Homegrown Terror. Eric D. Lehman
rode south and met his friend in the legislature, Silas Deane. Through a clever and possibly illegal financial maneuver, Deane and a few other legislators got the money and sent notice to Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, and an ambush, led by Allen and Arnold, was born.1
Events moved quickly. Recruitment began in Connecticut and Arnold and his allies moved across Massachusetts, collecting troops. Meanwhile, Ethan Allen gathered his own partisans, refusing to wait for the others. When Arnold heard this news, he was furious, through either personal ambition or worry that the entire operation would be blown. Riding alone through the hills of western Massachusetts, he joined former Connecticut man–turned-transient Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. The two egotistical men clashed immediately over command. But they both had enough presence of mind to put their differences aside and lead the motley soldiers through thick pine forests over the border of New York and sixty miles north past Lake George to the frontier outpost of Fort Ticonderoga.
In the dark early morning of May 9 they quietly crept within a mile of the fort. A small band of Americans padded through the forest along the cliff side and to the gate, where a lonely British sentinel stood guard. Before he could fire his flintlock, Ethan Allen knocked it to the ground and the band rushed the gates, scrambled across the courtyard, and ran up a flight of stairs to the captain’s quarters. Allen pounded on the door and a lieutenant appeared holding up his pants with one hand. Allen told him to “deliver to me the Fort instantly,” and the sleepy lieutenant asked what authority he had, apparently unaware of the situation in Boston. “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” Allen replied. The more diplomatic Arnold broke in, “Come, give up your arms and you’ll be treated like a gentleman.” Without much choice the British complied.2
Two days later they took the nearby lakeside fort at Crown Point. On May 12 the prisoners, including a major, a captain, and two lieutenants, were sent to Governor Trumbull. On their arrival, Trumbull immediately solicited the Continental Congress, pledging “support of the Grand American Cause” and urging for the “regular establishment of our Army around Boston.” Inside, he sent a second, more circumspect letter, in which he told the Congress that the real message will be delivered by the carrier, one that told them of the Ticonderoga expedition, “an affair of so great Importance,” and begged that Congress would “take it up.”3
But Arnold moved more quickly than letters and slow-moving machinations of the Continental Congress. He cataloged the cannons and prepared them for transport to the siege of Boston, while Eleazar Oswald arrived at Ticonderoga. Oswald had been born in England and had been in America only since 1770, but he had married an American girl in New York City and believed strongly in the goals of the Revolution. After moving to Connecticut, he had joined the New Haven Governor’s Foot Guard with Arnold, and now he brought more recruits and a sloop they had commandeered. With this ship at his disposal, Arnold rechristened it Liberty and sailed north across Lake Champlain with fifty men for almost a hundred miles, taking the Canadian outpost of Fort Saint-Jean just before the British had a chance to reinforce it.4 He wrote to Trumbull that “had we been 6 hours later in all Probability we should have miscarried in our Design…. Providence seems to have smiled on us.” They took everything portable from the fort, including prisoners, and sailed back down the lake.5
Left behind by Arnold, Ethan Allen had followed in slower ships and missed the spoils, though he was attacked by British reinforcements. Arnold reached Ticonderoga triumphant, proclaiming, “we are Masters of the Lake.”6 When Allen returned from Saint-Jean, the two men continued to argue. Arnold complained of the intolerable situation: “When Mister Allen, finding he has a strong party, and being impatient of control, and taking umbrage at my forbidding the people to plunder, he assumed the entire command, and I was not consulted for 4 days, which time I spent in the Garrison. And as a private person often insulted by him and his officers, often threatened with my life, and twice shot at by his men.”7 Arnold’s ambitions had been satisfied by his success but were dampened by Allen’s constant undermining of his authority and his accomplishments. However, the people of New York were more generous. Six hundred families subscribed to an address of praise for Arnold, “deeply impressed with a sense of your merit,” after his part in the Ticonderoga raid and subsequent work in the region.8 A troop of a thousand men finally arrived to reinforce the fort and secure the southern end of Lake Champlain. Arnold returned to Albany to give a report, where he learned that on June 19 his beautiful young wife Margaret had died.9
Silas Deane traveled to Weathersfield to visit his own wife, Elizabeth, but he was also needed in Philadelphia, pulled in different directions by love and duty. On one journey home he was joined by Arnold’s childhood playmate, Philip Turner, now a talented surgeon who became the doctor for Connecticut’s troops in the Continental army.10 The previous summer in Philadelphia, Deane spoke of the “task before us, which is as arduous and of as great consequence as ever man undertook.”11 The camaraderie in the summer of 1775 continued to feed Deane’s passionate patriotism, and even there at the heart of the Revolution, few matched him. He wrote back to Elizabeth in Weathersfield again, saying, “I have the fullest assurance that these colonies will rise triumphant, and shine to the latest posterity, though trying scenes are before us.”12 In another letter he continued even more firmly, “My principles are … to sacrifice all lesser considerations to the service of the whole, and in this tempestuous season to throw cheerfully overboard private fortune, private emolument, even my life—if the ship, with the jewel Liberty, may be safe.”13 This was no reckless youth with nothing to lose, but a man of nearly forty, whose success and family were much to risk and whose formerly mild temperament had brought him political position and success.
Deane tried to remain practical despite this revolutionary fervor, serving on various committees throughout the summer and debating with Thomas Paine and Roger Sherman on the positive necessity of clothing the soldiers.14 When news arrived of Arnold and Allen’s success, and his own part in financing the operation, his nickname in Congress became “Ticonderoga.”15 Then on June 14 Deane and a veteran of the French and Indian War named George Washington spent two days drafting rules and regulations for the army. The tall Virginian was preparing to ride to Boston and take command of the various New England militias and promised to stop in Weathersfield. Deane wrote to Elizabeth, “General Washington will be with you soon…. I have been with him for a great part of the last forty-eight hours in Congress and Committee, and the more that I have become acquainted with the man, the more I esteem him.”16 A few weeks later Washington rode through Connecticut, proclaimed in New Haven by cannons, drummers, and a Yale fifer named Noah Webster. The general stopped for lunch at Deane’s house, meeting Governor Trumbull and Jeremiah Wadsworth. Elizabeth Deane set lunch and withdrew to sit with the house slaves, Hagar and Pompey, in the kitchen, while in the best room the three men talked of freedom.
Washington rode on to the siege of Boston, already over two months old. Within the week after the shots were fired at Lexington almost four thousand Connecticut men had marched to join the army assembling around Cambridge. Many of these men came back, since there was little food in April for the huge numbers rushing to defend their homeland.17 But throughout the summer, recruitment for the war effort continued, and it increased with the arrival of Washington to lead and cohere the various militias and companies.
One of those inspired to join that summer was Nathan Hale, who felt restless teaching in New London. Every day thirty-two boys sat on benches at long tables and scraped their slates, staring out the wavy glass windows of the Union School while he taught them Latin and grammar. On Saturdays he taught girls, a practice for which he had been vilified by some of the more conservative people in town. But the trustees of the school, including Nathaniel and Lucretia Shaw, seem to have had no problem with this quirk, inviting him to meals at their huge stone house by the harbor.18 After all, Hale was a respected teacher, “frank and independent in his bearing, social, animated, ardent, a lover of the society of ladies, and a favorite among them.”19
Hale had joined the New London militia the previous autumn, and by the summer of 1775 was promoted to first sergeant.20 But the battle was not at New London, not yet, and even though his contract was nearly up anyway,