Ethan Allen was supremely self-confident, arrogant even. But that character trait — flaw, many would say — was key to his greatest success. It made him a natural leader, in the way that people who believe strongly in their leadership abilities often find others willing to follow.
Allen’s high self-regard, however, also proved his undoing, causing him to overestimate his own abilities and march blindly to his greatest failures.
The high and low points of his military career came the same year, 1775. The success is the more famous incident. If people know one thing about Allen, it’s that he led the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. A less vain man might have been more cautious and missed the opportunity.
From a military point of view, the capture of Fort Ticonderoga was not especially difficult. The fort’s occupants, a detachment of 50 British troops, were unaware that violence had broken out at the battles of Lexington and Concord weeks earlier; the commander had ignored orders to keep the fort alert to possible attacks; plus a section of the south wall had collapsed and been replaced by a wicker gate.
Despite these advantages, of which Allen was aware at the time, the attack almost didn’t happen. That’s because in the hours before the assault (which would come at dawn on May 10), Allen and his troops had no way to cross Lake Champlain. The plan called for ferrying the 230 men from Hand’s Cove on the Vermont shore to just north of Fort Ticonderoga on the New York side.
Allen hadn’t made proper arrangements to obtain the vital boats. Men had been dispatched to nearby Panton and to Skenesboro (present-day Whitehall, New York) to search for boats, but when Allen and the troops reached the embarkation point, none was in sight.
Midnight came and went. Still no boats. The first arrived after 1:30 a.m. A second pulled into the cove soon afterward. Two boats wouldn’t be nearly enough to ferry all his men across before sunrise, which was just three hours away.
Rather than postpone the mission for another day, Allen still liked his chances. Before dawn, he managed to get barely one-third of his 230 men across the lake. Allen marched the men quietly from the landing site, under the fort’s two dozen cannons (which were unmanned) to the fort’s gate, which was guarded by a lone sentry.
The soldier pointed his gun pointblank at Allen and pulled the trigger. Click. The gun failed to fire. So luck, not just self-confidence and courage, played a role that day.
No one was killed or even seriously injured, on either side, during the attack. It was the most bloodless military operation imaginable.
Capturing a warship
The success apparently went to Allen’s head. He boasted about it to all who would listen, and with some justification. This was an important action. It was the Colonies’ first offensive victory of the Revolution.
That’s because the Continental Congress had called on the Colonies to fight only defensively, as they had done at Lexington and Concord, in the hope that full-scale conflict could be avoided. Perhaps Allen foresaw that war was inevitable, or in his impatience for glory jumped the gun. Either way, the victory at Fort Ticonderoga only reinforced his already high opinion of his military prowess.
The next step in securing Lake Champlain, a vital corridor between British Canada and the Colonies, was to seize the one sizable British warship on the lake. Command of that mission fell to Benedict Arnold. Arnold, who held a commission from Massachusetts and had jointly led the attack on the fort, was the only officer present with naval experience. Allen might have wished he himself had gotten the call.
On May 14, four days late, the boats stolen from Skenesboro, a Tory stronghold 20 miles to the south, finally reached Ticonderoga. Benedict Arnold used those boats immediately to launch his mission, before word of Ticonderoga’s fall could spread.
Sailing 100 miles north, Arnold’s force entered the Sorel River, where they found the British sloop lying a mile from St. John’s. Arnold’s men easily seized the vessel, destroyed the small British base near St. John’s after taking its supplies, and captured 13 British soldiers.
Sailing south, Arnold encountered a ragged flotilla of almost 100 men led by Allen. Arnold learned that hours after he had sailed north from Fort Ticonderoga, Allen had found he couldn’t contain himself. He was eager to be part of the battle. He had quickly rallied a force, in his haste forgetting to stock adequate rations, and paddled toward St. John’s.
When Allen stepped aboard Arnold’s prize ship, he must have felt a twinge of jealousy. Arnold’s glory could have been his. In Arnold’s cabin, Allen announced that he would take his exhausted men and attack the town of St. John’s immediately. Arnold tried to dissuade Allen, but it was no use.
“100 mad fellows are going to take possession of St. John’s,” Arnold wrote in his journal after Allen left. “… A wild, impractical expensive Scheme. Of no Consequence.”
As the flotilla neared St. John’s, Allen learned from a scout that the British had dispatched 200 soldiers from Montreal to protect the town. Nearing St. John’s in the dark, Allen’s exhausted men paddled to a spot downriver from the town, climbed from their boats and promptly fell asleep on the riverbank. They were awakened at dawn by cannon fire from the opposite shore. The reinforcements had discovered them.
Allen’s men scrambled into their boats and paddled furiously out of the guns’ range. In their panic, they left three men behind. One was captured. Two others had to walk the 100 miles back south to Ticonderoga.
An ordinary man might have learned his lesson and forsworn rash decisions. Not Ethan Allen.
Eyes on Montreal
That summer, the Green Mountain Boys were converted into a regiment funded by New York. Allen expected to be elected unit commander. Instead, the men chose the level-headed Seth Warner. Perhaps the men thought Warner was less likely to get them killed. Allen wasn’t elected to any post, though his brothers Ira and Heman were both made officers.
To Allen’s credit, he still wanted to serve during the impending invasion of Canada. After friends lobbied for him, Allen was appointed a civilian scout, a position at which he proved quite adept. Allen moved freely and fearlessly behind enemy lines, rallying support among French Canadians and Indians against the British.
“I … have two hundred and fifty Canadians under arms; as I march, they gather fast,” Allen reported in a note to invasion commander Gen. Richard Montgomery. He said he could raise 1,000 or 2,000 men, given a week’s time.
Allen sent most of his 250 men to Montgomery, but still had nearly 100 with him when he hatched a plan. The idea, he later claimed, came from an officer, Major John Brown, who supposedly had raised 200 recruits of his own. Brown and Allen planned to use their combined forces to capture Montreal.
Never mind that neither man had authority to launch such an attack or that Montgomery viewed St. John’s as the more important military target. Allen wanted this prize.
Brown’s force would approach Montreal from the south while Allen’s approached from the north. When they were in place, they would exchange shouts before launching simultaneous assaults. It’s still unclear how they thought they would hear one another across what was then a city of roughly 9,000 people.
Allen managed with some difficulty to get his force across a river to the north end of the island of Montreal. There he waited for Brown’s signal. It never came. Inexplicably, Brown hadn’t moved into position.
When dawn broke, Allen had no chance to retreat. His force would have been an easy target recrossing the river. But he didn’t move forward either. Perhaps his confidence finally failed at this crucial moment. Some historians suggest that if he had attacked then, when word of an invading force had spread panic in the streets of Montreal, he might have carried the day.
However, Allen waited, and within hours Quebec Gov. Guy Carleton rallied troops who descended on Allen and his men. Most fled, but Allen and 38 others were captured that day. He would spend the next two and a half years a prisoner.
“I thought to have enrolled my name in the list of illustrious American heroes,” Allen later wrote of that day, “but was nipped in the bud.”
