IN THE SEVEN YEARS AFTER his father’s premature death, Ethan Allen could not venture far from the family farm in Cornwall, Connecticut, not until the dreaded French and their Indian auxiliaries had been defeated. At twenty-four, he remained unmarried, tethered to his mother’s burden and the family farm. By 1762, however, he was casting about for a new enterprise. A man of extraordinary intellect, he could not bear the idea of rusticating indefinitely on the farm, especially in backwater Cornwall. He had nursed the farm to a healthy self-sufficiency, expanding its acreage and improving house and barn to the point where he could turn their management over to his mother and younger brothers, the youngest of them now ten years old. Deciding to seek a new livelihood, Allen started out on his own and moved the ten miles over the Taconic Mountains to Salisbury, a more sophisticated town on the Massachusetts border, where he had so enjoyed his brief time as a student, and now found a job in the burgeoning iron industry.
As early as the mid-1730s, one of the first settlers of Salisbury had erected a small forge in the Lakeville section of town. The business sputtered along as the demand for its iron pigs and sows remained small. With settlement on the far western edge of Connecticut still sparse, the demand for manufactured farm implements remained minute, and the market was easily saturated even by such tiny furnaces. For much of each year, the furnace was out of blast. In western Connecticut, no ironmaster had yet been able to profit from his furnace alone. Few had enough cash to buy a steady supply of the wood or charcoal needed to feed the blast furnace. On average, a small forge such as Cornwall’s consumed fifty acres of hardwood a year. The route to profit for the iron maker was, as in Cornwall, to be among the first settlers of a town, to prepare the way for coming farmers, and to reap a double profit from iron and the sale of the land already cleared to provide the fuel for the furnace. Cleared land brought a much higher price than forest; a forge could survive only so long as large stands of uncleared hardwoods were nearby.
Aware of the limitations of the Lakeville furnace operated by Leonard Owen and his brothers, Ethan Allen decided to put together a partnership and buy the forge in April of 1762. The purchase included only the forge and water rights. He moved quickly when an investor, John Hazeltine of Upbridge, came to town to visit Hazeltine’s brother. Allen enthusiastically demonstrated his grasp of the iron business and persuaded the Hazeltines that there was an untapped potential for profit from casting the huge iron pots needed to boil down the prized potash into crystals. Impressed, John Hazeltine promised that, if Allen would provide his experience and manage the enterprise, the Hazeltine brothers would put up the money to buy the old forge and its water rights and build a modern blast furnace; Allen would also have to buy a one-eighth interest in an ore-rich hill just outside town and assure sufficient waterpower.
Allen knew that the Forbes brothers, who also owned one-eighth of the mountain, operated a forge in Canaan, five miles farther north. He went to them with his proposition and learned that they had put a value of £430 on their share of the mountain. Allen cut himself in on the deal. He persuaded the Forbes brothers to sell a half interest in their eighth to the Hazeltines and an eighth interest to him, and to retain three-eighths interest themselves. The Forbes brothers, in turn, had to provide enough ore for their own forge, for Allen and Hazeltine’s in Salisbury, and for the forge of Thomas Day in nearby Norfolk. Everyone assumed the mountain would provide a limitless supply of iron ore for the indefinite future.
Allen borrowed some of the money from neighbors and covered his £54 share of the purhase price of the ore mountain by pledging a £50 mortgage he held with his cousin Elihu on their farm. For another £20, he was able to buy from the forge’s original owners the water rights to the lake’s outlet. There he intended to build a mill race and install a watershed. He also acquired the privilege of cutting and turning into charcoal two-thirds of a large tract of hardwood forest on nearby Tohconnick Mountain. Allen began construction of the giant cone, the first blast furnace in colonial Connecticut, in April of 1762 and completed it that spring.
RESOURCEFUL FROM LONG necessity, impulsive by nature, Ethan Allen had learned how to live on little cash. In April of 1762, as soon as the roads were passable, he saddled his favorite horse and began to make regular rides from Salisbury to Woodbury, some twelve miles to the south, to ease the loneliness of life as a bachelor, boarder, and wage earner. One way he had learned to live frugally and build up his family’s stature was to stay single, although twenty-four was dead average for a man in New England to marry. His noisy Cornwall home already was too crowded for the addition of a bride, which invariably meant the start of another family. But the family-based culture of Puritan New England not only frowned on bachelors but also fined them and was especially harsh to them if they caused the slightest trouble. There was no inconspicuous place for an unmarried young man in Cornwall. Allen, outgoing, successful in business, was even more conspicuous in the dour, church-centered town, especially since he resisted attending New Light church services. His old family friend and erstwhile teacher, the Reverend Lee, pastor of the Salisbury church and town elder, was watching him. Lee found it inexcusable that Allen missed the Sunday meeting, its long sermons and bawled hymns. Between Sabbaths, Allen busied himself with mastering the iron business in all its elements. Learning what he would need to set up a forge of his own, he devoted long days to hard work, cracking his bullwhip over a team of plodding oxen towing a heavy cart of ore from a nearby mountain to one of the town’s two iron forges.
ON SATURDAYS, AT the workweek’s end, studiously avoiding Sunday church services, Ethan sloughed off the censorious atmosphere accorded a single man in his midtwenties and, risking the wrath of the Reverend Lee when he found Allen and his contribution to the church missing, slipped away to Woodbury to visit Mary Brownson. For nearly ten years now, since he had been an eager and unschooled boy of fifteen and she a woman of twenty-one, she had cooked for him, at first while her father, the region’s prosperous miller, ground the Allens’ grain. That millers literally prospered at the expense of the farmer—taking one-twelfth of all the grain they ground—made them rich in the eyes of their neighbors but often resented as well. It also had made the Woodbury miller selective in his daughter’s choice of a spouse. No portrait, not even a vivid word picture of Mary Brownson survives. Just why she was still unmarried at the uncommonly advanced age of thirty may be explained by her having two older brothers, Israel and Abraham, rough, domineering ne’er-do-wells who expected her to wait on them as unpaid cook and maid. Only a confident and successful young man such as Ethan Allen could hope to penetrate the Brownsons’ defenses.
Over the years since the death of Allen’s father, no one had asked for Mary Brownson’s hand in marriage while Allen had continued to visit her. Plain and pious, Mary had toiled ceaselessly for her brothers and father. Perhaps from his profound sense of injustice, Allen persisted from 1754 to 1762 to call on her. In Woodbury, Mary Brownson was “Ethan Allen’s girl,” a fact the entire community seemed to acknowledge. No evidence survives that he ever showed any interest in any other young woman in tiny Cornwall. He probably knew all of them too well or was related to them. While he still lived at home, it became his ritual to ride over to Woodbury, where everybody knew him and where he knew that Mary Brownson awaited him.
There was much to see when they strolled through Woodbury’s lively streets, to Allen a mecca of New England culture and a cosmopolitan town after tiny Cornwall. They went to house-raisings, husking bees, and barn dances together; they rode on hay carts in summer, hunted rabbits in the fall—all the recreational events commonplace in predominantly rural America in the eighteenth century. They could ride out beside the romantic rapids of Roxbury Falls, where the Shepaug River leaps between tall cliffs, pause to reflect at Pulpit Rock, where the missionary John Eliot had first preached to the Pequod Indians before a Massachusetts army slaughtered them. Back in town, long leisurely visits with the prospect of dinners someone else had cooked beckoned them to the homes of Allen’s favorite cousins, Seth Warner and Remember Baker, or to other members of his mother’s large family.
