On this day in New York · May 10, 1775
Ethan Allen Takes Fort Ticonderoga
A ragtag militia rowed across Lake Champlain before dawn, walked into a sleeping British fort, and pulled off the first American offensive strike of the Revolution without firing a shot.
The facts
- Date
- May 10, 1775
- Where
- Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain in the New York colony
- Attacking force
- About 83 Green Mountain Boys, led by Ethan Allen with Benedict Arnold at his side
- Casualties
- One British soldier concussed; the rest of the 48-man garrison surrendered without firing a shot
Before sunrise on May 10, 1775, Ethan Allen led about 83 Green Mountain Boys across Lake Champlain by rowboat to storm Fort Ticonderoga, a British post in upstate New York that guarded the route between Canada and the Hudson River. Benedict Arnold had shown up the night before with his own commission and his own claim to command, and the two men struck an uneasy truce to lead the assault side by side. The garrison, just 48 soldiers under Captain William Delaplace, was still asleep. Allen marched to Delaplace's quarters and demanded the fort surrender, and the British commander gave it up almost without a fight. It happened less than three weeks after Lexington and Concord, on a stretch of New York most people forget was ever a battlefield.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!
Ethan Allen, demanding the fort's surrender from Captain William Delaplace, May 10, 1775
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The cannon captured that morning got dragged three hundred miles to Boston by Henry Knox that winter, and once they were planted on Dorchester Heights the British had no choice but to sail out of the city in March 1776. A fort on Lake Champlain, hundreds of miles from the fighting everyone remembers, helped decide the siege of Boston.
Sources
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