Ethan Allen

American military leader and political philosopher

• Born: January 21, 1738
• Birthplace: Litchfield, Connecticut
• Died: February 12, 1789
• Place of death: Burlington, Vermont

Allen led Vermont settlers in their fight for land rights and secured the first military victory of the American Revolution at Fort Ticonderoga.

Early Life

The eldest of eight children born to Joseph Allen and Mary Baker, Ethan Allen was named for firmness and strength. The family moved to Cornwall, Connecticut, when Ethan was two years old. Joseph, a literate farmer, recognized his son’s keen mental abilities and sent him from the frontier community to Salisbury to prepare for entry into Yale College under the tutelage of a Congregational minister, the Reverend Jonathan Lee. As a young child, Ethan had become a prodigious reader and serious thinker who delighted in scribbling his thoughts on paper, so he made excellent progress in his studies.

When his father died suddenly in April, 1755, however, the strapping seventeen-year-old Ethan returned home to help his mother run the extensive family farm. Joseph Allen had been a town leader—a selectman and church member, respected for his hard work, his accumulation of land, and his belief in the dignity of others. However, he had also been regarded as a free spirit and a heretic, qualities Ethan was to exhibit.

In 1757, when he was nineteen, Allen joined the armed services under Colonel Ebenezer Marsh to defend Fort William Henry in the French and Indian War. Although the fort fell to the French within two weeks and Allen did not see any action during the short period of his muster, he did discover the next frontier of land, the New Hampshire Grants (what is now southern Vermont).

After his service, Allen used his energy as an entrepreneur, first starting a blast furnace to smelt ore in 1762 and later opening a lead mine. In the same year, he married Mary Brownson. They had three children, Lucy, Pamela, and Mary Ann. During this time, Allen became fast friends with Thomas Young, a Salisbury physician and Deist, with whom he enjoyed free-ranging discussions about the philosophies of Plutarch, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke, men whose ideas would preoccupy him all his life; this interest was later reflected in Allen’s book Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1785). Often the discussions took place in local taverns, where he earned a reputation as a hard drinker and roaring brawler.

Tiring of his life as a businessman and family man, Allen moved to the frontier country of the Grants during 1766 and 1767 to live for months by his knowledge of the wilderness. There he noted the peaceful relations between the Native Americans and the few white settlers.

Life’s Work

After the French and Indian War (1754-1763), migration to land north of Massachusetts and Connecticut, bounded by the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain, increased significantly. Former soldiers had seen the new frontier and had chosen to move their families where they could have more land, form their own settlements, and escape the chafing requirements of landlords. As they moved to the new town of Bennington, chartered in 1750, and the New Hampshire Grants, they bought their lots from land speculators who had received grants from Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire. Unfortunately, because land charters were often vague and contradictory, title to the land was controversial. Finally, King George III settled the matter and gave the land to New York.

From his days in Salisbury, Connecticut, Ethan Allen was familiar with boundary disputes. He had observed the economic and social struggles among those who lived on the land “at will” and those who owned it legally. When New York landlords attempted to regrant the already occupied Bennington land at stiff prices, men from the Grants met in 1770 at the Catamount Tavern in Bennington to form a military association, with Allen as their colonel commander. This rowdy group of three hundred young woodsmen, called the Green Mountain Boys because they stuck green sprigs in their hats, vowed to tackle the problem with force and terror but never loss of life. To assist the cause, Allen wrote bombastic articles for the Connecticut Courant about the unfair power the landowners exerted over the struggling young settlers. A showdown occurred in 1771 when three hundred New Yorkers attempted to evict James Breakenridge from his Bennington farm and reclaim the property. Because the Green Mountain Boys stood firmly armed in their belief that they were upholding the law of New Hampshire, the New Yorkers retreated, both then and later.

Settlers flowed into the Grants, and Allen sold his Connecticut land and became a major landowner by 1772, particularly because of his Onion River holdings near what is now Burlington, Vermont. However, strife between the wealthy New Yorkers and the poor Grantsmen intensified when the New Yorkers forbade gatherings of three or more settlers. The Green Mountain Boys held public meetings and prepared to fight New York.

Allen already had gained a reputation as a fiery patriot because of his defense of settlers’ rights, but he enhanced his reputation and secured his position in history when, accompanied by Benedict Arnold, he led eighty-three Green Mountain Boys in a surprise attack on Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775. Coming after the battles at Lexington and Concord, the conquest of the strategic Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain was important. Allen and his troops captured a generous supply of artillery pieces that would later serve the Continental army.

Exhilarated by the easy capture of Fort Ticonderoga, Allen proposed to attack Canada while the British were vulnerable. His superior, General Montgomery, was not convinced, and he assigned Allen the task of persuading the Canadians to aid the American cause. When a restless military colleague, Major John Brown, proposed a combined attack on Montreal instead, Allen enthusiastically agreed. When Brown’s forces failed to meet the Green Mountain Boys, however, Allen was forced to surrender to British officers, who considered him a rowdy and shameful enemy. He and his men were imprisoned on board various small, dank ships and taken first to Ireland, then England, and finally back to the colonies. This sorry situation is recounted in Allen’s A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779).

