Conceived in Liberty (215 page)

In addition to imposing a web of hierarchy on the Continental Army, Washington crushed liberty within by replacing individual responsibility by iron despotism and coercion. Severe and brutal punishments were imposed upon those soldiers whose sense of altruism failed to override their instinct for self-preservation. Furloughs were curtailed and girl friends of soldiers were expelled from camp; above all, lengthy floggings were introduced for all practices which Washington considered esthetically or morally offensive. He even had the temerity to urge Congress to raise the maximum number of strikes of the lash from 39 to the enormous number of 500; fortunately, Congress refused.

In a few short months, Washington had succeeded in extirpating a zealous, happy, individualistic people’s army, and transforming it into yet another statist army, filled with bored, resentful, and even mutinous soldiery. The only thing he could not do was force the troops to continue in camp after their terms of enlistment were up at the end of the year, and by now the soldiers were longing for home. In addition to all other factors, Americans were not geared—nor should they have been—for a lengthy conflict of position and attrition; they were not professional soldiers, and they were needed at their homes and jobs and on their farms. Had they been a frankly guerrilla army, there would have been no conflict between these roles.

As the end of 1775 drew near, then, Washington’s main preoccupation was in forging a new army to replace the 17,000 men whose terms of enlistment were about to expire. His problems were aggravated by Congress’ refusal to pay the bounties for enlistment New Englanders were used to receiving; instead caste distinctions were widened even further by raising officers’ pay, while privates’ pay remained the same. Only 3,500 of the old army agreed to reenlist; for the rest, very short-term enlistments of Massachusetts and New Hampshire men filled the gap until new enlistees finally swelled the total to about 10,000.

As might have been expected, the wealthy and aristocratic Washington, free from money worries, had little understanding of the economic plight of his soldiery. In contrast to the legends about his compassion, Washington
railed about the defecting troops as being possessed of a “dirty mercenary spirit” and of “basely deserting the cause of their country.”
*

A particularly colorful addition to the New England troops in the Continental Army, during the summer of 1775, was a detachment of nine enlisted companies of expert riflemen from the back-country frontier of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, five of them from Pennsylvania. There were over 1,400 of these riflemen in all. The bulk of them were hardy Ulster Scot frontiersmen, wearing hunting outfits bearing the motto Liberty or Death and employing the unique “Kentucky rifle,” invented by Pennsylvania German gunsmiths. This long-barreled rifle was uniquely suited for guerrilla warfare. It shot more accurately and over a far longer range than the shorter musket in general use, but it did not reload rapidly, and hence was not useful for orthodox, open-field, positional or linear volley warfare.

It is not surprising that these backwoodsmen proved even more individualistic and less tolerant of coercion than the New Englanders. When they terrorized British sentries with their sniping, Washington forbade such seemingly disorganized practice which spent ammunition. Whenever a rifleman was imprisoned for infringing one of Washington’s arbitrary but cherished rules, his comrades would break into the prison and set him free. On one occasion, virtually an entire Pennsylvania company mutinied to try to free one of their own, and several regiments were needed to disarm and convict the Pennsylvanians, whose penalty consisted of less than a week’s pay. The riflemen, however, were not so much unfit for any military service as they were “by nature and by experience, totally unfitted for inactive life in camp.” When the opportunity came for action for which they were suited, they were to serve admirably.
**

Meanwhile, the British troops, reinforced in midsummer by up to 5,000 effectives, also dug in for a lengthy siege. As was inevitable, General Gage was made the scapegoat for Bunker Hill, and in mid-October he was recalled and replaced as commander-in-chief by the hardly less culpable General Howe.

*
Willard M. Wallace,
Appeal to Arms: A Military History of the American Revolution
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1951), pp. 54–55.

