Inventing Ethan Allen

IV | Ethan Allen and the Historians

                      One story is good until another is told. { ethan allen to the Canadians, 1775 } chapter iv Ethan Allen and the Historians Discovering a Hero Though Ethan Allen had not participated in Vermont’s declaration of independence, the drafting of its constitution, or the formation of its government, over time he received credit as a prime mover in the state’s early years. During his life he had earned sufficient status to receive the attention of historians and later biographers. When some of them examined him, they could see the contradictions, controversies, and fabrications that swirled around him. Others simply accepted and sometimes expanded Allen’s tales. He had created them himself in the widely read Narrative of his captivity, the preface to Reason the Only Oracle of Man, and the spate of published letters and pamphlets in which he argued for his causes and belittled his opponents. Others with whom he interacted added to the complex portrait of an active man through their own activities, official records, reports, and correspondence. The memory of Allen did not disappear with the passage of time. In his case, for reasons largely unrelated to his actions, the story would expand, making him larger in memory than in life. the allen influence: early accounts The first accounts retold his role as a prominent leader in the New Hampshire Grants resistance to New York authority that led to the establishment of the State of Vermont and depicted the audacious captor of Fort Ticonderoga. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the 62 } Inventing Ethan Allen story had expanded. Historians and other writers had shaped Ethan Allen into an heroic icon whose person embodied Vermont’s image of itself. As a prolific polemicist, author of many political tracts and pamphlets , and frequent correspondent, Ethan, along with his brothers Ira and Levi, bequeathed to posterity a large body of material for historians to study and shape their accounts. Ethan and Ira frequently employed broadsides, newspapers, and pamphlets at their own or government expense to expand and win over their audience on the important public and private issues of the moment. That practice and their archival reflex—both Ethan and Levi mention “boxes” containing papers—led to the survival of many of their writings, especially after the late 1770s. Conscious of the importance of public opinion, Allen deliberately, even shamelessly, used his pen to present himself as he wished others to regard him. Those efforts extended the reach of his writing well beyond his lifetime. Even though Ethan Allen appreciated that “one story is good until another is told,” he probably hoped for but could not have foreseen the extent to which, with Ira’s help, he contributed to his own posterity, as his published work became a prime source beginning with the earliest historians of Vermont. “As the only early Vermont leaders who published voluminous accounts of their own accomplishments, the Allens dictated to succeeding generations the context in which they and their exploits would be judged.” An early twentieth-century biographer thought that because of the “abundant material” that Allen furnished, “few writers have dared to wander far from this hero’s estimate of his own services.”1 But the Allens could not control from their graves the way in which historians removed a generation and more would employ the Allen legacy for their own purposes. Ethan could not have anticipated the form and plot in the telling of another story. The initial historical treatments of Ethan Allen focused on larger issues than his activities. The first history of Vermont, Reverend Samuel Williams’s The Natural and Civil History of Vermont, appeared in 1794.2 It exhibited the growing maturity of Americans “as they transformed themselves from transplanted Europeans into Americans.” Williams held up Vermonters in settling a wilderness and achieving independence for themselves as the best model of a democratic civilization. In the eighteenth century a group of men wrote about the land and Ethan Allen and the Historians { 63 the flora and fauna in their new North American laboratories of discovery . After the successful Revolution and adoption of the U.S. Constitution , a small knot of American historians moved on to another very striking departure from the Old World, as they attempted to justify and explain the new polity. Williams combined the two strains. He provided details of the setting for an American experiment in which the success of Vermont in asserting its...