USA > Vermont > Men of Vermont : an illustrated biographical history of Vermonters and sons of Vermont > Part 2
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At the very inception of the controversy, when he had been upon the grants but a few months, he was selected for an agent to defend the New York suits against the set- tlers, and went to New Hampshire and got copies of Governor Wentworth's commis- sions and instructions from the King. Then he engaged Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut as counsel, and in June, 1770, appeared at Albany to answer in a suit of ejectment by a New York claimant against a settler. The judge, Livingston, was a patentee under New York grants, interested directly or indirectly in 30,000 acres. So were the attorneys and court officers, nearly all, and a fair consider- ation of the case was the last thing they pro- posed to permit. All of Allen's documents and deeds under New Hampshire authority were simply excluded as evidence, and the verdict was against him as arranged. After- wards some gentlemen called on him at his hotel, and representing how desperate the case was, urged him to go home and advise his friends to make the best terms they could. He coolly replied, " The gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills." Asked his meaning, he told them that if they would come to Bennington it should be made clear. There is a New York yarn that he promised to do as advised ; but the facts of history all go to contradict it, and the evidence is that he was offered land grants for himself and appointments to office under New York au-
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thority if he would use his influence, which was already recognized to be considerable, to support the New York side. He spurned the offer, as he always did all through his life, every attempt to induce him to betray a cause in which he was engaged.
Then began the long struggle between the two jurisdictions, not to be finally settled for eighteen years, during the first few of which, after New Hampshire had abandoned them, the settlers were practically without govern- ment, except such as they improvised for their towns, acknowledging no other author- ity and no other allegiance except such as they agreed to among themselves, for mutual protection. The sheriff of Albany county repeatedly came with posses of from 300 to 700 men to dispossess the farmers, but always without success, doubtless because the bor- dering people of New York, from whom the posses had to be recruited, had no heart in the work and no sympathy except for their fellow-farmers whom greedy aristocrats in the cities were using the law to drive out of their homes. The story has often been told of the raid on the farm of James Breaken- ridge, at Bennington, and its successful re- pulse without the firing of a gun. Here, Mr. Hall says, was really born the future state of Vermont. Allen was the leader of this resistance before and after it took organ- ized form. When the military organization was formed, towards the close of 1771, and Allen was elected colonel, with Seth Warner, Remember Baker, Robert Cochrane and Gid- eon Olin captains, this regiment took the name of "Green Mountain Boys," in derision and defiance of Governor Tryon of New York, afterwards the Tory leader, who had threat- ened to "drive the settlers from their farms into the Green Mountains." They repeat- edly drove off the New York authorities. They protected one another from arrest. They took in hand and disciplined anybody that ventured to survey or occupy lands un- der New York titles. Their method was generally that of the "beech seal," or, as Allen humorously described it, a "chastise- ment with the twigs of the wilderness, the growth of the land they coveted."
The New York government, met and beaten at every point, in the winter of 1771-'72 offered a reward of £150 for the capture of Allen and £50 for Baker and the others. Allen, Baker and Cochrane promptly met this with a counter proclamation, dated at Poultney, Feb. 5, 1772, reciting that " whereas James Duane and John Kempe of New York (prominent lawyers and advocates of New York's claims) have by their men- aces and threats greatly disturbed the public peace and repose of the honest peasants of Bennington and the settlements to the north- ward, * * * any person that will apprehend
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these common distubers shall have 05 reward for Duane and fro for Kempe."
Allen's personal comment on the act of ontlawry was this : " They may sentence us to be hung for refusing to vohitarily place our neeks in the halter, but how will the fools manage to hang a Green Mountain Boy before they catch him?" An anecdote is toll in this connection that illustrates his extraordinary daring and his power to awe men. Fears were expressed for his safety after this act of outlawry. He offered a bet that he would go to Albany and to the most prominent hotel, drink a bowl of punch and come back unharmed. And he did it. When he reached the city and the hotel, he alighted deliberately from his horse, called for his punch and drank it, while the word flew round, " Ethan Allen is in the city," bring- ing a large concourse of people, among them the sheriff of Albany county himself. It was worth $750, in those days of scarcity of money, to anybody that would take him, but they all stood gaping and wondering, while Allen leisurely enjoyed his punch, walked out, mounted his horse, and giving a " huzza for the Green Mountains," rode off. On another occasion, which Thompson describes interestingly in his tale of the "Green Moun- tain Boys," Allen, while hunting on the shores of Lake Champlain, stopped over night at the house of Mr. Richards. A party of six soldiers from Crown Point opposite, fully armed, determined to arrest him for the sake of the reward. Allen drank with them boisterously and got them well soaked, while he simulated worse intoxication himself, and he and his companions, having been warned by Mrs. Richards, silently raised a window and escaped.
