IN THE SERE SPRINGTIME OF 1775, every rider who swung down from his mount and clambered into Catamount Tavern in Bennington brought news of fresh alarms, where British troops were quick marching into small towns all along the Massachusetts coast to seize stores of gunpowder and weapons. General Gage, the British commander in Boston, would later quite accurately blame the system of postriders who crisscrossed New England and saddle stitched it to neighboring colonies for the mounting resistance to new British policies. Radical leaders in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and to the south kept abreast of the latest British maneuvers and were able to coordinate their responses within days of each British provocation. Systematically stripped of their munitions, devoid of artillery, radical leaders on the coast knew that only in the Green Mountains could they hope to muster a large, trained force when they decided to attack the heavily armed Lake Champlain forts on short notice.
With British posts thinly garrisoned, the militia Ethan Allen had so assiduously recruited and trained for four years now became, by default, the second-largest military force in North America, second only to the Redcoat garrison of Boston. It was common knowledge that, in all New York, there were only 150 Redcoats. After receiving a written warning about the unrest in the backcountry two months earlier from Gage, New York’s royal governor, Sir William Tryon, had appealed to Quebec’s royal governor, Sir Guy Carleton, for reinforcements. In fact, Carleton had few men to spare. In January, he had written to Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the Northern Department, that there were “not six hundred rank and file fit for duty upon the whole extent of this great [St. Lawrence] river, not an armed vessel…the ancient provincial forces enervated and broke to pieces.” When he wrote back to Governor Tryon, he downplayed the threat from the Green Mountains: Tryon should not be worried about “a few lawless vagabonds.”1
AS ETHAN ALLEN, acting on orders from the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence, dispatched couriers north and east through the Green Mountain settlements to raise the Boys, as described earlier, Benedict Arnold, unaware of Connecticut’s strategy, quick marched his red-coated militia company to Cambridge. There he talked the Massachusetts Provincial Congress into letting him lead the attack on the Lake Champlain forts. The leaders of the congress listened enthusiastically to Arnold’s report of the forts’ strategic importance, their armaments and vulnerability, and they commissioned him a Massachusetts colonel, providing him with ten packhorses, two hundred pounds of gunpowder, and a like amount of lead. Arnold and his personal orderly and string of swaybacked packhorses picked their way west, reaching Williamstown in northwestern Massachusetts after a 110-mile, three-day trek through a heavy spring downpour that had turned the road into a quagmire. His countenance the color of his uniform, Arnold learned that Allen, who would actually lead the invasion, was acting on the intelligence that Arnold himself had provided Colonel Parsons two weeks earlier.
The furious Arnold’s decision to assert overall command of the northern expedition nearly wrecked the expedition when he rashly fired off an order to the New York Committee of Safety demanding New York revolutionaries’ support. He was “now on the march for the reduction of Fort Ticonderoga.” It was a reckless step. If Arnold’s message had been intercepted by the British or a New Yorker loyal to the royal government, it could have ruined the surprise attack on Ticonderoga and led to the death or capture of Allen and many of his Boys, an event that would not have displeased many of New York’s officials.2
AS TOWN COMMITTEES hurried preparations, more and more of the Boys, armed with pistols, swords, and knives, clambered into Catamount Tavern. Those who had arms, stacked their muskets around the walls, awaiting orders. The news of the carnage outside Boston sobered and excited Allen and his comrades. All the years of raids, reprisals, and confrontations with New York sheriffs and settlers were now subsumed into a greater cause, which, as it must have occurred to Allen, would benefit the settlers and landowners of the Grants, including his family. Any chance for political reverie, however, was cut short as he rode north to Castleton to prepare the imminent attack on Fort Ticonderoga.
