WITH ONLY EIGHTY-THREE MEN, Ethan Allen had taken the mightiest fortress in colonial America, complete with all its vital artillery and munitions, without firing a shot or suffering a single casualty. In the first American offensive of the Revolutionary War, Allen had won America’s first victory and made himself its first war hero. As more of the Green Mountain Boys streamed into the fort, Allen ordered the captured garrison confined to their barracks at gunpoint. According to Lieutenant Feltham’s official report to General Howe, about four hundred Green Mountain Boys “came now to join in the plunder.”1
They soon discovered a cellar under the officers’ quarters housing ninety gallons of rum, Captain Delaplace’s private stock. Some of the Boys, who were normally not given to rowdiness but who’d had little to eat in several days, quickly got drunk. Allen sympathized with them: after years of intimidation and threats of dispossession and even execution by New York’s royal officials, he thought it perfectly understandable for them to celebrate the stunning achievement of capturing the king’s fort. Allen wrote a few days later to the treasurer of Connecticut to reimburse Captain Delaplace, by then a prisoner on his way there, for the rum, which Allen said had been “Greatly wanted for the Refreshment of the Fatigued Soldiery.”2
But Arnold, who had arrived on the frontier only the day before, was intent on his mission and his commission. He tried to get the Boys to help him strip the fort of its cannon and gunpowder and get them moving toward Boston. When a few of the Boys began to loot the barracks, Arnold recited military law to them. His interference infuriated Allen, who felt Arnold was abrogating their agreement about a joint command. After two inebriated Boys somewhat unsteadily fired at Arnold and missed him and another leaned the barrel of a musket against his chest and cocked it, Allen did not discipline his men but instead stripped Arnold of his command, confined him to quarters, and placed a guard at the door. By this time, Allen had organized and controlled his militia for four years. Arnold, a merchant ship’s captain, had no prior combat experience but he did not hesitate to judge Allen’s. To the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, he denounced Allen: “Colonel Allen is a proper man to head his own wild people, but entirely unacquainted with military service….”3
Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen had much in common but possessed decidedly opposing styles. Both were Connecticut patricians by birth; the families of both were among the founding generation of New Englanders. Arnold was Benedict V, descended from one of the original settlers of Rhode Island who had served as that colony’s longest-tenured governor. Arnold had a natural abhorrence of alcohol: his father had squandered the family’s wealth and twice been jailed for public drunkenness. Yet he would not be averse to serving his crews rum in the absence of food as they went into battle on Lake Champlain. Allen’s grandfather had gambled away the family fortune in bad real estate speculations, but his grandmother, born wealthy, had earned it back. Arnold’s and Allen’s forebears were visible saints, among the Puritan elect. Allen was a fourth-generation town founder. Both men, like so many of the founding fathers, were orphans who had struggled to achieve position and wealth. Both were competitive and unaccustomed to sharing power or praise, exceedingly aware of their images. And, like so many of their revolutionary generation, they were more a team of rivals than part of a band of brothers.
WHILE ARNOLD SCRATCHED out angry salvos, Allen was also busy writing. His version of events not only assured his place in history but also helped his friends and harmed Arnold. In a popular memoir, Allen ultimately published his own account of taking the great fortress without firing a shot or killing anyone. It was a “gray morning,” he wrote. “The sun seemed to rise that morning with a superior luster.” His men were “conquerors who tossed about the flowing bowl.” At first, he did not mention Arnold in his dispatches—“I took the fortress at Ticonderoga by storm.” The day after the attack, Allen sent off reports to Connecticut, to the Continental Congress, to Albany. In Ticonderoga’s commandant’s quarters, its new occupant was busy writing some of the most euphoric sentences of his life. To the governor of Connecticut, Allen wrote, “I make You a Present of a Major a Captain and Two lieuts in the regular Establishment of George the Third. I hope they may serve as ransoms for some of our Friends of Boston….”
In this letter, Allen for the first time laid out his next bold objective. At Skenesborough, the Boys had seized the newly built armed schooner Betsey.
I Expect in Ten days Time to have it rigged, man’d and arm’d with 6 or 8 Pieces of Canon which with the Boats in our Possession I Purpose to make an Attack on the arm’d Sloop George the Third which is Now Cruising on Lake Champlain and about Twice as bigg as the Schooner…. The Enterprise has been approbated by the Officers and Soldiary of the Green Mountain Boys. Nor do I hesitate as to the Success. I Expect Lives must be Lost in the attack as the Comander of George’s Sloop is a man of courage.
Moreover, Allen was certain there would be a British counterattack from Montreal. “Governor Carleton will Exert himself to oppose us & Command the Lake.” With perspicacity, Allen signed himself “at Present Commander of Ticondaroga.” Along with the prisoners, he sent back an accountant, the clerk of the Connecticut war committee who had been sent on the expedition to keep track of the Connecticut money that he had spent that could later be charged to the Continental Congress.4
Allen wrote with particular relish to the committee of safety in Albany, where he had so long been the subject of warrants and rewards and where he was still considered an outlaw who could be executed if he were arrested by some of the same people he was now notifying of his coup:
May 11, 1775
Ticonderoga
Gentlemen
I Have the Inexpressible Satisfaction to Acquaint you that at Day break of the Eleventh [sic] Instant (Pursuant to my Directions from Sundry Leading Gentlemen in the Colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut) I Took the Fortress of Ticonderoga with About one Hundred and thirty Green Mountain Boys…. Col. Arnold Entered the fortress with me Side by Side. The Guard were So Surprised that Contrary our Expectation Did Not fire on us but fled with Precippitancy. We Immediately Entered the fortress and Took the Garrisson Prisoners without Bloodshead or any Opposition…. You know Governor Carlton of Canada will Exert himself to retake it…Your Country is Nearer than any Other Part of the Colonies…I Expect Immediate [aid] from You Both in men and Provisions…. Pray Be Quick to our relief and Send us five hundred men Immediately. Fail Not….
Ethan Allen Commander of Ticondaroga5
One day after taking Ticonderoga, Allen, continuing his heavy reliance on his own trusted clan, dispatched his cousin Captain Seth Warner with forty Boys to seize Crown Point. From this strategic vantage point, ships could be seen approaching from the north for a dozen miles. Lightly garrisoned by a sergeant and nine enlisted men accompanied by ten women and children, Fort Amherst fell without resistance. Only a few cannon were visible at first, but in all one hundred and eleven had been abandoned by the retreating French. Back at Ticonderoga, Allen was excitedly cataloging an inventory of artillery from the two forts that he could send off toward Boston. He sent to congress a detailed list of seventy-eight serviceable cannon and large siege mortars and three howitzers plus a number of swivel guns, 18,000 pounds of musket balls, and 30,000 flints. The fieldpieces, ranging from three-pounders to forty-two-pounders, were an unbelievable treasure of state-of-the-art weaponry that would enable the Americans to fight the British on more even terms.
At their next council of war, Allen and Arnold, expediently reconciled, agreed that they had to protect this trove by taking Fort St. John on the Richelieu River five miles inside Quebec Province, to deprive the British of an advanced base for a counterattack. Arnold and fifty of his Massachusetts men fitted out Colonel Skene’s captured schooner with swivel guns, renamed it Liberty, and set sail north toward Canada. Allen and a contingent of the Boys followed them in slow bateaux, the sail-and oar-powered workboats of the lake. Arnold arrived first and took the fort’s thirteen-man garrison by surprise. He was already sailing back toward Ticonderoga at the helm of the captured British sloop of war, which he renamed Enterprise, when he saw Allen’s men struggling toward him down the Richelieu River. “[Arnold] saluted me,” Allen later wrote,
with a discharge of cannon, which I returned with a volley of small arms. This being repeated three times, I went on board the sloop with my party, where several loyal Congress healths were drunk. We were now masters of the lake, and the garrisons depending thereon.