These years were full of adventures like these, the expeditions against Clarendon, to break up its " hornets nest" of Yorkers, the raid on Colonel Reed's Scotchmen along the Otter Creek, the trials of Benjamin Spencer, Benjamin Hough, and Jacob Marsh for ac- cepting commissions as judge and justices in disregard of the order in council that no citizen should do any official act under New York authority, the offering of the Bennington county Yorkers' house as " a burnt sacrifice to the gods of the woods in burning the logs of his house," as Allen quaintly told him- these are only a few of the incidents that have come down to us. The size and the intensity of the struggle are illustrated by Allen's declaration, perhaps exaggerated, in a letter to Governor Tryon in 1772, that over 1,500 families had been ejected from their homes and the "writs come thicker and faster." "Nobody," he adds, with a recur- rence to first principles, " can be supposed under law if law does not protect."
Out of all this struggle was evolved, in 1 774,
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an interesting scheme of which Allen was a leading advocate, for the formation of a new colony to include the grants and stretch west and north of the Mohawk river to Lake Ontario. The capitol was to be Skeenes- borough, now Whitehall, and Col. Phillip Skeene was to be the Governor. He had gone to England to urge the project upon the ministry when the outbreak of the Revolution upset all plans.
After the Westminster massacre a meeting of committees was held at that place which passed resolutions to renounce and resist the authority of New York "until such times as life and property might be secured by it, or until the matter could be laid before the Crown and the people taken out of so oppres- sive a jurisdiction and annexed to some other government or erected into a new one." Al- len and Col. John Hazeltine of Townshend and Charles Phelps of Marlboro were ap- pointed a committee to prepare a remon- strance and petition to King George in ac- cordance.with these resolutions, but the rapid march of events left no taste or opportunity for such work. The petition was never pre- pared, and the resolutions were the last pub- lic expression of loyalty to the Crown that ever came from Vermont.
The Westminster massacre occurred March 13, 1775, the battles of Lexington and Con- cord April 19, and Ticonderoga was cap- tured May 10. In these opening days of the Revolutionary struggle Allen was among the most active of the patriots. Ever the unyielding advocate of the rights of man and a foe of oppression of all kinds, the issues of the Revolution were in close line with those upon which he had been thinking and writ- ing for the past five years, and they were a kind to enlist all the sympathy and arouse all the ambition of a nature like his, while the Westminster affair had given the subject a practical personal interest to him and to all Vermonters. He plunged into the patri- otic work with a promptness, a resolution and farsightedness of plans that ought to have made him one of the foremost men of the struggle and probably would but for the misadventure at Montreal. He early dis- patched messengers with characteristic let- ters, to win over the Indians to the side of the colonies, or at least to neutrality, and thereby he did an important service to the cause which did not cease entirely to be felt until the end of the war. Many of the red men were induced to come to Newbury, some to settle and some to enter the service as scouts and spies. Some were sent to Washington's camp and some went to Can- ada, where they procured information that was highly valued by Washington and Schuy- Jer. But while he was doing this work, and even before he had fairly gotten into it,
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Allen had entered with all his zest into the project for the capture of Ticonderoga. Even before the spring opened, perhaps be- fore the Westminster massacre, the plan had been formed. In the middle of February he wrote a letter, which is still extant in Massa- chusetts, to Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut that "the regiment of Green Mountain Boys would assist their American brethren," in case of war. John Brown, a Massachu- setts lawyer who had been through the grants to Canada in the interest of the Massachu- setts committee of safety, wrote on March 29, from Montreal to Boston : "The people on the New Hampshire grants have en- gaged to seize the fort at Ticonderoga as soon as possible, should hostilities be com- mitted by the King's troops."
