As Revolutionary War leader of the Green Mountain Boys militia, Ethan Allen had seemingly no sooner captured Fort Ticonderoga from British troops on May 10, 1775, when he put quill pen to parchment to chronicle his effort.
“I have,” Allen wrote, “taken the greatest care and pains to recollect the facts and arrange them; but as they touch a variety of characters and opposite interests, I am sensible that all will not be pleased with the relation of them.”
Two and a half centuries later, that’s the one and only thing most people can agree on.
“He has been accused of ignorance, weakness of mind, cowardice, infidelity, and atheism,” Henry Hall wrote in 1892’s “Ethan Allen: The Robin Hood of Vermont,” one of many books on the state’s love-him-or-hate-him symbolic rebel. “If Vermont is careful of her own fame, well does it become the people to know whether Ethan Allen was a hero or a humbug.”
Search “Ethan Allen” online today and you’ll find more assertations of the latter, be it questions about whether he enslaved Black people or stole land from Indigenous populations.
“He’s become a lightning rod for everyone’s feelings about that entire historical era,” Angie Grove, executive director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum in Burlington, said in a recent interview. “He gets all the credit and all the blame.”
Historians say that divide is complicating efforts to mark next weekend’s 250th anniversary of his crossing of Lake Champlain and capture of Fort Ticonderoga — and, conversely, offering them the opportunity to separate fact from fiction.
The 2,000-acre Fort Ticonderoga historic site in Ticonderoga, New York, is set to present a reenactment of Allen’s raid between May 9 and 11, as well as educational stops in the Vermont towns of Sudbury, Orwell and Shoreham and a flyover by the Vermont Air National Guard.
“Independence was not a foregone conclusion,” organizers note on their website. “Recovering the contingency of the American Revolution helps to underscore its profound significance.”
For its part, the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum will offer free admission to Vermonters on May 10 in hopes of drawing visitors, be they curious or cynical.
“I know that there are people who avoid the museum because they just assume Ethan Allen was a racist, Native American-slaughtering person,” Grove said.
Then again, Grove has met others who swear Allen was a trail-blazing abolitionist at a time Vermont was drafting a 1777 constitution that would make it the first state to outlaw adult slavery. (Children wouldn’t be officially protected under the provision until 2022.)
“Where did you get that information?” Grove will ask people expressing commendation or complaints.
“Oh, it’s just well known,” she often hears in reply.
But Grove — who holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Vermont — says it’s not so simple.
Allen has been the subject of a slew of books, starting with his own in 1779. Then in 2014, the now late professors John Duffy and H. Nicholas Muller published “Inventing Ethan Allen,” an exploration of the historiography behind him.
“How does the memory of Ethan Allen coincide with the reality of his life as well as much repeated supplemental legends and myths composed long after his death?” Duffy and Muller write in the prologue.
The book notes, for example, that past authors often have emphasized or excluded facts to fit a particular narrative.
“The story of Ethan Allen has been transformed since the 1830s to present a hero configured by comedic or tearful treatments in a consistently sentimental avoidance of events and actions that could otherwise have diminished his popular appeal,” Duffy and Muller write.
But that doesn’t mean historians have censored content. Although scholars have found records of other family members using Black labor — the legal status of “free” or “slave” is rarely reported — they’ve yet to find any definitive proof whether Allen enslaved people.
“In the absence of positive evidence, the question, ‘Did Ethan Allen ever own slaves?’ never appears in his biographies,” Duffy and Muller write.
So why do people claim Allen did? Grove cites primary sources that show American Colonial society as a whole exploited marginalized populations — a fact that can lead some to extend the generalization to specific individuals.
“We can make educated guesses, but we actually know very little about Ethan Allen’s political, social and moral relationship to slavery or Indigenous people that can be backed up with real evidence,” Grove said. “You can find claims online, but nobody has any sources for them. That isn’t to say we can’t find answers to these questions, but that research hasn’t been done yet.”
Study, however, takes money.
“Try as I might, I’ve found it challenging to convince people that research in general, and on Ethan Allen in particular, is worthy of investing in,” Grove said. “Anytime I mention anything about Ethan Allen, everyone says, ‘Nope, we don’t want to hear about him, we want to hear untold stories.’”
Increasingly that’s leaving the internet to spin its own speculation.
“In today’s climate, it doesn’t matter how much evidence or lack of evidence you have, people are going to feel the way they feel,” Grove said. “I always hope people are inspired by the idealism of the American Revolution — fighting for equality for all people, even though it didn’t give equality to all people. But I think it’s easier for some to blame certain figures of the past than to reckon with entrenched prejudices and inequalities in our society that have been passed down generation to generation.”
The historian stresses she’s not taking sides, just in search of a truth not yet fully found. She hopes people will discover the homestead and its work — if only to take in one of the state’s oldest farmed areas, with a documented history dating back 600 years.
“For better or for worse, Ethan Allen is the figurehead of Vermont,” Grove said. “It would be most responsible to invest in further research of him, particularly to see how well he represents the diverse state of today.”
