Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (7 page)

Then came the kicker. Enos and his officers, trailing behind the rest with the bulk of the provisions, decided to turn back. They took food, weapons, medical supplies, and a third of the army. Enos fully justified his decision to disobey orders and quit the apparently suicidal course that Arnold, Morgan, and the others had embraced. He had been defeated not by the enemy but by America’s vast terrain and the fear it engendered.

“In an absolute danger of starving,” the rest of the men stood one hundred miles from the settlements in Quebec, two hundred miles from those in Maine. “No one thought of returning,” a soldier recorded in his diary. “We found it best to endure it patiently.” Arnold went ahead in a canoe, promising to send supplies back as soon as he made contact with civilization over the mountains.

The men continued to ascend, now moving along a chain of ponds that were the source of the Dead River. They reached the divide that marked the border with Canada. They watched the mountains close in. “Every prospect of distress,” one man wrote, “now came thundering on.”

They had survived two weeks on half rations. By October 28, almost all food was exhausted. Each man was allotted a pint of flour and less than an ounce of salt pork per day. Many miles of hard marching lay ahead.

Passing onto the downhill phase of the journey did not make the going easier. Daniel Morgan quickly discovered why the river they needed to follow was named Chaudière, French for “cauldron” or “boiler.” Boarding his boat, he hurtled along in the white water until the rapids flipped the
craft over. He lost not just food, personal possessions, and guns, but the first man of the expedition to drown.

Still, the unspoiled beauty of the scene moved some of the men. “This place was not a little delightsome,” noted Isaac Senter, the expedition’s surgeon, “considering its situation in the midst of an amazing wilderness.”
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They entered a morass of streams and marshes. “After walking a few hours in the swamp,” a participant reported, “we seemed to have lost all sense of feeling in our feet and ankles.” The men stepped along “in great fear of breaking our bones or dislocating our joints.”
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To be disabled was certain death. On October 30 they waded six miles through a swamp “which was pane glass thick frozen.” Mrs. Grier held her skirts above her waist, but none of the men “dared to intimate a disrespectful idea of her.”

Their provisions exhausted, they ate moss, candles, and lip salve. They ate “roots and bark off trees and broth from boiling shoes and cartridge boxes.” On the first day of November they killed two dogs, one of them Henry Dearborn’s Newfoundland, and ate them “with good appetite, even the feet and skins.”

As one group prepared to plunge through yet another morass, Jemima Warner noticed that her husband was missing. She went back “with tears of affection in her eyes” and found him lying exhausted along the trail. She sat with him for several days in the cold until he “fell victim to the King of Terrors.” She covered his body with leaves and later arrived in camp carrying his rifle and powder horn.

All of this they experienced in the unearthly mental state that accompanies extreme hunger and fatigue. Their minds became taut wires through which they could hear the hum of the stars. The mountains and clouds, trees and rocks, as light as their bodies, seemed to float dreamlike in the cold. The aroma of pine and moss became intense.

“We are so faint and weak, we can scarcely walk,” one man noted. Another said, “That sensation of the mind called ‘the horrors,’ seemed to prevail.”
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While Morgan and Arnold struggled through Maine, Richard Montgomery and the force marching along the western route to Canada had run into problems of their own. The five hundred British soldiers at St. John’s managed to hold off Montgomery’s two thousand inexperienced men for two miserable months.

War had seared Montgomery long before the Revolution commenced. The son of Anglo-Irish gentry, the young man had been raised to fight. During the Seven Years’ War he had helped the British take Fort Ticonderoga and Montreal. He had endured a full range of slaughter and
misery while campaigning in America’s wilderness; he had fought through the hellish siege of Havana as the British grappled with Spanish forces. After returning to England, he languished. Europe was exhausted by war. Promotions dried up. His career stalled.

