The committee was asking Ethan Allen and his militia to carry out a treasonous invasion of one British province, New York, on the dubious authority of an illegal assemblage of rebels from another province, Connecticut. Allen needed little time to deliberate. He later wrote in his memoirs that he was “thoroughly electrified” by his selection for the task. The news of the first “systematical and bloody attempt by the British” to “enslave America” made him determined to risk a traitor’s death.

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The British garrison inside Fort Ticonderoga at the southern tip of Lake Champlain had no reason to expect Vermonters to assault a Crown fortress on New York soil, in part because the province’s royal government had officially and expressly forbidden any such raid. Unlike New Englanders, the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers were still loyal to the Crown. In addition, in its initial session in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress had also resolved that on no account should revolutionaries molest the garrisons of New York’s forts. As long as the British did not construct any new fortifications or impede the free passage of citizens, they should be allowed to occupy their barracks peaceably.

In fact, Congress had resolved that the American colonists would resort to force of arms only if British troops violated the people’s rights. The revolutionary leaders of New York had interpreted this to mean that the people should not confiscate any military property belonging to the British Crown. Furthermore, there had been no formal declaration of war. As late as May 16, 1775, six days after Allen and his Green Mountain Boys launched their predawn attack on Fort Ticonderoga, the delegates in Philadelphia would still be declaring that “Congress had nothing else in mind but the defense of the colonies.”

The view from New England was quite different. To Allen and other incipient New England revolutionaries, it appeared that the old British forts in upstate New York, each held by no more than a corporal’s guard of a few score men, were ripe for the plucking. Allen, Hancock, Adams, and Connecticut’s radical leaders believed the forts on Lake Champlain must be seized before they could be reinforced by British Redcoats or by militia loyal to the British, who could be called up any day by New York’s royal governor.

One leading Loyalist, Colonel Philip Skene, a Scottish veteran of the recent French and Indian War, had already built blockhouses at Skenesboro (present-day Whitehall) on his thirty-thousand-acre forest plantation just south of Lake Champlain. There, his family, his servants, and the workers in his sawmills and shipyard were prepared to defend his manor with cannons and his own armed schooner, Betsey. On May 10, Colonel Skene, a New York justice of the peace and longtime friend of Allen’s, was on the high seas, returning from England with instructions to raise a regiment of Loyalist troops to hold the Lake Champlain forts until the British could reinforce them.

To Allen, seizing the key Champlain forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point was a necessary preemptive act. He later wrote that he could not stand still and wait for the British and their Indian auxiliaries to attack settlements around the mountain lake and in the Green Mountains after he had labored for years to create a new and independent British province, the New Hampshire Grants. Sending couriers north and south, Allen had in less than two weeks recruited an armed force of three hundred frontiersmen from the hills of western Massachusetts, Connecticut, and present-day Vermont. Hundreds more were rushing to join him.

Allen, a commanding figure at well over six feet—nearly a head taller than most of his men—for five years had been the green-uniformed, elected colonel-commandant of the Green Mountain Boys he had formed to prevent New York from evicting as squatters some seven thousand settlers in the Green Mountains. After years of successful clashes with New York sheriffs and posses, Allen believed he could count on as many as two thousand armed men to follow him.

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