allen decided he could trust only his younger brother Heman, a respected Connecticut merchant and captain in the Green Mountain Boys, to ride south to the Connecticut capital at Hartford and deliver his strategic plan to Patriot leaders assembling there.
SOME THREE HUNDRED miles to the south, Benjamin Franklin, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Second Continental Congress, woke to the cacophony of Pennsylvania German farmers and their families unloading their Conestoga wagons and setting up their wares in the covered shed bisecting Philadelphia’s Market Street. Having returned only days before from failed peace negotiations in London, Franklin wrote to a friend in Parliament his initial reaction to Lexington and Concord:
You will have heard before this reaches you of the Commencement of Civil War; the end of it perhaps neither myself, nor you, who are much younger, will live to see. I find here all Ranks of People in Arms, disciplining themselves Morning & Evening, and am informed that the firmest Union prevails throughout North America.10
At nine o’clock the morning of the attack on Fort Ticonderoga, delegates from nine provinces, from as far away as New Hampshire and Georgia, took their places in the Pennsylvania State House on Chestnut Street around each colony’s green baize-covered table. They were summoned by the peal of a great bronze London-forged bell, ironically cast a quarter century earlier to celebrate American liberties. In the largest and most ornate building in colonial America, delegates sent by extralegal congresses of nine of the chain of thirteen Atlantic-rim British provinces settled into tall Windsor side chairs and prepared to debate for the third summer season. They were to decide, they now knew, what response, if any, they would collectively make to the disastrous British onslaught. After two years of inconclusive arguments, the First Continental Congress had adjourned in stalemate, sending only an obsequious olive-branch petition off to colonial officials in London, a feeble protest against the catalog of increasingly stringent British policies. No reply came from Whitehall Palace. Lord Dartmouth, the secretary of state for North America, had slid Congress’s petition, unread, under the bottom of a pile of eighty-five petitions of grievance from all over the nascent British Empire.
A majority of congressional delegates still clung to the hope that reconciliation with the mother country was possible, that all grievances could be assuaged short of military action. That first divided Congress could not even agree to establish a committee on defense, much less consider an offensive such as the Lake Champlain campaign. Until he learned of the fighting at Boston, the recent immigrant Thomas Paine, editor of Franklin’s Pennsylvania Magazine, considered the argument between colonies and England “a kind of lawsuit,” but the brutality of the British raids in Massachusetts made him reject “the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharoah of England forever.”11 When George Washington received the electrifying news at Mount Vernon, the Virginia congressional delegate wrote to a friend, “The once-happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched in blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alterative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?”12 Brevetted a British army brigadier after five years of combat in the recent French and Indian War, Washington was the only delegate to ride from his Philadelphia boardinghouse to the Second Continental Congress wearing his full military regalia. As late as May 16, 1775, six days after Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys attacked Fort Ticonderoga, the delegates in Philadelphia were still passing a resolution declaring that “Congress had nothing else in mind but the defense of the colonies.”13
WHEN THE POSTRIDER Israel Bissell reached New Haven at noon two and a half days after the British marched into Lexington, the Connecticut seaport’s leading smuggler, Benedict Arnold, rounded up sixty-three members of his Second Connecticut Company of Foot and ordered them to pack their kits and be ready to march early the next morning. At dawn on April 22, Arnold and his uniformed militiamen surrounded the tavern where New Haven’s selectmen had begun debating the grim news. At gunpoint, Arnold, son-in-law of New Haven’s sheriff, demanded the keys to the town’s powder magazine. Seizing ammunition, Arnold and his huzzah-ing volunteers stepped off briskly north toward Boston, a streak of scarlet against the bare spring landscape. They soon encountered Samuel Holden Parsons, colonel of the New London County militia and a member of the Connecticut General Assembly’s committee of correspondence. Returning from leading the militia of Connecticut’s largest port to the American lines outside Boston, Parsons was hurrying to Hartford to an emergency meeting of Connecticut’s principal Patriots. He paused long enough to bemoan the inherent weakness of the American forces in the face of an inevitable British counterattack. Without artillery, he told Arnold, the 15,000 to 20,000 massed militia would be helpless.
