Ticonderoga: Three Men, Three Accounts

Fort Ticonderoga sat at the junction of Lake Champlain and Lake George, a position that had mattered enormously during the French and Indian War and mattered again the moment fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord. By 1775 the British garrison there had shrunk to fewer than fifty men in a fort falling into disrepair, and word of its weak defenses and well-stocked arsenal had reached patriot leaders in both Massachusetts and Connecticut almost simultaneously. Two separate expeditions set out to take it, commanded by two men who could not stand each other, and who would spend the days after their joint victory writing competing accounts of what had happened. All three participant letters, Allen's, Arnold's, and the British officer Jocelyn Feltham's report to his commanding general, survive today and are preserved by Fort Ticonderoga's own museum.

Even before fighting broke out, Massachusetts had sent a lawyer named John Brown into Canada to assess Fort Ticonderoga's condition and report back on whether it could be taken if war came. His answer was unambiguous: the fort should be seized as soon as possible. Once Lexington and Concord made the question moot, two expeditions formed almost at once. Connecticut financed and organized a force under Ethan Allen, leader of the Green Mountain Boys, a militia already well known in the disputed New Hampshire Grants territory. Massachusetts separately commissioned Benedict Arnold, a Connecticut-born militia captain then serving outside besieged Boston, to lead his own expedition for the same purpose. Neither man knew of the other's mission until their paths converged on the shore of Lake Champlain in early May, by which point Allen's force, roughly 230 Green Mountain Boys and Massachusetts men, badly outnumbered the handful of soldiers Arnold had managed to bring with him.

The two commanders argued over who should lead the attack. Allen's men made clear they would follow no one but their own officer. Arnold, who held the only formal written commission either man possessed, insisted on his legal right to command. They settled, uneasily, on joint command, an arrangement that held only until the fort was actually taken.

Fewer than a hundred men crossed Lake Champlain in the dark, ahead of the rest of Allen's force, and rushed the fort's single sleeping sentry just before daybreak. What happened inside in the next several minutes survives in three separate first-hand accounts, written within a month of the event by the three men closest to it.

Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham, second in command of the British garrison, gave a very different version of the same minutes in his own report, filed a month later once he had reached New York. He was awakened by shouting and the words "no quarter," and described being cornered by armed men before he could reach the rest of the garrison.

The fort surrendered without a shot fired by either side. The Americans took roughly fifty British prisoners, along with the artillery and military stores that had drawn both expeditions there in the first place.

Allen and Arnold's joint command did not survive the victory it had just won. Arnold's own letter to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, written the day after the capture, describes watching his authority evaporate in real time once Allen realized his own men would answer to no one else.

Ticonderoga's capture did more than remove a small British garrison from the map. It cut communication between British forces in Canada and New York, and it handed the new Continental Army something it badly needed: artillery. On November 16, 1775, Washington issued written instructions ordering Henry Knox, a 25-year-old Boston bookseller turned artillery officer, to retrieve Ticonderoga's guns.

Knox's team hauled 59 cannon, roughly sixty tons, by sled across frozen rivers and the snow-covered Berkshires to Cambridge, arriving in late January 1776. Mounted on Dorchester Heights on the night of March 4, those guns gave Washington the leverage to force a British evacuation of Boston on March 17 without another major battle, a campaign told in full in this archive's Boston episode.

Arnold and Allen never reconciled their dispute over command. Arnold eventually resigned his commission over the matter and left the fort to others. Allen's account of the capture, the more widely circulated of the two at the time and ever since, is the version most people now remember. Arnold's own report, plainer and considerably less flattering to everyone involved including himself, survived too, filed quietly alongside it in the same archive.