When Benedict Arnold heard about the confrontations at Lexington and Concord from the post rider who reached New Haven two days afterward, he immediately “rounded up sixty-three members of his Second Connecticut Company of Foot and ordered them… ready to march early the next morning.” At dawn on April 22, while the New Haven board of selectmen debated a response to the Lexington Alarm, Arnold took the matter out of their hands by demanding the keys to the town’s powder magazine. Armed and provisioned, his company of militia then followed him eastward toward Cambridge to offer its services to the budding Continental Army.6
Somewhere beyond Hartford, Arnold met up with Samuel Holden Parsons, a colonel in the Connecticut militia who would make a brief but important appearance as the third member of this unlikely trio.
Parsons was just turning thirty-eight, the oldest of the three men. Born in Lyme, Connecticut, he had gone to Harvard instead of Yale only because his parents were living at the time in Newburyport, Massachusetts. After graduating in 1756, he returned to Lyme to practice law and was soon elected to the Connecticut General Assembly at the age of twenty-five. Among his later legislative assignments was the committee advocating Connecticut’s western land claims and Connecticut’s standing committee of correspondence, in 1773.7
It would be fascinating if a transcript existed of the conversation between Benedict Arnold and Samuel Parsons on the road near Hartford. Each would later claim that the idea of attacking Fort Ticonderoga had been his and that he had sold the other on the plan. Nonetheless, even Parsons acknowledged, in a letter apparently written that same day, that Arnold “gave him an account of the state of Ticonderoga, and that a great number of brass cannon were there.”8 Arnold probably presumed to speak confidently in his role as military historian and also emphasized the fort’s strategic importance.
The two men soon went their separate ways. Arnold continued east to Cambridge and, with his smooth salesmanship, regaled the committee of safety of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress with tales of the treasure of cannons and other arms at Ticonderoga. He also offered his opinion that the fort “could not hold out an hour against a vigorous onset.” Parsons continued west to Hartford and had a similar conversation, but with an ad hoc group of militia leaders rather than any formal governmental body. In Parsons’s words, he “first undertook and projected taking that Fort &c, and with the assistance of other persons procured money men &c.”9
Parsons apparently remained in Hartford, but the band of adventurers he helped to organize headed north through Pittsfield, in western Massachusetts. As they did so, they encountered more men equally excited about the prospects of an expedition to Ticonderoga, including, probably, John Brown, fresh from his mission to Montreal for the Provincial Congress. Augmented by the Pittsfield contingent, this private army continued north.
Not surprisingly, as they passed north of Bennington, they ran into the “people on New-Hampshire Grants” who Brown had reported were “engaged to do this business” of reducing Ticonderoga. This, of course, was Colonel Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, who were indeed embarked upon the same purpose. The Massachusetts men seem to have immediately recognized that Allen was on his home turf; there was no question but that he would take command of the combined force.
MEANWHILE, THE COMMITTEE OF SAFETY of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had debated granting Benedict Arnold full leave to capture Ticonderoga on Massachusetts’s behalf. All agreed it was a fine idea, but Ticonderoga and the surrounding region of Lakes Champlain and George were contested ground. Whether the area belonged to New York or New Hampshire was of considerable debate, and the province of Massachusetts had little or nothing to do with it.
