Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham

Jocelyn Feltham was a British army lieutenant serving as the deputy commander of the Fort Ticonderoga garrison in the spring of 1775, stationed at a post that had seen no serious military activity since the French and Indian War and that British military planners considered a quiet frontier outpost rather than an active threat zone. He was a professional officer doing ordinary garrison duty in an isolated wilderness fort, with nothing in his prior career to suggest that he would become a participant in one of the most celebrated confrontations of the American Revolution.

In the early morning hours of May 10, 1775, Feltham was awakened by the noise of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys entering the fort through an unguarded postern. He pulled on his coat over his nightclothes and rushed to the entrance of the officers' quarters to confront the intruders before his commanding officer, Captain Delaplace, could be dressed. Standing at the door in a state of considerable dishevelment, Feltham demanded to know by what authority the men had entered a royal fortification. The question he posed was Ethan Allen's cue to deliver what became one of the Revolution's most quoted — and most disputed — responses, demanding surrender in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. Whether Allen delivered that exact phrase or whether the wording was embellished in subsequent accounts, Feltham's challenge was the prompt that elicited it, making him an inadvertent contributor to Patriot mythology.

Feltham was taken prisoner with the rest of the garrison and eventually returned to British service after his exchange. He later wrote his own account of the Ticonderoga capture in letters that survive in British military archives, providing a perspective on the event that differs in several particulars from Allen's celebrated memoir. His account questioned Allen's famous phrase and described the scene with the more prosaic detail of a soldier surprised in the night rather than a dramatic tableau. His name endured primarily because of the role he played in a single extraordinary morning, an otherwise unremarkable career granted a footnote in history by the accident of being at Ticonderoga when Allen came calling.