As Arnold headed back toward his new base at Crown Point, Allen and one hundred Boys rowed on into Canada. While they had agreed on it initially, as was his own custom to varnish and manipulate the truth, Arnold later depicted Allen’s incursion onto Canadian soil as “a wild, impractical, expansive scheme” carried out by “one hundred mad fellows.” What Arnold probably didn’t know, because Allen never told him, was that Allen was carrying out the second phase of his secret orders from the revolutionary leaders of Connecticut and Massachusetts.6
ETHAN ALLEN’S FIRST, brief foray into Canada ended unceremoniously on May 19. He camped across the river from the captured fort at St. John, while he sent a Major Brown on to Montreal to request the support already proferred by English merchants to the Boston Committee of Correspondence. Allen wrote to James Morrison, a wealthy wheat exporter who was chairman of the secret Montreal Committee of Correspondence. Morrison had met with Brown, earlier in the spring. Brown assured Massachusetts Patriot leaders that Morrison was one of many Montrealers transplanted from New England at the end of the French and Indian War who were willing to support Boston’s cause. In February, little more than two months before the British attack on Lexington, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress directed the Boston Committee of Correspondence to send a mission to Canada. Lawyer Brown carried a letter from Samuel Adams to the Canadians, inviting them to set up their own committees of correspondence. Marking the first step toward concerted revolutionary activities, these committees infuriated British officials but put leaders of all the colonies in constant contact, making it possible for them to act in concert. In early April, Adams sent Brown back to Montreal, this time to invite the English Canadians to send a delegation to the Continental Congress.
When Brown reached Montreal on April 9, only ten days before Lexington and Concord, he read Adams’s letter and made a motion that Montreal send two delegates to Philadelphia to represent the three thousand transplanted New England settlers and traders now living in Quebec Province. But, if they joined the radical cause, some Montreal merchants asked, would they have to join Congress’s embargo on trade with England? Yes, Brown answered. The motion failed. At least one of the merchants believed that Massachusetts would invade Canada “if a man of us should dare to take up arms against the Bostonians.” The merchants could agree only to set up a secret committee of correspondence, with John Walker, the province’s wealthiest merchant, as chairman.7
FROM HIS BIVOUAC on the Richelieu River opposite Fort St. John, Ethan Allen wrote on May 18, 1775, to the merchants of Montreal.
I Expect the English Merchants as well as all Virtuous Disposed Gentlemen will be in the Interest of the Colonies. The Advance Guard of the Army is Now at Saint John and Desire Immediately to have a Personal intercourse with You. Your Immediate Assistance as to Provision Ammunision and Spiritous Liquors is wanted and fourthwith Expected…. I am Impow’d by the Colonies to Purchaise the Same…. My directions from the Colonies is not to Contend with or any way Injure or Molest the Canadians or Indians….
Allen’s message never made it to Montreal, for the British had intercepted his courier, Joseph Bendon, a member of the Montreal committee.8
Allen awoke abruptly the next morning to “a Canonading of Grape Shot.” He found “the Musick was both Terrible and Delightfull.” He had been taken by surprise by a large force of Redcoats. To Noah Lee, the officer he had left in command at Skenesboro, Allen wrote on May 21, “None of our Party was Killed,” despite a bayonet charge by the Redcoats. The Boys stood their ground and returned fire that “Broke their [Redcoats’] ranks but we Know Not as we Killed any of them.” At a hasty council of war, Allen, Seth Warner, and the other officers decided to retreat ten miles to the Ile aux Noix, on the Canadian border, and fortify it. Allen intended to draw all the troops he could from other positions to this advanced base. Captain Lee was to leave only five or six men at Skenesborough and rush the rest of his company to reinforce Allen. But most of the Green Mountain Boys had already gone home to do their spring planting. Lee couldn’t spare anyone. Ignoring Allen’s request, Lee wrote back, holding out for a promotion. In his reply, Ethan assured him, “Undoubtedly we Shall all be rewarded According to our Merit in this or the Coming world.”9
WITHOUT REINFORCEMENTS, ALLEN again had to move his base camp back down Lake Champlain to Crown Point. He decided to open negotiations with the Indians. Since his boyhood on the frontier, he had hunted, fished, and feasted with Mohawk Indians in Connecticut and in the Vermont wilderness. He had gained much of his prowess as a famous hunter from the Indians. One hint of his affinity for the Indians is that they never molested any of the neighboring settlements on the Grants; another, that Allen had decided against transplanting his family to the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, still claimed by the Six Nations Iroquois, after the death of his father, an original proprietor of the region, and the murder of Teedyuscung by settlers from Connecticut. Immediately after the capture of Ticonderoga, local Caughnawaga Mohawks paid a friendly call and offered to serve with him, but said their Iroquois confederacy overlords forbade them to get involved. He learned from a band of Stockbridge Indians from western Massachusetts, also visiting him at Ticonderoga, that members of their tribe had joined Massachusetts militia companies and marched to join the siege of Boston. In a letter to the Connecticut Assembly, Allen described their leader, Captain Abraham Nimham, as “a friendly Stockbridge Indian” who had volunteered to carry a letter to Indians in Canada as “our Imbassador of Peace to our Good Brother Indians” of four tribes in Quebec province. To the Caughnawagas, Allen wrote,
I hope as Indians are Good and Honest men You will Not fight for King George Against Your Friends in America as they have Done You No wrong and Desire to Live with You as Brothers. I was Always a Friend to Indians and have Hunted with them many Times and Know how to Shoot and Ambush Like Indians and am a Great Hunter.
Allen offered to give the Indians money, blankets, tomahawks, knives, and paint if the Indians would come to join him. “I want Your Warriors to Join with me and my Warriors Like Brothers and Ambush the Regulars.” He offered “to Go with You Into the woods to Scout and my men and Your men will sleep Together and Eat and Drink Together and fight Regulars.” Even if the Canadian Indians remained neutral, “still we will be Friends and Brothers and You may Come and Hunt in our Woods and Come with your Canoes in the Lake and Let us have Veneson at our forts on the Lake and have Rum, Bread and what you want and be Like Brothers.”10
Sending a copy of this letter to the Connecticut Assembly at Hartford, Allen reported that his embassy to the Caughnawaga Mohawks was being led by Captain Nimham, the son of a chief of the Wappinger band at Stockbridge and also included Winthrop Hoit, who had been a prisoner of the Mohawks and spoke their language, and two Mohicans from Stockbridge. When Allen’s four Caughnawaga emissaries were intercepted at Fort St. John, they were instantly arrested by British regulars, hauled off to Montreal, and sentenced to death by hanging. Only the angry intervention of Mohawk chiefs had obtained their release. Nimham was able to go on to deliver Allen’s message to the Caughnawaga Mohawks.
AT THE END OF May 1775, Ethan Allen received his first direct communication from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The message shocked him, since it challenged his view of himself as an independent fighter and colonial leader who had to answer to no one. Congress expressed approval of his capture of the British forts and their trove of invaluable cannon but ordered him to “remove the Artillery to the South End of Lake George and there to make a Stand.” Allen argued that such a maneuver “must ruin the Frontier Settlements.” Didn’t Congress know that “Several Thousand families who are Seated on that Tract of Country Called the New Hampshire Grants” in settlements extending a hundred miles north of this arbitrary defensive position would be exposed to British retribution?
He wondered whether any member of Congress owned a map, his question already reflecting a growing divide between him and what he was coming to consider the upstart leaders in Philadelphia. The southern tip of Lake Champlain was almost as far south as the position Congress was advocating. Seizing the lake forts “at the Special request and Solicitation” of the governments of Massachusetts and Connecticut, “Those Very Inhabitants” have “Insensed Governor Carleton.” To dig up and haul the guns away and abandon control of Lake Champlain and its forts would give the British advance bases and leave the country neglected and exposed. Only two days earlier, Allen, Arnold, and their officers had held a council of war on board the captured British sloop and decided to advance with all their captured vessels to Point au Fer, six miles south of the Canadian border where the New York shore juts out into the lake, allowing control of the deepwater passage of ships. There, Allen and Arnold had agreed, they could successfully defend the frontier settlements and their eight thousand inhabitants.
