Inventing Ethan Allen

V | The Many Guises of the Hero

                      Fiction resists fact to persist as heritage. { david lowenthal } chapter v The Many Guises of the Hero Ethan Allen in Fiction, Stone, Uniform, and Popular Imagination Historians, biographers, and novelists created Vermont’s paramount hero in the first half-century after his death and then sustained the image with little compromise even in the face of countervailing evidence. In other media, sculptors, painters, and print makers would reinforce the importance and heroic nature of Ethan Allen. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century Vermont leaders, coping with vast, perplexing, and negative change, invented a virtuous past for Vermont with Allen as its leader. Though specific to Vermont’s perceived problems, these treatments coincided with a national movement that revolved around what Michael Kammen has called “a mythos of the American Revolution .” Sharing memories of the event helped unify the republic. As the nineteenth century advanced, survivors of the war with active memories contributed to a dominant collective memory that envisioned a citizenry shaped by republican ideals of virtue and sacrifice. Initially, war leaders, most prominently George Washington, provided the exemplary models of virtue. Lesser, but still significant heroes—John Paul Jones, Francis Marion, and Richard Montgomery—came from the ranks below Washington . The methods of late eighteenth-century American biographies reflected the continuing influence of classical antiquity and medieval hagiography. Plutarch’s Lives became the most popular model, satisfying Henry St. John Bolingbroke’s dictum: “History is philosophy The Many Guises of the Hero { 95 teaching by example.”1 The Massachusetts Federalist Jedidiah Morse made a teachable moment of General Richard Montgomery’s death in the failed attack on Quebec on December 31, 1775. A Congregational minister and popular geographer in Charlestown, Morse wrote a dual biography for students, a Life of Washington and also of Brave General Montgomery (1791). He presented both men as following the Roman model of the farmer-warrior Cincinnatus. A veteran of the French and Indian War, Washington returned to his Virginia plantation, but when called to command the Continental Army left behind the life of a country gentleman to lead the colonies in the war against Britain. Montgomery , also a veteran of the earlier war, emigrated from Ireland to New York’s Hudson River Valley to marry into the Hudson River aristocracy and to become a gentleman farmer, and like Cincinnatus, answered the call to join Washington’s army. His death in battle pointedly served the purpose of Morse’s school book, encouraging young Americans to lead virtuous republican lives of honesty and self-sacrifice.2 Ethan Allen had predicted that a victory for Montgomery’s army in Canada would bring them fame and glory. As a martyr-hero, Montgomery affirmed that the new nation was worth dying for, but his sacrifice provided no guarantee of enduring fame. Like Allen he would need assistance from others who lived on and kept his memory alive. After more than forty years of persistently lobbying Congress and New York’s governors, Montgomery’s widow Janet Livingston finally succeeded in bringing his remains from Quebec to a New York City grave in 1818.3 As it receded into an increasingly distant past in the 1820s and 1830s, the Revolution became a noncontroversial and nonpartisan event. Kammen has further argued that Americans trivialized and “de-radicalized” the War for Independence, as they recalled it for the purposes of historical novels and sentimental biographies.4 But in the 1840s and 1850s, following the American success in the Mexican War (1846–48), historians and popular writers also fueled a growing militarism in the country with new recollections and biographies of the leaders of the War for Independence.5 Ira Allen’s history of Vermont, Jared Sparks’s biography, and Zadock Thompson’s history of Vermont (1842) presented the state’s past as a sermon on its creation, an accomplishment they mostly credited to Ethan Allen. According to Ira’s disingenuous introduction of 96 } Inventing Ethan Allen his brother—“Ethan Allen, Esq., a proprietor of the New Hampshire grants” (without mentioning the brothers’ Onion River Land Company , the largest private land owner in the state)—he was singularly motivated by a disinterested concern for the natural rights of his fellow settlers.6 These accounts present Allen as the conventional revolutionary hero cast from the same mold that Parson Weems used for George Washington.7 Ira says that in 1778 he had acquired on behalf of Ethan a 150-acre...