1775 (82 page)

Perhaps. But the nearness of overall victory on December 31 seems dubious. The Citadel of Quebec had never been taken by enemy attack. The British had won in 1759 because the Marquis de Montcalm, a chevalier, foolishly marched his soldiers onto the Plains of Abraham to do battle, when he could have safely forted up for the winter. Carleton had no such romantic notions, and although Montgomery and Arnold made a gallant attempt on December 31, the genuine American opportunity to force Quebec into surrender ended in November. The portrait of a heroic Montgomery and an almost-victory in that desperate attack has substituted for a reality in which much was unnecessarily lost and wasted.

Benedict Arnold: The Indispensable Man of 1775?

Indispensable is a fair description, but later treason has tainted and shadowed his extraordinary early Revolutionary achievements. Among Arnold’s 1775 assets, as a former Connecticut merchant and shipmaster, was knowing his way around the north country. He had sailed to both Canada and the West Indies, and as a merchant he had good contacts and relations with the politically active English-speaking communities in Montreal and Quebec.

When the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and his expedition to St. John several days later brought Arnold’s name to the attention of Guy Carleton
in Quebec, the latter’s June acknowledgment of Arnold’s Canadian expertise must have been grudging. No other Yankee colonel had comparable qualifications. But a second part of what pointed Arnold toward Ticonderoga and Crown Point was his knowledge of the two posts’ cannon, mortars, and military supplies.

As Captain Arnold of the Connecticut Foot Guards, he had been leading his men toward Boston on April 25 when he met Connecticut Colonel Samuel Holden Parsons in Hartford, beginning a conversation that would prove important to both colonies. When Parsons mentioned the Boston Patriots’ shortage of cannon, Arnold cited Ticonderoga as having “a great number of brass cannon.” Parsons passed this information to Connecticut leaders, who promptly drew £300 from the provincial treasury for an expedition. On April 29, Arnold arrived in Cambridge and arranged quarters for his troops. The next day, he met with Joseph Warren of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, pointing out that Ticonderoga, with as many as 130 pieces of artillery, was in such ruinous condition that it could be captured easily. On May 2, Massachusetts made Arnold a colonel on “secret” service and “commander in chief over a body of men not exceeding four hundred” for the purpose of capturing Ticonderoga. He was then to “take possession of the cannon, mortars, stores etc. upon the lake” and return to Cambridge with all the “serviceable” weaponry.
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After Ticonderoga and Crown Point fell, both Arnold and the Provincial Congress were unable to arrange for the ordnance to be taken to Massachusetts as Warren had hoped. But while the cannon sat, mid-May found Arnold busy making an inventory, increasing his detailed knowledge of the captured ordnance, munitions, and supplies so that even George Washington tapped it when Arnold visited Cambridge in August. The commanding general quickly requisitioned some of the lead his visitor mentioned for bullets.
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May also gave Arnold a chance to display his seamanship. Just days after Ticonderoga and Crown Point were taken, a longtime Arnold associate, Eleazer Oswald, informed him that a few miles to the south, his Patriot force had captured a small schooner from Philip Skene, a retired British officer and large landowner. After arming the schooner with six cannon and four swivels and renaming it the
Liberty,
Arnold sailed north to St. John, as yet minimally fortified. There he surprised and captured the small British garrison, further seizing the king’s 70-ton sloop, the only vessel of any size on Lake Champlain. Along with nine bateaux, the captured British
sloop was taken south to Crown Point and renamed the
Enterprise.
Until the British constructed another vessel or two, they had no way to move soldiers south on the lake. This barred, for the near term, any retaliatory invasion. Benedict Arnold, until April a part-time captain in the Connecticut Foot, had at least temporarily secured Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Lake Champlain for Congress.

As befit his new stature, Arnold drafted and in mid-June sent off a long letter and a set of recommendations to the Continental Congress. After describing Carleton’s failure to recruit either the French population or the northern Indians, he added that the Canadians had been expecting an American visit and were becoming “very impatient of our delay.”
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What he recommended was both bold and feasible—an invasion plan that called for a small army of 2,000 men and the necessary train of artillery, to depart as soon as possible. The entire force would move north to St. John and nearby Fort Chambly. On arrival, half would be left to besiege those two forts, while the other half headed for Montreal and ultimately Quebec. His argument, based on knowledge and contacts in both cities, was that the gates of Montreal, “on our arrival at that place, will be opened by our friends there, in consequence of a plan for that purpose already entered into.”
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Two thousand men—necessarily New Englanders, because New York was unprepared—would suffice. Speed was essential; there was no need to wait for any larger force.

His timing was politically unfortunate because Congress in mid-June was still caught up in adopting the army besieging Boston, naming Washington to command, and squabbling over the appointment of major generals and brigadiers. The delegates had signaled their willingness to keep Ticonderoga and Crown Point on May 31, but actual orders to invade Canada were not issued until June 27. New Yorker Schuyler was put in command, not Arnold. No relatively unknown New England colonel could have been named. But in the spring and summer of 1776, when painful retrospect was in order, it was clear that Arnold’s plan had been by far the best.

One Massachusetts historian summed up: “If two thousand men, well equipped, well supported, could at that juncture [June] have been thrown against Carleton, the result would have been a great success. Arnold’s information of the friendliness of the Canadian peasants, and the Indians, was quite correct…he could have crushed Carleton.”
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Both Philip Schuyler and George Washington took Arnold’s capacities
seriously indeed. In July Schuyler wanted him as his adjutant general but had to appoint a New Yorker. Then in August Washington chose Arnold to command the secondary expedition to Quebec that he had just decided upon, which would traverse Maine’s little-traveled high country. There, of course, Arnold distinguished himself with a performance that was likened to those of Hannibal and Xenophon. As for the main expedition, Schuyler fell short of hopes, and Montgomery’s performance largely escaped critical scrutiny because of his gallant death on December 31.

