WHEN FRANCE ENTERED the American Revolution in 1778 after the American victory at Saratoga, the war was transformed from being primarily a land war to being a worldwide naval war. The British held on to strong posts in Quebec, Halifax, and New York City but shifted to a strategy of defensive war coupled with diplomacy and espionage. From the headquarters of Sir Henry Clinton in New York City, the British secret service, headed by Major John André, was working to detach disgruntled Americans from their loyalty to the Continental Congress. On March 30, 1780, Ethan Allen was riding down the high street in Arlington, Vermont, when a man in the garb of a farmer galloped up and handed him an envelope. While the man waited, Allen tore open the seal and quickly scanned the letter. Waving the messenger off, he nudged his horse toward the home of Governor Chittenden, where he had been going for the council’s daily working meeting. “Within ten minutes,” he later wrote to the Continental Congress, he had turned the envelope over to the governor.1
At first glance, Chittenden might have been offended: the letter was addressed to “Governor Allen” by Colonel Beverley Robinson of the King’s American Regiment, a Loyalist unit based in New York City. Robinson, a high-ranking Loyalist working closely with the British secret service, was already deeply involved in clandestine negotiations with Benedict Arnold to betray West Point and its garrison. Robinson wrote to Allen, “I have often been informed that you & most of the Inhabitants of Vermont, are opposed to the wild and chimerical scheme of the americans; in attempts to separate this Continent from Great Britain & to Establish an Independt State of their own….” Perhaps inadvertently, Robinson was acknowledging the existence of Vermont by referring to its chosen name, while Congress and neighboring states still insisted on nebulous circumlocutions.
Not the first New York land baron to offer Allen a bribe, this time more than a horse and a little cash, the Loyalist leader was writing secretly to offer to make Allen a Loyalist general if he would take “an active part [in] embolding the Inhabitants of Vermont in favour of the Crown.” How this must have echoed James Duane and James Tabor Kempe’s bid, a decade earlier, for Allen’s aid in evicting settlers from their New Hampshire–granted lands or, five years earlier, from royal officials during his incarceration in England. Each bribe offer lefthandedly acknowledged Allen’s preeminence as the leader of the people of Vermont. Now, in return for Allen’s support, Vermont could “obtain a separate Government under the King & constitution of England.” Allen could, if he accepted Robinson’s offer and won the certain approval of British commander in chief, Sir Henry Clinton, from Loyalist regiments “under such officers as you shall Recommend.” The letter implied that Allen would be placed at the head of a new royal province’s government and have all his land grants confirmed by the king. If Allen took the offer as an insult, the Loyalist leader asked only that he allow the courier to “return in safety.” If he went along with the scheme and Clinton balked, “the matter shall be buried in oblivion between us.”2
Allen later said that he at once grasped that here was an opportunity to neutralize the continuing threat to Vermont from British ships and Loyalist and Indians raiding parties that continued, year after year, to attack all along the shores of Lake Champlain and deep into its river valleys. At the same time, to appear to play along with Colonel Robinson might bring pressure on the Continental Congress to recognize the importance of continued Vermont support at a time when the Revolution appeared to be stalemated. Robinson’s remarkable letter arrived at a propitious moment, as Ethan, not averse to playing both sides against the middle, could see. The governor’s council had just received another stinging rebuke from the Continental Congress. Many members, swayed by intransigent New York delegates, insisted that, even by entertaining the annexation of towns in New Hampshire, Vermont had subverted the unity of the United States. Although towns in New Hampshire and along the upper Hudson had sought annexation to Vermont to assure protection against British raiders from Canada, Congress and the governments of both New Hampshire and New York were blaming Vermont and were less likely than ever to admit Vermont to the Union. Surrounded by enemies, Allen was ready for a new line of attack. He urged Chittenden and his half dozen other councillors to keep quiet about Robinson’s letter while they considered the possibilities for exploiting it.
About one o’clock on the hot afternoon of May 31, 1780, Keziah Taylor, seven, and her sister Betsey, five, wandered into the dense forest around her family farm in Sunderland. Three hours later, their anxious father, Eldad, knocked on the door of neighbor Ethan Allen’s cottage: would he join a search party? At dusk, some one hundred men clambered into the underbrush, bearing torches and blowing hunting horns as they searched fruitlessly all night. The next day, more men and women came from nearby towns. By the third day, about seven hundred men, some from Massachusetts and New York, joined the desperate round-the-clock effort. That afternoon, milling around Taylor’s farmhouse, the weary rescuers were debating calling off the hunt when Allen leapt onto a stump and berated them. They were parents. How could they think of leaving the children “perishing with hunger and spending their last strength in crying for their father and mother”? Allen vowed he would go on searching until he found the girls or died trying. Who would join him? Instructing the men to march an arm’s length apart, he told them not to fire a gun until they found the “lost girls.” Four hours later, a captain of the Green Mountain Boys discovered the girls asleep under a tree, unharmed. They had survived on berries.3
THE BRITISH HOPED, by bribe and espionage, to lure Vermont back into the British Empire, thus driving a wedge between New York and New England; at the same time, they set out to prevent another American attack on Canada from the Hudson River forts, where George Washington was now basing the bulk of his army. In Quebec Province, General Frederick Haldimand, the Swiss-born former second-in-command to General Howe, had become governor-general of Canada, replacing Sir Guy Carleton, who had been superseded for failing to retake Lake Champlain and its forts in the 1776 campaign. Each year, from his base in Montreal, Haldimand launched attacks down both shores of the lake. Convinced by his spies that a combined Franco-American force would try to liberate French-speaking Quebec and add it to the United States, Haldimand maintained bases at Fort Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Ile aux Noix, five miles inside Canada, and sent raiding parties of ever greater strength against Vermont. Haldimand worried that Allen and his Green Mountain militia,
once united with Congress, would be very formidable enemies, having been from their early contests with their neighboring province continually in arms…. They are in every respect better provided than the Continental troops, and in their principles more determined. [They are] ready to a man to turn out upon the first alarm with provisions upon their backs…. [They] have always made me anxious to prevent the Union [with the United States] they seem so bent upon accomplishing.4
There had been sporadic raids ever since the first British invasion of 1776. As Burgoyne’s army marched south in 1777, Indians raided into Vermont’s northern valleys, burning houses, barns, and crops on isolated farms and taking men and boys as prisoners to Montreal’s jails.
