The First American Victory: Ethan Allen Takes Fort Ticonderoga

One day after taking Ticonderoga, Allen dispatched Captain Seth Warner with forty men to seize Crown Point, strategically located twelve miles up Lake Champlain on the New York shore. Lightly garrisoned by a sergeant, nine enlisted men and ten women and children, Fort Amherst fell without resistance. Only a few cannons were visible, but back at Ticonderoga Allen was excitedly cataloguing an inventory of captured artillery that he could send off toward Boston.

At first count, he found a hundred cannons. A later count sent off to Congress detailed eighty-seven: seventy-eight serviceable cannons, six large mortars, and three howitzers plus a number of swivel guns, eighteen thousand pounds of musket balls, and thirty thousand flints. At Crown Point they eventually retrieved more cannons, buried by the French. The fieldpieces, ranging from three-pounders to forty-two-pounders, were an unbelievable treasure, state-of-the-art weaponry that would enable the Americans to fight the British on more even terms.

At their next council of war, Allen and Arnold agreed that they had to turn their attention to the lake itself by taking the seventy-ton armed sloop George the Third, now anchored 125 miles away to the north, a mile above Fort St. John, on the Richelieu River inside Quebec province. Arnold and fifty of his Massachusetts men boarded Colonel Skene’s captured schooner, fitted it out with swivel guns, renamed it Liberty, and set sail north toward Canada. Allen and a contingent of the Boys followed in slow bateaux, the sail- and oar-powered workboats of the lake.

Arnold, a skilled mariner, arrived first and took the fort’s thirteen-man garrison by surprise. He was already sailing back toward Ticonderoga at the helm of the captured British sloop, which he renamed Enterprise, when Allen arrived.

“He saluted me with a discharge of cannon,” Allen wrote, “which I returned with a volley of small arms. This being repeated three times, I went on board the sloop with my party, where several loyal toasts were drunk, wishing Congress health. We were now masters of the lake, and the garrisons depending thereon.”

As Arnold headed back to his new base at Crown Point, Allen and the Green Mountain Boys rowed on into Canada. Arnold later depicted Allen’s invasion of Canada as “a wild, impractical, expensive scheme” carried out by “a hundred mad fellows.” Arnold didn’t know that Allen was carrying out secret orders from the revolutionary leaders of Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Allen’s first brief foray into Canada ended unceremoniously on May 19. He had camped across the river from the captured fort at St. Johns while he sent an emissary to Montreal to seek support from English merchants there for an attack. The British intercepted the courier, and Allen awoke the next morning to “a cannonading of grape shot,” he wrote. “The music was both terrible and delightful.” Taken by surprise by a large force of Redcoats, Allen and his troops hastily retreated toward Crown Point to await further orders.

News of the conquest of Lake Champlain and its forts at once exhilarated and horrified many members of the Continental Congress. Delighted at the newfound stock of weaponry, many delegates nevertheless considered the invasion of one colony by militias from two others on their own initiative a threat to any prospect of continental union. One direct result of Allen, Arnold, and the Green Mountain Boys’ series of fearless assaults was, within weeks, the creation of the Continental Army. Congress appointed George Washington as the first Continental soldier, and its commander in chief.

At the end of May 1775, Allen received his first direct communication from the Continental Congress. It shocked him. Congress ordered him to remove all cannons from the forts on Lake Champlain and retreat with them to the southern tip of Lake George and there make a stand when and if the British counterattacked from Canada. Writing back angrily, he argued that such a maneuver would “ruin the settlements,” including all of Vermont. Didn’t Congress know that several thousand families in settlements extend-ing a hundred miles north of this arbitrary defensive position would be exposed to British retribution? Didn’t Congress own a map?

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