The Green Mountain Boys and the Morning at Ticonderoga

Before Vermont was a state, before it was even a recognized territory, it had a militia. They called themselves the Green Mountain Boys, and they operated somewhere between a land-rights enforcement gang and a revolutionary army, depending on the year and who was asking.

The core dispute was the New Hampshire Grants. Between seventeen forty-nine and seventeen sixty-four, the colonial governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, had sold land patents in the region west of the Connecticut River that he claimed fell under New Hampshire's jurisdiction. New York disagreed. New York had its own royal grants and began issuing conflicting titles to the same land. Settlers who had bought from New Hampshire suddenly found New York sheriffs showing up to evict them.

Ethan Allen organized the resistance. He was a Connecticut-born speculator, philosopher, and talker, physically enormous, fond of rum and argument in roughly equal measure. The Green Mountain Boys he assembled were not regulars. They wore sprigs of evergreen in their hats. They drove out New York surveyors, burned the barns of New York settlers, and published furious pamphlets about property rights.

When the Revolutionary War broke out in April of seventeen seventy-five, Allen made a move. Fort Ticonderoga, at the narrow southern end of Lake Champlain in New York, was the key to the northern corridor. It held the largest cache of artillery in the colonies. On the morning of May tenth, seventeen seventy-five, Allen and about eighty-three Green Mountain Boys crossed the lake before dawn and demanded the surrender of the sleeping British garrison. The fort's commander, a Captain Delaplace, came to the door in his nightshirt. Allen reportedly told him the fort was being taken in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. Delaplace surrendered without a shot fired.

The cannons from Ticonderoga were dragged on sleds across three hundred miles of winter to Boston, where Henry Knox trained them on the British-held city. The British evacuated in March of seventeen seventy-six. The Green Mountain Boys never held a formal commission from anyone. They had taken the most important fortification of the early war on their own initiative, in the dark, with the flag of a republic that had not yet been declared.