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ethan allen

How Ethan Allen Got Married to a Loyalist

Ethan Allen got married to his second wife in a bizarre ceremony after a whirlwind courtship to a woman half his age.

At least that’s how the witness, a two-year-old at the time, told the story.

In 1789, the flamboyant Revolutionary War hero was a 46-year-old widower with three children. Ethan Allen was not easy to live with. He drank heavily and often stayed away from home. He also hadn’t been happy with his first wife, Mary Brownson, an illiterate scold. While she fully embraced Christianity, he opposed it, even writing an attack on it called Reason: the Only Oracle of Man.

Then a rich, beautiful, well-educated young Loyalist widow fell for him six months after his wife died. They married almost immediately.

Frances Montresor

How Ethan Allen Got Married

After the American Revolution ended, Frances Montresor Buchanan boarded in the home of Stephen Bradley in Westminster, Vt. She chose Westminster because she had inherited large tracts of land there. With her imperious manner and New York wardrobe, she made quite a splash in town.

When Ethan Allen came to town, people began to speculate about a match between the two prominent single people.

Her friends said if she married General Allen, she would be the queen of a new state. She replied, “If I should marry the devil, I’d be the queen of hell.”

‘Fine’

Ethan Allen apparently met her at a party at Bradley’s house during the February session of the Vermont Legislature. And there Bradley’s son, William Czar Bradley, picked up the story and made a legend out of it.

Detail from statue of Ethan Allen outside the Vermont Statehouse

In February 1784, Frances Montresor Buchanan stood on a chair arranging china on a shelf when Ethan Allen walked into the room. She told him people didn’t make calls that early in the morning. He said he was on his way to Sunderland. And, he added, “If we are to be married, now is the time.”

She put a decanter back on the shelf, stepped off the shelf and said, “Fine,” but she needed her coat.

A group of judges happened to be eating breakfast in the Bradley house, so Allen asked Judge Moses Robinson to perform the ceremony.

Said Allen, “For myself I have no great opinion of such formality, and from what I can discover, she thinks as little of it as I do. But as a decent respect for the opinions of mankind seems to require it, you will proceed.”

Moses replied, “General, this is an important matter. Have you given it serious consideration?”

“Certainly,” Allen replied and looked at his beautiful bride. “But I do not think it requires much consideration.”

The judge started the ceremony until he asked Ethan Allen whether he promised to live with his wife, ‘agreeable to the laws of God.’ Allen stopped the wedding and looked out the window. “The law of God as written in the great book of nature?” he said. “Yes. Go on.”

Frances Allen

The judge pronounced them man and wife. They put Fanny’s trunk and guitar case in the sleigh, she wrapped herself in a bear rug and the newlyweds drove off over the mountains.

Little is known about Frances Allen before she married the hero of Ticonderoga, and even afterward there is some question. Was she a girlish tease, a brainy, liberated woman or a shrewish stepmother? Who was her father? What was her real name?

Her daughter Fanny Allen recorded her maiden name as Montresor. But her tombstone names her Montezuma, while an 1858 family history calls her Frances Montuzan, daughter of a British colonel killed in the French and Indian War.

Who Was Frances Montresor?

She was believed to be the illegitimate daughter of Anna Schookraft (or Schoolcraft) and John Montresor, a British military engineer and womanizer.

She was born Feb. 4, 1760, according to Ethan Allen. She grew up in New York City, well-educated with interests in botany and music.

An Irish Loyalist, Crean Brush, had come into her life. He had large landholdings in New York and the New York Grants. He adopted Fanny, but how that happened is another question. Brush either married her mother or married her aunt after her mother died.

At 16, she had married a British army officer, John Buchanan, who died in battle. According to legend, she could barely tolerate him but he doted on her. And then when Crean Brush died, he left part of his estate to his adopted daughter.

