Seth Warner

Role: Green Mountain Boys Colonel

**The Capture of Crown Point, 1775** In the spring of 1775, the American colonies stood at the threshold of open war with Great Britain. The battles of Lexington and Concord in April had shattered any remaining illusion of peaceful reconciliation, and colonial leaders were scrambling to seize strategic advantages before the British could consolidate their military strength in North America. Among the most pressing concerns was control of the Lake Champlain corridor, a vital waterway that stretched from the northern reaches of New York into Canada and had served for decades as a critical military highway during the French and Indian War. Whoever controlled Lake Champlain controlled the most direct invasion route between the colonies and British-held Canada, and two aging but strategically essential fortifications — Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point — stood as the keys to that corridor. On May 10, 1775, Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold led a daring predawn raid on Fort Ticonderoga, catching the small British garrison completely off guard and compelling its surrender without a shot being fired. The success of that bold action immediately turned attention northward to Crown Point, a fortification situated roughly ten miles farther up the lake. Crown Point had once been among the most formidable military installations in North America, originally built by the French as Fort St. Frédéric before the British constructed a massive replacement during the French and Indian War. By 1775, however, the fort had fallen into considerable disrepair, ravaged by a fire years earlier and maintained by only a skeleton garrison of British soldiers. The task of capturing Crown Point fell to Seth Warner, a seasoned frontier leader and colonel of the Green Mountain Boys, the militia force from the New Hampshire Grants — the territory that would eventually become Vermont. Warner was a trusted and capable officer who had been deeply involved in the Green Mountain Boys' resistance to New York's jurisdictional claims over the Grants, and his military experience made him an ideal choice for the mission. On May 11, 1775, just one day after the fall of Ticonderoga, Warner led a detachment of men northward along the shore of Lake Champlain toward Crown Point. When they arrived, the small British garrison, vastly outnumbered and well aware of Ticonderoga's fate, offered no resistance whatsoever. The fort and everything within it passed into American hands without a single casualty on either side. Though the capture of Crown Point lacked the dramatic flair of the Ticonderoga raid, its strategic significance was enormous. Together, the seizure of both fortifications gave the Americans complete and unchallenged control of the southern end of Lake Champlain, denying the British a foothold from which they could launch operations into New York and New England. The two forts also yielded a substantial haul of artillery, cannons, ammunition, and military supplies that the fledgling Continental Army desperately needed. Much of this captured ordnance, particularly the heavy cannons from Ticonderoga, would later be transported overland to Boston under the supervision of Colonel Henry Knox during the winter of 1775–1776, where their placement on Dorchester Heights forced the British evacuation of the city in March 1776 — one of the earliest major American strategic victories of the war. Crown Point also assumed an important role in the months that followed its capture. It served as a staging area and supply depot for the ambitious American invasion of Canada launched later in 1775, an effort aimed at bringing Quebec into the revolutionary cause and eliminating the threat of a British attack from the north. The capture of Crown Point was thus not an isolated event but part of a broader coordinated effort to seize the entire Lake Champlain corridor before British reinforcements could arrive from across the Atlantic. In the larger narrative of the American Revolution, the capture of Crown Point illustrates how speed, initiative, and strategic thinking in the war's earliest weeks helped transform a colonial rebellion into a viable military effort. Seth Warner's bloodless seizure of the fort contributed directly to American control of a geographic lifeline, secured resources that would prove decisive at Boston, and laid the groundwork for military operations that shaped the war's northern theater for years to come.

Role: Green Mountain Boys Colonel

# Battle of Hubbardton In the summer of 1777, the British campaign to sever New England from the rest of the American colonies was in full swing. General John Burgoyne, commanding a formidable force of British regulars, German mercenaries, and allied Native American warriors, had marched south from Canada with the ambitious goal of seizing the Hudson River Valley and splitting the fledgling nation in two. His first major objective was Fort Ticonderoga, the great American stronghold on Lake Champlain that controlled the critical corridor between Canada and the colonies to the south. When Burgoyne's forces arrived in early July and positioned artillery on the commanding heights of nearby Mount Defiance, the American garrison under General Arthur St. Clair realized that their position had become untenable. On the night of July 5, 1777, St. Clair ordered a hasty evacuation, sending his troops retreating southward under cover of darkness in hopes of preserving his army to fight another day. To protect this vulnerable withdrawal, St. Clair assigned a rear guard composed of several regiments, placing Colonel Seth Warner in overall command of the detachment. Warner, the seasoned leader of the famed Green Mountain Boys — the Vermont militia force that had already distinguished itself earlier in the war — was tasked with holding off any British pursuit long enough for the main body of the American army to reach safety. Warner's rear guard encamped near the small settlement of Hubbardton, Vermont, on the evening of July 6, expecting to resume their march the following morning. However, Burgoyne had dispatched a swift pursuit force under Brigadier General Simon Fraser, reinforced by a contingent of German Brunswick troops commanded by Major General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel. Fraser's advance was rapid and aggressive, and on the morning of July 7, his forces caught up with Warner's rear guard before the Americans could break camp. The battle that erupted at Hubbardton was sudden, violent, and fiercely contested. Fraser's British regulars attacked first, striking the American lines with determination. Rather than breaking and fleeing, Warner's troops stood their ground and fought back with remarkable tenacity. The American soldiers, many of them hardened frontier fighters from the Vermont and New Hampshire countryside, traded volleys with some of the finest professional soldiers in the British army. At several points during the engagement, the Americans counterattacked and threatened to overwhelm Fraser's force. The arrival of Riedesel's German troops on the American flank, however, tipped the balance. Faced with this fresh assault, Warner's rear guard was eventually forced to withdraw, scattering into the surrounding woods and hills. The Battle of Hubbardton holds the distinction of being the only Revolutionary War engagement fought entirely on Vermont soil, and its significance extends far beyond its geographic uniqueness. Though the Americans were ultimately driven from the field, the cost to the British was steep. Fraser and Riedesel suffered substantial casualties that they could ill afford so far from their supply lines and reinforcements. More importantly, the stubborn resistance of Warner's rear guard accomplished its essential mission: the main American army under St. Clair escaped southward, living to regroup and fight again. The delay imposed on the British pursuit gave the Americans precious time to consolidate and prepare for the engagements to come. In the broader narrative of the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Hubbardton marked an early chapter in the slow unraveling of Burgoyne's grand strategy. The losses his forces sustained in this engagement were the first in a mounting series of setbacks — including the battles at Bennington and Bemis Heights — that would bleed his army of men and momentum over the course of the summer and fall. Each encounter wore down Burgoyne's strength and emboldened American resistance. The campaign of attrition that began at Hubbardton reached its dramatic conclusion at Saratoga in October 1777, where Burgoyne was forced to surrender his entire army, a turning point that brought France into the war as an American ally and fundamentally altered the course of the Revolution. The fierce stand made by Seth Warner and his men on that July morning in Vermont helped set in motion the chain of events that would ultimately secure American independence.