For the first time, Allen contended that, if only Congress would send him an army of two or three thousand troops, he could take Montreal. He would have
Little to fear from the Canadians or Indians and would Easily make a Conquest of that Place and Set up the Standard of American Liberty in the Extensive province of Quebec whose limit was Enlarged [by the Quebec Act] purely to Subvert the Liberties of America. Strikeing Such a blow would Intimidate the Torie party in Canada…. They are a Set of Gentlemen that will Not be Converted by reason but are Easily wrought upon by fear.
The only way to stop Carleton and the British ministry’s scheme to remake America, Allen told Congress, was to project an American army into Canada.11
THE NEWS THAT Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, with Massachusetts Colonel Benedict Arnold at his side, had captured British fortresses in New York and seized their cannon jolted the Continental Congress, which had been far from ready to authorize such an overt act of war. It had not yet even established a military committee of any sort, offensive or defensive. Congress still was mulling what to do about the British attack on Lexington and Concord and the ferocious response of Massachusetts’ militias. A divided Congress was still reeling from this news when it received Allen’s letter announcing the captures of Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Allen’s bold attack horrified many conservative members of Congress. Until now, Congress had preserved the appearance of acting only on the defensive. Seizing Crown forts and taking prisoners complicated Congress’s task and reflected the growing chasm between the wise men in Pennsylvania and impetuous fighters like Ethan Allen in Vermont.
On May 18, Major Brown reached Philadelphia, and the secretary of Congress read aloud Allen’s report of the capture of the Lake Champlain forts. Behind the closed doors of the Pennsylvania State House, Brown briefed Congress on conditions in the north. On May 26, on the same day that it sent another conciliatory petition to the king, Congress passed a resolution to put the American colonies “into a state of defense.” On June 1, the delegates voted against authorizing or supporting any “expedition or incursion” into Canada. As fifteen thousand New Englanders, many of them combat veterans of the French and Indian War, massed along the siege lines outside Boston, Congress passed a resolution to take a tentative first step toward approving a continental military. The Virginia delegate George Washington, brevetted a brigadier in the last war against the French, was named chairman of a committee to study the disposition of the New York forts.
Congress remained visibly divided. It would be exactly another year before members were ready to debate independence. It was as if two committees, one aggressive and militaristic, the other diplomatically inclined and accommodating, had written the congressional resolution and spliced together the document ordering that, after seizing the lake forts to protect themselves, Ethan Allen and his neighbors were now to dig up and haul the heavy guns, not to Boston, but to the south end of Lake George. Then, “if necessary,” they were to apply to New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut for forces to “establish a strong post” there. But the first thing Congress wanted Allen to do was to take “an exact inventory” of “all such cannon and stores” so that they could be “safely returned when the restoration of former harmony between Great Britain and these colonies, so ardently wished for” rendered their return “prudent and consistent with the overruling law of self-preservation.”12
Slapping Allen’s wrist, Congress insisted he not seize any more of the king’s forts, and New York, it resolved, should not disturb the Redcoats in any other forts so long as they proved peaceable and did not attempt to erect any new fortifications. According to the careful wording of the document, New York, overwhelmingly Loyalist at the time, was not on the list of colonies that Allen could ask for troops. Yet New York was to get all the cannon from Ticonderoga and Crown Point along with the British sloop of war, Colonel Skene’s schooner, and the five bateaux taken at St. John. There it was, a prime piece of back-bending political compromise couched in lawyer’s language. When he read the document, Allen had little doubt that it was the handiwork of one particularly conservative New York lawyer, Congressman James Duane, the principal New York claimant to Vermont lands, the man who four years earlier had tried to bribe Allen to betray his neighbors in exchange for a large New York land grant and a good horse. Indeed, as a New York delegate to the Continental Congress, Duane was taking a vigorous part in the proceedings in Philadelphia, especially in any discussion of what was to be done in the north country. It was diffilcut to see how Allen could have thought anything else when he read Congress’s orders to pull back and abandon Vermont’s settlements to British reprisals.
WHEREVER BENEDICT ARNOLD ventured in the summer of 1775, Ethan Allen, uneasy with their forced alliance, tried to be somewhere else. Arnold had fashioned himself “Commodore of the Lake” and made his headquarters aboard the captured British sloop of war. He named it Enterprise and usually kept it moored at Crown Point. Allen designated himself “Commander of the Forts” and made Ticonderoga his base. He found out that Arnold had spread the word that Allen had failed to hold St. John after he, Arnold, had captured it along with half a dozen vessels. Arnold gloated to Dr. James Warren, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, that Allen and one hundred Boys had been “obliged” by two hundred regulars with six artillery pieces “to make a precipitate retreat with a loss of three of their men.” Arnold added that Allen and the Boys “have returned without provision and much fatigued” while he, Arnold, had fitted out the captured vessels with cannon and swivel guns.
There were only two things that Allen and Arnold agreed on. One was that something was terribly amiss in Albany. Between them, the two commanders had only 150 pounds of gunpowder to share among their troops and ship’s guns, and their repeated appeals for ammunition and supplies were being ignored by Albany. The other: that it was insane to abandon the forts and retreat to Lake George. Arnold wrote to Congress, this time calling himself “colonel and commander of Ticonderoga”—an active misrepresentation—that there were five hundred families around Lake Champlain north of Ticonderoga “who will be left at the mercy of the King’s troops and Indians.” They had joined the army and “cannot now remain neutral.” Together, Arnold told Congress, he and Allen had decided to advance to Point au Fer with their armed boats to “make a stand,” hastening to add that they would only “act on the defensive.”13
One of the leading citizens of the Lake Champlain region, William Gilliland of Willsboro, New York, could not refrain from writing to Congress to support his friend Allen:
There are now in these parts a very considerable number of men under the command of Mr. Ethan Allen, as brave as Hercules, and as good marksmen as can be found in America, who might prove immediately serviceable to the common cause, were they regularly embodied, and commanded by officers of their own choice…. [E]xcellent wood rangers and particularly acquainted in the wilderness of Lake Champlain, [they] would, in all likelihood be more serviceable in these parts than treble their number of others…especially if left under the direction of their present enterprising and heroick commander, Mr. Allen.14
While Arnold sailed north on June 10 on an inspection cruise, Allen called a council of war, technically the prerogative only of a commander in chief. Eighteen officers were present at the meeting: Ethan and Ira Allen, Seth Warner and Remember Baker, Major Samuel Elmore of Connecticut, Captain James Noble (the man Arnold had left in command at the Point), and a dozen of Arnold’s company commanders, lieutenants, and commissaries. Ethan asked Elmore to preside over the meeting. Outlining a plan of attack on the British entrenching the Ile aux Noix and completely ignoring, as increasingly was his wont, the instructions of the Continental Congress to pull back, Allen convinced the other officers that they should attack now and, at the same time, send a delegation to explain their decision to the Continental Congress. The assembled officers voted to send Allen, Baker, and Warner as a delegation to Philadelphia. In the resolution Allen himself had written to carry to Congress, the council advised Congress that some three hundred Redcoats had landed at Fort St. John and were building boats to invade Lake Champlain and retake the forts. Allen, the resolution added, needed Congress’s approval to raise five hundred men, but “as they are poor,” they would have to be put on the regular Continental army establishment. Even Allen must have blushed as the council voted unanimously to endorse his actions during the Lake Champlain campaign: “Colonel Allen has behaved, in this affair, very singularly remarkable for his courage, and [we] must, in duty, recommend him to you and the whole Continent.”15
Benedict Arnold arrived toward the end of the meeting and evidently didn’t interrupt it, but he was, predictably, fuming. Arnold later maintained that Allen and his second-in-command, Major Easton, had gone on record at the meeting as “in possession” of the forts. In Arnold’s view, once again, as before the attack on Fort Ticonderoga, they had trumped up a council of war to write their own orders and then had sent off its proceedings to the Continental Congress. Arnold summarized his reaction to the episode in the regimental memorandum book:
Colonel Allen, Col. Easton and Major Elmore had called a council of their officers and others not belonging to my regiment. I sent for Major Elmore, who excused himself. On which I wrote the council I could not, consistent with my duty, suffer any illegal councils, meetings, etc., as they tended to raise a mutiny. That I was at present the only legal commanding officer and should not suffer my commands to be disputed, but would willingly give up the command whenever anyone appeared with proper authority to take it.
