As more of the Boys raced upstairs, yelling at him, Feltham fled. He later reported, “With great difficulty, I got into Delaplace’s room.” The commandant was coolly dressing, putting on his sword. Feltham opened a side door and started toward Allen, who was running up the stairs. Trying to stall him, Feltham loudly asked, “By what authority [had] they entered His Majesty’s fort?”

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Brandishing his cutlass, Allen, as he later wrote, bellowed, “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”—or that is what he later claimed he said. According to Lieutenant Feltham’s official British account, however, Allen invoked neither the deity nor Congress. Instead, he said, “Come out of there, you damned old rat!”

As Allen waved his sword over Feltham, his men leveled their flintlocks at him. Allen warned him “that if there was a single gun fired, neither man, woman or child would be left alive in this fort.” (There were approximately forty women and children, the soldiers’ families.) Captain Delaplace, in full dress uniform, came out and surrendered his sword, his pistols, and Fort Ticonderoga to Allen. Allen had taken the mightiest fortress in America, complete with all its artillery and munitions, without firing a shot or suffering a single casualty.

As Allen ordered the captured officers and men placed under guard, four hundred more of the Boys poured into the fort. They quickly discovered a cellar under the officers’ quarters housing ninety gallons of rum, Captain Delaplace’s private stock. Some of them were roaring drunk by the time Arnold tried to get them to help him strip the fort of its cannons, but Allen sympathized with his troops: After years of confrontations with the New York authorities, he wanted them to take the time to celebrate. Allen wrote a few days later to the treasurer of Connecticut to reimburse Captain Delaplace, by then a prisoner, for the rum, which Allen said had “been greatly wanted for the refreshment of the fatigued soldiery.”

When some of the Boys began to loot the fort, Arnold repeatedly recited military law. Arnold’s interference with the Green Mountain Boys infuriated Allen, who felt it was abrogating their agreement about a joint command. After two Boys unsteadily fired at Arnold and missed him, Allen stripped him of his command at gunpoint. A disgusted Arnold confined himself to officers’ quarters.

By this time, Allen had organized and led militia for five years. Arnold, an apothecary merchant and ship’s captain, had no combat experience, but he refused to resign. To Massachusetts officials Arnold wrote, “Colonel Allen is a proper man to head his own wild people but entirely unacquainted with military service.”

While Arnold scratched out angry salvos, Allen was also busy writing. At first he did not even mention Arnold in his dispatches—“I took the fortress at Ticonderoga by storm.” The next day, writing to Albany, he revised himself: “Colonel Arnold entered the fortress with me side by side.” All day on the 11th, an exultant Allen fired off ever-more-detailed reports to Boston, Albany, and the Continental Congress. In the former commandant’s quarters, the new commandant of Fort Ticonderoga was busy writing some of the happiest sentences of his life. To the governor of Connecticut he wrote: “I make you a present of a major, a captain and two lieutenants in the regular establishment of George the Third….I hope they may serve as ransoms for some of our friends of Boston.”

In his letters, Allen laid out an unfolding grand plan. At Skenesboro, the Boys had seized a newly built schooner. He wrote, “I expect in ten days time to have it rigged and manned and armed with six or eight pieces of cannon.” Then Allen said he would attack the British sloop-of-war, twice its size and the largest vessel on the lake, allowing, “I expect lives may be lost in the attack.” Moreover, he was sure there would be a British counterattack from Quebec. With perspicacity, Allen signed himself, “At Present Commander of Ticonderoga.”

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