=G.= THE CAPTURE OF TICONDEROGA, 1775.—It is in dispute who planned and who conducted the capture of Ticonderoga. On Feb. 21, 1775, Col. John Brown had suggested it to Warren (_Force's Archives_). Arnold made a statement of the post's defenceless condition to the Committee of Safety in Cambridge, April 30, 1775 (_Mass. Archives_, cxlvi. p. 30; _Amer. Bibliopolist_, 1873, p. 79). On the 2d of May he was given a money credit and munitions, and on the 3d he was definitely instructed to organize his party (_Mass. Archives_, cxlvi. p. 39). It is claimed that some purpose of acting on the suggestion of Brown prompted in part, at least, the Massachusetts provincial congress to appoint early in April a committee to proceed to Connecticut and the other New England colonies. Whether it was by their instigation, by certain movements in Connecticut, or by the direct agency of Arnold that the plan was formed, it is difficult to say. It is also claimed that the plan grew out of a conference with the Massachusetts delegates to the Philadelphia Congress, when, on their way, they stopped at Hartford and held a session with Governor Trumbull and his council (_Force's Archives_, ii. 507; Wells's _Sam. Adams_, ii. 298). Bancroft and the Connecticut antiquaries find the beginning rather in the impulses of one Parsons, who had just returned from Massachusetts, and had got from Benedict Arnold, whom he met on the way, a statement of the plunder to be obtained there, and, without any formal consent of the governor and council, proceeded in the organization of a committee in Connecticut (Bancroft, orig. ed., vii. 338; final revision, iv. 182). Official sanction was first evoked when Massachusetts, a few days later, commissioned Arnold (_Mass. Archives_, cxlvi. 130, 139; _American Bibliopolist_, 1873, p. 79; _N. Y. Hist. Soc. Proc._, 1844, p. 14). The Connecticut antiquaries have mainly set forth the claims of their colony for leadership of the affair in the papers which constitute vol. i. (pp. 163-185) of the _Conn. Hist. Soc. Collections_, in which is the journal of Edward Mott,[625] the chairman of the Connecticut committee, edited by J. H. Trumbull.[626]