Just about every Vermonter knows the name Ethan Allen. But according to two prominent Vermont historians, much of what we think we know is probably false.
H. Nicholas Muller and John Duffy agree that Ethan was the conqueror of Ticonderoga. He was an off-and-on leader of the Green Mountain Boys, a stirring speaker, and a prolific writer.
But he was also a relentless self-promoter who inflated the importance of just about everything he did. For example, he failed to mention that Ticonderoga, when he took it over, was a crumbling, half-decrepit fortress manned by a minimal garrison. Like so much else about Ethan Allen, the fall of Ticonderoga was first and foremost a public relations coup.
Historians Muller and Duffy, in their recent book, Inventing Ethan Allen, point out that Allen had almost no formal military experience, and when he was given command, was so consistently foolhardy that he often failed to obtain his objectives, lost some of his troops, and eventually got himself captured.
In the Haldemand negotiations, he flirted with treason, when he offered to give Vermont to Great Britain as a colony.
He also probably fabricated much of his 18th century best-seller, A Narrative of Col. Ethan Allen’s Captivity, and plagiarized most of his other major work, Reason, the Only Oracle of Man.
An aura of folklore has grown up about Ethan Allen – including tales of his supposed prodigious strength, his kindliness to those in need, and the odd belief that he would be reincarnated as a white stallion. But according to Muller and Duffy, all those tales and more are just that – folk tales. There’s no historical evidence to support any of them.
In fact, the two historians say, most of the heroic aura surrounding Allen’s name was added in the 19th century – a generation or so after his death.
In the mid-1800s, Vermont was economically depressed, losing population to the west, and generally worried about its future. It was sorely in need of heroic inspiration. And so, Ethan Allen, land speculator, calamitous military adventurer and tireless self-promoter was “re-invented,” and given heroic status, by a series of 19th century writers and historians.
However, despite the compelling evidence gathered by Muller and Duffy, contemporary writers still routinely resuscitate Ethan Allen’s now-suspect heroic status along with the unfounded myths and legends that envelop him.
This leaves me to wonder if we still need a superhuman hero – or whether we’re capable of seeing Ethan Allen as he most likely was – important, but human, and therefore flawed, like the rest of us?
The answer will tell us something about the many-layered complex history of this place called Vermont. Not to mention something as well about those other many-layered beings - ourselves.