Montgomery himself was exhausted. He sold his commission, left the army and moved to America, seeking the life of a simple farmer. He renewed his connection with heiress Janet Livingston, whom he had met during his period of service. Their marriage in 1773 joined Montgomery to one of the most powerful families in America. The couple settled on a Hudson Valley farm. His wife wanted a child. He did not. Melancholy, the eighteenth-century term for depression, haunted him. “My happiness is not lasting,” he wrote. “It has no foundation.”

He signed on to defend his adopted country and was appointed brigadier general under Schuyler. He felt it a “hard fate to be obliged to oppose a power I had been ever taught to reverence.” Before he left to join his men and to fight against his former comrades, he said, “‘Tis a mad world, my masters, I once thought so, now I know it.”
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The New York soldiers who fought under him at St. John’s knew that in Montgomery they had a commander with strong nerves, one of the most competent and inspiring officers on the continent. When they finally overran the post, they also captured a good portion of all British regulars in Canada. Their victory delivered the enemy “a most fatal stab.” The men’s own nerves were growing accustomed to fire and death. They were sure they could take Quebec and perhaps end the war before winter.

But Montgomery saw that time was slipping dangerously past. The enlistment of a portion of his troops would run out at the end of November. Days were growing shorter. The cold, dirty weather was turning roads to muck.

The British governor of Canada, General Guy Carleton, with only 130 soldiers left to command, abandoned Montreal. He lacked faith in the French Canadians, who had, he thought, “imbibed too much of the American Spirit of Licentiousness and Independence.”
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He hurried back to Quebec, allowing the Americans to take Montreal without a shot.

Yet Montgomery’s foreboding continued. In his letters to Janet, he often included the phrase, “If I live . . .” He admonished her not to send him “whining letters” that “lower my spirits.”

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On November 2, the supplies Arnold had promised began to reach his scattered and famished troops: two oxen, a cow, two sheep, and three bushels of potatoes. The cattle were butchered and eaten on the spot, the bloody hides fashioned into crude moccasins. Soon cornmeal, mutton,
and tobacco arrived. It was “like a translation from death to life,” one man noted. “Echoes of gladness resounded from front to rear.”

The inhabitants around Quebec were astounded to see the bearded, emaciated troops emerge from the wilderness. Of the 1,050 men who started, 675 had completed the miraculous journey. If they had reached the city a few days earlier, Arnold and his men might have taken it. But they found that a corps of loyal Scots Canadians had just arrived to defend the walled city. Arnold chose to withdraw twenty miles and wait for Montgomery. He reported to Washington that his men were “almost naked and in want of every necessity.”

In early December, Montgomery arrived, leading only three hundred of his New York men. He had left some to secure Montreal. The rest had departed when their enlistments expired, or had fallen ill or deserted. Arnold’s men cheered the arrival of this diminished prong of the grand pincer. They cheered the food, supplies, and winter clothing that Montgomery brought with him. The addition of several hundred Canadian militiamen, who had chosen to join the cause of those they called
Bostonois
or “Congress Troops,” raised their numbers to more than thirteen hundred.

General Carleton organized his defenses, but remained pessimistic. “We have so many enemies within and foolish people, dupes to those traitors,” he wrote to London authorities, “that I think our fate extremely doubtful.”
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From outside the city walls, Montgomery sent Carleton word that he was having trouble restraining his hordes from “insulting your works” and taking “an ample and just retaliation.” The British commander, who had fought with Montgomery in the West Indies, sneered at the threat.

During the next few weeks, the two sides engaged in a desultory cannon duel. The Americans tried building fortifications of ice, which enemy guns quickly splintered. One cannonball demolished Montgomery’s carriage and killed his horses seconds after he stepped down, one of his several brushes with death. Another shot decapitated a woman drawing water from a stream. It was Jemima Warner, who had left her dead husband under leaves back in the mountains.

Morgan’s riflemen fired at long range toward any defender who appeared on the walls. After they shot a sentry through the head, a British captain complained about the “skulking riflemen . . . These fellows who call themselves soldiers . . . are worse than savages. They lie in wait to shoot a sentry! A deed worthy of Yankee men at war!”