Parsons and Connecticut radicals knew Benedict Arnold as a fifth-generation New Englander, a patrician descended from Rhode Island’s longest-serving governor. Married to the daughter of the sheriff of New Haven County, Arnold owned thirteen merchant ships. He had grown rich smuggling luxury goods from the Caribbean, but he was heavily in debt to London merchants. The leader of the 10,000 member Sons of Liberty, he had personally and quite publicly flogged a crewman who informed customs officers of his illicit cargo. Arnold now told Colonel Parsons that he knew just where to find hundreds of serviceable cannon: the French had buried them or left them intact around the Lake Champlain forts when they retreated to Canada fifteen years earlier. The British forts, he added, were garrisoned only by corporals’ guards. As Arnold resumed his brisk march toward Boston, Parsons galloped to Hartford, arriving just as Governor Jonathan Trumbull convened an emergency joint meeting of the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence and the Hartford Committee of Safety. Massachusetts’ congressional delegation had arrived by fast sloop down the Connecticut River from Springfield. Samuel Adams, the Harvard-educated firebrand of Boston’s Patriots, whose father’s fortune had been ruined by British currency regulations, and Colonel John Hancock, scion of Boston’s wealthiest commercial dynasty and chairman of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, had just come ashore exhausted after a sleepless week on the run. They had planned to ride south to the Continental Congress in Hancock’s comfortable carriage, stopping to pick up the other delegates—John Adams, Thomas Cushing, and Robert Treat Paine—en route, but they were spirited from their Woburn hiding place by an escort of armed Massachusetts militiamen the fifty miles to Worcester, where they waited a nerve-racking five days for the other delegates before sailing to hastily arranged clandestine meetings at Hartford and New Haven.
The Connecticut contingent at the Hartford conference included some of the wealthiest and most powerful leaders of that colony. All of them were financially interested in westward expansion, blocked by royal decree for the past dozen years from a greater share of the fabulously valuable fur trade that New Englanders had expected to take over from the French but that they now saw coming under the control of British merchants. Parsons, head of the militia of the colony’s principal port, was a major land speculator, as were Silas Deane and Christopher Leffingwell, who had represented Connecticut in the First Continental Congress. Leffingwell’s family had founded Norwich, and he was the patriarch of a flourishing family network of agricultural and mercantile businesses, including the manufacture of paper, a scarce commodity at the time, and the production of chocolates. It was Leffingwell who bankrolled Arnold’s march to Boston and paid his men. He was the captain of the Norwich Light Infantry, a cavalry unit composed of businessmen and their clerks. An organizer of early protests against British trade restrictions, he had openly opposed the Stamp Act and served on the seaport’s Committee of Safety.
Silas Deane, secretary of the assembly’s Committee of Correspondence, was a blacksmith’s son from Groton who became a lawyer and married wealthily twice. His second wife was the granddaughter of Gurdon Saltonstall, former governor of Connecticut. Deane, who would become the Continental Congress’s first diplomatic representative in France a short time later, had a reputation of being clever, opportunistic, and amoral, in part because of dealings connected with the estate of his first wife and questionable real estate dealings. He was a prime mover in the Susquehannah Company of Pennsylvania, a frontier land-developing scheme in which Ethan Allen’s father was an original investor. The colony’s leading expansionist, Deane was in politics closely allied with Governor Trumbull.
Without waiting for authorization from Congress or the Connecticut General Assembly, Trumbull, the only royal governor who became a revolutionary governor, agreed with the Adamses, Hancock, and the other committeemen that they must act swiftly to buttress the New England army. John Adams described the chaotic conditions along the makeshift Patriot lines and seconded Parsons’s assessment of how woefully insubstantial they were. By meeting’s end, the Connecticut committeemen decided to “borrow” £3,000 (about $450,000 today) on their personal security from the colony’s treasury to finance an expedition to seize Fort Ticonderoga, Fort Amherst, and their vital cannon.
