Patriots (46 page)

Charles Lee

COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG FOUNDATION

F
OR
B
ENEDICT
A
RNOLD
, the weeks since his victory at Ticonderoga had been filled with humiliation and pain. He had pleaded with the Continental Congress to let him invade Canada. Instead, the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety turned over the command at Ticonderoga to another Connecticut colonel. That rebuff led Arnold to resign his commission. He asked, however, that the Provincial Congress reimburse him for the money he had advanced for America’s only victory. The legislature refused, advising Arnold to deal directly with the Continental Congress. When his unpaid soldiers heard that news, they mutinied, took Arnold prisoner and negotiated for themselves directly with Massachusetts. The men got their money, and Arnold was set free. He was ordered to report to Cambridge to settle his accounts.

He went instead to New Haven, where he learned that his wife had died. Although she had come to despise him, Peggy Arnold’s
death sent him into a depression that was complicated by a siege of gout. Then, while his sister Hannah tended to his three children, the eldest only seven, Arnold went to Cambridge to clear up the question of his expenses. There his figures were repeatedly challenged and disallowed. The board of examiners agreed to pay him one hundred and ninety-five pounds—less than half what he had spent to capture two forts and a wealth of armaments.

Arnold’s one consolation was a meeting in Cambridge at which he was able to propose to General Washington his latest plan: Arnold would lead an expedition through the wilderness and mountains of Maine, take Quebec by surprise and capture it for America. Once again other men had anticipated him. George Washington, though he was hampered by a lack of supplies and manpower, had already explored the idea of a diversion in Canada and had picked General Schuyler to lead it. Very well, said Arnold, he would take his men north to support Schuyler.

The expedition was a belated attempt to enlist Canadians in America’s revolution. France had ceded Canada to Britain under the 1763 treaty that ended the French and Indian War. Eleven years later, with the Quebec Act of 1774, Lord North’s ministers tried to bind Canada closer to England by making concessions to its French Catholics. Even though Catholics already outnumbered British Protestants in Canada four hundred to one, the act brought in another eighty thousand French settlers by extending Canada’s boundaries south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi. Lord North had promised the Canadians a legislature, but held off creating one because he wanted to keep the French Catholics in the minority and there was no way of guaranteeing that. But Catholics could practice their religion so long as their priests recognized the political supremacy of George III.

The Quebec Act had alarmed the American settlers who coveted the Ohio wilderness and had outraged New England Protestants with its leniency toward the Roman Catholic Church. Patriots like Samuel Adams traded on anti-Catholic sentiment as a tactic, but they also genuinely feared Rome’s power. Whig speakers told their audiences that the Quebec Act would lead to
a new Inquisition and the burning of heretics in Massachusetts and New York. In October 1774, during its first session, the Continental Congress had denounced the Quebec Act. Yet its members now assumed the Canadians would fight with them against British tyranny, even
though George III was granting them more liberties than France’s kings had ever done.

George Washington was prepared to test the Canadian response. A message was drafted for him and translated into French. Then, given Washington’s past problem, General Charles Lee read it over for accuracy.
“Let us run together to the same goal,” Washington’s appeal urged the Canadians. Because armed troops would be bearing the message, he tried to be reassuring:
“The Great American Congress has sent an army into your province under the command of General Schuyler, not to plunder but to protect you.”

The logistics behind Washington’s plan were formidable. General Schuyler had ordered Brigadier General Richard Montgomery to leave Ticonderoga and march north. Schuyler would join Montgomery at Crown Point. Together they would have seventeen hundred men. Washington also authorized Benedict Arnold to lead another eleven hundred soldiers along the Atlantic coast to the Kennebec River. It would be a punishing trek, and Washington advised Arnold to recruit volunteers during a parade at headquarters on September 6. Arnold’s own zeal and the promise of action after weeks of waiting in Cambridge contributed to the good response, and Washington also agreed to send several companies chosen by lot from the Pennsylvania and Virginia militia. A week later, Arnold’s men were ready to march. According to the best information, the British had only one company at Quebec but could draw on eleven hundred more troops, some of them Indians, from Montreal and other forts.

