Ethan Allen Lives

His men were armed, probably, with long rifles and muskets, but they were no match for regulars. Even so, they were ready to fight and to follow his lead. But .  .  . Ticonderoga? Built by the French in the style of Vauban, master of fortifications, the fort guarded the narrow passage between the southerly end of Lake Champlain and the north shore of Lake George, in a natural bottleneck of the water route between New York and Montreal. It was thus of enormous strategic importance and had earned a reputation for impregnability during the Seven Years’ War, when 16,000 British troops were unable to take it from 4,000 Frenchmen in the Battle of Carillon.

On a good day, Allen could muster about 200 men, most of them sober.

By 1775, the fort, in truth, was indifferently manned and maintained by the British Army. But it still housed a considerable number of artillery pieces. Among the most pressing needs of the American colonists if they were, indeed, to fight for independence was artillery. Taking Ticonderoga would go a long way toward alleviating that problem.

Still .  .  . not only was the fort a daunting objective in purely military terms, it was also the property of the king of England. To strike at Ticonderoga was to strike at the crown. It might still be possible to patch things up after the actions at Lexington and Concord. Those could be considered unfortunate episodes where emotions boiled over and things got out of hand. But a deliberate assault on one of the king’s forts by a militia and the seizure of his cannons .  .  . that would be an unmistakable act of war.

For Ethan Allen, that might have been the point. As he wrote later,

So he and the Boys marched to Castleton, where they went scouting for the boats they needed for an amphibious assault. They found enough to transport only 83 men and launched before dawn on May 10, 1775.

As it turned out, they had an easy time of it. The few troops garrisoned at the fort were asleep. One sentry who was awake tried to shoot Allen, but his weapon misfired. Otherwise, there was no real resistance, except from a soldier who tried to bayonet one of Allen’s men. Allen struck the man on the head with the flat of his sword, then demanded to be taken to the commanding officer’s quarters, where he banged on the door and called on him to surrender the fort.

And in just whose name was this demand being made, the British officer asked?

“In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” Allen immortally replied.

Or .  .  . maybe not.

Like so much about Ethan Allen, there is some question as to whether he actually spoke those words. According to his own bestselling book, he did. But according to one of his biographers, “There were later recollections among those who had been at the fort with him that he had shouted out: ‘Come out of there you damned old Rat.’ Others claimed that it was: ‘Come out of there you sons of British whores, or I’ll smoke you out.’ Nobody except Ethan seemed to recall anything about the Great Jehovah.”

Precisely what Allen actually said, of course, we’ll never know. Nor, it seems, will we ever know exactly what he looked like. No painting or sculpted likeness of him has ever turned up. It is not known, even, where his bones are buried. He is, it seems, more myth than man.

Still, there was a real man, one who had the audacity to take Fort Ticonderoga, and, as George Washington once observed, there was “an original something in him that commands admiration.”

So Ethan Allen became one of the iconic figures of the generation that made the American Revolution, even though he was not a soldier of distinction. He was not on the field at any of the great battles that followed; not in attendance at any of those meetings of large historical significance where the Founders laid down the footings and the design of the new country. When the Declaration of Independence was being drafted and signed, he was a guest of the British, as a prisoner of war. After he was exchanged, he was given a military title but no important responsibilities. But it cannot be said that he entirely sat out the rest of the war. He used his time to write the story of his captivity.

He remained the hero of Ticonderoga, the colonists’ first victory, making him its first hero, but there was no military second act.

Still, there is a statue of Ethan Allen in the Capitol building in Washington, and the USS Ethan Allen is the only nuclear submarine ever to fire an armed Polaris missile. The submerged ship launched the missile in a test on May 6, 1962, and the warhead detonated “right in the pickle barrel,” according to the ship’s captain, a phrase that Ethan would doubtless have appreciated. He appears in historical fiction, doing impossible deeds. No other revolutionary figure from what became the state of Vermont is so well known, not even close. He is far better known — in legend, at least—than Seth Warner, who was one of his lieutenants on the Ticonderoga expedition and was, a few months later, elected by the Green Mountain Boys as their leader. Warner’s performance amply validated their choice. Interestingly, Ethan Allen and Seth Warner shared a cousin, the wonderfully named Remember Baker, who also served with the Boys and was, according to one source, “a tough, redheaded, freckle-faced young giant, a man with whom it was best not to tangle, if it could be avoided.”