There were simultaneously in the latter days of April and early in May movements started for the capture from both Connecti- cut and Massachusetts. That from the former state was in charge of Edward Mott, afterwards a major in Colonel Gray's regi- ment, and it started out April 28 and 29, enlisting sixteen men before it arrived at Pittsfield, Mass., where John Brown was met on his way back from Canada and joined them. Thirty-nine more men were enlisted at Jericho and Williamstown, and the party proceeded to Bennington, where a party of future Vermonters were gathered. No one dreamed of any one but Allen for com- mander, and he, full of energy and resolu- tion, goes ahead of the party to raise more men and make sure, by throwing trusted scouts still farther ahead, that no tidings of the approach reach the fort. But when the expedition reaches Castleton, May 8, it is overtaken by Benedict Arnold, on horseback and with one attendant, to arrogantly claim the command, and show a commission from the committee of safety at Cambridge, Mass. The dispute for a time threatened to wreck the project. Arnold persisted until the men declared that they would serve under no offi- cers other than those with whom they had engaged. Finally, when Allen was overtaken, he good-naturedly averted the difficulty by agreeing that, while he should command, Arnold might accompany him at the head of the attacking party.
There was great difficulty, and partial miscarriage of plans to procure boats to cross the lake, and as morning began to dawn, May 10, only eighty-three men had been got across, while Seth Warner, with the re- mainder of the two hundred and thirty men of the expedition was impatienty waiting on the Vermont side. Allen saw that no time was to be lost, so he drew his men up in line, told them it was a desperate attempt that was about to be made and gave all who wished the privilege of backing out, but asked those
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who were willing to follow him into the fort to poise their fire-locks. Instantly every fire- lock was poised. " Face to the right," he cried, and he marched the men in three files, himself at the head of the center file, to the gate. A sentry at the wicker gate snapped his fuse at Allen, who pursued him with up- raised sword into the parade ground of the garrison. Allen then formed his men so as to face the two barracks, and ordered three huzzas. Another sentry, who had slightly wounded an officer with a bayonet thrust, and been struck in the head by Allen's sword, begged for quarter, which was granted on condition that he show the way to the quarters of the commanding officer, Captain De La Place, which were in the second story of a barrack. Allen strode up the stairway and summoned Captain De La Place to come out instantly or the whole garrison would be sacrificed. De La Place appeared at the door, trousers in hand, and asked by what authority the demand was made, elicit- ing the reply, which has gone thundering down the generations : "In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." The dazed commandant wanted more infor- mation and began further parley, but Allen, with drawn sword, and voice and manner that admitted no trifling, repeated his de- mand for an immediate surrender. De La Place had to comply and ordered his men to parade without arms. All were treated by Allen with characteristic generosity but as prisoners of war. After the capture, Arnold again demanded the command, greatly to the wrath of officers and men, and to end the assumption the committee of war gave Allen a certificate signed by Edward Mott, chair- man, requiring him to keep command until further orders from Connecticut or Congress.
The capture was made on the very day of the first assembling of the Revolutionary Congress. It was the first surrender of the British flag, and had a great effect on the spirits of the country. Lieutenant-Governor Colden, in reporting it with other misfor- tunes to Governor Dartmouth, found his consolation in the fact that "the only people of any prominence that had any hand in this expedition were that lawless people whom your lordship has heard so much of under the name of the Bennington mob."
The capture was followed by a rapid suc- cession of brilliant strokes. Capt. Sam Her- rick and his detachment had simultaneously captured Skeenesboro and Major Skeene, and seized a schooner and several bateaux there. Warner with a detachment of one hundred men was dispatched to Crown Point, which he captured the same day, with thirteen men and sixty-one pieces of cannon. Allen and Arnold with their sloop and a lot of bateaux proceeded to St. Johns on the 1Sth, where
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they or rather Arnold who went ahead of the bateaux, captured the King's armed sloop that was ernising the lake, and Allen attempt- ed a land attack though unsuccessful, being attacked by a superior force, and compelled to retire with a loss of three men.
