Ethan Allen Captures Fort Ticonderoga

On the night of May 9, 1775, three weeks after Lexington, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys gathered on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain to seize Fort Ticonderoga. There were not enough boats. With dawn coming, Allen and Benedict Arnold, who claimed a share of the command, went in with the eighty-three men already across.

The run-down fort held about four dozen British soldiers, many unfit for duty. A lone sentry's musket misfired and he ran. Allen later wrote that he demanded the surrender "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress," and that the officer who met him came to the door holding his breeches. Nobody was killed.

The real prize was the artillery. That winter Henry Knox hauled fifty-nine pieces some three hundred miles by boat, sled and ox team to the lines around Boston. In March 1776 the guns went up onto Dorchester Heights, and the British evacuated the city.

The painting catches the rush into the fort at first light. Allen, in a fringed buckskin hunting shirt and slouch hat, raises his sword as his men press in behind him. On the right a stone stairway climbs to a doorway where a figure in a white nightshirt appears. Beyond the walls the lake lies silver below the mountains.