Inventing Ethan Allen

Two distinguished historians of early Vermont clearly and emphatically pick apart one of our founding legends, the antics of Ethan Allen. Allen led a street gang originally called the Bennington Mob, but later celebrated as the Green Mountain boys. They destroyed property of farmers who had innocently bought land from New York speculators. He captured Fort Ticonderoga with only 83 men, but the fort was held by only 20 Britishers, all but one of whom were asleep. When the Continental Congress authorized a regiment of soldiers from Vermont, the assembly, knowing Allen's recklessness, instead chose steady and competent Seth Warner to command it. Allen then took off for Canada with a handful of men, hoping to capture Montreal. Naturally, he failed and spent two and a half years away from Vermont as a guest of the British. When he came back the council let him command the state's militia, but not to have much else to do with public affairs. The authors show that the legend of Ethan Allen was created in the 19th Century, when leading citizens decided they wanted a hero of the Revolution. Seth Warner, Governor Chittenden, Moses Robinson, Ethan's brother Ira and others were too colorless. None had written a best selling book, like Allen's account of his captivity (in which he commisioned himself a colonel). His waffling on statehood, and his ambiguous dealings with the British, were overlooked or lied about. In our time a biography written by Willard Sterne Randall bought the entire legend, despite the lack of reliable sources, and accompanied it with page after page of simple factual errors. This book patiently shows how little of the legend is true, and why it was invented. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of early Vermont, the first republic admitted to the Union.

I feel guilty about this 3 star review because this book is clearly extraordinarily researched and most likely the definitive account of the enigmatic Ethan Allen.However, the book is a bit of a one note song, which boils down to: Ethan Allen was a self-interested land speculator who didn’t do most of the things attributed to him, and those things that he did do are either grossly exaggerated or given misassigned motivations.The reader can pick up pretty much everything he needs to know in the first three chapters and the author’s excellent summary at the end of the book. The intervening 130 pages while well written, simply flesh out with details and examples those first three chapters, over and over again.There is no doubt in my mind that this book is an invaluable cautionary tale to aspiring history majors to use first hand accounts, and multiple sources, before coming to a conclusion. However, for the weekend history reader this book is simply too down in the weeds to make an entertaining read.

Best thing I read so far on him. Some of my ancestors were Loyalists chiefly because of him. They had to move to Ontario. I am delighted to see that them vindicated. While I am a US citizen and glad of it, I realize that too much history is written by the winners.

A superior piece of historiography. Muller and Duffy separate fact from fiction, and find mostly the latter. It needed to be done.

Though this book was well researched as far as the actual historical event documentation, beyond that I cannot recommend for any serious history reader. The analysis offered by the authors is entirely the problem with this book. It's full of nothing but baseless, opinionated conclusions that prove nothing new or disprove anything old. What it does do is try to revise the early history of Vermont using Allen as a poster boy. In some cases even presenting intentional distortions of facts where the misinterpretation is so obvious, no professional historian would make such a mistake by accident. They ignore truths of the time period only to replace those truths with a fictitious presentation. The writers openly attempt to erase Allen as a significant player in Vermont's history, but go further in attempting to also discredit past historians, create narratives out of thin air & outright lie about context and quotes.I offer a harsh critique, but the nature of historical scholarship requires the utmost care in both the exact detailing of events and their analysis.The time period of the revolution and its beginnings were a time of rebellion. Where the founders represent breaking the chains of Tyrannical Rule from country heads, Allen represented such liberty for the average citizen from divine right style rule wherever it was found. Far too often in the modern times people forget these things had never been seen in history before. That alone earned Allen his place in history and certainly in Vermont's creation and the culture of our self representing style system.Given the authors preceding reputations as respected historians, I can only see this book as likely being intentional revisionism or propaganda intended to fictitiously reshape the history of Vermont and the political philosophy of individualism for future readers.