Inventing Ethan Allen

II | Seeking the Main Chance

                      Ethan Allen’s education “furnished him with a mere smattering of knowledge, but his mind was naturally haughty, restless and enterprising.” { timothy dwight, Travels in New England and New York } chapter ii Seeking the Main Chance Limited Education, Failed Ventures, and the Promise of the New Hampshire Grants To characterize Ethan Allen’s roots and origin as a preparation for his adult heroics, biographers have consistently mixed a bit of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier theory of the ever-advancing edge of settlement with the legends of later settlers, like Daniel Boone, who packed up and headed out whenever they spied a new neighbor’s chimney smoke on the horizon. In those versions of his upbringing, the Allen family’s place in the westward movement of New England’s population over their first hundred years reduces to this formula: “[they] raised families and moved. Four generations averaged ten children each and lived in eight different places. Restless, energetic, hopeful, they followed the frontier persistently.” The large families and changing places of residence ring true for many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emigrants to the American colonies of the British Empire and to Canada, Australia, and South Africa.1 At birth Ethan and his siblings became part of a large, extended family that had begun with Samuel Allen coming to Massachusetts from England in 1640 and moving west to Windsor, Connecticut, where he established a productive farm and built a large home. Each generation of his descendants would move to new lands and towns in the Connecticut River Valley and to the west. They generally prospered, earned respectable status, and lived in substantial homes. They counted a number Seeking the Main Chance { 23 of clergy among the clan, and some held civil offices at the town level. In 1740, three years after Ethan’s birth, his parents left their farm in Litchfield, Connecticut, and moved ten miles west to a newly granted, unsettled tract in Cornwall. Ethan’s father Joseph and his uncle Daniel laid out the road to the new town where Joseph served as the first town moderator. In 1742 only three residents of Cornwall owned a larger “rateable estate.” Ethan came from solid middle-class stock.2 settling for wealth But Ethan Allen’s biographers’ explanation of his family’s motives to move depends on a mythic metaphor in which the Allens spent their years “moving restlessly from here to there, as if drawn by some secret compulsion to a point just beyond the next horizon where the battle might be joined once more with the wilderness.” A hint of Darwinian struggle adds some pathos to the story. More likely, families seeking to maintain their standard of living moved because of the ineluctable facts of the frontier economy of subsistence farming, soil exhaustion, and difficult access to markets, as well as the maintenance of necessarily large families to supply the required labor, rather than an innate impulse to tame new land. Also, as sons and daughters matured and married, they would have to seek new lands. The thin and stony soil of farm acreage in the older settlements quickly wore out. Despite the long known importance of fertilization, “the supply of manure was often inadequate.” Without enough manure “by the middle of the eighteenth century, much land, of only moderate fertility in the first place, particularly in areas distant from the shore and herring rivers [where seaweed and fish provided fertilizer], had been cropped.” Ethan’s father Joseph Allen owned eighteen cows, at least two of them probably milk cows for domestic consumption. Once calves were weaned, the oldest brood stock could be slaughtered to feed the family or driven to Albany or Hartford markets by an able son. Yearlings, market beef, and a few milk cows produced insufficient manure to improve crop yields. Soil depletion from cultivating wheat and corn combined with large families “posed a fundamental threat to family life” because of “too many sons and not enough land.” Thus farmers and their sons “were anxious to find new land.”3 24 } Inventing Ethan Allen Even with a life expectancy of less than fifty years for those who survived youth, the Allen men, like most of their neighbors, tended to delay marriage until they could provide for a family. To acquire new land to settle, start a family, and farm, their options were limited. Those without their own money might inherit the farm or house...