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Arnold’s Boot

or negotiate, and months away from declaring independence, Congress initially rejected the plan to invade Canada and then, as suddenly, reversed itself and accepted the idea.

Personally bankrolling his operations on Lake Champlain as finances from Massachusetts or Congress were practically nonexistent, Arnold was blindsided when another Connecticut officer arrived to assume command at Fort Ticonderoga. He was one of the Connecticut militia officers who had earlier refused Arnold the keys to the armory, and there was bad blood between them. Unaware that he had been the subject of damaging reports and a whispering campaign meant to undermine his role in the capture of Ticonderoga, Arnold was furious at this treatment, which he saw as a slight to his achievements. His record of expenditures was also being questioned in Massachusetts. As Arnold viewed every one of these reversals as an assault on his honor, his famous pique took over and he quit his command.

“I have resigned my commission, not being able to hold it longer with honor,” he wrote, just before learning that his plan to invade Canada had been accepted. Adding to the injustice in his eyes, New York’s Philip Schuyler, one of the Continental army’s new major generals, had been given command of the operation—
his
operation, to Arnold’s thinking. On his way back to Connecticut, a dispirited Arnold met with Philip Schuyler, born into one of New York’s most powerful families and wed into another. A veteran of the French and Indian War, Schuyler was a delegate to the Continental Congress and was chosen to command the Northern Department of the army when Washington was appointed commander in chief. Impressed with Arnold, Schuyler offered him a key staff position. But Arnold also received a much-delayed letter informing him that his thirty-year-old wife, Peggy, had died suddenly in his absence. He returned to New Haven and his | 187 \

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three young motherless boys. Still intent upon a role in the invasion of Canada, he left the boys in the care of his sister, Hannah, and set off for Cambridge, where General Washington was now keeping the British at bay while attempting to mold a new American army.

Meeting Washington on August 15, 1775, Benedict Arnold laid out a plan for a secondary invasion of Canada while Schuyler, who had taken Arnold’s Ticonderoga nemesis Ethan Allen into his command, pursued the assault on Canada up from Lake Champlain. Arnold’s new plan called for a second attack aimed at Quebec, by traversing the Maine wilderness by canoe before winter set in. Confounded by the woes of the untrained, ill-fed army that had been presented to him, and the politicians he answered to, Washington apparently found Arnold a kindred spirit. As biographer Willard Sterne Randall commented, “Both understood . . . rule in war by an officer class which insisted on rank, order and discipline and emphasized leadership by personal example. Most of all, they were daring soldiers by inclination, and they sensed and admired this trait in others.”12 Washington gave Arnold a new commission as a colonel and more than a thousand men for his Canadian venture. But Arnold had to first endure a humiliating committee of investigation that was challenging his actions and expenditures, based on the innuendo spread about him by some old Connecticut enemies. Despite his successes, and his own opinion of his abilities which were admittedly considerable, Arnold found his path constantly blocked by forces who wanted to undercut him. He was also learning, as George Washington was, that all was fair in politics and war.

I also give it in charge to you to avoid all disrespect or contempt of the religion of the country and its ceremonies. Prudence, policy and a true Christian spirit will lead us to look with compassion upon their errors | 188 \

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without insulting them. While we are contending for our own liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the rights of conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the judge of the hearts of men and to him only, in this case, they are answerable.

—George Washington, written orders to Benedict Arnold
Washington’s instructions to Arnold before sending him north hint at a little-noted aspect of America’s independence movement, one not usually mentioned in the same breath as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That was colonial America’s deeply held, sharp, and often virulent anti-Catholic (and anti-French) prejudices. Centuries of England’s religious turmoil and Protestant propaganda had left many Americans, particularly the Puritan stock of New England, violently anti-Catholic. In Boston, Catholic priests had long been banned, and November 5 (known as Guy Fawkes Day in England, commemorating a failed Catholic plot against Parliament) had come to be celebrated as “Pope’s Day.” As the pope was paraded in effigy through the streets, mobs were encouraged to lustily express their contempt for Roman Catholicism, and Boston’s authorities allowed South Side mobs to brawl in the streets against North Side gangs as a way to “blow off steam.”13

To America’s vast Protestant majority, the long history of Spanish “perfidies,” the purges of Protestants under Bloody Mary detailed in Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs,
the anti-Catholic rants of clerics such as Cotton Mather, and the fresh example of French Catholic–allied Indians massacring English settlers and soldiers were all bitterly held memories.

