After seizing the lake forts to protect themselves, Allen and his neighbors were now supposed to dig up and haul the heavy guns away. If they gave up the forts, he wrote, “We may as well give up the whole region.” After re-occupying the forts, the British could “make incursions into the heart of our country.”

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For the first time Allen pleaded that, if only he had five hundred troops, he could take Montreal before the British could reinforce it. But Congress was badly split between hawks and doves; it would be another year before members even began to debate independence. Meanwhile, Congress ordered Allen to take “an exact inventory” of “all such cannon and stores,” the British sloop-of-war, Colonel Skene’s schooner, and the nine bateaux taken at St. John’s. They could be “safely returned when the restoration of former harmony between Great Britain and these colonies, so ardently wished for, rendered their return prudent and consistent with the overruling law of self-preservation.”

Disgusted by such a prime piece of back-bending political compromise couched in lawyer’s language, Allen headed south. On Friday, June 23, he and his cousin, Captain Seth Warner, marched into Pennsylvania’s State House with their own Declaration of Independence, signed at Crown Point by five hundred soldiers and citizens of the Lake Champlain region.

For Allen, it was both an exhilarating and desperate moment. He was known as the hero of Ticonderoga, the only hero of the Revolution so far. Six days earlier, the New England army besieging Boston, devoid of artillery and running out of gunpowder, had been driven from Breed’s Hill. Washington, the newly elected commander in chief, was rushing north.

The tall, self-assured Colonel Allen impressed most of the delegates. As he argued for invading Canada, men such as John Hancock, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson all listened intently. When he was finished, Congress voted unanimously to “procure a list of the men employed in taking and garrisoning Crown Point and Ticonderoga” so that they could be given Continental Army pay.

Equally pleasing to Allen was that the newly created Green Mountain Regiment was to serve under the officers its troops elected. He had entered the Congressional chamber as an outlaw, the traitor who had seized the king’s forts, and emerged as the first Continental Army colonel of the Green Mountain Regiment. The Boys were to be folded into the Continental Army.

When he returned to Ticonderoga, Allen found mixed news awaiting him. That same day, under investigation by auditors for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, Benedict Arnold had resigned his commission. Allen’s old enemies in New York had been busy in his absence, however. At the urging of General Philip Schuyler of Albany, a convention of the committees of safety from towns west of the Green Mountains had met in Allen’s absence and elected officers for the new regiment. Most of the town elders, more conservative than the men Allen had led for many years, were alarmed by his confrontational tactics and worried that he would bring down the wrath of the British and their Indian allies on their farms.

The village elders rebelled. By a lopsided 25-to-5 vote in a secret ballot, they elected Seth Warner, not Allen, colonel in command of the Green Mountain Regiment. Of the twenty-three officers they elected, Allen was not even chosen as a lieutenant.

Stunned, Allen wrote to Governor Trumbull of Connecticut that “the old farmers” who “do not incline to go to war” had “completely omitted me. How the old men came to reject me I cannot conceive inasmuch as I saved them.” Less than three months after his greatest achievement, Allen was out. But even though he was without a command, Allen joined the American army about to invade Canada, to act as a scout.

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