The Green Mountain Boys encircled the hostages, muskets aloft. Allen thundered a command for the British to hand over the fort. “If you do not comply, or a single gun from this fort is fired, neither man, woman, or child will be left alive!” he yelled. “What?” gasped a cowering woman. A few Green Mountain Boys flipped their muskets around and menaced the kneelers with the butt ends. “For the sake of your men and their families,” Arnold said to a British officer, “surrender this post.”
All of this was surprisingly upsetting to witness. These were my sweet Green Mountain Boys? The ones who had spent two days drawing my attention to interesting birds’ nests we marched past, sharing with me the orange peels they had candied themselves, and teaching me about buttons? When I’d first been introduced to them, they had been interchangeable old-timey people. Now I could easily distinguish between the beech-nut and ash browns of their wool coats. I knew exactly how damp those coats were, how overpoweringly they reeked of wet sheep. That was Emily, the fifer, dragging a man out of bed. That was Wilson, the genial leather-breeches maker, shoving a soldier to his knees. These were my friends? Holding a baby hostage at gunpoint? When the fort commander surrendered his sword, shrieks of glee ripped from the throats of the Green Mountain Boys.
I spent the night in a Super 8 and, when I returned to the fort the next morning, was jarred to realize that the reenactment had resumed. Oxen were taking part in it now; they were being used to tow the imprisoned soldiers’ belongings, as the British-garrison reenactors—now prisoners of war—were marched toward the parking lot. When, I wondered, would the past end? I spotted a Green Mountain Boy I knew, Avi, and confessed to him that I’d found the reenactment unsettling. “It was a big tragedy,” he said. “These people”—he cast his eyes over the parade ground—“were as American as us in a lot of ways.”
This, perhaps, is the chief merit of reenacting: not that it glorifies past accomplishments or condemns past failures, but that it emphasizes how any action humans have ever performed, whether for good or for ill, has been carried out by ordinary women and men. The Green Mountain Boys were not hellhounds. They were farmers. Kind and generous fellows were no doubt among the British soldiers killed at Bunker Hill. George Washington turned out in clean military dress because women did his laundry.
This is an emboldening and disquieting way to apprehend history: not as a logical march toward an inevitable destination, but as a free-for-all dash subjected to the whims of regular people. It could end up anywhere.