1775 (81 page)

Schuyler might have been reticent, and New Englanders criticized him repeatedly: in 1775 for slowness; in 1776 for abandoning Crown Point; and in 1777 for partial culpability in the abandonment of Ticonderoga. His embarrassment peaked in 1778 when British Major John Acland, one of Burgoyne’s officers, who had become close to Schuyler during his captivity after the Battle of Saratoga, reported to British generals that the New Yorker had not favored the break with Britain.
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Why Quebec Almost Fell but Did Not

Unfortunately for the Patriot cause, delay came in many forms—provincial, political, and military. All were at work in the second half of 1775 as opportunity after opportunity was missed.

In
The War of American Independence,
military historian Don Higginbotham blistered Schuyler as “vastly deficient in assembling and training an offensive army” and lamented his “dilatory tactics.”
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In late July, the general advised the Continental Congress of his easygoing intentions: he would be “going to St. John’s with a respectable body, giving the Canadians to understand, when we arrive there, that we mean nothing more than to prevent the regular troops from getting a naval strength and interrupting the friendly intercourse that has subsisted between them and us.”
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The more soldierly Montgomery began the Canadian incursion “with no intention of pressing down upon Quebec just then, but planned to spend the winter at Montreal.”
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That relaxed time frame seems to have lingered. In late October, to quell unrest among his men, he promised that those who continued on with him to Montreal could depart for home. In late August, though, Washington had told Schuyler that Benedict Arnold would be marching to Quebec through Maine.

By early September, as Schuyler and Montgomery moved their 1,500 men into Quebec, the St. John entrenchments had become the designated British strongpoint to block the American advance.
Map 8
shows the essential locations and distances. Of the 700 redcoats then stationed in Canada, 200 were in Montreal, 80 were at Fort Chambly, and 400 were concentrated at St. John. These entrenchments on the Richelieu River were not a full, purpose-built fort; they should have fallen in a few weeks, given the cannon and mortars available at Ticonderoga and Crown Point.

The initial approaches to St. John, carried out with Schuyler in command on September 5–6 and on September 10–11, were muddles, as historians generally agree. The first was stung by an Indian ambush, followed by the American commander’s gullible acceptance of supposedly friendly advice to retreat. He was told of the fort’s completion—untrue—and of potential bombardment by the sixteen-gun schooner
Royal Savage
(which in fact lacked room to maneuver on the river). Schuyler quickly retreated ten miles south, disheartening his inexperienced troops.
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The September 10–11 effort, likewise riddled with mismanagement and
again demoralizing, resulted in a second retreat back to the Isle de Noix. The hapless Schuyler, whose health problems seem to have been aggravated by military stress, thereupon went home for rest and care. Montgomery, left in command, advanced to St. John and on September 18 undertook a siege and river blockade.

Montgomery’s generalship, although muscular alongside Schuyler’s, had shortcomings. Not only did he lack artillery experience, but according to one British military history “the American blockade was also extremely lax—Preston [Major Charles Preston, the British commander at St. John] communicated regularly with Carleton and on October 4, two Canadian officers rounded up eight cattle from nearby fields and brought them into the fort.”
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Food supplies were only belatedly cut off.

