Читать книгу The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson - Страница 17

INTO CANADA, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1775

Some 230 miles northwest of Boston, a second siege now threatened Britain’s hold on Canada. For almost a month, more than a thousand American troops had surrounded Fort St. Johns, a dank compound twenty miles below Montreal on the swampy western bank of the Richelieu River in what one regular called “the most unhealthy spot in inhabited Canada.” A stockade and a dry moat lined with sharpened stakes enclosed a pair of earthen redoubts, two hundred yards apart and connected by a muddy trench. A small stone barracks, a bakery, a powder magazine, and several log buildings chinked with moss stood in the southern redoubt. Thirty cannons crowned the ramparts and poked through sodded embrasures, spitting iron balls whenever the rebels approached or grew too impertinent with their own artillery. By mid-October, seven hundred people were trapped at St. Johns, among them most of the British troops in Canada—drawn from the 26th Foot and the 7th Foot, known as the Royal Fusiliers—as well as most of the Royal Artillery’s gunners, eighty women and children, and more than seventy Canadian volunteers. Sentries cried, “Shot!” whenever they spotted smoke and flame from a rebel battery, and hundreds fell on their faces in the mud as the ball whizzed overhead or splatted home, somewhere.

The regulars still wore summer uniforms and suffered from the cold: the first hard frost had set on September 30, followed by eight consecutive days of rain. Some ripped the skirts from their coats to wrap around their feet. The garrison now lived on half-rations and shared a total of twenty blankets, with no bedding or straw for warmth. Only a shallow house cellar in the northern redoubt offered any shelter belowground, and it was crammed with the sick and the groaning wounded. Major Charles Preston, the fort’s dimple-chinned commandant, had sent four couriers to plead for help in Montreal. Each slipped from the fort at night and scuttled through the dense Richelieu thickets. But no reply had been heard—“not a syllable,” as Preston archly noted—since an order had arrived from the high command in early September to “defend St. Johns to the last extremity.”

At one p.m. on Saturday, October 14, many cries of “Shot!” were heard when the rebels opened a new battery with two 12-pounders and two 4-pounders barely three hundred yards away on the river’s eastern shore. One cannonball ricocheted from a chimney, demolishing the house and killing a lieutenant; another detonated a barrel of gunpowder in an orange fireball, killing another man and wounding three. Balls battered the fort’s gate and clipped its parapet. A 13-inch shell from a rebel mortar called Old Sow punched through the barracks roof, blowing out windows while killing two more and wounding five. “The hottest fire this day that hath been done here,” an officer told his diary.

The next day was just as hot: 140 rebel rounds bombarded the fort on Sunday, perforating buildings and men. A Canadian cook lost both legs. A twelve-gun British schooner, the Royal Savage, was moored between the redoubts along the western riverbank, although the crew fled to the fort after complaining that it was “impossible to sleep on board without being amphibious.” Rebel gunners now took aim at Royal Savage with heated balls, punching nine holes in the hull and three through the mainmast, then demolishing the sternpost holding the rudder. “The schooner sunk up to her ports … and her colors which lay in the hold were scorched,” a British lieutenant, John André, wrote in his journal. She soon sank with a gurgle into the Richelieu mud.

Major Preston and most of his men remained defiant, despite the paltry daily ration of roots and salt pork, despite the awful smells seeping from the cellar hospital, despite the rebel riflemen who crept close at dusk for a shot at anyone careless enough to show his silhouette on the rampart. British ammunition stocks dwindled, but gunners still sought out rebel batteries, smashing the hemlocks and the balm of Gilead trees around the American positions north and west of the fort. Yet without prompt relief—whether from Montreal, London, or heaven—few doubted that the last extremity had drawn near. “I am still alive,” wrote one of the besieged in late October, “but the will to live diminishes within me.”

For nearly a century, Americans had seen Canada as a blood enemy. New Englanders and New Yorkers especially never forgave the atrocities committed by French raiders and their Indian confederates at Deerfield, Schenectady, Fort William Henry, and other frontier settlements. Catholic Quebec was seen as a citadel of popery and tyranny. The French, as a Rhode Island pastor proclaimed in 1759, were children of the “scarlet whore, the mother of harlots.”

Britain’s triumph in the Seven Years’ War and its acquisition of New France in 1763—known in Quebec as “the Conquest”—gladdened American hearts. Many French Canadians decamped for France. Priests lost the right to collect tithes and the benefit of an established state religion. A small commercial class of English merchants, friendly to American traders, took root. The Canadian population—under a hundred thousand, less than New Jersey—was still largely rural, illiterate, dependent on farming and fur, and essentially feudal. Most were French-Canadian habitants, or peasants, now known as “new subjects,” since their allegiance to the British Crown was barely a decade old and deeply suspect. Many secretly hoped that France would win back what had been lost or that the “Londoners”—Englishmen—would tire of the weather and go home. Largely descended from Norman colonists sent to the New World by Louis XIV, the habitants were described by an eighteenth-century author as “loud, boastful, mendacious, obliging, civil, and honest.” A few thousand “old subjects”—Anglo merchants and Crown officials—congregated in Montreal and Quebec City. Nova Scotia and the maritime precincts remained wild, isolated, and sparsely peopled.

As tensions with Britain escalated, many Americans—Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams among them—considered Canada a natural component of a united North America. The First Continental Congress in October 1774 sent Canadians an open letter, at once beckoning and sinister: “You have been conquered into liberty.… You are a small people, compared to those who with open arms invite you into fellowship.” Canadians faced a choice between having “all the rest of North America your unalterable friends, or your inveterate enemies.”

The Quebec Act, which took effect in May 1775, infuriated the Americans and altered the political calculus. Canada would be ruled not by an elected assembly, but by a royal governor and his council, a harbinger, in American eyes, of British tyranny across the continent. Even more provocative were the provisions extending Quebec’s boundaries south and west, into the rich lands beyond the Appalachians for which American colonists had fought both Indians and the French, and the recognition of the Roman Catholic Church’s status in Canada, including the right of Catholics to hold office and citizenship, to again levy parish tithes, to serve in the army, and to retain French civil law. These provisions riled American expansionists—fifty thousand of whom now lived west of the mountains—and revived fears of what one chaplain described as “this vast extended country, which has been for ages the dwelling of Satan.” Catholic hordes—likened to a mythical beast found in the Book of Revelation, “drunk with the wine of her fornications”—could well descend on Protestant America. It was said that hundreds of pairs of snowshoes had been readied, should Canadian legions be commanded to march southward.

