Benedict Arnold & Ethan Allen

The story of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys is one of those delightful tales that American schoolchildren hear about in school, but it is also one that is much more interesting to read about in older age. Unlike revered Founding Fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who came from Virginian plantations, Allen was a rough and tumble frontiersman more likely to fight than talk. And yet, he was in no way a dullard, but instead as well-read as many of his contemporaries and more so than the average man of his day. His family story reads almost like a cheap novel, from his heretic father to his hotheaded brothers and his shrewish first wife. By the time he was 30 years old, Allen had run up a significant list of skirmishes with law, something most of his fellow Revolutionary War heroes managed to avoid. Unlike Washington, who received his military training as a soldier in the famous British Army, Allen learned to fight in the backwoods of what is now Vermont, struggling alongside others for independence years before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.

When the American Revolutionary War broke out in earnest, Green did not go to state leaders to ask for a commission to fight; instead, Connecticut officials came to him, and it led to his involvement in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, a successful but controversial operation that found Allen having to work with none other than Benedict Arnold over who would lead the attack on the British fort.

While that success suggested an instinct for battle, Allen would suffer setbacks, and eventually he was captured and held prisoner by the British for nearly two years. Fortunately, the two years he spent as a captive with the British were not wasted, for when he returned home, he joined the people of the newly formed Republic of Vermont and worked towards making it an independent state. Though it took years of work both honorable and underhanded, he ultimately succeeded and remains held in the highest esteem by many in the state of Vermont to this day.

On October 7, 1777, Benedict Arnold rode out against orders and led an American assault against British forces led by General John Burgoyne in one of the climactic battles and ultimate turning point of the war at Saratoga. Near the end of the most important American victory of the Revolution, Arnold’s leg was shattered by a volley that also hit his horse, which fell on the leg as well.

Arnold would later remark that he wish the shot had hit him in the chest. If it had, he would be remembered as one of America’s greatest war heroes, and probably second only to George Washington among the generals of the Revolution. In fact, when Arnold was injured at the height of his success in October 1777, he had been the most successful leader of American forces during the war to date. Arnold had been instrumental in the seizure of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, he constructed the first makeshift American navy to defend Lake Champlain and delay British campaigning in 1776, and he was the principal leader at Saratoga in 1777. Even his unsuccessful campaign to Quebec in the winter of 1775 is remembered primarily for the amazing logistical feats undertaken by Arnold and his men to even reach the target.

History has accorded Arnold his fair share of credit for the fighting he participated in from 1775–1777. The problem is his contemporaries did not. Arnold was better on the field than any other American general in those years, but his mercurial personality rubbed some the wrong way, and other self-promoting generals, from Ethan Allen to Horatio Gates, credited themselves with success at Arnold’s expense. Meanwhile, the Second Continental Congress frequently if inadvertently slighted Arnold, failing to duly promote him in a timely fashion and failing to pay him four years of back pay even as he spent his own private fortune training, equipping, and feeding his army and navy.