“Surrender, in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”
That was Ethan Allen gently explaining to the skeleton British garrison at Fort Ticonderoga that their time had come. The capture of the fort on May 10, 1775, by what amounted to a guerrilla American force was not a battle for the ages. It is often ignored in standard histories of the Revolution, except for one robust detail. The British cannons at the fort were dragged to Boston by General Henry Knox and used by General George Washington in March 1776 to force the British to evacuate the city. That major victory would not have been possible without Allen’s success at Ticonderoga.
The fort commanded a strategic spot in New York on the western shore of Lake Champlain, near the river that connects the large lake to Lake George. In effect, it commanded the only practical inland route between New York City and Quebec. But the British had so little regard for American military capacity that they left it guarded by only 48 soldiers. Allen attacked with a force not much larger. He had 83 men with him, as well as Benedict Arnold, who had arrived with a commission from Massachusetts and who had declared his right to lead the expedition.
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It was Allen, however, who awakened the British commander, Captain William Delaplace, and thus had the opportunity to deliver what may be the best rhetorical flourish of the whole Revolutionary War. Delaplace demanded to know by what authority his fort had been entered, and Allen replied, invoking “Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” This God-and-country combination did the trick. Fort Ticonderoga fell without a shot being fired.
This was the first significant military action of the war after the events at Concord and Lexington. Allen followed up with successful actions on several other British strongholds, including the next day at Fort Crown Point. Benedict Arnold also got busy, capturing some British ships and supplies. The capture of Fort Ticonderoga and the mopping up ensured that the Revolutionary cause was safe from British forces making any rapid advance from Quebec.
Ethan Allen’s name still resonates in America as a grassroots hero who aroused revolutionary spirit in the frontiersmen of Vermont. But he is a somewhat ambiguous figure. Vermont was a territory claimed by conflicting British interests in New York and New Hampshire. New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth had been selling Vermont land since 1749. Surveyors from both states criss-crossed Vermont and sometimes encountered armed resistance.
The younger sons of New England farmers who could not inherit their fathers’ lands had, over the course of several generations, run out of places where they could pioneer. Upstate New York was still largely controlled by the Iroquois. Vermont’s mountainous landscape didn’t make it an especially attractive place to cut new farms into the virgin forest, but there were few other options. Ignoring the claims of the absentee landowners in New York, defiant New Englanders began moving in.
Ethan Allen, from Connecticut, was among them. He was a natural gang leader and in 1770 began recruiting other New England settlers to join his “Green Mountain Boys,” who set about terrorizing settlers from New York. Allen and two of his cousins, backed by the Boys, burned the property of New York settlers and threatened further violence. The governor of New York, William Tryon, put a bounty on the heads of Allen and his lieutenants. Allen ignored this and founded his own company for buying up Vermont land, from which the New Yorkers had been chased, to sell at a profit.
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Come the American Revolution, Ethan Allen was ready and waiting with an organized force that had practical experience in using violence to get its way.
Revolutions are seldom genteel. Though the American Revolution had its share of intellectuals and philosophers, it also had its share of rough and ready men who were ready to risk their necks. The Green Mountain Boys were those men, and doubtless they inspired many other frontiersmen with nothing to lose and perhaps a lot to gain by throwing off the yoke of British law and order.
Though no shots were fired in taking Fort Ticonderoga, Allen couldn’t avoid a bit of personal violence. He struck one British soldier on the head with his cutlass, leaving the man with a concussion. The British would suffer worse before the war was over.
Elites, of course, always fear the rabble. “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose,” Bob Dylan put it in “Like a Rolling Stone.” But that fear is always unfounded—until someone like Ethan Allen comes along, someone who has the talent to articulate the grievances of the common people and organize their energy for a definite purpose, perhaps for the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.
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Art by Beck & Stone
