Presents a biography of the frontier Founding Father who led a daring attack on Fort Ticonderoga and almost single-handedly brought the state of Vermont into the Union.

While Ethan Allen, a canonical hero of the American Revolution, has always been defined by his daring 1775 predawn attack on British-controlled Fort Ticonderoga, biographer Willard Sterne Randall challenges our conventional understanding of this largely unexamined Founding Father, documenting that much of what we "know" of Allen is mere folklore. Widening the scope of his inquiry beyond the Revolutionary War, Randall traces Allen back to his modest origins in Connecticut, where he was born in 1738. Largely self-educated, Allen demonstrated his rebellious nature early on through his attraction to Deism, his dramatic defense of smallpox vaccinations, and his early support of separation of church and state. Chronicling Allen's progress to commander of the largest American paramilitary force on the eve of the Revolution, Randall unlocks a trove of new source material, particularly evident in his portrait of Allen as a British prisoner-of-war, and reveals not only a public-spirited leader but a self-interested individual, often no less rapacious than his archenemies, the New York land barons.--From publisher description.