Shortly after Allen’s appointment as brigadier general and before he could build up supplies and enlistments, Haldimand decided to launch an attack on the Allens’ settlements in the Winooski Valley. A combined force of Loyalists and Mohawk Indians broke up after squabbling. Their July 28 raid “only destroyed some barns and a couple of mills upon the lower part of the Onion River,” Haldimand reported to Secretary of State Germain in London. He explained that his next target would be settlements from Crown Point to Ticonderoga that could supply provisions for an American army attacking Quebec from the south. Haldimand intended to destroy those farms after hauling the hay north on shipboard to feed the king’s horses.4
In late September, Benedict Arnold’s plot to turn over West Point to the British and, with it, Washington and his visiting suite of generals collapsed when Major André, appointed by Clinton to head his secret service, ignored Clinton’s instructions and was captured in civilian clothes behind American lines with detailed schematics of West Point and reports on troop strengths hidden in his unmistakable English boot. By this time, Colonel Robinson had sent copies of his original letter of enticement to Allen, and twice more the governor’s council had decided to shelve them. Within the next month, Haldimand unleashed two devastating British raids on Vermont. In the first, on October 16, a British force of regimental strength that included some three hundred Mohawks descended on the widely scattered farmsteads along the White River, destroying dozens of homes and barns, killing livestock, and burning the town of Royalton. Of the four settlers killed, the Indians speared two men in revenge for the killings of two Indians before the war.
Obviously demonstrating the consequences of ignoring Colonel Robinson’s blandishments, only one week later the British attacked again, in even greater force. On October 24, Colonel Christopher Carleton, a nephew of Sir Guy Carleton who adopted the Indian lifestyle, bore Mohawk tattoos, painted his face, and married an Indian woman, attacked Vermont with a mixed force of a thousand troops, including Loyalists, Hessians, and a hundred Mohawks. War canoes flanked two men-of-war, the Lady Maria and the Carleton, named after the major’s aunt and uncle, as the flotilla sailed south, attacking settlements and gathering prisoners as it went, and sending them north to the Montreal jail. By the time Carleton reached Fort Ticonderoga, forty Vermonters shivered under a tent on the Lady Maria’s deck. On November 6, Carleton’s force reached Otter Creek and destroyed all the buildings and supplies below Middlebury Falls. It next attacked up Otter Creek, burning cabins and seizing seven settlers at Weybridge who had not heeded warnings of the attack. At Panton, it destroyed the home of Peter Ferris, a Quaker who had bought his lakefront land from the Allens. While their home burned, Ferris and his son, deer hunting across the lake, were captured when they returned. Four more prisoners were taken at New Haven. In all, Carleton shipped off fifty-one prisoners to Canada: en route, a handful managed to escape, including Allen’s brother-in-law Israel Brownson, who had served with him at Ticonderoga and Montreal and once before been a British prisoner. (Brownson was either the luckiest or the unluckiest man in Vermont: thrice a prisoner of war, he was shot thirteen times during the Revolution and survived.) In all, Carleton’s raiders destroyed seven buildings and “four month’s provisions for 12,000 men,” he reported to Governor Haldimand.5
AS IF STRATEGICALLY timed to coincide with Carleton’s raid, the arrival of a British cutter in East Bay off Castleton four days later signaled the onset of two years of secret negotiations between Ethan Allen and a British spy who was a former member of the Green Mountain Boys. Representing Haldimand, Lieutenant Colonel Justus Sherwood of the Queen’s Rangers landed at the Mills, a frontier outpost of Vermont’s militia four miles west of the Castleton blockhouse, under a flag of truce with a “drum, fife and two men.” Before he was blindfolded and led to Colonel Samuel Herrick’s quarters, Sherwood, as he later reported to Haldimand, calculated that the troop strength at the outpost was a mere three hundred. A former Green Mountain Boy who had left his farm at New Haven on the Lake Champlain shore and fled to Canada during the 1776 British invasion, he had formed a Loyalist corps and commanded it in the battles at Saratoga. Agent 008 in the British secret service, he supervised all British intelligence activities in Vermont, running a network of spies based in Montreal. Allen certainly knew this.