TO BENEDICT ARNOLD’S intelligence about the trove of French cannon around Lake Champlain and Ethan Allen’s offer to put at their disposal the Green Mountain Boys, the Adamses and Hancock added another precipitant for the lightning strike at the king’s forts. For months, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had been receiving secret reports from John Brown, a Pittsfield lawyer and Arnold’s cousin acting as the secret emissary of its Committee of Safety (aka Samuel Adams) to Montreal’s mercantile community. According to Brown, a cousin of Arnold’s, many Canadians, both English and French, were eager to make common cause with the Americans. A quick capture of the British forts would yield a unique opportunity to remove a far greater threat. A thrust up Lake Champlain into Quebec Province would make it possible to seize control of the poorly defended province before the British could implement a new form of government that, in the eyes of the Puritan Patriots gathered at Hartford, endangered New England’s very culture and economy. Among Americans angered by the Coercive Acts, which had closed the port of Boston, New England Puritans in particular seethed at the passage of the Quebec Act of 1774, which would take effect in only a few days, on May 1, 1775. The act would more than double the size of Quebec Province, extending its boundaries to the Ohio River and the Mississippi (roughly the American Midwest). Even more egregious from the standpoint of Protestant New England, it guaranteed religious toleration for Catholics and preserved the ancient feudal system of the French.
The act was the handiwork of the French-speaking Sir Guy Carleton, governor-general of Quebec Province. Despite persistent opposition in the House of Commons, Carleton had managed finally to prevail through powerful connections at the English court, including the Duke of Richmond, the secretary of state for the Northern Department, effectively the man in charge of all the American colonies. Carleton had won parliamentary support for the controversial bill by maintaining that it would keep the conquered French Canadians peaceful by honoring their traditions and their religion. Carleton paid little heed to the consternation of some three thousand New England merchants and traders who had flocked into Quebec Province after the 1763 Treaty of Paris to harvest the wheat of the rich 750-mile-long St. Lawrence Valley and had a monopoly on the lucrative trade with the Indians in beaver pelts coveted by fashionable gentlemen in Europe. Carleton made no secret that he despised what he considered the money-grubbing New England Yankees. He privately feared their struggle for increasingly radical democracy, and he had worked for years to thwart it.
The secret blueprint for Canadian government that Carleton had written and personally taken to London to see through Parliament would create not only a vastly enlarged colony but one entirely different from any other British American province. Fiercely resisted and long bottled up in parliamentary committee, the act finally passed by a four-to-one majority in the wake of the Boston Tea Party. Many Americans saw it as a reprisal for the Boston Sons of Liberty’s December 1773 raid, organized and led by Samuel Adams as a protest against the force-feeding of English tea. The Quebec Act, by extending Quebec Province beyond its former borders, annexed to the Canadian province the uncharted western territories granted by the charters of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia in their early seventeenth-century charters, thus blocking their westward expansion and interdicting land speculation. It also created a single-house legislature appointed by the king to advise the royal governor, himself also a Crown appointee, eliminating the lower house elected by the people and its taxing power. It preserved French civil law, including land-tenure law, and abolished English law courts, habeas corpus, and trial by jury, the bedrock of English liberties dating back to Magna Carta in 1215. The Quebec Act, widely regarded as embodying a model of the form of government the British wished to impose on their other colonies, by granting religious toleration to Catholics, as one noted Jesuit archivist in Quebec put it, gave “permission to Roman Catholics to enjoy the free exercise of their religion and to their clergy to receive from their parishes their accustomed dues and rights.” But as Reverend Stiles warned from his pulpit, the Quebec Act established the “Romish Church and IDOLATRY.” Establishment Catholicism, pervasively feared in the colonies, meant that, for the first time since the Reformation, there would soon be in British territory Catholic bishops supported by the tithing of the crops and the incomes of all citizens.14
THE ODIOUS QUEBEC ACT took effect on May 1, 1775, before the news of Lexington and Concord reached Montreal. That morning, a crowd gathered in the Place d’Armes, at Montreal’s center. Overnight, the bust of King George III had been smeared with a coat of black paint and a rosary of potatoes and a black cross draped around its neck. On the cross was the inscription “Behold the Pope of Canada, or the English Fool.” Indignant British officers offered a £50 reward for the culprit. A young Jewish merchant, David Solebury Franks, would later admit it was his handiwork. The next day, a French merchant told bystanders that the proper reward for such an insult was hanging. At that, young Franks punched the Frenchman, as another merchant, named Salomon, shouted that it must have been done by a French Canadian. When a Frenchman reported that it was more likely a Jew, Salomon punched him in the face. British soldiers seized both Franks and Salomon.15