By choosing Warner, the Green Mountain Boys, in effect, voted Allen out of office. But he had earned the rebuke, fair and square. The Boys had looked to him as their leader and had been loyal to him in the hours leading up to the assault on Ticonderoga, when a fancy officer from Connecticut had appeared on the scene. Colonel Benedict Arnold attempted to assume command of the Ticonderoga operation, under some pretext of authority from the state of Massachusetts. Unlike Allen, Arnold actually wore a proper uniform and was plainly confident in the rightness of his position and in his own military fitness and ability to command. So much so that Allen, according to some accounts, almost gave in. But the Green Mountain Boys were not having any. Unless they were led by Ethan Allen, they were not going to attack that fort.

They had a defiant and independent — not to say insubordinate — streak. Like their leader.

The Green Mountain Boys did attack Ticonderoga but only after a compromise of sorts was arrived at. Arnold could march in the lead, shoulder to shoulder with Allen. But he would not be in command. His presence was allowed but confined to the ceremonial.

In the aftermath of the fort’s capture, though, it became evident that Arnold was the superior military leader and Allen an amateur. The latter rewarded the Green Mountain Boys for their victory by opening up the ample supply of rum that had been stockpiled by the fort’s commander. Two days of revelry followed, and the initiative was lost.

Meanwhile, Arnold acted. Shortly after the taking of Ticonderoga, he had acquired some men of his own to command. They had marched up from Massachusetts, and he put them to quick use capturing a British sloop and with it command of Lake Champlain. Allen loaded his men on boats, once they sobered up, and pushed off to take a new objective, further north on the lake. But he neglected to provision the men, who, after two days with no rations, were delighted by the appearance of Arnold in his sloop, with food to spare for them.

That blunder was followed by others, and eventually Allen’s attempt to carry the offensive against the British ended in demoralizing withdrawal. It could have been much worse, and soon would be.

By this time, the cannons from Ticonderoga were on their way to Boston, where they were badly needed. So when Allen and Seth Warner appeared in Philadelphia before the Second Continental Congress and petitioned for the Green Mountain Boys to be made a part of the regular army with appropriate titles and pay, they got their wish. This is when the troops gathered to elect their officers and chose Warner to command them, leaving Allen in command of nothing.

This no doubt stung. If there are uncertainties and mysteries around the large person of Ethan Allen, no one has ever doubted his self-esteem. But he took the rejection manfully. He remained both friendly and loyal to Warner and offered to serve in any capacity that might be useful.

The Green Mountain Boys had, as it turned out, gotten it right. Warner was the leader they — and the revolution — needed, as he proved most conclusively at the Battle of Bennington, an American victory in a relatively small fight that made possible the much larger victory at Saratoga, which, as J. F. C. Fuller writes in his Decisive Battles of the Western World, was “one of the most fateful in British history.”

Ethan Allen was not present at the battle of Saratoga. He was in jail on Manhattan Island in October 1777 when General John Burgoyne’s men grounded their arms. (It was the first of only three occasions when a British Army has surrendered in the field, the others being Yorktown and Singapore.) Allen had been captured a few months earlier during the ill-fated campaign to seize Montreal led by Benedict Arnold. His resistance now took a new form.

At first, it was all he could do to stay alive. He was put in irons and held in the stinking bowels of a British ship for several weeks before being taken across the Atlantic, presumably to be hanged as a traitor. But the English were sticklers for the law, and before he could be hanged, he would need to be tried and convicted, which could be messy and provide the rebels with still more justification for their cause. The alternative was to treat Allen as a prisoner of war, which would mean sending him back to America to serve out his time as a POW. Better to hold him than to martyr him.

As a footnote, Allen’s time in England generated material for one of Abraham Lincoln’s little parables— and it is not surprising that Lincoln, another rough, self-educated son of the frontier, would have felt a kind of fondness for Ethan Allen. According to this tale, Allen was shown, by his captors, to the privy, where a portrait of George Washington hung on the wall. When he came out, Allen was asked how he liked the decor. He answered that he found it appropriate since “nothing would make an Englishman s— quicker than the sight of General Washington.”

The story may be apocryphal in both regards. It may not have happened, and Lincoln may not have told it. But it made it into the film Lincoln, so like so many other stories it is now part of the Ethan Allen legend.