To avoid the risk of Allen’s retaliating by ordering him seized, Arnold waited until nightfall and then rowed out to the Enterprise. Allen, too, was eager to get away from Crown Point before any more public display of the rift between them, but he waited until the next morning before climbing into a bateau with his officers. When he “attempted passing the sloop without showing their pass”—a pass signed by Arnold—the officer on duty on the Enterprise ordered Allen to come about and return to shore until he showed the proper pass. Arnold was insisting on his orders. Returning to the fort, he summoned Major Elmore for “private discourse.” Elmore explained that he had been sent by Connecticut with reinforcements. At this point, Major Easton brushed past the guard on the door and stalked into Arnold’s office. There is no record what Easton said, but, whatever it was, Arnold’s building frustration toward Allen boiled into a full-blown rage. Arnold wrote in the regimental memorandum book, “I took the liberty of breaking his head.” Losing his temper, resorting to brute force, Arnold drew his sword and cracked Easton over the head with the flat of the blade, demanding that the erstwhile inn-keeper, whom he considered a coward, fight a duel with him: “On refusing to draw like a gentleman, he having a hanger (sword) by his side and cases of loaded pistols in his pockets, I kicked him very heartily and ordered him from the Point.”16 Arnold remained unrepentant about this serious breach of decorum and military discipline by striking an officer in the presence of subordinates. To make matters worse, not only had he lost control in front of several officers, but any plan he had to return to the Canadian frontier was dashed when the Albany Committee of Safety decided at exactly this moment to pull back its men to Ticonderoga at the same time that Allen and his officers sailed away from Crown Point. It appeared there was a connection between Arnold’s treatment of Easton and the withdrawal of the New York troops. In fact, the Albany committee was only carrying out the orders of the Continental Congress and was pulling back all of its men to Ticonderoga on their way to Fort George. The coincidence merely deepened the rift between Arnold and Allen. Neither man knew that they both were about to be superseded with the arrival of massive reinforcements from Connecticut under a new commanding officer.
EVER SO SLOWLY, supplies and reinforcements came trickling toward Ticonderoga from the provincial congresses of New York and New England. Assured by the Continental Congress that the cannon were to be sent south, the New York Provincial Congress, meeting in New York City, sent one hundred barrels of pork, two hundred barrels of flour, and twenty barrels of rum to Albany to forward to the lake garrisons. But it would take Allen’s personal visit to the Continental Congress, six weeks after the capture of Ticonderoga, to break the logjam in Philadelphia. As they sailed down the Hudson River, Allen and his cousin Seth Warner heard for the first time of a terrible battle outside Boston that now made it virtually impossible to talk of peace and reconciliation with the mother country.
For nearly a month since Lexington and Concord, both the British inside Boston and the Americans surrounding them had been building up their strength. By mid-June, the Americans had about 15,000 men. On June 15, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress was informed that the British commander, Sir Thomas Gage, whose American wife probably again leaked the information, intended to occupy Dorchester Heights and decided to move immediately to fortify the high ground overlooking Boston. On the night of June 16, some 900 young farmers marched on the double to Breed’s Hill on the Charlestown peninsula. From its 75-foot-high summit, shells could be lobbed down on British warships in the harbor and on Boston itself. Marking out a small redoubt roughly 45 yards square, they began digging at midnight and ran the east wall, a breastwork, 100 yards down the hill to an impassable swamp. Expecting that the British would try to outflank them, they deployed 200 Connecticut marksmen behind a rail fence with a stone base 100 yards to the rear and downhill from the mud fort atop Breed’s Hill. Between the Mystic River beach and the fence lay fresh-cut hay. Soon they were reinforced by four companies of New Hampshire frontiersmen, who threw up a stone breastwork across the beach to the water’s edge. All night, 800 rugged farmers, including 7 freed African Americans, were busy digging a square hole 5 feet deep, piling the excavated dirt into a 6-foot-high wall behind it that baked hard in the searing noonday sun. They laid wooden platforms along the insides of the redoubt to stand on when firing, but they forgot to pierce the front parapet for their two small cannon. Two shots at point-blank range did the job.
At dawn, British forward observers were startled to find that the entire hill had been fortified overnight. General Gage called a hasty council of war. There was to be an immediate attack before the rebels could entrench the other hills and cut off the British from the mainland. The general officers decided on a quick and classic flanking attack up the Mystic River to Morton’s Point. As Bostonians hurried into their houses, crowded into windows, and scurried onto rooftops for a better view, British men-of-war maneuvered closer to shore, anchored, and disgorged their barges ashore as their cannon began sending shells crashing into the hillside in front of the redoubt. By noon, British grenadiers marched through the streets and down to the bank of the Charles River to wait for the landing craft to ferry them across. American snipers with long rifles posted in the deserted houses of Charlestown began peppering them, most of their shots falling short. British ships lowered their guns and shelled the town, setting it ablaze.
By the time the landing boats waited for the tide and inched up onto the beach, the sun blazed high and hot. The regulars wore their only uniforms, wool, and carried 125 pounds of weapons and gear, three days’ rations of boiled beef and bread and cooking implements on their backs. Their orders were to roll over the peninsula and march the four miles to the American camp at Cambridge and beyond, if necessary, to break up the rebellion before it could spread any further. From the start, things went badly for the British. Their field artillery mired down in the muddy fields. The advance light infantry, trotting up the beach on the right, stumbled into the reinforced rail fence and a withering fire. A bayonet charge proved impossible: the rebels were firing in rotation with no pause for reloading that would have allowed time to rush them. Row on row of Redcoats—most of them shot in the groin so they would never fight again—pitched into the fresh-mown hay as they tried to clamber across the fence. Ninety-six lay dead on the beach.
While the flanking effort failed, Howe had at the same time unleashed 600 men up the steep rough hillside over fallen trees, tangles of blackberry and blueberry through tall grass toward the strangely silent earthworks. Behind the breastwork, a fifty-seven-year-old veteran thanked God for sparing him to fight this day. Colonel Israel Putnam of Connecticut, cutlass in hand, lectured his sharpshooters: “Men, you are all good marksmen. Don’t one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” At one hundred yards, the Redcoats fired a volley, too high, too far away. At fifty yards, they fired again. Again, too high. Up they trudged, bayonets glimmering, until the Americans could make out the brass matchboxes on their coats. At fifteen yards, the earthworks erupted. Three long, scarlet rows of England’s best troops crumpled, pitching into the grass, thrashing and screaming.
Only the best American marksmen had fired, sighting in on the crossed white sashes of the Redcoats where they intersected at the belly. Behind the earthworks, young boys rammed home rusty nails and double-charged buckshot and bits of glass and lead balls and cloth wadding and handed them up to the sharpshooters on the parapet. By now, British artillery was pounding holes in the crude fort, sending shells through the useless little sally port, and killing defenders with solid-iron shells that skittered along the ground, shearing off arms, legs, and heads. Suddenly, the little fort turned into an open grave. As carefully as the sharpshooters had conserved their precious powder, untrained artillerymen had wasted it. They opened the last two cannonballs and divided the gunpowder among the marksmen.
