So much looting was going on that General Howe directed his provost marshal “to go his rounds, attended by the executioner, with orders to hang up on the spot the first man he should detect in the fact without waiting for further proof for trial.”63 Because of the food shortage, Howe, loosening the rules, allowed families to leave in increasing numbers. Loyalists appealed to him to stop the exodus because they feared that the Rebels would burn down the town if its only population were Tories and soldiers. Howe agreed, after letting some three hundred people leave on November 25. When they got past the checkpoint, one was dead and two were dying. Washington, fearing a smallpox epidemic, barred the refugees from the American camp.64
Soon after taking over from Gage, Howe formed quasi-military “companies,” commanded by officers he named, and directed by members of the mandamus council. Volunteers for the companies, he proclaimed, “shall be properly armed, and an allowance of fuel and provisions be made to those requiring the same, equal to what is issued to his Majesty’s troops within the garrison.”65
By December members of another Loyalist home guard unit—three hundred Royal Fencible Americans—were patrolling the streets, on the watch for fires and burglaries while Crean Brush was busily emptying houses.66 Generals Howe and Washington, meanwhile, were planning their strategies for the months ahead. Howe looked to New York as the next battleground. Washington looked to Canada.
* This generally meant real silver.
* Seven dollars had about the same purchasing power as about $200 in 2009.
* A “fencible soldier” was eligible for home service only. The British interpreted this to mean that fencibles could be deployed anywhere in the colonies.
6
INTO THE FOURTEENTH COLONY
CANADA, 1775
My friends and Fellow Subjects—The unhappy necessity which subsists of dislodging the Ministerial Troops obliges me to carry on Hostilities against your city… . I find myself reduced to Measures which may overwhelm you with Distress!
—Brig. Gen. Richard Montgomery, letter to the people of Quebec1
Washington was on his way to Cambridge, as commander in chief of the Continental Army, when General Ward and his council of war decided to invade Canada. First Congress and then Washington ratified the decision, for there was reason to believe that Canada, Britain’s fourteenth colony, would join the other thirteen in rebellion. Hope was strengthened by fresh news of revolutionary fervor to the north.
On May 1, 1775, only twelve days after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, an anonymous rebel in Montreal defaced a bust of the king and hung on it a mock rosary, with potatoes for beads. Attached was a sign in French that said, “Here’s the Canadian Pope and English Fool.”2 The desecration triggered widespread clashes between supporters and opponents of British rule. When word of the incident reached Congress, invasion enthusiasts believed that apotential Son of Canadian Liberty had spiritually joined the American revolt.
The symbolic attack on the king was inspired by an uproar over the Quebec Act, which went into effect on May 1. American Patriots detested the act because it barred western expansion. Canadians were infuriated by the act’s acceptance of Catholics as royal officeholders and its legalization of previously outlawed priests. So there was a tenuous anti-British link between Canadians and Americans.
But congressmen who backed the invasion nevertheless believed that if New England and the other colonies wanted freedom from British oppression, then Canadians would certainly feel the same. Enthusiasts ignored the fact that Canadian Catholics, mainly in Quebec, distrusted Protestant New England. Among Canadiens (French-speaking Canadians), the common name for New Englanders in particular and Americans in general was Bostonais, a derogatory term which came to mean anything that was terrible and violent.3
The congressmen saw a march northward as a friendly act of liberation from British tyranny, not as an unprovoked attack on a neighbor. Washington, sidestepping the ideology, endorsed the congressional invasion proposal on strategic grounds: The invasion would block a possible British thrust into New York from Quebec. That peril was real, for British officials and American Loyalists along the New York frontier were already rousing Indians against the Patriots. The British Department of Indian Affairs—an agency more military than political—had dozens of agents in northern New York recruiting Indian allies.4 Throughout the war a British-Indian-Loyalist alliance would fight the Patriots along the New York—Canada frontier.
