Independence (39 page)

Montgomery's problems paled next to those that confronted the secondary force. Arnold's men, many of whom lacked experience in roughing it on the frontier, faced a tortuous seven-week advance through more than two hundred miles of wilderness. Almost from the first day, bateau loaded with the expedition's supplies overturned, dumping their precious contents to the bottom of Maine's swirling, frigid rivers. Only a couple of weeks into the campaign the hungry soldiers were eating tree bark and candle wax, not to mention pet dogs that some of the men had unwarily brought along for companionship. There were too few blankets, especially after many wound up underwater. Habitually wet shoes disintegrated, leaving many men to proceed barefoot. Their plight was exacerbated by rain and snow, and incredibly by what appears to have been a hurricane that struck a month into the march. By mid-October some men had died and many others suffered from diarrhea, rheumatism, and arthritis. On October 25 an entire battalion of some 200 men deserted, taking with them about 150 others who were too ill to continue. Nor were they the only deserters. Upwards of 50 additional men appear to have deserted singly or in small parties. On November 9, about the time Montgomery was launching operations to take Montreal nearly 150 miles downriver, Arnold and his survivors reached Quebec City. Intelligence reported that a British force of 800 men were inside Quebec's walls. Arnold had some 650 men, a bit more than half the force that he had started with fifty-one days earlier. He decided to await the arrival of Montgomery.

The two rebel forces united on December 2 at Pointe-aux-Trembles, twenty miles down the St. Lawrence from Quebec City. Attrition in Montgomery's force had exceeded even that in Arnold's. Montgomery had only 300 men when he linked up with Arnold. Some of Montgomery's men had been lost in action; many more had died of disease; desertion had been heavy; more than 300 had to be left behind to garrison St. Johns and Montreal; and not a few soldiers had left for home when their enlistments expired in November. In command of a paltry army of about 950 men—one third of the number that had set out from New York and New England—Montgomery on December 3 ordered his troops to march through the swirling snow to the Plains of Abraham, just outside Quebec's formidable walls. Over the next few days the American army was augmented by the arrival of about 175 Massachusetts troops as well as some 200 men who formed a Canadian regiment that had been raised after the fall of Montreal, the grand total of
habitants
who had stepped forward to fight with the rebels. By the second week in December the American army stood at some 1,300 men.
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The numerical superiority that Congress had anticipated did not exist. The defenders of Quebec City were now known to number nearly 1,800 men, as the original garrison had been augmented by the survivors of the fighting at St. Johns and Montreal. Furthermore, Quebec City's topography offered natural defensive features. The city stood on a tall, nearly unassailable promontory above the St. Lawrence and St. Charles rivers. It was further protected by formidable man-made defenses, including a thirty-foot-tall wall buttressed by a stone foundation on the more exposed western side of the city. Lacking the manpower and artillery to conduct a siege, Montgomery tried to lure the British out of their citadel to fight on the Plains of Abraham. When that failed, the American commander had only one choice: to attack. Unable to persuade those soldiers to reenlist whose tour of duty ended on December 31, Montgomery knew that he had to attack before the end of the month.

Montgomery had to realize that the odds were heavy against success, though there was some reason for hope. The British might possess numerical superiority, but many of their men were militiamen. The British garrison also had to defend an enormous area with relatively few troops. If the Americans surprised their adversary and massed their firepower, they might succeed. Waiting patiently for stormy conditions, Montgomery plotted torching the town, hoping for a raging, wind-driven conflagration that would sow confusion among the defenders and burn at least a portion of the palisade.

Montgomery waited until the last possible moment, December 31. His plan was to open the engagement by launching feints designed to fool the defenders. While Montgomery's deceptive actions unfolded, Arnold, with half the army, was to break through a sturdy barricade defended by redcoats on the northeast side of the city. Montgomery, with the other half of the army, was to fight his way through a similar barricade on the southwest side. When both divisions were through, they would link up and charge into the lower city, setting it afire.

Things began propitiously. A heavy snowstorm struck that day, leading the Americans to hope that the unsuspecting British would be caught by surprise. But the British were not taken unaware. And the diversionary attacks that Montgomery ordered fooled no one. That set the tone for what lay ahead. The Americans failed to achieve any of their objectives. Neither barricade was taken. Montgomery died at the very outset of his assault, nearly decapitated by a burst of fire by the British defenders. After heavy fighting, Arnold was felled with a disabling wound to his Achilles tendon.

By seven A.M. it was over. The American attack had been repulsed with staggering losses. Nearly five hundred of the rebel soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured. In three hours more than one third of the American army in Canada had been destroyed. The British lost only eighteen men.
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More than two weeks passed before news of the disaster reached Philadelphia. It struck Congress with the force of a body blow, and the residents of Philadelphia, at least according to one delegate, reacted as if “universally struck with grief.”
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All knew that the “events of war are always uncertain,” as Franklin had written to Dumas a month earlier, but a failure of this magnitude was shocking. The dire news hit all the harder because this was the first real defeat sustained by the rebels. The drubbing inevitably raised troubling questions about the colonists' ability to successfully conduct the war.

