Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom: Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys and the American Revolution

Former New York Times reporter Wren (The End of the Line) fleshes out a lesser-known aspect of the Revolutionary War in this engrossing account of the Green Mountain Boys militia and its complicated role in the struggle for independence. Wren relays his history through interwoven accounts of three main figures. The group’s original leader, Ethan Allen, had a mixed track record as a military commander and ended up endeavoring to make the independent republic of Vermont a British province, even after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown effectively ended the American Revolution. It was his obscure cousin, Seth Warner, who shaped the Green Mountain Boys “into a disciplined force whose hit-and-run tactics honed in strategic retreats helped save a broken, diseased American army from annihilation.” The third member, Justus Sherwood, a friend of Allen and Warner’s, had initially joined with their efforts to defend Vermont homesteaders from New Yorkers who had filed court challenges to their rights to the properties they had settled and worked, and sought to eject the New Yorkers. Wren vividly brings to life characters and events, and this volume will appeal to fans of Nathaniel Philbrick’s popular histories. (May)