Congress launched the campaign against Canada by instructing Maj. Gen. Philip J. Schuyler to lead a strong force to Ticonderoga, destroy any vessels that the British could use for an invasion of New York, and then launch an invasion of his own. He was ordered to seize St. John’s on the Richelieu River north of Lake Champlain, a gateway to Montreal—and then take Montreal itself. Congress added an odd condition that showed American sensibilities toward the neighbor tothe north: Invade only if the invasion “will not be disagreeable to the Canadians.”5
Washington, after approving the Schuyler expedition, ordered Col. Benedict Arnold to lead a second march through the Maine wilderness to Quebec. Washington gave Arnold copies of an appeal that was to be handed out to the “Friends and Brethren” of Canada, asking them to join in the rebellion against British rule. In a bid for Catholic support, Washington wrote, “The cause of America and of liberty is the cause of every virtuous American Citizen Whatever may be his Religion or his descent.”6
For a long time the focal point in Canada for Patriot activities was Nova Scotia. In 1768, when the Massachusetts legislature sent a circular letter protesting the Townshend Acts to all the colonies, Nova Scotia was included as a sister colony. The letter so distressed Nova Scotia’s lieutenant governor that he felt compelled to send a message to London, assuring the minister for colonial affairs that “no temptation, however great, will lead the inhabitants of this colony to show the least inclination to oppose acts of the British parliament.”7
In October 1774, the Continental Congress invited Quebec to send delegates to Philadelphia for the next session. “We do not ask you, by this address, to commence acts of hostility against the government of our common Sovereign,” the invitation said. “We only invite you to consult your own glory and welfare, and complete this highly desirable union.”8 Congress translated the invitation into French and sent two thousand copies to Thomas Walker, a Montreal merchant who was an ex-Bostonian and a friend of the Rebels. He distributed the invitations to French-speaking Canadians.9 Quebec declined the invitation.
Walker, once a justice of the peace, was a notorious foe of British rules about the billeting of Redcoats. In 1764 he and four other magistrates had imprisoned a British officer in a dispute over his lodgings. Four masked men avenged the officer by breaking into Walker’s house, beating him severely, and hacking off one of his ears. Foursoldiers were arrested for the assault, put on trial, and acquitted. A subsequent trial of four others ended the same way. The acquittals added to Walker’s rage. By 1773 he was the leader of a small group of radical Canadians—and a spy for both Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen. A year later, he was a full-fledged revolutionary, eager to bring a fourteenth colony into the Revolution.10
Colonial officials in Canada, reacting to the whiff of Revolution from across the border, began to fear that opposition to royal rule could be contagious. Chief Justice Jonathan Belcher, Jr., of Nova Scotia founded the Association for Loyal Allegiance, whose members aided authorities who were mobilizing to repel the invaders. Martial law was later decreed, and strangers entering the province had to report to a magistrate or be treated as American spies.11 American Loyalists were fleeing from northern New York into Canada—and pro-Patriot Canadians were crossing into New York or Maine.12
This was the setting when General Schuyler, a wealthy Albany entrepreneur, assumed command of the invasion army. He had fought at Ticonderoga during the French and Indian War. Now he was back at Ticonderoga, the terminus for the long-established waterway path to Canada. Schu
yler, ailing and overly cautious, took his time, spending weeks gathering supplies and building boats for the trip northward down Lake Champlain.13 He was soon eclipsed by his younger and brasher second in command, Brig. Gen. Richard Montgomery, an Irishman turned American Patriot.
