The British captain apologized.
Arnold almost lost one of his ships to confiscation when he was twenty-five. A sailor, Peter Boole, tried to blackmail him over contraband from the Indies. Arnold refused to pay, and Boole informed the customs agents. Soon afterward, Arnold caught him and beat him badly. When Boole threatened to sue, Arnold collected a gang of men who considered informing a heinous crime. They inflicted forty lashes on Boole and ran him out of town. Boole continued to press for justice until two judges awarded him a mere fifty shillings in damages. The judges were burned in effigy, and a torchlight parade was staged in Benedict Arnold’s honor. Only six months after the Stamp Act riots, Arnold had found a way to turn the antigovernment sentiment to his own uses.
With his powerful build and his Caribbean tan, Arnold was popular with New Haven’s young women. At twenty-five, he fell passionately in love with Margaret Mansfield, the daughter of New Haven’s sheriff. They had their first son within a year of their marriage, and two more not long afterward. His shipping business sometimes faltered, London merchants hounded him for bills, and his wife grew estranged and would not answer his letters while he was away at sea. One winter he returned to find that Peggy Arnold had heard that her husband had contracted a venereal disease in the islands and would not let him touch her.
One consolation was his membership in the Governor’s Foot Guards, a unit made up of the most prominent young men in New Haven. When Arnold was named its captain, he was as proud as John Hancock had been of leading Boston’s cadets, and he celebrated in the same way. He ordered his tailor to run up a scarlet coat, which he wore with white breeches and white stockings.
By the time of the Boston Port Act, Arnold was drilling his men regularly on the New Haven green. He had recruited about sixty of them, including many students from Yale. When news of the slaughter at Lexington reached New Haven, about noon the next day, Arnold bullied the selectmen into opening the powder magazine, but an officer asked him to delay his march to Massachusetts until orders could be issued. Captain Arnold wasn’t prepared to wait. “None but Almighty God,” he said, “shall prevent my marching.”
All the same, sending the local guardsmen away from home required a written agreement, and before they left Arnold and his men signed a pledge to conduct themselves decently and inoffensively. They also agreed to avoid every vice, including gambling, swearing and drunkenness. Officers were not permitted to strike their men, but an unruly private could be expelled for being unworthy of serving in such a glorious cause.
Captain Arnold reached Cambridge and took as his headquarters the mansion of a Tory who had fled to Boston. His smart apparel and the uniforms of his men stood out among the dusty farm clothes of the other troops, and when the Americans wanted to return the body of a British officer who had been taken prisoner at Lexington and died of his wounds, Captain Arnold’s men were chosen as the honor guard. But he was not content with ceremonial duties. The captain went before Dr. Joseph Warren and the Committee of Safety with a plan. He said that he knew Fort Ticonderoga, although he didn’t reveal his desertion there. He proposed to lead a band of Americans to seize the fort from the British. The idea was daring but not original. Months before, Samuel Adams had anticipated what the British strategy might be when war came. He concluded that General Gage would try to cut off New England from the south and the west by sending troops down through Lake Champlain, Lake George and the Hudson River to the town of New York. As Gage was dispatching scouts to Concord, Adams had sent John Brown, a Pittsfield lawyer, to Canada to gauge Canadian attitudes toward an American revolt. Brown was also told to gather information about the condition of the forts since the French and Indian War. Three weeks before the battle of Lexington, he had returned to say that if the king’s troops provoked a battle, Fort Ticonderoga should be seized at once. In fact, Brown had assigned the task to a group of New Hampshire farmers who were already waging a running battle against New Yorkers in a property dispute. Those men from New Hampshire, led by a giant named Ethan Allen, called themselves the Green Mountain Boys.
Joseph Warren and his committee knew nothing about Ethan Allen and were enthusiastic about Benedict Arnold’s suggestion. Dr. Warren’s army was less than two weeks old and needed Ticonderoga’s cannon, mortars and howitzers. On May 3, the committee named Benedict Arnold a colonel in the new American Army and authorized him to go to western Massachusetts and recruit four hundred men for his expedition. Three days later, Colonel Arnold heard in Stockbridge that a band of men had set off to take Ticonderoga. Arnold had only a few officers with him and no troops, but he resolved to overtake the ragtag upstarts from New Hampshire and make them yield to his official commission. He left his officers behind to drum up an army and hurried after the trail of the Green Mountain Boys.
