Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom
Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys and the American Revolution
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The myth and the reality of Ethan Allen and the much-loved Green Mountain Boys of Vermont—a “surprising and interesting new account…useful, informative reexamination of an often-misunderstood aspect of the American Revolution” (Booklist).
In the “highly recommended” (Library Journal) Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom, Wren overturns the myth of Ethan Allen as a legendary hero of the American Revolution and a patriotic son of Vermont and offers a different portrait of Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. They were ruffians who joined the rush for cheap land on the northern frontier of the colonies in the years before the American Revolution. Allen did not serve in the Continental Army but he raced Benedict Arnold for the famous seizure of Britain’s Fort Ticonderoga. Allen and Arnold loathed each other. General George Washington, leery of Allen, refused to give him troops. In a botched attempt to capture Montreal against specific orders of the commanding American general, Allen was captured in 1775 and shipped to England to be hanged. Freed in 1778, he spent the rest of his time negotiating with the British but failing to bring Vermont back under British rule.
“A worthy addition to the canon of works written about this fractious period in this country’s history” (Addison County Independent), this is a groundbreaking account of an important and little-known front of the Revolutionary War, of George Washington (and his good sense), and of a major American myth. Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom is an “engrossing” (Publishers Weekly) and essential contribution to the history of the American Revolution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former New York Times reporter Wren (The End of the Line) fleshes out a lesser-known aspect of the Revolutionary War in this engrossing account of the Green Mountain Boys militia and its complicated role in the struggle for independence. Wren relays his history through interwoven accounts of three main figures. The group's original leader, Ethan Allen, had a mixed track record as a military commander and ended up endeavoring to make the independent republic of Vermont a British province, even after Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown effectively ended the American Revolution. It was his obscure cousin, Seth Warner, who shaped the Green Mountain Boys "into a disciplined force whose hit-and-run tactics honed in strategic retreats helped save a broken, diseased American army from annihilation." The third member, Justus Sherwood, a friend of Allen and Warner's, had initially joined with their efforts to defend Vermont homesteaders from New Yorkers who had filed court challenges to their rights to the properties they had settled and worked, and sought to eject the New Yorkers. Wren vividly brings to life characters and events, and this volume will appeal to fans of Nathaniel Philbrick's popular histories.