Read The First American Army Online
Authors: Bruce Chadwick
The First American Army (10 page)
Some of the better educated men in the army believed they were casting the foundation not just for a new political system in the 1770s, but a new democratic order that would last forever and become a model for republics throughout the earth.
And they fought because they had good reason to do so. Americans had not gone to war since the oppressions of the Crown had begun in the early 1760s because no one seemed to believe that there was a significant reason for a military engagement. The British had not attacked any of their militias and the navy had not bombarded any colonial port. Even the occupation of the British army, the quartering of soldiers in colonists’ homes, and the Boston Massacre in 1770 did not seem like justifications for an armed rebellion. There had been many reasons to wail about the British in newspapers and magazines and to stage rallies to protest restrictive trade laws and rising tax levies and to damn the king in round after round of beers at taverns, but none to actually fight a war. The brutal, bloody battles of Lexington and Concord changed all that. The Americans had been attacked by the British army and had to defend their country. It was that simple.
Newspapers from Georgia to Massachusetts hailed the brave soldiers of the brand new Continental Army. Despite the many vexations that the enlisted men caused them, Washington and his staff would always be proud of them. “I cherish those dear, ragged Continentals, whose patience will be the admiration of future ages and glory in bleeding with them,” wrote Colonel John Laurens, one of Washington’s top aides.
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The generals who fought with them the longest, such as Nathanael Greene, respected the foot soldiers more than anyone else. “Our men are better than our officers,” he wrote.
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The soldiers who stayed with the army returned the confidence placed in them, assuring all that when it came time to fight they would be ready. Many felt just like a Connecticut private who wrote home of the men in arms just before the crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Day in 1776 that “You would be amazed to see the fine spirits they are in. The . . . troops are really well disciplined and you may depend will fight bravely . . . we shall do honour to ourselves.”
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Chapter Seven
The War
C
anada. The northern neighbor of the thirteen colonies was so vast that it could not even be properly charted on existing maps. The members of the Continental Congress, flush with successes at Lexington, Concord, and the valiant stand atop Bunker Hill, plus the ongoing siege of Boston, coveted Canada. Why not conquer it and annex it as the “fourteenth colony,” more than doubling the size of the “united colonies,” and removing the British from most of North America?
The idea was not a new one. In 1690, New England colonists, tired of raids by the Indians and their French allies, launched a two-pronged assault on the country, one on land to capture Montreal and another by sea to take Quebec. Men in both had to turn back when a smallpox epidemic struck the region. Again, in 1740, New England troops under the Crown’s flag captured Fort Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island, but had to cede it back to France. The British, with American volunteers, had captured Quebec and Montreal during the French and Indian War, which was waged between 1756 and 1763.
Now, in the fall of 1775, Canada beckoned once again. Congress feared an invasion by the British down the Richelieu River into Lake Champlain and then, following an overland march to Albany, on down the Hudson River to New York. It would permit the British to separate New England from the other colonies. Members of Congress had invited Canadians favorably disposed to the Revolution to sit in on some of their meetings concerning their country in an effort to gain their support for an invasion of Canada. That effort never materialized, but the delegates always believed that these men, and thousands of other Canadians, would lock arms with the Continental troops and rise up against the Crown as soon as the American army was within sight of their communities.
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The delegates were eager to strike Canada and so was George Washington, who saw the conquest of the country as a sure way to block any land or sea assaults on America from the north. Any full-scale invasion of Canada was complicated, though. How do you take another country? What if the local residents did not rise up and join the Americans? Would soldiers who had marched a few miles to Boston down well-traveled highways be able to march more than two hundred miles through treacherous mountain terrain to Canada? How could such a venture be supplied?
And who would lead such a dangerous mission?
J
eremiah Greenman, seventeen, from Newport, Rhode Island, was one of nearly seven hundred privates in a force of eleven hundred soldiers walking up gangplanks onto the decks of a fleet of eleven ships at a wharf at Newburyport, Massachusetts, on September 18, 1775. He had enlisted in the army just a few weeks before and had arrived in Cambridge just in time to be assigned to the Canadian expedition.
Greenman was impressed by the spirit of the men boarding the boats that day and even more taken by the rousing send-off they were given by a large and boisterous crowd of citizens gathered near the docks of the fishing town. He wrote of the scene in the journal he kept for the duration of the American Revolution, “Colors flying, drums a-beating and fifes a-playing, the hills and wharves covered [with people] bidding their friends farewell.”
Greenman and the Rhode Islanders, and the other soldiers, were confident, too, because they would march north under the leadership of one of the early heroes of the Revolution, Colonel Benedict Arnold. Washington needed a man of great fortitude and endurance who could command men on a wilderness trek as well as on the battlefield, a man the troops could trust and someone the people admired. That was Arnold.
