Washington knew that others in the audience were also ready for firmer measures. Shortly after Lexington and Concord, delegates from New England had stopped their carriages en route to Congress for a secret meeting in Hartford, Connecticut. There, while the Connecticut Assembly was officially adjourned, they supported the decision of the Assembly's Committee of Safety—meeting in an unauthorized, extralegal session—to commission Ethan Allen and his paramilitary Green Mountain Boys to seize control of Lake Champlain, its forts, and ships. Hoping for a lightning invasion of Canada that would make it part of a new North American union before the British could reinforce its garrisons from faraway England, Samuel Adams and John Hancock of Massachusetts had joined Connecticut's secret committee in commissioning Allen's bold assault.

It had been only three weeks since the first shots of the American Revolution were fired on April 19 at Lexington, and the news had spread quickly. Late in the afternoon of April 25, three mud-spattered riders galloped up to the Catamount Tavern in Bennington in present-day Vermont. Inside, they found thirty-seven-year-old Ethan Allen, the towering black-haired colonel commandant of the Green Mountain Boys, huddling with his officers and members of committees of safety from a dozen nearby settlements.

The sudden appearance of Ethan's younger brother, Connecticut merchant Heman Allen, silenced the tumultuous gathering. Heman had ridden all night with Captains Edward Mott and Noah Phelps, both veterans of the French and Indian War, to bring Ethan two urgent messages from Hartford. First, there had indeed been heavy fighting outside Boston. A brigade of a thousand Redcoats had quick-marched to Lexington, where they killed six militiamen and wounded four others.

As Heman handed Ethan the second message, he explained that he had been passing through Hartford on his way back to his general store in Connecticut from a meeting of Vermont land speculators when the Connecticut committeemen summoned him. How many Green Mountain Boys could Ethan raise? How quickly? And would he be willing to lead them on a dangerous mission to seize the forts and their hundreds of vital cannons before reinforcements from the 26th Regiment of Foot arrived from Montreal?

The committee was asking Ethan Allen and his militia to carry out a treasonous invasion of one British province, New York, on the dubious authority of an illegal assemblage of rebels from another province, Connecticut. Allen needed little time to deliberate. He later wrote in his memoirs that he was "thoroughly electrified" by his selection for the task. The news of the first "systematical and bloody attempt by the British" to "enslave America" made him determined to risk a traitor's death.

The British garrison inside Fort Ticonderoga at the southern tip of Lake Champlain had no reason to expect Vermonters to assault a Crown fortress on New York soil, in part because the province's royal government had officially and expressly forbidden any such raid. Unlike New Englanders, the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers were still loyal to the Crown. In addition, in its initial session in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress had also resolved that on no account should revolutionaries molest the garrisons of New York's forts. As long as the British did not construct any new fortifications or impede the free passage of citizens, they should be allowed to occupy their barracks peaceably.

In fact, Congress had resolved that the American colonists would resort to force of arms only if British troops violated the people's rights. The revolutionary leaders of New York had interpreted this to mean that the people should not confiscate any military property belonging to the British Crown. Furthermore, there had been no formal declaration of war. As late as May 16, 1775, six days after Allen and his Green Mountain Boys launched their predawn attack on Fort Ticonderoga, the delegates in Philadelphia would still be declaring that "Congress had nothing else in mind but the defense of the colonies."

The view from New England was quite different. To Allen and other incipient New England revolutionaries, it appeared that the old British forts in upstate New York, each held by no more than a corporal's guard of a few score men, were ripe for the plucking. Allen, Hancock, Adams, and Connecticut's radical leaders believed the forts on Lake Champlain must be seized before they could be reinforced by British Redcoats or by militia loyal to the British, who could be called up any day by New York's royal governor.

One leading Loyalist, Colonel Philip Skene, a Scottish veteran of the recent French and Indian War, had already built blockhouses at Skenesboro (present-day Whitehall) on his thirty-thousand-acre forest plantation just south of Lake Champlain. There, his family, his servants, and the workers in his sawmills and shipyard were prepared to defend his manor with cannons and his own armed schooner, Betsey. On May 10, Colonel Skene, a New York justice of the peace and longtime friend of Allen's, was on the high seas, returning from England with instructions to raise a regiment of Loyalist troops to hold the Lake Champlain forts until the British could reinforce them.