—
What Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had in common was audacity. When Ethan was two years old, his father had moved the family to a rough frontier farm in the New Hampshire Grants lands. By the age of ten the boy was fending off wolves and rattlesnakes, but his only schoolbooks were the family Bible and Plutarch’s Lives. When he was about sixteen, he was sent to the town of Salisbury, where his family hoped that tutoring from a local clergyman could make him acceptable to Yale. Then Ethan’s father died, and he was called home. From that time on he knew that he was smart—smart enough, he thought, to see through orthodox Christianity—but he apologized often for his shaky command of grammar and spelling.
Before he turned twenty, he went off to fight the Marquis de Montcalm during the French and Indian War. In the course of that long struggle, a talented French military engineer named de Lotbinière built a star-shaped fortress of stone, earth and timber near the southern end of Lake Champlain. Across the lake the new fortress faced a bluff, and a little to the south Lake George emptied into a channel that flowed through a gorge into Champlain. As a result, whoever held the fort controlled the one southward passage out of Champlain, leading toward the Hudson River by way of Lake George, and on to Albany. The Frenchman had called his fort Carillon because of the loud splash of nearby rapids. For the same reason, the Indians called the spot Cheonderoga, which meant “noisy.” Jeffrey Amherst took the base for the British in 1759, and his men called it Ticonderoga. The Americans called it Fort Ti.
When the French and Indian War finally ended, an irksome border war arose. New Yorkers claimed to hold deeds to the land Ethan Allen and his neighbors had been farming for years. Allen was chosen to represent them in court, but when he lost, the people of Bennington and its outlying areas dispensed with further legal pleas. Whenever a New York sheriff appeared in the disputed area, he was roughed up and sent home. Ethan Allen formed his own permanent posse in the early 1770s, with a man named Seth Warner as his captain. By New Year’s Day 1772, the Green Mountain Boys were holding formal drills and passing in review like a professional army.
New York’s governor called the Boys riotous trespassers and offered a twenty-pound reward for Allen’s arrest. As the disturbances grew, the bounty went up to a hundred and fifty pounds. Allen resented the charge of trespassing, but the accusations of riotous behavior helped to keep his more timid opponents at bay. He proved it by betting his Boys that he could ride into Albany, drink a bowl of punch at the busiest tavern in town and return unharmed.
Allen reached the town, entered a crowded tavern and called for the punch. As he was sipping it, people flocked to the tavern to watch the noted outlaw. The county sheriff went with them. Allen finished the bowl, walked deliberately to the door and climbed back on his horse. The sheriff decided that the reward still wasn’t large enough to risk an arrest. Ethan Allen rode off with a cry, “Huzzah for the Green Mountains!”
Allen and his Boys didn’t expect the British crown to support them in their struggle with New York, and the dispute had left Allen with a passion for liberty. Lexington to him was only another proof of Britain’s desire to enslave all of America. In a vote of confidence at the Catamount Tavern in Bennington,
the Green Mountain Boys elected Allen their commander for the assault on Fort Ti. He withdrew to plan his campaign, and the Boys readied themselves by getting drunk.
They were deep in their preparations when Benedict Arnold arrived at the tavern. Colonel Arnold, resplendent as ever, announced that he had come to lead the charge against Ticonderoga. The Boys laughed. Arnold produced his commission from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. To show how impressed they were, the Boys climbed on the tables and danced, flapping their coattails at him. One of their number spelled out their message: If Ethan Allen was replaced, the Boys would stay home. Amid mockery and shouts, Colonel Arnold was taken to meet Allen. Hours passed, heads cleared, and the Boys learned that their mission would now have two commanders. One of them had an army of two hundred and fifty men, the other had a piece of paper signed in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Boys reached the shore at Lake George well before dawn, but neither of their leaders had remembered that the water here was a mile wide, and no one had boats. It was nearly daybreak before they had rounded up enough small craft to row eighty-three men across the water to the fort’s high walls. The Boys crept to the fortress gate. It was open. The sentry on duty was asleep. At the prospect of such an easy victory, the Boys began to whoop, which roused the sentry. He aimed his weapon, thought better of it and ran away. Ticonderoga had been built as a garrison for four hundred men, but during the dozen peacetime years the British had let it deteriorate and kept it severely undermanned.
