Revolutionary outlaws

In this revisionary look at the eighteenth-century frontier, Michael A. Bellesiles shows us that more than a legendary Revolutionary War hero, Ethan Allen was the leader of a group of frontier subsistence farmers united in their opposition to New York elites and land speculators; the independence Allen and his followers fought for was as much from eastern elites as it was from the British crown. But what makes the story of the Green Mountain frontier so remarkable is that the settlers won.

Revolutionary Outlaws is both a biography of Ethan Allen and a social history of the conflict between agrarian commoners and their wealthy adversaries. Beginning his political career with a price on his head, Allen was transformed by the American Revolution into a national hero. In the same way he and his outlaws, the Green Mountain Boys, became exemplars of republican virtue.

But in their own eyes, these frontier farmers never changed their purpose; from 1764 until 1789 they battled the elites who sought to steal their land and reduce them to tenancy. A study in state formation, this book unites politics and social history. The poor farmers who settled the Green Mountain frontier not only fought efforts to dispossess them, they worked to create the state of Vermont, crafting the most democratic constitution of the eighteenth century.

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Although he is a major figure, Ethan Allen has been overlooked by scholarly biographers, but in Michael Bellesiles he has found a historian worth the wait. Bellesiles shows how Allen's variegated careers as republican politician, local leader, military tactician, rationalist ideologue, and land speculator intersect with many key themes of American development in the last half of the eighteenth century.

Revolutionary Outlaws explores the roots of popular political commitment to the patriot cause, the significance of rural crowd activity, the character of popular religious culture and dissent, and the origins and structures of an emerging democratic polity.