General Washington told Arnold to send an express messenger back to Cambridge if problems arose during the march. When no messenger appeared, Washington was reassured rather than anxious. General Montgomery, who had served under James Wolfe during the successful British assault on Quebec in 1759, was indignant at the low quality of his American troops. He said that the brazen Yankees were all generals and not one a soldier. New Yorkers were worse. Their lax morals shocked Montgomery, and he found them
“the sweepings of the streets.” Yet he forged ahead, capturing two forts to the north of Lake Champlain—one at Chambly on October 20 and another at St. Johns two weeks later.

Benedict Arnold was paying the price for choosing the more rugged route. Aaron Burr, who had charmed Dorothy Quincy at his uncle’s house, had been commissioned a captain and had joined
Arnold’s expedition despite letters from home filled with such encouragements as
“You will die, I know you will die.” When a rider caught up with the marching column to say that Burr’s uncle had ordered him home, Burr threatened to have the messenger hanged if he bothered him again. But when the weather turned foul in October, it seemed likely Burr’s family would be proved right. Benedict Arnold’s men were slogging through rain and snow over half-frozen swamps and were fording rivers so swollen and fast-running that they whipped the army’s supplies out of their canoes. Arnold’s only guide was his memories of a trip he had once made to Quebec as a trader and the old journal of a British engineer.

The daily rations for Arnold’s advance riflemen fell to half an inch of raw pork and half a biscuit to last them from the Kennebec River to the walls of Quebec, and they had no sure idea how far that was. The brambles and the small firs had become so thick that the men were scrambling along on all fours like dogs. They were
eating dog, too. A captain surrendered his great black Newfoundland, which had been a company favorite, and the men ate every bit, including the entrails. They collected the bones, pounded them to dust and brewed a greenish broth for the next day. Some men tried to make soup from their deerskin moccasins, but no matter how long they boiled them they were still leather. Starved men sat down on the ground and were dead within minutes.

When one rifleman shot a duck, the others in his ten-man party boiled it in a kettle along with their last bits of pork, each marked with its owner’s name. They drank the broth for supper, ate the boiled pork for breakfast and cut the duck into ten parts. As one man turned his back, the leader held up a portion—a wing, a leg, the neck—and asked, “Whose shall this be?” The man called out a soldier’s name. For dinner the next day, they ate those shares of duck. The day after that, they ate nothing.

When a man’s boots wore out, he wrapped his sore feet in flour bags and kept marching. For thread the men pulled up cedar root, and during the portages they patched their dugouts with pitch scraped from pine trees. Sickness cut the eleven hundred men to nine hundred and fifty. The few women marching with their husbands expected no favors. As the army moved across one frozen pond, the ice broke and the men had to wade through the freezing water with their rifles raised above their heads. When her turn came, Mrs. Greer, a large and respectable sergeant’s wife, hitched
up her skirts to the waist, and even the New Yorkers didn’t make a joke about it.

By the time Colonel Arnold caught up with his forward companies their supplies were exhausted. He brought food, and men wept when they saw the cattle herded into camp. Arnold wrote optimistically to Washington that his provisions would last twenty-five days and that he expected to reach the waters of the Chaudière River in ten days, which would put him within striking distance of Quebec. At the Chaudière on October 27 Arnold received heartening political news. Two Indians brought him a letter saying that the people of Quebec rejoiced at his approach and would join the Americans in subduing the British forces.

From Arnold’s positive report General Washington assumed that Arnold would be in Quebec on November 5, But when that day came, Arnold was facing new problems. He now had only six hundred and fifty men, many of them shivering in their shirts from the winter winds. French settlers told him that the British had burned all the boats on the St. Lawrence River to stop his troops from getting across. He ordered men to bring up the canoes from their last river crossing. In the past eight weeks, Arnold and his men had traveled nearly six hundred miles, through swampland one third of the way and carrying boats and baggage on their shoulders for forty miles. At times, one day’s food had lasted a week. Now the men straggling to Arnold’s side looked across the St. Lawrence to a disheartening sight.