Much of her share of the Brush estate was conveyed to Ethan Allen two months after their marriage. They had three children, and historians say they had a happy, though short, marriage. Ethan Allen died five years after their wedding, on Feb. 12, 1789. Their daughter, Fanny, became New England’s first Catholic nun.

* * *

Now available in paperback and as an ebook. Click here to order your copy.

With thanks to A Treasury of New England Folklore, The Stories, Legends, Tall Tales, Traditions, Ballads and Songs of the Yankee People, edited by B.A. Botkin. This story about the second marriage of Ethan Allen was updated in 2024.

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Vermont Statehood, Never A Sure Thing Until New York Got Paid Off

The American Revolution finally ended for Vermont in Oct. 28, 1790, when the state offered to pay New York $30,000 ($770,000 in 2014 dollars). In exchange, New York would release all claims against land in the future Green Mountain State. New York accepted the deal, clearing the way for Vermont statehood the following year.

Ira Allen (Smithsonian Institution)

Vermont’s tortured journey to statehood was mired in a decades-old struggle between New Hampshire on one side and New York on the other. In between stood the irascible Allen boys, Ira and Ethan (with their Onion River Land Company). Also in the way: Thomas Chittenden, Vermont’s first governor (and president of Vermont when it operated as an independent republic).

Vermont Statehood Uncertain

By 1790, the issues over Vermont statehood were pretty well resolved, but 10 years earlier nothing had been certain. The trouble started decades earlier when Benning Wentworth, New Hampshire’s colonial governor, began issuing land grants in Vermont.

Gov. Benning Wentworth

The King of England invalidated those grants, instead authorizing New York governor George Clinton to distribute the land.

Not surprisingly, the Vermonters already occupying the land took the decision badly. Calling themselves the Green Mountain Boys, they then began running off New York surveyors, judges and anyone else who came to Vermont to enforce the king’s wishes.

Flag of the Green Mountain Boys

When the American Revolution broke out, Vermont found itself in a strange predicament. Its people mostly supported the American side. But New Hampshire and New York blocked it from having much influence in the Continental Congress. Both resisted Vermont’s efforts to form a government of its own and join the Congress.

For a while the Allens even entertained the notion of attaching to Quebec as a British colony. Faced with the prospect of losing Vermont altogether, representatives of other colonies then began softening their positions.

Chittenden Deals

Settling first with New Hampshire, Vermont established the Connecticut River as a boundary. However, many towns along both sides of the river wanted to remain united as part of the same state (either Vermont or New Hampshire). Vermonters then agreed to make no claims west of the western border of Massachusetts, though some in the border regions wanted to remain part of New York.

Presumed likeness of Thomas Chittenden

Finally, the leading families of Vermont, with Chittenden in the lead, agreed to make the offer that New York accepted in 1790.

Ethan Allen never made it to statehood, dying unexpectedly in 1789. By the time of his death, he had made himself widely unpopular, not only for trying to ally with the British but for publishing a book attacking the Bible. News of his death brought no mourning from many public figures. Ira and Chittenden, however, made it to the goal line.

With Vermont established, Ira Allen would move on to cook up a scheme to take over Canada, with French assistance. The British, however, stopped him before he put his plan into action.

This story last updated in 2023. Images: Ira Allen By pohick2 – originally posted to Flickr as 1941.5.3, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6076872.

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Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Not a Fan of the Mexican War

Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, grandson of the Revolutionary War hero, struggled with questions of right and wrong during his long military career. He thought the Mexican-American War was wrong because the United States had ‘not one particle of right’ to be there.’ He did his duty as a soldier, though, and served with distinction.

Ethan Allen Hitchcock

President James Polk pushed for the war to acquire California, then part of Mexico. Anti-slavery Northerners viewed expansion as a way to create more slave territory. Hitchcock then predicted vast bloodshed would result from U.S. aggression. He was right.

