Most Americans, I suspect, think “furniture” when they hear the name Ethan Allen. But Allen was one of the most fascinating figures the American Revolution: hero of Fort Ticonderoga, leader of Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys, religious skeptic, and a bit of a scoundrel.
Some overstate the prominence of deism in the Revolution, but certainly in Ethan Allen and his contemporary Tom Paine we find not only two honest-to-goodness deists, but also America’s two best-selling writers of the era. (Both had their greatest successes on topics other than religion, though.) In his Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784), Allen made a remarkable declaration for his time: he was “no Christian,” he said, “except mere infant baptism makes me one.”
Randall, a former investigative reporter, skillfully portrays Allen’s military exploits and experiences as a prisoner of war. His book is peppered, however, with careless errors, suspect claims, and ahistorical characterizations, especially with regard to Allen’s religious context, which in Randall’s telling was dominated by monochromatic “Puritanism,” even after the Revolution. Some examples of the problems: on page 60, Randall uses a quote about George Whitefield that I’ve never seen before; it does not appear elsewhere in a Google Books search, and is not cited in an end note. Antirevivalist pastor Charles Chauncy’s name is spelled two different ways. Six people were killed in the Boston Massacre, Randall says; later he says five.
Randall states that evangelical theologian Jonathan Edwards “inveighed” against smallpox inoculations from his pulpit (again with no end note), another assertion I cannot find elsewhere. In his most inexplicable statement, Randall says—with no further commentary—that today Jonathan Edwards “would probably be an Evangelical Lutheran.” I was surprised to see these kinds of missteps in a book published by the normally reliable Norton. These weaknesses suggest that we may have to wait for a more authoritative biography of Allen.
Thomas S. Kidd is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University, and the author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution and the forthcoming Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots.
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