IN THE YEARS JUST AFTER the Revolution, a depression in trade in America caused growing political discontent as well as economic hardship. With the public credit destroyed by huge war debts and the loss of British and French gold, currency was in free fall. Disbanding the army had produced widespread unemployment. The reimposition of Britain’s Rule of 1756 restricting trade to Canada and the British Isles to “English goods in English bottoms,” the Confederation teetered on the brink of collapse. Competition between states sharpened. New York demanded a customs duty on every boatload of firewood from New Jersey vital to fueling and heating New York City. Pinched New Jersey boatmen put pressure on their legislature to tax New York for the lighthouse and plot around it on Sandy Hook that belonged to New York City. Connecticut exacted heavier customs duties on imports from Massachusetts than on those from Great Britain.
As thousands of New Englanders poured into Vermont, more than tripling the population in a decade, the newcomers often ran up bills and faced lawsuits, the courts filling with debt cases and attorneys who came to harvest them. By 1786, the assembly was receiving a torrent of petitions complaining of court costs and legal fees. One unpopular Bennington lawyer who had moved up from Princeton was called “Jersey Slick.” Early in 1786, Vermonters, reflecting a sensibility that had already begun, were petitioning the legislature to have lawyers expelled and debts canceled. By the mid-1780s, no one seemed to have any money. Most people sought extensions from creditors.
Ethan Allen was away then, seeking an extension from a creditor, the Hartford firm of Hudson and Goodwin, printer of a pamphlet he had coauthored six years earlier, offering to repay the debt in cattle he had raised and asking for more time—a commonplace request in cash-strapped post-revolutionary America. Like those of most Vermonters, Allen’s creditor wouldn’t wait. Barzillai Hudson wanted the full amount and wanted it immediately. Allen’s attorney was Stephen R. Bradley, a young Yale-educated Revolutionary War veteran who had emigrated from Massachusetts during the war, quickly rose to colonel of the Green Mountain Regiment, and was one of the first admitted to the Vermont bar. When Allen’s case came up, Bradley argued before the court that he didn’t owe Hudson, because the signature on the note wasn’t in his handwriting. Furious, Allen interrupted Bradley. He hired Bradley to get an extension, not to lie for him. “That is a true note,” he told the crowded court. “I signed it, I’ll swear to it, and I’ll pay it. I want no shuffling, but I want time.” The judge approved the extension.1
“I am drove almost to death for money,” Allen wrote to his brother Ira. While he owned thousands of acres of Vermont land, nobody had the money to buy it. For three weeks, Ethan went from courthouse to courthouse in Connecticut and Vermont, juggling judgments. He didn’t even have enough cash to pay the property taxes on three tracts of land in the Heroes that the Onion River Land Company had sold and he would have to refund their entire purchase price if he couldn’t come up with fifteen dollars. He asked his cousin Ebenezer, who was operating a tavern and a ferry on South Hero, to stall for time. “We are rich poor Cursed rascals By God,” Allen told Ira.2
All over Vermont, by late summer of 1786, farmers facing foreclosures were desperately trying to block foreclosure hearings and forced sales. That August, two hundred farmers had milled outside the Rutland County courthouse as the Vermont Supreme Court deliberated debtors’ cases. Haswell’s Vermont Gazette reported that they were “manifesting appointed resentment” and cursing lawyers as “banditti” and “pickpockets.” Although the Gazette reported that “nothing of a riotous or unlawful nature took place,” the crowd warned both lawyers and judges to “take notice how you impose upon those who have passed thro’ the wilderness and endured fire, famine and the sword [to obtain] their own rights.” The crowd continued to menace the lawyers until a hundred Vermont militia arrived to break it up.