Neither Schuyler nor Montgomery seems to have understood the need to pound St. John into quick submission in order to reach Quebec by late October or early November. Both men were initially reconciliation minded, and neither initially demanded siege artillery. Indeed, Schuyler retained some of his colony’s earlier reluctance to use the cannon and mortars captured at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. In July, he had referred to making use of the field pieces “in the State House Yard at Philadelphia.”
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Historian Allen French dismissed Schuyler’s knowledge of gunnery as “strangely vague” in light of his July request for “an assortment of articles in the artillery way.”
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At any rate, when the siege of St. John began on September 18, the encircling Americans were outgunned by the cannon of the British defenders.
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Montgomery, no artillerist, may have deplored the very notion of pounding the British into submission as incompatible with reconciliation. He had been a British Army captain himself until 1772. Indeed, although the thirteen-inch mortar nicknamed “the Sow” belatedly arrived from Ticonderoga on October 5, its initial use was apparently ineffective. Details from a diary kept during the siege by the Reverend Benjamin Trumbull, another Connecticut chaplain, noted that by mid-October, officers of the besieging army, New Englanders, New Yorkers, and allied Canadians, were on the verge of mutiny over Montgomery’s ineffective placements of artillery. In a council of war, Montgomery reluctantly consented to the new placements insisted upon. Work quickly got under way. Diarist Trumbull’s explanation is revealing: the new battery “entirely answered the Expectations of the Army. In a Day or two, it sunk the Enemy’s Schooner and opened a more safe passage by the Forts down the Lake [Richelieu River]. Besides, it greatly
annoyed the Enemy, and seemed to prepare the Way for all the future Success of the Army. It is remarkable however that General Montgomery never gave any General Orders to erect, man or in any way to maintain or Support this Battery from first to last, nor would he ever own it to be his.”
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The belatedly intensified bombardment destroyed buildings, walls, vessels, and provisions—the garrison had to sleep in cellars—on a scale that obliged Major Preston to surrender St. John on November 3. Despite commanding scarcely more than “two low-lying small redoubts connected by palisades,” Preston had held out against what could have been an American victory won in two to four weeks, and he pointedly noted in his journal that “we may thank our Enemy…for leaving us in such slight field Works the credit of having been only reduced by Famine.”
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Several Canadian historians have come to the same conclusion. One of them, Jacques Castonguay, wrote that “if Quebec has saved Canada from the American Revolution, it seems fair to say that it is St. John that saved Quebec. If Arnold and Montgomery could not take Quebec December 31, 1775, that is primarily due to the small army of Major Preston, in garrison at Fort St. John. The Americans had hoped to take over Canada in early fall 1775, but their plan was thwarted and rendered impossible by the fierce resistance they met on the Richelieu.”
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Fort Chambly, a less important outlier of Montreal, had surrendered on October 18. Thus St. John’s capture in early November meant that nearly 500 of Canada’s 700 redcoats were now American prisoners. Montgomery entered Montreal on November 13, but in the meantime Governor Carleton escaped downriver toward Quebec by disguising himself as a poor
habitant.
These weeks of British despondency confirmed the Patriot opportunity. Quebec now lay wide open, and on November 8, Benedict Arnold, leading his remaining 600 down the Chaudière River to the St. Lawrence, could see the great citadel in the distance.

Carleton was especially bitter over French peasant disaffection and widespread refusal to serve in his militia. He told London officials that his defense of the province would have succeeded “had not this wretched people been blind to honour, duty, and their own interest.” He also lamented the state of affairs in Quebec: “We have not one soldier in the town and the lower sort are not more loyal than here [Montreal].” As for the Indians, “they are as easily dejected as the Canadian peasantry, and like them chose to be of the strongest side.”
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Although George Washington did not take up the Abenaki chiefs on their promise to join the Americans in invading
Canada, Benedict Arnold enlisted 40 St. Francis Abenaki and ten Penobscot.

As we saw in
Chapter 10
, British apprehension extended to Niagara in the west and Nova Scotia in the east. General Gage in Boston, on hearing September reports of Arnold’s small fleet carrying troops to cross Maine, first surmised they were a Nova Scotia–bound invasion force.
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In October and November, some 20 ships in Montreal and Quebec sailed for Britain carrying valuable goods, munitions, and government papers. Lieutenant Governor Hector Cramahe, in charge during Carleton’s absence, wrote to Lord Dartmouth on November 9 that “two battalions in the spring might have saved the province,” but now “I doubt whether twenty would regain it.”
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As late as November 12, legend has Quebec City’s St. John’s Gate remaining open.

