The First American Victory: Ethan Allen Takes Fort Ticonderoga
By William J. Astore

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At 5 o’clock on the morning of May 10, 1775, Ethan Allen decided it was time to act. In the storm-tossed hours since midnight, only two waterlogged boatloads bearing some eighty-nine of Allen’s men had made it across the narrow neck of wind-whipped Lake Champlain. Now the protective darkness was quickly fading to a glowing white morning fog. Soon that would burn off, exposing his meager amateur assault force to any British sentinel patrolling Fort Ticonderoga’s towering ramparts. Allen could wait no longer for boats to ferry across the rest of the Green Mountain Boys he’d left less than a mile from the fort, hidden behind a screen of spruces at Hand’s Cove on the Vermont shore.

Some three hundred miles to the south, the Second Continental Congress would convene at 11 that morning in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia. Delegates from the British colonies up and down the Atlantic Coast were meeting to decide what, if anything, to do about the surprise British attack on Massachusetts militiamen at Lexington and Concord.

The First Continental Congress had adjourned in stalemate six months earlier after sending a humble olive-branch petition off to London, a feeble protest against the increasingly severe British colonial policies. No reply had come back from London. The British secretary of state for North America had put Congress’ grievances, unread, at the bottom of a huge pile.

A majority of the delegates still believed that reconciliation with the mother country was possible, that all grievances could be assuaged without military action. That first Congress had not even agreed to create a committee on defense, let alone prepare for offensive warfare.

This second Congress would open its session on May 10 with a rare speech by Virginia delegate George Washington. To make the point that the time for talking was over, Washington, who had risen to the rank of colonel in the British army during the French and Indian War, was the only delegate who arrived in Philadelphia in uniform.

Washington knew that others in the audience were also ready for firmer measures. Shortly after Lexington and Concord, delegates from New England had stopped their carriages en route to Congress for a secret meeting in Hartford, Connecticut. There, while the Connecticut Assembly was officially adjourned, they supported the decision of the Assembly’s Committee of Safety—meeting in an unauthorized, extralegal session—to commission Ethan Allen and his paramilitary Green Mountain Boys to seize control of Lake Champlain, its forts, and ships. Hoping for a lightning invasion of Canada that would make it part of a new North American union before the British could reinforce its garrisons from faraway England, Samuel Adams and John Hancock of Massachusetts had joined Connecticut’s secret committee in commissioning Allen’s bold assault.

It had been only three weeks since the first shots of the American Revolution were fired on April 19 at Lexington, and the news had spread quickly. Late in the afternoon of April 25, three mud-spattered riders galloped up to the Catamount Tavern in Bennington in present-day Vermont. Inside, they found thirty-seven-year-old Ethan Allen, the towering black-haired colonel commandant of the Green Mountain Boys, huddling with his officers and members of committees of safety from a dozen nearby settlements.

The sudden appearance of Ethan’s younger brother, Connecticut merchant Heman Allen, silenced the tumultuous gathering. Heman had ridden all night with Captains Edward Mott and Noah Phelps, both veterans of the French and Indian War, to bring Ethan two urgent messages from Hartford. First, there had indeed been heavy fighting outside Boston. A brigade of a thousand Redcoats had quick-marched to Lexington, where they killed six militiamen and wounded four others.

As Heman handed Ethan the second message, he explained that he had been passing through Hartford on his way back to his general store in Connecticut from a meeting of Vermont land speculators when the Connecticut committeemen summoned him. How many Green Mountain Boys could Ethan raise? How quickly? And would he be willing to lead them on a dangerous mission to seize the forts and their hundreds of vital cannons before reinforcements from the 26th Regiment of Foot arrived from Montreal?

Tags: American Revolutionary War, Historical Figures

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