The whole of Lake Champlain within a little over a week had fallen into the hands of the Revolutionists. With Ticonderoga were taken without a blow, not only a fortress that had cost Britain years of struggle and vast expenditures of blood and treasure, but stores of incalculable benefit to the army near Boston, including one hundred and twenty iron cannon, fifty swivels, ten tons of musket balls, three cart-loads of flints, a ware- house full of material for boat building and a large quantity of other supplies and material.
Allen's conceptions were Napoleonic. He proposed at once to follow up his success with the capture of Canada, which was almost depleted of British forces, there only being about seven hundred regulars in the province, and where a large part if not an actual major- ity of the people were ready to rise in sympa- thy. It was a great opportunity lost. If there had been in Congress energy and fore- sight equal to Allen's the whole course of the war would have been changed and the geog- raphy of America made a century ago what it may take a century yet to make it. And Ethan Allen would in all likelihood have ranked next to Washington among the Revolutionary commanders. Allen wrote to Congress May 29 : "The Canadians (all except the noblesse ) and also the Indians appear at present to be very friendly to us; and it is my humble opinion that the more vigorous the colonies push the war against the King's troops in Canada, the more friends we shall find in that country."
He offered to "lay his life on it" that "with fifteen hundred men and a proper train of artillery," he would take Montreal. Then "there would be no insuperable difficulty to take Quebec, and set up the standard of liberty in the extensive province whose limit was enlarged purely to subvert the liberties of America." He pointed out that the only possible defense for the British against such a diversion would be to draw troops from General Gage in front of Washington at Boston, and the result would surely be to "weaken General Gage or insure us of Can- ada." Lake Champlain, he shrewdly argued, was "the key of either Canada or our country, according as which party holds the same in possession and makes a proper improvement of it. The key is ours as yet, and provided the colonies would suddenly push an army of two or three thousand men into Canada, they might make a conquest of all that would op- pose them. *
* Our friends in Canada can never help us until we help them."
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The imagination cannot help but draw pictures of the results of such a master- stroke. The enthusiasm following the cap- ture of Ticonderoga, and the successful dashes about the Lake, gave the Americans every advantage in pushing their victory. The success of Allen's " political preaching" a few months later showed how receptive the Canadians were. (Even in September James Livingston reported "them all friends, and a spirit of freedom seems to reign among them.") And the dissatisfaction with British rule that has continued ever since, with the repeated though ill-fated uprisings to win the independence the people of the States had secured, indicate something of the tre- mendous advantage it would have been to have these people as allies rather than ene- mies -- a part of the new republic instead of a base for British operations all through the war. Burgoyne's expedition would never have been thought of. The Indian alliances with all their bloody work, which the officers of the Crown negotiated, would have been be- yond their reach, and all the fighting that was done by Indians would have been, under the plans launched by Allen, on the side of the colonists. How much this one fact alone would have meant for American his- tory in the last one hundred years ! Allen's project, with proper support, could hardly have failed of success, because it would have been undertaken with advantages that were largely gone when the expeditions of the fall were undertaken. If it had failed, its defeat would have been accomplished by so weakening Gage as to make it more than probable that he would have been crushed by Washington. On the other hand, it is to be remembered that success would have meant the incorporation of Canada, with problems of church and state, of race and education, with which, as we can now see, our American system could not safely have loaded itself, besides all the other problems it has had to solve. And it would probably have made impossible the independence of Vermont with its valuable additions to the democratic thought of the age. So we can see how the most disappointing things of history do their part in working out mighty results of righteousness.