In Protestant New England, the injection of this incendiary religious issue brought together politicians and clergy to drum up support for armed resistance to British reforms. Within a month of the signing of the Quebec Act, the Reverend Peter Whitney, pastor of the Church of Christ in Northborough, Massachusetts, protested the presence of a popish bishop and Catholic priests in neighboring Quebec as “not safe for any Protestant government.”16 The Reverend Samuel Sherwood of Fairfield, Connecticut, warned parishioners they were on the point of being deprived of “the liberty of our conscience” and that New England should unite against the British government’s new policy. Such sermons were printed for wide distribution. In New Haven, Stiles called the Quebec Act the outstanding grievance against the British government. Protest against the act was incorporated into the most radical Massachusetts document, the Suffolk Resolves, drafted by Dr. Joseph Warren, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and adopted by the Boston town meeting. The resolves, rushed to Philadelpia and adopted at the end of the First Continental Congress, characterized the new Canadian charter as “dangerous in an extreme degree to the Protestant religion and to the civil rights and liberties of all America. As men and Protestant Christians, we are indispensably obliged to take all the measures for our security…to acquaint ourselves with the art of war as soon as possible.”17
WITH THE FULL Connecticut Assembly in adjournment, neither the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence nor the Hartford Committee of Safety had any right to authorize a military expedition against any territory, let alone other British colonies. The Patriot committeemen certainly knew that it would be an illegal act of war and that the instigators of such an attack would undoubtedly be branded traitors. If they were discovered, they could be arrested and transported—in chains, of course—to England where they would surely be hanged and drawn and quartered in London. Yet Connecticut’s revolutionary leaders considered themselves bound in common cause with Massachusetts’ Patriots, who, they believed, had without provocation been attacked by British troops. Brushing aside their law books, the Patriot leaders of Connecticut and Massachusetts summoned Heman Allen into the tavern meeting room the afternoon of April 28. Silas Deane handed Heman the committee’s lethal instructions: Ethan Allen was to muster the Green Mountain Boys without delay and seize Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point and aim their guns toward Boston. A dispatch sent by Colonel James Easton, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, tavern keeper and captain in the Berkshire County militia, to a friend who had joined the siege of Boston, reported that, several hours later, “a number of gentlemen” from Connecticut had just passed through Pittsfield to join an attack on Ticonderoga to be led by Allen:
The expedition has been carried on with the utmost secrecy, as they are in hopes of taking those forts by surprise…. The plan was concerted at Hartford last Saturday by the Governour [John Trumbull] and [his] Council, Colonel Hancock, and Mr. Adams, and others from our Province being present…. We earnestly pray for success to this important expedition, as the taking [of] those places would afford us a key to all Canada.18
ON THE AFTERNOON of April 30, less than a week after Ethan Allen had first been informed of the carnage outside Boston, three mud-spattered riders galloped up to the Catamount Tavern, the unofficial capitol of pre-revolutionary Vermont, with an answer. Inside, their muskets slouched against the walls of the tavern’s main room, a few score Green Mountain Boys were laughing and sipping on tankards of the house specialty, Stonewall, a potent punch made of hard cider laced with rum. Heman Allen, a successful Connecticut merchant, a captain in the Boys, and Ethan’s partner in Vermont’s leading land company, shouldered his way through the entrance, marked by a crudely lettered sign, “Council Room.” There he found his one-year-older brother, resplendent in his calf-length, forest green, gold-epauletted colonel commandant’s uniform huddling with his fellow officers. Heman had ridden all night over slippery roads with Captains Edward Mott and Noah Phelps, veterans of the French and Indian War, to bring Ethan a commission and orders from Hartford. Indeed, as he had proposed, the Boys were to attack the Lake Champlain forts and speed their precious cannon toward Boston. Heman gave the hushed crowd more details of the heavy fighting. For the first time, many of the Boys learned that the makeshift New England army would be helpless to withstand a British counterattack without state-of-the-art artillery.