Consequently, the committee of safety decided to send a missive to New York noting the importance of Ticonderoga and hinting that New York might “give such orders as are agreeable to you” to effect its immediate capture. While coveting “the usefulness of those fine cannon, mortars, and field-pieces which are there,” the Massachusetts committee assured its New York neighbors, “we would not, even upon this emergency, infringe upon the rights of our sister Colony.”10
But then Massachusetts did just that. Recognizing that time was of the essence—just as it was in so many rebel decisions of late—the committee gave Benedict Arnold a temporary commission as colonel and authorized him to raise a force for the specific purpose of capturing Ticonderoga. Evidently suspecting that just such a force was already in the field because of his conversation with Samuel Parsons, Arnold delegated the raising of Massachusetts volunteers to others and hurried north to assume command of whatever troops might be in the field. The full irony of the commission he carried in the pocket of his tunic would not become clear until some months later. It had been signed for the committee of safety by one of its most trusted members, Dr. Benjamin Church.11
Arnold caught up with the combined Hartford, Pittsfield, and Green Mountain Boys contingent at the frontier town of Castleton, Vermont, about twenty miles southeast of Ticonderoga, near what is now the New York–Vermont border. Ethan Allen was farther ahead, scouting the approaches to the fort, but the reaction of his men was predictable when Arnold officiously waved his commission and announced that he was assuming command. There were a host of guffaws and chuckles and then so-what shrugs. Arnold could tag along if he wanted, but they would take their orders only from Ethan Allen.
The next day, Allen and Arnold met in person. A man of lesser backbone and force of personality than Arnold probably would have backed down, but Arnold stood his ground in the face of Allen’s domineering presence. Capturing Ticonderoga might well be Arnold’s path to sudden military celebrity in a continental army. He was not about to let some rough-cut frontiersman, whom he clearly viewed as beneath him—at least as a gentleman—interfere with the opportunity. Allen would have been quite satisfied to settle the matter with a duel, but Arnold instead played the role of charmer and with a certain amount of guile brought Allen under his spell. The result was an agreement to devise a plan of attack and share command, which in military situations is rarely, if ever, a good solution.
On the evening of May 9, these two polar opposites gathered their force—which still did not include any Massachusetts troops—of not quite three hundred men at Hand’s Cove, on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain. Slightly up the lake, across about a mile of water, stood the massive walls and forbidding gun emplacements of Ticonderoga. But where were the boats that were supposed to transport them across the lake? Only one small skiff floated at the shore. No other boats were to be found, and as the night wore on, both Arnold and Allen worried that they would be discovered. Finally, in the early hours of May 10, a decrepit scow floated into view. Fearing that their element of surprise would be lost if they waited for better transport, Arnold and Allen for once agreed, and they set off for the opposite shore in the scow with less than a third of their men.
They almost didn’t make it. A brisk wind kicked up whitecaps on the lake and rendered the heavily laden scow almost unmanageable. Waves broke over the gunwales and drenched the oarsmen, who desperately tried to make some headway. No one else stayed dry, either. The tattered sail was of no use and only served to make the vessel less stable. It looked as if at any moment eighty-three men would be thrown into the frigid spring waters of Lake Champlain and meet rapid death from hypothermia. Only after an excruciating ninety minutes did the scow touch on the western shore just north of the fort.
But upon landing, the first exchange of combat almost came between Arnold and Allen, as Arnold once again asserted his right to sole command. In one of those ridiculous episodes that leave later observers wondering what they could have been thinking, one of Allen’s officers brokered a truce and sent the two leaders, looking like Mutt and Jeff—Allen the towering hulk of a bear and Arnold the diminutive spit-and-polish soldier—marching side by side through dense undergrowth to the gates of the fort.12
No warning shot sounded from the ramparts, and while the huge wooden gat
es were closed, the smaller wicket door stood open in apparent welcome. The lone guard in the sentry box brandished his musket and offered a tentative challenge, but then ran, shouting, into the fort’s interior. Allen quickly brushed aside another sentry with his sword and followed. The ragged party formed on the parade ground, facing the two barracks, and according to Allen “gave three huzzas which greatly surprised” the sleeping British garrison.
Allen, with Arnold on his heels, made for the officers’ quarters on the second level, where Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham, the fort’s second in command, confronted them. Feltham had stumbled out to inquire about the noise with a dazed look on his face and his breeches in his hand. Meanwhile, Captain Delaplace, the post’s commander, refused to open the door to his quarters until he was properly attired. He may well have been having flashbacks to General Gage’s letter urging him to be on guard against any unpleasant surprises.