Allen flooded the Continental Congress and the provincial congresses of New York and Massachusetts with letters and petitions and arguments in favor of his project and in remonstrance against a plan advanced in the Continental Congress to remove the stores and cannon of Ticonderoga to the south end of Lake George, which he declared truly, " meant ruin to the frontier settlements which are extended at least 100 miles to the north- ward of that place." Backed by the pro- tests of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New
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York, he secured the abandonment of that plan. In the meantime he went ahead with letters, proclamations and embassies to the Indians and Canadians to prepare the way for an invasion, exhibiting a vigor and adroit- ness that evidenced his high quality of lead- ership. May 18 he wrote the merchants of Montreal, calling for provisions, ammuni- tion and liquors, assuring them that it should all be paid for and that his orders were not to "contend with or in any way injure or molest" them, "but, on the other hand, to treat them with the greatest friendship and kindness." May 24 he addressed a letter to the Indians, calling them "brothers and friends," telling them how King George's troops had killed some of their "good friends and brothers at Boston,' how Ticonderoga and Crown Point had been taken with all their artillery and two great armies raised, one of which was coming to fight the King's troops in Canada, and how he hoped the In- dians, as "good and honest men, would not fight for King George against your friends in America, as they have done you no wrong, and desire to live with you as brothers ;" how he had always been a friend to Indians and hunted with them many times ; how his warriors fought like the Indians in ambush, while the British regulars stood all along close together, rank and file ; how he would give them blankets, tomahawks, knives, paint and anything, and "my men and your men will sleep together and eat and drink to- gether and fight regulars because they first killed our brothers." The letter was most shrewdly calculated to impress the Indian mind, and its arguments were reinforced by sending "our trusty and well-beloved friend and brother," Capt. Ninham of Stockbridge and Winthrop Hoit of Bennington, who had long lived among the Indians and was an adopted son of one of the tribes, as embas- sadors to them to further explain the good intentions of the Americans.
There is no doubt that if Allen's policy had been promptly and systematically fol- lowed the trouble from the Indians in the later years of the war might have been greatly avoided. June 4 he issued a procla- mation to the French people of Canada, appealing to their sense of "justice and equitableness " not to "take part with the King's troops in the present civil war against the colonies," for they were fighting in a common cause to "maintain natural and constitutional rights," and assuring the peo- ple that his special orders were "to befriend and protect you if need be; so that if you desire our friendship you are invited to embrace it, for nothing can be more unde- sirable to your friends in the colonies than a war with their fellow-subjects the Canadians, or with the Indians" "Pray," he added,
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"is it necessary that the Canadians and the inhabitants of the English colonies should battle with one another? God forbid ! There is no controversy subsisting between you and them. Pray, let Old England and the colon- ies fight it out, and you, Canadians, stand by and see what an arm of flesh can do." But his vigorous scheme of invasion was too much for the nerveless control of that time. There was indeed at first some disposition to apolo- gize for the seizure of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and it was not until autumn that an invading army was put in motion. Allen wrote, August 3, "I fear the colonies have been too slow in their resolution and prepa- tion."
Allen and Warner went to Philadelphia and Albany to urge the scheme on the con- tinental and provincial congresses. They were received with considerable honor at both places, though they were still placarded as outlaws by the New York government. The result, after long urging, was that the New York Congress, on the recommendation of the continental body, authorized the rais- ing of a regiment of Green Mountain Boys, to be commanded by officers chosen by themselves. Another mortification followed for Allen, for when a committee of towns met at Dorset, July 27, to choose a lieutenant- colonel to command the regiment, Seth War- ner was elected by a vote of 41 to 5. Not- withstanding the high merit as an officer always displayed by Warner, it is difficult to account for this action, in view of Allen's recent achievements, the large capacity he had shown and the unanimity with which he had been regarded as the leader only a few weeks before. Allen himself, in a letter to Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, attri- buted it to " the old farmers who do not in- cline to go to war," saying he was in the fa- vor of the officers of the army and the young Green Mountain Boys. He hoped, however, to get a commission from the Continental Congress, and when, in the fall, General Schuyler invited him to accompany the ex- pedition to Canada, with the understanding that he should be regarded as an officer, and have command of detachments as occasion required, he accepted. But this service had continued only about three weeks when it was ended by his capture before Montreal. Schuyler sent him on several expeditions " preaching politics " and extending the work he had so hopefully began to arouse and or- ganize the people of Canada into support of the Revolution. He met with sweeping suc- cess ; the Canadians guided and guarded him through the woods : enthusiastic crowds greeted him in the villages ; the Caughna- waga Indians, some of whom had been among the British skirmishers, sent him assurances that they would not take up arms on either
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