When Herrick “demanded my business,” Sherwood wrote, “I informed him I was sent by Major Carleton to negotiate a cartel for the exchange of prisoners.” More importantly, Sherwood carried dispatches from General Haldimand to Allen and Vermont Governor Chittenden. Herrick told Sherwood that “General Allen commanded at Castleton and that my dispatches should be forwarded without delay.” The next day, October 29, 1780, Sherwood noted in his journal, he “had an interview with General Allen.” After breakfast, they “removed to Major [Isaac] Clark’s house”:
General Allen summoned a council of ten field officers and informed them that I was sent to negotiate a cartel for exchange of prisoners but as he found that my instructions was [sic] somewhat discretionary he desired, previous to entering on business to have a short conference with me by himself that he might clearly understand my ideas and assist me in explaining my business to them. To this they consented.
Sherwood reported to General Haldimand,
I walked out with him and after much conversation informed him that I had some business of importance with him, but before I communicated it must request his honor as a gentleman that, should it not please him, he would take no advantage of me nor ever mention it while I remain in the country. He said he would if it was no Arnold plan to sell his country and his own honor by betraying the trust reposed in him.
Sherwood also reported that he told Allen “that General Haldimand was no stranger to their disputes with the other states” and that “His Excellency was perfectly well informed of all that had lately passed between Congress and Vermont and of the fixed intentions of Congress never to there being a separate state.” From Allen’s “common character,” Congress was only duping the Vermonters and waited for a favorable opportunity to crush them, that this was a proper time for them to cast off the Congress yoke and resume their former allegiance to the king of Great Britain:
General Allen observed that the proposals so far had not the weight of a straw with him, that he was not to be purchased at any rate, that he had been offered a lieutenant colonel’s commission while in captivitiy which he refused…but that since the proposals seemed materially to concern the whole people of Vermont whose liberties and properties for a number of years past was much dearer to him than his own life, he should take them into very serious consideration. He then said we must go in as we had already been too long together.
Allen and Sherwood had “another short conference that evening” and the next day, October 30. Sherwood “conversed with him till 2 o’clock free of any restraint” and told him, “I had brought written proposals with me and had secreted them but could procure them if he thought proper. He advised me to let them rest.”
In his lengthy report, long overlooked by American historians, Sherwood summarized “our several conferences.”
General Allen says he finds himself surrounded by enemies on every side, the most inveterate is New York; that he is heartily weary of war and wishes once more to devote himself to his philosophical studies…that nothing short of the same tyrannical proceedings from Congress towards Vermont which Congress at first complained of suffering from Great Britain…should ever cause him to deviate from the cause….
Allen would consider a truce and a prisoner exchange, and would listen to further suggestions by Haldimand just so long as Haldimand would propose “no damned Arnold plan to sell his country and his honor by betraying the trust reposed in him.”6
Yet he then dangled the intelligence that Vermont would soon publish a manifesto that it would “declare herself a neutral power,” cease sending troops and supplies to support the Continental army, and “invite all people to a free trade with her.” Allen promised to send his brother Ira and Major Daniel Fay to negotiate the prisoner cartel. Meanwhile, for his part, Sherwood promised there would be no further British attacks on Vermont or the northeastern frontier of New York during their negotiations. Should New York attack Vermont, the British would have a force ready to protect Vermont. In that extremity, Allen would “expect to command his own forces.” But “Vermont must be a government separate from and independent of any other province in America.”7
THE CEASE-FIRE THAT Allen had arranged with the British command in Canada under the guise of an exchange of prisoners of war prevented any further British attacks on the shores of Lake Champlain for the next three years. He seems not to have entertained any question whether Governor Chittenden and the other Vermont leaders he let in on the secret compact would repudiate it or chastise him for it. Allen was never more confident that he spoke for Vermont. Indeed, Carleton’s raid had already convinced Chittenden and the other members of the executive council that they could no longer ignore British overtures. When another copy of Robinson’s March 30 letter arrived under flag of truce, the governor’s council, aware of intense espionage taking place all around them, decided to keep entirely secret all meetings and correspondence with the British while they carried out private talks that might provide leverage in pursuing admission to the Continental Congress over New York’s adamant objections. Now, as a result of Haldimand’s overtures, Allen was able to drag out, until war’s end, the secret negotiations for a cartel to exchange all Vermont prisoners of war incarcerated in Montreal for the Loyalist and British prisoners held in the Windsor jail. All this time, Allen, through his trusted intermediaries Ira Allen and Daniel Fay, led Haldimand and his seconds to believe that the citizens of the republic of Vermont would, in due time and after careful preparation, return to their allegiance to the king. Concomitantly, in an attempt to win the support of any sympathetic New Yorkers, Allen insisted that the truce include northern New York. As they dragged their feet and leaked to spies for Washington and the Continental Congress that they were considering rejoining the British, the Allens became the principal negotiators with Sherwood in talks on shipboard at the British base off Crown Point and at Loyal Fort on Ile aux Noix, inside Canada, where Ira met twice with the chief British negotiator, Justus Sherwood.
