1775 (51 page)

Although delays were to be expected, given a new Congress, a new army in formation, and the need to soothe regional squabbles, these wasted weeks were predictive of more to come. Each week lost, in turn, narrowed the summer and early autumn window of plausible invasion. As
Chapter 21
will detail, several constraints stood out: indecision in Congress; excessively cautious leadership by the designated commander, General Philip Schuyler of New York; lack of supplies and ammunition; soldiers’ short-term enlistments that expired in November and December; and insufficient knowledge by top commanders of northern New England and the alternative routes available.

These pages have already touched on the historical and psychological drive that pushed New Englanders to invade Canada. The issue we must now frame is that of underlying military and political plausibility: Could the Americans hope to succeed? In the summer and autumn of 1775, the answer was yes.

Chronicles wedded to 1776 as the American annus mirabilis say no. Canada, they insist, was too grand a target, too much of a military reach. In addition, the Catholic Church and people of French Canada had been won to the British side by the Quebec Act, a milestone of tolerance, as well as by persisting distrust of their old
Bastonnais
foes. Analyses emphasizing only retrospect are further colored by the Americans’ late-winter and early-spring 1776 retreat from Quebec, which developed into a disease-ridden rout.

In 1775, amid that year’s American hubris and the near panic in British
Canada, things looked quite different; a timely Hudson-Champlain corridor invasion could have succeeded. The most serious American proposals rightly emphasized speed and seasonality. Even in October and November, both Carleton and Quebec’s lieutenant governor, Hector Cramahe, worried that all seemed lost. And as we will shortly see, two centuries later Canadian historian Thomas Raddall made a reasonable case that Nova Scotia held out a greater prospect for American victory than Quebec.

During the weeks after Lexington and Concord, amid one of the earliest-budding springtimes in eighteenth-century North America, premature warmth in New England helped unnerve British generals. Ice broke up early; further snowfall was dismissed. Gage had sent Carleton a belated dispatch in mid-April requesting him to reinforce the tiny garrison in Ticonderoga. Ironically, Arnold and Allen were at Ticonderoga’s gates more quickly than Gage’s letter reached Quebec.

Not that Carleton could have done much. Two of his four regiments had earlier been sent to Gage; then on April 30, Halifax was stripped of troops to further reinforce Boston. Although several posts in the Great Lakes were still manned by small details, from Montreal east to the new British North Atlantic naval base in Halifax, Canada held only 700 redcoats that summer.
²⁸

For Britain, the naval situation was little cheerier. Only one vessel was regularly in Halifax. In May, Arnold had captured the one sloop on Lake Champlain, in some accounts called the
King George III.
While not quite “wide open,” Canada was extremely vulnerable. Moreover, because the Royal Navy disliked risking the bad weather in the Gulf of St. Lawrence after late September, reinforcements not on hand by October were unlikely to arrive until ice on the river broke up in May.

British vulnerability was also increased by cultural and political discontent in Montreal and the French-speaking rural sections of the St. Lawrence Valley. Official hopes that the Quebec Act had persuaded a sullen peasantry, the
habitants,
to fight for British king and empire proved illusory. Moreover, the mistake had originated at the top, with Governor Guy Carleton, the act’s principal architect. He was something of a francophile, and his young wife was an ardent one. Lady Maria was English, the younger daughter of the Earl of Effingham, but she had been educated at the French court in Versailles.
²⁹
Quebec’s French-Canadian gentry, the seigneurs, seem to have cherished the faint hint of the Grand Apartment among the hemlocks, snow fences, and ice floes.

In an earlier letter to London, Carleton had enthused that although his regular garrison was small, the
habitants
could “send into the field about eighteen thousand men well able to carry arms; of which number above one half have already served with as much valour, with more zeal, and more military knowledge for America than the regular troops of France that were joined with them.”
³⁰
This was altogether unrealistic.