British fortune brightened somewhat when Arnold’s troops, reaching the St. Lawrence on November 9, were obliged by weather to wait several days to cross in canoes—and even then only 350 managed to cross by November 13. The remaining 150 were still on the eastern shore. These were the days during which the gates were supposedly open, and even the exhausted 350 men might have taken Quebec. On November 20, a frustrated Arnold wrote to George Washington that “had I been ten days sooner, Quebec must inevitably have fallen into our hands, as there was not a man there to oppose us.”
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Further optimism followed the arrival of ships, officers, and reinforcements between November 4 and November 19. The first reinforcement arrived by ship on November 4—90 recruits, mostly Irish, from Newfoundland. On November 5, the 28-gun British frigate
Lizard,
which had escorted two powder ships up the St. Lawrence, arrived with a small complement of marines, as well as some 150 naval personnel. These became the core of a 400-man “Marine Battalion” organized from seamen on the various vessels. November 12 brought the arrival of the British officer widely credited with December’s successful defense of Quebec—Lieutenant Colonel Allan MacLean of the Royal Highland Emigrants.

Ordered to help defend Montreal, MacLean had left Quebec back in September with 120 of his men, adding 60 fusiliers from the Seventh Regiment as well as several hundred French militia. Blocked near Montreal by American troops, his militia fled, and he hurried back, reaching Quebec by November 12 just before Arnold managed to cross the St. Lawrence. MacLean quickly took over command from a relieved Cramahe, organized the
men, inspected the walls, and mounted cannon to best effect. Between the end of October and November 15, the men on hand to defend the city doubled from essentially militia strength to a more impressive 1,800, although the reliability of the 540 Quebecois militia remained suspect.
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Montgomery’s dawdling also aided the defenders. He had entered Montreal on November 13 but took weeks to move on. After causing a near-mutiny in October by reluctance to pound the British in St. John, he again soured his officers through his supposed cosseting of the British officers captured at St. John and Chambly. Stung by these criticisms, Montgomery resigned. Then he spent another day to work out partial retractions of their slights so that he could honorably withdraw his resignation and resume the campaign. With several vital days wasted, Montgomery wrote apologetically to Washington: “I am ashamed of staying here so long and not getting to Arnold’s assistance.”
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So many soldiers had taken advantage of Montgomery’s October promise of being able to go home if they stayed to reach Montreal that after leaving a garrison in Montreal, he approached Quebec on December 1 with only 300 men.

As for Arnold, with just 350 men on the Quebec City side of the St. Lawrence, November’s new British arrivals soon worried him. A full inspection of his arms and ammunition found so much powder deteriorated or lost that only five rounds per man remained—too little should MacLean decide to sally and attack, as was rumored. Thus on November 18 Arnold had decided to leave Quebec City and move 30 miles south to Pointe-aux-Trembles, where he could safely wait for a Montgomery now far behind schedule. Montgomery’s delay meant that the whole surprise and benefit of the grueling march through Maine had been lost. The 1,150 selected volunteers Arnold had started with could just as well have come up the Champlain-Hudson corridor. Had they done so, the combined force could have moved more powerfully and quickly than Montgomery did.

By the time Montgomery arrived on December 1, the days and weeks dissipated during September, October, and November had dimmed the once-bright prospect of victory. Had Montgomery taken St. John and Montreal in October and brought a 1,000-man army to Quebec’s walls as November began, the surprise of Arnold’s additional 600 arriving shortly thereafter would probably have caused Quebec to surrender. One British official had heard that residents had already drawn up articles of capitulation.
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Now fortune favored the British. After MacLean returned to Quebec on
November 12, Governor Carleton made his way back by November 19. By December, the citadel’s heavy cannon were fully in position, and by Christmas, some 1,850 defenders outnumbered 1,000 or so attackers. Worse, the enlistment terms of many of the remaining New England soldiers expired on December 31. As the month drew to a close, Montgomery and Arnold had no option. They had to attack, which the British knew—and for which they were prepared.

Montgomery dying in the attack and Arnold being wounded, mainstream American history has somewhat romanticized the actual battle for Quebec and its citadel, turning it into a fight the colonial forces nearly won despite a snowstorm and two-to-one odds in favor of the defenders. Several moments of possible American nearness to victory have become frequent citations: the potential opportunity once through the barricades on the Sault-au-Matelot; the strong position at the abandoned British battery thrown away by Colonel Campbell’s muddled retreat after Montgomery’s death; and Daniel Morgan’s delay and consequential lost opportunity to break through into Quebec’s Lower Town.
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