War in Massachusetts, and the American capture of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, brought matters to a head. Congress dithered, initially proposing to return the two forts rather than end any chance of reconciliation with Britain; then decided to keep them; then dithered some more over whether to preemptively attack Quebec when it became clear that Canada was unlikely to send delegates to Philadelphia despite an invitation to “the oppressed inhabitants” to make common cause as “fellow sufferers.” The debate raged for weeks. Even Washington, who had qualms about opening another front, saw utility in capturing Canadian staging grounds before the reinforced British could descend on New York and New England. Others saw a chance to seize the Canadian granary and fur trade, to forestall attacks by Britain’s potential Indian allies, and to preclude the need to rebuild Ticonderoga and other frontier defenses. Britain reportedly had fewer than seven hundred regulars scattered across Quebec; two of the four regiments posted there had been sent to Boston in 1774 at Gage’s request. Canada conceivably could be captured and converted into the fourteenth American province with fewer than two thousand troops in a quick, cheap campaign. Skeptics argued that an invasion would convert Americans into aggressors, disperse scarce military resources, and alienate both American moderates and British supporters of the colonial cause. Some recalled that during the last war, more than a million British colonists and regulars had needed six years, several of them disastrous, to subdue less than seventy thousand Canadians and their French allies.

In late June, Congress finally ordered Major General Philip Schuyler, a well-born New Yorker, to launch preemptive attacks to prevent Britain from seizing Lake Champlain. He was authorized to “take possession of St. Johns, Montreal, and any other parts of the country” if “practicable” and if the intrusion “will not be disagreeable to the Canadians.” Under the guise of promoting continental “peace and security”—Congress promised to “adopt them into our union as a sister colony”—Canada was to be obliterated as a military and political threat. Most Canadians were expected to welcome the incursion, a fantasy not unlike that harbored by Britain about the Americans. This would be the first, but hardly the last, American invasion of another land under the pretext of bettering life for the invaded.

Congress had denounced Catholics for “impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.” Now it found “the Protestant and Catholic colonies to be strongly linked” by their common antipathy to British oppression. In a gesture of tolerance and perhaps to forestall charges of hypocrisy, Congress also acknowledged that Catholics deserved “liberty of conscience.” If nothing else, the Canadian gambit caused Americans to contemplate the practical merits of inclusion, moderation, and religious freedom. The Northern Army, as the invasion host was named, was to be a liberating force, not a vengeful one.

For two months little had gone right in the campaign. The Northern Army comprised twelve hundred ill-trained, ill-equipped, insubordinate troops, many without decent firelocks or gunsmiths at hand to fix them. When General Schuyler reached Ticonderoga at ten p.m. on a July evening, the lone sentinel tried unsuccessfully to waken the watch and the rest of the garrison. “With a penknife only,” Schuyler wrote Washington, “I could … have set fire to the blockhouse, destroyed the stores, and starved the people here.” Three weeks later, having advanced not a step farther north, he reported that he had less than a ton of gunpowder, no carriages to move his field guns, and little food. His men, scattered along the Hudson valley, seemed “much inclined to a seditious and mutinous temper.” Carpenters building flat-bottomed bateaux to cross Lake Champlain lacked timber, nails, pitch, and cordage. When Schuyler requested reinforcements, the New York Committee of Safety told him, “Our troops can be of no service to you. They have no arms, clothes, blankets, or ammunition; the officers no commissions; our treasury no money.”

Tall, thin, and florid, with kinky hair and a raspy voice, Philip Schuyler was among America’s wealthiest and most accomplished men. The scion of émigré Dutch land barons, he owned twenty thousand acres from New York to Detroit, including a brick mansion on a ridge above Albany with a view of the Catskills and hand-painted wallpaper depicting romantic Roman ruins. His country seat on Fish Creek in Saratoga abutted sawmills and a flax plantation that spun linen. He spoke French and Mohawk, understood lumber markets, mathematics, boat-building, slave owning, navigation, hemp cultivation, and, from service in the last war, military logistics. British officers had praised his “zeal, punctuality, and strict honesty.” The body of his young friend Lord George Howe, slain by the French at Ticonderoga, lay in the Schuyler family vault for years before permanent burial in a lead casket beneath St. Peter’s chancel in Albany. As a delegate to Congress, Schuyler sat with Washington on a committee to collect ammunition and war matériel, then rode north with him from Philadelphia after both received their general’s commissions. Among other services rendered the Northern Army, Schuyler helped persuade Iroquois warriors to renounce their traditional allegiance to Britain and to remain neutral, at least for now, in what he described—during pipe-smoking negotiations at Cartwright’s Tavern in Albany—as “a family quarrel.” To impress the Indians with American strength, he had ordered troops to march in circles through the town, magnifying their numbers.

For all his virtues, Schuyler was wholly unfit to command a field army in the wilderness. His urbane, patrician mien could seem “haughty and overbearing,” as one chaplain wrote, especially to New Englanders who habitually disliked the New York Dutch because of border disputes and ethnic frictions. Almost from the start of the campaign, the general was accused of being a secret Tory and of sabotaging the Canadian expedition. Not yet forty-two, he also suffered from “a barbarous complication of disorders,” including gout, malaria, and rheumatic afflictions. His clinical bulletins to Washington routinely described “a very severe fit of the ague,” or “a copious scorbutic eruption,” or “a copious discharge from an internal impostume in my breast.” He was not a well man.

Alarming reports in late August of British vessels at St. Johns preparing to sortie onto Lake Champlain forced the Americans into motion. Brigadier General Richard Montgomery set out from Ticonderoga on August 31 with the twelve hundred men and four 12-pounders aboard a schooner, a sloop, and a mismatched flotilla of bateaux, row galleys, and canoes. He urged the ailing Schuyler, his superior, to “follow us in a whaleboat.… It will give the men great confidence in your spirit and activity.” Despite the “inflexible severity of my disorders,” Schuyler subsequently headed north in early September with a stack of proclamations in French to be scattered across Quebec: “We cannot doubt that you are pleased that the Grand Congress have ordered an army into Canada.” From Cambridge, Washington wrote, “I trust you will have a feeble enemy to contend with and a whole province on your side.”

Wishing did not make it so. Reunited on the upper reaches of Lake Champlain, Schuyler and Montgomery led their men down the Richelieu, which flowed north from the lake for almost eighty miles to the St. Lawrence River. The invaders disembarked on September 6 just short of Fort St. Johns, about a third of the distance to the St. Lawrence, then struggled toward the compound in “a tangled way” for a quarter mile through a swampy woodland, only to be ambushed by Indians and regulars in a confused melee that left nine Americans dead and as many wounded.