Sensing victory, the British regrouped, charged through the ragged fire, surrounded the ramparts, and stormed over them. There was no way out. No escape route remained for the last 150 men trapped inside the fort. The British fired down into the mass of stumbling, running, yelling, rebellious Americans. Dr. Joseph Warren, the handsome young president of the Massachusetts Congress and the father of four small children, was shot in the head as he fled. One hundred and forty Americans died; 301 were wounded, of whom 30 were taken prisoner. Proportionately, it was the costliest victory in all British military history: 1,054 killed and wounded out of 2,000 combatants. Yet both sides were to claim a Pyrrhic victory. While ardent Patriots were sure that, given enough gunpowder, time, and men and the support of the rest of the colonies, they would be the match of the best soldiers in the world, at first, Patriot morale plummeted. Then, as news of British losses came from Boston, it skyrocketed. Inside blockaded Boston, even as they slaughtered their horses to get fresh meat and carts of moaning wounded rumbled over the rough rutted streets, the British command declared that they had fallen short of totally crushing the rebellion only because they lacked adequate manpower. General Howe demanded 30,000 fresh troops from London.17
ON JUNE 23, 1775, after a nearly two-week journey, Ethan Allen and Seth Warner, stopping off only briefly in New York City to draw £30 of travel money from the New York Provincial Congress, arrived in Philadelphia, the largest town in British America and the most populous place Allen had ever seen. He was accustomed to New England’s backcountry frontier settlements, where, often, the nearest house was a mile away. In Philadelphia, nearly twenty-five thousand people, three times as many people as in all of the New Hampshire Grants, lived in a two-square-mile area and ships with goods from as far away as the Mediterranean crowded the waterfront and towered over the elegant four- and five-story brick mansions of Society Hill.
Arriving on a market day, the Green Mountain delegation had to thread through a cavalcade of Conestoga farm wagons and herds of sheep and pigs. In the cool early morning air, clouds of steam rose from the flanks of great black draft horses as they strained to pull wagons crammed with cargoes of the produce, cheeses, baked goods, and cured hams of Pennsylvania German farmers. The canvas covers of the wagons fluttered as women and children inside jounced down Second Street Pike, the first cobbled street in America. Allen and his cousins passed the massive white spire of redbrick Christ Church before they crossed High Street, its long covered stone sheds coming to life for market day. As they approached the ornate Pennsylvania State House, the largest building in colonial America, they passed a long line of carriages, scores of them. No other town in America could rival the more than four score equipages in the town, or the snarled traffic they helped to produce. And everywhere, they saw militia drilling.
Just before Allen’s arrival, John Adams wrote his wife, Abigail, that he had seen
a very wonderfull Phenomenon in this City—a field Day, on which three Battalions of Soldiers were reviewed, making full two thousand Men. Battalion Men, Light Infantry, Grenadiers, Rifle Men, Light Horse, Artillery Men, with a fine train, all in their Uniforms, going thro the manual Exercise and the Maneuvres, with remarkable Dexterity…. All this has been accomplished in this City since the 19th of April [the date of the outbreak of fighting at Lexington and Concord]. So sudden a formation of an Army never took Place any where.18
Later that day, Ethan Allen and Seth Warner strode into the State House to present the Continental Congress with a declaration of principles signed at Crown Point by thirty-two soldiers and citizens of the Lake Champlain region and a request that Allen be allowed to brief the entire Congress on conditions on the Lake Champlain frontier. For him, it was an exhilarating and humbling moment. He was known as the hero of Ticonderoga, the sole hero of the Revolution so far. In the eyes of conservative Americans, a majority in New York and New Jersey when Allen and his cousins had just passed through, the ragtag New England army besieging Boston had been thoroughly routed in the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill.
Two days before the battle in Boston, the Continental Congress had appointed George Washington commander in chief of its newly minted Continental army, in part a gesture to include Virginia and the South in the until then entirely New England war. As Allen and his cousin rode into Philadelphia on June 23, Washington, with a small staff and an escort of Philadelphia’s shakoed First City Troop, rattled north over cobbled Second Street Pike and up the Boston Post Road to take command of New England’s forces. The news of what was being called the Battle of Bunker Hill reached Washington on the road. Congress had also appointed three major generals, including the Hudson River land baron Philip Schuyler, who was given command of the northern department, chiefly made up of New York and any territories where the American army became engaged to the north. Schuyler, a slave owner who employed hundreds of tenant farmers to farm his immense holdings in the Mohawk Valley and along the upper Hudson River, had served in the provincial assembly as the representative of Albany County through Allen’s struggle with New York claimants to the New Hampshire Grants. Many of the other New York claimants were his relatives or in-laws. As he hurried north, Washington stopped on June 25 in New York City to confer with Schuyler.
SPEAKING IN HIS SLOW, confident, distinctive voice, Allen told Congress that, amid all its military preparations and political organizing, he could not get food, ammunition, uniforms, or pay for his men. Unless Congress moved quickly, they could expect massive retaliation from the British. Governor Carleton was raising Loyalist militia, had reinforced St. John, and was building assault craft and escort vessels to come down Lake Champlain and retake the forts. Congress had to authorize an invasion of Quebec Province and seize Montreal and Quebec before the British could send massive reinforcements from England.
Many of the congressional delegates seated in high-backed Windsor chairs at the green baize-covered tables in the provincial assembly room were impressed by this tall, self-assured Colonel Allen they had heard so much about. As Allen outlined the critical state of affairs around Lake Champlain and argued for an immediate advance into Canada, all the New England Patriots who had ordered the Champlain campaign were in his audience. John Hancock and John Adams sat at the Massachusetts table. A bifocaled sixty-nine-year-old Benjamin Franklin, returned from a decade of frustrating diplomacy in England only a month earlier, sat at Pennsylvania’s table, his gouty foot propped on a special stool of his invention. Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, Peyton Randolph and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia sat coolly in their silks while the New Englanders in their heavy broadcloth suffered in Philadelphia’s sultry humidity.
Not everyone, however, was thrilled to see so much adulation paid to Ethan Allen. At New York’s table with James Duane, the king’s counsel at the 1770 Grants ejectment trials, sat another Hudson River land baron, Philip Livingston and his brother Robert, whom Allen had last seen scowling down at him from the bench of the Supreme Court of Judicature of the Province of New York. To all of them, including Allen, it was a paradoxical moment. Allen ironically was still was under sentence of death as an outlaw in New York. The nascent country needed to coalesce men of all socioeconomic classes, and this convocation, with Allen in attendance, underscored that as poignantly as anything.