WHEN A SCARLET-UNIFORMED Colonel Benedict Arnold pushed open the front door of the Catamount Tavern, Boys who had been cursing the Redcoats now thought they were seeing one and dived for their guns. A score of weapons, hammers cocked, pointed at Arnold before he could identify himself. Presenting his written commission to Captain Mott, Arnold brusquely recited his orders to take command. The score of Boys left behind by Allen began to hoot and mimic Arnold and jump up on the tables. When the catcalls subsided, Captain Mott coolly explained to Arnold that the leadership of the Grants had convened a week ago. They had constituted a council of war and had allowed the Boys to elect their own officers, according to New England tradition, a tradition that Arnold did not share. Ethan Allen had been unanimously reelected colonel commandant of the Boys, the post, Mott explained, that he had held for four years since he had organized the Vermont militia. If Arnold hurried, he might overtake Allen at Castleton, fifty miles to the north, and offer his services.
THE LAUNCHING POINT for the main attack on Fort Ticonderoga was to be a promontory at Hand’s Cove, on the Vermont shore, directly opposite the fort. All day on May 9 and into the night, only 230 of the Boys had arrived in Shoreham. Allen had reason to be nervous. He knew that it was planting season in Vermont, an especially important one after three years of very little rain. Rumors of British marches brought by couriers from the east further dissuaded some of the Boys from leaving their farms and the defense of their families for very long. The sight of Arnold riding up to the Shoreham schoolhouse only complicated Allen’s plans. It was here that Arnold met Allen for the first time. Captain Mott later reported to the Hartford Committee of Safety that Arnold had “insisted that he had a right to command them and all their officers, which bred such a mutiny among the soldiers which had nearly frustrated our whole design.”3
After the brief altercation over command mentioned earlier, Allen tried to ease the tension by proposing that he lead his Boys and the sixteen Connecticut militiamen forwarded to him by the Hartford committee and that Arnold, exercising his Massachusetts commission, lead any Massachusetts troops. At dusk on May 9, Allen, with Arnold at his side, led the Green Mountain Boys and their new comrades from Connecticut and Massachusetts silently toward the lake, their movements shielded by dense spruce trees as they waited for the boats within a mile of Fort Ticonderoga’s sentries. Most of the officers were members of the extended Allen clan: Heman, Levi, Zimri, and Ira were joined by cousins Ebenezer Allen, Seth Warner, and Remember Baker. Among the lieutenants was a future congressman, Matthew Lyon, who later became the only congressman to be elected from three states and, continuing the Vermont tradition of insurrection, the only congressman to be imprisoned in 1798 under the Alien and Sedition Act. Lyon had brought men all the way from the Onion River Land Company’s fort at the mouth of the Winooski River.
By sunset, three hundred men waited soundlessly, anxiously, but six hours later, at one-thirty the morning of the tenth, as the wind whipped the lake into whitecaps, still there were no boats. A fierce storm had lashed the lake half the night, nearly wrecking the expedition. There was barely enough time left now to ferry a fraction of the men across to the New York shore before daylight. What Allen would not learn for several more days was that, according to an affidavit later sworn by Major Skene, some of the Boys raiding the manor had been distracted by a cellar stocked with choice liquors. Even if they had remained sober, the raiders couldn’t have found Skene’s schooner, because it was docked more than one hundred miles farther up the lake at the British fort at St. John. Captain Asa Douglass’s detachment, sent north toward Crown Point, could locate only a single, thirty-three-foot lug-sailed scow with a terrified young black slave at its tiller. Douglass had told the youth they would pay him to take them hunting. The lumbering workboat finally tacked into Hand’s Cove at three o’clock the morning of May 10. Already the sky to the east was turning gray against the black silhouettes of trees and hills. A few minutes later, a second small boat appeared.
Even as the scow bumped the Vermont shore, Allen and Arnold made their first joint decision. They had to attack with as many chosen men as they could get across the lake in the next hour. As it set out on its first crossing, the scow wallowed in the choppy water under the weight of so many men, nearly sinking into the darkened lake. A sudden storm now kicked up whitecaps, sending water sloshing over the gunwales. The lugsail was useless. In the high wind, it could capsize the unwieldy, overloaded boat. Squall-whipped water drenched the novice oarsmen, blinding them. At that time of year, the water temperature rarely reached more than forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. It took a nerve-racking ninety minutes for the small boat to cross one mile of heaving water. After a second crossing, only eighty-three drenched, shivering men had been deposited on the New York shore a quarter mile east of Fort Ticonderoga. The sleepless little army picked its way up the slope just north of a jutting piece of shoreline known as Willow Point.
AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning of May 10, Allen gave the signal of three owl hoots. With only a third of their men and none of their supplies having made it across the lake, Allen and Arnold led the way along the path up from the shore toward the main gate. The ghostly line of frontiersmen hugged the crumbling granite south wall of the main star-shaped fortress until they reached a breach where, after years of neglect, the stones had parted. Despite intelligence to the contrary from the spies, the French and Indian War veteran officers Noah Phelps and Ezra Hickok, whom Allen had sent into the fort, he now found the main gates closed. Had a Loyalist neighbor suspicious of all the men and activity on the Vermont shore warned the British? Cut out of the main gate was a wicket gate, a narrow, low door with a sentry box just inside. The solitary Redcoat sentry on duty had dozed off.
Both Allen, on the right, the traditional position of honor, and Arnold, on the left, would later claim that they had rushed the guard simultaneously, but eyewitnesses said the smaller, faster Arnold was first to squeeze through the narrow gate. The startled guard aimed his musket and pulled the trigger, but it had been a damp night and the gun misfired, the hammer snapping harmlessly in the pan. The terrified soldier threw down his gun and ran, yelling, toward the barracks. A second sentry appeared. This time, Allen reached him first. The Redcoat fired, but the shot went high. Then he lunged at Allen with his bayonet. Sidestepping, Allen swung at the soldier’s head with his heavy cutlass. The blow, enough to behead a man, struck a wooden comb in the Englishman’s carefully coiffed and powdered hair, sending him sprawling. Allen later wrote that he had deliberately spared the man’s life by deflecting the sword’s arc: “My first thought was to kill him with my sword but; in an instant, [I] altered the design and fury of the blow to a slight cut on the side of the head.”4
Allen demanded that the stunned guard get up and lead him to the commandant’s quarters. Despite reconnaissance, none of his men knew the fort’s exact layout. Arnold, meanwhile, had run toward the main barracks. Finding the garrison’s muskets neatly stacked out on the parade ground, he raced ahead of his men upstairs to wake the Redcoats at gunpoint. With half a dozen of the Green Mountain Boys, Allen prodded the wounded sentry before him, crossing the parade ground to the west wall and hurried up a stone stairway toward what obviously was the officer’s quarters, yelling, “No quarter! No quarter!” In his room, Lieutenant Feltham, the young artillerist posted to Ticonderoga little more than a week earlier, jumped up and ran in his underwear to the door of Captain Delaplace, the commandant. The subaltern banged on the door and, as he later reported to General Gage, waited, his trousers in his hand, “to receive orders.” Delaplace didn’t answer. Feltham ran back to his room, pulled on his red coat and, still naked from the waist down, ran toward the din on the stairs, clutching his trousers, hoping that his few visible symbols of authority would help him rally the garrison.
As more of the Boys surged upstairs, yelling at him, Feltham fled. He later reported, “With great difficulty, I got into Delaplace’s room.” The commandant was coolly dressing, putting on his sword. Feltham opened a side door and started toward Allen, who was running up the stairs. Trying to stall him, Feltham loudly asked “by what authority [had] they entered His Majesty’s fort.” Brandishing his cutlass, Allen bellowed, “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”—or that is what Allen later wrote he said. According to Lieutenant Feltham’s official account, however, Allen invoked neither the deity nor congress. Instead, Allen said, “Come out of there, you old rat.” One of Allen’s own men insisted that Allen bellowed at Captain Delaplace a more characteristic “Come out of there, you goddam old rat.”5
Pivoting toward Lieutenant Feltham, Allen waved his sword over the terrified subaltern. Several of the Boys had leveled their flintlocks at him. Allen warned Feltham “that if there was a single gun fired, neither man, woman or child would be left alive in this fort.” (There were approximately forty women and children, the soldiers’ families.) Finally, Captain Delaplace, in full dress uniform, came out and asked Allen what terms he would give. Allen replied that he would have Delaplace’s immediate surrender or instant death from his right fist, the “beetle of immortality,” likening his hand to a wood splitter’s hammer. Delaplace instantly surrendered his sword, his pistols, and Fort Ticonderoga.6