If family legend is to be believed, Ethan and Mary spent nights together “bundling,” sleeping together fully clothed. It was a custom from England that was long held to be widely practiced in New England, and, supposedly, Ethan and Mary were no exceptions, even though New Light clergy were railing against the custom as contributing to lewdness and disorder among youth. The historian Edmund Morgan has offered a more modern and cogent view. In an effort to gain control over their choice of a spouse and to encourage early marriage as an antidote to sex outside the marital state, a Puritan taboo,
New England families…encouraged the young men courting their daughters to spend the whole night at it under their own roofs. After the old folks retired the couple slept together unattended. They were supposed to do no more than slumber, but did anyone really expect that a young man and young woman in bed together would simply whisper sweet nothings to each other before dozing off?
Marriages in New England at this time were commonly preceded by formal espousals, often public and sometimes lasting several months:
Many people felt that espousals were a sufficiently binding commitment to justify intercourse and acted accordingly. In doing so they were not rejecting the substance of Puritan doctrine.
Morgan maintains that while sexual relations outside of marriage were still felonious,
by the 1750s courts had lost interest in punishing pre-marital sex, despite a growing number of pregnant brides, amounting to 30 or 40 percent in some towns…. When young men went acourting now, they did not necessarily wait for permission from the girls’ parents. Parents allowed their sons and daughters to frolic unchaperoned in late-night sleigh rides, corn huskings, and dancing parties.
However “shocking to outsiders,” the practice of bundling thrived in part because it “had the advantage of giving parents some influence in their daughter’s choice of a husband.”1
The eighth of eleven children, Mary Brownson was described by one Ethan Allen biographer as “a delicate girl, deeply religious, humorless, and illiterate. She signed her name with a cross.” But illiteracy in a frontier American village that had no common schools when she was of school age was not unusual. Even in larger towns or on great southern plantations, literacy among women in America varied widely at this time. Even though his sister Jane, a Puritan and lifelong resident of Boston, wrote quite well given the nature of their correspondence, Benjamin Franklin poked fun at the pitiful attempts at letter writing of his Philadelphia-born common-law wife, Deborah Read Franklin, the daughter of a prosperous bookseller and mayor of the Quaker city. In fact, while Franklin would not spend a farthing on educating Deborah, he admired the epistolary elegance of the women he knew in Paris. George Washington married the wealthiest widow in Virginia, but he rewrote even her shopping lists rather than let anyone see Martha’s irregular spellings and poor grammar: the daughter of a county clerk, she had no formal education. Mary Brownson had not learned to write, but she must have learned to read, especially the Bible, a deep common interest she and young Ethan Allen had imbibed from their parents. On what could be stretched to be called their dates, young couples would discuss the Bible. Quotes from Scripture were their lingua franca, the language of frontier families; if they owned only one book, it was the family Bible.2
Some Allen biographers have suggested that it was her father’s great tracts of land that attracted Ethan, that Mary would bring with her a considerable dowry of land, but there is no record of this. The only land she ever sold was a modest town lot some twenty years later, hardly an alluring inheritance. Her father owned considerable land and had the status of millowner, but there were eleven children, and she had older brothers. Mary’s inheritance, if any, would be rather modest. From his many visits, Ethan had, quite simply, gotten to know Mary Brownson, who first mothered him, then became his big sister, then his girlfriend, and finally his wife. If, as one unsympathetic biographer put it, “Mary posed a rigid and unrelenting piety that hung like a pall over the Allen household,” there is little suggestion of it in their blossoming courtship. But historians who have decided that “there was much to be scolded” in Ethan Allen have decided that Mary was “an intolerable scold.”3
Very little historical evidence and no portrait remains of Mary Brownson Allen, but that has not deterred each generation of historians from embroidering it more, each time becoming less sympathetic, more condescending. On paper, at least, she became “dull, dreary, and far from pretty,” as one biographer put it, “tailored by nature and training for a life of cheerless mediocrity.” The person who could have shed some light, Ethan Allen, left no comment. In all the thousands of pages of his writings that survive, he never said a word about her. The only evidence, in fact, is that they were married for twenty-one years and had five children. And of all the brickbats hurled at Allen over the years, no one has suggested that he was ever unfaithful to her, or she to him.4
ERECTION OF THE first blast furnace in western Connecticut complete, Allen decided he could now afford to support a family. He seems not to have even considered, now that he had money, taking more time to date other women. It was, as far as we can determine, just the right time to get married, and Mary Brownson would do well enough. One day in June of 1762, about the time the first charge of iron poured out of the new blast furnace, Ethan rode once more to Woodbury and asked Mary to marry him. Not surprisingly, she accepted. There is no evidence that he ever asked her father for her hand, even though that was the custom. On June 23, they were married by the Reverend Daniel Brinsmade of Judea Parish in Woodbury. The ceremony cost Ethan four shillings, and the record shows no more than that. Then Ethan Allen, age twenty-four, hoisted Mary Brownson, thirty, up onto the pillion behind his saddle and rode with her through the romantic lake district of Litchfield County to their new home in Salisbury.
For the first year of their marriage, the newlyweds rented a small, clapboarded cottage in the heart of Salisbury, a frontier boomtown on the borders of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. Their first home was small, probably only two rooms, with a cellar and the loft where brother Heman slept. The setting was picturesque, and the house possessed a charm its size belied, standing on a round little hill beside the mill brook. The newlyweds hauled water in a wooden bucket from a well in the side of the hill and crossed the brook on a plank that took them from house to furnace. Below the forge and the hill lay the village green, like so many in New England then and now, with its Congregational meetinghouse, a tavern, and a pillory. Lining the green were the unpainted frame houses of several prominent families, including Justice of the Peace John Hutchinson; the town doctor, Joshua Porter; Paul Hazeltine, brother of Ethan’s business partner; John Knickerbocker, one of the original settlers and a Dutchman from New York; and the Tousley and Caldwell families. All of them were farmers who kept livestock, whatever else their professions became.
But picture postcards do not convey sound, and Salisbury, population 1,500, was growing rapidly. Ethan thrived on this noisy, bustling place, with scores of wagons and oxcarts, their drivers yelling and cracking their whips as they carried the raw materials to the furnace amid the roar of each blast and the hiss of the molten iron and the clang of the heavy metallic pigs and sows as they were manhandled and carted away. He was at work at the furnace all day, and Mary became accustomed to being alone for long stretches and probably liked it after the tense years in her brawling family’s home in Woodbury. In many ways, her life was fairly typical of the new middling class of New Englanders straddling the old life of the farm and the new life of the small town. She always kept a kitchen garden. She had time to read her Bible, sew, and cook. She had money for whatever else they needed from Ethan’s wages. When it was time to give birth to their first child, Ethan took her to Cornwall to stay with his mother during her confinement. Ignoring the persistent Puritan practice of adopting Old Testament names, they named their first child Loraine when she was born in April of 1763, ten months after they were married. Ethan was busy in Salisbury most of the time but came home to Cornwall for occasional visits.