The economic distress continued well into the fall. In October, angry crowds harassed surveyors trying to lay out town lines and lots in the Northeast Kingdom, a mountainous region full of squatters. The mobs included settlers whose land titles had been clouded by earlier surveys, some made by Surveyor General Ira Allen. Two weeks later, in Windsor, thirty armed men, wielding guns, bayonets, swords, clubs, and deadly farming implements, attempted to keep the county courts from opening. From October 31 to November 13, mobs clashed with Windsor County sheriff’s deputies, only dissolving when six hundred Vermont militia arrived. Four days later, another riot broke out when the Rutland County court reconvened. A “considerable number” of men carrying bludgeons petitioned the court to adjourn. When the judges refused, one hundred protesters, led by Colonel Thomas Lee, stormed the courthouse and “in a most insolent manner began to harangue and threaten the court.” The next day, the mob took the judge and the sheriff prisoner. Calling themselves Regulators, the term first heard on the North Carolina frontier in the early 1770s, they seized the courthouse and called for reinforcements. When one hundred and fifty Vermont militia arrived the next day, the mob evacuated the courthouse but lingered nearby. The militia arrested the leaders of the protest, among them a Vermont assemblyman who was fined heavily and expelled from the legislature. But two days later, another angry crowd, some two hundred strong, surrounded the local colonel’s house, demanding to know what would happen to the prisoners. He assured them that the rumor that they were being mistreated in jail was false, and the crowd broke up.3
AS THE CRITICAL YEAR of 1787 began, Captain John Marshall of Virginia wrote to a former Revolutionary War comrade in arms, with an air of despair hanging over veterans like themselves. On New Year’s Day, the future chief justice of the United States Supreme Court wrote to General James Wilkinson, “All is gloom in the Eastern states.” Massachusetts, where the fuse of the Revolution had been lit only a dozen years earlier, was now, wrote Marshall, “rent into two armed factions.” A civil war between armed and embittered frontier farmers, many of them veterans, and Boston politicians and merchants loomed not only in Massachusetts but also as far south as North Carolina. Currency and land speculators were in control of state legislatures.
As two private Massachusetts armies formed to march against each other, Marshall worried that he could get very little accurate news from New England, but he feared that “an appeal to force has, by this time, been made to the God of Battles.” Marshall had himself wintered, often hungry, with George Washington at Valley Forge. He feared that the rebellion on the New England frontier would spread south through the Appalachian backcountry and destroy the fragile fabric of the young American confederation. “Such violent, bloody dissension as this so-called Shays Rebellion casts a deep shadow over the new nation,” Marshall wrote Wilkinson. “I fear we may live to see another revolution.”4
Other former Revolutionary War leaders shared Marshall’s forebodings. The thirteen newly independent states, economically impoverished, were behaving more like warring nations than members of the same victorious confederacy. Marshall was embarrassed to write that he had even been unable to obtain a passport for General Wilkinson to cross the Potomac River from Maryland to Virginia on his way to Kentucky. In Vermont, Allen wrote to Frederick Haldimand, Canada’s governor general, offering to supply beef cattle to British troops garrisoning Quebec Province. Haldimand wrote back and apologetically declined Allen’s offer because British policy on “free trade” with the republic of Vermont was unclear. The Allen brothers nonetheless were already exporting to Canada lumber taken from the Winooski Valley on a huge raft. Levi Allen had set up a business in St. Jean-sur-Richelieu, and Ira was supplying him from the Vermont side. But their notes and drafts were being refused by Canadian merchants. Often, the only way debts could be paid was by barter. One bill introduced into the Vermont Assembly called for merchants to accept cattle as currency, a measure that the Allens, who were raising cattle, supported.
AS THE ECONOMIC crisis deepened, George Washington and other revolutionary leaders conferred at Mount Vernon and decided to call a convention at Annapolis, Maryland, for the autumn of 1786. The conference, attended by representatives of six states, ended abruptly when news arrived that debt-ridden farmers in the Berkshire Mountains on the New England frontier, on Vermont’s southern border, had rebelled. When the Massachusetts state government tried to collect taxes to pay the interest on bonds issued to pay the state debts and bought by wealthy Boston merchants, widespread tax foreclosures ensued. A high percentage of the region’s farmers, no longer able to pay tax collectors, now faced eviction with their families from their farms. The rebels, as Massachusetts politicians quickly denominated them, were especially bitter because the Massachusetts legislature had adjourned on July 8 without heeding their plea to issue paper money or to pass “stay” laws that would halt foreclosures on farms and homes. At a town meeting at Worcester on August 15, discontent boiled over into angry calls for action that led to a Hampshire County convention of some fifty towns at Hatfield a week later.