For more than a week, the invasion stalled. Priests in Montreal celebrated Canada’s deliverance in a thanksgiving mass with a jubilant Te Deum. Another American advance on the fort turned to fiasco when strange noises spooked the men, who “ran like sheep,” in Montgomery’s contemptuous phrase. With difficulty and a threat of bayonets, they were restrained from pushing off in the boats and abandoning their officers on the shoreline. “Such a set of pusillanimous wretches never were collected,” Montgomery wrote his wife. “Could I, with decency, leave the army in its present situation, I would not serve an hour longer.”

If Montgomery could not abandon the Northern Army, Schuyler could and did. Crippled by rheumatic and perhaps malarial miseries, he reported to Philadelphia that “I am now so low as not to be able to hold the pen.” On September 16, soldiers hoisted him into a covered boat and rowed him in the rain back to a Ticonderoga sickbed. “If Job had been a general in my situation,” he wrote Congress, “his memory had not been so famous for patience.”

Further misfortune befell the invaders when Ethan Allen, the conqueror of Ticonderoga, foolishly decided to storm Montreal with a small band of henchmen rather than enlist Canadian recruits in the countryside, as he had been instructed. Described by one acquaintance as “a singular compound of local barbarisms, scriptural phrases, and oriental wildness,” Allen hoped for the glory of a quick victory. But as he approached the city, several dozen regulars and two hundred French and English militiamen sortied through the gates on September 25 to catch him by surprise along the St. Lawrence. “The last I see of Allen,” one of his men wrote, “he was surrounded, had hold with both hands the muzzle of a gun, swinging it around.” Captured and paraded through Montreal, he would be shipped to England in thirty-pound leg irons and imprisoned in the lower reaches of Pendennis Castle, on the southern coast of Cornwall, a cautionary tale for traitors to the Crown. Allen’s “rash and ill-concerted measure,” an American chaplain told his journal, “not only served to dishearten the Army and weaken it, but it prejudiced the people against us and both made us enemies and lost us friends.” Montgomery added in a dispatch to Schuyler, “I have to lament Mr. Allen’s imprudence and ambition.”

Despite such misfires and misadventures, Montgomery—tall, bald, and Dublin-born—soon had the whip hand at St. Johns. Reinforcements streamed north across Lake Champlain in October, including Connecticut regiments and a New York artillery detachment with siege guns, bringing American strength to 2,700. Gunners built batteries south of the fort and across the Richelieu to the northeast. More than 350 men slipped ten miles down the river to fire a few cannonballs at the high-walled British fort at Chambly. The 84-man garrison promptly surrendered on October 18, handing over 124 barrels of gunpowder, 233 muskets, 6,600 cartridges in copper-hooped barrels, and ample stocks of flour, pork, and marine supplies.

“We have gotten six tons of powder which, with God’s blessing, will finish our business here,” Montgomery wrote Schuyler. No less ominous for St. Johns, a putative rescue force from Montreal—some eight hundred habitants, Indians, loyal merchants, and regulars—assembled on an island in the St. Lawrence on October 30, then beat across the river toward Longueuil in several dozen bateaux. Three hundred Americans rose up along the south bank to scourge the boats with musketry and grapeshot, killing between a few and a few dozen—depending on the account—without a single Yankee casualty. The bateaux scattered, the habitants and loyalists deserted in droves, and St. Johns’ last hope for salvation vanished.

Three hundred yards northwest of the beleaguered fort, yet another American battery had been hacked from the swamp and furnished with cannons, mortars, and a chest-high breastworks. Men lugged iron balls from the Richelieu on their shoulders or in slings made from their trousers, while gunners packed the newly acquired powder into cartridges and explosive shells. At ten a.m. on Wednesday, November 1—All Saints’ Day—the guns opened in concert with the battery across the river in a stupefying bombardment of a thousand balls and more than fifty shells, which by sunset had “knocked everything in the fort to shatters,” an American officer exulted. Montgomery halted the cannonade long enough to send a white flag to the gate, carried by a Canadian prisoner who swore upon the Holy Evangelist that the rescue force from Montreal had indeed been routed, that no more help was forthcoming, and that further resistance would bring “melancholy consequences.”

After a fifty-three-day siege, with sixty defenders killed or wounded, his food and powder all but gone, Major Preston had finally had enough. He stalled for a day by trying to squeeze concessions from the Americans. Would the honors of war be observed? Could officers keep their baggage? Sidearms? Why not permit the men to sail for England on parole? “Let me entreat you, sir, to spare the lives of a brave garrison,” Montgomery told him. The British would be “treated with brotherly affection” in Connecticut jails. Negotiations briefly broke down when the proposed articles of capitulation suggested that British “fortitude and perseverance” should have been “exerted in a better cause.” Preston declared that his men would rather “die with their arms in their hands than submit to the indignity of such a reflection.” Montgomery struck the clause but threatened to resume his bombardment “if you do not surrender this day.”

At eight a.m. on November 3, a wet, blustery Friday, Montgomery’s men shouldered their firelocks in a field south of the fort. A few wore smart uniforms, like the gunners in blue coats with buff facings; more sported drab yeoman togs and slouch hats. To the trill and rap of fife and drum, the defeated garrison marched six abreast with colors flying through the gate, some of them mud-caked, their feet bound in rags. First came the 26th Foot in brick-red coats with pale yellow facings; then the Royal Fusiliers with blue facings; then Royal Artillery troops in dark blue coats and once-white waistcoats, drawing two small guns; and finally sailors in pigtails, Indians in blankets and feathers, a few kilt-clad Scots, carpenters, cooks, servants, and a gaggle of women and fretful children. At least one officer kept a locket portrait of his lover hidden under his tongue in case the Yankees began to pilfer. Major Preston strutted to the front of the American ranks. “The tears run down his cheeks,” a Connecticut soldier reported, “and he cried like a child.” On Preston’s order the troops stacked their muskets—officers kept swords and sidearms—then shuffled into the waiting bateaux for the long journey across Champlain to captivity in New England.

More than three-quarters of the British regulars in Canada had now been captured or killed, along with virtually all of the trained artillerymen. The booty from St. Johns included seventeen fine brass guns, two brass howitzers, twenty-two iron guns, eight hundred stand of small arms, sails, pitch, tar, and precious nails. The cost of the long siege to the American invaders was steep—a hundred combat casualties and another thousand men, including their commanding general, sent back to New York with various ailments. But the front door to Canada had swung open, and thousands of additional Yankees stood ready to march through.