IN ITS FIRST three years, the iron furnace of Forbes and Allen proved profitable. Allen built dams, obtained additional water rights, and supervised construction of a toll road to bring the iron ore from mine to furnace, his efforts contributing to an iron-making business that employed upwards of fifty men. He hired and oversaw them and acted as the salaried timekeeper. The large egg-shaped stone and wood-framed furnace, ten feet in diameter and twenty-four feet high (a modern three-story building), consumed in a single charge three tons of crude iron ore reacting with 250 bushels of charcoal and half a ton of limestone flux to produce two tons of molten iron—and it would produce iron full blast right on through the American Revolution, when it was taken over by the state and produced heavy cannon for Henry Knox’s artillery.
The success of twenty-six-year-old Ethan Allen, ironmaster—a title of great respect in colonial America—brought with it a kind of temptation he had never faced before. Within nine months of the business’s inception, the partners were able to pay off Leonard Owen for the land, the water rights to the falls at the mouth of the pond, an ore bed, two coal houses, and two dwelling houses. As manager, Allen could have lived in one of these houses, but he had grander plans. When his first child was born, he decided that the new Allen family deserved a larger house. On a little hill opposite the furnace across the mill brook stood just such a house, a fine house situated on five hundred acres of land. It would provide pasturage for a large herd of cattle as well as a generous garden for Mary to grow vegetables. The steep £500 purchase price—more than the entire mine and forge had cost, did not deter the expansive ironmaster Allen. Cousin Elihu paid him the £50 he owed him for his farm, plus £10 interest, a 20 percent return for the use of his money for two years. Allen gave Eliphalet Buell a £50 cash down payment for the house and farm and mortgaged the Allen family farm in Cornwall to Buell for the remaining £450. One hitch in the exchange was that Allen did not own all of the family farm: his two-years-younger brother, Heman, owned some of the plowland. Ethan had to buy out Heman’s land. So Ethan turned around and sold Heman a half interest in his share of the furnace for £300 and a half interest in the Buell house for £200. To pay Ethan, his brother Heman, who also had little cash, sold him the Cornwall plowland, then mortgaged his share of the Buell house to one Colonel Martin Hoffman and gave Ethan notes payable in “good neat cattle.” The complicated transaction was typical of its time and place, involving only £50 in cash. But when the ink was dry, to buy his grand new house, Ethan had cut in half his interest in the furnace. Now, though, he would have time to spend at home because his hardworking, businesslike brother Heman came to work and helped him run the forge. In this new house, Ethan had leisure to study once again, to read, and to converse with the more interesting people of the town. Had it not been for his brief, newfound leisure for intellectual pursuits and his conspicuous success at business, Ethan Allen might not have run afoul of the clergy and magistrates of Salisbury, who still ruled town life.
WHEN ETHAN FIRST came to Salisbury, as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, he was introduced to Dr. Thomas Young, a young, well-read physician who had recently moved to Salisbury and opened practice in the Oblong, a hilly section of land straddling the New York–Connecticut border. There, Ethan frequently visited Young, six years his senior, and Young’s wife, Mary. The two men spent their evenings discussing theology, philosophy, and politics. Young, in his early twenties, was impressed by the sixteen-year-old’s precocious knowledge and ability at biblical disputation. Young had studied a smattering of the works of Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes, and Machiavelli as well as the political poetry of Alexander Pope, the natural philosophy of John Locke, and the deist writings of Charles Blount. As a student at Yale, he had copied his favorite readings into notebooks in a practice called commonplacing, and he lent these to young Ethan along with pamphlets attacking New Light theology. While he could not offer him the books themselves, he watched in delight as Ethan pored over the notebooks. After hearing the New Light sermons of his schoolmaster, the Reverend Lee, several times a week, Ethan listened in wonder as Young skewered the works of Whitefield and Edwards, the Old Testament prophets and early Christian Fathers.
When Allen returned to Salisbury seven years later, they rekindled their friendship, spending long, happy evenings and weekends sipping rum and, by the firelight, reading to each other passages they especially liked, both delighting to find literate kinship in such a provincial backwater. Young, now in his early thirties, relished the role of the mentor. He loved an audience, and he never had a better student. For his part, Allen found not only the older brother he had lacked but also his most influential teacher, the man who, after his father, made the greatest impression on him, the man who possessed the Yale education he had been denied. Even while events would intervene, a lifelong friendship developed in those two years in Salisbury.
The story of Young’s early life inspired Allen as much as his later life would pain him. Born the eldest of seven children of Scotch-Irish immigrants in a log house in New Windsor, on the Hudson River in New York, Young as a child with an exceptional memory could read any English book by age six, something he had in common with Allen. He was educated by his father at a local school but, beyond that, was entirely self-taught. He borrowed books from his neighbor and kinsman Colonel Charles Clinton (father of future New York Governor and Vice President George Clinton and great-uncle of Governor De Witt Clinton). He read some Latin and Greek and had a workable knowledge of Dutch and German and could read French, although he never learned to pronounce it. Interested in medicine, he studied botany, gaining a thorough knowledge of local plants and their uses. At seventeen, he became apprenticed to a local physician: there still was no medical school in America. Two years later, he began to practice in what is now Amenia, New York, a frontier town fifteen miles west of Cornwall and which he himself named. According to Young’s brother, also a physician, he “acquired fame and a very extensive practice” after marrying the daughter of his landlord and moving with her to Salisbury. He then began to publish newspaper articles and pamphlets on medical topics.5
The degree of cultivation during Ethan Allen’s evenings with Dr. Young eclipsed anything he had experienced in his frontier youth. At a time when fiddling at barn dances provided the only extra-ecclesiastical music in the New England backcountry, Young had learned to play classical violin, probably as a student at Yale. The concertinos of Corelli, the music of the minuet, were the current favorite at the subscription assembly balls of Philadelphia attended by Benjamin Franklin’s son, William. At this time, George Washington hired a German music teacher for four-hour sessions of lessons and dancing at Mount Vernon for his stepchildren and his neighbors, confiding in a letter to Francis Hopkinson, a well-known composer in Philadelphia, “I can neither sing one of the songs or raise a single note on any instrument.” Washington preferred the music of Josef Haydn and Johann Christian Bach, of Ignaz Pleyel and Johann Baptist Vanhal, as well as country fiddle music and the eerie sound of the armonica, a musical instrument made of glass goblets worked by a footpedal and perfected by his friend Benjamin Franklin. Whatever music emanated from the Salisbury soirees, it charmed Ethan Allen and his wife.6
From Dr. Young’s storytelling, Allen was also imbibing a kind of iconoclastic humor that pricked pomposity. Young even poked fun at his own profession, quipping that doctors, “if they live near the sea, order the patient to take a ride in the country; if inland, to take the sea air.”7 Sometimes he even dared to mock the Bible, something he could risk in New England only with the most trusted of friends. Where, he asked Allen, did Eve get the thread to stitch together her fig leaves? And from whom, exactly, did the serpent learn to talk? Allen was getting his first exposure to rational inquiry.