This centuries-old religious animus took a sharp political turn in 1774, when England passed the Quebec Act, along with the Intolerable Acts. The former law’s intent was to keep Canada’s largely French Catholic population pacified so that England would not have to gar-

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rison the massive territory. While Catholics were not allowed to hold public office in Canada, the Quebec Act recognized the Roman Catholic religion and restored Canada’s frontier borders. The law was not only considered a betrayal of Protestantism but also a direct assault on the land claims made by American speculators who had fought against the French and now felt stabbed in the heart by Parliament, creating another layer of American colonial resentment. After the Quebec Act was announced, Congregational minister (and later Yale president) Ezra Stiles screamed that it had established the “Roman Church and IDOLATRY.” A seemingly otherwise enlightened Dr. Joseph Warren deemed the Canadian charter “dangerous in an extreme degree to the Protestant religion and to the civil rights and liberties of all America.”

New York’s John Jay, a delegate to the Continental Congress, spoke for many Americans when he expressed his fears of a wave of Catholic immigration that would, “reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies to [a] state of slavery.” Reacting to the act, Jay railed in “astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish . . . a religion that has deluged your island in blood and spread impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion throughout every part of the world.”

(When later drafting New York’s state constitution, Jay, the future first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed erecting what he called “a wall of brass around the country” to keep out Catholics.) Credit George Washington with more temperate views, a tolerance of other religious traditions that was far from common in eighteenth-century Christian America. Besides, Washington knew that if a Canadian invasion were to succeed and French Canadians to join the Americans in rebellion, he needed the goodwill of the predominantly Catholic population.

While Arnold prepared for this wilderness march to Quebec, his | 190 \

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rival Ethan Allen was already assaulting Montreal. With only a handful of men, Allen had foolishly attacked the city late in September 1775. The attack was a fiasco, and the hero of Ticonderoga was captured by the British. His Revolutionary military career was over. In roundabout fashion, Allen was transported by prison ship to Ireland, Madeira, North Carolina, Halifax, and finally New York, which had by then fallen to British forces. Ethan Allen remained captive for more than two years, until he was exchanged for a British officer. Allen returned to the Republic of Vermont, where he was appointed general of the still-disputed area’s army by men with little love for either England or America, and lobbied for recognition of the state. When Congress refused, Allen began negotiating with the British governor of Canada for recognition of Vermont as a British province. For this, he was later charged with treason, but the charge was never substantiated. Allen always claimed that it had simply been a ploy to force Congress to recognize Vermont.

Following Allen’s defeat and capture, Benedict Arnold’s expedition into Canada deteriorated into a disaster of even greater proportions. With a force of eleven hundred men, Arnold had moved by river through Maine’s wilderness and over the Appalachian Mountains.

Among his command was a young volunteer from a prominent New Jersey family. Aaron Burr was accompanied by a nineteen-year-old Abenaki woman the other men had nicknamed “Golden Thighs.”14

Her presence might have provided the few moments of solace enjoyed on what otherwise became a hellish march.

When he reached the outskirts of Quebec in November 1775, Arnold had fewer than seven hundred men still with him. Those who finished the trek had endured six weeks of starvation and disease, reduced to eating dogs to survive. About 150 of his men had | 191 \

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died, mostly sickened by dysentery, a debilitating disease that causes diarrhea. Hungry, sick, and injured, many others had deserted during the grueling expedition through 350 miles of Maine’s rugged backcountry. Arnold then linked his forces with those of General Richard Montgomery, a former British officer who had joined the rebels and had replaced General Schuyler, who had since fallen ill. A few weeks after Ethan Allen’s failed attack on Montreal, Montgomery successfully captured the French citadel on November 13, 1775.

