The First American Victory: Ethan Allen Takes Fort Ticonderoga

The lumbering workboat finally tacked into Hand’s Cove at 3 p.m. on May 10. As Allen and his first chosen men clambered aboard, the sky to the east was already turning gray against the black silhouettes of the mountains. The scow wallowed in the choppy water under the weight of so many men and their guns, nearly sinking into the heaving lake. Water sloshed over the gunwales. At that time of year, the water temperature rarely reaches forty-five degrees. The lugsail was useless: In the high wind, it could capsize the unwieldy, overloaded boat. Squall-whipped water drenched the novice oarsmen, blinding them.

It took a nerve-wracking hour and a half for the scow to make the one-mile crossing and return for more men. After a second slow crossing, only eighty-three shivering men had been deposited on the New York shore, a quarter mile east of Fort Ticonderoga. They headed up the slope just north of a jutting piece of shoreline known as Willow Point.

At 5 a.m., with the sun about to rise and only a third of his scratch army—and none of their supplies—on the right side of the lake, Allen made the prearranged three owl hoots. Raising his cutlass over his head and swinging it toward the main guard post at Fort Ticonderoga, he launched the first offensive military action in the history of the United States. For once in his life, he had very little to say, only a hoarse whisper: “Let’s go!”

Despite intelligence to the contrary from spies Phelps and Hickok, they found the main gate closed. Had a Loyalist neighbor, suspicious of all the men and activity on the Vermont shore, warned the British? Cut out of the main gate was a narrow doorway, a wicket with a sentry box just inside. A single Redcoat stood sentry duty, and he had dozed off.

Both Allen, on the right, the traditional position of honor, and Benedict Arnold, on the left, would later claim that they had rushed the guard simultaneously, but eyewitnesses said only one man, the smaller, faster Arnold, squeezed through the narrow gate. The startled guard aimed his musket and pulled the trigger. But it had been a damp night and it misfired, the hammer snapping harmlessly in the pan. The terrified soldier threw down his gun and ran toward the barracks, yelling.

A second sentry appeared. This time Allen reached him first. The Redcoat fired high, missing, then rushed Allen with his bayonet. Sidestepping, Allen swung at the soldier’s head with his heavy cutlass. The blow, enough to behead a man, struck a wooden comb in the Englishman’s carefully coiffed and powdered hair, sending him sprawling. Allen later wrote that he deliberately spared the man’s life by deflecting the sword’s arc: “My first thought was to kill him with my sword but, in an instant I altered the design and fury of the blow to a slight cut on the side of the head.”

Allen demanded that the stunned guard get up and lead him to the commandant’s quarters. Despite reconnaissance, no one knew the fort’s exact layout. Arnold, meanwhile, had run toward the main barracks, found the garrison’s muskets neatly stacked out front and led his men upstairs to wake the Redcoats at gunpoint and take them prisoner.

With a half dozen of the Green Mountain Boys, Allen prodded the wounded sentry before him, crossing the parade ground to the west wall and hurrying up a stone stairway toward what obviously was the officers’ quarters, yelling, “No quarter! No quarter!” In his room, Lieutenant Feltham, a young artillerist posted to Ticonderoga only a week earlier, jumped up and ran in his underwear to the door of Captain William Delaplace, the commandant.

The subaltern banged on the door and—as he later reported—waited, his trousers in his hand, “to receive orders.” Delaplace didn’t answer. Feltham ran back to his room, pulled on his red coat, and ran toward the din on the stairs, hoping that his few visible symbols of authority would help him rally the garrison.