As the last of his captives vanished up the gray Richelieu, Brigadier General Montgomery took a moment to scribble his wife a note. “If I live,” he wrote, “you may depend upon it that I will see you this winter.”

That Richard Montgomery now prepared to finish conquering Canada for the American cause was no small irony, for as a young regular officer in an earlier life he had helped to conquer it for the British Empire. The youngest son of an Irish baronet, he was commissioned as an ensign after two years of college in Dublin, then devoted sixteen years to the king’s service, half of it in North America and the West Indies. Slender and lightly pocked, he blamed “the heat and severity” of combat in Martinique and Cuba in 1762 for the loss of his hair; he blamed a girlfriend for other disorders. “She has clapped me,” he wrote a fellow officer in 1769. “The flames of my passion have subsided with those of my urine.”

An end to the French war meant an end to promotions, and in 1772, after years as a captain—including wartime service at St. Johns and Montreal—Montgomery in disgust sold his commission for £1,500. “I have of late conceived a violent passion,” he wrote a cousin. “I have cast my eyes on America, where my pride and poverty will be much more at their ease.” Packing up his volumes of Hume, Montesquieu, and Franklin’s Experiments, as well as a new microscope, surveying equipment, and draftsman’s tools, he sailed for New York and bought a seventy-acre farm just north of Manhattan. Still only thirty-four, in July 1773 he married well: Janet Livingston was the eldest daughter of a prominent New York patriot judge who owned a thirteen-thousand-acre estate in Albany County. Elected to the New York Provincial Congress when political unrest turned to rebellion, Captain Montgomery abruptly found himself appointed a brigadier general; his “air and manner designated the real soldier,” one subordinate wrote. But the honor only deepened his Irish fatalism. He told a former British comrade of a premonition that he would die “by a pistol,” and before marching north he wrote his will. “I have been dragged from obscurity much against my inclination and not without some struggle,” he told Janet, adding that as soon as he could “slip my neck out of the yoke, I will return to my family and farm.”

That yoke still held him, and the ordeal at St. Johns—“half-drowned rats crawling through the swamp,” in his description—showed Montgomery how removed the Northern Army was from disciplined proficiency, regardless of its success in capturing the fort. After one contentious conference with his subordinates, he wrote on the minutes, “I can’t help observing to how little purpose I am [here].” To his brother-in-law he denounced “the badness of the troops. The New Englanders, I am now convinced, are the worst stuff imaginable for soldiers.… The privates are all generals, but not soldiers.” New York regiments were “the sweepings of York’s streets.…’Tis no uncommon thing to see an officer beastly drunk even on duty.” Shortly before Preston’s surrender, Montgomery narrowly escaped death when a British cannonball sliced the tail from his uniform coat, knocking him to the ground. Disheartened and depressed, he contemplated resignation. “I have not the talents or temper for such a command,” he wrote Schuyler, who was still overseeing the invasion from afar. Generalship, he added, required “acting eternally out of character.”

But the command was his until his superiors decided otherwise, and now Montreal beckoned. The Northern Army plodded northwest from St. Johns toward the St. Lawrence, through “mud and mire and scarce a spot of dry ground for miles together,” a Connecticut chaplain noted. Baggage carts sank to their axles on roads corduroyed with crumbling logs. Foul weather and a shortage of boats delayed crossing the river, but on November 9 Montgomery sent an ultimatum: unless Montreal unlocked her gates, he would raze the town, leaving eight thousand residents homeless in a Canadian winter.

Built on a ridge parallel to the river’s northwestern bank, with eighteen-foot plastered stone walls described as “little more than an egg shell” and a loopholed parapet in bad repair, Montreal was built for commerce and God’s glory, not for fighting, except when drunken fur traders grew rowdy. Sometimes called Ville-Marie, the city of Mary, it was founded in the mid-seventeenth century as a shrine to the Virgin, a prayerful place of ecstasies, visions, converted Indians, and beaver pelts. River navigation ended here, and here the boundless western wilderness began. The town had become a “somewhat unsavory assemblage of merchants on the make,” a Canadian history observed. “It was no accident that New France never had a printing press.” A British officer reported that “the people throw all their dung on the ice in order that it may float away when the winter breaks up.”

By Sunday, November 12, when Montgomery reached Récollet, in the southwest suburbs, a delegation of frightened merchants agreed to his capitulation terms. On Monday morning they swung open the Récollet Gate and the Northern Army, led by two wheeled field guns, rambled into Montreal. Some wore British red coats confiscated at Chambly or St. Johns, but most were now so shabby that “a beggar in Europe would be better dressed than they were,” one priest said. Down Rue Notre-Dame the column tramped, past seminaries, dingy trapper taverns in the Rue de la Capitale, and a few fine houses of dressed gray limestone with tin roofs and green shutters. The Yankees camped in public storehouses and the citadel barracks at the north end of town. Most took it as a good sign when a marble bust of George III was decapitated by an anonymous vandal and dumped down a well in the Place d’Armes.

Rarely had a fortified town fallen so easily, yet Montgomery took little solace in the triumph. He warned Schuyler on November 13 that his troops were “exceedingly turbulent & indeed mutinous.” Only by promising that they could soon go home had he been able “to coax them to Montreal.” He was hounded by a “legion of females” pleading for British and Canadian husbands, brothers, and sons captured in the past month, while also battling his own soldiers over their confiscation of those redcoat uniforms. “There was no driving it into their noodles that the clothing was really the property of the [British] soldier, that he had paid for it,” Montgomery wrote Janet. To Schuyler he added, “I must go home.… I am weary of power.” He suggested that Schuyler come to Montreal, or that General Lee take command in Canada, or that Congress send a delegation to oversee the invasion.

None of that was likely with winter descending, and he knew it. Montgomery would have to soldier on alone. One final objective remained before Canada could be considered an American possession, and that lay 144 miles down the St. Lawrence. “I need not tell you that till Quebec is taken, Canada is unconquered,” he wrote his brother-in-law. To Janet he added, “I have courted fortune and found her kind. I have one more favor to solicit, and then I have done.”

Forty miles downstream, perhaps the only man able to save Canada for the Crown now pondered how to reverse Montgomery’s fortunes. Major General Guy Carleton, governor of the province and commander of the few royal forces still intact, had narrowly escaped capture in Montreal. A few hours before the invaders reached Récollet, Carleton and ninety loyal companions slipped through the shadows to a St. Lawrence wharf, tumbled onto the brig Gaspé and ten smaller vessels, then shoved off for Quebec. A witness described the departure as “the saddest funeral.” They had reached Sorel—less than halfway to their destination, at the mouth of the Richelieu—when opposing easterly winds and the sudden appearance of American shore batteries forced them to drop anchor to await a dark night and a following breeze before running the gantlet. “I shall try to retard the evil hour,” Carleton had written Lord Dartmouth, “though all my hopes of succor now begin to vanish.”

