1775 (52 page)

Brewer himself was badly wounded at Bunker Hill. And Washington did not sign off on an expedition using the Kennebec-Chaudière back door to Quebec until August. Then he gave that command to Arnold. The main attack through the Hudson-Champlain corridor would be commanded by New York General Philip Schuyler, who had fallen behind schedule.

Since the 1690s, Arnold’s route had been a favored war trail for Indians from Quebec raiding the southern Maine settlements in York, Saco, and points east. For these war parties, the south-flowing Kennebec provided a convenient highway. Sometimes colonial forces traveled 50 or 100 miles upstream to retaliate. No British or colonial troops, though, had ever used the full Kennebec-Chaudière route to attack Quebec.

By 1775, English-speaking settlers had pushed 50 miles up the Kennebec. In September, before Arnold’s force set off, several local guides and boat builders had scouted the route north to the Dead River and the Height of Land, where major portages would be necessary. Arnold’s soldiers would be accompanied, at least to the Dead River, by 20 carpenters who would help with the tiring, grueling portages but also, and more important, maintain and repair the 220 flat-bottomed wooden bateaux. Each weighed 400 pounds empty, and was capable of carrying five or six men equipped with oars, paddles, and poles.
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Had it left in August, the expedition might have been a grand success.

Instead, cruel weather, excess baggage weight, intermittent low water, flooding, and insufficient food were all problems. The first freezing night came on September 28, the first snow two weeks later. The cruelest condition involved a misconception of distance. Montresor’s map, parts of it blanked out, was read by Arnold, his guides, and officers to show lesser distances than in fact existed. By the time the expedition reached the “Great Carrying Place” between the Kennebec and Dead rivers, its men had gone 90 miles and hoped the worst was over; but in fact Quebec City was 270 miles from Fort Western, the jumping-off point.
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The rear guard of three
companies, one third of Arnold’s men, eventually turned around and went back to Fort Western.

The saga, obviously, partook of the heroic. Dozens of books have been written about the march to Quebec by Arnold and his remaining 600. They were late, reaching the St. Lawrence only on November 6. Their tattered display was conveyed by one participant: “Our clothes were torn to pieces by the bushes, and hung in strings—few of us had any shoes, but moggasons [moccasins] made of raw skins—many of us without hats—and beards long and visages thin and meager. I thought we much resembled the animals which inhabit New-Spain [South America] called the Ourang-Outang.”
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Even though Arnold was late, the culpable tardiness was that of the main force, first under the sluggish Schuyler, and then under the better (but still slow) Montgomery. Many of the enlistees who had come up the Hudson-Champlain corridor or gone over the mountains were short-term volunteers. Men whose service ended in December—and were committed to going home at that point—should have arrived near Quebec no later than October. Yet there is inspiration in how close they nevertheless came.

The Military Road: From the Coos to St. John

In a letter that George Washington penned to John Hancock in early August 1775, he raised another route—the possibility of invading through the upper Connecticut Valley. This corridor was well known to Chief Louis of the intermittently pro-American St. Francis Indians. Together with rebel Colonel Jacob Bayley of Newbury (in what would become Vermont), the chief journeyed to visit Washington in late July. Their contention—reiterated by Bayley in several letters—was that the best route to Quebec’s Missisquoi Bay or Fort St. John ran northwest from the new settlements on the “Coos,” the great oxbow bend of the northern Connecticut River. Troops marching to Montreal from populous central or eastern New England would have a much shorter and faster trip, saving 70 miles. As Washington advised Hancock, the chief had promised that “if an Expedition is meditated against Canada, the Indians in that quarter would give all their assistance.”
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This alternative, too, could have been useful in 1775 had Washington not opted for the Kennebec-Chaudière route. However, the rough trail was not surveyed until March 1776, and road makers only began work the next
month. In July 1776, they would stop, worried now that such a road might only benefit the British forces poised to march south.

Oswego and Niagara: The Western Route

In New York’s Mohawk Valley, Colonel Guy Johnson became superintendent of the Northern Indian Department in July 1774, following the sudden death of his legendary uncle, Sir William Johnson. But less than a year later, burgeoning rebel sentiment in the valley forced Guy Johnson to flee. On May 31, after a warning by General Gage that he was likely to be seized and held, Johnson gathered his closest advisers and several hundred Tories and Mohawk Indians and fled west up the valley.

This was the western route to Canada—along the Mohawk River and some lesser waterways to Lake Ontario, and then north along the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec. In Johnson’s case, as circumstances in Canada clouded, he and his principal advisers took ship from Montreal to London.