Allen appears to have been sincere in negotiating a prisoner exchange as well as hoodwinking the British and manipulating congressional support, but a prisoner exchange by the Americans without the authorization of George Washington had become impossible. The British accused the Americans of violating a surrender agreement signed by Benedict Arnold and a British officer near Montreal during the Canadian campaign of 1776. Washington refused to allow Allen to trade prisoners taken by Major Brown and Captain Ebenezer Allen when the Vermont regiment took British works at Fort Ann and atop Mount Defiance, overlooking Ticonderoga, during the Saratoga campaign of 1777. Washington insisted on his firm policy that prisoners held far longer must be exchanged first and then rank for rank. He would go only so far as to write to Haldimand to protest the “close and rigorous confinement of suffering” Vermonters and demand that officers be sent to New York City for exchange “in the due order of their capture.”8
BY JULY OF 1781, Washington was already planning his joint attack with the French army and navy on British forces under Cornwallis that had backed into a trap on the Yorktown Peninsula of Virginia, where he would appeal futilely for support by the lethargic Clinton. After three weeks of fruitless talk between Ira Allen and Joseph Fay at Ile aux Noix with Sherwood, Haldimand was growing suspicious. He declared that he would give the Vermont leaders until October, when the Vermont General Assembly reconvened, to come to an agreement and meet British terms, or he would send in his army and force a decision. Meanwhile, Allen was spreading persistent rumors of the secret negotiations to induce the Continental Congress to act. He was so successful that George Washington, unnerved by Benedict Arnold’s defection to the British and egged on at first by New York’s General Philip Schuyler, began to believe that Ethan Allen was indeed a traitor and a spy and authorized Schuyler to try to arrest him. This ruled out further visits by Allen to the Continental Congress, which took him through New York. Washington actually sent to Vermont a spy, the same Ezra Hickok whom Allen had sent into Fort Ticonderoga the day before his famous attack. Hickok apparently reassured Washington about the true nature of Allen’s bold gambit.
Finally, fear that Vermont and its combat-seasoned troops would accept the British offer prompted a congressional committee to recommend admitting Vermont to the confederation. On that news, a Vermont delegation led by Ira Allen hurried to Philadelphia, but by the time it arrived, it found Congress astir over captured British documents that revealed the Crown’s intention to regain Vermont. Congress, also alarmed that Vermont had recently annexed corners of northern New York and Massachusetts, once again reversed itself and refused to reconsider Vermont’s status until it shed all of its annexations.
For three years, the Machiavellian Ethan Allen had been playing a dangerous game, going back and forth between the British and the Continental Congress, letting each know only part of his dialogue with the other, all the time keeping Vermont on its independent course. After this latest failure to win congressional approval, Allen urged Haldimand to be patient. He confided that the Vermont General Assembly would refuse Congress’s conditions for recognition. On Allen’s recommendation and the junto’s redoubled assurances, Haldimand prepared a proclamation confirming the terms of reentry, including confirmation of Vermont land titles, free trade with Canada, and the protection of the British army. To Allen’s mind, Washington’s refusal to exchange prisoners taken from the independent republic of Vermont gave him the justification he needed for Vermont to continue its own independent negotiations with Haldimand for prisoner exchanges. His negotiations finally did succeed, even without Washington’s cooperation, in winning a general exchange of prisoners between Vermont and the British. In the summer of 1781, the prisoners seized during the October 1780 raids went home.
When he at length successfully negotiated the basis for present and future exchanges, Allen wrote to Colonel Carleton, in command of the British-held fort at Crown Point, that he was pleased that “the present Cartel respects Vermont.” That mattered mightily to Allen, and, at times, he must have wavered as Congress and all the surrounding states rebuffed Vermont. He was well aware that such an agreement between Haldimand and Vermont meant not only that Vermonters captured by the British could expect to be returned to their families after suffering captivity for far less time than he had but also that, as Washington must know, it was tantamount to British recognition of Vermont as an independent state. Only the British, it seemed, would acknowledge Vermont’s sovereignty, its independent existence.9
But Allen remained cautious. Even to his old friend General John Stark, who had led Vermont and New Hampshire troops to victory in the Battle of Bennington, he refused to spell out all his dealings: “The transactions of this State in making a truce with the British” would be made plain in a manifesto at some indefinite future date. Until then, “people must be content” with “conjectures.” He added bluntly, “I am at a loss to form an Idea what the people of the United States would have Vermont to do.”10 Twice, Congress had promised to admit Vermont to the Union, only to renege when New York threatened to secede from the confederation and pull its troops out of the Continental army. So much of Vermont’s difficulty in gaining statehood obviously was coming from New York. In March of 1781, Allen argued to Samuel Huntington, president of Congress, that he personally had a “Sincear Attachment to the cause of my Country” but that “Vermont has an Indubitable Right to agree on terms” for a truce with England so long as “the United States Persist in Rejecting her Application for a Union with them.”11
