Inventing Ethan Allen

III | Chasing Fame and Glory

                      I would Not for my Right arm act without or Contrary to Orders. { ethan allen to Jonathan Trumbull, July 12, 1775, The Great Adventure Against Ticonderoga } chapter iii Chasing Fame and Glory Success at Ticonderoga, Blundering at St. John, and Defeat at Montreal On May 10, 1775, Ethan Allen, along with Benedict Arnold of Connecticut and James Easton and John Brown of Massachusetts, led a band of eighty-three New Hampshire Grants farmers as well as Connecticut and Massachusetts volunteers across Lake Champlain to seize control of the British fort at Ticonderoga on the western shore of Lake Champlain. They surprised the sleeping garrison by attacking at dawn’s first light. Allen recounted the raid and seizure of Ticonderoga in the opening pages of A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity Containing His Voyages & Travels etc. . . . (1779). The story of that victory in the earliest stages of the American War for Independence became the signal event for which he has been remembered. Like so many of the events in Ethan Allen’s life, controversy, contradictions, and hard feelings attended the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Recollections of other participants in the event have both supported and contradicted his version of seizing the decaying fort. Allen’s account, written four years after the event in his Narrative, emphasized his tactical diligence in deploying a rear guard and blocking routes for possible alarms reaching the fort before him, as well as the presence of 230 Green Mountain Boys and others that messengers had alerted to gather on the lakeshore across from the old fort. He vaguely acknowledged a near-failure in logistics. “With utmost difficulty . . . I procured boats to cross the lake,” but 44 } Inventing Ethan Allen owing to the lack of foresight to gather sufficient boats, only eightythree of the massed attackers were transported to the western shore. Allen ratcheted up his narrative’s dramatic tension in the final moments before the raiders entered the fort. Suggesting some uncertainty about a successful raid, he delivered an emboldening harangue (a speech reported only by Allen in his Narrative) to go forward with “a desperate attempt, (which none but the bravest of men dare undertake ). I do not urge it on any contrary to his will.” None of the other militia leaders who accompanied the attackers—John Brown, James Easton, and Benedict Arnold—reported Allen’s oration.1 Ticonderoga had seen heavy fighting during the French and Indian War and by 1775 it had become a ruined shell of its former self. A year earlier British army engineer Captain John Montresor, whose illegitimate daughter Frances would marry Ethan Allen in 1784, reported the useless conditions of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, recommending their demolition and replacement by a single new fort built at Crown Point.2 John Brown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, went as a spy to Montreal and Ticonderoga during February 1775. Peleg Sunderland, one of Allen’s subalterns in the Green Mountain Boys, served as his guide. Brown reported the fort’s crumbling stone walls and a feeble garrison with few able men to repel attacks. Equally significant, he wrote to Samuel Adams in Boston that “the Fort at Tyconderoga must be seised as soon as possible should hostilities be committed by the Kings Troops. The people on N Hampshire Grants have ingaged to do this businees, and in my opinion they are the most proper Persons for this Jobb.”3 In March 1775 British Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham had led a reinforcement of only twenty soldiers of the 26th Regiment from Montreal to Ticonderoga . Later in June, as a prisoner in Connecticut, he reported that on the night of the American attack, only twenty-three of thirty-five rank-and-file soldiers were deemed “serviceable”; the remainder were “old,” “lame,” or “worn out.”4 The eighty-three raiders outnumbered the twenty-three “serviceable” defenders almost four-to-one. Allen’s men aroused the sleeping British, disarmed them, and took control of the old fort, with gunfire limited to a musket misfire by a drowsy guard at the gate. Allen batted him on the head with the side of a cutlass or shortsword and proceeded into the parade ground and up the steps to the officer’s quarters. Allen’s “do or die” harangue fit Chasing Fame and Glory { 45 for “the bravest of men” implied an equally brave leader, the very figure he displayed when Lieutenant Feltham, the fort’s second...