A British lieutenant, Jocelyn Feltham, who heard the triumphant shouts ringing over the battlements, jumped from bed, threw open his door and ran into an immense man. Another, very dapper man was standing beside him. By what authority have you stormed this fort? Lieutenant Feltham demanded.
“In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!” roared Ethan Allen.
When they pressed on to the commander’s quarters, Allen’s eloquence failed him. Waving his sword above his head, he shouted over and over, “Come out, you old rat!”
Captain William Delaplace appeared, nearly speechless. “Damn you,” he said, “what—what—does this mean?”
Allen assured the captain that the Green Mountain Boys had already disarmed his men; there had been only forty-two of them. At that news, Captain Delaplace held out the hilt of his sword in surrender.
It was then that the battle for Ticonderoga began in earnest. The Boys had discovered stores of rum. As they reinforced their high spirits, they ran through the fort, grabbing what they could from the British soldiers. Since Ethan Allen didn’t try to stop them, Benedict Arnold raised his voice above the din to declare that military law strictly forbade looting. Several Boys spat at Colonel Arnold’s feet.
One American had found a trinket, and its British owner was trailing after him, pleading to have it back. Colonel Arnold wrested it away and returned it. The Boy loaded a musket and pressed it hard against Arnold’s chest. Admit, he demanded, that Ethan Allen was the leader here.
Benedict Arnold stared contemptuously at the man and said he was the official commander appointed by the authority of Massachusetts Bay and to him the Green Mountain Boys were behaving like drunken outlaws. The man lowered his weapon.
Four days later, fifty men recruited by Benedict Arnold’s officers arrived on the scene, and Arnold took formal command of the fort, with its one hundred and twenty iron cannon, two brass cannon, fifty swivels, two 10-inch mortars, ten tons of musket balls, three cartloads of flints, thirty gun carriages and ten cases of powder.
—
Since their escape from Lexington, Samuel Adams and John Hancock had kept moving, but the stealth and the isolation were taking a toll of Hancock’s nerves. From Worcester he wrote to the colony’s Committee of Safety asking, What were they to do next? Where were the rest of the delegates who would be going to the second session of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia–Thomas Cushing, Robert Treat Paine, John Adams? Hancock craved news and was full of advice. Seize Castle William! Stop up the port! “Boston must be entered; the troops must be sent away. Our friends are valuable, but the country must be saved.” Hancock added that he and Adams needed some sign of support from their countrymen. Where was the escort that would prove that they were the first citizens of the colony and not criminals on the run? “We travel rather as deserters, which I will not submit to.”
A few days later, Lydia Hancock, along with Dorothy Quincy, joined her nephew at Worcester, and the party left for New York. At Fairfield, Connecticut, Hancock entrusted his aunt and Miss Quincy to the sheriff, Thaddeus Burr. After Hancock and Adams set out for Philadelphia, Burr welcomed another house guest to his mansion, his nephew Aaron.
The young man was a precocious nineteen. When he was an infant, his mother’s death had launched Aaron Burr on a lifelong quest for affection, and he was helped along by his remarkable looks. He was slight but with a large head, a wide mouth and deep-set hazel eyes that many women found irresistible. He had come to understand early that every time a woman fell in love with him and he rejected her, however gently, he had made another enemy. All the same, he kept their letters. Some were from ladies, some from less than ladies, but Aaron cherished them all. His father, who died when Aaron was young, had been president of the College of New Jersey and had raised the money for Nassau Hall, the first building erected when the college moved to Prince Town. Aaron had applied for the freshman class when he was eleven years old and looked nine, but the college had rejected him. Two years later he was admitted as a sophomore. He had studied law and had eloped. The couple was caught at a ferry crossing and Burr was ducked in the water by the young woman’s brothers. Now he was caught up in the politics exploding around him.