AFTER THE DEFEAT of the British army at Yorktown in October of 1781 all but ended any fighting, Allen broke into print again, spelling out, in The Present State of the Controversy, that he doubted, now that the Revolutionary War was drawing to a close, that Congress would “rouse the whole confederacy and destroy Vermont.” This was “as unlikely as that the tail of the next comet will set the world on fire.” By mid-June of 1782, Allen was writing to General Frederick Haldimand, the British commander in Canada, that Congress’s latest refusal to admit Vermont into the Union “has done more to awaken the common people to a Sense of their Interest and resentment of their Conduct” than all the years of open opposition by New York. Congress “by their own act declare that Vermont does not and shall not belong” to the Union. “I Shall do Every thing in my Power to render this State a British province.”12
But did Allen mean it, or was he only wedging the door open for future ties between Vermont and Canada? Had he ever meant it? By this time, Haldimand suspected that Allen and his damnable Vermonters had outwitted the British, by promises and foot dragging, shielding Vermont from British invasion for the past five years. Cornwallis had surrendered, and Guy Carleton was preparing the British evacuation from the United States. The British government once believed that its Loyalist informants were accurate when the Anglican Reverend Charles Ingles wrote, “It would not be difficult to bring over Allen.”13
The British spymaster in Vermont, Agent 008, Captain Justus Sherwood, Allen’s old friend in the Green Mountain Boys who had personally led secret negotiations at Crown Point, believed that Allen would lead a Vermont army to attack Albany, but that it would be “a work of time.” That time had dragged on, as first Ethan, then Ira and Ethan, and then only Ira met infrequently with Sherwood, eventually confining their meetings to the Ile aux Noix. Ethan and Ira scrupulously turned over written communications to the governor’s council, but when the general assembly was not kept abreast of the talks, some delegates began to doubt that Ethan had been able to avert further invasions by “a hook in the nose.” Tired of the political wrangling, Allen resigned as brigadier general of the Vermont militia.14
EVER SO SLOWLY, the British authorities came to realize that Allen and his junto were equivocating. Haldimand was the first to express his doubts about Allen—“I am assured by all [Loyalist spies], that no dependence can be had in Him,” he wrote as early as 1780. “His character is well-known and his Followers…are a collection of the most abandoned wretches that ever lived, to be bound by no Laws or Ties.” Sherwood wrote to Haldimand in February 1781 that either Allen was “sincere” and the plot to join Vermont to Canada was “drawing to a favorable conclusion much faster than I ever expected, or he is a most subtle, designing fellow.” Haldimand finally ran out of patience and warned that he was preparing an invasion of Vermont in October of 1781, but then he learned that Cornwallis and the southern British army had surrendered at Yorktown. As he waited for further instructions from England, tens of thousands of Loyalists began to flee to Canada, to England, to Caribbean islands. Finally, Frederick Haldimand realized that he had been duped.15
BETWEEN 1778, WHEN he was released from captivity, and 1784, Ethan Allen served as commander in chief of Vermont’s militia, unelected member of its assembly, chief diplomat to the Continental Congress and the New England states, close personal adviser to Governor Chittenden, and ex officio judge of Vermont’s court of confiscation. The war hero, the counselor of state, he became the public face of Vermont, inside and outside the republic. All bluster and dash on the surface, Allen was all the while careful to urge Governor Chittenden to grasp any opportunity to correspond over the heads of the Vermont government and the Continental Congress, directly with General Washington. Congress deliberated on Vermont’s admission to the Union again in August 1781 and, this time, only New York voted its continued opposition.
BY 1781, MANY Vermonters in the Connecticut Valley were becoming disenchanted with the Allens, Chittenden, and the Arlington Junto, especially their inability to ward off British attack, above all after Carleton’s raid and a bloody raid on Royalton, more than halfway across the state. By then, New York and Massachusetts both were claiming that Vermont belonged under their jurisdiction, rendering Congress incapable of any decision on Vermont’s right to statehood. Meanwhile, the New Hampshire towns along the Connecticut River once again were demanding to join Vermont, this time opposed by Vermont towns along the river whose leading landowners remained loyal to New York and were eager to escape the domination of the Arlington Junto. In the summer of 1782, the Vermont Assembly responded in force, sending Allen with four hundred militia across the mountains in a raid on Guilford in Windham County, where two sets of officials had been contesting control for several years. Allen declared martial law in the name of the Vermont legislature and demanded back taxes. Anyone who did not swear allegiance to Vermont would have to leave for New York.
FINALLY DETERMINED TO break the impasse, General Washington, dealing secretly through military couriers from his base at New Windsor on the Hudson, was supplying Chittenden with the resolutions of Congress. On January 1, 1782, he wrote again from Philadelphia on his way north from his final victory at Yorktown. Chittenden had used the pretext of a letter congratulating Washington on his great victory to spell out the “essence of the dispute.” Washington wrote back privately, chastising the Vermonters for what was obviously, to him, their land-grabbing ploy:
Now I would ask you candidly, whether the Claim of the people of Vermont, was not for a long time confined solely, or very nearly, to that tract of Country [called Vermont and] the late extension of your Claim upon New Hampshire and New York, was not more of a political Manoeuvre than one in which you conceived yourselves justifiable….[Y]our late extension of Claim [has] rather diminished than increased the number of your Friends…. [I]f such extension should be persisted in, it will be made a common cause. [It is] a loss of too serious a nature not to claim the attention of many people.