The soldiers suffered from “lice Itch Jaundice Crabs Bedbugs and an unknown sight of Fleas.”
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Worse—smallpox soon began to prostrate one man after another.

General Montgomery mulled his options. Tall, slender, balding, with a handsome, slightly pockmarked face, he was beloved for “his manliness of soul, heroic bravery, and suavity of manners.” Staring at the wintery walls of Quebec, he knew that he must act. Most of the New England troops had enlisted only through December. No pleading could convince them to stay past their promised time. The only course left was to take Quebec by storm. With limited manpower, the key to entering the city was to concentrate on one point. But where?

Montgomery chose the Lower Town, the sprawling waterfront commercial district at the foot of the cliffs on which Quebec stood. “I propose amusing Mr. Carleton with a formal attack, erecting batteries, etc.,” Montgomery wrote to Schuyler in the sardonic tone of the day, “but mean to assault the works, I believe towards the lower town, which is the weakest point.” Taking the Lower Town would cut off the garrison from the water. A threat to burn the warehouses and places of business might induce the inhabitants to surrender.

On December 16, Montgomery put the question to his officers. They debated the matter: a few staunchly opposed the foolhardy attempt, the majority voted to lead their men against the city’s walls. They agreed that the faint of heart could bow out, only volunteers would be included.

“Fortune favors the brave,” Montgomery stated. On the evening of Christmas Day, the general gave a rousing address to the troops. “General Montgomery was born to command,” one man wrote. He sweetened the prospect of attack, proclaiming that “all who get safe into the city will live well,” plundering as they pleased. They would attack using the “first strong north-wester” for cover.

Although Montgomery kept up a brave front for his men, he was feeling the strain. “I must go home,” he had written to Schuyler. “I am weary of power and totally want that patience and temper so requisite for such a command.”
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Quebec sat on a rocky bluff at the end of a peninsula between two rivers: the Charles on the northwest side, the tidal St. Lawrence on the southeast. Montgomery’s plan was to set fires at the western gates as a diversion and attack the Lower Town from two directions. He would personally lead an advance party along the path between the bottom of the bluff and the St. Lawrence. Arnold would advance on the Charles side with the main force.

By December 29, it seemed likely the clock would run out before the men could act on the plan. Many of the soldiers were already packing, settling debts, and preparing to return home on January 1. The weather, which had tormented them during the march, now remained frustratingly
clear. If they attacked without the cover of a storm, the defenders inside the walls could anticipate and counter every move.

The next evening it began to snow. A screeching gale swept in from the northeast. Word went out for the men to be ready at midnight. They would attack on the last day of 1775.

Doctor Isaac Senter, the battalion physician, remembered that General Montgomery was “extremely anxious” during the preparations. Fortune, Montgomery had written, although it might favor the brave, “often baffles the sanguine expectations of poor mortals.”

Waiting in darkness, the troops hunched against the fanged blizzard. At four in the morning, rockets fired to coordinate the separate attacks. Artillerymen working mortars began to lob bombs into the city. The time for action had come.

Montgomery led his three hundred New York musketmen on a mission known as a “forlorn hope.” Derived from a Dutch military term
verloren hoop,
“detached troop,” it had nothing to do with hope but simply meant an advance assault force. Yet the English words carried their own connotation and fit the tenor of Montgomery’s mind.

His contingent descended the steep path to the river. Accompanied by his officers and by workmen equipped with axes and saws, he took the lead. The soldiers strung out behind him. They crept along the narrow ledge between the river and the steep rock cliff on their left. The bitter wind took their breath away.

The river had thrown large blocks of ice onto the path. It took them an hour to scramble two miles. They reached a barricade that Carleton had ordered built to protect the Lower Town. The palisade of stakes was undefended. Carpenters hacked an opening. Beyond, officers made out a two-story blockhouse, its black gun portals staring blankly. Nothing moved.

Every second was precious now. Rather than wait for his straggling men to come up, Montgomery chose to advance with fifteen officers. He drew his short sword with its silver dog’s head pommel. He motioned his men forward into the snowy darkness.

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