Young also attempted to write poetry, his one publication a 608-line paean to Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm at Quebec, its turgid couplets made worse by the profuse typographical errors committed by the nearest printer, in faraway New Haven, who, while inept, was the only printer in Puritan Connecticut unafraid to publish a deist’s work. Already, by the time Allen renewed their friendship, Young had gained a reputation as a blasphemer. On August 8, 1756, at age twenty-four, Young had been hauled into court and accused of saying, “Jesus Christ was a knave and a fool.” Young’s punishment was to recant publicly to the court.8
Far from being shocked, Allen found himself drawn to Young’s skeptical views on religion. Allen’s and his father’s clash with the intolerant Dr. Bellamy over the ouster of Solomon Palmer had predisposed him to begin to question orthodox Christian doctrine. Dr. Bellamy struck again in 1758 in an anonymous letter to a Boston newspaper circulating all over Connecticut, denouncing deism. After Allen’s father’s death, his erstwhile schoolmaster, the Reverend Lee, appointed himself Allen’s spiritual watchdog. Lee was disturbed to hear that Allen was going around the town spreading deist views he was learning from Dr. Young. When, after imbibing some rum in a local tavern, Allen ridiculed Calvinistic doctrine and said he did not believe in original sin, the Reverend Lee confronted him: without original sin, Lee argued, there would be no need for atonement, and thus no need for Christ, and thus no need for Christianity. Two decades later, Allen wrote that this altercation with Lee remained “uppermost” in his mind for several months. “After many painful searches and researches after the truth,” he had resolved “at all events to abide [by] the decision” he had made to favor “rational argument [over] the premises” of Christianity and to reject “the whole—Original Sin, Imputation, Christ and Christianity.”9
In writing about Ethan some thirty years later, his brother Ira stated flatly that, “after an Acquaintance with Doctor Thomas Young, a Deist my brother embrased the same centiments.”10 Ethan later published his own explanation:
In the circle of my acquaintance, (which has not been small,) I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism makes me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not, strictly speaking, whether I am one or not, for I have never read their writings….11
Here, Ethan Allen was shading the truth: he had not read deist writings himself, but he had imbibed them from the commonplace books and long evenings of conversations over a two-year period in the parlor of his friend Dr. Thomas Young.
Ethan Allen’s newly adopted set of beliefs, more a rational philosophy than a religion, acknowledged that God existed, that he was the remote Creator of the universe who did not intervene in the daily affairs of individual believers and did not saddle human beings with the burden of original sin, each person enjoying the freedom to choose or reject salvation. Allen’s brand of deism also rejected the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the divine incarnation of Jesus, who was a great moral teacher but not God. Deism’s core beliefs, held by Isaac Newton and John Locke, would evolve eventually in the hands of the philosopher David Hume coming to conclude that miracles, which by definition went beyond the confines of rationality, lay at the core of Christianity. At the time Allen was espousing deism, its main tenets included worshipping the one transcendent God and demonstrating this worship by practicing morality, including dealing justly with others. Eventually, Allen would, like the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, believe that the Bible should be scrutinized in the light of reason. As if all of this were not shocking enough to Allen’s New England neighbors, deists considered the Bible a holy book that was not divinely inspired or authored: to deists, the only word of God was the Creation. To New England Congregationalists, deism was just another word for atheism.
A quarter century before Ethan Allen was first exposed to deistic thought in Salisbury, in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, who had printed the journals of George Whitefield, wrote to his close friend Thomas Hopkinson, the first president of the American Philosophical Society:
I oppose my Theist to his Atheist, because I think they are diametrically opposite and no near of kin, as Mr. Whitefield seems to suppose where [in his journal] he tells us Mr. B. was a Deist, I had almost said an Atheist. That is chalk, I had almost said charcoal.12
In his famous Autobiography, Franklin would later write of his reaction when he had read Andrew Baxer’s 1745 work, Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul:
Some books against Deism fell into my hands. They were said to be the substance of sermons preached at [Robert] Boyle’s lectures [in London]. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended of them, for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations. In short, I soon became a thorough Deist.13
Other future founding fathers were similarly rebelling against the established religions in their native colonies, creating a profound historical movement that shifted theocratic control away from the leading clergymen and would, in time, influence these future leaders to write separation of church and state into the Constitution. George Washington became a deist with an unquestioning faith in Providence, his substitute for “God.” His use of the word was not a rhetorical flourish but a mark of his reliance on a Grand Designer, as deists put it. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his own epitaph that, next to being the “Author of the Declaration of Independence,” he was proudest of writing “the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom” after a bitter fight that disestablished Anglicanism as the official taxpayer-supported religion in his commonwealth. As president, Jefferson was attacked from pulpit and Massachusetts statehouse by the Congregationalist clergy largely because he was an avowed deist. In his famous correspondence with former President John Adams, former President Jefferson decried Calvin in terms that Ethan Allen would have understood:
I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5 [theological] points is not the God whom you and I acknolege and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.14
Franklin and Jefferson would learn firsthand as American revolutionary diplomats in France that deism was the very foundation of Enlightenment skepticism that led to the French Revolution. Among its leading practitioners were Voltaire, Diderot, and the encyclopédistes. “Deism proved influential in the United States from roughly 1725 through the first several decades of the nineteenth century,” writes the historian David L. Holmes:
Emphasizing human inquiry, reason, and personal freedom, it catered to American principles of individuality. Paradoxically, the movement also failed in part because of these characteristics. Deism excluded the emotional and mysterious aspects of religion. It ignored the need of many humans for spiritual guidance, worship, and a community of faith.
Holmes views the appeal of deism for educated American colonists as “the idea of reason as a liberator from the shackles of repressive religion and tyrannical government.” As a consequence, he finds, by the 1760s an alarmed clergy began to speak out against rational religion: when James Madison returned to Virginia from his studies at the College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton, an opponent of deism warned the elder Madisons that their son’s religious beliefs had clearly deviated in the direction of deism. The change in young Madison was due to “political associations with those of infidel principles” at that most orthodox of colonial colleges.15
In 1764, Ethan Allen and Thomas Young decided to challenge Calvinist orthodoxy openly. Together, by the firelight, the two young backwoods philosophers began to collaborate on a book of rational philosophy, Young serving up quotations from his eclectic readings, Allen drawing on his thorough knowledge of the Bible.
CONSISTENT WITH HIS character, Ethan Allen turned his philosophical ruminations into radical action. If indeed, as the two young deists believed, religious taboos were often mere superstition, then they should be challenged by rational scientific experiments. Every year, hundreds even thousands of American colonists died from a dread disease that it was illegal, in New England even considered sinful, to confront: Puritans deemed it a great sin to interfere with God’s will by trying to prevent death. In the spring of 1764, smallpox scourged Salisbury and all of New England as it had periodically all of Allen’s life. This time, Allen looked at the outbreak skeptically, through the prism of his newfound philosophy of questioning authority. A Connecticut statute forbade the use of smallpox serum without the express consent of the town’s selectmen. Twenty-six-year-old Ethan Allen and his doctor, Thomas Young, decided to challenge this law.