The peasantry, by one account, were overwhelmingly illiterate, content with mere subsistence and suspicious of all foreigners. They were also “devout in their religion while grudging the parish tithes, obedient to the seigneurs while resenting their authority.” They had “the peasants’ dislike of the corvee, which forced them to work on the roads without pay, and of war, for the militia system of the French regime had demanded the armed service of all able-bodied males from boys of 16 to gray-heads of 60. These two things had put in their hearts a deep hatred of conscription in any form…The cold truth was that the Quebec Act, with all its good intentions, had gained for the British the ardent support of the clergy and the
seigneurs,
but no one else. The
habitant
remained unmoved.”
³¹

Nor were Canada’s Indians impressed. Several tribes farther south, from the Passamaquoddy in Maine and Nova Scotia to the Oneida in New York, openly sided with the rebels in 1775, while the more important northern confederations—the Abenaki, Hurons, and Caughnawaga—took generally neutral stands.

Ideological commitment to the rebel cause was thin among the French peasantry, being largely confined to pro-American merchants in Montreal and Quebec City, along with Voltaire-quoting, anticlerical Quebec
Congressistes.
But if few
habitants
were truly pro-American, most were willing to sell food, and some would enlist in their service. Just two criteria had to be met:
Les Bastonnais
must pay in gold and silver, not paper; and the armies of Congress must continue to appear headed for victory in Canada. These circumstances crumbled in 1776, but through 1775 they remained favorable. As we will see, the commanders of both columns advancing that autumn, General Richard Montgomery through the Hudson-Champlain corridor, and Benedict Arnold via backwoods Maine and then Quebec’s rock-toothed Chaudière Valley, recruited and enjoyed considerable French-Canadian support.

Only in the spring of 1776 did the
habitants
and Indians tilt back to the British side, as a new set of American failures and weaknesses converged. Once winter set in, the rebels were too weak to capture Quebec. As they
ran out of coin, they paid in paper that
habitants
sneered at. Many New England soldiers left in December because of expiring enlistments. And friend and foe alike knew that melting ice on the St. Lawrence would bring the Royal Navy and reinforcements.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Could better and quicker decisions between May and August 1775 have brought about American capture of Quebec in November or December, following a September or October occupation of Montreal? Probably, as
Chapter 21
will amplify. Could the rebels have held Canada through the war, and then obtained a final cession from Britain in the 1783 peace treaty? That seems less likely.

What can be ventured with very little doubt is that the battle for Canada begun in 1775 was a serious and wide-ranging one, with important ramifications and several lasting benefits.

The Sea Route to Nova Scotia and the St. Lawrence

In October 1774, an
Address to the People of Quebec
sent by the Continental Congress stumbled badly in a sentence alleging that “the injuries of Boston have roused and associated every colony from Nova Scotia to Georgia. Your province is the only link that is wanting to complete the bright, strong chain of union.”
³²

This was a major misreading of Nova Scotia, and within nine months a partly New England–settled and somewhat sympathetic place had slipped from expected fourteenth colony to become a declared invasion target of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. But confusion cut two ways. In the autumn of 1775, Royal Governor Francis Legge was nervous enough to see a rebel behind every lobster trap, and he offended New England–born residents by trying to force them into an unnecessary militia.
³³

Congressional interest in Nova Scotia rekindled several times during the Revolution, and George Washington, after rejecting the first invasion proposal in August 1775, had to do so several times again. For this chapter, suffice it to say that no serious invasion fleet ever sailed—from Newburyport, Machias, or any other Massachusetts seaport. Despite the great familiarity of Bay Colony seamen with Nova Scotia waters and a considerable kinship, the relationship of Massachusetts with its neighbor across the Bay of Fundy might have prompted a modern psychiatrist to use the term love-hate.

Five or six thousand Nova Scotians—perhaps 40 percent of the total
population—did share New England ancestry. But what ultimately counted more was not having shared their cousins’ intensely political experience of living in Massachusetts during the pre-Revolutionary decade. To many Bay Colony stalwarts, Nova Scotians had become weak and fallen away, a people apparently content to become minions of empire.

For two decades, loyalty had been a focal point of imperial administrators in Nova Scotia. In the mid-1750s, no sooner had war resumed with France than the fearful British government expelled some 6,000 French-speaking Acadians, to be replaced by roughly as many Protestant New Englanders. Promised the same town-government culture they were leaving behind, what the New Englanders actually got was an appearance with very little substance. Towns in Nova Scotia were not self-governing. The Church of England, not the Congregational Church, enjoyed local establishment.