Ethan Allen Hitchcock

Like his grandfather Ethan Allen, Hitchcock was a bold and independent thinker. He was born on May 18, 1798, in Vergennes, Vt.,the son of Samuel Hitchcock and Lucy Caroline Allen. Though no likeness exists of his grandfather, his mother said her son bore a strong resemblance to him.

His brother Henry served as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. One nephew served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President William McKinley.

Ethan Allen Hitchcock graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, commissioned a third lieutenant and then quickly rose through the ranks of the U.S. Army. He served in the Seminole War in Florida and as the right-hand man of Gen. Winfield Scott during the Mexican-American War.

Hitchcock was a devoted scholar, an admirer of the philosopher Spinoza and a collector of books on alchemy and flute music.

Battle of Buena Vista, 1847

In 1845, Hitchcock served in the 3^rd Infantry Regiment, but not happily. He viewed the impending conflict with Mexico with dread and despair. “For ten years we have been encroaching on Mexico and insulting her,” he wrote. “Her people I consider a simple, well disposed, pastoral race, no way inclined to savage usages.”

Violence

On June 30, 1845, Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock was stationed at Fort Jessup in Louisiana. He had just learned of orders to move the army to the west bank of the Rio Grande. Hitchcock believed Texas had no right to claim the territory they were ordered to defend. He wrote in his diary:

Fort Jessup, La., June 30, 1845. Orders came last evening by express from Washington City directing General [Zachary] Taylor to move without any delay to some point on the coast near the Sabine or elsewhere, and as soon as he shall hear of the acceptance by the Texas convention of the annexation resolutions of our Congress he is immediately to proceed with his whole command to the extreme western border of Texas and take up a position on the banks of or near the Rio Grande, and he is to expel any armed force of Mexicans who may cross that river.

[William W. S.] Bliss read the orders to me last evening hastily at tattoo. I have scarcely slept a wink, thinking of the needful preparations. I am now noting [writing] at reveille by candlelight and waiting the signal for muster….Violence leads to violence, and if this movement of ours does not lead to others and bloodshed, I am much mistaken….

The Rest of the War

Hitchcock predicted correctly. The Mexican-American War went on for two years. Mexicans more properly call it Intervención estadounidense en México (American intervention in Mexico).

Winfield Scott

Hitchcock served throughout the war. U.S. troops invaded Mexico’s heartland under Gen. Winfield Scott. During the march on Mexica City, Hitchcock served as his inspector general. When the war ended in 1848, Mexico ceded California, Nevada and Utah and parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.

Historian Howard Zinn relied on Hitchcock’s journal entries during the war for his treatment of the conflict in Voices of A People’s History of the United States.

With thanks to the History Is A Weapon blog.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold Capture Fort Ticonderoga, 1775

Early in the American Revolution, a small team of rivals thirsting for glory captured Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys competed for credit with Benedict Arnold and his two militias from Connecticut and Massachusetts.

How Ethan Allen wanted the capture of Fort Ticonderoga to be remembered

How Ethan Allen wanted the capture of Fort Ticonderoga remembered

Both Arnold and Allen jockeyed for command of the expedition at a time when no Continental Army existed. George Washington was still just a delegate to the Second Continental Congress.

Soon after the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, Gen. Erastus Wolcott and others from the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence sent a letter to the provincial Congress of Massachusetts Bay. They pleaded for the colonies to get along and not to quarrel over credit for the captured fort. The letter underscores the fragility of the colonies’ alliance and the uncertainties with which they fought the war.

The Race to Fort Ticonderoga

Arnold was a captain in the Connecticut militia when the war broke out. He marched to Boston with his company to help out in the siege.

Arnold knew the condition of Fort Ticonderoga. He suggested to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety that it send a force to capture it. The committee then gave him a commission as colonel, horses, gunpowder, ammunition and 100 pounds. It also gave him authority to recruit up to 400 men for the secret mission.

