Green guerilla

Ethan Allen: Founding Father or rebel and hustler?

August 21, 2011|By James Zug

(Jonathan Twingley for the…)

ETHAN ALLEN: His Life and Times By Willard Sterne Randall

Norton, 617 pp., illustrated, $35

Part of the historian’s gambit with figures from the distant past involves making them relatable. Nothing gets you past the scrim of centuries and into the three-dimensional better than details. In Harper’s magazine nearly 40 years ago, Barbara Tuchman dubbed it “history by the ounce.’’ Instead of history by the gallon jug, she went for the little fact that bred that elusive sense of familiarity. “History is human behavior, not arithmetic,’’ Tuchman wrote.

It is the little ounces of detail embedded in William Sterne Randall’s new account of the life of Ethan Allen that makes him appear so approachable. When he captured Fort Ticonderoga, he called the commandant a “goddamn old rat.’’ While waiting at the grist mill, he courted his first wife, the miller’s daughter. As a prisoner of war in England, Allen was visited by an acquaintance who whispered that bets were being laid in London on whether Allen would be executed. Then he slipped Allen a gold coin. You can almost see Allen fingering the coin as he awaited his fate.

Randall is used to wrestling with the capitalized, marbleized Founding Fathers: He’s done biographies of Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, and Hamilton, as well as Benedict Arnold. Americans generally know much less about Allen than those others, beyond a few touchstones like Fort Ticonderoga, the Green Mountain Boys, and the furniture store (founded by unrelated New Yorkers in the 1930s). Allen was America’s first famous frontiersman.

Today, we’d more likely characterize him as a terrorist or real estate swindler. Or both.

Like Che Guevara, Allen was not from the place for which he became synonymous with liberating. He was a Connecticut man, born in Litchfield and raised in Cornwall (his parents were among the first to move to that remote corner of the colony). In fact, Allen was 19 before he ever left Connecticut.

With just a year of formal schooling, Allen was a classic streetwise American entrepreneur, always on the lookout for a deal. He farmed. He bought mills, mines, and forges to run an iron furnace. He invested in a silver mine, which turned out to be full of useless lead. He hunted deer to sell hides and trapped beaver to sell furs. He speculated in land. He was constantly on the move, whether from an unhappy marriage (he wrote hundreds of thousands of words but never once mentioned his wife) or from legal problems. He was sued. He got into fistfights and clubbed enemies on the head. Both Salisbury, Conn., and Northampton kicked him out of town.