When the Continental Congress refused their repeated requests for recognition and membership, the Allens began seeing closer ties with British Canada as a viable alternative path to their cherished goals of independence and economic success.

The author argues that Allen was not an ideological revolutionary or even a devout antiroyalist, but was instead animated by a fierce jealousy of Vermont’s independence, which Vermonters declared against New York in 1777 while Allen was in British captivity.īennett portrays Allen and his brothers as protean Vermont nationalists who strove to preserve the legitimacy of the New Hampshire Grants and increase the region’s prosperity. Bennett claims that Allen’s famous seizure of Fort Ticonderoga in the name of “‘the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,’” rather than being a patriotic move, was in fact a means of undercutting Yorker dominion over the New Hampshire Grants by hamstringing their royal supporters (p. Enraged by the high-handedness of Yorker officials, Allen joined with like-minded Vermonters and formed the Green Mountain Boys in 1770 to protect the grantees from ejection by force of arms. These were deeds of land sold by New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth in the 1740s and 1750s that New York, which was granted authority over much of present-day Vermont by the Crown in 1764, refused to honor. The primary issue in these disputes was the legal status of the New Hampshire Grants.

Bennett’s tale focuses on the Allens’ and Vermont’s troubled relationship with New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, the British in Canada, the King-in-Council, and the Continental Congress.

Reviewed by Michael Verney (University of New Hampshire)ĭavid Bennett’s book examines the complex drama of Revolutionary-era Vermont through the career of its primary defender, Ethan Allen, and to a lesser extent, through Allen’s brothers Heman and Ira. A Few Lawless Vagabonds: Ethan Allen, the Republic of Vermont, and the American Revolution.

Ethan Allen by Willard Sterne Randall