The British Are Coming

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.