Even becalmed in the middle of nowhere, Guy Carleton was a formidable enemy. One acquaintance called him “a man of ten thousand eyes … not to be taken unawares.” He had showed his contempt for the Americans by refusing to read Montgomery’s surrender demand in Montreal, instead ordering the town executioner to ritually tread on the paper before tossing it with tongs into the fireplace. At fifty-one, he was tall and straight, with thinning hair, bushy brows, and cheeks beginning to jowl; a biographer described his “enormous nose mounted like a geological formation in the middle of his rather shapely face.” Like Montgomery, he was of Anglo-Irish gentry, and also a third son. Commissioned in 1742, he had been named quartermaster general by his friend James Wolfe for the 1759 expedition that captured Quebec but cost General Wolfe his life. In his will, Wolfe left his books and a thousand pounds to Carleton, who had survived a head wound in that battle and would survive three more wounds in other scraps.

He was quick-tempered, autocratic, humane, and secretive—“everything with him is mystery,” a British major observed. Another subordinate called him “one of the most distant, reserved men in the world; he has a rigid strictness in his manner, very unpleasing.… In time of danger he possesses a coolness and steadiness.” The king himself had praised Carleton, calling him “gallant & sensible” and noting that his “uncorruptness is universally acknowledged.” Appointed governor of Canada in 1768, he soon returned to England—in one of his fourteen Atlantic crossings—to advocate the bold, progressive reform that became known as the Quebec Act. During the four years needed to persuade Parliament, Carleton also met and married Maria Howard, an earl’s daughter almost thirty years his junior; she had been educated in Versailles, a useful pedigree when they returned to Canada together in late 1774.

He found North America in turmoil, of course, with the fetid spirit of liberty threatening British sovereignty north and south. No sooner had his Quebec Act taken effect than Carleton declared martial law and sent Maria home, the better to battle American interlopers. If the Canadian clergy and affluent French seigneurs supported him and his reforms, the habitants were wary and the English merchants mostly hostile because of his disdain for democratic niceties. Before fleeing Montreal just ahead of Montgomery, Carleton wrote Dartmouth that his scheme to defend Canada had failed: Lake Champlain lost, the outposts at Chambly and St. Johns overrun, Montreal doomed, and the militia hopelessly inert because of “the stupid baseness of the Canadian peasantry.” No longer did Britain have certain military advantages that had helped conquer New France fifteen years earlier, notably logistics bases in New England and New York and thousands of armed American provincials fighting for the Crown; in fact, hundreds of Canadians—the “lower sort”—had now rallied to the rebel cause. When this dispatch reached London, a courtier concluded that Carleton was “one of those men who see affairs in the most unfavorable light.”

By Wednesday night, November 15, Carleton saw little reason for optimism on the dark, swirling St. Lawrence. Gunfire from American cannons on both shores, as well as from a floating battery, swept the British vessels “in such a quantity all the soldiers left the deck,” a mariner reported. Frightened sailors refused to go aloft to loosen the sails. Pilots turned mutinous, the wind remained contrary, and the master of a British munitions ship carrying several tons of gunpowder vowed to surrender rather than be blown to flinders. A truce flag from Sorel brought another American ultimatum, and this time Carleton had no executioner’s fire tongs at hand. Colonel James Easton wrote:

General Montgomery is in possession of the fortress Montreal.… Your own situation is rendered very disagreeable.… If you will resign your fleet to me immediately without destroying the effects on board, you and your men shall be used with due civility.

Failure to comply would result in the squadron’s annihilation by 32-pounders, the Americans warned, though in truth they had no guns that large.

The moment had arrived for desperate measures. On Thursday night, with help from Jean Baptiste Bouchette—a sloop captain known as the “Wild Pigeon” for his stealth and speed—Carleton disguised himself as a habitant in a tasseled wool cap, moccasins, and a blanket coat belted with a ceinture fléchée, the traditional peasant sash. Over the Gaspé’s rail he climbed, and into a waiting skiff with an orderly, an aide, and several crewmen. At Bouchette’s direction, they steered for the river’s narrow northern channel, shipping the muffled oars and paddling with cupped hands past American campfires and barking dogs for more than thirty miles to the trading town of Trois-Rivières. There an armed two-masted snow, the Fell, would carry him farther downstream.

Behind them, their erstwhile comrades dumped most of the gunpowder and shot into the St. Lawrence, then struck their flags in surrender. Even without the powder, more spoils fell into American hands: 11 rivercraft, 760 barrels of flour, 675 barrels of beef, 8 chests of arms, entrenching tools, additional red coats, 200 pairs of shoes, and more than 100 prisoners, among them Brigadier General Richard Prescott. Carleton had again made good his escape, slipping into Fortress Quebec on November 19. “To the unspeakable joy of the friends of the government, & to the utter dismay of the abettors of sedition and rebellion, Gen. Carleton arrived,” a customs officer recorded. “We saw our salvation in his presence.”

But as he stripped off his peasant disguise to reemerge as the king’s satrap in Canada, Carleton hardly felt like a savior. “We have so many enemies within,” he privately wrote Dartmouth from Château St. Louis, the governor’s palace. “I think our fate extremely doubtful, to say nothing worse.” Of even greater concern were enemies without. As a Quebec merchant had just written, “Intelligence has been received that one Arnold, with 1,500 woodsmen, marched from … New England the first of October on an expedition against this place. Their intention must be to enter the city by assault.”

That was precisely Colonel Benedict Arnold’s intention. The former Connecticut apothecary, who had captured Ticonderoga in cahoots with the star-crossed Ethan Allen, was gathering strength twenty miles west of Quebec City, amid aspen and birch groves in Pointe-aux-Trembles, a riverine hamlet with a church, a nunnery, and a few farmhouses built of flint cobbles. His 675 emaciated men—less than two-thirds the number that had started north with him from Cambridge almost two months earlier—were recuperating from a grueling trek through the Maine wilderness, already lauded by one Canadian admirer as “an undertaking above the race of men in this debauched age.” The last miles along the St. Lawrence had been particularly painful. “Most of the soldiers were in constant misery,” a Connecticut private wrote, “as they were bare-footed, and the ground frozen and very uneven. We might have been tracked all the way by the blood from our shattered hoofs.” At Arnold’s request, all shoemakers around Pointe-aux-Trembles were now sewing moccasins for the men from badly tanned hides. Habitants brought hampers of roast beef, pork, potatoes, and turnips, despite a recent church edict that barred those disloyal to the Crown from receiving Holy Communion, baptism, or burial in sacred ground. Once his men regained their vigor and were reinforced by Montgomery’s troops from Montreal, Arnold planned to “knock up a dust with the garrison at Quebec, who are already panic-struck.” His only regret was not capturing the city already. “Had I been ten days sooner,” he wrote Washington on November 20, “Quebec must inevitably have fallen into our hands.”