Unpleasant as this was, and trying to buy time for his commander, Lieutenant Feltham demanded to know by what authority this band of rabble had entered His Majesty’s fort. Allen’s purported response would be repeated by rebels and published in dozens of newspapers throughout the colonies. Even if he didn’t say it, the words made for marvelous press. Surrender, Ethan Allen declared, “in the name of the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress.”13
Allen himself eschewed organized religion, and the Continental Congress was as yet ignorant of his mission, but the words struck a chord and perfectly caught the tenor of the times—particularly in the retelling—by balancing God and country.
According to Lieutenant Feltham’s subsequent report to General Gage, only Arnold’s “genteel manner” prevented Allen from storming Captain Delaplace’s quarters before the commandant was neat in his uniform with his sword at his side. When Delaplace finally appeared, he was left with little choice but to surrender to Allen and Arnold what only a few years before had been the most heavily defended and most important strategic position between Quebec and New York. Allen’s men captured the nearby post of Crown Point and its eleven-man garrison with a similar lack of opposition the next day. Control of Lake Champlain would be more problematic but arguably more important.
ON MAY 11, THE DAY after taking Ticonderoga, Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen each sat down and wrote separate reports to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress detailing the capture. It is understandable that Arnold, having received his commission from Massachusetts, would do so. But Allen seems also to have done so in an attempt to emphasize his own role in the venture and cloak it in the dubious authority of the Connecticut General Assembly. Although the two protagonists had not come to physical blows in the course of their short campaign together, these initial reports began a duel of letters that Arnold and Allen repeatedly fired off to various authorities in the neighboring colonies.
In his May 11 letter, Ethan Allen noted “with pleasure unfelt before” that “by order of the General Assembly of the colony of Connecticut” he had taken “the Fortress of Ticonderoga by storm” with “about one hundred Green Mountain Boys and near fifty veteran soldiers” from Massachusetts. Allen made no mention of Benedict Arnold, but went on to report: “The soldiery behaved with such resistless fury, that they so terrified the King’s Troops that they durst not fire on their assailants.” Allen’s short message ended with a plea that Massachusetts immediately assist “the Government of Connecticut in establishing a garrison in the reduced premises.”14
Benedict Arnold had a great deal more to say, and much of it was about Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. Having already dispatched a short report on the day of the capture, Arnold then launched into a lengthy indictment of Allen and his methods as well as the manners of his men. Despite their agreement on a joint command, Arnold reported that Allen, “finding he had the ascendance over his people, positively insisted I should have no command,” in part because Arnold had insisted on strict order. The result, Arnold claimed, was “near one hundred men, who are in the greatest confusion and anarchy, destroying and plundering private property, committing every enormity, and paying no attention to publick service.” As for Allen himself, Arnold found him “a proper man to head his own wild people, but entirely unacquainted with military service.”15 Clearly there were different standards of conduct between New Haven and the New Hampshire Grants. Despite their differences, however, Arnold and Allen were soon involved in another military venture.
Sailor that he was, Benedict Arnold was convinced that the capture of Ticonderoga and Crown Point would not be complete until he controlled the waters of Lake Champlain. Amid a host of dugouts, skiffs, and bateaux, there were two major ships on the lake that could tip the balance of power. One was a schooner owned by loyalist Philip Skene, which had been captured at nearby Skenesborough by Allen’s men on the same day as Ticonderoga. The other was the George, a British sloop of war. It was then at St. John’s, Quebec, on the Richelieu River near the outlet of the lake, about one hundred miles to the north.
As long as the George was at large, there was the threat of several hundred British troops sailing quickly up the lake and recapturing Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Arnold proposed arming Skene’s captured schooner and sailing down the lake to surprise the George at St. John’s before it could get under way with a relief expedition. Whether Ethan Allen embraced this plan at the time or subsequently, in light of its success, is a matter of some debate.