Duane and many other wealthy conservatives in Congress, including a majority of the New York delegates, still favored continued attempts at reconciliation over an expanded war into Canada that would have to be launched from their province, which would thus be the first target of a destructive retaliation. Making no secret of his scorn for the man he had once tried to bribe to join forces with him in dispossessing settlers on the Grants if they would not pay a second time for their land and agree to higher annual rents, Duane for four years had drafted—and doctored—accusatory affidavits detailing Allen’s activities that he submitted as evidence in the New York Assembly hearings in 1774, leading to the outlawing of Allen and seven Grants leaders. One year earlier, Duane had written caustically of “Mr. Allen,” calling him “fickle and enterprising.” Allen, he wrote, “was joined by men of rash and violent tempers” who had “vainly conceived of themselves as invincible.” Later that year, Duane, still a British official paid by the Crown, served as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. He voted in favor of a plan of union proposed by Joseph Galloway, the conservative Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly and supported by the royal governor of New Jersey, William Franklin. The plan, which was based on a plan formulated by Governor Franklin’s father in an imperial crisis twenty years earlier, anticipated the British Commonwealth of Nations by 150 years. Under the Galloway-Franklin plan of union, which rested heavily on British acquiescence in the scheme, each colony would continue to govern its own affairs, but there would be a central administration of the American colonies that would consist of a president-general appointed by the king and holding veto power over the acts of a grand council, whose members were to be chosen for three-year terms by the assemblies of each colony. The governor and council would constitute an “inferior and distinct branch of the British legislature.” When the proposal came to a vote, it failed to pass and had to be tabled. Before it could be brought up again, the Sons of Liberty sent Galloway a box containing a torn life insurance policy and a noose. Galloway, who became the Loyalist police superintendant of Philadelphia during its British wartime occupation and later fled to England, resigned from Congress, and the proposal was never mentioned in Congress again.19
Despite their misgivings, the New York delegates went on record in the Journal of Congress as taking part in the unanimous vote that was one of the greatest triumphs of Ethan Allen’s life. Congress instructed General Philip Schuyler to “procure a list of the men employed in taking and garrisoning Crown Point and Ticonderoga.” He was to see that each man was to be given the same pay as officers and privates in the Continental army. Particularly pleasing to Allen was Congress’s recommendation that the convention of New York, “consulting with General Schuyler, employ those called the Green Mountain Boys under such officers as the said Green Mountain Boys choose.” Entering the congressional chamber an outlaw to New York’s royal officials, a traitor who had seized the king’s forts, Allen emerged the first Continental army lieutenant colonel of the Green Mountain Regiment. As a fringe benefit of his commissioning as an officer in the Continental service, he became, in American eyes at least, subject to military law and immune to prosecution and execution by the New York royal government. In the eyes of the Continental Congress, at least, Allen no longer had a price on his head.20
Later that day, President of the Congress John Hancock, the wealthy and urbane Boston radical leader who had so recently been a prime target of the British attack on Lexington and Concord, sent for Allen, whose boldness and charisma he admired. Allen was to carry a letter immediately to the New York Provincial Congress:
Gentlemen, By order of the Congress I enclose you certain Resolves, passed yesterday, respecting those who were concerned in taking and garrisoning Crown Point and Ticonderoga. As the Congress are of opinion that the employing the Green Mountain Boys in the American Army would be advantageous to the common cause, as well on account of their situation as of the disposition and alertness, they are desirous you should embody them among the Troops you shall raise. As it is represented to the Congress that they will not serve under any officers but such as they themselves choose, you are desired to consult with General Schuyler in whom the Congress are informed those people place a great confidence, about the field officers to be set over them.21
Certain that this meant that he had won the command of the new Green Mountain Regiment of the Continental army, Allen hurried off toward New York City, his cousin Seth at his side, only pausing long enough to say goodbye to his oldest friend and some wonderful new friends he had met in his short stay in Philadelphia.
BEFORE THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS and in the taverns of Philadelphia after hours, Ethan Allen enjoyed one of the most satisfying interludes in his tempestuous life. As soon as he arrived in the city, he learned that Dr. Thomas Young, his old friend and mentor from Salisbury, was now, not surprisingly, at the center of Philadelphia’s most radical revolutionary circle. The group around Young was by then known as the Independents and included Thomas Paine, whom Allen would quickly come to influence. Paine had arrived from England only six months earlier with letters of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin. He immediately launched in the city’s newspapers—under the pseudonym “Humanus”—epistolary assaults on the mother country he had just left behind. Raised as a corset maker, twice fired as a customs collector, and twice married and twice widowed, Paine went to work on Franklin’s newly founded Pennsylvania Magazine and wrote its opening essay. He edited the other contributors, including the Reverend John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey, and the lawyer-poet Francis Hopkinson. Paine’s blunt, direct, prosecutorial writing style instantly became popular, making the journal the best-read magazine ever attempted in colonial America. Paine delighted its rebellious readers with attacks on King George III, calling him “the Honorable plunderer of this country” and “the Right Honorable murderer of mankind.” Dr. Young’s and Tom Paine’s radical literary circle soon expanded to embrace Dr. Benjamin Rush and, when he returned triumphantly from England, Franklin himself.22
News of the fighting at Lexington and Concord, followed immediately by Ethan Allen’s electrifying conquest of Fort Ticonderoga, thrilled the editor Paine, who was quickly becoming more American than many Americans. When Allen arrived in town, Paine’s June edition was being pulled from the press. Allen and Dr. Young applauded Paine’s descriptions of “ministerial corruption” and “the tempest” around them. The loquacious Dr. Young regaled Allen with his account of the dozen-odd years since they had last toasted each other over tankards of hot-buttered rum. Young had moved away from Salisbury after his smallpox inoculation of Allen had led to his expulsion from the town and the collapse of Young’s medical practice. He settled in Albany and aided the Hudson Valley rent strikers. When Stamp Act protests swept America, Young organized resistance in Albany and became one of the founders of the Sons of Liberty, traveling to the first intercolonial conference of the Sons in Annapolis, Maryland, and the Stamp Act Congress in New York City. As he rose through the ranks of radicals, his medical practice began to fall off.
Moving to Boston, the epicenter of the gathering storm in 1766, he found new patients to support his sickly wife and six children. He discovered a tumultuous seaport where, as his brother put it, “American patriots were in full operation.” In the larger theater of Boston, the radicalized Young flourished. Among his patients and fellow Patriots was Samuel Adams. The two became political intimates. At Adams’s behest, the Boston town meeting of 1772 placed Young on two key committees. From then on, he was at the heart of the colonial protest movement. With a sword in hand at the Boston Massacre, he prevented more bloodshed after five Patriots were slain, then eulogized them at the first annual Boston Massacre Day. When merchants marched through Boston streets to protest British customs levies, they paraded “with Dr. Young at their head with three flags flying, drums beating and a French horn.” His early ties to Allen would prove pivotal in Allen’s own ascent in the politicial hierarchy of rebelling leaders.
In October 1772, while Allen and the Boys were driving New York surveyors off the Grants, Adams organized the first committee of correspondence to link radicals in all the colonial legislatures. Adams appointed Young one of the original twenty-one members of this historic committee. John Adams, in fact, praised Young as “an unwearied assertor of the rights of his countrymen.” An organizer of the Boston Tea Party who refused to wear a disguise, Young had made himself a marked man. Soon afterward, when the British retaliated by closing the port, Young was the first to speak openly of resorting to arms against “our oppressors.” Shortly after he wrote this to John Adams at the First Continental Congress, two British officers attacked Young on the street. The officers, aware that their commanding general was watching Young, beat him savagely and left him for dead. Young was carried home “all bloody,” he wrote, from a saber slash that glanced off his temple and struck his shoulder.23
Pursued by the British and fearing for his life, Young escaped to Newport, Rhode Island, on September 13 and then, still stalked by the British, dressed as a sailor and escaped by ship to Philadelphia only weeks before the Second Continental Congress learned of Allen’s bold attack on Fort Ticonderoga. As soon as he arrived, he wrote to Sam Adams, who was sequestered with the First Continental Congress. Adams found time to write a long letter to Young on October 17. He had apparently put off writing because he was disappointed that Young had fled Boston:
My dear sir,
…I regretted your Removal from Boston when you first informd me of it, but I trust it will be for the publick Advantage. Wherever you may be I am sure you will improve your ten Talents for the public Good. I pray God to direct and reward you…. I am with due regard to Mrs. Young, affectionately yours
Saml Adams24
Administering medication to members of Congress, Young brought his family to Philadelphia and, introduced by Sam Adams, plunged into its most radical political circle, lending his pen to revolutionary petitions and papers, befriending Paine and the prominent physician Benjamin Rush. Joining the revolutionary medical service as surgeon to a rifle company, he also worked late at night with Paine, Timothy Matlock, and Sam Adams, plotting to overthrow Pennsylvania’s conservative, Quaker-dominated government. Eventually, according to Dr. Rush, Young worked with Paine and Franklin in drafting the radical Pennsylvania constitution, the model for the Vermont constitution. He would also suggest the name Vermont for the new state. The week that Allen appeared before Congress, Young published a medical treatise on bilious fever in the Pennsylvania Packet. For Allen, reuniting with his old mentor Young, visiting Young’s family, and making friends in the Revolution’s most radical circle was a milestone in his evolution into a revolutionary philosopher. Before he left the capital, Allen renewed his vow to one day complete, with Young, the work of deistic philosophy they had begun so long ago but left only one-third finished.