Even now, gaunt after his Maine anabasis, Arnold at thirty-four was muscular and graceful, with black hair, a swarthy complexion, and that long, beaky nose. He was adept at fencing, boxing, sailing, shooting, riding, and ice-skating. “There wasn’t any waste timber in him,” a subordinate observed. Restive and audacious, he was “as brave a man as ever lived,” in one comrade’s estimation, and as fine a battle captain as America would produce that century, a man born to lead other men in the dark of night. Yet he would forever be an enigma, beset with both a gnawing sense of grievance and the nattering enmity of lesser fellows. His destiny, as the historian James Kirby Martin later wrote, encompassed both “the luminescent hero and the serpentine villain.” His Christian name meant “blessed,” but that came to be a central irony in his life, for his was an unquiet soul.

His father was a drunk merchant who had started life as a cooper’s apprentice, rising high only to tumble low, from the owner of a fine house and a prominent pew in the First Church of Norwich to arrest for public inebriation and debt. Young Benedict was forced to leave school, abandoning the family plan for him to attend Yale. Instead he was apprenticed in 1756 to two brothers who ran a successful pharmacy and trading firm; the boy would later describe himself as a coward until forced to head his household at fifteen. “Be dutiful to superiors, obliging to equals, and affable to inferiors, if any such there be,” his mother had told him before her death three years later, adding, “Don’t neglect your precious soul, which once lost can never be regained.”

His masters were generous and trusting. They sent him on trading voyages to the West Indies and London and, when he turned twenty-one, provided him with a handsome grubstake of £500. He set up his own emporium in the growing seaport of New Haven, selling Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, Francis’s Female Elixir, and tincture of valerian, an aphrodisiac, as well as earrings, rosewater, surgical instruments, and books ranging from Paradise Lost to Practical Farrier. His black-and-gold storefront sign proclaimed, SIBI TOTIQUE—for himself and for everyone—and he did not correct customers who called him “Dr. Arnold from London.”

His ambitions grew with his business. He bought a forty-ton sloop, the Fortune, running her from Montreal to the Bay of Honduras, trading livestock, furs, Spanish gold, cheese, slaves, cotton, and salt. By 1766, at twenty-five, “Captain Arnold” owned three ships and was an adept smuggler of contraband rum and Central American mahogany. More than once he ran afoul of associates, who accused him of jackleg business practices; in that same year he was briefly arrested after failing to pay £1,700 to his London creditors. Even so, as one of New Haven’s most prosperous merchants, he married, had three sons, joined the Freemasons to widen his social and business circles, and built a house overlooking the harbor, with a gambrel roof, marble fireplaces, wainscoting, and an orchard with a hundred fruit trees. But British commercial repression pinched him; he grew political, then radical, and in March 1775 was elected captain of a militia company, the Foot Guards, by comrades who saw him as a stalwart, worldly leader.

With the seizure of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Arnold burst into American history, never to leave. After securing both forts in May 1775, wearing a scarlet militia uniform coat with buff facings and big epaulettes, he led three dozen men on a brief raid across Lake Champlain into Canada to capture thirteen prisoners and a sloop—the George, which he renamed Enterprise—in what the biographer Willard Sterne Randall would call the first American naval assault as well as the first American attack of a foreign country. In a long letter to the Continental Congress, Arnold was also among the first to urge an invasion of Canada via St. Johns, Chambly, and Montreal, offering to lead the expedition himself “with the smiles of heaven.” Congress approved the plan but not the planner, selecting Schuyler and Montgomery instead. A few weeks later, Arnold rode into Cambridge to settle his financial accounts with the provincial congress, which had subsidized the Ticonderoga escapade. He took the opportunity to convince Washington that he was the right man to lead a second invasion force directly to Quebec along a rugged trace used in the past century by Indian raiders, Jesuit missionaries, and French trappers. His proposed route followed the Kennebec and Chaudière Rivers from the coast of the Eastern Country—still part of Massachusetts, but later to become Maine—to the St. Lawrence valley.

The boy in the shop apron had made good. Yet throughout his remarkable ascent he was bedeviled by episodes that suggested a trajectory forever wobbling between shadow and bright light. An accusation in 1770 that he was a drunken whoremonger who had contracted a venereal disease in the West Indies led to a lawsuit, depositions from business colleagues “in regard to my being in perfect health,” and a duel. In another incident, Arnold allegedly dragged a sailor from a tavern and administered forty lashes for gossiping about his smuggling activities. Success at Ticonderoga was followed by an ugly quarrel over who was in command—“I took the liberty of breaking his head,” Arnold wrote after thrashing another militia colonel—and a brief mutiny during which Arnold was locked in the Enterprise cabin. “Col. Arnold has been greatly abused and misrepresented by designing persons,” one soldier wrote, but others saw him as headstrong and arrogant. After departing Crown Point in a huff, he learned that his wife had abruptly died, leaving him with three boys under the age of eight. He put them in the care of his faithful sister and headed for Cambridge, telling a friend that “an idle life under my present circumstances would be but a lingering death.”

Washington chose to take a chance on him. The commander in chief had contemplated a similar expedition through Canada’s back door, and this pugnacious, enterprising, persuasive merchant—this fighter—seemed worth a gamble. In early September, he gave Arnold a Continental Army colonel’s commission and permission to recruit eleven hundred “active woodsmen” from the regiments in Cambridge for a mission that was “secret though known to everybody,” as one officer noted. “Not a moment’s time is to be lost,” Washington wrote. “The season will be considerably advanced.” He believed “that Quebec will fall into our hands a very easy prey.”

