Bennington

Bennington: The Raid That Broke an Empire's Campaign

Long before the first shots of the American Revolution echoed across Massachusetts, the rough country of the New Hampshire Grants — the territory that would become Vermont — was already a place defined by defiance. Bennington, nestled in the southwestern corner of that disputed region, had been the political and organizational heart of resistance for nearly a decade before independence was even declared. It was here, beginning in 1769, that Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, Remember Baker, and other frontier leaders organized the Green Mountain Boys, a militia force originally formed not to fight the British Crown but to resist the colonial government of New York, which claimed jurisdiction over lands that settlers held under grants from New Hampshire. The Green Mountain Boys were rowdy, ungovernable, and effective — qualities that would prove remarkably useful when the nature of the enemy changed. By the time the Revolution began, Bennington had already cultivated a culture of armed self-reliance and suspicion of distant authority that made it a natural cradle of rebellion.

The town's first major contribution to the Revolution came early and dramatically. On May 10, 1775 — barely three weeks after Lexington and Concord — Ethan Allen led roughly eighty Green Mountain Boys, joined by Benedict Arnold, in a predawn assault on Fort Ticonderoga at the southern tip of Lake Champlain. The British garrison, numbering fewer than fifty soldiers, was caught entirely by surprise. Allen famously demanded the fort's surrender "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress," though some historians have questioned whether his actual language was quite so elevated. Regardless, the capture of Ticonderoga was a galvanizing moment for the patriot cause. It secured a vast store of artillery — cannon that Henry Knox would later haul across the frozen wilderness to Boston — and it demonstrated that Americans could seize a British stronghold, not merely defend a bridge or a hilltop. The men who accomplished this feat had been recruited, organized, and drilled, such as they were, in and around Bennington. The town could fairly claim to have furnished one of the Revolution's first offensive victories.

Meanwhile, the territory surrounding Bennington was forging its own political identity with astonishing speed. A Convention of the New Hampshire Grants, representing the different towns, met in January 1777 and declared the district a free and independent state. By July, delegates meeting at Windsor had adopted a constitution — modeled on Pennsylvania's, but with important changes: its Bill of Rights abolished slavery and extended voting privileges to all freemen.

The convention elected Thomas Chittenden, Ira Allen, and others to a Council of Safety, the interim government that would administer this fledgling republic in the middle of a war. Bennington served as a critical early seat of this new government's authority. The first General Assembly under the new constitution was originally scheduled to meet at Bennington in January 1778 , though the chaos of war would delay those plans. The people of the Grants were now fighting two battles at once — for independence from Britain and for recognition as a sovereign entity separate from New York.

But Bennington's defining moment came two years after Ticonderoga, in the pivotal summer of 1777, during a campaign that would determine the fate of the entire war. General John Burgoyne, one of the most ambitious and theatrical officers in the British Army — he was also a successful London playwright — had devised a grand strategy to sever New England from the rest of the rebellious colonies by driving south from Canada through the Lake Champlain–Hudson River corridor. Burgoyne led a column of 8,000 men from Montreal to Albany, where they planned to link up with General William Howe's army marching up the Hudson. In late June 1777, Burgoyne's army of British regulars, Hessian professionals, Loyalists, and Native allies crossed into New York from Canada with considerable confidence. The early days seemed to justify that confidence: on July 5 and 6, American forces withdrew from Fort Ticonderoga and Mount Independence, leaving these fortifications to the British. But the advance was not entirely unopposed. As the British followed the Americans southward, they were delayed on July 7 by a rearguard action at Hubbardton — the only Revolutionary War battle fought entirely on Vermont soil — which gave American forces a chance to regroup and forged the first successful resistance to Burgoyne's plan.

By August, the grand design was beginning to fray. The British commander's army was slowed by poor roads as well as trees and other obstacles strewn along the route by the Americans.

Burgoyne found himself in desperate need of provisions, wagons, cattle, and horses. His German dragoons had no cavalry horses, and his supply lines back to Canada were growing dangerously long. He decided to send an expeditionary force under Lt. Col. Friedrich Baum, one of the German officers in his command, to capture military supplies being stockpiled at Bennington and to collect cattle and horses for the main army.

Philip Skene, a prominent local Loyalist landowner, was acting as interpreter for Baum, who spoke no English.

Believing the town to be only lightly defended, Burgoyne and Baum were unaware that Stark and 1,500 American militiamen were stationed there.

The British had badly miscalculated, in no small part because of what was happening on the American side. Alarmed at the pace and probable success of Burgoyne's advancing army, the newly formed Republic of Vermont, through its Council of Safety, appealed to neighboring New Hampshire for assistance. As Ira Allen, the twenty-six-year-old secretary of the Council, emphasized in his appeal, the Vermonters could not carry their defense into execution without New Hampshire's help. New Hampshire responded on July 18 by authorizing John Stark to raise a militia for the defense of the people. Stark was no ordinary militia officer. He was a Continental Army colonel who had fought at the battles of Bunker Hill, Trenton, and Princeton.

He had resigned in March of 1777 after being passed over for a promotion, only to return to service four months later as a brigadier general in the New Hampshire Militia — independent of the Continental Army. Stubborn and experienced, Stark refused to take orders from Congress or from any Continental officer; he answered to New Hampshire alone. He raised more than 1,500 men in a matter of six days, more than 10 percent of New Hampshire's men over the age of sixteen — a staggering mobilization that spoke to both the urgency of the moment and the power of Stark's reputation. Using funds provided by John Langdon , the New Hampshire politician who reportedly pledged his own fortune to the cause, Stark marched his force to Bennington.

Baum's detachment of roughly 700 men consisted of Hessian and British Army troops, Canadian and Loyalist irregulars, and a number of Iroquois warriors. They set out on August 11, and by August 14, Baum's advance guard had skirmished with a det