Montgomery had sold his captain’s commission in the British Army, immigrated to America in 1771, and bought a sixty-seven-acre farm at King’s Bridge, about a dozen miles up the Hudson from New York City. While stationed in New York during the French and Indian War, he had met Janet Livingston, daughter of the ruling land baron of the most powerful Patriot family in New York. Later, back in New York as a wealthy, charming immigrant, he courted Janet Livingston. They were married in July 1773 at Clermont, the family’s thirteen-thousand-acre Hudson Valley estate.14 One of his brothers-in-law was Robert R. Livingston, Jr., who would be a member of the “Committee of Five” that drafted the Declaration of Independence.15
When Montgomery volunteered to go to war, his wife had a nightmare in which she saw him die of wounds inflicted by his brother. Entwined in that nightmare was her vision of the civil war that had struck even Clermont: Three of Montgomery’s officers would carry the Livingston name into Canadian battles. But, while the Livingstons fought for the Patriots, most of their tenants, turning against their landlords, became avowed Tories.16 The phenomenon, repeated on baronial estates all along the Hudson Valley, was inspired by the tenants’ belief that after the war the victorious British would distribute land to Americans who had supported the king.17
On September 5 Schuyler issued a proclamation that said “the Grand Congress” had sent the army to “Expell” British troops “which now, acting under the orders of a Despotic Ministry, would wish to Enslave their Countrymen.” He also vowed that he would do no harm to Indians, known to be mostly pro-British.18
Schuyler, who suffered from gout and rheumatism, stayed behind as Montgomery led about one thousand men in a fleet of boats to Fort St. John’s, on the Richelieu River north of Lake Champlain. They landed a mile and a half from the fort and were slogging through a marsh when they were ambushed by Capt. Gilbert Tice of the British Department of Indian Affairs, who commanded a combined force of Loyalists and Indians. In the thirty-minute firefight, Tice lost ten men, Montgomery eight. Tice, an American Tory who had run a tavern in Johnstown, New York, had been recruiting for some time in the border area.19
Schuyler, too ill to go on, put Montgomery in command and returned to Ticonderoga. Montgomery, realizing that his force was too green and disorganized for an attack on the fort, began a siege. He also sent small detachments northward to recruit Canadians. Ethan Allen, acting on his own as usual, declared that he would seize Montreal with the aid of Canadians who would rise up and join the American side.20 Instead, British troops, aided by Canadian Loyalists, captured Allen and forty of his Green Mountain Boys. Allen was shipped to England and would not be exchanged until 1778.21
Fort St. John’s finally surrendered on November 2, and Montgomery headed for Montreal, which had a small British garrison. Another fort, north of St. John’s, fell quickly. Among the British officers captured was Lt. John André, who was destined to play a much larger role in the Revolution. The colors of André’s regiment were furled and sent to Congress as a trophy of a victory on the path to Quebec.22
Arnold, meanwhile, had started off with 1,050 men on his epic expedition, which began on September 13 with a march from Cambridge to Newburyport, where the men boarded ships for a three-day voyage to a port up the Kennebec River. There a fleet of more than two hundred newly built bateaux awaited the troops for the next leg of their journey through the wilds of Maine. To penetrate these seemingly trackless forests, Arnold had a copy of a map that showed a paddle-and-portage route to Quebec. He expected to reach the city in three weeks.
The map was made during the French and Indian War by John Montrésor, a brilliant young British Army engineer. How Arnold obtained the map is not known, but he had been to Quebec as a merchant during that war and had known Indians who had made the journey. He may have met Montrésor, for Arnold also had a copy of Montrésor’s handwritten journal describing his two round-trip journeys from Quebec to the Maine coast.23
Arnold plunged into the unknown with faith in the map and his handpicked men, who included keen-eyed Virginia riflemen famous for their sniping of British sentinels in Boston. Their commander was Capt. Daniel Morgan, a future hit-and-run fighter against Redcoats and Tories in the South. One of Arnold’s other officers was nineteen-year-old Aaron Burr, accompanied part of the way by a beautiful young Indian woman whom soldiers called Golden Thighs.24
Knowing that he needed to update Montrésor’s map, Arnold commissioned a Maine surveyor to make copies for his officers and add information about the depths and speeds of the Kennebec. The surveyor, who had worked for a Loyalist-owned land company and wasalmost certainly a Loyalist himself, deliberately introduced errors into the map. It probably had some inaccuracies already because British Army clerks routinely put errors on copies of maps likely to fall into enemy hands.25
The doctored map produced lost days, lost miles, and a loss of embittered men who wandered off, hoping to find a way home. The bateaux were difficult to maneuver and, in Arnold’s words, “very badly built.”26 Day after day men paddled and portaged, carrying the four-hundred-pound boats on their chafing shoulders, working up hills, slogging through swamps and bogs, soldiering on for nearly six hundred miles. In the fifty-one-day struggle against storm, disease, hunger, and despair, Arnold lost 40 percent of his men to death or desertion.27
On November 12 Montgomery reached Montreal, which was defended by only about 150 men. Attempting to evacuate the city, they embarked in a fleet of small boats. Headwinds and cannon fire stopped the exodus. But their commander escaped and set out for Quebec. He was Gen. Guy Carleton, both governor of Quebec and commander of Canadian forces, under General Gage.
