Ethan Allen, Willard Sterne Randall
I had to get this biography – Ethan Allen did not make
furniture, but it seems as if that is all people can think of now. He was a rebellious American before and after
the war of independence and he and the Green Mountain Boys are a colorful part
of our colonial/revolutionary history. In fact, this man embodies rebellion and free
thinking to the point where he made the other patriots nervous!
His story goes from Massachusetts to Connecticut to Vermont
and in the end his story is the story of Vermont, the 14th
state. His first brush with controversy is when he
challenges the religions that were dominating and dictating to the
colonies. He challenges the religions,
the religious leaders, and their message.
I loved it. Of course it got him
kicked out of multiple towns and began his adventures.
Eventually he ends up in that no man’s land that both New
Hampshire and New York colonies are trying to claim. Each colony wants the settlers to pay for
their land and that would mean buying it twice.
To complicate things the royal governors of both colonies are selling
the same land grants to different people.
And of course this is not something that Allen will tolerate. He runs off the NY posse and gets a price on
his head. It does not bother Ethan
Allen.
Allen organizes the Green Mountain boys and even leads the
country in to battle when he takes Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain while the
colonial leaders for insurrection are still talking about what to do. Then he leads an attack on Montreal. His military success was set back by
captivity. He was captured and kept in
terrible conditions for 32 months with the British refusing to acknowledge the
revolutionary men as soldiers – they are treated as criminals. Put on a boat, kept in a box, taken to
England and back to America, Allen survives the ordeal and writes a book that
becomes a best seller about his time in the hands of the British and the
loyalists.
“Between 1778, when he was released from captivity, and 1784
Ethan Allen served as commander in chief of Vermont’s militia, unelected member
of its assembly, chief diplomat to the Continental Congress and the New England
states, close personal adviser to Governor Chittenden, and ex officio judge of
Vermont’s court of confiscation. The war
hero, the counselor of state, he became the public face of Vermont, inside and
outside the republic. All bluster and
dash on the surface, Allen was all the while careful to urge Governor
Chittenden to grasp any opportunity to correspond over the heads of the Vermont
government and the Continental Congress, directly with General Washington.”
Statehood was denied over and over because of the bitterness
of New York and Allen even negotiated to be recognized as a separate nation
with Britain as a ploy to get the new US to bring him in. He sympathized and sheltered the Shays
Rebellion members and continued to threaten and push for things he felt was
right. In the end, Washington intervened
on behalf of statehood.
Then Allen went on to marry a younger woman, to write “Reason, the only oracle of Man” that
expressed his rejection of the powers of the church. He attacked Christianity and other forms of
revealed religion as a “torrent of superstition.” And stated, “As far as we understand nature,
we are become acquainted with the character of God, for the knowledge of nature
is the revelation of God.” This was in
advance of Emerson and the transcendentalists.
Of course he caught ‘hell’ for expressing his views.
He died relatively young having never compromised on his
belief in what was right and what was right was based on reason. Vermont entered the US with a state
constitution and laws that were much different than the rest of the nation and
included the first complete exclusion of slavery. There is a lot to admire here.
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