Nor did Arnold’s spectacular achievements in the north country finish in 1775. On October 11, 1776, months after bedraggled American forces had left Canada, Arnold—now commanding a flotilla of fifteen gundalows and galleys—fought General Carleton and a naval force of 25 vessels under Commodore Thomas Pringle near Valcour Island in Lake Champlain. Because the broadsides fired by the British fleet outweighed Arnold’s by two to one, most of the American squadron was sunk. But Arnold had delayed Carleton long enough that the British commander decided to return to Canada. In doing so, he postponed any invasion through New York from Canada until 1777. For that reason, the famed naval historian Alfred T. Mahan rated the Battle of Valcour Island as one of the war’s most important American successes: “When Benedict Arnold on Lake Champlain by vigorous use of small means obtained a year’s delay for the colonists, he compassed the surrender of Burgoyne in 1777. The surrender of Burgoyne, justly estimated as the decisive event of the war, was due to Arnold’s previous action.”
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A year later Arnold commanded during the decisive American victory in the extended Battle of Saratoga, overshadowing the army’s nominal commander, General Horatio Gates. But as in 1775 and 1776, Arnold did not receive the recognition that he expected and deserved. Over the subsequent two centuries, unwillingness to praise a man who later turned traitor doubtless worked to narrow Americans’ attention to the invasion of Canada. It is jarring to read about an Arnold whose accomplishments were second only to those of George Washington.

The Invasion of Canada: Victory or Defeat?

Neither description really fits. No true victory could have ended in the ignominious retreat of American armies in June and July 1776. But neither can the term
defeat
be used to describe Arnold’s wilderness march, or the
many times during October and November when an American victory had been within reach. Overall, in strategic terms, the invasion of Canada achieved most of its secondary goals: the inevitable British invasion southward through New York’s Champlain-Hudson corridor was delayed and ultimately thwarted; the Canadian Indians, traditionally hostile to New England, were neutralized during 1775 and early 1776; no attack on the New England frontier was launched from Canada during that period to draw Yankee militia away from the siege of Boston; and a fair amount of vital artillery and gunpowder was captured in Canada, although not the Quebec ordnance and munitions that tantalized George Washington.

British military historians have admitted that the North ministry was stunned on December 23 when a frigate arrived from Quebec with news that the British forces in Montreal had been shattered while another band of rebels had burst from the wilderness near Quebec City, putting the latter under siege.
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But to one American chronicler, British sangfroid had to accept a new script: “This news forced the government to alter radically its plans for the forthcoming campaign in America. The relief of Quebec and the reconquest of Canada now had to take priority over the invasion of New York.” The first and third divisions of transports were assigned for Canada.
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The fact that the invasion of Canada ended in retreat produced the predictable historical blurring and intercolony name-calling. New Yorkers blamed the New Englanders who left before December 31 because their enlistments were up. New Englanders criticized Schuyler and blamed the New Yorkers for tardy commitment and supplies. John Adams, bitter at the lost opportunity, blamed the naïve reconciliation wing in the Second Continental Congress led by John Dickinson and James Duane, and some New England historians have concurred.
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What should not be debated was whether the invasion was a sound idea. Arnold’s June 1775 proposal—a masterful assessment—seems to have been conceptually embraced by Washington even after Congress’s rejection. When Montgomery didn’t simultaneously put St. John under siege and bombardment while moving part of his force on to Montreal, the commanding general asked why.
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When Schuyler and Montgomery seemed to procrastinate, Washington worried about Arnold being left out on a limb. Had the latter been named brigadier general, put in command of 2,000 men, and ordered to implement his own invasion blueprint during the summer of 1775, he would have won. His fame might have become second only
to Washington, who would deservedly have shared in any Canadian laurels.

In the longer term, any such victory might have been surprisingly complicated. Most historians believe that whatever happened in 1775, Britain would have regained Quebec and Canada within a few years. On the other hand, at least one Canadian chronicler has contended that if the Americans had taken Canada, they could have kept it in the final peace negotiations.
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Perhaps the most intriguing caveat is that if the Americans had taken Quebec and Canada in 1775, Foreign Minister Vergennes and Louis XVI could have made Canada’s return to France a precondition of the essential aid that that nation extended in 1776 and 1777. That could have made the invasion of 1775 seem less wise.

But the actual results, as we have seen, threw the British into a confusion that played havoc with their early war plan. This embarrassment was not confined to Boston and Canada. In Virginia, the early British response to the Revolution miscarried in the hands of a royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, whose flashes of strategic acumen were brought to naught by delusions of personal and military grandeur.

T
hat George Washington and Richard Henry Lee, within only a few weeks of each other, could differ so much on the prospects of Virginia’s royal governor testifies to Dunmore’s important but odd place in the early American Revolution. His brief leadership against the American cause crossed the Virginia skies with an almost cometlike trajectory. More than any other North American governor, he merged his idiosyncrasies and controversial views into the nature of the war in his colony until, like a shooting star, he fell from sight in the summer of 1776. Never again would he return to Virginia.

John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, had been governor of New York for a short time before London moved him to the Old Dominion as governor in 1771. The principal preoccupations he displayed while in New York—
finding opportunities to acquire land—continued to motivate him in Williamsburg. He had come to America, he acknowledged, to make his fortune.
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