Blood of Tyrants. Logan Beirne
was enraged by reports that the British had abused the popular American patriot Colonel Ethan Allen. Allen was a flamboyant farmer-turned-statesman-turned-land-speculator best known as the charismatic leader of a “merry band” of militiamen called the Green Mountain Boys.9 Allen was born into a relatively prosperous farming family in the sparsely populated hills of northwestern Connecticut. But farm life was not enough for this fiery character. Like many ambitious youth at the time, he journeyed to the frontier to find his fortune and eventually made his way to the wilderness of Vermont. Not yet a state, it was a hotly disputed area over which New York landowners attempted to assert control while the squatters living there sought independent statehood. The “wild west” of New England, this region was dominated by a rambunctious lot. Allen fit right in.
With a long face, narrow-set eyes, big nose, and bushy brown hair, Allen matured into a loud man with a penchant for taking the law into his own hands. Married to an uneducated and rigidly religious woman who did not care for her husband’s debaucherous streak, he faced constant criticism at home.10 This made Allen rather eager to escape the house.
He escaped to the local taverns and town hall, where he became not only a connoisseur of cheap rum but also a raucous figure in the community. Standing over six feet tall, he was impossible to ignore as he shouted and his large face grew ruddy with passion. With his incendiary oratory, Allen had a knack for whipping his audiences into action. He soon emerged as the grandiloquent leader of the frontiersmen seeking to forcefully secure their Vermont land claims against wealthy New Yorkers. Many of these Green Mountain Boys, including Allen himself, had outstanding arrest warrants in New York for beating anyone who challenged their claims. Enjoying a good fight almost as much as a good drink, this guerilla force readily followed Allen into battle time and again.
When the Revolutionary War broke out, the unhappily married thirty-seven-year-old Allen was ready to leap into the center of the struggle. Even though most of the action was in Massachusetts, Allen led the unruly Green Mountain Boys into the backwater of upstate New York to take part in America’s first offensive of the war. Their target was the formidable, granite-walled Fort Ticonderoga. Known as the “Gibraltar of North America,” this imposing British fortress secured the waterway connecting Canada to New York. Overlooking Lake Champlain, Ticonderoga was in a heavily wooded and largely uninhabited area, then just beginning to enjoy the effects of spring’s slow march northward.
Allen’s men set out on a midnight raid on a rain-soaked May night in 1775, under orders to seize the boats of wealthy British merchants so that the American forces might use them as ferries across the lake.11 Stumbling upon “choice liquors” in a Loyalist’s cellar, however, the Vermonters took to drinking instead.12 At three o’clock in the morning, they decided to make do with just the single boat they had secured to ferry as many men as possible before they lost the cover of darkness.
After two trips across the choppy, cold water, only ninety men were in place. Two-thirds of the American troops were still stranded on the other side of the lake, but Allen decided to attack before daybreak anyway. His force a less-than-optimal mixture of drunk and hung over, the brazen Allen and his dysfunctional militia charged the fort.
Luckily for Allen, the British had only one sentry on duty, and he was helping himself to an unauthorized catnap. Taken by complete surprise, the undermanned fort put up little resistance, as the half-naked British soldiers did not even have time to put on their pants, let alone ready their muskets.13 In a stunning blow to the British, the fort fell to the Americans, thereby thwarting Britain’s plan to invade through Montreal. Perhaps more importantly, the Americans acquired the gunpowder and artillery that Washington needed to rain hell on the British in Boston. Washington was rather pleased.
Drunk with confidence—and booze—after this triumph, Allen began lobbying Congress to expand the war, writing, “I will lay my life on it, that with fifteen hundred men, and a proper artillery, I will take Montreal.”14 Eager to spread the Revolution to the French Canadians, Congress agreed to a daring invasion of Canada. Washington, though not technically authorized by Congress to do so, was so enthusiastic about the plan that he sent up his own separate brigade.15
As usual, Allen was among the first to charge to the front lines of the fight. Patience not being one of his virtues, he led approximately one hundred men in a foolhardy attack on Montreal ahead of the main American force.16 Outnumbered two to one, his rogue team fought ferociously but was quickly defeated and Allen was captured. Now wise to the plans for a larger assault, the British repelled the American invasion of Canada. Allen was trapped.
British Brigadier Prescott ordered that Allen be tightly shackled and chained within the dark hull of a prison ship moored in Montreal’s harbor. Prescott was an odious character, whose large, almost serpentine eyes were suited to his oppressive disposition. He became known for his “many acts of petty tyranny,” and Allen felt the brunt of his wrath.17
Rather than languish in defeat in his dank wooden prison, however, Allen was defiant, much to his dour captor’s vexation. Choosing to “behave in a daring, soldier-like manner, that [he] might exhibit a good sample of American fortitude,” the colorful Allen challenged each of his guards to a manly fistfight as they passed by.18 While not one of them accepted his challenge, Prescott found Allen’s bravado infuriating and ordered that he be treated “with much severity.”19
The British beat Allen, deprived him of adequate water and rations, and repeatedly threatened him with hanging.20 For weeks he was held almost naked, wearing little more than the heavy iron chains that cut his wrists and weighed him to the ground.21 “I have suffered every thing short of death,” he reported.22 The large man withered as his health deteriorated. But the plucky Allen survived. Unsure of what to do with this defiant troublemaker, the British shipped him off to England, where he was imprisoned in a dark old castle in Cornwall.23 Like an exhibit at the zoo, he slept in hay infested with vermin as locals bribed guards for a peek at the giant who had taken Ticonderoga.
Everyone expected that Allen would be swiftly hanged. But when word reached Washington that Allen was “thrown into Irons and suffers all the Hardships inflicted upon common Felons,” the commander was incensed, to put it mildly.24 He felt bound by his strong sense of honor to employ all means necessary to protect Allen. And Washington was prepared to go to great lengths to save an American life.
In a lucky twist of fate, the Americans captured Ethan Allen’s tormentor, Brigadier Prescott, during a subsequent battle. Washington now had his bargaining chip. And he used it. He promptly contacted the new commanding British general, William Howe, who had assumed leadership of the British forces after Parliament recalled Thomas Gage. The British government had lost faith in Gage after he had failed to finish off the colonists’ insurrection in Boston, and had transferred the reins to Howe in hopes of a speedy end to the war. Washington was now negotiating with a more sympathetic character.
General Howe was a British aristocrat who, although a capable commander, nevertheless benefitted from his family’s money and connections. His grandmother had an affair with King George I, and so his family tree—more resembling a twisted bush—positioned Howe as King George III’s illegitimate uncle. Having begun his military career as a teenager, Howe gradually rose through the ranks to achieve his current lofty rank. Now forty-seven years old, he was a brawny six feet tall, with a broad nose and black eyes that sparkled almost as much as his stellar reputation.1 While fond of merriment—“a glass and a lass” in particular—Howe also had a darker side and “suffered from the Howe family fits of gloom.”2 And he was a bit gloomy about his present appointment as well.
Ironically, Howe sympathized with the American cause, and he took up arms against the colonists only