Three months later he organized a force of about 130 New England militia and French Canadians and, assured of support by its English merchants, attempted to capture Montreal. His force became divided, however, and after a three-hour firefight in which all but thirty-two of his men ran away, Allen was forced to surrender.

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He would spend the next thirty-two months in British captivity, shunted first in irons to England, then to Ireland, the Carolinas, Halifax, and New York City, where he was finally exchanged for the colonel of a British regiment in May 1778. His refusal to try to escape (all the men captured with him managed to get away) forced the British to establish protocols for exchanging American officers for captured Britons.

Allen’s greatest contribution to the American Revolution came in the winter of 1775-76, while he shivered in the dank hold of a ship taking him to almost certain execution in England. Desperate for artillery to bombard the British inside Boston, General Washington dispatched a twenty-five-year-old bookseller, Henry Knox, his first artillery commander, to bring the cannons Allen had so daringly seized to the heights overlooking Boston.

In the snows of a New England winter, Colonel Knox sorted through the weapons, selecting sixty-five guns weighing about sixty tons, including thirty-nine fieldpieces, two short-barreled howitzers with a thousand-yard range, and fourteen mortars with a range of up to thirteen hundred yards. Hauling the guns and hundreds of heavy barrels of lead and flints onto bateaux, Knox and three hundred soldiers and civilians shoved out onto Lake George.

At its southern tip, Knox collected 160 oxen, several teams of horses, forty heavy-duty sleds, and a herd of cattle. Fifty miles farther south, they crossed the frozen Hudson, the sleds spaced two hundred yards apart. Traveling over frozen ground and through deep snow, they crossed the Berkshires in mid-January, the teamsters using block and tackle to keep from losing a single gun as the unwieldy sleds slid down the steep slopes. After they reached Springfield by January 20, Knox rode ahead to Cambridge to supervise construction of gun carriages.

Allen was on the high seas, a forty-pound iron bar between his ankles chained to his manacled wrists so tightly that he could not lie down or stand up. It would be months before he learned that the guns he had dragged from Fort Ticonderoga had forced the British to evacuate Boston or face devastating cannonades from the Heights of Dorchester. Allen had given George Washington what he needed to clear all of New England of Redcoats by Evacuation Day in April 1776.

When an emaciated Ethan Allen finally was released, he rode to Valley Forge, where Washington gave him a hero’s welcome. Writing to Henry Laurens, the president of Congress, Washington wrote his impressions after meeting the legendary Green Mountain colonel-commandant: “His fortitude and firmness seemed to have placed him out of the reach of misfortune. There is an original something in him that commands admiration, and his long captivity and sufferings have only served to increase, if possible, his enthusiastic zeal.”

This article was written by William J. Astore and originally published in the Autumn 2007 issue of MHQ Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ magazine today!

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