BEFORE ALLEN COULD return to Ticonderoga, as he later learned from Benedict Arnold, the emissary Allen had sent to the Caughnawaga Indians in Quebec brought back word that the Mohawk chiefs were determined not to assist the king’s troops. But, at the same time, they had also ordered that any Indian who took up arms against the English would be punished by death. Five Caughnawaga chiefs, their wives, and children had accompanied Winthrop Hoyt to Crown Point with the message. Offsetting this discouraging news was intelligence received from Allen’s scouts in Canada that Governor-General Carleton had been able to raise only a force of twenty French Canadian noblesse and then only by promising them offices and honors. Disgusted with the English merchants of Montreal, Carleton declared martial law and threatened to burn the town if they would not help to defend it. He also learned en route that the Congress had directed that, since New York refused to send troops to garrison the lake forts, Connecticut was to send in a thousand reinforcements under a new commanding officer. This would resolve the dispute over command between Allen and Arnold. Both would be replaced by the commander of the Connecticut relief force.
The sanguinary battle at Bunker Hill had finally persuaded wavering congressmen that the British intended to crush the rebellion. The news awaiting Allen at Ticonderoga was that, the very day of his arrival at Ticonderoga, Arnold, under investigation by auditors for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, had resigned his Massachusetts commission after being superseded by Connecticut troops and investigated for padding his expense account—an action not surprising, given Arnold’s lavish tastes—by auditors from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. On his way back to his home in New Haven, Arnold stopped off long enough to visit the baronial Hudson River mansion of General Philip Schuyler in Albany. Schuyler had just learned from the Continental Congress that he was to prepare for an invasion of Canada, he reported to Arnold. Schuyler was shocked to learn that Allen’s years of frontier resistance were now being crowned by the Continental Congress with command of a Continental regiment. He urged Arnold to write a report criticizing Allen’s command:
When I left Crown Point, there were at that post near three hundred men, without employ, having received no orders to fortify; at Ticonderoga about six hundred in the same state; at Fort George, upwards of three hundred men; some few building batteaus, and on scouting parties. Very little provision at any of the places…. Great want of discipline and regularity among the troops. On the other hand, the enemy at St. John’s indefatiguable in fortifying, and collecting timber (supposed) for building a vessel.25
Shortly afterward, Schuyler sent a courier with a letter to Daniel Fay, one of Bennington’s town leaders. It was important, Schuyler stressed, that the leaders of the New Hampshire Grants choose their own officers and, by implication, not Allen. The message was not lost on Fay, who knew that other members of committees of safety had long feared reprisals from the Hudson River oligarchs, their neighbors, and especially wished to please Schuyler, whose command now included the Grants as well as New York.
HIS TIME TO TARRY in Philadelphia drawing to a close, Allen rode north to New York City, carrying the Continental Congress’s resolution making him a Continental army colonel in charge of the newly constituted Green Mountain Regiment to the provincial congress. As Allen headed north, the roads and ferries across New Jersey were thronged with Loyalists leaving the city and going to their country houses to avoid the upheaval on crowded Manhattan Island. The shocking news of the fighting in Massachusetts had produced a dramatic and sudden transformation in the city of New York. Even as the British had prepared to march on Lexington and Concord, the city’s Sons of Liberty had begun a systematic purge of Loyalists sympathetic to England. In April 1775, more than 22,000 residents crowded Manhattan’s one square mile. Only 5,000 residents remained one year later, many of them freed blacks.
The ominous scent of war, like the acrid smoke of an out-of-control, approaching fire, pervaded the entire city. All over Manhattan, volunteer militia companies were drilling. At King’s College, twenty-year-old Alexander Hamilton transformed his literary discussion club into a militia company. Drilling every morning in the churchyard of St. George’s Chapel in short green coats, they wore leather caps with the inscription “Freedom or Death” on the front and a cockade on the side. The time for drilling was brief. Rallying at the Liberty Pole in City Hall Park, the Sons of Liberty marched downtown to the East River docks and forced their way aboard two British munitions ships. Raiding City Hall arsenal, in the spirit of their comrades in New England, they carried off six hundred muskets plus bayonets and cartridge boxes. A week later, a crowd of five thousand, many of them laborers—virtually everyone in the city who had not fled—jammed City Hall Park as local committees crossed the line from resistance to revolution, forming a new provincial congress to control the colony. It, in turn, put the city under the control of a revolutionary committee of one hundred. Isaac Sears, a former privateersman, led 360 Sons of Liberty as they, echoing a new tradition begun by Ethan Allen, seized the keys to the customs house and declared the port of New York closed. The Sons of Liberty, a coalition of sailors and shopkeepers, took over the town watch, patrolling the streets at night.
New York’s deposed royal officials felt powerless to do anything but grumble. Attorney General William Smith Jr. confided to his diary,
It is impossible fully to describe the agitated State of the Town…. At all corners, People inquisitive for News. Tales of all kinds invented believed, denied, discredited…. The Taverns filled with Publicans at Night. Little Business done in the Day…. The Merchants are amazed and yet so humbled as only to sigh or complain in whispers. They now dread Sears’s Train of armed Men.
Another Loyalist called it a “total revolution.” New York City was being ruled by “a parcel of the meanest people, Children & Negroes.”26
WHETHER ALLEN SHOULD be allowed to present the resolution of the Continental Congress to the New York Congress provoked a sharp debate. Allen and Seth Warner wrote on July 4 to Eliphalet Dyer and Silas Deane, both members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation in Philadelphia. When Allen asked to address the New York Congress, meeting behind heavily guarded doors in City Hall at the foot of Broadway, he was forced to wait several days during a heated debate. Finally, it was Isaac Sears, leader of the Sons of Liberty, who insisted, as Allen reported, that Allen be allowed to speak:
We have been Detain’d in this City Longer than would have been Necessary had Not former Prejudices Interfered. We were Nevertheless this Day allowed to appear before the Congress and Defend our Characters against sundry Aspersions…. Having Acquitted our selves in the Opinion of by far the Majority of Members [we] were Honourably Treated and the Requisition of the honble Continental Congress was Comply’d with…. Next morning we shall Proceed to raise the men….27
New York’s congress included many members who had a serious conflict of interest in the day’s proceedings as major speculators in New York grants in Vermont. Although his appointment as a Continental officer had won him immunity from arrest and prosecution, no longer leaving a price on his head, several delegates to the New York Congress loathed Allen and considered it presumptuous of him to ask to speak to them.
When the provincial congress voted, a majority of 18–9 favored admitting him. The delegates from Albany, Richmond, and New York counties, where there was the heaviest speculation in Vermont lands, dissented. As the Continental Congress had recommended to New York (that’s all it could ever do, recommend), the divided New York Congress passed a resolution creating the Green Mountain Regiment, authorizing the election of officers by enlisted men. The provincial congress authorized commissions for two field officers and half a dozen captains and lieutenants, assuming that Allen would be the regimental commander.
On his way back to Ticonderoga, with Captain Seth Warner, his cousin and subordinate, Allen stopped over in Bennington. When they strolled into the Catamount Tavern on July 26, Allen received startling news. The New York Congress’s resolution provided for the election of two field-grade officers, one as lieutenant colonel, the other as a major. It did not stipulate just who they would be. In Allen’s absence, a convention of the committees of safety of twenty-nine towns east and west of the Green Mountains had met at Cephas Kent’s tavern in Dorset and elected officers for the new regiment. This flew in the face of Allen’s appeal to the Continental Congress and the resolution it had passed and forwarded to General Schuyler that the soldiers, as was the custom in New England, choose their own leaders.