After Congregational services on a Sunday morning, in front of the Salisbury meetinghouse, where Allen’s kinsman the Reverend Lee presided as pastor, Dr. Young inoculated Ethan Allen before a horrified crowd. The experiment was all the more provocative because of the personal relationship between Allen and the Reverend Lee. In a small New England town, all transactions were personal. Lee could only have taken Allen’s intrepidity as a very public personal affront. He may have already known that his erstwhile pupil was determined to confront him. The preparations could hardly have remained secret in Salisbury. Under Young’s watchful eye, Allen had followed a special program of diet and purgings. Now, with virtually the whole town present for the obligatory Sunday service, Salisbury watched as Dr. Young passed a needle and a piece of thread that carried a small quantity of untreated pus from the suppurating sore of a patient with a mild case of smallpox through a scratch on Allen’s arm. Their intent was to induce in Allen a milder case of the illness than he would have experienced if he had contracted the disease naturally. Both men knew they risked a stiff fine, but this was their first strong, overt act of rebellion against what they considered to be the irrational theocracy of Connecticut, and they were determined to test a law that struck them as irrational.
That spring, a major smallpox epidemic was ravaging colonial America. In most colonies, including Connecticut, smallpox inoculation was illegal. Allen and Young knew they were risking not only official sanction but mob action. For more than forty years, New England had been racked by controversy each time smallpox struck again. The Indians, who had no immunity to the disease, had already been decimated before the Pilgrims arrived, quite likely from contact with English fishermen who made annual visits to Cape Cod to dry and salt their catches and almost certainly because of the exploration and mapping of New England by Captain John Smith and his party from Jamestown Colony in Virginia, where colonists suffered from the disease after its introduction from England. As early as the arrival of the Pilgrims more than a century earlier, every year large numbers of smallpox deaths had stopped all travel and much farmwork. Every year in the eighteenth century, some 400,000 Europeans died of the highly contagious disease, which was spread by coughing and contact. Transmitted to the Americas on shipboard, the smallpox epidemics were most devastating during the sporadic imperial wars, spread in the colonies by soldiers and sailors. King William’s War in 1689 subjected maritime Boston, the largest town in British America at the time, to its worst outbreak in the seventeenth century, killing 1,200 in a population of 12,000.
Outbreaks of smallpox periodically rekindled the inoculation controversy that sometimes erupted into riots. Nobody remained neutral on the subject. Colony after colony had banned inoculation since that first long-ago epidemic. In 1720, smallpox again decimated Boston: of 12,000 citizens, more than 1,000 perished, a calamity from which Boston never fully recovered in the eighteenth century. Ships’ captains began to boycott Boston, finding safer harbors—Portsmouth, Newport, Salem, and Newburyport—which siphoned off Boston’s trade. Townspeople moved away, founding new towns, some joining new immigrants who bypassed Boston and moved out onto the frontier.
In that worst scourge of eighteenth-century Boston, the leading Congregationalist clergyman, Increase Mather, urged his neighbor Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to conduct an experiment. In addition to being the scion of New England’s leading family of theologians, Mather at the time was one of only two Americans inducted into membership in the Royal Society of London. The English literary bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had visited the Ottoman Empire two years earlier and written extensively to influential friends in England about the successful experiment she had witnessed. Mather, reading about the successful Turkish experiment in the Royal Society’s Transactions, was impressed by the possibility of reducing mortality and suffering by inoculating healthy people with the smallpox contagion and thereby building up an immunity to the disease. Mather wielded enormous influence all over New England. From the pulpit and in print, Mather, joined by other clerical luminaries, supported the experimental inoculation of Bostonians. Mather urged Dr. Boylston to conduct the experiment. Boylston inoculated his own son, among others. Already divided by several political and religious fault lines, Boston split into two strident camps over inoculation.
To most Bostonians, the deliberate spreading of smallpox by inoculation seemed criminal stupidity when almost every house in town was flying the quarantine flag amid an endless procession of coffins to the graveyard. Not only were most Bostonians unlettered in the intricacies of science but they could see no benefit to allowing a doctor to slice open a vein and fill the incision with pus from a smallpox victim. Trying to avoid smallpox by natural means seemed preferable to agreeing voluntarily to contract the disease, even if in a mild form. But Dr. Boylston failed to prevent the further spread of the epidemic that summer, probably because he failed to isolate his patients while they were in the disease’s incubation period, and smallpox actually spread by contact with his patients. Six of the inoculated patients died, a far-below-average number, but one victim who came close to succumbing was Boylston’s own son. Mather and Boylston incurred the wrath of most of New England’s Puritan clergy, who considered it a great sin to interfere with God’s will by trying to prevent death.
The bitter controversy kept printers busy, the argument over inoculation confirming growing public opinion that the clergy where overstepping their proper clerical role. Benjamin Franklin’s older brother, James, publisher of the New England Courant, lashed out at Mather and Boylston, inciting a superstitious public to riot. Ironically, a dozen years later, Benjamin Franklin’s only legitimate son, Francis, would die at age four after Franklin refused to have him inoculated during an outbreak in Philadelphia. The controversy and the epidemic in Boston lasted a full year. Virtually the whole community blamed Mather. Public antagonism to the clergy became so great that someone lobbed a bomb through the window of Mather’s study.
AS ETHAN ALLEN confined himself in quarantine at home in Salisbury, the New England epidemic of 1764 was keeping cautious courting couples away from each other. John Adams and Abigail Quincy had planned to get married that spring, but the arrival of smallpox in Boston forced them to wait. The danger of accidentally infecting Abigail seemed so serious to John that he had himself illegally inoculated by his good friend Dr. Joseph Warren, and then quarantined himself under Warren’s care away from Abigail and other patients. Because John and Abigail had to stay apart, their lifelong habit of corresponding blossomed. While she treasured John’s letters, Abigail believed that anything that had been touched by someone infected with smallpox put her at risk: letters were themselves dangerous. Before she would read them, she held Adams’s letters over smoke to decontaminate them.
Even Congregational clergy opposed to inoculation learned that they were not immune to what they considered a scourge by God for New England’s errant ways. The fire-and-brimstone Great Awakening theologian Jonathan Edwards had inveighed against inoculation from his pulpit at Northampton’s First Church. When the Reverend Aaron Burr Sr., president of the College of New Jersey, and his wife, the daughter of Edwards, died of smallpox, the trustees of the college offered Edwards its presidency, but, according to some historians, they made smallpox inoculation a condition of his employment. He reluctantly accepted the post and, convinced that he would have to submit to inoculation if he expected inoculation of his students, died within a month of smallpox, leaving his grandson, Aaron Burr Jr., future vice president of the United States, an orphan.