There is no calamity within the compass of my foresight, which is more to be dreaded, than a necessity of coercion on the part of Congress….16
Washington, who knew that Governr Clinton was chomping at the bit to attack Vermont, then wrote privately to General Philip Schuyler, some of whose lands Vermont had annexed. Schuyler, prodded by one son-in-law, Colonel Alexander Hamilton, and turning a deaf ear to further arguments of another son-in-law, James Duane—Hamilton’s law preceptor—now openly swung his support to Vermont’s independence. Washington told Schuyler that he had shown this “private” letter “to a number of [his] friends, members of Congress and others…. Perhaps it may have some effect upon the leaders of Vermont.” Washington was also writing to other rivals of Vermont’s leaders in New York. He bluntly warned Governor George Clinton that the majority of New Englanders, especially among his officers, supported statehood for Vermont.
Almost as soon as they heard from Washington in February of 1782, Allen met with the Arlington Junto, which authorized Governor Chittenden to send a resolution of the general assembly racing south to Washington’s headquarters. Vermont had decided, after all, to return once and for all to its former boundary lines. In addition, Vermont was sending Ethan Allen and three other “agents” to the Continental Congress “to negotiate the admission of the state of Vermont into the confederation of the United States.”17
ABOUT NINE MONTHS after Allen’s return to Vermont in 1778, the Allens’ fourth daughter, Pamelia, was born early in 1779. Mary Brownson Allen had suffered greatly during Ethan’s imprisonment, probably doubting at times that even her Ethan was strong enough to survive. His recovery had been remarkably swift: by July 15, 1778, only two months after his return, he could write to Horatio Gates from Albany, where he had gone on business, “I am now in a State of Perfect health.” Unfortunately, Mary was not. She had long complained about chest pains. For the next four years, as Ethan came and went—to Philadelphia, to Connecticut, to Boston, to Poughkeepsie—Mary stayed home with the children. It was the longest time they ever shared together, living in a deep valley, her small, square, clapboarded house surrounded by tall, dark evergreens. Even while sick, she was always expected to care for a large group of people. And although her three grown daughters supported her, she was constantly kept busy by two babies, brothers, in-laws, her husband, and a friend or two of his, talking politics and punch. Ethan must have noticed the coughing spells as they lasted longer. Then Mary became bedridden and, in June of 1783, worn out at age fifty, she died of tuberculosis. There is no written record of Ethan’s reaction, although some people thought he wrote the lines of lachrymose verse that appeared in the next Vermont Gazette. But he must have been moved. A few days later, he sold Mary’s brother Gideon a right—some 350-odd acres—on the Heroes, the two islands in northern Lake Champlain granted to the Allens and the Green Mountain Boys. He charged Gideon only one shilling. The customary price was £50.18
WHAT LIFTED ETHAN Allen’s spirits amid so much sickness, unhappiness, and uncertainty was his lifelong habit of writing. Encouraged by the popularity of his captivity memoir and provided with enough cash from royalties to buy himself not only land but leisure, he penned long pep talks for his neighbors in the Green Mountains. By 1784 he was signing himself, in letters to Ira, “From the Philosopher.” During one of his visits to Philadelphia in 1781 to charm and arm-wrestle members of the Continental Congress, he tracked down the widow of his old friend Dr. Thomas Young and, en route back to Bennington, he found her living in poverty with her five children on her family’s farm in Dutchess County, New York. He brought home to Vermont the opening chapters of the deistic work they had begun in collaboration two decades earlier. It is unimaginable that he did not help her with some of the cash he received from his book. He did, in fact, find a job for Young’s son in Vermont’s government and petitioned the Vermont Assembly for a sizable land grant for the children of the man who helped to draft the Pennsylvania model of Vermont’s constitution and gave the state its name, but the general assembly turned him down.
For three winters, writing consumed much of Allen’s time. In the winter and spring of 1782, he began to write a volume of rational philosophy, the first deist work published in America (although Allen still insisted he couldn’t be quite sure he was a deist):
In the circle of my acquaintance (which has not been small) I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I have 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; mine will therefore determine the matter….19
In his 1785 work, the 477-page Reason, the Only Oracle of Man, Allen attacked conventional Christianity and all other forms of revealed religion, labeling them a “torrent of superstition.” The historian T. D. Seymour Bassett has written that Allen was “against superstition, miracles and anything that violated natural law” and believed “in the rationalism of common sense, immortality, morality and progress.”20 In what became known as “Ethan Allen’s Bible,” he employed his special brand of ridicule to mock the idea that the devil was turned loose on two innocent young people in the Garden of Eden, “just out of the mold” and “destitute of learning or instruction, having been formed at full size in the space of one day, and consequently void of experience.” At least God could have given them a bodyguard of angels. He heaped special scorn on superstition and on the clergy, beginning with Moses, “the only historian in the circle of my reading, who has ever given the public a particular account of his own death.” Allen had never understood how full-grown, otherwise intelligent people could take the Bible seriously. He blamed this, too, on the clergy. Writing at the end of a revolution that was changing every other fact of life in America, he claimed that “priest craft is being discredited at roughly the rate of fifty percent per annum.”