It is undeniable that the real man suffered — all around him, men were dying of scurvy — but he held up during his captivity. He was harshly treated, and when his conditions improved, he continued to make a nuisance of himself. Paroled in Manhattan and allowed, more or less, to move about at will, he visited prisons where other men were still held and found them, as he later wrote, “in the agonies of death, in consequence of very hunger, and others speechless and very near death, biting pieces of chips; others pleading for God’s sake for something to eat. .  .  . Hollow groans saluted my ears, and despair seemed printed on every of their countenances. .  .  . I have seen in one of these churches seven dead at the same time, lying among the excrements of their bodies.”

He protested these conditions in letters to the British command. They went unanswered. But they did stimulate action. He was offered his release in exchange for .  .  . well, an act of treason. His jailers offered to make him a colonel in command of a regiment of Tories.

Unlike his old rival, Benedict Arnold, he passed, and in his usual spirited fashion. According to his own account (the only one we have), he compared himself to Jesus Christ refusing the devil’s offer “to give him all the kingdoms of the world if he would fall down and worship him.”

Thirty-two months after he was captured, Allen was exchanged for a British officer, the result of long and acrimonious negotiations between Generals Howe and Washington. “In a transport of joy,” Allen later wrote, “I landed on liberty ground, and as I advanced into the country, received the acclamation of a grateful people.”

Allen went promptly to Valley Forge after his exchange and saw there evidence of the hard winter that Washington and his troops had endured. The general met him cordially and was impressed enough to write of Allen, “His fortitude and firmness seem to have placed him out of reach of misfortune.”

Washington’s letter of recommendation accompanying Allen’s request for a commission and command in the army was tepid, though, saying only that he expected that the Continental Congress would “make such provision for him as they think profitable and suitable.”

Which amounted, in the event, to not very much—a commission and pay, but no command. And, as with the election of Warner to command the Green Mountain Boys, this was not so much a matter of talent neglected as character wisely appraised. Ticonderoga had been a long time ago. The aspiring nation now had a real army and real allies, the French. This was real war and not impulsive adventurism.

So Allen finished writing his book, A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity, from the Time of his being taken by the British, near Montreal, on the 25th Day of September, in the year 1775, to the time of his exchange [there is more here but skip to] with the most remarkable Occurrences respecting himself and many other Continental Prisoners [fast forward] Particularly the Destruction of the Prisoners, at New York, by General Sir William Howe [fast forward, again] Interspersed with some Political Observations, written by himself and now published for the Information of the Curious in all Nations.

The unwieldy title and florid style did not inhibit sales, and the short book is still worth a read. Its publication stimulated people’s appetite for the cause and enhanced the author’s already outsized reputation.

There was a third act. The real Ethan Allen was a major player in the history of the Republic of Vermont. And he completed another book, one he had begun as a collaboration when he was a young man. The book, called Reason, the Only Oracle of Man, is an overwrought polemic attacking religion and endorsing a sort of deism. It was a failure.

Allen died in 1789, at the age of 51, two years before Vermont became the fourteenth state. There is controversy to this day over whether he attempted to manipulate Vermont into some kind of alliance with the British during the interim. There is, in fact, a lot of controversy about Allen. Questions that go deeper than the exact wording of his surrender demand at Ticonderoga.

A lot about the legendary Allen is not merely open to question but dismissible on common-sense grounds. Over the years, he has been made into one of those mythic American frontier characters, like Mike Fink or Davy (who preferred “David”) Crockett or Daniel Boone or Timothy Murphy, the man who supposedly turned the tide of battle at Saratoga with a single 300-yard shot.

It is probably safe to assume that Ethan Allen was not, while passed out drunk, bitten several times by a rattlesnake, then woke up sober to find the snake dead drunk (or, maybe, just dead). Also that he never picked up a bushel bag of salt with his teeth and tossed it over his shoulder. And on and on.

The Allen of myth was seductive enough, however, for Herman Melville to write, “He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial as a Roman, hearty as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his peculiar Americanism.” And for Melville to give him a walk-on role in his historical novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. The Ethan Allen who appears in Melville’s book is the one who was a prisoner in England. The novel’s narrator likens him to a “baited bull in the ring .  .  . outlandishly arrayed in the sorry remains of a half-Indian, half-Canadian sort of dress.” His “whole marred aspect was that of some wild beast; but a loyal sort and unsubdued by the cage.” Melville even has Allen shout his defiance, bellowing, “You may well stare at Ethan Ticonderoga Allen, the unconquered soldier.”