In a howling winter storm on December 31, 1775, Montgomery and Arnold led an American attack on the well-fortified city of Quebec but suffered another grievous defeat. As Richard Ketchum succinctly wrote about the battle, “Just about everything that could go wrong, did . . . Montgomery was killed, Arnold badly wounded, and another exceptional officer, Daniel Morgan captured. Even at that, the rebels nearly brought it off.”15 Ultimately the British prevailed, with hundreds of Americans left dead or captured in the futile attack. In a winter that was as unforgiving for the 350 American survivors of the battle for Quebec as Valley Forge later proved to be for Washington’s troops, the severely wounded Arnold maintained a halfhearted siege of Quebec, camped around the city.

Onto this abysmal scene, another old enemy arrived—smallpox.

In
Pox Americana,
Elizabeth Fenn describes the state of the Americans outside Quebec: “The men were exhausted. Many were weak from starvation. They lived in close, unsanitary conditions, and with winter setting in, lodgings only became more crowded and contact more familiar. Very soon after arriving, a Massachusetts-born fife player made an ominous journal entry. ‘The small pox is all around us,’ wrote Caleb Haskell on December 6, 1775, ‘and there is great danger of its spreading in the army.’ ”16 In a humane act in the midst of war, the British | 192 \

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commander at Quebec took in many of the American sick in an attempt to properly care for them. Benedict Arnold initially enforced the Continental army’s prohibition against inoculation, still a highly controversial expedient, but eventually looked the other way as the disease threatened his army.

In the spring of 1776, Arnold was relieved and returned to Montreal, where he continued to recuperate, having nearly lost his leg.

By then, Henry Knox, a portly twenty-five-year-old bookseller from Boston, had finished the mission that Arnold had begun months earlier at Fort Ticonderoga. In doing so, Knox carried off one of the most extraordinary feats of the Revolution’s early days. Between December 5, 1775, and January 26, 1776, “Ox” Knox and his men had managed to transport sixty tons of cannons and mortars from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge. In the dead of winter, moving with ox-drawn sleds, they had negotiated the frozen Hudson River and then crossed the Berkshire Mountains, delivering the artillery to an overjoyed George Washington. Knox earned Washington’s permanent gratitude, friendship, and respect, and the bookish Quaker, with no real military experience, was placed in charge of Washington’s artillery. He remained one of Washington’s closest aides throughout the war, later becoming the nation’s first secretary of war when Washington was elected president.

In a dazzling engineering feat, the cannons Knox delivered were placed overnight on Dorchester Heights, overlooking Boston. The sight of this artillery greeting them one morning astonished the British, and General Howe, who had replaced the disgraced General Gage, reportedly exclaimed, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”

The shocking new reality forced the British to abandon Boston, | 193 \

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evacuating in hundreds of shiploads on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1776. They took along thousands of Boston’s Tory loyalists, who were forced to leave behind almost everything they owned. Almost un-believably, Boston was in patriot hands. The British sailed first for Halifax and ultimately to New York, where George Washington also moved the bulk of his army in preparation for the next great engagement of the war.

Back in Canada, the “quiet war” was about to give way to a curi-ous attempt at diplomacy. On April 29, 1776, Benedict Arnold turned out his men for a welcoming ceremony. At Montreal’s landing, he greeted a group of commissioners secretly sent by Congress hoping to persuade the people of Canada to unite with the American cause and create a fourteenth colony. The odd collection of dignitaries included a congressman, one of America’s richest men, America’s most famous man, the seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin, and an American Jesuit priest. Having endured a rigorous winter journey from Philadelphia, Franklin, Maryland congressman Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll, a wealthy Maryland patriot, carried gold to resupply Arnold’s army and a printing press that would turn out propaganda to convince French Canadians to join the American cause.