Allen attacked dogmatic religion and supernaturalism in general, positing, instead of this “dreary” system, a natural religion based on the use of reason. “As far as we understand nature, we are become acquainted with the character of God, for the knowledge of nature is the revelation of God”:
If we form in our imagination a compendious idea of the harmony of the universe, it is the same as calling God by the name of harmony, for there could be no harmony without regulation, and no regulation without a regulator, which is expressive of the idea of a God.
Morality, he argued, came not from the Bible “but from the fitness of things.” It was not the exclusive domain of Christians and certainly did not require predestination. From his studies, Allen also found morality “interspersed through the pages of the Koran.” According to him, morality “is founded on eternal right” and does not require the revealed words of Scripture:
Reason therefore must be the standard, by which we determine the respective claims of revelation…. [I]f reason rejects the whole of those revelations, we ought to return to the religion of nature and reason…. Preposterously absurd it would be, to negative the exercise of reason in religious concerns, and yet be actuated, by it in all other and less occurrences of life.
He refused to espouse the dark visions of the hell’s-fire-and-brimstone orthodox Puritanism: “God is infinitely good;…therefore there cannot be an infinite evil in the universe.”21
As Allen explained to his close friend and attorney, Judge Stephen Bradley, he was trying to debunk the central Calvinist doctrine of predestination by negating its linchpin, original sin. Writing to Bradley from Bennington on September 7, 1785, as he waited for his book to come off the press, he argued against the fundamental Christian doctrine that human beings have been perpetually tainted by the sin of Adam and the never-ending “Vindictive displeasure of Almighty God for it”:
On the Christian scheme, God was Criminal, Judge, & Executioner, and thus having wrought an everlasting Righteousness, imputed it to a certain Elect number, of favourites, and doomed the residue of the human race, to Everlasting wo[e] and perdition….
I Fancy sir, you will be diverted when you read the 12th Chapter, it rips up, and overturns the whole notion of Jockeying, alienating, transferring, or imputing of Sin, or Righteousness, from one person to another, and leaves all mankind accountable, for their own moral agency. This is fatal to the Ministerial Damnation Salvation, and their merchandize thereof.
Attacking the clergy with as much reckless abandon as he had Ticonderoga or Montreal, he took on Protestants and Catholics alike:
In order to carry on this Priestcraft, the Clergy must invalidate the law of Nature, Reason is represented as Carnal, and depraved, and the natural State, a condition of mankind, to be damnable, to make way for their mysteries, insperations, and pious frauds, and thus most of the Human race, have been miserably Priest-ridden.
To remedy the human species, from this Ghostly Tyranny (as far as in me lay,) was the Object of my writing, the Oracles of Reason, an Object worthy of Genl Allen, whatever his success may be.22
Reason, he contended, had to replace reliance on miracles.
Allen’s self-described “compendious system of natural religion” was, according to the family genealogist John L. Barr, an amalgam of “English Deism, Spinozan naturalism,” and “what would later become known as New England Transcendentalism.”
ALLEN WAS NOT entirely prepared for the violent reaction to his book. For six months, his manuscript languished in the Hartford print shop that had turned out so many of his earlier writings quickly. The printer obviously hesitated to print something so anticlerical in Puritan-dominated Connecticut. Fetching it back, Allen sold large quantities of land and pressed his debtors to pay up scarce hard cash so that he could pay the Bennington printer Anthony Haswell, to run off fifteen hundred leather-bound copies. He sent off the first forty copies to influential friends, including one to his former captor, the new governor-general of Canada, Lord Dorchester (the former Sir Guy Carleton).
To Benjamin Stiles of Woodbury, Connecticut, his former partner in the failed lead mine in Northampton, Massachusetts, he wrote,
As to my philosophy…. The curiosity of the public is much excited, and there is a great demand for the books, they will in all probability reach Woodbury, in the course of the winter. In one of them you read my very soul, for I have not concealed my opinion, nor disguised my sentiments in the least, and however you may, as a severe critic, censer [sic] my performance, I presume you will not impeach me with cowardice. I expect, that the clergy, and their devotees, will proclaim war with me, in the name of the Lord, his battles they effect to fight, having put on the armour of Faith, the sword of the Spirit and the Artillery of Hell fire. But I am a hardy Mountaineer, and have been accustomed to the dangers and horrors of War, and captivity, and scorn to be intimidated by threats, if they fight me, they must absolutely produce some of their tremendous fire, and give me a sensitive scorching.23
Allen sent a copy to Paris to the French philosophe Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, whom he had met in Philadelphia. Crèvecouer had farmed in Dutchess County in upstate New York not far from Bennington. At first unsympathetic to the Revolution and targeted as a Loyalist, he fled to France, forced to leave behind his American wife and their three children. In Paris, he published his classic commentary on “the new man,” Letters from an American Farmer. He returned to America as France’s vice consul general and discussed philosophy several times with Allen during Allen’s frequent visits to Philadelphia as Vermont’s agent, lobbying Congress for statehoood. During his absence from America, Crèvecoeur’s American wife died, and his three children were being raised as orphans. When he returned to France again after the American Revolution, his book a success, he took his place in the salon of his close friend, the influential Comtesse d’Houdetot, an ideal position for introducing the work of his friend Ethan Allen.