In a tense gathering, town delegates condemned the Massachusetts Senate, the lawyers, the high costs of obtaining justice, the entire tax system, and the lack of paper money. While the conventioneers advised against the use of force, armed violence broke out. One week after the Hatfield convention, on August 31, an angry crowd of armed men prevented the judges and court officers at Northampton to sit; another week and protesters closed the September session of courts at Worcester. The same anger that had fueled the Revolution was now aimed at the new sitting government. Crowds barred judges and lawyers from entering the courthouses at Concord and Great Barrington, chasing away the sheriffs and stopping the sheriffs’ sales. Near panic, Governor James Bowdoin dispatched six hundred militiamen to guard the Massachusetts Supreme Court in Springfield.
On both sides, the situation was threatening to snowball out of control. At Springfield on September 26, 1786, Daniel Shays, a destitute farmer who had attained the rank of captain in the Revolutionary army and since held town offices in Pelham, gathered about 600 men who were armed with flintlocks and were ready to fight. Confronting an inferior state militia, the veterans forced it to back away. The supreme court fled. In panic, Secretary of War Henry Knox reported with wild exaggeration to Congress, to George Washington, and other former Revolutionary War leaders that Shays commanded 10,000 to 15,000 men and that they were besieging the federal arsenal at Springfield. Civil war appeared imminent. Thoroughly alarmed at reports that the armed rebels were about to seize cannon from the Springfield arsenal, Congress did the one thing it had clear-cut authority to do under its governing Articles of Confederation. On October 20, it voted to raise an army, even if it did it on tenterhooks. Congress authorized the secretary of war himself, three-hundred-pound Henry Knox, to raise 1,340 men, ostensibly to serve against the Indians. But Knox was able to gather recruits for the federal force only so slowly that they never saw combat.
The taxpayers’ revolt suffered a severe setback with the capture of one of its organizers, Job Shattuck, on November 30, but, as snow blanketed the Berkshires, Captain Shays gathered his own army of about 1,200 men in November and December. The day after Christmas, he marched them to Springfield on the Connecticut River to join forces with other insurgents under the command of Luke Day. They aimed to intimidate a small militia force already guarding the federal arsenal. Their march thoroughly alarmed Governor Bowdoin, who now called up 4,400 men and put them under the command of the veteran General Benjamin Lincoln. Authorized for one month, it was the largest armed force mustered in the United States since the Revolution. The mayhem produced by the rebellious militia threatened to undo the very existence of the new government.
The insurgent leaders Shays and Day made the classic mistake of keeping their forces divided by the Connecticut River as they rushed toward Springfield and attempted to scatter the arsenal’s guard before Lincoln could reinforce it. When Shays proposed a joint attack, Day sent him a note, insisting that he could not attack for another two days. The note was intercepted. Shays pressed on, confident that Day would strike simultaneously. The Shaysites marched uphill within one hundred yards of the arsenal before the arsenal’s gunners unleashed a volley of cannon fire. Four rebels dropped dead; the rest broke and ran. When Lincoln arrived with his army of mercenaries, he pursued Day, splitting off his force as Day fled into the hills of New Hampshire. Hard marching all night, Lincoln and his army surprised Shays at dawn on February 4 at Sheffield, where they captured 150 of the insurgents. Many of them, like Shays and his aides, disappeared across the Vermont border to seek refuge in Bennington. In the next few months, facing arrest for treason, some 4,000 Shaysites and their families sold their belongings and fled to Vermont.
Shays’s Rebellion thoroughly alarmed many Americans who were worried that the fragile Union was on the verge of collapse. Shays’s escape into Vermont threatened to ignite another tinderbox of rebellion. One expert on Vermont’s land laws and its tempestuous relations with neighboring states was Alexander Hamilton. He had closely followed Vermont’s claims for independence from New York as aide-de-camp to Washington before becoming a member of the New York Assembly. He was one of the Continental officers supporting Vermont’s request to join the Continental Congress. Increasingly, he opposed Governor Clinton’s belligerent insistence that New York militia be mobilized to crush resistance in Vermont and force it back to its claimed status as part of New York.
