Patriots

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Truth, Heroism, and Other

Confusing Subjects

Some years ago I thought that by studying history I'd learn the truth about what happened in the past. I've become perhaps wiser and certainly more cautious in my assumptions as I've grown older. I still believe in truth in an absolute sense. I just don't believe that human beings will ever run into it.

I'm not really sure about why I did some of the things I've done. The reasons I thought I did them were almost certainly, it now seems, not the real reasons. Do I know the real reasons? Well, maybe, but chances are that another ten or twenty-five years of distance and experience will give me a still different take on what was going on.

The above disclaimer is a prelude to me saying that as best I can tell, the action of Patriots is based pretty much on the way things happened in Vermont-then the New Hampshire Grants-just before the start of the American Revolution. (I modeled the climax on the capture of Fort Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.) I don't know about history classes nowadays but believe me, this isn't the way I learned about it in high school.

The cannon captured at Fort Ticonderoga were virtually the only heavy ordnance the fledgling Continental Army had. Without them the British would have continued to hold Boston and might have snuffed out the rebellion before it got properly under way. It startled me to learn that their capture was the next thing to an accident rather than the result of somebody's careful plan.

The trouble with history survey courses is that they only have space to tell you that X did Y and the result was Z. That may well be correct, but it leaves you with the impression that X did Y to achieve Z. More often than not it turns out that X didn't imagine Z, and chances are he/she didn't even intend to do Y. Remember, Columbus died convinced that he'd discovered not America but a new route to India.

I started researching the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in the belief that the Green Mountain Boys were a citizens' militia like the Minutemen in Massachusetts and that Ethan Allen was an American patriot in the mold of Paul Revere. It quickly became obvious that the Green Mountain Boys were closer in purpose and tactics to Quantrill's Raiders-or the Kansas Jayhawkers who opposed them. As for Ethan Allen himself, he was a unique individual in a time that had more than its share of them.

Vermont was really beyond America 's wild frontier until the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. At that point the land which had been granted conflictingly by royal governors in both New Hampshire and New York started to be worth something. The folks who'd already settled on the land did so mostly under New Hampshire grants. New York had a better claim and the New York authorities were ready to assert that claim in their own courts, with New York sheriffs enforcing the decisions.

On the other side were investors, mostly in Connecticut, who held large undeveloped tracts under New Hampshire grants, and the settlers who were already in the area. Men and women who'd risked everything in the face of Indian raids to build homes in the wilderness weren't going to roll over and play dead when a New York process server arrived. The settlers had political and financial backing from the Connecticut investors, and for a leader they had Ethan Allen.

Ethan Allen was a smart, enormously strong man whose idea of a good time was to get drunk and smash up a tavern. He and his family had been run out of Massachusetts. He'd never committed a crime for gain, but he was too raucously violent to live in what passed for civilized society even on the edges of the American colonies.

The militia that Allen raised, the Green Mountain Boys, were local men who would lose everything (including support for their families) if the New York officials had their way. They were hard, tough fellows or they wouldn't have chosen to settle a wilderness and been able to survive. They were operating outside of any law, and they knew they'd be hanged if they fell into the hands of their enemies.

There's no evidence that the Green Mountain Boys ever used deadly force in their activities. To me this is the most remarkable tribute of all to Ethan Allen. For what the struggle could have been-almost certainly would have been-without him, look at the activities of Quantrill and the Jayhawkers of Bloody Kansas in the 1850s.

Oh, neither Allen nor the men under him would ever be mistaken for saints. The Green Mountain Boys burned houses, beat men in front of their families, and in one case hoisted an unfortunate traveler from New York onto a flagpole and left him there all day. Nonetheless they didn't kill, maim, or attempt to kill and maim their opponents.

The British government had to some degree supported the Vermont settlers against the New York authorities. Apparently the only reason the Green Mountain Boys acted suddenly and effectively against the British at the beginning of the Revolutionary War is that Ethan Allen himself decided they ought to.

Nobody knows why he did that. Nobody knew at the time it happened, and I'd venture a guess that Allen himself couldn't have told you the real reason. My guess, based on having a friend or two of a similar type, is that it seemed like an interesting thing to try at the time; and Ethan Allen never did anything with less than a hundred and ten percent enthusiasm.

Allen didn't capture Fort Ticonderoga because he was a patriot who believed in America in the sense we'd mean that now. Later during the Revolution he negotiated with the British in an attempt to make Vermont a province of Canada. When he wrote an account of the capture four years later he claimed he summoned the British commander to surrender "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress," but chances are he hadn't heard of the Continental Congress at the time. (There's even less chance that he said anything about Jehovah: Allen was a noted atheist and reputed to be the most profane man in America.)

I've told you that Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys weren't the people I thought they were when I began to research this novel. I'm not saying that they weren't heroes and patriots.

What I am saying is that heroes and patriots are real human beings, only maybe more so. They're not perfect and they're not saints; they do things for the same sort of fuzzy reasons that you and I do. But at the end of the day, the things they've done have made the future.

And you know, maybe you and I ought sometimes to think about the future we're making.

– Dave Drake

Chatham County, NC