To Allen, seizing the key Champlain forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point was a necessary preemptive act. He later wrote that he could not stand still and wait for the British and their Indian auxiliaries to attack settlements around the mountain lake and in the Green Mountains after he had labored for years to create a new and independent British province, the New Hampshire Grants. Sending couriers north and south, Allen had in less than two weeks recruited an armed force of three hundred frontiersmen from the hills of western Massachusetts, Connecticut, and present-day Vermont. Hundreds more were rushing to join him.

Allen, a commanding figure at well over six feet—nearly a head taller than most of his men—for five years had been the green-uniformed, elected colonel-commandant of the Green Mountain Boys he had formed to prevent New York from evicting as squatters some seven thousand settlers in the Green Mountains. After years of successful clashes with New York sheriffs and posses, Allen believed he could count on as many as two thousand armed men to follow him.

Within only a few days, 230 Boys had arrived, as well as seventy volunteers from Connecticut and Massachusetts, and more were coming in every hour. Farmers and hunters, lawyers, bartenders, tavern owners, town clerks, a poet, even the odd Yale College graduate and a future congressman had arrived on the Champlain shore in their work clothes or in buckskin hunting shirts made by their wives, sisters, or mothers. They pelted down from their hill farms and from river towns to Hand's Cove, where Allen had set up his headquarters in Paul Moore's farmhouse. Allen was not only the leader of a clan that spanned Vermont and Connecticut but also the head at that moment of the largest armed force in North America.

from MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

Only hours before the attack was scheduled to begin, Allen's plans were almost wrecked by the arrival of Colonel Benedict Arnold of Connecticut, bearing a commission from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Arnold, all spit and polish, arrived in the scarlet uniform he had designed for the 2nd Company of Connecticut Footguards, which he had founded, armed, and bankrolled. He was a wealthy New Haven shipowner, ship's captain, and smuggler of luxury goods.

Marching his militiamen to aid the Bostonians, Arnold had met Colonel Samuel Holden Parsons, head of Connecticut's militia, on the road. Parsons, returning from Massachusetts, bemoaned the lack of artillery. Arnold, who had frequently visited the Champlain Valley as a horse trader and merchant, told Parsons about the hundreds of French cannons in the Champlain forts before marching on with his company toward Boston. A member of Connecticut's Committee of Safety, Parsons had dashed to Hartford with this intelligence, triggering Allen's expedition.

Now Arnold was insisting that Massachusetts had authorized him to seize the cannons and arrange to haul them to the makeshift lines taking shape around Boston. Without cannons, it would be impossible to stave off the expected British onslaught. Arnold demanded that Allen turn over command of the Green Mountain Boys and all other recruits to him.

The two men faced off in front of the Boys in a field at Shoreham on May 9. At first Allen, nearly a head taller than Arnold, seemed to cave in before Arnold's ramrod-straight physical presence, but it was only an act. Allen knew that he had no more and no less legal authority than Arnold, but he also knew that the Green Mountain Boys around him, clutching their guns, would only follow his orders. He had successfully wielded de facto authority in the forests for five years, and he did not intend to relinquish it now.

In a loud, mocking voice, Allen announced that Colonel Arnold would henceforth command the Boys. If they followed Arnold, their pay would be the same $2 a day. His unusual tone sent a signal to his men. Without a word, they silently drifted to the edges of the clearing and stacked their guns. To a man, they refused to fight under anyone but the officers they had already elected. If they could not have Allen as their leader, they would club their muskets over their shoulders and march home. Arnold had no choice but to back down.

Allen's demeanor suddenly changed. He now proposed a joint command, with Allen leading the Boys and any Connecticut troops, and Arnold commanding any soldiers who showed up from Massachusetts. As a token of reconciliation, Allen lent Arnold a short brass blunderbuss. The hair-triggered Arnold had ridden off to war without a gun.

