Freethinking Warrior
(Note: I’m crossposting this to Freethought History, which after this week of transition will be the place where I do all my secular radicalism content. I’ll continue to post announcements with links in this feed.)
Ethan Allen is remembered as a legendary Revolutionary warrior, leader of the Green Mountain Boys, and of course as the founder of the Vermont Republic. He was also a freethinker and probably co-author (working for several years prior to 1764 with physician Thomas Young) of Reason, the Only Oracle of Man. As many people have noted since Reason’s publication in 1785, Allen was not as accomplished a wordsmith as Thomas Paine. But the book was popular and influential enough to draw the ire of Yale’s president, the Congregationalist Reverend Timothy Dwight, who said Reason was “crude and vulgar, and the sentiments were coarser than the style” (Dwight was a really great infidel-hater, and needs to be featured in one of my stories someday). I was amused but not surprised when I learned that the father of freethinker Samuel Ranney (who pre-emptively excommunicated the Ashfield church in my book, An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy) bought his land in Ashfield from Lamberton Allen, one of Ethan’s many freethinking cousins. It was a small world, and there were lots of connections we no longer see.
Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys were said to be able to cross the mountains of Vermont overnight and surprise their opponents by appearing where they were not expected. I’ve driven from Brattleboro to Bennington several times, so I’m very impressed. And equally impressed that the warrior, politician, and woodsman took the time to write stuff like this:
Such of mankind as break the fetters of their education, remove such other obstacles as are in their way, and have the confidence publicly to talk rational, exalt reason to its just supremacy, and vindicate truth…are sure to be stamped with the epithet of irreligious, infidel, profane, and the like. But it is often observed of such a man, that he is morally honest, and as often replied, what of that? Morality will carry no man to heaven. So that all the satisfaction the honest man can have while the superstitious are squibbling hell-fire at him, is to retort back upon them that they are priest-ridden.
This also from D. M. Bennett’s excellent book, The World's Sages, Infidels, and Thinkers : being biographical sketches of leading philosophers, teachers, reformers, innovators, founders of new schools of thought, eminent scientists, etc., p. 556.