Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom by Christopher S. Wren

Author:Christopher S. Wren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

TEN

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Conniving with the Enemy

The plot to suborn Ethan Allen can be traced to his captivity in England when the royal cabinet, meeting in London on December 26, 1775, considered that he be bribed and not hanged. Lord Germain had agreed that buying members of Congress or generals like Benedict Arnold would hasten the defeat of Washington’s army. The lowest-hanging fruit was Vermont, whose claim to independence was rejected by the original thirteen states. The New Hampshire Grants had seemed but a flyspeck on the British Empire until Burgoyne’s disastrous campaign in 1777 exposed its significance as an enemy. Vermont looked ripe for plucking. It had no formal ties to sever with Britain.

In July 1780, a British soldier in farmer’s clothes stopped Ethan Allen on the street in his hometown to hand him a letter more than three months old. It came from Beverley Robinson, a Tory of prominence in New York, who inferred “that you, and most of the inhabitants of Vermont, are opposed to the wild and chimerical scheme of the Americans in attempting to separate this continent” from Britain, and would be willing to help restore the ties “so wantonly and inadvisedly destroyed by the rebels.”

Robinson, who commanded a Loyalist regiment but dabbled in espionage, said: “If I have been rightly informed, and these are your sentiments and inclination, I beg that you will communicate them to me without reserve.” He promised that Vermont could have “a separate government under the king and constitution of England, and the men, formed into regiments under such officers as you shall recommend.”

Ethan did not reply. He showed Robinson’s invitation to Vermont’s governor, Tom Chittenden, who agreed that unless Congress supported its independence from New York, Vermont had no reason to remain at war with Great Britain, and was free to make its separate peace. In late September 1780, Chittenden wrote to Canada’s governor general, Frederick Haldimand, proposing a cartel, or written agreement, to exchange prisoners captured along Vermont’s northern frontier with Quebec. “If you will send a proper person with full power to Major Carleton, at Crown Point or St. Johns, to confer upon this business,” Haldimand replied, “I shall authorize the major to receive him.”

Major Christopher Carleton was a natural choice, and not because his uncle was the former governor general of Canada. Orphaned at four years when his parents drowned in a shipwreck, Chris Carleton joined the British army when he was twelve, and later lived among the Iroquois, who decorated his body with fanciful tattoos and bedded him with a native wife, an interlude he recalled with nostalgia.

Carleton learned to fight like the Iroquois, daubing his face with war paint and wearing a ring in his nose. In October 1778, he led more than two hundred British soldiers and native warriors on a rampage through Vermont’s Champlain Valley, guided to settlements targeted for destruction by Justus Sherwood and his Queen’s Loyal Rangers. Over three weeks, the raiders burned farms, mills, storehouses, and crops, slaughtered livestock, and destroyed enough food crops to sustain twelve thousand men for four months.

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