François Furstenberg: Ethan Allen Was the Founding Father of Vermont and Kind of a Greedy Jerk

Ethan Allen was at various times: reckless speculator, captain of the continent's largest paramilitary force, outlaw with a £100 bounty on his head, American Revolutionary commander, prisoner of war, best-selling author, radical Deist philosopher, and founding father of Vermont. Despite this remarkable life, and despite a time when biographies of America's Founding Fathers fall from the presses like rotten apples from a tree, in the last half-century only one full-length biography had been written about Ethan Allen. How could this be?

As Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, a new and frustrating biography by Willard Sterne Randall, shows, Allen is hard to write about. He poses a challenge not so much because he is different from more famous Founders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin but because he resembles them perhaps a bit too much—in ways most Americans prefer not to think about.

Like Washington, Allen was self-taught. Like Jefferson, he descended from a family of land speculators. Like Franklin, he was of Puritan stock but turned away from the Calvinism of his forebears. Born in the Berkshire Mountains in 1738, Allen grew up amid religious ferment that little affected him. Pugnacious by intellect and temperament, he cussed and fought until his neighbors could stand it no longer; he got "read out" of not one but two New England towns. His early years were also marked by heedless ambition, which landed him in lawsuits with brothers-in-law, fistfights with business associates, and countless failed enterprises. In 1767, on the heels of another professional and personal humiliation, Allen's restless scheming took a new turn: Looking north, he began eying Vermont land....