EVEN AS VERMONTERS touched off armed resistance to debt collections and mortgage foreclosures at frontier courthouses in the Green Mountains, Ethan Allen turned his attention to another smoldering revolt in the Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania. Before the Revolution, hundreds of settlers, including his father, Joseph, had bought land from the Susquehannah Company in the Pocono Mountains. After the war, in yet another example of the feebleness of diplomacy between states under the Confederation, Pennsylvania laid claim to the region and insisted that the Wyoming Valley settlers did not hold clear title to the lands unless they repurchased them—exactly as New York had done in Vermont before the Revolution. Irate settlers appealed their plight to Congress. On December 30, 1782, a five-man congressional tribunal had met in Trenton, New Jersey, and ruled unanimously that the disputed lands belonged to Pennsylvania because its territory was contiguous. Without waiting to settle individual claims, the Pennsylvania Assembly had approved plans to evict the Connecticut settlers.
In desperation, some of the Wyoming Valley settlers turned to that legendary defender of local autonomy—Ethan Allen of Vermont. Shays’s Rebellion convinced the Wyoming Valley settlers that Allen and his rough-riding Green Mountain Boys could be “particularly serviceable” in their cause by striking terror into the hearts of lawyers and lawmakers in Philadelphia. Allen’s presence in the Poconos along with some of his Boys might coerce Pennsylvania to negotiate. To lure Allen, they offered him the two commodities he loved the most, land and command. He declared that the Wyoming Valley cause—“our cause”—was “just.” Writing from Vermont, he promised to fight to the death the “avaricious men [who] make interest their God.” On his advice, the Wyoming Valley settlers procured guns and ammunition and recruited four hundred Connecticut settlers waiting for the arrival of their leader, the “head doctor from the North with his glister pipe” (a glass device used, when heated, for giving an enema) to purge the Pennsylvania government. But first Allen warned a Connecticut delegate to Congress that he intended to “speedily repair to Wyoming with a small detachment of Green Mountain Boys to vindicate” their claims. Confident that Congress could hardly respond quickly enough, Allen rode into Pennsylvania on April 27, 1786, boasting to a crowd “that he had formed one new state” and now would do it again “in defiance of Pennsylvania.” One anxious official reported to Philadelphia that “since [his] arrival every idea of submission to the laws of Pennsylvania has vanished.”5
In the spring of 1786, Philadelphians were reading a broadside reminiscent of Allen’s rhetoric before he led his Boys to seize Fort Ticonderoga a decade earlier. He scorned Congress’s “tribunal of land monopolizers.” Addressing “the court of conscience, of the people at large,” he declared that the Wyoming settlers—and he now counted himself one of them—“will not tamely surrender our farms, orchards, tenements, neighbors, and right to soil to a junto of land thieves.” He threatened to “smoke it out at the muzzle of the firelock.” Did Philadelphia’s “pious legalists” believe that the farmers had fought the Revolution in vain, only for Pennsylvania and Congress to “cram their laws down our throats”? As panicky rumors of the approach of an army of Green Mountain Boys flew through the streets of Philadelphia, the state legislature hastily convened inside Independence Hall. Terrified lawmakers, declaring that “bandittis [are] rising up against law and good order in all quarters of our country,” regarded Ethan Allen and Daniel Shays as part of the same lawlessness that threatened to destroy the Union.6
In two brief visits to the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, Allen managed to jolt Pennsylvania’s legislature into confirming the Connecticut settlers’ claims to their lands—including his twelve rights (about 4,000 acres)—and forming their settlements into a separate Pennsylvania county. On April 30, Allen, his letter dripping with scorn, wrote from the Wyoming Valley to Connecticut’s governor, Matthew Griswold, that two days earlier he had
arrived to the Hostile ground, and found a territory which has been distressed by Britons, Tories, Savages, and the more Savage and avaricious land-jobbers (I had almost said Government) of Pennsylvania. Every exertion of Government, in its consequences, has hitherto been attended with cruelties…. Law, Order, and Government, are the Hobby Horses of the Pennsylvanians, with which they…design to disposess the Connecticut Settlers, and obtain and accumulate to themselves, their lands and labours.