Obdurate superstition obviously was not the exclusive province of New England Puritans. In Virginia, two people died near coastal Yorktown after inoculated patients were released prematurely from quarantine. In 1768 and again in 1769, confrontations between pro- and anti-inoculation factions led to riots. Two doctors who carried out inoculations were indicted by the Norfolk County court. When one doctor attempted to inoculate his own family members at his plantation, a mob attacked his house and chased him and the inoculated patients three miles to the county pesthouse. The year after Allen’s inoculation, Thomas Jefferson’s favorite sister, Jane, died of smallpox at their Charlottesville, Virginia, home. Shortly after her death, the grieving Thomas, at twenty-three, journeyed alone in a one-horse buggy all the way to Philadelphia by a circuitous mountain route for an inoculation, because it was illegal to be inoculated in Virginia. Illegal immunizations had taken place in Virginia for twenty years, but Jefferson wanted a trained physician outside the colony to carry out his inoculation to keep smallpox from spreading closer to home. For many years after his sister’s death from smallpox, Jefferson fought a battle in Virginia’s courts without fee against the opponents of legalizing inoculation. (While American minister plenipotentiary in France in 1787, he arranged to have his slave Sally Hemings inoculated.) During the 1764 epidemic in New England, Samuel Adams took his children to the office of his friend Dr. Joseph Warren, who had just inoculated his cousin John Adams. Defying the taboo against inoculation was the first overt act of rebellion for these future founding fathers—Jefferson, the Adamses, and Ethan Allen—their iconoclastic act sparing them for later, more public revolutionary acts.
WHILE ETHAN ALLEN and Thomas Young put into public practice their deism in the Connecticut backcountry, the English Parliament was experimenting with imperial legislation. Finding itself with a farflung empire, the British government undertook a thorough review of American policies and taxes. After the French surrender, the British in effect became the overlords of all the Indians between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, now the western boundary of British territory. By proclamation in 1763, the British forbade settlement west of the Appalachians: what had been so hard-won by the British and American colonial troops became a huge Indian reserve. Settlers already west of the mountains were ordered to leave, and British troops were sent in to make sure any recalcitrant settlers left. Someone would have to pay for the twenty thousand Redcoats in two hundred forts and stockades envisioned by Parliament. The British ministry expected the Americans to help. The British national debt was enough to make any minister look for new answers: as of January 5, 1763, according to the Exchequer, funded debt stood at £122 million, a staggering sum that carried annual interest of £4.4 million. For the next three years, the debt grew annually by £7 million because of the costs of maintaining the new empire. Financing the debt absorbed more and more of ministers’ time and turned their attention increasingly to America, which, in British eyes, already possessed great riches. In truth, this was more legend than reality.
Relatively little can be known about the exact scale of the American economy in the years before the American Revolution, because the fortunes of so many successful merchants were based on smuggling. Every Connecticut and Rhode Island shipowner who dealt with French, Spanish, or Dutch colonies in the Caribbean in the molasses trade, for example, was a smuggler, according to the records of the British Board of Trade and Plantations. Nothing in customs duties was credited to the books of the Board of Trade for the two maritime colonies in an account of all the duties collected under the Molasses Act between 1733 and 1735, even as of all the northern provinces they were the most dependent on the French sugar islands. Many of New England’s most prominent citizens—the Hancocks of Boston, the Trumbulls of Connecticut, and the Browns of Rhode Island—built family fortunes by evading the welter of contradictory British trade laws metastasizing for over a century. In fact, smuggling had become an economic necessity on which depended the welfare not only of shipowners but of farmers and merchants and virtually everyone doing business in colonial America. British government ministers had understood for a century the wisdom of winking at trade laws, but, at exactly the time young Ethan Allen purchased his share in the Salisbury iron forge, the British began tinkering with the trade laws as one inept aristocratic minister after another tried to make sense of the administration of the new British Empire.
While the British triumph over the French ended a century and a half of commercial rivalry between the French and the English and should have brought a massive expansion of trade by English colonists, for many Americans, especially Ethan Allen and his Connecticut frontier neighbors, peace produced a long depression. The abrupt end of British wartime subsidies to colonial governments to pay their militias and the drying up of wartime contracts to feed, house, and transport British armies led to the collapse of colonial economies. Concommitantly, the British Currency Act of 1764 forbade the printing of colonial paper money just as the British were redoubling their efforts to tax American trade to pay for American defense. Thus, the new taxes had to be paid in silver or gold. Consequently, the first serious attempts to regulate American trade and enforce customs duties further shocked the markets in every American colony. In New Jersey, James Parker, erstwhile New York partner of Benjamin Franklin, shortly before issuing a wildly revolutionary blast at Parliament, coolly took the measure of the crisis in a letter to Attorney General Cortlandt Skinner:
There is such a general scarcity of cash that nothing we have will command it and real estates of every kind are falling at least one-half in value. Debtors that were a year or two ago responsible for £1,000 can not now raise a fourth part of the sum…. There is an entire stop to all sales by the sheriffs for want of buyers, and men of the best estates amongst us can scarce raise money enough to defray the necessary expenses of their families…. Under the unsupportable distress we are now called upon for many thousands of pounds sterling to be paid by a stamp duty.
Even taxes long paid by the English at home, such as the tax stamp, triggered costly repercussions when Parliament tried to apply them in the colonies. In postwar America, unemployment was high and cash in extremely short supply. One sharp-eyed British visitor wrote home from Connecticut that this colony may have been the most strapped for cash, that he “would not give £800 sterling for the entire province.” He had been “all over it”—including Litchfield County—and came away convinced that “they are all mortgaged to the full.”16
As the postwar depression deepened, announcement of stamp levies set off a round of riots from Boston to Charleston. In Connecticut, antitax rallies and protest meetings in New Haven attracted lawyers and merchants. Jared Ingersoll, the colony’s leading lawyer, warned a friend in the Treasury in London that Yankee merchants were unanimously opposed to the new taxes, that there was not a single merchant “with the most Distant intention to pay the Dutys.” Ingersoll was ambivalent about the tax. While he protested it, he was, for financial reasons, eager to accept appointment as the colony’s distributor of the stamped parchment. In Stratford, Connecticut, the Anglican lawyer William Samuel Johnson, a delegate to the colonial general assembly, gloomily wrote to the Yale professor Ezra Stiles, “From this time date the Slavery of the Colonies.” The Connecticut Gazette, which Ethan Allen and Thomas Young eagerly read in Salisbury, asked its readers “whether Americans were going to allow themselves to be bondsmen.” The Gazette ominously printed the names of all of the thirteen colonies’ stamp commissioners in British America, branding them “mean, mercenary Hirelings, Parricides among yourselves, who for a little filthy Lucre would at any time betray every Right, Liberty and Privilege of their fellow subjects.”17
As Royal Navy ships delivered strongboxes of the hated tax stamps to America’s Atlantic coast ports all that summer of 1765, crowds brought pressure to bear on the royal establishment. On the evening of August 21, some 750 mounted Sons of Liberty burned Jared Ingersoll in effigy at Norwich Town and again the next day in New London. Officials in every colony and town now feared that mob violence would lead to anarchy. In the Connecticut River valley, away from the coastal towns where merchants, shipowners, and sailors were suffering from the postwar collapse in trade, there was little organized resistance, at first, to the new British taxes. In Salisbury, local civil, militia, and church authorities nervously kept tight control, quashing any flicker of dissent.
