and galloped to Boston.54 When the news reached New Haven, class exercises were suspended, and Ezra Stiles’s son, who had followed in his father’s footsteps at Yale, left for Newport and arrived on April 26, surprising his father.55 Norwich’s Ebenezer Huntington, a senior at Yale, left class and marched directly to Boston to meet his brother Jedediah, who had graduated from Harvard a decade earlier. They and the other volunteers began to surround the city.
Twenty-one-year-old Jonathan Mix Jr., whose father had arrested Benedict Arnold nine years earlier, was a member of the New Haven Cadets and had recently joined the Governor’s Foot Guard under Captain Arnold. On April 21 a herald sent by Arnold banged on his door and called him out to the green, where he and forty others gathered and heard the news. They voted unanimously to march to Boston. The following morning when they gathered to leave, Arnold asked the Board of Selectmen for the keys to the powder house, since his small troop lacked gunpowder. Fellow mason David Wooster put up a cautious resistance, saying that they should wait for proper authorization, probably from Governor Trumbull. Arnold told him that they could give him the keys or he and his men would break in. Wooster gave him the keys. Arnold left his three sons and his sickly wife and marched to war, leading Mix and the small band of dedicated militia toward Boston.56 Resistance had become revolution.
Meanwhile, the only colonial governor who supported that revolution, Jonathan Trumbull, called together his Council of Safety and began to form six regiments under new articles of war.57 Few in the colonies were as ready as Trumbull and his allies for this moment. Men carrying letters and messages galloped around the state—between Trumbull in Lebanon, Samuel Huntington in Norwich, Nathaniel Shaw in New London, Thomas Mumford, Daniel Lathrop, Eliphalet Dyer, Benjamin Tallmadge, and William Ledyard—and circulated further on to those who had joined the army or were serving in the Continental Congress, such as William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, Roger Sherman, Jeremiah Wadsworth, Gold Selleck Silliman, Silas Deane, and Benedict Arnold. Shaw asked the Huntingtons for powder for the Oliver Cromwell. The Huntingtons sent flour and salt pork to the Trumbulls.58 Forts were occupied, Tory assets were seized, and military plans were put into action. They had long since planted the seeds, and the grass had finally broken through the soil.
Resist Even Unto Blood
BENEDICT ARNOLD and his New Haven militia got as far as Massachusetts before they ran into a Connecticut patriot named Samuel Parsons. A member of the General Assembly, Parsons had ridden to Boston early and was coming back to report on the conflict. Arnold mentioned the cannon at Fort Ticonderoga at the southern end of New York’s Lake Champlain, where the British garrison might not have yet heard the alarm of revolution. Parsons rode south and met his friend in the legislature, Silas Deane. Through a clever and possibly illegal financial maneuver, Deane and a few other legislators got the money and sent notice to Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, and an ambush, led by Allen and Arnold, was born.1
Events moved quickly. Recruitment began in Connecticut and Arnold and his allies moved across Massachusetts, collecting troops. Meanwhile, Ethan Allen gathered his own partisans, refusing to wait for the others. When Arnold heard this news, he was furious, through either personal ambition or worry that the entire operation would be blown. Riding alone through the hills of western Massachusetts, he joined former Connecticut man–turned-transient Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. The two egotistical men clashed immediately over command. But they both had enough presence of mind to put their differences aside and lead the motley soldiers through thick pine forests over the border of New York and sixty miles north past Lake George to the frontier outpost of Fort Ticonderoga.
In the dark early morning of May 9 they quietly crept within a mile of the fort. A small band of Americans padded through the forest along the cliff side and to the gate, where a lonely British sentinel stood guard. Before he could fire his flintlock, Ethan Allen knocked it to the ground and the band rushed the gates, scrambled across the courtyard, and ran up a flight of stairs to the captain’s quarters. Allen pounded on the door and a lieutenant appeared holding up his pants with one hand. Allen told him to “deliver to me the Fort instantly,” and the sleepy lieutenant asked what authority he had, apparently unaware of the situation in Boston. “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” Allen replied. The more diplomatic Arnold broke in, “Come, give up your arms and you’ll be treated like a gentleman.” Without much choice the British complied.2
Two days later they took the nearby lakeside fort at Crown Point. On May 12 the prisoners, including a major, a captain, and two lieutenants, were sent to Governor Trumbull. On their arrival, Trumbull immediately solicited the Continental Congress, pledging “support of the Grand American Cause” and urging for the “regular establishment of our Army around Boston.” Inside, he sent a second, more circumspect letter, in which he told the Congress that the real message will be delivered by the carrier, one that told them of the Ticonderoga expedition, “an affair of so great Importance,” and begged that Congress would “take it up.”3
But Arnold moved more quickly than letters and slow-moving machinations of the Continental Congress. He cataloged the cannons and prepared them for transport to the siege of Boston, while Eleazar Oswald arrived at Ticonderoga. Oswald had been born in England and had been in America only since 1770, but he had married an American girl in New York City and believed strongly in the goals of the Revolution. After moving to Connecticut, he had joined the New Haven Governor’s Foot Guard with Arnold, and now he brought more recruits and a sloop they had commandeered. With this ship at his disposal, Arnold rechristened it Liberty and sailed north across Lake Champlain with fifty men for almost a hundred miles, taking the Canadian outpost of Fort Saint-Jean just before the British had a chance to reinforce it.4 He wrote to Trumbull that “had we been 6 hours later in all Probability we should have miscarried in our Design…. Providence seems to have smiled on us.” They took everything portable from the fort, including prisoners, and sailed back down the lake.5
Left behind by Arnold, Ethan Allen had followed in slower ships and missed the spoils, though he was attacked by British reinforcements. Arnold reached Ticonderoga triumphant, proclaiming, “we are Masters of the Lake.”6 When Allen returned from Saint-Jean, the two men continued to argue. Arnold complained of the intolerable situation: “When Mister Allen, finding he has a strong party, and being impatient of control, and taking umbrage at my forbidding the people to plunder, he assumed the entire command, and I was not consulted for 4 days, which time I spent in the Garrison. And as a private person often insulted by him and his officers, often threatened with my life, and twice shot at by his men.”7 Arnold’s ambitions had been satisfied by his success but were dampened by Allen’s constant undermining of his authority and his accomplishments. However, the people of New York were more generous. Six hundred families subscribed to an address of praise for Arnold, “deeply impressed with a sense of your merit,” after his part in the Ticonderoga raid and subsequent work in the region.8 A troop of a thousand men finally arrived to reinforce the fort and secure the southern end of Lake Champlain. Arnold returned to Albany to give a report, where he learned that on June 19 his beautiful young wife Margaret had died.9
Silas Deane traveled to Weathersfield to visit his own wife, Elizabeth, but he was also needed in Philadelphia, pulled in different directions by love and duty. On one journey home he was joined by Arnold’s childhood playmate, Philip Turner, now a talented surgeon who became the doctor for Connecticut’s troops in the Continental army.10 The previous summer in Philadelphia, Deane spoke of the “task before us, which is as arduous and of as great consequence as ever man undertook.”11 The camaraderie in the summer of 1775 continued to feed Deane’s passionate patriotism, and even there at the heart of the Revolution, few matched him. He wrote back to Elizabeth in Weathersfield again, saying, “I have the fullest assurance that these colonies will rise triumphant, and shine to the latest posterity,