The western passageways had not been prominent until the 1740s when Anglo-French combat in North America intensified around the Forks of the Ohio and the Great Lakes. But after defeating France, Britain closed many old forts. By the beginning of 1775, only five posts were manned—Oswegatchie (New York), Niagara (New York), Detroit (Michigan), Michilimackinac (Michigan), and Kaskaskia (Illinois). Between them, they housed just eight companies of the Eighth Regiment. In command was Lieutenant Colonel John Caldwell, who had four of these companies stationed with him at Niagara—the old French stone fort where the Niagara River empties into Lake Ontario.
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These were not good months for British Canada or for the Northern Indian Department. Johnson’s flight had left Colonel Caldwell as the ranking king’s officer on the New York and Great Lakes frontier. In late summer, as the rebel armies prepared to cross into Canada, the Indians—including some of the usually pro-British Iroquois—pursued better relations with the colonists and met with Patriot emissaries. With Johnson gone, the Northern Indian Department was a shambles. An apprehensive Caldwell, with only 200 to 300 soldiers, had to keep watch in several different directions.
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Just 200 miles from Niagara, the region at the Forks of the Ohio was claimed by both Virginia and Pennsylvania. The collapse of royal authority quickly weakened both Johnson’s Indian Department deputy, Alexander
McKee, and Lord Dunmore’s local representative, John Connolly. From May 1775 into 1776, power in Pittsburgh rested with a Committee of Safety dominated by Patriot-faction Virginians, who eyed Niagara. In June 1775, Caldwell had conveyed to Carleton his fear of “the Virginians [at Pittsburgh] making an attempt on Fort Erie,” an outpost of Fort Niagara on the Lake Erie side of the 30-mile portage and waterway. Later that summer, Caldwell felt obliged to promise support to the Seneca tribe should the Virginians march north.
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The Virginians never came, but a second threat to Niagara lay to the east. In November, after General Richard Montgomery’s army of New Yorkers and New Englanders had taken Montreal, the general queried which as-yet-uncaptured forts held the largest trove of badly needed cannon and munitions. Quebec led the list, but Niagara was thought to rank next, and he suggested that it might be a worthwhile campaign for Congress’s armies.
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Early in 1776 General Schuyler, the New York theater commander, weighed an attack on Niagara but decided that a march through Iroquois territory would be too risky. The Indian Department now had an agent in Niagara, John Butler, who kept warning the tribes: New England soldiers would come from the east and Virginians from the south to reduce Niagara and “immediately fall upon the Six Nations and extirpate them from the Earth.”
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Besides Guy Johnson, another important British officer took the western back door to Canada. Colonel Allan Maclean of the Royal Highland Emigrants Regiment reached Montreal in late August by way of Oswego. As we will see, some Canadian historians give Maclean, not Carleton, the credit for keeping Quebec out of American hands.
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The American defeat before Quebec in December 1775 did not clearly end the danger to Niagara, but the American retreat from Quebec did represent a watershed. By the summer of 1776, Patriot talk about attacking Niagara, Quebec, or Halifax, if not absurd, would not regain plausibility until the French alliance of 1778 reopened the issue of a Canadian invasion on a new dimension. Chronicles of 1776 can scoff at the initial American attempt, but as
Chapter 21
will pursue, the facts and events of 1775 tell a much more complicated tale, in which early British overconcentration in Canada worked against the Crown’s victory prospects elsewhere.

T
he wars fought by the United States have been a display case of the nation’s ascending capacity for explosives production. The weight of shells fired during the American Civil War set a global record. In World War I, U.S. munitions makers became essential suppliers to Europe. World War II made the United States into “the arsenal of democracy.” The atomic megatonnage of Hiroshima crowned American explosive technology. By the twenty-first century, the American military had come to think of itself in war-god-like terms, able to hurl unmatchable thunderbolts.

Not so in 1775. The Revolution began in circumstances remote from Jupiter’s realm, better resembling the biblical David clutching his mere slingshot and a few stones. The reality of munitions in Patriot North America that year was one of woeful shortage.

To convince the king and his ministers that the disaffected colonies were willing and able to fight, the potential rebels had to possess cannon and gunpowder in serious quantities. At the time of the Coercive Acts, they did not, as official London knew. In July 1773, Lord Dartmouth had sent a circular letter to North American and West Indian governors requesting information about provincial trade and military supplies on hand.
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Few surprises turned up. Ancient muskets and fowling pieces the mainland colonists had aplenty, but these fired every conceivable caliber of bullet—a major handicap for any organized force in a time of war. Some old cannon were on hand in provincial arsenals. So were old “Brown Bess” British Army muskets—named for the unusual hue imparted as their barrels oxidized—left from the French and frontier wars of the 1740s and 1750s. Several thousand specially made rifles, most fashioned by Pennsylvania German craftsmen, gave many Appalachian borderers their reputation for marksmanship. But such weapons were scarce in New England militia units.

As for gunpowder, mainland governors had generally reported little on hand. Powder stocks left from earlier wars had shrunk, not just from usage and spoilage. As popular political unrest mounted in the 1760s, wary royal officials had sold off quantities. Massachusetts had switched to smaller cannon using lesser charges for ceremonial salutes; New Hampshire, by its official count, had only four ounces of powder for each militiaman, and muskets for just one in four.
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Most of the cannon, mortars, and ordinary muskets in America, coming from Britain and the European Continent, had been shipped by the Crown during earlier wars. Little gunpowder was produced in the thirteen colonies, and the handful of wartime mills was in ruins. The first contract for North American–made muskets, some 500 during the 1740s, had been fulfilled by Hugh Orr of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and both the Bay Colony and Connecticut could claim some experience in gunsmithing.
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In October 1774, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress declared its preference for rearming with locally made muskets. But that pretense dissolved amid the great needs of 1775.

Washington’s Gunpowder Crisis

Despite six to eight months of preparation, the ammunition consumed in the Lexington-Concord fighting left Massachusetts authorities with only 82 half barrels in late April. To rebuild its depleted store, the Committee of Safety asked the province’s hundred-odd townships for 68 barrels, and some were forthcoming. Even so, by early June, two weeks before Bunker Hill, Artemas Ward, the colony’s senior general, worried that Massachusetts would “for want of the means of defense, fall at last a prey to our enemies.”
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As May’s capture of the forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point escalated into late June’s tentative commitment to invade Canada, Patriot focus on gunpowder and small arms only intensified. If on one hand the invasion required arms and ammunition to proceed, by late summer and autumn congressional and military leaders were also viewing major Canadian forts and citadels as potential munitions sources. Washington, after taking command in July, had to guard his own comments lest the army’s shortage become common gossip, but by winter he was writing to General Montgomery in Canada “to supply [arms] from the King’s Stores in Quebec.”
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