Allen reported that, two years earlier, the Pennsylvania secretary of state, Brigadier General John Armstrong, had been sent with an armed force to “quiet the disturbances” in the Wyoming Valley “and parley between them.” The settlers agreed to surrender their weapons to Armstrong’s militia or he “would shoot them dead.” Armstrong then arrested the settlers. Jailed for high treason against Pennsylvania’s government, they were acquitted after a jury trial.7
In the short run, Allen’s personal intervention in Pennsylvania and Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts had the combined effect of electrifying discontented frontiersmen all up and down the Appalachian Mountain frontier. At Mount Vernon, George Washington became convinced that the rebellion would spread into a full-scale resumption of the Revolution. He feared that “levelers” were triggering agrarian reforms that would reapportion wealth and produce a schism of social classes in the new country—something Ethan Allen knew how to exploit. Washington’s estate had already dwindled by half, because of currency depreciation and wartime and postwar British curtailment of trade. On a tour of his frontier lands in western Pennsylvania, Washington was unable to collect rents from his tenant farmers, most of them Revolutionary War veterans who had served under him, and instituted eviction proceedings against them in Fayette County court. Returning to Mount Vernon, he wrote to James Madison, “We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion.”8
AFTER GENERAL BENJAMIN LINCOLN scattered the Shaysites in western Massachusetts in early February 1787, Governor Bowdoin decided to hunt down and punish the rebels who had fled across the border to Vermont. He called on the governors of neighboring states to arrest the “malcontents.” The governors of Connecticut and New Hampshire promised to cooperate. New York’s Governor Clinton marched with three regiments of militia to reinforce Lincoln. Twice, Lincoln called for Vermont’s Governor Chittenden, whose government was closest to the rebellion, to help. Chittenden promised to see what he could do. Vermont’s white-haired legislators dreaded being dragged into the war with their neighbor even as they sought their neighbors’ support for their petition for statehood. Some Vermonters thought that promises to intervene in Massachusetts would actually increase Vermont’s support in Congress. A scant majority of the Vermont legislature voted to disavow Shays’s Rebellion. At the end of February 1787, after Shays fled to Vermont, Chittenden issued the assembly-drafted proclamation warning citizens not to “harbor, entertain or conceal” Shays and the three other rebel leaders—who were camping, at Chittenden’s invitation and with his personal protection, on the Arlington farm right next door to Chittenden’s.9
But Vermont’s waffling only led worried leaders in New York and Massachusetts to believe that Vermonters were planning, once again, to annex the rebellious border regions of both states. In Boston, Governor Bowdoin heard that hundreds of Shaysites were massing near Ethan Allen’s homestead in the Winooski River valley. Allen, even though he was a significant land-holder, openly sympathized with the Shaysites. When Bowdoin sent Major Royall Tyler, General Lincoln’s aide-de-camp, to demand that Governor Chittenden turn over Shays for Tyler to bring him back for trial, Allen met with him in Rutland against the backdrop of a made-to-order gathering of protesters. Fresh from his triumph in Pennsylvania, Allen harangued the crowd about the evils of Massachuetts’ iniquitous leaders, including Bowdoin, Lincoln, and the Adamses. Those who “held the reins of government in Massachusetts [are] a pack of damned rascals and there is no virtue among them,” he bellowed. Allen appears to have pledged to Tyler that Vermont would not be used as a base for any Shaysite attack on Massachusetts. The Vermont Assembly refused Tyler’s demand that they turn over the Shaysite leaders and agreed only that Govenor Chittenden would issue his proclamation. Tyler carried orders to return empty-handed if his life appeared threatened. Author of The Contrast, the first play written and produced in the United States, Tyler knew a good exit line: he decided to leave Vermont, at least temporarily. A few years later, he returned to Vermont to practice law and became a justice on its supreme court. In August of 1787, when Vermont militia caught “two notorious offenders” with horses they had stolen from Massachusetts, Allen took the opportunity to write to Tyler:
Such persons who are criminals and have acted against law and Society in general and have come from your State to this we send back to you…. Others who have only taken part with Shayes we govern by our laws so that they do not, and dare not make any inroads or devastation in the Massachusets.