While their rowdy leader was imprisoned for thirty-two months, from September, 1775, to May, 1778, Grants settlers from twenty-two towns held a convention and voted to form a new state, New Connecticut. Spurned by Congress in its attempts to join the Union, on June 4, 1777, the new state became Vermont, an independent republic boasting a liberal constitution developed with guidance from Allen’s longtime friend Thomas Young.

Vermont sent a constant flow of requests to Congress in its effort to become a member of the Union, but Governor Clinton of New York was adamant against admission of the rebels. The situation became fragile when New Hampshire towns decided they wanted to join the new republic of Vermont.

In 1779, Congress ordered Vermont to cease its existence as an independent republic. Allen was incensed, and he persuaded the Vermont Assembly to be equally upset and defiant. To emphasize its restraining order, Congress next forbade the distribution of supplies by the Continental Commissary at Bennington. While this hostile stalemate continued, Allen began discussions with the British, through Lieutenant General Frederick Haldimand, concerning the return of Vermont to the British Empire. Whether Allen was toying with treason or merely manipulating the Union’s suspicion of the British is difficult for historians to determine. Nevertheless, in November, 1780, some Vermont assemblymen acted upon their suspicions and introduced resolutions that would lead to Allen’s impeachment. Although the resolutions were never issued, Allen resigned his command and left the British negotiations in the hands of his brother Ira, who continued to bargain for more than two years. With the defeat of the British army at Saratoga and at Yorktown and the end of the American Revolution in 1783, the possibility of bringing Vermont into the British Empire was not realistic.

Allen slipped into a quieter life after the death in 1783 of his first wife from tuberculosis, and in 1785 he married Fanny Montresor Buchanan—who was, ironically, the daughter of a New York landowner. This new marriage brought him great pleasure, and they had three children, Fanny, Hannibal, and Ethan Alphonso.

Two other important events happened in Allen’s life in 1785: one last military effort and the publication of an important book. The Connecticut settlers of the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, experiencing a threat to their land claims by Pennsylvania, asked Allen to lead the charge to vindicate their rights. In return, the settlers promised to deed Wyoming Valley land to him. Allen warmed to the prospect, but Pennsylvania resolved the argument by ceding the land rights to the settlers.

Also in that year, Allen published his long, controversial attack on conventional religion, Reason the Only Oracle of Man. In this treatise, begun many years earlier with Young, Allen mocked clergymen and prayer and proclaimed that men and women were their own sources of happiness or wickedness. People could know God best, he maintained, through harmony with nature. Allen then moved to Burlington, where he farmed his considerable acres, wrote An Essay on the Universal Plenitude of Being (1788), and discussed philosophy whenever possible.

In February, 1789, on the way home from a blustery trip to seek hay for his farm animals, Allen became sick and never recovered. Wild tales abound about the cause of his death, but he probably suffered a stroke. As a brigadier general, the fifty-one-year-old Allen received a military funeral that was hugely attended by Green Mountain Boys and Vermont settlers.

For years, Allen had been the energy behind the republic of Vermont. With his death, the New York land-grant claim was settled, and the settlers of the independent republic resolutely voted to join the United States, an event that took place on March 4, 1791.

Significance

Ethan Allen once described himself as “a conjurer by profession.” Others have described him as a bandit, manipulator, renegade, and agitator, but to Vermont settlers, he was a tough, courageous hero. He led their efforts to honor their land rights, voiced their concerns to authorities, and with the Green Mountain Boys enforced their principles.

A passionately democratic man, Allen was one of few who recorded the events and issues of the day, publishing them for others to debate. According to his brother Ira, Allen often decided what course Vermont should take and persuaded others to follow. Clearly, without Allen the settlement would not have become a resourceful republic, nor would the conquest of Fort Ticonderoga have become the first important victory of the Revolutionary War.

Always a towering presence, after his death Allen became legendary in his military prowess, personal invincibility, and loyalty to Vermont’s principles.

Bibliography

Bellesiles, Michael. Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. A lengthy scholarly examination of Allen’s role in frontier democracy and the social history of Vermont.

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. Vermont Tradition. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953. Contains a chapter on Allen and argues that the unorthodox rustic fit Vermont’s culture well. Explains why Allen is the only person who could have led Vermonters at this important time in American history.

Hahn, Michael T. Ethan Allen: A Life of Adventure. Shelburne, Vt.: New England Press, 1994. For young adult readers, shows the complexities of Allen’s life. Includes a helpful chronology and a short bibliography.

Holbrook, Stewart H. Ethan Allen. New York: Macmillan, 1940. Gives a full and admiring biography, but sources are undocumented. Bibliography.

Jellison, Charles A. Ethan Allen: Frontier Rebel. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969. Provides important reasons for Allen’s controversial behavior and reinterprets his life in the light of its folklore. Examines Allen’s writings and has extensive notes about sources.

Sherman, Michael, Gene Sessions, and P. Jeffrey Potash. Freedom and Unity: A History of Vermont. Barre: Vermont Historical Society, 2004. This 730-page book provides a comprehensive account of Vermont history, from prehistoric times to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Includes information about Ethan Allen and the other rebels and outlaws who helped separate Vermont politically and culturally.