**
Christopher Ward,
The War of the Revolution
(New York: Macmillan, 1952), I:108.

While Washington busied himself with crippling the morale of the American army before Boston, other American forces were not idle. We have seen that promptly upon seizing Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold both pressed upon Congress the urgency of seizing the northern British base in Canada. They realized the necessity of speed; the British commander in Canada, Gen. Guy Carleton, his troops depleted to aid General Gage in Boston, had only two foot regiments and two artillery companies to defend the entire region. Speed was also needed to take advantage of spring and summer weather. There were Americans who supported a prompt strike at the British base in Canada—for instance, one of the sparkplugs of the blow at Ticonderoga had been John Brown, a lawyer of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who had been sent as early as February as a secret agent to the Canadians by the Boston Committee of Correspondence to whip up support for the colonial cause. But we have seen that the conservatives in the Congress timorously scuttled the plan and even tried to get the Americans to withdraw from Ticonderoga. They even went so far as to drive the bold and brilliant Arnold and Allen from command.

The discontented activist officers at Ticonderoga quickly reacted by sending Ethan Allen and Seth Warner of the Green Mountain Boys as emissaries to the Continental Congress. Apparently, Congress found Allen persuasive, for it promptly recommended to the New York Provincial Congress that it form the Green Mountain Boys into a ranger regiment with officers of their own choosing. Moreover, four days later, on June 27, Congress finally decided to authorize an invasion of Canada.

While the Americans essentially adopted Arnold’s tactical plan of taking Montreal and then moving on to Quebec, Congress, of course, did not have the imagination or daring to place such brilliant military radicals as Arnold or Allen in charge of the expedition against Canada. Instead, command was given to the man already in charge of the “northern department” at New York, the timorous and conservative scion of the New York landed oligarchy, Philip Schuyler. At a time when speed was of the essence, Schuyler dithered for two precious months, preparing his army of 1,700 men to move north from Crown Point and Ticonderoga. Fortunately, Schuyler had as his second in command the highly competent Brig. Gen. Richard Montgomery, who recognized the need for speed in mounting the invasion. The British-born Montgomery had had almost as much military experience in Europe as his friend Charles Lee or Horatio Gates, and had resigned from the British army in 1772 to settle in New York and marry into the Livingston branch of the New York landed aristocracy. In vain did he press Schuyler to march north; finally, taking advantage of Schuyler’s absence at a parley to secure the neutrality of the Iroquois, Montgomery took it upon himself to make the move against Canada at the end of August, a decision in which Schuyler, taken off the hook, readily concurred.

General Carleton decided to make his main stand at Fort St. John’s on the Richelieu River, north of Lake Champlain. But Schuyler lingered defensively in front of St. John’s for two weeks, and only his illness, forcing him to return south in mid-September, permitted Montgomery to surround and lay proper siege to the fort.

The great bulk of the American expeditionary force came from Connecticut; the conservative province of New York, as Connecticut’s Colonel Hinman said sourly, “abounds with officers, but I have not had my curiosity gratified by the sight of one private.” While this proved to be a slight exaggeration, the New Englanders were understandably aggrieved at seeing the New Yorkers fill the major posts and gain lucrative commissary contracts, while
they
furnished the fighting men. The New Hampshire Grant contribution, in the meanwhile, had been gravely crippled by an upheaval among the Green Mountain Boys. Acceding to Congress’ request, the New York Provincial Congress, in early July, had agreed to raise a battalion of five hundred men from the grant lands, to be known as the Green Mountain Rangers. But when the Committee of Safety of the towns west of the Green Mountains assembled at Dorset at the end of July to elect officers of the new battalion, Allen was humiliatingly repudiated. Seth Warner was chosen to be commander and Allen was not even selected as one of the subordinate officers.

The brutal cashiering of the magnificent Allen had been accomplished not by his devoted Green Mountain Boys, but by the timorous town elders
of the grant lands, who hated the radical, brawling, zestful deist, and took this opportunity to scuttle him. The enraged young men of the grant lands thereupon refused to enlist, and Warner was not able to bring the battalion to more than half strength. Deprived of their leader and their enthusiasm, the Green Mountain men were no longer the superbly effective force they once had been.