Allen did not mention that, five months earlier, Daniel Shays had sent two fellow insurgents, Luke Day and Eli Parsons, to Allen to offer him the command of a “revolutionary army” to carry on the struggle.10
In the meantime, in the months before the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia in May, Alexander Hamilton led a personal crusade in the New York Assembly to end the twenty-year-old confrontation with Vermonters. He introduced a bill directing the states’ congressional delegates to support independence for Vermont. “Vermont is in fact independent,” he contended, “but she is not confederated.” He understood Ethan Allen’s shrewd efforts to exploit Shays’s Rebellion. “Is it not normal for a free people, irritated by neglect, to provide for their own safety by seeking connections?” Vermont had turned first to the British, now to Shays. New York must finally settle the controversy. “They are useless to us now,” he said of Vermonters, “and if they continue as they are, they will be formidable to us hereafter.” The New York Assembly agreed, but the Senate, where Governor Clinton and Allen’s old nemesis James Duane held sway against Hamilton and his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, refused. In the end, Allen’s moderate stance during Shays’s Rebellion and his refusal of its command won over a majority of New York lawmakers. By keeping Vermont neutral, Allen finally won a quarter-century-long struggle. New York at last abandoned its fight to claim Vermont. Four years later, in 1791, Vermont paid New York patentees of lands in Vermont a mere $30,000 for clear land titles. This removed the last obstacle for Governor Clinton to sign off, endorsing Vermont’s admission to the Union.11
Hamilton’s support in New York struck Allen like a lightning bolt, coming just when Shays was offering him command of a revolution. Allen had to choose between the independence for Vermont he had pursued for more than twenty years or a brief adventure that might end on the gallows. He chose statehood for his beloved Vermont. Publicly, he “contemptuously refused” Shays’s offer of command and ordered him and his lieutenants to leave Vermont. (Of course, Allen had no intention of expelling Shays; in fact, Shays and his aides stayed put in the governor’s side yard even as four thousand Shaysites and their families fled across the border from Massachusetts and settled in Vermont.) Hamilton had long ago helped the prisoner-of-war Allen escape from brutal confinement in New York’s Provost jail by arranging his exchange. Now he gave Hamilton the political victory he needed. Allen would not live to see it, but Hamilton, four years later, helped usher Vermont into the Union as the fourteenth state.
IN THE WINTER OF 1784, about six months after Mary Brownson Allen died, the Vermont Assembly convened in Westminster in the Connecticut Valley. As usual, Allen attended at Governor Chittenden’s invitation. His close friend and lawyer Stephen Bradley had built a sprawling house in Westminster and took in lodgers to help pay for it. Two women, Margaret Schoolcraft Brush Wall and her young niece Frances Montresor Brush Buchanan, rented several rooms while they located lands left to them by Mrs. Wall’s late husband, the Loyalist Crean Brush. Onetime claimant of sixty thousand acres of Vermont lands who had drafted the Bloody Acts a decade earlier, Brush had committed suicide after Vermont confiscated virtually all of them.
When Margaret Schoolcraft married Brush in 1766, she brought to the marriage six-year-old Frances Montresor. Fanny, as she became known, was her sister Anna’s illegitimate daughter by Captain John Montresor, the Swiss military engineer and mapmaker in the British army whose bogus travel diary led Benedict Arnold’s army astray in the Maine woods in 1775. When Crean Brush died, Fanny stood to inherit any of his land that Vermont hadn’t confiscated, as much as twenty thousand acres. When the Revolution ended, Fanny’s aunt, now remarried to Patrick Wall and living in Boston, brought her to Westminster to see what lands they could salvage and sell.
Allen, forty-five, was, quite simply, mesmerized, when he first saw the twenty-four-year-old Fanny. It was, after all, not uncommon for older widowers to marry younger women then: Benedict Arnold was twice Peggy Shippen’s age. Twenty years earlier, Allen had married a woman six years older than him. Fanny Montresor was all that Mary Brownson had not been: physically beautiful, sensitive and vivacious, accomplished in music, fluent in French, and a notable botanist in addition to having a lot of money, which clearly Mary never had. Ethan, still wearing his forest green brigadier general’s uniform, was the commanding figure of a military officer that Fanny had always responded to. In the drab northern woods, the flamboyant General Ethan Allen was encountering a lady of New York fashion. Each had weathered tempestuous lives. Ethan would soon learn, if he didn’t already know, that Fanny’s aunt, who survived three husbands, had forced her illegitimate niece Fanny to marry, at sixteen, a British navy officer who left her pregnant when he was killed in a sea fight with an American privateer. Ethan didn’t care, as they said then, a fig about her past life. In fact, he quite readily abandoned reason when he first saw her at a party at his good friend Stephen Bradley’s house in Westminster during the February session of the Vermont Assembly some six months after Mary Brownson Allen died.
