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. Schuyler, 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 joined 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.35Sent 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

Maclean sailed to Boston, where Gage made him, as a lieutenant colonel, commander of the regiment, which he divided into two battalions. Recruits for one of them were to come from Nova Scotia and St. John’s Island (now Prince Edward Island). The other battalion, which Maclean would directly command, was to enlist Loyalists in Canada and New York—a limitation Maclean ignored so that he could include Highlanders in the Carolinas.40

• • •

Maclean’s Royal Highland Emigrants regiment would be the first organized Loyalist military unit to fight in a major battle of the Revolution. When Maclean arrived in Quebec, he found, to his surprise and rage, that pro-American Québécois were expecting to surrender the city to Benedict Arnold. Carleton arrived next and reacted swiftly, proclaiming that every able-bodied man who refused to bear arms was to leave Quebec within four days. The proclamation drove out many families known to be pro-American. But Carleton knew that others remained, and he still feared that if the invaders managed to get within the walled city, they would attract sympathizers.41 He tried to stifle rebellion among Catholics by getting the local Catholic hierarchy to decree that anyone helping the invaders would be denied the sacraments.42

Carleton assembled an army of assorted defenders. The garrison could muster only about one hundred men because most of Canada’s British Regulars had been sent to Boston as reinforcements for Gage. Added to the garrison troops were four hundred sailors and thirty-five marines of two Royal Navy warships in Quebec Harbor, along with fifty masters and mates of merchant ships. There were also nine hundred local militiamen—some British, some Canadien—and a number of Catholic seminary students.43Carleton handed military command to Maclean, who strengthened defenses in the two-tier city, which consisted of a vulnerable lower town open to the harbor and a walled, fortresslike upper town.

On November 14 Arnold’s men paddled and rowed across the river and encamped on the Plains of Abraham. Here had been the climactic battle of the French and Indian War, when Gen. James Wolfe defeated the Marquis de Montcalm. The fall of Quebec meant the conquest of Canada. Arnold, well aware that history could repeat itself here, boldly sent an officer toward the city under a flag of truce with a demand of surrender. Maclean’s guns fired on the officer. The next day Arnold tried again and got the same response. Prudently he withdrew about twenty miles from Quebec and awaited Montgomery.44

Montgomery appeared with about three hundred men, including pro-American Canadian militiamen he had picked up along the way. He also brought spoils from British river forts that had fallen to him: ammunition, guns, and Redcoats’ winter uniforms. Most of Arnold’s men were half naked, shivering in the cold shortening days of December. They eagerly donned the uniforms, attaching twigs of hemlock to their hats to advertise their true identity.45

Montgomery took command and established a camp close to the city. He immediately sent a letter to Carleton demanding surrender. Carleton refused to accept it. So Montgomery recruited an old woman to deliver a second letter, which said that the Americans came “with the professed Intention of eradicating Tyranny and giving Liberty and Security to this oppressed Province.”46 Carleton burned the note without reading it, had the woman arrested, and after she spent a night in jail, he put her outside the gates.

Montgomery began a siege. But the enlistment of many of his men ended on New Year’s Day, and he knew he had no choice but an attack. At 2 a.m. on the last day of 1775, his men tramped through a blizzard to their places in Montgomery’s attack plan: two feints, then—on the signal of two rockets flaring in the darkness—two attacks on the lower town. Once it was taken, the combined force would advance on the upper town. All of this was known by the defenders because a deserter had slipped into the city and revealed the plan. So they were ready when they saw the rockets rising in the black sky and the dots of lanterns advancing in the whirling snow.

Arnold, leading six hundred men into the lower town from the north, reached as far as a barricade that erupted with fierce fire. Shot in the left leg, he leaned against a wall and, waving his sword, urged his men on until, his boot filling with blood, he was taken off, still gripping his sword.47He turned command over to Daniel Morgan, who fought his way to the rendezvous site but, instead of linking up with Montgomery, was surrounded by two hundred of Maclean’s men and was captured with most of his force.48

On the south side of town Montgomery, leading his advance guard, charged a fortified house. He was ten yards from the house when a blast of cannon and musket fire killed him, two other officers, andten nearby men. Others were wounded.49 Suddenly leaderless, the rest turned and ran. Many of them would be among the four hundred prisoners taken that day.50 About eighty in the invading force were killed or wounded.51

The next day British troops saw a hand sticking out of a drift of bloodied snow. They dug and found the body of Montgomery, his sword at his side. Had he not been killed, Arnold wrote in tribute, “the town would have been ours.”52

Arnold, propped up in a hospital bed in a Quebec suburb, commanded about six hundred men who had managed to escape and regroup outside the city. They lived from day to day on diminishing rations while men deserted and Arnold sent couriers to Montreal, still in the invaders’ hands, carrying urgent requests for troops and supplies. Canadiens drifted into Arnold’s camp, hoping to arm themselves and somehow fight the British. Carleton did not attack, for he knew that in spring reinforcements would come in Royal Navy warships.