Consequently, Heman told his brother that Massachusetts and Connecticut Patriot leaders were commissioning him a colonel in the Connecticut militia and placing him in command of the Green Mountain Boys. They were to seize the cannon in two of the king’s forts on the New York shore, at Fort Ticonderoga and at Fort Amherst, twelve miles north at Crown Point. Ethan Allen could have refused to carry out a treasonous invasion of one British province, New York, on the dubious authority of an illegal assemblage of rebels from two other provinces not even sanctioned by a divided Continental Congress. But Allen needed little prodding. He later wrote in his 1779 memoir that his selection for the mission “thoroughly electrified” him. “Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, and acquainted myself with the general history of mankind, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty.” The blood shed at Lexington and Concord was to him the first “systematical and bloody attempt” by the British to “enslave America” and made him determined to risk a traitor’s death, fully realizing that to accept Connecticut’s commission to attack the king’s forts was a blatant act of treason under English law.19
Sending couriers north and south, Ethan Allen recruited in less than two weeks an advance force of 300 frontiersmen from the hills of western Massachusetts, Connecticut, and present-day Vermont as hundreds more slogged through mud-season roads to join him. After years of successfully rebuffing New York sheriffs and posses, Allen believed that he could count on—from a population of 8,800—as many as 2,000 armed and trained frontiersmen, to join the expedition. Turning out for the attack on Fort Ticonderoga was a motley crew: wealthy and poor farmers; hunters and trappers; a lawyer and a tavern owner; town clerks and storekeepers; a poet; a recent Yale College graduate; three African Americans; new immigrants from Scotland, England, and Ireland; a future congressman; and six of Ethan Allen’s brothers and cousins. They arrived on the Champlain shore in their work clothes or in buckskin hunting shirts made by their wives, sisters, or mothers. In linsey-woolsey, fustian or plush, in wool stockings, moccasins or rude boots, in prized beaver hats or bearskin caps, in calico or silk waistcoats, they pelted down from their hill farms and from river towns to join Allen at the staging area at Hand’s Cove in Shoreham, where, after a two-day march from Bennington, Allen had set up his headquarters in Paul Moore’s farmhouse.
ONLY HOURS BEFORE the attack had to begin, the arrival of Benedict Arnold, bearing a freshly minted Massachusetts colonel’s commission, almost dashed Allen’s plan. All spit and polish, Arnold had marched his Connecticut Second Company of Foot to Cambridge, where, because of their impeccable martial appearance and red uniforms, they were asked to make up the guard of honor that escorted the body of the sole British officer slain at Concord to British headquarters. Arnold then informed the Massachusetts Provincial Congress of the number and disposition of cannon in the Lake Champlain forts. The Massachusetts congress, unaware that Connecticut had already commissioned Allen for the task, commissioned Arnold a Massachusetts colonel and ordered him to dash west, recruiting enough men to seize the vital cannon as he went.
After overtaking Allen on the Vermont shore opposite Ticonderoga, the imperious Arnold was demanding that Allen turn over command of the Green Mountain Boys and all other recruits to him. The two men faced off in front of the Boys in a field at Shoreham on May 9. At first, Allen, nearly a head taller than Arnold, seemed to cave in before Arnold’s ramrod-straight physical presence, but it was only an act. Allen knew that he had no more and no less legal authority than Arnold. But he also knew that the Green Mountain Boys around him, clutching their guns, would follow only his orders. He had successfully wielded de facto authority in the forests for four years. He did not intend to relinquish it now, much less to a bombastic elitist like Arnold. In a loud, mocking voice, Allen announced that Colonel Arnold would henceforth command the Boys. If they followed Arnold, their pay would be the same two dollars a day.