According to the kind of persistent Vermont legend that sounds more like thigh-slapping nineteenth-century Vermont humor than history, Ethan may have heard about Fanny for the first time in a local tavern—almost all Ethan Allen stories are somehow connected to a tavern and a flowing bowl—from the tavern’s owner, a friend of Ethan’s, who said he had quipped with Fanny a few days earlier, “If you marry General Allen, you will be the queen of a new state.”
Stephen Bradley was entertaining judges at breakfast on February 9, 1784, when he heard the bells of a sleigh stop at his door. Allen strode in and knocked the snow off his boots. Bradley invited him to join the judges who had gathered to smoke their long clay pipes in the drawing room. The general declined. He preferred to cross the hall and meet the ladies having their breakfast. Fanny was dressed in a morning gown when he came in. She promptly told him that proper gentlemen didn’t make social calls so early in the morning. Ethan apologized, but explained that he was on military business and had to leave for Bennington at once.
Then, the story goes, Ethan blurted out, “If we are to be married, now is the time.” Apparently nonplussed, the young widow put down the cracked decanter she was dusting and said slowly, softly, “Very well, but give me time to put on my Joseph [coat].” A few minutes later, they crossed the hall arm in arm to the parlor, where the men, still smoking their glowing long pipes, were startled to see Fanny on the general’s arm. “Judge Robinson,” Ethan said to his old friend Moses Robinson, “this young woman and myself have concluded to marry each other and to have you perform the ceremony.”
“When?” asked Judge Robinson.
“Now,” replied Ethan. “For myself I have no great opinion of such formality, and from what I can discover, she thinks as little of it as I do. But as a decent respect for the opinions of mankind seems to require it, you will proceed.”
“General, this is an important matter,” said the judge. “Have you given it serious consideration?”
“Certainly,” Ethan replied, turning to Fanny. “But I do not think it requires much consideration.”
The ceremony was as swift as Ethan’s and Fanny’s recognition of each other’s passion. While it cannot be gainsayed that Allen was aware of her reputed means and social standing, and she aware of his popularity, it was evident that this was a marriage based on initial attractional love, rather than mere convenience. When Judge Robinson asked Ethan whether he promised to live with Fanny “agreeable to the laws of God,” Ethan glanced out a window for a moment. “The law of God as written in the great book of nature? Yes.” When the ceremony was over, Ethan’s hired man, the freed slave Newport, lugged out Fanny’s portmanteau and guitar case and put them in the back of Ethan’s sleigh. Wrapping his bride in a great bear rug, he snapped his bullwhip over the horses’ heads, and to the jingling of sleigh bells, the newlyweds raced off across the Green Mountains.12
ETHAN AND FANNY ALLEN enjoyed the best five years of their tempestuous lives together, first in the shadow of the Bennington Congregational meetinghouse, where Ethan still rented the large hip-roofed house, and then, after Ethan dissolved the Onion River Land Company, in a modest 24-by-36-foot two-story frame house Ethan had his brother Ira arrange to build on Ethan’s 1,400-acre share of choice intervale land overlooking the Winooski River in the town of Burlington. Nine people, including Fanny’s son, Ethan’s three daughters, two farmhands—Newport and William Stewart (who had been tomahawked and taken prisoner with Ethan at Montreal)—and a woman servant, filled the small clapboard house with din, music, laughter. Stewart, a former Green Mountain Boy and surveyor’s assistant for the Onion River Land Company, had charged into Fort Ticonderoga with him. When someone had tried to attach the impoverished Stewart’s musket for nonpayment of a small debt, Allen had come to his rescue in court and then given him a lifetime job as a farmhand.
The first year on Allen’s idyllic farm, Fanny gave birth to a girl. They named her Frances Margaret after her mother and great aunt: this Fanny Allen later studied French in Montreal, converted to Catholicism, and became the first American-born nun. (A hospital in Vermont is named after her.) Subsequently, a boy, whose name is unrecorded, died of whooping cough as an infant. A son named Hannibal survived. Ethan was ecstatic to have a son again: he named him, reflecting his interest in classical military history, after the great Carthaginian conqueror who came over the Alps in winter to attack the mighty empire of Rome. A second living son he named Ethan Voltaire Allen, whose namesake’s writings Allen had learned enough French, with Fanny’s help, to read and admire, especially now that, like Candide, he had turned his back on politics. Aided by Fanny, he kept up his correspondence with Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. At Crèvecoeur’s request, Allen had obtained for him Vermont citizenship so that his American-born son could inherit his French patrimony. To win the favor of Louis XVI, Allen, at Crèvecoeur’s suggestion, gave French place-names to towns he founded on Allen’s land: Vergennes after the foreign minister who talked the indolent king into an alliance with the infant United States that saved the American Revolution; Calais on the Canadian border after the Channel port; Danby after the French naval commander whose fleet invaded New England’s waters in the French and Indian War. Allen honored his friend St. John de Crèvecoeur by naming the timber-rich town of St. Johnsbury in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom after him.