This Allen of legend worked his way into historical novels and even a few episodes of a long running television serial called Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans based loosely on the James Fenimore Cooper novels, which, according to D. H. Lawrence, revealed that “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Mark Twain had a more American take in his classic literary demolition job, Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, from which Cooper’s reputation never recovered. So much of the frontier stuff was, indeed, Cooperesque sensationalism, like the illustrations of Allen demanding the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga that showed him in full dress uniform, complete with epaulets, holding a very large sword. A preposterous representation, helping to stimulate a revisionist attitude toward the entire Ethan Allen legend that has reduced him to a minor, eccentric figure not to be taken seriously.

But, but .  .  . he did march on Ticonderoga, and it was an undeniably audacious thing to do. And, one wonders, how did he happen to be there, at the ready, with men willing to follow him in the attempt? This, it can be argued, is the Ethan Allen story that resonates. And should.

It’s a story of yeomanry in conflict with aristocracy, and in it one can detect chords of so many later American conflicts, including one that endures still. If “populism,” a word that gets much used these days, can be defined as politics based on a belief in the inevitable conflict between a moneyed elite and the common people, then Ethan Allen was the first American populist.

He came to the role through a dispute over title to the lands west of the Green Mountains and east of the Connecticut River. There were rival claims to much of this area when Allen arrived there in 1766. The governor of New Hampshire had issued grants (for a price) to lands in this area, as had the authorities in New York. The dispute over which of these were legitimate came down to a fight between pioneers from Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts who arrived with an ax and a plow and a dream, on the one hand, and the large aristocratic landholders of New York who operated on a system of tenant farming or “sharecropping,” on the other. It was, at bottom, a fight between feudalism and a new kind of arrangement based on freeholds and a “middle class.”

When Allen arrived in this territory — which came to be known as “the Grants” — he was interested more in speculating on land than farming it. But if he was a speculator, he was also a leader and a dynamic and forceful personality, recognized as such by people fighting for land they believed they had paid for and owned fair and square. They turned to Allen for leadership, first in court and when that failed — as it was bound to since the judges were “Yorkers” — in the field at the head of the ad hoc militia that became the Green Mountain Boys.

The struggle went on until the revolution, and in the abstract, it was never a fair fight. The Yorkers had control of the legal machinery and the courts; if that was not enough, they could, in theory, bring out regular troops — Redcoats — to enforce their claims. But the people of the Grants managed to hold out, and this was due, in no small measure, to Ethan Allen and the force of his personality. If he had started as a land speculator (and never stopped being one), he also picked up and internalized the cause. After a defeat in court, he was approached by his antagonists and offered what amounted to a bribe to induce him to turn against his own side, which he refused. Well, someone supposedly said, he might want to remember that “might often does make right.”

To which Allen famously replied, “The gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills.”

One of the men asked just what that was supposed to mean. “If you will accompany me to the hill in Bennington,” Allen said, “the sense will be made clear.”

So the fight was on. A reward was put out on Ethan Allen, and he countered by putting out a reward of his own against the Yorkers who had bested him in court. And then, to drive his point home, he rode over to Albany, which was enemy territory, and hoisted a few at a tavern where he made sure that everyone knew exactly who he was. He even asked the proprietor to nail the poster offering a reward for the capture of his enemies to the tavern wall. Then, in his own good time, he mounted up and rode, unmolested, back home.

On another occasion, Ethan and the Boys “arrested” one of their antagonists and held a “trial” at the tavern where they were accustomed to gather and make plans over cups of rum flip. The man was, unsurprisingly, found guilty, and his punishment was to be tied to a chair and hoisted 20 feet off the ground on the tavern flagpole and left there for a couple of hours.

There was, inevitably, more to the friction over the Grants than this Robin Hood stuff. It was serious business, and from 1771 until the opening of the revolution, there were incidents, many of them violent, almost every month. Some people were burned out. Some whipped. But there were no killings, right up until the day when Redcoats and militiamen fired on each other at Lexington and Concord and Ethan determined to march on Ticonderoga with the Green Mountain Boys, who were ready and willing.

He — and they — had been fighting the good fight for years. Ethan Allen does, perhaps, exist mostly as legend, but when you read the stories of the struggles over the Grants, you understand that, whatever else he might have been, he was an American original.

Accent on the first word.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.