WHAT MAKES THE STORY of Ethan Allen endure so prominently in American history? There have been very few books about him—only one credible biography in nearly half a century—yet his own narrative as a prisoner of war has remained in print for more than two centuries.
Some sixty editions alone came off the presses before the Civil War. His legacy was especially dominant during our nation’s defining battle between the North and the South, when thousands of Green Mountain Boys, tracing their lineage to the regiment Ethan Allen formed during the American Revolution, streamed down from their hill farms. In fact, per capita, twice as many Vermonters as men from any other Union state joined the fight against slavery, an institutional evil that never had been tolerated in a state where iconoclastic traditions have always been distinguishing features.
Like Vermont, the nation’s first independent republic, Ethan Allen bore scant resemblance to his fellow founding fathers, so little that he, even in his own lifetime, became a myth, part of a folklore that people handed down, as if to arrive at a truth that somehow validated them. And, like a myth, the fable of Ethan Allen spread in many different ways. Invariably, his story, over the centuries, became the myth of the first famous frontiersman, ineluctably pulled toward the newest frontier. As the frontier spread west, so did his myth. The hero of the New England frontier came to represent not just the yearnings of disenfranchised Yankees but invariably the struggles of generations of frontiersmen who lamented, some more raucously than others, that the voices of Washington’s established politicians failed to respond to their distinct needs.
In the nineteenth century, a young nation without much of a past demanded such mythic tales, while today, as we appear mired in a new state of spiritual malaise, we seem to cling to such myths to shield us from that which may be more unvarnished than we want to know. Yet now, still at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it feels imperative to me, as a historian and biographer, to examine these legends and to separate myth from self-serving fiction. Nevertheless, in this new biographical evaluation, it remains paramount that we not exclude those voices that have been generally excluded, for often their insights are of great historical significance.
While Ethan Allen embodied the virtues and vices of the nation’s founding fathers more colorfully than any of his more venerated and aristocratic counterparts, he is frequently defined by a single night in 1775 when he led a daring predawn attack on Fort Ticonderoga, a British fortress in northern New York. Yet, as the man who virtually hand-carved the state of Vermont into the Union, Allen was an enigmatic and highly charismatic product of the American frontier, blessed with an extraordinary intellect if also with a hot-tempered propensity for action.
To delve more deeply into his character and achievements, it is now possible, with the help of an ever-increasing number of Internet links, to mine databases that extend the use of fragile documents in archives, to examine long-neglected records in the United States, England, and Canada, and to consult the personal papers of other Revolutionary War–era figures, both friends and enemies. Widening the scope of my research beyond the borders of Vermont, I have attempted as well to shed new light on Allen’s brutal treatment as a prisoner of war of the British, a sustained period of his life that has not always interested more popular historians. At the same time, I have also concentrated on his intrigues as a frontier politician and as a progenitor of guerrilla warfare in undefined colonial borderlands. A so-called Robin Hood in the eyes of many dispossessed Green Mountain settlers, Allen also, and unabashedly so, aggrandized the holdings of his family, a fact that is generally glossed over in previous accounts. He emerges here not only as a public-spirited leader but as a self-interested individual as well, often no less rapacious than his archenemies, the New York land barons of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys.
As aware as Benjamin Franklin about the need to burnish his popular image, as concerned as Jefferson, though in a more folksy way, to define his legacy, Allen projects himself as a populist frontier philosopher on horseback. His copious newspaper writings and pamphleteering first brought him to the attention of other New England radicals, making him their choice, with the help of his legion of Green Mountain Boys, to lead the first American offensive of the Revolutionary War. Allen’s sometimes embellished prisoner-of-war narrative established him, after Tom Paine, as the second-best-selling author of the Revolution, influencing Enlightenment thinkers ranging from Paine himself to Madison. A speculator in business and war, Allen also evolved into a homespun pundit who translated his rational explorations into often impetuous action. His final testament was to take the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher John Locke’s “state of nature,” simply lop off “of nature,” and make a new state—Vermont, whose distinct ideology would come to reflect a parallel and potent voice in American political history.