Allen’s uncharacteristically unassuming tone sent a signal to his men. Without a word, they silently drifted to the edges of the clearing and stacked their guns. To a man, the Boys refused to fight under anyone but the officers they had already elected. If they could not have Ethan Allen as their leader, they would club their muskets over their shoulders and march home. Arnold had no choice but to back down. Then Allen’s demeanor suddenly changed. He now proposed a joint command, with Allen leading the Boys and any Connecticut troops, and Arnold commanding any soldiers who showed up from Massachusetts. As a token of reconciliation, Allen lent Arnold a short brass blunderbuss. The hair-triggered Arnold had ridden off to war without a gun.
On his arrival at Shoreham three days earlier, Allen was confident that it would be relatively easy to enter and seize one of the strongest British fortresses in North America by surprise. Nevertheless, he dispatched two veteran officers, Connecticut Captains Noah Phelps and Ezra Hickok, to stroll into the fort and pass themselves off as a pair of fur trappers coming down from the hills to have their long, unkempt beards and matted hair trimmed by the fort’s barber. Once inside, they had time to note the laxity of the sentinels, the poor condition of the walls, and the fort’s strengths and weak spots. Because he had so often been there, Allen knew that all sorts of people on the New York–Vermont frontier—hunters, trappers, and fur traders, merchants, farmers, and Indians—wandered in and out of the fort. Indeed, Phelps and Hickok returned to report that the fort’s main gates were no longer locked at night. Somebody even said that the keys had long ago been lost. Fortuitously, Allen’s spies had also discovered that the British garrison was made up of forty-six regulars with their wives and children and two officers and learned that reinforcement by the Twenty-sixth Regiment of Foot from Montreal was imminent.
THE BRITISH GARRISON inside Fort Ticonderoga had no reason to expect Vermonters to assault a Crown fortress on New York soil, in part because that province’s royal government had officially and expressly forbidden any such raid. Unlike New Englanders, the majority of New Yorkers, not only the wealthy landowners, were at this time loyal to the Crown, and New York was no Massachusetts. In addition, the First Continental Congress had resolved that on no account should colonists molest the garrisons of British forts. As long as the British did not construct any new fortifications or impede the free passage of citizens, the Redcoats should be allowed to occupy their barracks peaceably. A hundred miles south in New York City, the conservative provincial congress of New York, meeting in City Hall on Broadway, had interpreted this to mean that the people should not confiscate any military property belonging to the British Crown.
Ticonderoga’s garrison had not yet learned that fighting had broken out far to the east, outside Boston, that hundreds of British regulars had been killed or wounded, that a state of rebellion existed. Military dispatches or mail of any type did not travel quickly or directly from Boston west over the mountains to Lake Champlain. The news that fighting had erupted nearly a month earlier had to be sent by Royal Navy courier aboard a man-of-war first from Boston north to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where it was forwarded the long reach around eastern Canada and then south, up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec. There it had to be transferred to a supply ship that sailed only periodically from Quebec to Montreal, where the British officer in charge had to counter-sign it and write his own orders to be put aboard another vessel that had to carry it south along the Richelieu River to St. Jean in southern Quebec Province.
After receiving a written communiqué two months earlier from the British commander in chief, Sir Thomas Gage in Boston, Ticonderoga’s commandant, Captain William Delaplace, had asked Sir Guy Carleton, governor-general of Quebec, for reinforcements. The first of those left Canada on April 12. A second squad of ten, under Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham, arrived on April 29, but those troops did not know about Lexington and Concord. On May 10, the communiqué describing the bloody battle outside Boston was aboard the Royal Navy sloop of war George, tied up at a dock at St. Jean-sur-Richelieu, just inside Quebec Province and nearly 125 miles away from Fort Ticonderoga. However, that ship would sail for Ticonderoga any day now. With it would undoubtedly come more British reinforcements and skillful resistance.
