The First American Army (12 page)

Two days later, they passed a farmhouse where the residents offered to sell Arnold more food. Greenman wrote, “There was beef and bread for us, which we cooked plenty of. Some of the men made themselves sick eating so much.” He added that it snowed that night as they lay on the ground, but, thanks to the food, “we slept very hearty.”

On November 12, Arnold’s expedition, fortified by more food from farmers they met, arrived on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, one of North America’s major waterways, which connected the Atlantic Ocean to both Quebec and Montreal. Their journey was nearly over. The enlisted men and their officers, and Arnold, had accomplished quite a feat; they had walked and sailed through three hundred fifty miles of some of the most difficult terrain in the United States, traveled up three rivers, crossed two mountain ranges, survived a severe storm, a treacherous flood, and several snowstorms and made it to the gates of Quebec City with 675 men, losing just 55—dead, sick, or deserted—not counting the three hundred men who turned back with Enos.

In letters he wrote to his superior, Schuyler, back in Albany, Benedict Arnold praised his men. “Short of provisions, part of the detachment disheartened and gone back, famine staring us in the face, an enemy’s country and uncertainty ahead. Notwithstanding all these obstacles, the officers and men, inspired and fired with the love of liberty and their country, pushed on.”
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But Arnold’s praise for the enlisted men under his care paled in comparison to the admiration they had for him for leading them through the wilderness. Private Stocking, who feared death on the trip, told friends, in remarks repeated by all of the enlisted soldiers, that Arnold was “beloved by his men.”

Congress was euphoric. One delegate wrote that the journey through the wilds of New England was “thought equal Hannibal’s over the Alps.”

Q
uebec City was a walled-in fortification that an army could not conquer unless it was starved out, battered it with cannon in a lengthy siege, or stormed it with several thousand troops. This did not worry either General Arnold (he had been promoted on January 10, 1776) or General Montgomery, who arrived there with his army on December 3 and took charge of the entire operation. Both men had said earlier that the inhabitants of Quebec and the towns around it, both French and English, would rise up and join forces with the Americans as soon as the fighting began. This idea had been part of the overall plan for months and this anticipated love of the Americans was reaffirmed for Arnold in conversations with Frenchmen from whom he purchased provisions as his army marched closer to the St. Lawrence.
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The two generals were wrong. The inhabitants had no intentions of assisting the Americans. That realization led Montgomery to suggest a short siege of the city and its eighteen hundred defenders to soften up its defenses, followed by a storming of the walls. The siege did not last long because it was ineffective, as the American forces totaled around 1,325 men; Montgomery then planned a direct assault. He would wait until a snowstorm hit and then launch a surprise attack, using the blanket of falling snow as a cover. The generals knew that they could not attack the city directly across what was called the Plains of Abraham on the western side of the city because the walls overlooking the wide plains were too well fortified. They had to go around the city and attack from the rear, near the river. That would be a difficult task.

The central part of Quebec, with its military garrison, administrative officials, and cathedral, was inside a stone fortress that could only be entered through heavily guarded gates. The only feasible assault would have to be a concentrated charge against one of the large gates protecting the city or an attack in which men mounted the walls with ladders. To do so, the Americans would have to charge through the streets of what was called the lower town, a series of neighborhoods in front of one gate that overlooked the St. Lawrence. Two narrow roads led to it.

Everything fell into place on December 31 when a storm began. The attack was a disaster. Montgomery and Arnold underestimated the firepower of the British inside the town. Very few local residents rose up and joined Montgomery, but the overwhelming majority helped the British hold Quebec against the Americans. The snowstorm did not act as a cover and, in fact, made it difficult for the advancing lines of Americans to see where they were going. The nearly one foot of snow on the ground made it impossible to carry cannon caissons on sleds and some had to be left behind. The roads into Quebec were much narrower than they appeared on maps and the troops found that they had to advance in double, and at times in single file, and became easy targets for British musket fire. The British had suspected a night assault and were prepared with artillery. A single cannon burst killed Montgomery and two of his top aides shortly after his wing of the army reached the town. Benedict Arnold, advancing from another direction, was shot in the leg and went down, cursing loudly. His wound prohibited him from any movement, slowing his column of troops.

Several companies of men managed to force their way into the lower town after subduing the enemy at barricades at one of the wharves defended by several cannon. Wrote Private Morison, “We fired into the portholes with such effect that the enemy cannot discharge a single cannon.” One company of riflemen led by Daniel Morgan surprised a company of British, taking them prisoners. Morgan was uncertain about what to do next. He had heard that Arnold was wounded, but he had no idea what was happening to Arnold’s main troop. Morgan took command, but did not know the fate of Montgomery and his men, either. His officers insisted on waiting for the general. Instead of moving forward, Morgan opted to wait for Montgomery, who never came. He and his men were eventually confronted by the British in the town. Morison continued, “A furious discharge of musketry is let loose upon us from behind houses; in an instant we are assailed from different quarters with deadly fire. We rush on to every part (of the neighborhood) rouse the enemy from their covert and force a body of them to an open fight; (but) now attacked by thrice our number.”
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Morgan’s men were forced to surrender.