To Crèvecoeur in Paris, Allen wrote,
I am not so vain as to imagine that my theology, will afford any considerable entertainment, to the enlightened mind of Mr. St. John, or to any learned Gentlemen in France. Yet it is possible, that he or they, may be Somewhat diverted, with the untutored logic, and Sallies of a mind nursed principally, in the Mountanious wilds of America. And since it is the almost universal foible of mankind, to aspire to something, or other, beyond their natural, or acquired abilities, and as I feel the infection I desire, that Mr. St. John, would lay the oracles of Reason, before the royal academy….
Allen added that “the Clergy in this County, reprobate the work, and anathematize the writer of it!”24
In September of 1785, three years after he began to write Reason, Allen advertised it in Haswell’s Vermont Gazette. The Reverend Timothy Dwight, soon to be president of Yale College, later summed up the Puritan theologian’s view of Reason as the “Contemptible plagiarism of every hackneyed, worn-out, half-rotten dogma of the English deistical writers….”
When it came out, I read as much of it as I could summon patience to read. Decent nonsense may possibly amuse an idle hour, but brutal nonsense can only be read as an infliction of penal justice. The style was crude and vulgar, and the sentiments were coarser than the style. The arguments were flimsy and unmeaning, and the conclusions were fastened upon the premises by mere force.25
While Dwight characterized Reason as “the first attack on Christianity,” not everyone agreed. Vermonters who applauded “Ethan Allen’s Bible” rarely commented on it, except Tom Paine, who had been a boon companion of Thomas Young and had met Allen in Philadelphia after arriving from England in 1775 and many times later when the Vermonter came to lobby Congress for statehood. Paine had found a sinecure as secretary to the congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs. He was aware of the work, which anticipated by ten years his The Age of Reason.
Some twentieth-century historians believed that Paine borrowed heavily from Allen’s Reason. The biographer John Pell quoted John E. Henry, the historian of Benedict Arnold’s march to Quebec: “Long after the publication of Allen’s book, which had fallen into oblivion even with its readers, that vile reprobate, Thomas Paine…filched from Ethan Allen the great body of his deistical and atheistical opinions….” As the Reverend Nathan Perkins, a Congregational missionary touring Vermont while on leave from his parish in Connecticut, wrote in his journal, “About one quarter of the inhabitants and almost all of the men of learning [are] deists.” Basing his impressions on visits to about two dozen households, Perkins traveled 150 miles to the edge of settlements on the west side of the mountains and back in forty-seven days. “I have rode more than 100 miles and seen no meeting house!” he wrote from Governor Chittenden’s farm in Williston. A disgruntled Perkins recorded that the governor gave him only a dollar and that Mrs. Chittenden made him dine with the farmhands. Perkins came away from his Vermont sojourn with a jaundiced view of its populace:
People pay little regard to ye Sabbath, hunt & fish on that day frequently. Not more than 1-6 part of the families attend family prayer. About 1-2 would be glad…to support public worship & ye gospel Ministry. The rest would chuse to have no Sabbath—no ministers—no religion—no heaven—no hell—no morality.
Touring the Vermont frontier on a sabbatical from his Hartford congregation, Nathan Perkins recorded in his journal that he was appalled to find every stripe of Protestant, Jew, Catholic, Quaker, deist, and agnostic, for a Calvinist such an intolerable diversity in a New England state. He did not grasp the central point that Vermont’s religious diversity was, as the historian Bassett has phrased it, “central to the understanding of successful resistance to New York’s political and Congregationalism’s religious authority.”26
The historian Robert E. Shalhope found that Allen’s longest work had a lasting effect outside Vermont:
In this book, the most radically democratic of all his works, Allen supported a natural religion resting upon man’s reason rather than the revealed religion based upon the Bible and the hierarchy of ministers that held sway throughout New England. In place of a fearsome Calvinistic deity, Ethan offered a benevolent god who allowed each person, through the use of intelligence and conscience, to judge between right and wrong. In essence, Allen democratized religion, just as he had democratized all other social and politcial aspects of his culture. Unlike his earlier publications, however, his attack upon the Bible predictably brought the wrath of clergymen down upon his head.27
Unfortunately for Ethan Allen, many of the citizens of Bennington, where he had lived for most of his years in Vermont, were horrified at the book that Allen penned in the hip-roofed house right next door to the Congregational meetinghouse. (The house was demolished in the early nineteenth century to make way for an extension to the graveyard.) While some town historians claim that it was a bolt of lightning, possibly hurled from heaven, that set fire to the five hundred uncirculated copies of Reason, others are certain that Haswell, who was just launching his own printing business, was so thoroughly terrified by the irate indignation of the town’s Congregationalists that he himself burned the rest of the pages in his own fireplace. Only the forty copies Allen had already shipped and some he had at home escaped the flames. Whatever actually happened, Allen began to think it was time to move away from Bennington as soon as he could find a way. By then, however, he had another motive, to some in Vermont more scandalous than his theological skepticism.