Only the secret got out. Arnold had also mentioned the vulnerability of Fort Ticonderoga to Connecticut militiamen. The Connecticut Committee of Correspondence decided to pay for its capture and to recruit militia for the operation.

Meanwhile, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys also wanted to capture Fort Ticonderoga. On May 6, Arnold was on the border of Massachusetts and what was then the New Hampshire Grants (Vermont). He learned Allen had marched 50 miles ahead of him. Arnold also found out a Connecticut militia was on its way.

Fort Ticonderoga today.

Co-Command at Fort Ticonderoga

Benedict Arnold wasn’t about to let anyone else grab all the glory. He rode his horse so furiously to Bennington that the animal had to be destroyed.

After a quarrel over who should lead the assault on the fort, Allen and Arnold agreed to co-command. At dawn on May 10, Fort Ticonderoga fell to 100 Green Mountain Boys, 40 Massachusetts men raised and 20 men from Connecticut.

It was a cakewalk. The only sentry on duty fled. Then the Americans roused the sleeping British soldiers at gunpoint. Only one person received an injury, an American by a bayonet.

Ethan Allen

Allen and Arnold had rushed up to the officers’ quarters to demand surrender. The commander’s assistant demanded to know under what authority they captured Fort Ticonderoga.

Allen famously answered, “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”

Capt. William Delaplace, the fort’s commander, emerged from his bedroom and surrendered his sword.

Though only 48 men and 15 women and children defended the fort, its capture had strategic importance. It cut off communications between the northern and southern units of the British Army. The capture also created a staging ground for the invasion of Quebec. Finally, and unforeseen at the time, it provided artillery that Henry Knox would haul to Boston to force the British evacuation.

‘You can have it’

Benedict Arnold

Six days after the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, Connecticut general Erastus Wolcott sent a letter from Hartford to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts.

In the letter, Wolcott noted the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence sent an express rider with the news to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The committee also sent a rider to the Committee of Correspondence in Albany asking for help in holding down Fort Ticonderoga.

Wolcott then acknowledged a question about who had the right to command and hold the Fort Ticonderoga. He suggested Massachusetts handle he fort, as it had more available men and Connecticut had so much on its plate.

In the letter, he wrote,

We consider all the Colonies, and the New-England Colonies especially, as brethren united together in one joint interest, and pursuing the same general design, and that whatever expedition in furtherance of the grand designs may be undertaken by any one of the Colonies, or body of men in either of them, ought to be considered as undertaken for the joint benefit of the whole confederate Colonies, and the expenses of the enterprise, and cost of maintaining and defending the same, is to be borne by all in proportion to their abilities.

“We hope all will wish to put out a helping hand, and mutually afford each other all necessary assistance against our common enemy,” he wrote. He hoped New York and Connecticut would help, but Massachusetts shouldn’t count on it.

Wolcott signed the letter along with William Williams, Samuel Bishop and Samuel H. Parsons, all members of Connecticut’s Committee of Correspondence.

This story about Fort Ticonderoga was updated in 2022. Image of Fort Ticonderoga By User:Americasroof – Author’s own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1131154. Fort Ticonderoga today By Mwanner – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6967864.

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In Colonial New England, the New Year Started on March 25

In colonial New England, the new year did not start on January 1. Not because the Puritans didn’t want people to have too much fun on New Year’s Eve. It was because England refused to go along with the rest of Europe in adopting the Gregorian calendar.

The English year didn’t change until March 25, or Lady Day, when Christians celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin. So in 1620, John Winthrop’s father Adam wrote in his diary, “The new year beginneth,” on March 25.

European New Year

Didn’t go along with the pope.

The whole thing started with Julius Caesar. In 45 B.C., he ordered a new calendar, one with 12 months, 365 days and a start date of January 1. Every fourth year would include a leap year to compensate for the extra six hours or so it takes the earth to revolve around the sun.