Allen’s Green Mountain Boys were initially content to help themselves to whatever plunder Ticonderoga had to offer, and their actions, as Lieutenant Feltham wryly observed, were “most rigidly performed as to liquors.”16 The boys probably thought that Benedict Arnold’s scheme to capture the George was just a little too far from home. But then the first complement of the Massachusetts men whom Arnold had been authorized to raise arrived on the scene, and this suddenly gave Arnold troops under his own command who held no loyalty to Ethan Allen. At the same time, once the liquor had quenched their thirst, many of Allen’s men were ready to leave for their homes to put in spring planting. This was not out of selfishness but in recognition of frontier reality: one might fight for a cause, but one farmed for survival.
The end result was that Benedict Arnold took a complement of his own men on board Philip Skene’s newly armed schooner, which Arnold renamed Liberty, and made a successful raid against St. John’s that captured the George. Arnold returned toward Ticonderoga with his little fleet—he also gave the George the new name Enterprise, the first of a noble line of American warships to bear that name—only to find Ethan Allen and some of his men rowing north in a collection of bateaux. Whether Allen had had second thoughts about being left out of Arnold’s attack or had in fact embarked simultaneously with him and been quickly outdistanced by the faster schooner is not entirely clear.
In his memoirs, Ethan Allen never mentioned Benedict Arnold having been involved in the capture of the fort or anything else until this moment, when Allen’s flotilla of bateaux met Arnold’s schooner and captured sloop on the lake. According to Allen, Arnold “saluted me with a discharge of cannon, which I returned with a volley of small arms.” Allen then joined Arnold aboard the Enterprise, “where several loyal Congress healths were drank.” But such conviviality was fleeting.17
Ethan Allen was bound and determined to continue on and, by seizing and holding St. John’s, win a measure of glory that would match what Arnold won with his capture of the George. Arnold had picked up intelligence while there that the British were indeed preparing a major counterattack, and he warned Allen that an extended occupation by Allen’s men was far different from his hit-and-run raid to capture the sloop. Allen refused to hear such cautionary advice and rowed on toward St. John’s. Arnold may have been secretly delighted, because it left him the undisputed commander of Ticonderoga in Allen’s absence.
Ethan Allen’s foray farther north ended as Benedict Arnold had predicted. British regulars and Canadian militia—the latter far from welcoming to the Americans, contrary to what Sam
uel Adams and others had hoped—surprised Allen’s force just south of St. John’s and sent it scurrying southward in a rout. Allen also failed to mention this episode in his memoirs. By May 21, he and his men were once more safely inside the walls of Fort Ticonderoga, where Arnold had taken advantage of Allen’s brief absence to cement his own personal control.
MEANWHILE, PITTSFIELD ATTORNEY JOHN BROWN, who that spring had already traveled to Montreal, back to Massachusetts, and then north again to Ticonderoga to take part in the assault with Allen and Arnold, was riding hard to reach the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia and announce the news of Ticonderoga’s capture. After reporting first to Massachusetts while en route, Brown arrived in Philadelphia on Wednesday night, May 17, and delivered letters from Allen and Arnold to Virginia’s Peyton Randolph, the presiding officer. The next morning, Randolph apprised the members of this “important intelligence,” had the letters read, and then summoned Brown to give a further account not only of the taking of the post and its importance but also of “the disposition of the Canadians” to help the rebel cause. To the latter, Brown could add no further insight beyond what he had already given to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress: any intervention from Canada was likely to come at the point of a British bayonet and not from legions of Canadians coming south to offer their support to the rebel cause.
After Brown left the assembly, its members began a heated debate. It might seem that Brown’s news from Ticonderoga would have been met with wild jubilation in view of the strategic importance of the fort and the newly acquired artillery. But the Continental Congress was, if not deeply divided, at least still tentative on what its broader course of action should be. To be sure, there were avowed rebels on the floor, such as John Hancock and Samuel Adams and Virginia’s Patrick Henry. The latter had taken his seat only that very morning, after his gunpowder confrontation at Williamsburg. But there were also some moderates intent on making one last stand for reconciliation with Great Britain.
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