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If I’m going to be a loudmouth regarding my take on Rev250, I might as well make the biography of a Revolution-era loudmouth my “book of the month” (especially since he’s family). No sooner had the “shot heard round the world” been fired than Ethan Allen and his paramilitary “Green Mountain Boys” decided they would capture the strongest British fortification on the continent. That should sum up who Ethan Allen was in a nutshell. Willard Sterne Randall explores the life of a founding father who is criminally underdiscussed despite his life being an 18th-century “Odyssey.” Born the oldest son of a New England family, he was a near-perfect balance between brains and brawns, tending to his family’s farm while studying theology, medicine, philosophy, history, and politics on the side. A staunch skeptic of Puritan law, he got himself into trouble by receiving his smallpox inoculation in front of his town’s church during Sunday services, as part of a huge spectacle. As an adult, he moved further into the frontier to speculate in land in the New Hampshire “Grants” (present-day Vermont). Long story short, he, among many other settlers, bought land from New Hampshire, but the neighboring (and wealthier) colony of New York also claimed ownership of the land. The King sided with New York. As you can imagine, Allen wasn’t going to surrender his land to self-important New Yorkers, and thus he founded America’s first paramilitary group, the “Green Mountain Boys” in 1770, years before the Revolution. It would be this group that followed Allen to Fort Ticonderoga, capturing it without anyone being killed. He would later participate in the ill-fated invasion of Quebec, being captured and sent to a prison barge. He would fight to survive, eventually returning to the newly declared Vermont Republic, which desperately wanted to be the 14th state of the new United States. (A side note, this independent country forbade slavery immediately, becoming the first “state” to outlaw slavery upon their admission to the Union.) If you’re looking for a new story on the Revolution, or want to learn more about a lesser-known figure involved in our nation’s founding, Willard Sterne Randall’s biography on Ethan Allen should be your first choice!
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