By the 9^th century, some southern European countries began celebrating the first day of the new year on March 25 to coincide with the Annunciation. Balky England didn’t follow along until the 12^th century.

By the 16^th century it became obvious that the Julian calendar overcompensated with too many leap years. Equinoxes were falling 10 days too early. Catholics worried they weren’t celebrating Easter in the proper season. So in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII approved the New Style, or Gregorian calendar. Ten days were dropped from October 1582 and leap years came slightly less often. Only millennia years divisible by 400 would have leap years. January 1 would be New Year’s Day.

Pope Gregory by Lavinia Fontana

Most of Europe went along with the change. England did not. In 1582, Protestant Queen Elizabeth I did not intend to take orders from the Catholic Church. March 25 remained the legal start of the new year. But the English people began celebrating January 1 as New Year’s Day along with the rest of Europe. Almanac publishers went along with them, too.

Double Dating

That’s how double dating got started in colonial record keeping. Dates between Jan. 1 and March 25 were identified with a slash mark between the years that overlapped. Just as an example, records of the first parish in Brewster, Mass., show double dates: ’Eleazer Crosbeys Eunice baptized on Jan : 9 . 1731/2’ and ‘Jonathan Cobb admitted on March 19 . 1731/2.’

Connecticut State Library

Double dating wasn’t for everyone, as the Connecticut State Library points out. The Colony of Connecticut’s records show a court at Hartford on 27 December 1636 followed by a court at Hartford on 21 February 1636 followed in turn by a court at Hartford on 28 March 1637. You might think the February session was recorded out of sequence, but it’s correct: December 1636 was followed by January and February 1636, because 1636 continued until March 24.

England and her colonies finally caved in to the new calendar when Parliament passed the Calendar Act of 1750. As of 1752, January 1 was officially the new year and 11 days were dropped from September.

Historians generally list both Old Style and New Style dates for pre-1752 records. Look up Ethan Allen, for example, and you’ll see his dates listed as ‘January 21, 1738 [O.S. January 10, 1737] – February 12, 1789.’ But that isn’t always the case. George Washington changed his birthdate from Feb. 11, 1732 under the Julian calendar to Feb. 22, 1732 under the Gregorian calendar.

So a word to the wise historian: Be careful how you date!

This story was updated in 2023.

Image: Connecticut State Library By STATELIB – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60468962

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Ethan Allen and the Tale from the Outhouse

On Sept. 25, 1775, the British captured Ethan Allen while he ran a fool’s errand to Canada.

Fresh from his stunning capture of Fort Ticonderoga, Ethan Allen thought he could capture Montreal. He led an invasion into Canada with a small band of his Green Mountain Boys, but he timed the mission badly and didn’t think it through.

Ethan Allen capturing Fort Ticonderoga

The British seized Allen and held him on a series of prison ships, then moved him to England. As an officer of the Continental Army he would have been executed, but the British feared reprisals.

So the British held Allen for two years in England, then sent him back to America as part of a prisoner exchange.

Ethan Allen Returns to England

Abraham Lincoln loved to tell a story about what happened to Allen after the war. Though it may never have happened, it’s characteristic of Allen, who courted controversy in life. He was brash, crude and daring.

Ethan Allen

Allen opposed organized religion and wrote an attack on Christianity called Reason: the Only Oracle of Man. He married a Loyalist only a few weeks after meeting her and only six months after his first wife died.

Ironically, Ethan Allen’s daughter Fanny converted to Catholicism and became New England’s first nun.

Here is the story as Lincoln liked to tell it.

Ethan Allen returned to England after the war, and the British made fun of him. One day they put a picture of George Washington in an outhouse where Allen would be sure to see it. He used the outhouse but said nothing about the picture. Then the British asked him about it and Allen said it was a very appropriate place for an Englishman to hang the picture because “nothing will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington.”

Abraham Lincoln

There is little evidence to support the truth of the story, though Lincoln most certainly told it.

This story was updated in 2022.

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