Arnold was the man of the hour. The feisty colonel from Connecticut had earned headlines when, with Ethan Allen, he captured the “impregnable” Fort Ticonderoga on the southwestern shore of Lake Champlain earlier that spring. Arnold seemed to be everywhere during the early days of the war. Following his audacious conquest of Ticonderoga, he sailed up Lake Champlain and captured the British garrison at the Canadian town of St. John’s, seizing the British warship
George
anchored there.
He returned to Massachusetts surrounded by some minor controversy because he had become involved in a contentious dispute with Congress over the reimbursement of his personal expenses—he had few receipts—during his heroics at Fort Ticonderoga. At the time, few thought much about it.
Arnold, the son of a shipowner and great-great-grandson of the colonial governor of Rhode Island, had always thirsted for the military life. He joined a local militia company in New Haven, where he lived, in the early 1770s following years of traveling on land and on sea as a trader and was soon elected its captain. Arnold led his seventy-man company to Boston to join the army after the battles of Lexington and Concord. He was easily noticed. Colonel Arnold was about five feet, eight inches tall and possessed a compact, muscular frame. He had jet-black hair, bluegray eyes, and a hooked nose. He was extremely well dressed, a persuasive speaker, and had arrived as the commander of six dozen men. He was ready to fight, right now. In short, he was just the kind of man the Continental Army needed.
Later, Colonel Henry Livingston wrote of Arnold’s possible departure from the service in 1777, just after the battle of Saratoga, “I am much distressed that General Arnold’s determination to retire from the army . . . He is the life and soul of the troops . . . to him and to him alone is due the honor of our late victory.”
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People who met him grumbled about his egotism, hot temper, and self-congratulatory airs, but none of that really mattered because the army was woefully short of men with any military acumen at all. That experience was evident in his masterful planning for the assault on Ticonderoga and his leadership in the actual attack.
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Benedict Arnold got things done.
Washington wanted to take Canada. His initial plan was to send General Philip Schuyler there from Albany at the head of a fifteen hundred man force to launch a two-pronged attack. Arnold insisted on showing him another plan and the commander in chief was intrigued. As a trader, the colonel told Washington, he had visited Quebec by ship and sailed up and down the coast of New England and knew well the Kennebec River, in Maine, then part of the Massachusetts colony. He had obtained copies of journals and maps drawn in the French and Indian War by British colonel John Montresor, including Montresor’s charts of water and land routes between the Kennebec and Quebec, charts with which the commander in chief was familiar. With Washington listening intently, Arnold proposed journeying to Quebec via an unusual route up the Kennebec—from its mouth in the Atlantic Ocean to the Chaudière River, past the ominously named Dead River, to Quebec. His requested force of one thousand men would have to cover about one hundred eighty miles on land and water and trek across several low mountain ranges, but they would surprise the British at Quebec and conquer the walled-in city.
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On paper, the plan seemed feasible.
There were weaknesses. It would take seven or eight weeks to reach Canada and the men would have to march through the mountainous regions in early winter, a season that could bring numerous snowfalls and freezing temperatures for soldiers who had never marched that far in inclement weather. An army might live off the land in summer, but it could not do so in winter. No one took into consideration the snow in the mountains and the flooding of the rivers and lakes in the area following lengthy and often ferocious rainstorms. The maps did not indicate the many churning rapids and high waterfalls around which the men would have to carry sixty-five tons of supplies and their two hundred bateaux— flat-bottomed boats that carried eight men each. Maps of the area were not accurate and the distances between places in the country were actually far greater than they appeared on them. The charts showed rivers and ponds, but did not note their true depths. There were hardly any villages, farms, or people in that northeastern area of New England who could provide supplies if necessary.
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If the expedition became lost or trapped by snowstorms, they would be too far away from any towns for rescue.
General Schuyler never made it to Canada. His army of fifteen hundred began its journey on August 30, but Schuyler fell ill with scurvy and rheumatism halfway there and was forced to return to Fort Ticonderoga, replaced by his second in command, the energetic General Richard Montgomery.
The charismatic Montgomery, thirty-seven, was the son of a member of the Irish parliament who had served in the British army for years before moving to America in 1772 and marrying the daughter of wealthy New Yorker Robert Livingston. He was determined to spend the rest of his life as a gentleman farmer, but joined the Continental Army when the war began. Assisted by reinforcements, Montgomery, an experienced commander, defeated British and Canadian forces at Chambly and St. John’s in Canada and on November 13 seized Montreal. The city only had one hundred fifty men in it; most were captured. The head of the province, Governor Guy Carleton, a British general, had left Montreal two days before it surrendered. He raced to Quebec to help fortify that city. Montgomery left men in Montreal to hold the town and marched toward Quebec, the first part of the plan a great success.