Few military expeditions would be more heroic or more heartbreaking. “The drums beat and away they go,” a rifleman in Cambridge wrote a friend, “to scale the walls of Quebec and spend the winter in joy and festivity among the sweet nuns.” The “active woodsmen” were mostly farmers, with a few adventurous oddballs like a wiry nineteen-year-old named Aaron Burr, grandson of the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards and son of the former president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey, where young Burr was admitted at age thirteen. Washington also provided three companies of riflemen from Virginia and Pennsylvania, partly to get them out of Cambridge; their acknowledged leader was a deep-chested teamster, sawyer, and “formidable border pugilist” named Daniel Morgan. Captain Morgan, known as “the Old Wagoner,” carried a turkey call made out of a conch shell. He also wore scars from a savage British flogging administered after he beat up an insolent regular in 1755 and from an Indian musket ball that perforated his cheek a year later.

After marching forty miles north to Newburyport, Arnold’s brigade paraded with flags unfurled near the Merrimack River, listened to a sermon drawn from Exodus in the First Presbyterian Church—“If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence”—then clambered onto eleven coasters stinking of fish. “Weighed anchor,” the soldier Ebenezer Wild told his journal, “with a pleasant gale, our colors flying, drums beating, fifes playing, and the hills all round covered with pretty girls weeping for their departing swains.” The men soon grew seasick—“indifferent whether I lived or died,” as one wrote—despite the two hundred pounds of ginger Arnold distributed as an antidote. But by September 22 they had traveled over one hundred miles up the Maine coast, past Honeywell Head and Merrymeeting Bay to Reuben Colburn’s shipyard on the banks of the Kennebec.

Here, on Washington’s orders, 220 flat-bottomed bateaux were under construction, with flaring sides, tapered ends, and more than 1,300 paddles, oars, and setting poles. One sniff told the men that unseasoned, green pine boards had been used. Not only were the boats cursedly heavy, but they leaked from the moment they touched water, requiring constant bailing. With seams opening faster than they could be caulked, casks of dried peas, salt fish, and beef swelled and spoiled; a hundred tons of provisions—the men ate three thousand pounds of food each day—dwindled at an alarming rate as the armada nosed north. Shallows scraped the bateaux bottoms, forcing men into the frigid river for miles on end, pushing from the stern, pulling by the painters, and cursing the boatbuilders as “infamous villains.” “You would have taken the men for amphibious animals,” Arnold wrote Washington, “as they were a great part of the time under water.” Surveyor John Pierce told his diary, “Every man’s teeth chattered in their heads.” They chattered more upon waking on the bitter night of September 29 to find wet clothing “frozen a pane of glass thick,” as another man wrote, “which proved very disagreeable, being obliged to lie in them.” Arnold urged them on with cries of “To Quebec and victory!”

Hemlock and spruce crowded the riverbanks, and autumn colors smeared the hillsides. But soon the land grew poor, with little game to be seen. Ticonic Falls was the first of four cataracts on the Kennebec, and the first of many portages that required lugging bateaux, supplies, and muskets for miles over terrain ever more vertical; from sea level they would climb fourteen hundred feet. “This place,” one officer wrote as they rigged ropes and pulleys, “is almost perpendicular.” Sickness set in—“a sad plight with the diarrhea,” noted Dr. Isaac Senter, the expedition surgeon—followed by the first deaths, from pneumonia, a falling tree, an errant gunshot.

More than 130 miles upriver they left the Kennebec in mid-October and crossed the Great Carrying Place—a thirteen-mile, five-day portage, much of it ascending—to reach the Dead River, a dark, reedy stream that slithered like a black snake toward the Canadian uplands. A terrible storm on October 21, perhaps the tail of an Atlantic hurricane, caused the Dead to rise eight feet in nine hours, sweeping away bedrolls, guns, and food. With “trees tumbling on all quarters,” the brigade clung to hilltops and ridgelines. Six inches of snow fell three nights later. More men grew sick, or worse, in what Dr. Senter described as “a direful, howling wilderness.” Jemima Warner, among the few women camp followers, tended her sick husband until he died; a comrade recorded that lacking a shovel, “she covered him with leaves, and then took his gun and other implements, and left him with a heavy heart.” In late October Arnold learned that his rear battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Roger Enos, had turned back without permission, taking three hundred troops and much of the expedition’s reserve food supply. “Our men made a general prayer,” Captain Henry Dearborn wrote in his diary, “that Colonel Enos and all his men might die by the way, or meet with some disaster.” Back in Cambridge, Enos would be arrested, court-martialed, and acquitted; those who could testify to his venality were in Canada.

“We are in an absolute danger of starving,” a Rhode Island captain wrote. By the time Enos’s betrayal was discovered, their food stocks had dwindled to five pints of flour and less than an ounce of salt pork per man. “Dollars were offered for bits of bread as big as the palm of one’s hand,” Ebenezer Wild recorded. Then even that was gone. A dozen hunters “killed one partridge and divided it into 12 parts,” John Pierce wrote on October 29. John Joseph Henry, a sixteen-year-old Pennsylvania rifleman, described how a small duck was shot and carved by his comrades “most fairly into ten shares, each one eyeing the integrity of the division.”

Stews were boiled from rawhide thongs, moose-skin breeches, and the rough hides that lined the bateaux floors. Men gnawed on shaving soap, tree sap, birch bark, and lip balm. “This day I roasted my shot pouch and eat it,” wrote rifleman George Morison. “It was now four days since I had eat anything save the skin of a squirrel.” Young John Henry was offered a greenish broth said to be bear stew, but “this was instantly known to be untrue. It was that of a dog. He was a large black Newfoundland dog” that had belonged to Captain Dearborn, a New Hampshire physician who had fought at Bunker Hill. Men also gobbled down the feet and skin. Jeremiah Greenman described adding “the head of a squirrel with a parcel of candlewicks boiled up together, which made a very fine soup without salt.… Thinking it was the best that I ever eat.”

They trudged on, across a snowy plateau known as the Height of Land, then skirted Lac-Mégantic before starting down the wild, shallow Chaudière—the word meant “boiler”—which tumbled north a hundred miles to the St. Lawrence. More men died, fell behind, or wandered into the trackless forest, never to be seen again. “I must confess that I began to be concerned about our situation,” Lieutenant William Humphrey told his journal. “There was no sign of any humane being.” By early November, a rifleman wrote, “many of the company were so weak that they could hardly stand.… They reeled about like drunken men.”

Salvation appeared as a bovine apparition: at midday on Thursday, November 2, forty miles north of Lac-Mégantic, a small herd of horned cattle ambled up the riverbank, driven by several French Canadians. “It was the joyfulest sight that I ever saw,” Jeremiah Greenman wrote. “Some could not refrain from crying for joy.” Ravenous men slashed open a heifer and threw skin, entrails, “and everything that could be eat” on an open fire. Engorged, they sliced “savage shoes” from the hide for their ruined feet. “Blessed our stars,” Dr. Senter noted in his diary.