Allen, however, swallowed his pride in his eagerness to aid the revolutionary cause, and went back to Ticonderoga in hope of a commission, but Schuyler scornfully allowed the hero of Ticonderoga to sign on only as a private. At the siege of St. John’s, General Montgomery put Allen in charge of thirty Connecticut militiamen, and sent him off through the countryside between the Richelieu and Montreal to try to raise Canadian volunteers for the cause. John Brown, now a major, and Warner were also sent around the countryside on similar errands. Repeatedly urging Montgomery to seize St. John’s without delay, Allen managed to raise about eighty Canadians.

On September 24, Allen encountered Brown near Longueuil across the St. Lawrence from Montreal. Brown’s bold proposal to strike at Montreal with his force of 200 had been vetoed by Montgomery, so he joined with Allen in a daring plan for a joint surprise strike at that great Canadian port. They agreed upon an immediate coordinated attack: Brown to cross the river and approach the city from the north, and Allen, his force now grown to 150, to attack simultaneously from the south.

The plan was brilliantly conceived and rested on the mobility and surprise inherent in a guerrilla-style operation. But Brown unaccountably failed to cross the river as agreed. The abandoned Allen was left to face an open battle with a superior force of over thirty British regulars and two hundred Canadian volunteers. Furthermore, Allen’s men were not trained and loyal Green Mountain Boys, and the Canadians on Allen’s flanks fled as soon as the British force surged out of Montreal to do battle. Allen and the tiny remainder of his force were taken prisoner, with Allen placed in chains and transported to England. The Americans’ greatest and most daring guerrilla fighter was removed from the scene. Washington, who was wont to defend and wet nurse his fellow oligarch, Schuyler, could only react with near satisfaction to the loss of Allen: “Colonel Allen’s misfortune will, I hope, teach a lesson of prudence and subordination to others....”

The population of Canada in 1775 numbered approximately 60,000, almost all of them French peasants, or
habitants,
oppressed alike by the British state-privileged
seigneurs
and by the state-privileged church. There were only several hundred English Canadians (“Old Subjects”), most of them bureaucrats, soldiers, and merchants engaged in the Montreal fur
trade. Naturally, as the Revolutionary War began, both the British and the Americans tried to woo the Canadians; equally naturally, the French Canadians, certain of English and American contempt for their religion and their ethnic origins, had little interest in either party and remained neutral and aloof. Had the Anglo-American record of racial and religious bigotry not prevented the French Canadians from joining the revolutionary cause, Canada (Quebec) would undoubtedly have become a fourteenth original state of the United States.

The capture of Ethan Allen had considerable influence in swaying the cautious Canadians and Canadian Indians toward what looked like the winning side; but Carleton quickly dissipated any goodwill among the
habitants
by trying to conscript them
en masse
into the army—a draft that the sturdy French refused to obey. Nine hundred new men thus conscripted swiftly deserted at a rate of nearly forty a day.

The weather was now turning cold; the many months of American delay were already beginning to take their toll. The heavy New England force was also irrepressibly asserting its individuality and was in a state near to total mutiny. Montgomery’s orders were being blithely disregarded, and he perceptively testified to the libertarian spirit of his troops, complaining to Schuyler that it was impossible to command men “who carried the spirit of freedom into the field, and think for themselves.” In short, “the privates are all generals.”

Things had begun to look up for the American forces, however. Montgomery’s kinsman, Col. James Livingston, managed to maneuver past St. John’s and capture Fort Chambly, some miles to the north, on October 8. St. John’s was now in grave peril and Carleton raised a rescue force of sixty regulars and over seven hundred allied Indians and set forth across the St. Lawrence. But Seth Warner and the Green Mountain Rangers had fortified the opposite bank at Longueuil; their fire beat back the British. The doomed Fort St. John’s surrendered on November 2, and 500 regulars, the bulk of the British force in Canada, were taken prisoner.

The great victory at St. John’s threw Montreal wide open to the American forces, and General Montgomery swiftly pressed his advantage. Carleton escaped with his 150 regulars down-river toward Quebec, the last British stronghold in Canada. On November 13, a citizens’ committee surrendered Montreal to the American force.