The Death of Montgomery
by John Trumbull. General Richard Montgomery, commander of the American army that attacked Quebec on December 31, 1775, was killed in the engagement. One third of Montgomery's army was lost, nearly five hundred men. (Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY)

There were those, like New York's Robert R. Livingston, who wished to pull out of Canada immediately. The place would bleed the colonies to death both in human and economic terms, he argued, adding that it was “most evident that the Canadians are not to be relied on” to bear arms. He thought it wiser to withdraw and prepare defenses along the Canadian border. There were also some congressmen who saw the debacle as a “needfull” demonstration of “our Dependence” on foreign assistance, especially as the notion was growing that this might be a protracted war, one in which America's staying power hinged on acquiring a wide variety of military supplies from abroad.

But the viewpoint around which a majority of congressmen coalesced in January was to send another army into Canada “with the utmost Dispatch.” The delegates reasoned that Quebec City might still be taken before British reinforcements arrived, which would not occur until the St. Lawrence thawed in the late spring. Some believed there was no choice but to continue to fight for Quebec. Should the British regain their citadel, they warned, the royal authorities would mobilize the Canadians and the Indians against the colonists, and they would strike the northern provinces with “a force … more formidable than that of all the British Troops they can import into America.”

Some saw another urgent reason for continuing to campaign for Quebec. Word had reached Philadelphia of both the king's address and Germain's remarks hinting that peace commissioners might be sent across the sea. Some believed that if Canada could be taken before the envoys arrived, it would be an important bargaining chip in the negotiations with the commissioners. Within seventy-two hours of learning of the defeat at Quebec, Congress not only ordered seven regiments to be raised and sent to Canada but also, for the first time, authorized the payment of bounties to raise recruits for the Canadian army. Quietly, too, news of the setback at the gates of Quebec stirred the Committee of Correspondence to let contracts with Pliarne and Penet, the two Nantes merchants who had languished impatiently for weeks in Philadelphia. With the sanction of Congress, trade was opened with France in order to secure arms and munitions.
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Just days before word of the Canadian calamity reached Congress, an express arrived with the first tidings of George III's October address to Parliament. “It is decisive,” a New Englander instantly responded. No greater proof was needed that Britain's monarch “meant to make himself an absolute despotic Tyrant.” Samuel Ward added that “Every Man must now be convinced that … our Safety depends wholly upon a brave, wise and determined Resistance.” Samuel Adams told others that this proved the king was the driving force behind British policy. War guilt “must lie at his Door,” he added. A Virginian, Francis Lightfoot Lee, concurred. The king's speech laid bare his and North's “bloody intentions” and demonstrated beyond doubt that it was folly to any longer continue “gaping after a reconciliation.”
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Thirty-six hours after the express brought the king's speech to town, Thomas Paine's
Common Sense
, the most important pamphlet published in the American Revolution—indeed, the most influential pamphlet published in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—hit Philadelphia's streets. Its central argument was cogent and timely: Reconciliation was not in the best interests of the colonists.

The thirty-seven-year-old Paine was an Englishman who, like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, had failed at numerous endeavors. Unemployed, divorced, and at loose ends, he had left his homeland in 1774 to begin a new life in America. He claimed that he came to the colonies planning to start a school for girls, but if that was his intention, he never got around to it. In his last years in England, with time heavy on his hands, Paine had taken to writing essays. He discovered that he had a facility for writing. Furthermore, he could earn a modest living as an author, enabling him to avoid toiling for sixty hours a week, as his other jobs had required. Paine had hardly landed in Philadelphia before he took up his pen. He published a newspaper or magazine article roughly every two weeks during his initial ten months in the city. He wrote about the war, calling it wicked and “unworthy [of] a British soldier,” attacked slavery, and reflected on science, mathematics, dogs, dueling, women (“at all times and in all places” women have been “adored and oppressed”), love, ancient history, and unhappy marriages.
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Within a few months, it was apparent to Paine's growing number of readers that he was no ordinary writer. His essays, typified by a seldom-equaled clarity, also brandished an unmatched passion and verve. Sometime in the autumn of 1775—most likely when Dickinson persuaded the Pennsylvania assembly to instruct its delegates to Congress to seek redress and reconciliation—some congressmen and private citizens in Philadelphia appealed to Paine to pen a tract urging American independence. Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of Philadelphia's leading physicians, somewhat artlessly though accurately told Paine that he had nothing to lose by writing such a radical essay. What, Rush asked, could happen to someone who was already unemployed and nearly penniless?

The thought had already crossed Paine's mind. Though he had previously intended to write a series of short newspaper pieces on American independence, the entreaties of influential men set him to thinking in terms of writing a longer essay suitable for a pamphlet, and in November he commenced work. Paine made writing look easy, though in reality it was hard, slow work for him. He lashed himself to his desk for a few hours daily and over the course of a month crafted an essay of some eighteen thousand words. Not much of his argument was original. He had heard the ideas bandied about in coffeehouses and taverns, and some of his polemic—especially those portions dealing with governance in England—was the staple of eighteenth-century English radicalism. It was Paine's genius to marshal the disparate arguments in a cohesive and straightforward manner. Above all, Paine presented his arguments to readers in an inviting literary style.
Common Sense
was free of nearly indecipherable jargon and minus the recurrent Latin phraseology so popular with the lawyers who wrote most of the pamphlets. It was crucial for Paine to write in an accessible manner, as he was seeking to do what few other pamphleteers had ever tried. Most pamphleteers wrote for the best educated in society. Paine consciously sought a wider audience. His object was to convince the mass of colonists that it was desirable and feasible for America to sever its ties with Great Britain, and he especially wished to bring on a transformation in how American independence was viewed by the inhabitants of the most recalcitrant colonies, including Pennsylvania.