On April 1, 1776, Arnold, promoted to brigadier general, was ordered to Montreal. There, to his surprise, he met Ben Franklin and two other commissioners dispatched by the Continental Congress in quest of the fourteenth colony. The commissioners had been told to find a way “to promote or to form a union between the United Colonies and the people of Canada.” The commissioners stayed in what Franklin called “the best built and the best furnished house in the city”—the mansion of Thomas Walker, the one-eared Canadian rebel. The commission gave Arnold permission to supply the struggling invasion force by seizing goods from the warehouses and ships of Montreal Tories. He paid in worthless Continental currency rather than gold. The authorized plundering was the sole accomplishment of the commission, which fled Canada in May.53

Several Continental Army regiments made their way to Quebec, adding to the remnants of the invasion force. But there was little chance for a second thrust into Quebec, for in May and June, British reinforcements arrived, and the Americans and their Canadian alliesbegan to withdraw. Carleton pursued, leading a force of eight thousand Regulars and three thousand German mercenaries, collectively called Hessians. The Patriots, burning or seizing anything of value, retreated up the Richelieu River to Lake Champlain, marshaling finally at Crown Point, just above Ticonderoga.54

“The junction of the Canadians with the Colonies,” Arnold wrote to General Schuyler, “… is at an end. Let us quit then and secure our own country before it is too late.” Arnold took command of the retreat as Carleton began building warships at the north end of Lake Champlain to speed up his chase. To fight for control of the lake and thwart or delay a British invasion, Arnold rounded up carpenters and shipwrights to build a fleet of smaller ships near Crown Point, at Skenes-borough (now Whitehall, New York).

Skenesborough was named after a powerful local Tory, Col. Philip Skene, who was away on business in England. Arnold seized Skene’s trading schooner, the Katherine, and renamed her Liberty. Arnold’s men, searching out Tories, captured Skene’s twenty-two-year-old son Andrew, other members of the family, a dozen slaves, and fifty tenants. All but Andrew were released. He was jailed as a military prisoner, but he escaped and made his way to Quebec to become part of the growing Loyalist military presence in Canada.

Arnold’s men took possession of Skene’s mansion and the large stone fort that he had built to guard his fiefdom. In the cellar of his house they found the body of Skene’s wife, preserved, it was said, so that he could continue to receive an annuity provided for him while his wife remained above ground. The soldiers buried the body at the base of what is still called Skene’s Mountain.55

The sixteen vessels of Arnold’s little navy consisted mostly of flat-bottomed craft about fifty-three feet long propelled by oars and a fore-and-aft sail. Each carried a few small cannons. The British fleet, which sailed south in October 1776, dwarfed Arnold’s. The British could fire one thousand pounds of shot for every six hundred pounds fired by Arnold’s boats.56 In a ferocious hide-and-seek battle around

Valcour Island near the western shore of the lake, Arnold lost eleven of his sixteen boats but thwarted Carleton’s hope for a swift drive southward.57

Arnold took charge of a rear guard to shield the rest of his retreating force from Carleton’s advance guard. He set Skenesborough afire and got his men to the boats that would save them. As the British came into sight, Arnold galloped to the shore of Lake Champlain, shot his horse to deny it to the enemy, took his saddle, and climbed into a boat destined for Crown Point. He had vowed to be the last man out of Canada, and he was.58

During his retreat he had stripped the land of food, impeding and slowing down a British advance toward the Hudson River, the waterway to New York City. Carleton, in the chill of a frustrating October, postponed his planned invasion and decided that the campaign season had ended. He retired to winter quarters, giving the Rebels a hard-won chance to regroup.59

The failed invasion did not end the American fascination with the fourteenth colony. Even as Arnold was retreating, another invasion was about to begin. The leader was Jonathan Eddy, one of the many Massachusetts colonists who had migrated to Nova Scotia.

In 1755 Eddy had joined a force formed by John Winslow (Edward Winslow’s uncle) to seize the French fort Beauséjour at the head of the Bay of Fundy. The taking of the fort began the campaign to rid British Canada of Acadians. The British distrusted the Catholic, French-speaking Acadians, most of them fishermen and farmers who declined to join Britain in its war against France.