The musket fire from the walls proved deadly. Private Stocking wrote of “a tremendous fire from the windows” that halted the attack of his company. “Thirty of our privates being killed and thirty-five wounded,” he wrote of the enlisted men, “and surrounded as we were without any relief, we were obliged to surrender ourselves.”
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A Rhode Island company lost several men in a heavy musket fire from the ramparts as they advanced through the lower town but did not make it into the inner city. William Humphrey, a private in the regiment, wrote of the frustration of its members: “We rallied our men and tried to scale the second barrier, and not withstanding their utmost efforts, we got some of our ladders up but was obliged to retreat, our guns being wet, as not one to ten would fire; then we was concluded to retreat, which we did to the first barrier that we had took, and when we came there we found we could not retreat without losing all our men or at least most of them.”
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Jeremiah Greenman was in one of the other companies that fought their way into the lower town. He wrote, “With hearts undaunted to scale the walls we march on down to St. Roche,” and then to the lower town area of Quebec. They were easily spotted. “Alarm sounded and bells rang. They soon turned out and formed themselves along the ramparts. They kept a continual fire on us but we got up to their two-gun battery after losing a great number of men. We soon got into their battery, which was two nine pounders. We got in and took seventy prisoners. Then our men’s arms got wet and we could not do much.”

Greenman’s unit was trapped. They soon learned that Montgomery had been killed and Arnold wounded. The attack had failed. Surrounded, they were forced to surrender to the British, as did between three and four hundred other Americans (fifty-one were killed and thirty-six wounded in the assault). Greenman was first marched to a Jesuit college in Quebec, opposite the cathedral there, and then to a convent, where he was put under guard, with others, as a prisoner of war.

At first, Arnold did not know what happened to anyone after he was shot and went down in the snow. The general was carried back to a makeshift American hospital at St. Roche, where he received reports of the fighting. Despite the setbacks he had seen all around him in Quebec, he refused to order a retreat. The feisty Arnold was treated by Dr. Senter and did remain in the hospital, confined to bed, but he took two pistols with him and told Senter that he would fight it out with the British from his bed should they arrive.

Upon his arrival at the convent on the evening of January 1, 1776, Greenman had to chuckle when his jailers presented him with a cup of rum and a biscuit and wished him a happy New Year. Some New Year.

The prisoners there, all enlisted men, were given one pound of bread, a half pound of meat and six ounces of butter once a day, and a half pint of boiled rice each day. A resident of the town gave them a cask of wine for New Year’s.

The enlisted men were kept in very cramped quarters. “Very uncomfortable,” wrote Greenman, “Not enough room to lay down to sleep.”

He wrote too soon. A few days later the enlisted men were taken to another room in the convent that was smaller than their original chamber. The men tore up some partition boards in the new cell and burned them to give themselves more room. Two men didn’t need more room; they were clamped in irons following a conversation about escaping that was overheard by a guard. The promised food allowances had been forgotten and the men were served salmon, or “stinking salmon,” as Greenman put it.

Some of the troops were housed in a jail that overlooked a square through which wooden wagons carried the blood-soaked bodies of dead Americans. They had been tossed on top of each other, their limbs splayed this way and that, and their wounds fresh. They were driven on the way to the “death house,” where the slain American soldiers would be dumped in a pile with their compatriots. Pvt. John Henry, somberly watching a procession of the wagons, began to cry when one drove past his cell window carrying a friend. He wrote, “Poor Nelson lay on top of half a dozen other bodies, his arms extended beyond his head, as if in the act of prayer.”
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Greenman found himself in such a tawdry prison because neither side planned for a long war. Neither the Americans or British constructed prisons and prisoners of war were marched into whatever large structures either side could find. The British put several thousand captured soldiers in New York City prisons that were formerly sugar warehouses. Prisoners taken in the Philadelphia battles found themselves in the Walnut Street jail in that city. Many American sailors were taken back to England and tossed into Dartmoor, Old Mill, and Forten prisons and even incarcerated in the Tower of London. Those captured in the Caribbean, usually from privateer vessels, were put into small jails or homes converted into jails on nearby islands. British and Hessian prisoners were held in jails and warehouses. Some Hessians were put to work as laborers in ironworks.

The worst jails were the dreaded prison ships of the British navy, anchored in Wallabout Bay, off Brooklyn. The British needed large spaces to house three thousand American soldiers captured in the New York battles in 1776 and decided to refit several transport ships for confinement. The men were dumped into hopelessly overcrowded and badly managed ships, such as the
Jersey, Hunter,
and
Stromboli
. They slept side by side on wood planks in the badly ventilated holds of the ships with terrible food, infrequent exercise, and severe punishments for small infractions of the captain’s haphazard rules. The
Jersey,
a real hellhole, was renovated as a prison after it was determined to be unfit for service in the early 1770s. The men considered it the worst prison. Thousands died on the prison ships and their bodies were buried on beaches of Wallabout Bay. In 1808, American authorities decided to dig up the skeletons of prisoners buried there and found eleven thousand, some of whom were British and Hessian dead. Several thousand more were buried elsewhere and never found. No comprehensive records were kept on either side, but it is likely that more than ten thousand Americans perished as prisoners of war.
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One solution to prison overcrowding for the British, particularly early in the war, was parole. Officers who were captured were held in private homes at night and allowed to walk about the city during the day; some even struck up friendships with residents and conducted romances with local women. These prisoners were usually kept between six months and a year and then sent home.

Prison exchanges were another means of obtaining freedom. The British would free several dozen prisoners following a similar release by the Americans. This was often done by rank, one general for another or three lieutenants for three lieutenants. Enlisted men exchanged were grouped together.