As Carleton found himself defending his province against invasion, he drew upon his experience as a courageous officer in the French and Indian War—and his discovery that he possessed political courage. He had been involved in the writing of the Quebec Act, which he viewed as a bulwark against a French insurgency. And when the possibility of an American invasion loomed, he had taken the unpopular step of placing the province under martial law.28
Carleton was ready when Arnold and more than six hundred starving and exhausted survivors of his march reached the southern side of the St. Lawrence River, directly across from Quebec. Arnold immediately began to gather boats and canoes for a crossing. And he found some obvious supporters of the invasion: people willing to help his men make scaling ladders for an assault on the city’s walls.29
Arnold also got the help of Thomas Walker, the Montreal radical. When the invasion began, Carleton had arrested and jailed Walkerfor recruiting Canadians to fight against the British and their Loyalists. As Carleton was escaping from Montreal, he put Walker on a Quebec-bound ship, which Americans captured.30 As soon as he was freed, Walker made his way to Arnold.31 Another ally was Philadelphia-born David Franks, a civilian volunteer who served as Arnold’s aide-de-camp. A prominent Jew in Catholic Quebec, Franks had been accused of the potato-rosary desecration. Attacks on him inspired his decision to aid Arnold.32
British Army colonel Allan Maclean arrived in Quebec on November 12 with reinforcements—220 Royal Highland Emigrants. Maclean and his men, marching toward Montreal, had been summoned to Quebec by Carleton. A few months before, Maclean had made a secret recruiting tour of Scots-Irish communities in the Carolinas and in the Mohawk Valley, along the New York—Canada border.33 Most of his recruits were recent Scottish emigrants to America and Canada. Many of them were veteran Highlanders tested in combat—stalwart men transplanted from the rugged, rock-strewn land of gorse and heather to the New World, where their skill at arms would challenge the Continental Army.34
Maclean was born a Highlander on the Hebridean island of Mull in 1725. In an act of clan fidelity, he joi
ned the Jacobites* in support of Charles Edward Stuart—” Bonnie Prince Charlie.” Rebellion flared when Prince Charlie made his futile attempt to regain the throne that his grandfather, King James II, had been forced to abandon. In 1746 Maclean fought the British in the disastrous defeat at Culloden that ended the rebellion. He fled to Holland and enlisted in the Scots brigade of the Dutch army. In 1750 he returned from exile after King George II granted amnesty to Jacobite officers who swore allegiance to the Crown.
Six years later Maclean accepted a commission in the Royal Americans, an oddly formed new regiment that included foreign officers who had deserted from their armies; rejects of Irish regiments; and colonial recruits drawn primarily from Swiss and German emigrants in Pennsylvania.35 Sent to America, Maclean fought gallantly in the French and Indian War and raised a Canadian regiment called Maclean’s Highlanders. When the war ended, many of his Highlanders settled in Canada on land granted by the Crown but the twice-wounded Maclean chose to return to Britain.
As rebellion simmered in America, Maclean suggested to superiors the idea of the Royal Highland Emigrants.36 On April 3, 1775—two weeks before the Battles of Lexington and Concord—King George III approved the proposal, authorized the regiment’s name, and directed General Gage and the royal governors of North America to assist Maclean.37
A half century before, King George I had been warned about the Highlanders: “Their Notions of Virtue and Vice are very different from the more civilised part of Mankind… .”38 But the Highlanders of America were now led by chieftains loyal to the king and hopeful of reward when this civil war ended in royal victory. In Scotland the clan system had been breaking down; landowners were continually raising tenants’ rents. “It is a grief to our spirits to leave our native land and venture upon such a dangerous voyage,” an immigrant wrote; “but there is no help for it. We are not able to stand the high rents and must do something for bread or see our families reduced to beggary.”39
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