By 5 a.m. the next morning, scabbards clanging against each other's, Allen and Arnold had jumped out of the crowded boats onto the New York shore just north of Willow Point, scarcely a quarter mile from Fort Ticonderoga. Years later, in his best-selling memoir A Narrative of the Captivity of Colonel Allen, Allen would claim that just after coming ashore he had halted long enough to inspire his men with a speech. The plan "concerted at Hartford," he told them, was an "important expedition…to provide us a key to all Canada." But Allen would have had little chance to deliver an oration at that point. Any speech loud enough to be heard by his strung-out column would have alerted a British sentry just a musket shot away.

http://www.historynet.com/the-first-american-victory-ethan-allen-takes-fort-ticonderoga.htm/3

Castleton Vermont

On the 22d of September, 1761, the charter was granted to Samuel Brown and sixty-nine others, most of whom being simply speculators in land, never effected a settlement here. The first records of proprietors' meetings have been destroyed, and the earliest account of such a meeting is dated some time in 1766, and was probably held at the house of Colonel Bird, in Salisbury, Conn. Another meeting in October of the same year was undoubtedly provisonal for the first visit here by Colonels Bird and Lee, made in 1767, as appears in the following vote, passed at that time : — " Voted, that there shall be a rate or tax laid on the proprietors of the township of Castleton of one hundred and ninety-two pounds, lawful money, to de- 517 TOWN OF CASTLETON. fray the expense that has already arisen, or that shall arise, in laying out the the township of Castleton, and in cutting a road through the woods, from Wood Creek to Castleton, and other incidental charges that may arise."

History of Rutland County

In the following spring Colonels Amos Bird and Noah Lee, accompanied by a colored man, set out on the first journey to this town, which they had never seen. From Salisbury they came through Bennington to Manchester. Thence all was wilderness, to be traversed by marked trees, till they came to Clarendon. At Danby there was a log hut inhabited by one solitary man, where they tarried for the night. From Clarendon they went to Rutland, where they struck the old military road leading from Charlestown, N. H. (known as No. 4), to Crown Point, N. Y. Following this road, they passed along the northern border of Castleton, wholly ignorant of the fact, to Crown Point, and thence to Ticonderoga. Here they replenished their stock of provisions, and proceeded by way of Skeenesboro (now Whitehall) to Castleton, arriving in June, 1767. They thus nearly compassed the township, touching its borders at one time ; and from Manchester, forty miles south of Castleton, they must have traveled at least one hundred and thirty miles to reach the place. 

The last proprietors' meeting held in Salisbury, on the 27th of February, 1770, was " adjourned to be held at the house of Colonel Amos Bird, in Castleton, the 27th day of May next, at two o'clock, p. m." Colonels Bird and Lee were both present at this meeting and assisted in making arrangements for the settlement of their town in the following spring. In pursuance of these arrangements, Ephraim Buel, Ebenezer Bartholomew and Zadock Remington arrived with their families in May, 1770. These were the first settlers and the only families here during that year, as Bird and Lee did not bring their families until later.

Down to the Revolutionary War times a considerable settlement had been established in Castleton. The family of Colonel Bird, which came in 1771, returned to Salisbury, Conn., upon his death, and did not again visit this town.

Colonel Noah Lee brought his family to town 1772, made his pitch in the east part of the township, on what was afterwards known as the Gridley farm, and built a log house, which they occupied until the breaking out of the Revolutionary War. His wife, Dorcas Bird, niece of Colonel Amos A. Bird, then returned to Salisbury, and remained there se ven years, while he enacted the prominent part which he took in the war. Colonel Lee was born in Newark, Conn., October 15, 1745. He was a waiter in the Colonial army when he was but fifteen years of age, stationed at Crown Point. He was one of the active propietors of Castleton, and was a vigilant opponent

TOWN OF CASTLETON.

After the termination of the conflict he returned to Castleton with his family, where he passed the remainder of his long life in agricultural pursuits. Albert Smith, now residing at Castleton Corners, is a descendant of Colonel Lee. 

Nathaniel Northrup, in 1774, settled north of the village on the road to East Hubbardton. He lived to old age, and left a numerous race of descendants.

The importance of Castleton as a military rendezvous during the Revolutionary War, for the American forces, may best be remembered from the fact that here, in a small farm house built by Richard Bently, and standing just in front of the old Congregational parsonage, occurred the angry midnight discussion between Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen as to which should command the expedition against Ticonderoga. This was on the 8th of May, 1775. The subsequent retreat of the American forces laid open the entire region around Castleton, indeed all Western Vermont, to British and Indian depredation. On a Sabbath, July 6, 1777, a skirmish occurred about half a mile east of the village, around the residence of George Foote, where Fort Warren was afterwards constructed. Captain John Hall was mortally wounded in this engagement, while Elias and Alpheus Hall, George Foote, and others were taken to Ticonderoga as prisoners, but soon after effected their escape. 

Ira of Castleton is descended from Nathaniel (prob of Salisbury) & Sarah Norton Northrop (1750 - 1817)*