ETHAN ALLEN’S FIRST overt act of rebellion had been to defend in print a Puritan heretic, Solomon Palmer. Inoculation, his second and even more public act, took place in front of the Salisbury meetinghouse that symbolized the New England church-state. Carried out before a crowd that included all of Salisbury’s leaders, that piece of defiance may have saved his life but did not go unpunished. For years, Allen had endured the Reverend Lee’s unctuous ministrations in classroom, parlor, and pulpit. He considered Lee, this self-appointed family chaplain, overbearing and, in this case, just plain backward. When Lee, acting with another selectman, Peter Stoddard, threatened to arrest him, Allen lost his temper. According to Salisbury court records, Allen menaced the selectmen with his bullwhip. The charge of blasphemy entered on the town records alleged that Allen swore at them, a crime in theocratic Connecticut:
By Jesus Christ, I wish I may be bound down in Hell with old Beelzebub a thousand years in the lowest pit in Hell and that every little insipid devil should come along by and ask the reason of Allen’s lying there, if it should be said he made a promise…that he would have satisfaction of Lee and Stoddard and did not fulfill it.
In other words, Allen threatened two selectmen and demanded they give him “satisfaction,” the unmistakable call to a duel. Lee and Stoddard ignored Allen’s challenge and, instead of arresting him for violating the ban on inoculations, arrested him for breach of the peace. The charge was that he had blasphemed by referring to Jesus Christ, Beelzebub, and “every little insipid devil,” all in one breath.
In New England since the time of Anne Hutchinson, courtroom drama took the place of theater, and even a hearing on a misdemeanor charge filled the courtroom. When Ethan Allen’s case came before the magistrates, Salisbury citizens packed the courtroom—the common room in Bushnell’s Tavern on the green opposite the Congregational meetinghouse. That a young businessman was challenging the authority of the very symbols of the Salisbury oligarchy by denying the divinity of Christ undoubtedly piqued public interest. As he usually did, Allen acted as his own lawyer. He cleverly argued that he had “uttered the word ‘By’ at the same time turning his face and eyes upward, making a pause, and with a horsewhip wrote or marked on a rail of the fence and then said, ‘This stands for Jesus Christ and add this and that together makes, ‘By Jesus Christ.’”
He further argued that “he did not in an absolute sense wish he might be bound down in Hell with Beelzebub” but only if Lee and Stoddard prosecuted him under the law of inoculation, which they had not done. So, Allen contended, he had only implied the oath. It was only an oath on a condition, one that had not been fulfilled. Therefore, he had not breached the king’s peace. Allen’s casuistic logic brought howls of approval from the crowd and an acquittal from the town selectmen. He had won his case, but he would soon discover that he had lost the respect and patience of many of his neighbors in small-town Salisbury.18
ETHAN ALLEN’S NEXT legal altercation in Salisbury stemmed from a dispute over the differences between one town’s and another’s policy of dealing with the perennial New England problem of runaway pigs. Owners of large herds of the animals argued for their right to a free range even in town: pigs had the right to roam free. The Allens represented the majority point of view, however, consistently voting in town meetings that pigs must be kept properly pent up. Each town had an official hog reeve, often the local tavern keeper, who knew what to do with any unclaimed pork. It was his duty to round up strays to hold in a designated town pound until their owner ransomed them by paying him a fine. Soon after the smallpox inoculation controversy, eight pigs belonging to one of Salisbury’s old-line families, the Tousleys, escaped their pen and got into Mary Allen’s garden. Ethan and Heman apparently had complained to Samuel Tousley before, but to no avail. This time, the Allen brothers adroitly rounded up the vagrant pigs and confined them in the pigpen of a friend. Instead of simply going to the pen and rescuing his pigs, Tousley complained to Justice of the Peace John Hutchinson, his neighbor on the green, who brought an action against the Allens for failure to confine Tousley’s pigs in the legally defined town pound.
The select board, including the Reverend Lee, summoned Allen to court again. Word of the popular Allen’s latest legal skirmish flew through litigious Salisbury, packing the town tavern-turned-courthouse. Allen rose and insisted he had indeed provided a proper pound. When plaintiff Tousley insisted it wasn’t, Allen’s riposte that “one pigpen is as good as another” brought howls of laughter from the audience. But Justice Hutchinson didn’t appreciate Allen’s indecorous waggishness in such a serious matter. Insisting on upholding the point of law, Hutchinson ordered the Allens to pay damages of ten shillings to Tousley and assessed them five shillings in court costs, in all about a week’s wages for a skilled artisan. Allen did not burnish his image among Salisbury’s elite when he retaliated against Tousley by demanding immediate payment of a two-pound note owed him by Tousley’s brother, John, and then, as was his right, hauled Tousley into court for refusing to pay up. Ethan Allen won this case, but at a cost.19
Apparently oblivious to the frost that was forming over his neighbors, Allen continued his public disputes at Bushnell’s Tavern and at his forge. Meanwhile, his closest friend, Thomas Young, had by his outspoken deism made himself anathema to the New Light townsfolk. While Dr. Young was considered an excellent physician—his medical techniques would be adopted by the famous Dr. Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia, and Young would one day treat many members of the Continental Congress—there was another doctor in Salisbury with the “correct” theological views. Dr. Young’s patients deserted him for the more conservative physician. In short, Salisbury turned against its two iconoclasts, ostracizing them—even though, by removing themselves from the town’s church-centered social life, Ethan Allen and Thomas Young had already made themselves personae non gratae.