In fact, the New York land baron Philip Schuyler, now in command of the northern department of the incipient Continental army, had been working behind the scenes to block Ethan Allen from taking command of the new Green Mountain Regiment. Hardly neutral on the subject of Allen and the Boys, Schuyler would write bluntly to the Continental Congress on July 21, denouncing the raid on the Loyalist Colonel Philip Skene’s manor as part of the attack on Fort Ticonderoga two months earlier. Labeling Allen and his men “a set of people calling themselves a Committee of War,” Schuyler told Hancock that the Green Mountain detachment, commissioned by Connecticut, had taken Skene’s forge and farm under the pretense of public service but actually “to embezzle everything.” Schuyler gave orders to restore Skene’s property so “that no disgrace may be brought on our cause by such lawless proceedings.”28
Schuyler failed to mention that, a little more than a week earlier, on July 12, he had written to Daniel Fay, one of the town fathers of Bennington,
Who the people are that are designated by the appellation of Green Mountain Boys, I am at a loss particularly to determine. Perhaps such of the inhabitants of this colony [New York] as reside on what are commonly called the New Hampshire Grants are intended. In this doubt I find myself under the necessity of applying to you for information, which I entreat, and make no doubt but you will give me with all that candor which, as a friend to your country, is your indispensable duty to do.
Schuyler then urged Fay to take whatever steps were necessary “as that the Green Mountain Boys, whoever they may be,” might immediately elect their officers, “and fill the regiment without delay.” He went on to tell Fay that Governor Trumbull of Connecticut and President Warren of the Massachusetts Congress had urged him to advance the Green Mountain Boys to Canada and to “invest Montreal.” But, Schuyler added, he refused to do this without orders.29
Schuyler also received an urgent correspondence from William Marsh, a grandee of Bennington’s equally conservative neighbor, Manchester, that some independent-minded town leaders might revolt against the faraway Continental Congress’s dictates. Marsh wrote to Schuyler on July 16 that he had heard of the new regiment authorized by the Continental Congress and that the Grants towns were to select their own officers: “I hope you will consider before you grant either warrants or commissions, for I am bold to say that neither the settlers nor the committees in the towns in the New Hampshire Grants have not been consulted on this important matter.”30 A former Green Mountain Boy, Marsh had attended the January 31 convention of committees of safety and, alienated by what he considered disloyalty to the king, thrown in his lot with New York, representing Charlotte County in the New York Provincial Congress, and doubtless voted against Ethan Allen.
When the leaders of Vermont’s southern towns convened again on July 26, in Kent’s tavern in Dorset, a majority were older, wealthier, and more conservative than the men Allen had led for so many years. Nathan Clark of Bennington chaired the meeting of delegates from twenty-nine towns. Many were alarmed by Allen’s confrontational tactics. Still not aware of the broader implications of the Revolution, they were worried that he would bring down the wrath of the British and their Indian allies on their settlements. Some committeemen, especially Clark, were outspoken born-again Great Awakening Christians who remained appalled at Allen’s youthful attacks on Puritan leaders, were horrified by his conversion to Anglicanism, and were scandalized to learn that he had been read out of towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut for his irreverent clashes with the clergy and magistrates. Ignoring the wishes of the Continental and New York congresses, the village elders rebelled. By a landslide 41–5 vote taken by secret ballot, the convention elected the devout Congregationalist Seth Warner, not Ethan Allen, as colonel in command of the Green Mountain Regiment. In all, the convention elected twenty-three officers. In addition to Warner, four other Allen cousins received commissions. Heman, who had left his store in Salisbury to bring the orders from Hartford that triggered Ethan’s capture of Ticonderoga, retained his captaincy. Ethan’s youngest brother, Ira, and his cousins Ebenezer Allen and Remember Baker were commissioned lieutenants. But Ethan Allen was not even elected a lieutenant.
To Allen, this was an entirely unexpected blow. An overnight folk hero whose exploits were appearing in newspapers the length of America and in Europe, he had been rejected by the very neighbors whose lands he had so long protected. For nearly five years, he had organized, trained, and led the Green Mountain Boys as they shielded these same farmers first from New York’s courts’ seizures and then from invasion by the British. Allen’s rejection came only six days after his gracious and conciliatory letter to the New York Assembly, praising “the union that hath lately taken place between the [New York] Government and those its former discontented subjects, [by] making a united resistance against [British] ministerial vengeance and slavery.” His brusque and confrontational tactics had finally caught up with him.31
To Allen, at this humiliating moment, it seemed more a betrayal by the people who had lived so close to him that he had never suspected their feelings toward him. More, it felt to him like a mortal wound, far more injurious than anything the British could have delivered. As a clerk was reading his conciliatory letter to the provincial congress in New York City, the man who had kept the New York “landgrabbers” at bay for five years was reeling from the overwhelming nature of his rejection by his own Vermont neighbors. To Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut, Allen wrote,
Notwithstanding my zeal and success in my Country’s cause, the old farmers on the New-Hampshire Grants, who do not incline to go to war, have met in a Committee meeting, and in their nomination of officers for the Regiment…have wholly omitted me….I find myself in favour with the officers of the Army and the young Green Mountain Boys. How the old men came to reject me, I cannot conceive, inasmuch as I saved them from the encroachments of New-York.32
In fact, Allen realized that many of the older, wealthier, and more conservative landowners had never liked him. They considered him a reckless troublemaker whose guerrilla tactics surely would one day bring retribution from the royal government. Some Vermonters just found him arrogant, but his premature attempt to take and hold the reinforced fort at St. John also called his military judgment into question. Many of the gray-haired town elders far preferred the cautious style of Allen’s more conservative cousin, Seth Warner, who long had held the commission of captain in charge of Bennington’s militia. Warner, whose family had moved to Bennington from Mary Baker Allen’s hometown of Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1763, was considered a member of one of the more established Bennington families, Ethan a newcomer and interloper. Warner, like his cousin over six feet tall but modest and unassuming, could scarcely have offered a more striking contrast to Allen. When Allen and Warner presented themselves to Schuyler at Ticonderoga, Schuyler told him that the congressional resolutions left the choice of all officers to the people. He did not tell them he had instigated the shift from the Green Mountain Boys’ electing their officers to authorizing their election by far more conservative village elders, thus asserting his authority over the New Hampshire Grants and virtually nullifying the settlers’ years of resistance to New York authority.
After their meeting with Schuyler, Allen expressed his outrage, but Warner, now in command, would not back down. After a violent quarrel, the two parted. But it was clear to both men that an important shift had taken place in the frontier settlements. At Vermont’s seminal political convention at Dorset, delegates decided almost unanimously that they wanted their troops under a commanding officer who would collaborate with them, a planner even if he was a plodder, not an opportunist like Allen who, far worse, took the Lord’s name in vain when he was with his bumptious men. Ethan’s brothers Ira and Heman and cousins Remember Baker and Ebenezer Allen decided against resigning their commissions; Ethan decided to serve as a volunteer. Ira, writing in his memoirs of the growing rift between Ethan and Warner, told of Schuyler’s fear
that the contest between Allen and Warner would result in few enlistments, but neither Ethan Allen nor his brothers took any action to that end. Far from taking offense and sulking in their tents in a fit of Achillean anger, all rallied to the common cause…. Had Warner been of similar temper, he would have insisted on Allen’s appointment.
Instead of an independent Vermont regiment serving under the Continental Congress, after all the years of border strife the Green Mountain Boys dissolved into what Ira Allen denominated “Warner’s regiment,” serving under Schuyler and “enrolled under the Province of New York,” still a royal, and largely royalist, province of the British Empire. “Not without difficulty were men led to enlist under Warner’s leadership, nor were those who did so all that could be desired in number or quality.”33
NOT LONG AFTER the attack on Fort Ticonderoga, the citizens of Bennington gathered at First Church, a few hundred feet from the Catamount Inn, to hear the Reverend Jedediah Dewey, brother of the owner of another tavern that stood opposite the Green Mountain Boys’ headquarters, lead a thanksgiving and prayer service. The oldest meetinghouse in Vermont, the church was packed, with Allen and his officers and many of the men who had stormed the fort in its pews. The Reverend Dewey went on at great length, praising the Almighty and giving credit to God for the victory. After he heard Parson Dewey connect divine providence with the triumph for the third time, Allen could stand it no longer and stood up.
“Don’t forget, Parson, that I was there,” he called out.
Parson Dewey pointed his finger ominously at Ethan. “Sit down, thou bold blasphemer!”
Less than three months after his greatest achievement, while technically he still held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Continental army, Ethan Allen was out.34