On his release he did not join the army. Vermont had declared itself an independent State in 1777, and sought admittance to the Confederation. This New York opposed. Allen took up the cause, visited Congress on the subject, but found its members not inclined to offend the powerful State of New York. There was danger of civil war in the midst of the war for independence, and the English leaders, seeing the state of affairs, tried to persuade Allen and the other Green Mountain leaders to declare for the authority of the king. They evidently did not know Ethan Allen. He was far too sound a patriot to entertain for a moment such a thought. The letters received by him he sent in 1782 to Congress, and when the war ended Vermont was a part of the Union, though not admitted as a State till 1791. Allen was then dead, having been carried away suddenly by apoplexy in 1789. THE BRITISH AT NEW YORK. Before the days of dynamite and the other powerful explosives which enable modern man to set at naught the most rigid conditions of nature, warfare with the torpedo was little thought of, gunpowder being a comparatively innocent agent for this purpose. In the second period of the Revolutionary War, when the British fleet had left Boston and appeared in the harbor of New York, preparatory to an attack on the latter city, the only methods devised by the Americans for protection of the Hudson were sunken hulks in the stream, _chevaux-de-frise_, composed of anchored logs, and fire-ships prepared to float down on the foe. All these proved of no avail. The current loosened the anchored logs, so that they proved useless; the fire-ships did no damage; and the batteries on shore were not able to hinder certain ships of the enemy from running the gantlet of the city, and ascending the Hudson to Tappan Sea, forty miles above. All the service done by the fire-ships was to alarm the captains of these bold cruisers, and induce them to run down the river again, and rejoin the fleet at the Narrows. It was at this juncture that an interesting event took place, the first instance on record of the use of a torpedo-vessel in warfare. A Connecticut officer named Bushnell, an ingenious mechanician, had invented during his college-life an oddly-conceived machine for submarine explosion, to which he gave the appropriate name of "The American Turtle." He had the model with him in camp. A report of the existence of this contrivance reached General Putnam, then in command at New York. He sent for Bushnell, talked the matter over with him, examined the model, and was so pleased with it that he gave the inventor an order to construct a working-machine, supplying funds for this purpose.