British administrators, understanding fully well what they distrusted about New England—namely, its republican government and religion—simply barred its Canadian reproduction. The other new immigrants brought in—Scots, Germans, Yorkshiremen, and Newfoundlanders—generally accepted imperial sway. Politically, control of the Assembly and Governor’s Council rested with a merchant oligarchy tied to interests in the City of London. Executive authority lay with royal appointees in Halifax and the commanders of the all-important naval facilities. Military and naval subsidies kept Nova Scotia, its finances, and its ships afloat.
³⁴

Massachusetts Patriot leaders seethed in the early summer of 1775, after Nova Scotians sent many cargoes of provisions, lumber, and firewood to British-occupied Boston. That influenced a Massachusetts legislative committee to recommend the summer invasion, which Washington rejected. Plans to invade Canada, while not exactly a dime a dozen in those months, were certainly two-or-three-a-week submissions in the American camp near Boston. Proposals for attacking Nova Scotia usually emphasized the goal of destroying the Royal Naval dockyard in Halifax, and this was the essence of the August submission, also known as the Thomson proposal.

Two centuries later Thomas Raddall concluded that the Thomson proposal had been more feasible than Washington’s decision that month to send Arnold through Maine. The Americans, Raddall said, could have landed in force among Yankee-born sympathizers on the Bay of Fundy’s Minas Basin. The Royal Navy was always nervous about local fog and tides. After seizing the port of Windsor, an American force of 4,000 to 5,000 men
could have marched overland to Halifax, some 40 miles away. Nova Scotia’s only British troops were stationed in Halifax that November, but there were just 390—and only 126 were fit for duty.
³⁵

Noting that roughly 5,000 Americans perished in Canada between November 1775 and June 1776, Raddall argued that had that many been sent to Halifax, they could have held it. Enough timorous ex–New Englanders would have aided their cousins if the Yankees became actual occupiers. He concluded: “With Nova Scotia fixed in American hands the British fleet would have lost its last winter mooring post on the continent north of New York, thus changing the whole face of the war and of the subsequent peace; for the British peace commissioners [in 1782] were in no mood to haggle over an established fourteenth star in the American flag.”
³⁶
As a what-might-have-been, Raddall’s is on a grand scale.

Angry response to clumsy Royal Governor Legge made Nova Scotians look more rebellion prone in late 1775 than they were. All that came to pass was a small-scale and unofficial invasion from Maine in 1776, which failed to capture Fort Cumberland. Congress never did send a serious expedition to the supposed fourteenth colony.

The Backwoods Route Through Maine

As matters stood in the late summer of 1775, the Kennebec-Chaudière route was not a wise one for a commander to endorse—at least not if the contemplated expedition was (1) setting out well into September, late enough to face snow and sleet en route; (2) starting from coastal Maine and heading north into higher elevations and rugged terrain; (3) relying on a map—drawn back in 1761 by British military engineer John Montresor—that had been edited to omit many details and distances; and (4) including too many men (about 1,150) to avoid scaring off game or to manage the faster time possible for a small party.

This was not the invasion plan drawn up in June by Benedict Arnold, which as we will see was a shrewder variation on the Hudson-Champlain corridor approach. Nevertheless, Arnold chose to accept this route in mid-August, when Washington offered him command of the secondary expedition.

The first American officer to propose the Kennebec route, Massachusetts Colonel Jonathan Brewer, had done so on May 1. This was ten days before Ticonderoga and Crown Point were captured—and more than a month
before a skittish Congress would entertain going on the offensive. What Brewer proposed was to take 500 volunteers upstream along Maine’s Kennebec River, over a massif called the Height of Land, and then down Quebec’s Chaudière River to the St. Lawrence, almost at Quebec City’s door.
³⁷
His timing was workable. Had 500 men been ready to go in late July, say, they would have easily completed their trip by late August, a perfectly coordinated diversion if the principal invading army, gathered in the Lake Champlain region, had just crossed into Canada.