That commitment didn’t stop Burr from a few days’ flirtation with Dorothy Quincy. He enjoyed listening to his own deft flattery, and Lydia Hancock watched as he and Dolly Quincy talked together with obvious fascination. Miss Quincy discovered that Burr not only was pleasingly handsome but also had been left pleasantly rich. He may not have had John Hancock’s holdings–few men did—but young Burr could support a wife in comfort. To her irritation, however, Dolly Quincy was never left alone with him. Lydia Hancock was always at her side. When Burr cut his visit short, Dolly Quincy knew whom to blame.
Her fiancé was also being diverted during his journey to Philadelphia. New York had provided a reception fit for a king, and Hancock described the scene to Miss Quincy in detail while assuring her that such displays were distasteful to him. Within three miles of the town he had been met by a grenadier company, a militia regiment, men in carriages and on horseback and thousands of people following in the road on foot and raising the greatest cloud of dust Hancock had ever seen. A mile outside New York, men stopped his carriage, freed the horses and insisted on using their own muscle to pull him into town. Hancock told Miss Quincy that he had protested against that excessive display and prevailed on them to return his horses. But he let her know that “in short, no person could possibly be more noticed than myself.”
At King’s Bridge, just north of New York, Hancock and Samuel Adams had joined the other Massachusetts delegates, and although Miss Quincy wouldn’t know it from Hancock’s letter, all five men had been included in the tumultuous welcome. It was Samuel Adams, riding in Hancock’s phaeton, who had put a stop to pulling the carriage by hand. He thought the spectacle would be humiliating and said he wouldn’t permit his fellow citizens to degrade themselves to the level of beasts.
By the time the delegates reached Philadelphia, Samuel Adams no longer cut much of a figure. His fine apparel had been abandoned when he fled Lexington, and he had only the clothes on his back. He needed a new outfit for this second session of the Congress, but he had almost no money of his own and he questioned the ethics of charging his clothes to the colony. In the end, politics prevailed. He decided that he must not disgrace Massachusetts, and Massachusetts should pay the bill, which it readily did.
No gentlemanly attire could deceiv
e the conservative delegates as they convened on May 10, 1775, this time in Pennsylvania’s State House. They suspected that Adams hoped to use the bloodshed at Lexington to provoke Congress into declaring America independent from Britain. If they were right, Adams stood nearly alone in that goal. Benjamin Franklin had come home from London and was there as one of Philadelphia’s delegates. But Franklin’s resolutions were mild ones—offering official thanks to Lord Chatham, to Edmund Burke, to all the members of both houses who had championed America’s cause. Otherwise, to the dismay of John Adams, Franklin spent most of the proceedings fast asleep in his chair.
The session was barely launched when Samuel Adams’ emissary, John Brown, showed up with news that Ticonderoga had been captured, along with its hoard of weapons. Ethan Allen was even talking about attacking Montreal and Quebec. The report disconcerted most delegates in Philadelphia. They first passed a resolution that Allen and Benedict Arnold take charge of the Ticonderoga artillery but make an inventory so that everything could be returned to Britain when harmony was restored. That order was soon countermanded. In fact, some delegates detected a slight shift in this session toward Samuel Adams’ more combative position. For the first time, Georgia had sent a delegation to Philadelphia. Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania had retired. George Washington of Virginia was attending every session in his colonel’s uniform.
John Adams, before he had come to Philadelphia, had toured Dr. Warren’s headquarters at Cambridge and had found confusion and shortages. He had retraced the march to Lexington and talked with townspeople along the route. Now he offered the Congress a comprehensive military plan. First, he urged the delegates to protect the patriots still living in Boston, who might be robbed, even killed, given the temper of the British soldiers. Adams recommended that each colony seize all British officials and hold them—humanely and generously—as hostage for Boston’s patriots. Each colony should then set up its own new government, and the Continental Congress should declare independence and offer to negotiate peace terms with Britain. Adams also wanted to warn the British that if fighting continued, America would seek alliance with France, Spain or any other European power. At the same time, Congress should consider Warren’s volunteers in Cambridge as a Continental Army, appoint a commanding general for them and underwrite their pay and costs.
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