This did not deter Allen. Young had not only awakened his intellectual curiosity but enchanted him with a vision of the fortune that he could make in land speculation. Allen had already heard from some of Salisbury’s leading citizens of a new El Dorado for land speculators about to open up far to the north. Like so many other Americans during this time, the end of the constant threat of French-instigated Indian attacks had led Young to speculate in lands west of the Allegheny Mountains that had opened up for sale and settlement. Allen had never met anyone who could daydream of landed wealth better than Thomas Young. In 1760, Young had invested in a real estate venture promoted by one John Henry Lydius, a shady land dealer who had been expelled from French Canada for violating the royal policy forbidding private land deals with the Indians. From his base at Fort Edward near Lake George, Lydius sold some two hundred square miles of surrounding lands in eastern New York and what is today southern Vermont, from Wood Creek to the Battenkill. Young was only one of numerous would-be landowners fleeced in Lydius’s scheme. It was the same Lydius who had illegally negotiated with the Iroquois for Indian lands in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania and had lured Connecticut investors, including Allen’s father, to invest in the Susquehannah Company, even though officials had warned would-be pioneers not to depend on Lydius’s Indian deeds, because they could not get clear title to the lands. Undeterred, Young regaled his acolyte Allen with dreams of landed wealth beyond the mountains, reawakening in him memories of stories he had heard at his father’s knee and from the scouts leading the quick march to Fort William Henry. At the same time, Young blamed the shady land dealings on the royal government officials and owners of the great Hudson and Mohawk River tenant farms, “the great land-jobbers in New York,” a pejorative term Allen was hearing for the first time.20
Drawing Allen into a tangle of intrigues over land claims that would eventually pull him northward into Vermont, Young rehearsed for him his arguments for a passionate defense of all landholders. By Young’s fire in Salisbury, Allen was learning John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government as paraphrased by Thomas Young in a pamphlet. Young had written that “liberty and property” were “the Household Gods of Englishmen,” who have “called loudly for our blood and treasure”:
We, the common people, have freely lavish’d both; we are impoverish’d in war, and now want land to exercise the arts of peace upon, at such rates as we can promise ourselves some recompense to our labours…. All we ask, request, and implore, is that we may enjoy our undoubted rights, and not have them so cruelly rent out of our hands….21
As Stamp Act protests ignited colonial America, Young was coining ringing revolutionary phrases that would echo through hundreds of speeches and pamphlets. “Our blood and treasure” invoked the century-long efforts of the American colonists to defeat England’s enemy, the French. “Our undoubted rights” would become the watchwords in the Declaration of Independence a dozen years later. “We, the common people” in slightly altered form would become the opening phrase of the Constitution. For Ethan Allen, the stirring rhetoric of Thomas Young would become his new catechism.22
SOON AFTER YOUNG published his trumpet blast against New York’s oligarchs, he suddenly moved away from Salisbury. His practice dwindling after the smallpox inoculation affair, he decided to return to his native Albany to establish a new practice. Allen would maintain a lifetime friendship with Young. Enthralled by the Stamp Act crisis in 1766, Young would uproot his family again, this time moving to Boston, where he continued on his erratic path to what one Philadelphian called “noisy fame.” He served on Massachusetts’ revolutionary Committee of Correspondence, the first extralegal step toward intercolonial organization. He was present, a sword in his hand, four years later at the Boston Massacre. He traveled widely, stirring up the spirit of revolt wherever he went, along with the resentment of less charismatic rebels. John Adams called Young “a Firebrand, an Incendiary, an eternal Fisher in Troubled Waters.” He considered Young disreputable. “Boston will never be in peace while that fellow lives in it,” he harrumphed. “He is a Scourge, a Pestilence, a Judgment.” British forces occupying Boston at the time agreed. Two British officers nearly beat Dr. Young to death in a street fight after he delivered the oration commemorating the Boston Massacre on its first anniversary. Then Young was a principal organizer of the Boston Tea Party, where he refused to wear a disguise, making himself a marked man. And Ethan Allen, enchanted by his quixotic friend, followed his movements and, to a great extent, his example.23
WHETHER IT WAS because of his growing unpopularity with Salisbury’s theocracy over his religious views or his cocky public self-defense in court cases, Ethan Allen ran into financial trouble during the postwar depression of 1765. His legal squabbling with neighbors did not make it easier for him to borrow the capital he needed to feed the constant demands of the iron furnace. The drying up of markets for his expensive potash kettles only exacerbated his problems. If Salisbury was tired of Allen, he, too, was exhausted from trying to meet his debts, which, by the autumn of 1765, amounted to an astronomical £1,200.
All up and down the Allegheny frontier that year, as investors like Benjamin Franklin and the Whartons were forming corporations to fund silver- and copper-mining explorations, Allen learned of an opportunity to turn his iron holdings into silver and decided to sell his house and his interest in the iron forge and leave Salisbury. Always a speculator, he preferred the opportunity for great gain over a steady return on cautious investment. Allen was about to learn that so much of success or failure in business is a question of timing and, at this moment, his proved to be terrible. Selling his interest in the iron furnace, he bought a share in what was supposed to be a silver mine: it turned out to yield only lead. He bought mining rights in Woodbury, then hired the New York merchant Sampson Simpson to research other mines that were for sale, settling on a mine in Northampton, Massachusetts, once the home of his grandparents. Ethan and Heman sold their half of the Salisbury furnace for £500. Heman bought a general store with his share and decided to stay in Salisbury. Undoubtedly because the real estate market had collapsed in the postwar recession, Ethan took a beating on the sale of his handsome hilltop house for £272, little more than half what he had paid for it.
After the property settlement and the signing of deeds, Ethan, Heman, and George Caldwell, the purchaser of their share in the furnace, adjourned to the nearby tavern for a celebratory bowl of punch and the payment of the purchase price. At this point, Caldwell refused to come up with all of the cash he had promised Ethan. Technically, since the Allens had already signed over the deeds to the forge, there was little they could do. Ethan and Heman now lacked the cash they needed to buy their shares in their new investment in Woodbury. By that evening, when Ethan and Caldwell failed to find a peaceful solution, they were summoned before Justice Hutchinson, charged with fighting. In the words of the official complaint, Ethan Allen
did in a tumultuous and offensive manner with threatening words and angry looks, strip himself even to his naked body and with force and arms without law or right, did assault and actually strike the person of George Caldwell of Salisbury in the presence and to the disturbance of many of His Majesty’s good subjects.
Whether the townsfolk enjoyed the fisticuffs and the spectacle of one of its leading citizens stripped to the waist and throwing punches does not appear on the court record. The record does show that Justice Hutchinson again fined Ethan Allen, this time ten shillings.24
Immediately after his second conviction, Allen left Salisbury and rode with a group of his friends down to Woodbury to make final his plan to buy the lead mine with his new partners, his brothers-in-law Abraham and Israel Brownson. The partners and their friends were on their way north again to take possession of the mine when they passed through Salisbury. In the street, they encountered Allen’s antagonist George Caldwell and a muscular companion, Robert Branthwaite. They exchanged unpleasantries and, according to this court complaint, Allen hit Branthwaite and “soon after in a violent and angry manner stripped off his clothes to his naked body and with a club struck…Caldwell on the head.”
According to the court record, Branthwaite grabbed the club. Allen hit him, evidently this time landing a solid punch, just as Luke Camp, the town constable, ran up and cited all three men for breach of peace. On the same day, before Allen and his friends could leave Salisbury, however, they again encountered Caldwell and his friends. Whatever Caldwell said to provoke him, according to the court record, Allen this time
stripped off his clothes to his naked body and in a threatening manner with his fist lifted up, repeated these malicious words three times: “You lie you dog” and also did with a loud voice say that he would spill the blood of any that opposed him.25
No one tried to prevent Ethan Allen and his kinsmen from leaving Salisbury, where many of the townspeople were disgusted by his cockiness and apparently natural propensity to fight. But before he could leave town, the constable overtook him and served him with a subpoena to appear before Justice Hutchinson two weeks later. This fourth court action led to Ethan Allen’s being “read out” of staid Salisbury. It was an intensely personal judgment. Allen’s cousin and former mentor, the Reverend Lee, served on the selectboard that banished him from Salisbury, and the verdict fell heavily on Allen’s entire family. Amid the turmoil, Mary, expecting her second child, was permitted to remain with Heman in Salisbury until her husband returned from moving their belongings to a new home in another town and colony. He reappeared in Salisbury in time to appeal this latest conviction to the Litchfield County court on October 28, 1765. Unanimously, the court rejected his appeal. The only concession was that Ethan was allowed to stay with Mary at Heman’s until the baby was born. They named the baby Joseph, after his father and, as the beleaguered couple may have intended, after the father of Christ who had, according to their Bible, fled with his wife and infant child from oppression into a strange and foreign land. Then, as December snow packed hard on the road and the Connecticut River froze over, Ethan wrapped Mary and the babies in bearskin robes for the frigid eighty-mile sleigh ride to Northampton, Massachusetts.26