Ticonderoga

The Citadel of Revolution: Ticonderoga and the War That Made a Nation

Few places in America can claim to have shaped the Revolutionary War as decisively and repeatedly as the small community perched on the western shore of Lake Champlain in upstate New York. Ticonderoga — its name derived from the Iroquois word tekontaró:ken, meaning "it is at the junction of two waterways" — was not merely a backdrop for a single dramatic event. It was a strategic fulcrum upon which the fortunes of the entire war pivoted, again and again, between 1775 and 1777. The fort that stood there, originally built by the French in 1755 as Fort Carillon, commanded the narrow corridor linking Canada to the Hudson River Valley, and whoever controlled it controlled the most vital military highway on the continent. During the 1758 Battle of Carillon, just 4,000 French defenders had repelled an assault by 16,000 British troops — an astonishing feat that earned the place its legendary reputation as the "Gibraltar of North America." In the span of just two and a half years, Fort Ticonderoga was seized by rebel militia in a surprise dawn raid, stripped of its cannons for use in a nearly impossible winter journey to Boston, used as the staging ground for America's first naval campaign, recaptured by a massive British invasion force, and then abandoned in a desperate nighttime evacuation. No other location in the Revolution witnessed such a concentrated cascade of consequential events, and no serious understanding of how American independence was won can afford to overlook what happened here.

The story begins in the pre-dawn darkness of May 10, 1775 — less than three weeks after the shots at Lexington and Concord. Ethan Allen, the towering, profane, and charismatic leader of the Green Mountain Boys, had been planning an assault on the lightly garrisoned British fort for weeks. His motivation was partly patriotic and partly personal: the Green Mountain Boys were a militia formed to defend the land claims of settlers in the New Hampshire Grants (present-day Vermont) against the colony of New York, and Allen saw an opportunity to strike a blow that would serve both causes at once. The fort at that time was garrisoned by a small detachment of the 26th Regiment of Foot under the command of Captain William Delaplace — just two officers and forty-six soldiers, many of them classified as "invalids" (troops on limited duty because of disability or illness), along with some twenty-four women and children who lived within the crumbling walls. The French had blown up the fort's powder magazine when they abandoned it years before, and the place had fallen further into disrepair; historian Christopher Ward would later describe it as "more like a backwoods village than a fort."

But as Allen gathered his men on the eastern shore of the lake at Hand's Cove, a complication arrived in the form of Benedict Arnold, then a captain in the Connecticut militia, who carried a commission from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety authorizing him — and him alone — to capture the fort. Arnold had frequently traveled through the region and was intimately familiar with the fort's condition, manning, and armaments; en route to Boston after Lexington and Concord, he had told members of the Connecticut militia about the vulnerable garrison and its valuable artillery, prompting the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence to fund a covert mission to take it. The confrontation between Allen and Arnold was immediate and sharp. Arnold insisted on his legal authority to command the expedition. Allen's men, fiercely loyal and uninterested in taking orders from an outsider, made it clear they would follow no one but their own leader. A tense compromise was reached: Allen and Arnold would enter the fort side by side, sharing command in fact if not on paper. It was an awkward arrangement, but it held just long enough to accomplish its purpose.

With roughly eighty-three men — fewer than originally planned, because not enough boats could be found to ferry the entire force across the lake before dawn — Allen and Arnold approached the south gate of the fort. Boats had not arrived at Hand's Cove until about 1:30 in the morning of May 10, and they were inadequate to carry the whole force, so Allen and Arnold resolved to attack with the men at hand rather than lose the element of surprise. A single sentry snapped his musket at Allen and missed; the Americans rushed into the fort. Allen stormed toward the officers' quarters and, according to his own later account, demanded the fort's surrender "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!" — though the surrender demand was actually received not by Captain Delaplace but by his subordinate, Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham, who had come running in his nightclothes. Delaplace soon appeared and formally surrendered his sword. Not a single person was killed on either side. It was the first offensive victory for American forces in the Revolutionary War.

The triumph at Ticonderoga set off a chain reaction of aggressive moves. The very next day, May 11, a small detachment captured the nearby Fort Crown Point. Seven days later, Arnold himself led fifty men in a bold raid on Fort Saint-Jean on the Richelieu River in southern Quebec, seizing military supplies, additional cannons, and the largest military vessel on Lake Champlain — an act that severed British overland communications between Quebec and Boston and forced a restructuring of British command in North America. Within weeks, in July 1775, General Philip Schuyler began using Ticonderoga as the staging ground for the Continental Army's invasion of Quebec, launched late that August — the first major American expeditionary campaign of the war.

Arnold, meanwhile, found himself sidelined by politics and ego. When a thousand Connecticut troops arrived in June 1775 under Colonel Benjamin Hinman, bearing a congressional commission, Arnold was ordered to serve under the new commander. Furious and proud, he refused, disbanded his men, resigned his commission, and went home — having spent more than £1,000 of his own money in the effort to capture the fort. It was an early episode in the long, sour pattern of grievance that would ultimately drive Arnold to treason.

The great prize taken at Ticonderoga was not the fort itself but the vast trove of artillery within its walls — cannons, howitzers, and mortars that the Continental Army desperately lacked. In the fall of 1775, George Washington, then locked in a frustrating stalemate besieging British-held Boston, seized upon a scheme to retrieve those weapons. He chose for the job a twenty-five-year-old former Boston bookseller named Henry Knox, whose shop had been, in one account, "a fashionable morning lounge" for luminaries like John Adams. What Knox lacked in formal military training he made up for with a passion for military science honed by years of reading the very volumes he sold. On November 16, 1775, Washington issued Knox his orders and authorized £1,000 for the purpose. Knox departed the next day, accompanied by his nineteen-year-old brother William and a servant, traveling first to New York City for supplies before reaching Fort Ticonderoga on December 5.

Over five days at Ticonderoga, Knox directed Continental soldiers in consolidating, loading, and preparing fifty-nine pieces of artillery — forty-three heavy brass and iron cannon, six cohorns, eight mortars, and two howitzers — weighing an estimated 120,000 pounds, roughly sixty tons. The largest pieces were the massive 24-pounders, eleven feet long and weighing over 5,000 pounds