Even without reinforcements from the Montreal garrison, the veteran British detachment inside the heavily armed fort could be expected to put up a fight. If they could hold out until several hundred more regulars arrived, the American capture of Fort Ticonderoga and its vital cannon would be virtually impossible. If Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys succeeded, they would be renowned as the first heroes of the American Revolution. If they failed, they would either be killed or be shipped off to England to be hanged and drawn and quartered. Undoubtedly, Allen calculated the risk of failure against success in resolving a dozen years of claims, counterclaims, and armed clashes between neighboring colonies over the ownership of hundreds of thousands of acres of richly forested lands, a struggle that he now believed would be, at this opportune moment, subsumed into a general American rebellion against what he perceived to be every colony’s common oppressor, England.
LATE THE AFTERNOON of May 9, Allen lined up the Boys in a light rain and, in his distinctive country preacher voice, as was his custom and their accustomed lot, gave them a speech that he hoped would inspire them. Four years later, in his popular wartime memoir, he recalled having told the Boys that by undertaking the perilous mission “conceived at Hartford,” they were carrying out an “important expedition…to provide us a key to all Canada,” for a century and a half the base for French and Indian attacks on New England’s frontier settlements:
Friends and fellow soldiers, you have, for a number of years past, been a scourge and terror to arbitrary power. Your valour has been famed abroad…. I now propose to advance before you, and in person conduct you through the wicket-gate; for we must this morning either quit our pretensions to valour, or possess ourselves of this fortress in a few minutes; and, in as much as it is a desperate attempt, which none but the bravest of men dare undertake, I do not urge it on any contrary to his will.20
By sunset, three hundred men chafed at Hand’s Cove, anxiously waiting for boats to be rounded up by detachments Allen had sent north, along the lake toward Crown Point and south to Skene’s plantation. But six hours later, as the wind whipped the lake into whitecaps, there still were no boats. A fierce storm lashed the lake half the night, nearly wrecking the expedition. When it died down, there was barely enough time to ferry a fraction of the force over to the New York shore before daybreak. What Allen wouldn’t learn for several days was that Captain Samuel Herrick and the thirty men he’d sent to seize Skenesborough couldn’t find the schooner Allen was relying on, because it was cruising a hundred miles farther up the lake, delivering grain and iron from the manor to the British garrison at St. Jean in Quebec Province. Another detachment Allen had sent north, under Captain Asa Douglass, could locate only a single thirty-three-foot scow sailed by a terrified young black slave along the shore near Crown Point. Douglass told the slave he wanted to pay him to take him and his men hunting. The lumbering workboat finally tacked into Hand’s Cove at three in the morning on May 10. As Allen and his first chosen men clambered aboard, the sky to the east was already turning gray against the black silhouettes of the mountains. The scow wallowed in the choppy water under the weight of so many men and their guns, nearly sinking into the heaving lake. Water sloshed over the gunwales. At that time of year, the water temperature rarely reaches forty-five degrees. The lugsail was useless: in the high wind, it would capsize the unwieldy, overloaded boat. Squall-whipped water drenched the novice oarsmen, blinding them. It took a nerve-racking hour and a half for the scow to make the one-mile crossing and return for more men. After a second slow crossing, only eighty-three shivering men had reached the New York shore.
By first light the next morning, the unlikely duo of Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold were jumping side by side out of the wallowing boats just north of Willow Point, scarcely a quarter mile from the fort, leading the Boys silently past the unguarded eastern redoubt, the shoreline outer works of the fort. The ghostly column of frontiersmen hugged the wall of the unguarded waterfront redoubt, then hurried up the steep slope two hundred yards toward the looming granite walls of the main, star-shaped fortress. At five, with the sun about to rise and only a third of his scratch army—and none of their supplies—on the right side of lake, Allen whispered “Let’s go” to Benedict Arnold and, making the prearranged pass-along signal, three owl hoots, launched the first offensive military action in the history of the United States.21