Capture of Fort Ticonderoga

Before dawn on May 10, 1775, three weeks after Lexington and Concord, 83 men crossed Lake Champlain at Hand's Cove, in what is now Shoreham, Vermont. They were Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys, with Benedict Arnold, who held a Massachusetts commission and disputed command with Allen. The two reportedly agreed to go in together.

The garrison at Fort Ticonderoga was two officers and 46 men, many of them invalids, and they were asleep. Captain William Delaplace surrendered the fort. Allen later said he answered with "In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress"; by other accounts it was Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham, the first officer awakened, who asked by what authority they had come.

The real prize was the artillery. In the winter of 1775–76 Henry Knox moved the fort's guns across the snow to Boston, and when they were set up on Dorchester Heights the British left the city in March 1776.

A man in a tricorn raises his sword as he comes through the stone gateway, with a younger man at his shoulder carrying a musket and a column of bayonets filling the arch behind them. On the right a few redcoats in a rough yard throw up their hands. Smoke hangs in a gold-brown sky, and above the gate flies a stars-and-stripes flag, a liberty the calendar did not allow: that design was still two years away in May 1775.