They also blessed Arnold, for he had saved them—though only after badly miscalculating the distance and duration of their journey. From Colburn’s shipyard to Quebec was 270 miles, not 180, as he had told Washington, and the journey would take six weeks, not twenty days. Yet his fortitude and iron will won through. In late October, aware that his men were failing fast, he had lunged ahead with a small vanguard down the Chaudière, racing through the rapids—smashing three bateaux against the rocks and capsizing others—before reaching Sartigan, a hardscrabble settlement of whitewashed houses with thatched roofs and paper windows. Astonished Canadian farmers, he wrote, “received us in the most hospitable manner.” Arnold sent the horned cattle upriver, soon followed by mutton, flour, tobacco, and horses to evacuate the lame.

In the coming days his troops straggled into Sartigan, “more like ghosts than men,” wrote one rifleman. Filthy, feeble, their clothes torn and their beards matted, they “resembled those animals of New Spain called ourang-outangs,” another man wrote. A captain told his family, “We have waded 100 miles.” Of the 1,080 who set out from Cambridge in September, about 400 had turned back, or had been sent home as invalids, or had died on the trek, their bones scattered as mileposts across the border uplands. “Our march has been attended with an amazing deal of fatigue,” Arnold told Washington, “… with a thousand difficulties I never apprehended.” The commanding general in reply would praise “your enterprising & persevering spirit,” adding, “It is not in the power of any man to command success, but you have done more—you have deserved it.”

Ever aggressive, Arnold next resolved to seize Quebec immediately. Over the following week, as the men regained health and weight, he hired carpenters and smiths to make scaling ladders, spears, and grappling hooks. Firelocks were repaired, canoes purchased. Company by company, the men moved north to Pointe-Levy, three miles up the St. Lawrence from Quebec, where locals welcomed them with a country dance featuring bagpipes, fiddle music, and drams of rum. John Pierce wrote of his hosts, “They have their saints placed as big as life which they bow down to and worship as they pass them.”

At nine p.m. on November 13, a calm, cold Monday with a late moonrise, the river crossing began in forty canoes. Carefully skirting two British warships that had recently appeared on the St. Lawrence—the Lizard, a frigate, and Hunter, a sloop—five hundred Americans landed at Wolfe’s Cove by four a.m. on Tuesday. They soon climbed the escarpment that nimble William Howe had scaled in 1759 to reach the Plains of Abraham, barely a cannon’s shot west of Quebec’s massive walls. Later in the day Arnold’s men paraded within a few hundred yards of the St. Louis Gate, marching to and fro, while shouting insults in a bootless effort to entice the defenders to fight in the open, just as Wolfe had baited the French sixteen years earlier.

“They huzzahed thrice,” a British officer reported. “We answered them with three cheers of defiance, & saluted them with a few cannon loaded with grape & canister shot. They did not wait for a second round.” Arnold also dispatched a white flag with a written ultimatum: “If I am obliged to carry the town by storm, you may expect every severity practiced on such occasions.” The demand, a Canadian historian later complained, included “the usual mixture of cant, bombast, threats, and bad taste so characteristic of the effusions of this generation of American commanders.” British gunners answered with an 18-pound ball fired from the parapet, spattering Arnold’s envoy with mud.

Even Colonel Arnold knew when the hour demanded prudence. He had no artillery, few bayonets, little cash, and almost a hundred broken muskets. A tally revealed that his men averaged only five reliable cartridges each. Informants told him the Quebec garrison had nearly nineteen hundred men after reinforcement by the Royal Navy, merchant seamen, and other armed loyalists, more than he’d expected. Although half were “obliged to bear arms against their inclination,” as Arnold wrote Montgomery, he calculated that two thousand attackers would be needed “to carry the town.” The informants also warned him that the defenders planned a sudden sally to catch him unawares.

He ordered the men assembled, and at three a.m. on November 19 they staggered west on bloody feet for Pointe-aux-Trembles to await Montgomery. “Very cold morning,” Pierce told his diary. “Ground frozen very hard.” An armed two-masted snow passed them, heading down the St. Lawrence for Quebec; on deck, they would later learn, stood General Carleton in his habitant disguise.

Having survived unspeakable hardship, many men desperately missed their homes and families. “God deliver me from this land of ignorance,” Pierce wrote, “and in his own due time return me once more where they can pronounce English.” Yet most recognized that more hardship lay ahead. “We have a winter’s campaign before us,” Captain Samuel Ward, Jr., told his family in Rhode Island. “But I trust we shall have the glory of taking Quebec!”

Good news out of Canada sparked jubilation from Cambridge to Philadelphia and beyond. The invasion gambit had all but succeeded. General Montgomery controlled the Lake Champlain–Richelieu corridor, as well as Montreal and the western St. Lawrence valley. He soon would move east to join forces with Colonel Arnold, now hailed as an American Hannibal for a feat likened to crossing the Alps with elephants in midwinter.

Canadian volunteers flocked to the American standard despite the clergy’s threat of eternal damnation. Some publicly acknowledged asking God to help les Bostonnais, as they called all Yankees. Habitants from sixteen parishes around Quebec City alone would assist the invaders by confiscating British supplies, detaining loyalists and overzealous priests, and ransacking the estates of wealthy seigneurs in a spate of score settling. Others provided firewood, built scaling ladders, and stood guard around American camps. “We can expect no assistance from the Canadian peasantry,” a Quebec merchant wrote. “They have imbibed a notion that if the rebels get entire possession of the country, they’ll be forever exempted from paying taxes.”

For the American invaders, the delay in taking St. Johns was nettlesome. A quicker capture of Montreal in early fall might have bagged Carleton and permitted the seizure of defenseless Quebec in a swift coup de main. Aware that Britain would likely dispatch a robust force in the spring to recoup the empire’s losses in Canada, both Washington and Schuyler believed that Fortress Quebec must be quickly reduced in the coming weeks, then manned and fortified over the winter to withstand the anticipated assault. Although more than six tons of gunpowder had been sent to the Northern Army, mostly from South Carolina and New York, shortages persisted of everything from food and winter clothing to money and munitions.

Still, with Montgomery and Arnold leading their “famine-proof veterans,” victory in the north seemed at hand. A Virginia congressman, Richard Henry Lee, spoke for many when he declared in Philadelphia, “No doubt is entertained here that this Congress will be shortly joined by delegates from Canada, which will then complete the union of fourteen provinces.”