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"Early in November 1771 Ethan Allen and Remember Baker, leaders-to-be of the Green Mountain Boys, led a small crowd (only nine men strong) to the house of Charles Hutchesson, a sometime corporal in a Highland regiment, who was trying to set himself up as a farmer near New Perth, on New York's northern frontier. Setting the house on fire, they told Hutchesson that "ey had resolved to offer a burnt sacrifice to the Gods of the World.'"(1)
"One can make a good case...that we need to know as much about rural crowds.. for their own sake and for the sake of a fuller understanding of the [American] Revolution. ... it was this rural mobilization that led to the most bitter internal disputes of the period, both between patriot and loyalist Americans, and within the patriot camp itself."(2)
Ethan Allen fought against the New Yorkers for Vermont and for himself. Ethan was not unlike the rest of the settlers in Vermont. All of them wanted to provide for their families. This was a Lockian unalienable right they believed they should have. The unalienable right of liberty in the colonies was based on who owned land. The only way Allen and the settlers believed they could have this right, was to form a state independent of New York and Britain.