Ethan Allen: His Life and Times

by Willard Sterne Randall

Overview

"Nuanced, multidimensional…Randall’s book feels like it’s charting territory as unexplored as the acreage that Allen…snapped up." —Los Angeles Times

Both a rousing adventure story and a testament to the spirit of democracy, Ethan Allen is the landmark biography of a man whose temper and philosophy helped define a nation. William Sterne Randall gives us the first comprehensive portrait of Ethan Allen in decades, masterfully evoking the upward struggle from childhood poverty to commandment of the largest American military force on the eve of the Revolution. The result is an explosive biography of the frontier Founding Father, one whose influential writings and bold actions inspired a generation of followers including Paine, Jefferson, and Madison.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393342291
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/06/2012
Pages:	640
Product dimensions:	5.62(w) x 8.04(h) x 1.18(d)

About the Author

Willard Sterne Randall is the author of Ethan Allen: His Life and Times and Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Randall is a professor of history at Champlain College and lives in Burlington, Vermont.

Table of Contents

Prologue xi

Part 1 "The Most Unwearied Pains"

1 "A Sincere Passion for Liberty" 5

2 "The Roughest Township in Connecticut" 45

3 "I Experienced Great Advantages" 79

4 "Any Furnace for Making Steel" 100

Part 2 "Gods of the Hills"

5 "A Tumultuous and Offensive Manner" 119

6 'The Greatest Hassurds of His Life" 158

7 "No Better than Peddlers" 197

8 "Gods of the Hills" 221

9 "The Law of Self Preservation" 249

10 "In the Name of the Great Jehovah" 303

Part 3 "No Damned Arnold"

11 "Thou Bold Blasphemer" 315

12 "I Had No Chance to Fly" 359

13 "Ye Shall Grace a Halter" 375

14 "A Game of Hazard" 435

15 "A Hook in the Nose" 479

16 "Clodhopper Philosopher" 508

Afterword 531

Acknowledgments 537

Notes 541

Bibliography 557

Index 579

Editorial Reviews

"[An] engrossing treatment from an accomplished biographer."

Philadelphia Enquirer

"Graceful, authoritative…a gripping story of guts and élan…This balanced biography is equally adept in relating Allen’s heroics, as in revealing his ‘intrigues as a frontier politician.’"

Dallas Morning News

"Exhaustively researched and insightful."

Wall Street Journal

The brash, multifaceted ebullience of the United States at its birth comes through in this rich portrait of Ethan Allen (1738–1789), one of its iconic founders. Historian Randall (Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor) gives us a complex, protean Allen: strapping frontiersman; cunning entrepreneur; rationalist philosophe whose deistic manifesto scandalized Puritan divines and influenced Thomas Paine; amateur soldier whose impetuosity led to the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, the first strategically significant American victory of the Revolution, and later to disaster; finally, he was a Machiavellian politician who played the British off against the Continental Congress. Allen's saga was founded on a giant real estate swindle—the royal governors of New Hampshire and New York sold the territory of modern-day Vermont twice, to rival cliques of developers—that took on insurrectionary dimensions as he led his Green Mountain Boys militia against absentee landlords trying to evict settlers (a project that handily benefited his own byzantine land deals); the result, as Allen trod "a blurred line between land speculator and latter-day Robin Hood," was a new style of politics mixing populist ideals with canny corruption. Randall incorporates a wealth of research and colorful detail into an absorbing, well-paced narrative that highlights Allen's distinctively American energies—and contradictions.16 pages of illus. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"This is the first biography of Ethan Allen in half a century, and the only one to render him a psychologically complicated, fully flawed hero of the American Revolution."

Joseph J. Ellis

"This is the powerful story about an essential and little-understood figure in American history. Willard Randall writes with grace and insight, and Ethan Allen is an engaging biography."

Jon Meacham

"Willard Sterne Randall has few equals as a writer. A careful and meticulous historian, and an esteemed biographer, Randall has marshaled his many talents to produce the definite biography of Ethan Allen, one of the most fascinating figures in the founding of the American nation.... a must read."

John Ferling

"This is the powerful story about an essential and little-understood figure in American history. Willard Randall writes with grace and insight, and Ethan Allen is an engaging biography."

Jon Meacham

In this work, Randall (history, Champlain Coll.) presents Ethan Allen as much more than the hero of Fort Ticonderoga, leader of the Green Mountain Boys, and founder of Vermont. A contradictory character, Allen is shown here as the outspoken defender of New York land-grant settlers against land speculators but also as a land speculator himself; as a principled champion of justice and liberty while still an ambitious, glory-seeking opportunist; as a riotous and impetuous frontiersman as well as a self-educated philosopher and religious iconoclast. Randall effectively explains Allen's beliefs and actions by chronicling the economic, religious, and political developments in Colonial New England that shaped Allen and fomented the atmosphere of rebellion before and after 1775. VERDICT The relaxed narrative is supported by valuable primary documents and secondary sources, but Randall ignores Michael Bellesiles's Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (1993). Of greater concern, upon viewing the first submitted galley for the book, LJ pointed out to the publisher that certain passages closely followed Charles Jellison's Ethan Allen: Frontier Rebel (1969). The book has since been revised for publication, yet the new version still contains some passages that echo Jellison's narrative patterns. Nonetheless, this biography of a larger-than-life adventurer and flawed hero will be enjoyed by readers of popular histories about the country's early years, and by serious researchers in Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New York history.—Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY

Library Journal

Randall (History/Champlain Coll.;Alexander Hamilton: A Life, 2003, etc.) delves beneath the myth to fashion the definitive biography of the frontier hero and founder of Vermont.

Best known for leading his paramilitary Green Mountain Boys on a daring attack on British-held Fort Ticonderoga, at Lake Champlain, on May 10, 1775—the first American action in the Revolutionary War—the charismatic Allen was a Connecticut-born farmer, businessman and politician who would become an American folk hero. Self-educated, foul-mouthed and over six feet tall (unusual for the time), he was celebrated for his legendary physical prowess.He could lift a bushel bag full of salt with his teeth and throw it over his head, the stories said. "He was a Paul Bunyan before Bunyan ever existed," writes Randall. When Allen first moved to Vermont in 1770, the territory was claimed by both the colonies of New Hampshire and New York. Determined to see Vermont become part of New England, where he owned land, Allen and his militia waged a five-year campaign of intimidation to drive away New York settlers. This same rag-tag band of Vermont farmers and hunters took Ticonderoga, without the Continental Congress's approval, shortly after hostilities began at Lexington and Concord. Randall's authoritative, vivid book is especially good on Allen's nearly three-year imprisonment after his failed attack on Montreal in 1775.Harshly treated, first in England and then in New York, he was finally released in a prisoner exchange. He then served Vermont as commander of the militia, chief diplomat to the Continental Congress and advisor to the governor. "The war hero, the counselor of state, he became the public face of Vermont, inside and outside the republic," writes the author. Allen's prison memoir was a bestseller during the Revolutionary era.

Colorful, well-written and nuanced.

Kirkus Reviews