Winslow, at the head of a regiment consisting mostly of Massachusetts volunteers like Eddy, was one of the officers who carried out the expulsion of the Acadians, a tragedy immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem Evangeline. Winslow began by ordering “both old men and young men, as well as all the lads of ten years of age” to assemble in a Catholic church “that we may impart to them what we are ordered to communicate … no excuse will be admittedon any pretence whatever, on pain of forfeiting goods and chattels, in default of real estate.”60

Winslow shut the doors of the church and addressed the 418 men and boys in English, which few Acadians understood. He told them that they were all “the King’s prisoners” and that their “lands and tenements, cattle of all kinds and live stock of all sorts, are forfeited to the Crown.” Five days later, as their burned-down homes and barns smoldered behind them, more than one thousand men, women, and children were herded onto ships, with little regard for keeping families intact. They were the first of more than ten thousand Acadians who were expelled between 1775 and 1783, mostly to other American colonies.61

Eddy served at Beauséjour—renamed Fort Cumberland—from 1759 until 1760, and after his discharge returned home to Massachusetts. Three years later, drawn by the offer of cheap land, he was among the New Englanders who settled on what had been Acadian farmland. As a member of the new landed gentry he was appointed a member of the Nova Scotia legislature.62

As reports of rebellion arrived from Massachusetts, Eddy felt a kinship with the Rebels in his native colony. Resurrecting his old wartime title, Captain Eddy sailed to Massachusetts, leaving his family behind. In March 27, 1776, Eddy met with George Washington in Cambridge and urged him to support Patriots in Nova Scotia. Washington gave Eddy his blessing—and money to travel to Philadelphia and present his proposal to Congress.63

Congressmen politely told him they could not give him any assistance. The failed invasion had dampened congressional enthusiasm about actions in Canada. A month before, Congress had secretly turned down a plan to put Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the torch. The arson raid had been proposed by Jeremiah O’Brien, hero of the HMS Margaretta seizure in Machias, Maine, and another man, presumably a privateer like O’Brien.64

Eddy next went before the Massachusetts legislature, which rejected his request for troops but did give him ammunition and some supplies. He chartered a small ship and crew and sailed to Machias, where he found some followers, and then went on to Nova Scotia for more, particularly around Fort Cumberland. His grand plan was to take the fort and march on to Halifax, his force swelling with more and more devotees of the fourteenth colony. When he was ready to attack the fort, he later claimed, he had an army of 180 men, including Indians, Acadian exiles, and Maine Patriots. On November 10 he appeared before Fort Cumberland, and, under a flag of truce, as “Commanding Officer of the United Forces,” demanded surrender.65

The fort was manned by Loyalists, the Royal Fencible Americans. The fort’s commander replied with a letter ordering Eddy to “disarm yourself and party Immediately and Surrender to the King’s mercy.” After the Loyalist force easily repulsed two feeble attacks, Eddy withdrew to await reinforcements that never came. Later in the month additional defenders arrived at the fort, including more Loyalists—the Canada-based battalion of the Royal Highland Emigrants.66 After some desultory sparring between defenders and would-be attackers, the commander of the fort ended the invasion by issuing a general amnesty that pardoned nearly all the Canadians, dissolving Eddy’s army.67

Eddy fled to Machias, which soon was targeted for reprisal. Four British warships sailed up the Machias River to shell the town. Townspeople and Indian allies defended from both shores. To move a cannon to a strategic spot for firing on one of the ships, militiamen staged a funeral procession, with the cannon disguised as a bier draped with a blanket. When the bier began spewing cannonballs, the warship pulled away, beginning the British withdrawal.68 The raid was a lesson for British strategists, who realized that the real danger from the Rebels was on the sea. The Royal Navy sharpened its vigilance along the Nova Scotia coast, dueling with privateers like Jeremiah O’Brien.

Washington continued to yearn for the fourteenth colony, but never again would he approve an invasion, even though he knew that a Canada in British hands would always be a menace. Ten days after getting from General Schuyler “the melancholy account” of the failed attack on Quebec, Washington wrote to Arnold, saying of Canada, “To whomsoever it belongs, in their favor, probably, willthe balance turn. If it is in ours, success I think will most certainly crown our virtuous struggles. If it is in theirs, the contest at best will be doubtful, hazardous, and bloody.”69 By the time he wrote this, in January 1776, he knew that the war had to be fought not in Canada but where he was, in Cambridge, or where the British and their Tories were, in Boston.

* From the Latin Iacobus: James. Jacobites supported a deposed seventeenth-century king, Britain’s last Catholic monarch-James II of England (who also ruled Scotland as James VII).

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