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By Root 372 0

gatherings of angered residents were now evolving into organized groups of as many as a hundred men, dressed in a lurid mixture of American Indian headwear, women’s caps, and powdered wigs. They had taken to brandishing clubs, swords, and rifles, issuing threats, knocking down fences, destroying crops, and burning haystacks. Often these frightening mobs were led by a man named Seth Warner. But New York’s worst Vermont nightmare was about to take place: Seth Warner and Ethan Allen joined forces.

Allen’s furniture-burning days were first recorded that fall in an October 1771 deposition regarding a dispossessed New York claimant. “One, surnamed Allen,” a witness recounting what the victim had told him, vowed that “they had resolved to offer a burnt sacrifice to the gods of the world in burning the logs of that house. That they then kindled four fires on the logs of that house.… Allen and Baker, holding two clubs over the deponent’s head, commanded him to leave that land.”4 Allen and others named in the proceedings soon found their efforts widely publicized in notices offering a reward of £25 for their arrest.

Allen’s response revealed his continuing outrage at the corruption he had encountered in the New York legal system now seeking his arrest. He posted notices saying:

TWENTY FIVE POUNDS REWARD

Whereas James Duane and John Kempe of New York have by their menaces and threats greatly disturbed the public peace and repose of the honest peasants of Bennington and the settlements to the northward … any person that will apprehend these common disturbers, viz. James Duane and John Kempe, and bring them to Landlord Fay’s at Bennington, shall have fifteen pounds for James Duane and ten pounds for John Kempe, paid by,

ETHAN ALLEN

REMEMBER BAKER

ROBERT COCHRAN

With confrontations escalating on both sides, New York Governor William Tryon sought the assistance of British troops. But the last thing England wanted, with its American colonies already a political tinderbox, was to have its army firing upon its subjects. Likewise, the residents living on land obtained through the New Hampshire Grants turned to New Hampshire for assistance from its militia. New Hampshire, with its own concerns about potentially igniting the tinderbox politics in the colonies, abstained. Vermont was, as it would remain, on its own.

By August 1773 Ethan Allen and Seth Warner were burning entire settlements that had recently been established under grants from New York. Governor Tryon increased the reward for Allen’s arrest to £100. The New York legislature upped the ante, declaring that if Allen, Warner, and six other named cohorts did not turn themselves in within seventy days, they would be deemed guilty of felonies for which they would be (if caught) put to death.

As before, New York’s declaration was answered by a declaration, this time issued in the name of the Green Mountain Boys, though widely believed to be the voice of Ethan Allen. It met New York’s bet … and raised it:

And furthermore that we will kill or destroy any person or persons whomsoever that shall presume to be accessory, aiding or assisting in taking any of us as aforesaid; for by these presents we give any such disposed person or persons to understand that, though they have license by the law aforesaid to kill us, and “indemnification” for such murder from the same authority, they have no indemnification for doing so from the Green Mountain Boys.5

Going all in with their chips, Allen and the other leaders of the Green Mountain Boys set up their own government. New York claimants now found themselves being put on trial in courts created by the Green Mountain Boys. Floggings and other sentences were administered as homesteads continued to be burned.

A major confrontation with New York was on the verge of exploding. Then suddenly it ended—silenced by a gun fired 137 miles away. On April 19, 1775, British troops marching to Concord, Massachusetts, to destroy a cache of weapons, encountered an armed group of colonists in the village of Lexington. In moving to disarm