Borrowing a page from Voltaire’s Candide, Allen cultivated his own philosophizing gardens by continuing to write. He began to sign his letters, self-mockingly, “Clodhopper Philosopher.” After the uproar that greeted his Reason, he wrote a long appendix, which was not published for eighty years. At the time of Shays’s Rebellion, amid the constitutional crisis over the failure of the Articles of Confederation to unite the former British American colonies, Allen had grave doubts about Vermont’s ever joining the United States. He could never forget all the years of border warfare with the state of New York, which had obstructed Vermont’s efforts to join the Union for so long even while Vermont provided a military and diplomatic buffer against further British invasion. More importantly, he knew that Vermonters recoiled at heavy taxation and feared that they would have to pay a share of the United States’ heavy load of unpaid Revolutionary War debts if they joined the Union now. Unlike other states, Vermont had paid for its share of the war and for troops it sent to the Continental army with the proceeds of confiscated Loyalist lands. To have to pay again would be an egregious reminder of New York’s long-ago demand that New Hampshire grantees pay a second time for their land. This had, after all, been the cause of forming the Green Mountain Boys and fighting a dangerous guerrilla war with a rebel’s death noose hanging over his head.
By the winter of 1789, a new U.S. government had been formed after a Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia unattended by delegates from Vermont, which was still unrepresented in national government. In its dozen years as a republic, Vermont thrived, its population doubling and redoubling since the Revolution. Allen no longer played an active role in politics, but his influence was pervasive. He loved returning to farm life. He told his friend Stephen Bradley that he was planning to cultivate some 350 acres of “choice River Intervale” and upland, meadows “interspersed with the finest of wheat land and pastureland.” He had picked out the land two decades earlier: it was “by nature equal to any tract of land of the same number of acres that I ever saw.” At first, he was cultivating an ambitious 40 acres. There was not enough hay to feed his cattle during the drought year of 1788. The same three-year drought created grain shortages and food riots in Paris and would, a few months later, lead to the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution. At almost exactly this moment, newly elected U.S. senators and congressional representatives were casting their ballots as electors to choose, inevitably and unanimously, George Washington as the first president.13
After such a stormy life, Ethan Allen died quietly, his sudden death failing to match the action and drama that had marked so much of his life. In the bitter cold February of 1789, he set out across frozen Lake Champlain with a sledge to borrow hay from his third cousin Ebenezer, who had settled at the southern tip of South Hero Island. That night, after word flashed through the Heroes that Ethan Allen was coming, the Green Mountain Boys crowded into Ebenezer’s tavern. The stories, the rum punch toasts, the songs lasted well into the early hours of morning. As Newport drove the loaded sledge slowly across the frozen lake, he noticed that Allen had become unusually silent. The last thing Allen mumbled was how dark the trees looked in the early morning light. Then he slumped over, falling into the arms of his freed slave. By the time they reached Allen’s homestead, it was plain that Allen had lapsed into a coma, apparently after suffering a stroke. Ira and his wife, Jerusha, Fanny and their children, the servants and the farmhands crowded into the small house as Ethan Allen, quietly and without regaining consciousness, died the next day. He was only fifty-one. It was February 12, 1789, one week after Washington was elected the first president of the United States and exactly twenty years before another poor boy, Abraham Lincoln, would be born in Kentucky, on the latest frontier.
When the Reverend Ezra Stiles, then the president of Yale College, heard that Allen had died, he wrote in his diary, “13th Instant died in Vermont the profane and impious Deist General Ethan Allen, author of the Oracles of Reason, a book replete with scurrilous reflexions on Revelation….And in Hell he lift up his Eyes being in Torments.”14