In the harbor below the walled heights of Quebec was a British frigate with twenty-six guns and a warship, the
Hornet
, with another sixteen. The ships had arrived the day before, bringing five hundred men to reinforce the town. His informants continued to assure Arnold that all of the Canadians, except for a hundred staunch Tories, would greet his arrival by throwing down their weapons. Arnold needed the encouragement. On the same day, he discovered that all three companies of his rear detachment had decided that they didn’t have enough provisions to continue and had headed back to Cambridge.

Arnold’s shortage of boats was more critical now than it had been at Ticonderoga. For a week, he had to send men as far away as twenty miles to buy birchbark and canvas while every day the British went on improving their defenses. At last Arnold had enough boats for five hundred men, but a storm forced him to delay again.
It was 9
P.M.
on November 13, 1775, before Arnold and his canoes slipped past the British ships on the river and landed at Wolfe’s Cove. At daybreak, Arnold led the men up a steep path to an expanse of land called the Plains of Abraham. General James Wolfe had stood there sixteen years before, at the head of thousands of well-equipped British troops and with twenty-two ships to control the St. Lawrence. General Wolfe had taken Quebec from the French. But in the hour of his victory he had died, quoting from Thomas Gray, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

Arnold’s several hundred ragged men compared with Wolfe’s legions only in courage, and yet Arnold planned to use the same tactic that had succeeded before. Wolfe had provoked a skirmish outside the garrison’s perimeter, and General Montcalm had let himself be drawn into it. Arnold intended to get the British out from behind their walls so that the Canadians and their militia could seize the town and turn it over to Arnold. That was his plan.

Benedict Arnold marched his band to the walls of Quebec and ordered them to give a cheer. The noise seemed to provoke curiosity inside the town, but nothing more. Britain’s commander, Sir Guy Carleton, had served as a subaltern with Wolfe and wasn’t going to be tricked by a stratagem the British had invented. Carleton had eighteen hundred men inside the fortress, but because he doubted the sympathies of the Canadians he kept his troops behind the walls. When Arnold sent a messenger to demand surrender, the British fired at the courier, who turned and ran back. Meanwhile, Arnold heard that even more British reinforcements were on the way. His men had ammunition for five rounds. Neither pride nor valor could argue against a timely retreat. Arnold took his men to a haven twenty miles above Quebec, set up camp at Pointe-aux-Trembles, and waited for General Montgomery to arrive. While there, Arnold received a message that General Washington had arrested the colonel who had given up the march and would try him for desertion. Washington believed that the Americans were now within the town walls, and he added that he hoped Arnold was enjoying the laurels that his hardships in taking Quebec had won for him.

—

The weeks during the autumn of 1775 when John Adams was away from home at the Continental Congress had been a melancholy
time for his wife back in Braintree. On the first day of October, she lost her mother to an epidemic of dysentery. In November, she herself was struck by jaundice. She had expected her husband to return at any moment, but James Warren paid a call to tell her that the Congress would be staying in session another month. Abigail Adams resolved not to grieve.

She was troubled, though, by the secrecy imposed at Philadelphia, which prevented her husband from sharing with her the debates going on there. Her lonely waiting was making her pessimistic, and she confided her doubts in a letter to John: “I am more and more convinced that Man is a dangerous creature, and that power, whether vested in many or few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, Give, give.” She worried that Americans had grown so comfortable without a government that they wouldn’t submit to any new order when it came. She was anxious about America’s future, whether it was as a monarchy or as a democracy.

The Continental Congress was too distracted with logistics and finances to discuss the problems disturbing Abigail Adams. Members had just rejected giving a bonus to any soldier who enlisted in the winter army. But she was looking beyond the war’s end and asking, “How shall we be governed so as to retain our liberties? Can any government be free which is not administered by general stated laws? Who shall frame these laws? Who will give them
force and energy?”