The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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      Major Preston and most of his men remained defiant, despite the paltry daily ration of roots and salt pork, despite the awful smells seeping from the cellar hospital, despite the rebel riflemen who crept close at dusk for a shot at anyone careless enough to show his silhouette on the rampart. British ammunition stocks dwindled, but gunners still sought out rebel batteries, smashing the hemlocks and the balm of Gilead trees around the American positions north and west of the fort. Yet without prompt relief—whether from Montreal, London, or heaven—few doubted that the last extremity had drawn near. “I am still alive,” wrote one of the besieged in late October, “but the will to live diminishes within me.”

      For nearly a century, Americans had seen Canada as a blood enemy. New Englanders and New Yorkers especially never forgave the atrocities committed by French raiders and their Indian confederates at Deerfield, Schenectady, Fort William Henry, and other frontier settlements. Catholic Quebec was seen as a citadel of popery and tyranny. The French, as a Rhode Island pastor proclaimed in 1759, were children of the “scarlet whore, the mother of harlots.”

      Britain’s triumph in the Seven Years’ War and its acquisition of New France in 1763—known in Quebec as “the Conquest”—gladdened American hearts. Many French Canadians decamped for France. Priests lost the right to collect tithes and the benefit of an established state religion. A small commercial class of English merchants, friendly to American traders, took root. The Canadian population—under a hundred thousand, less than New Jersey—was still largely rural, illiterate, dependent on farming and fur, and essentially feudal. Most were French-Canadian habitants, or peasants, now known as “new subjects,” since their allegiance to the British Crown was barely a decade old and deeply suspect. Many secretly hoped that France would win back what had been lost or that the “Londoners”—Englishmen—would tire of the weather and go home. Largely descended from Norman colonists sent to the New World by Louis XIV, the habitants were described by an eighteenth-century author as “loud, boastful, mendacious, obliging, civil, and honest.” A few thousand “old subjects”—Anglo merchants and Crown officials—congregated in Montreal and Quebec City. Nova Scotia and the maritime precincts remained wild, isolated, and sparsely peopled.

      As tensions with Britain escalated, many Americans—Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams among them—considered Canada a natural component of a united North America. The First Continental Congress in October 1774 sent Canadians an open letter, at once beckoning and sinister: “You have been conquered into liberty.… You are a small people, compared to those who with open arms invite you into fellowship.” Canadians faced a choice between having “all the rest of North America your unalterable friends, or your inveterate enemies.”

      The Quebec Act, which took effect in May 1775, infuriated the Americans and altered the political calculus. Canada would be ruled not by an elected assembly, but by a royal governor and his council, a harbinger, in American eyes, of British tyranny across the continent. Even more provocative were the provisions extending Quebec’s boundaries south and west, into the rich lands beyond the Appalachians for which American colonists had fought both Indians and the French, and the recognition of the Roman Catholic Church’s status in Canada, including the right of Catholics to hold office and citizenship, to again levy parish tithes, to serve in the army, and to retain French civil law. These provisions riled American expansionists—fifty thousand of whom now lived west of the mountains—and revived fears of what one chaplain described as “this vast extended country, which has been for ages the dwelling of Satan.” Catholic hordes—likened to a mythical beast found in the Book of Revelation, “drunk with the wine of her fornications”—could well descend on Protestant America. It was said that hundreds of pairs of snowshoes had been readied, should Canadian legions be commanded to march southward.

      War in Massachusetts, and the American capture of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, brought matters to a head. Congress dithered, initially proposing to return the two forts rather than end any chance of reconciliation with Britain; then decided to keep them; then dithered some more over whether to preemptively attack Quebec when it became clear that Canada was unlikely to send delegates to Philadelphia despite an invitation to “the oppressed inhabitants” to make common cause as “fellow sufferers.” The debate raged for weeks. Even Washington, who had qualms about opening another front, saw utility in capturing Canadian staging grounds before the reinforced British could descend on New York and New England. Others saw a chance to seize the Canadian granary and fur trade, to forestall attacks by Britain’s potential Indian allies, and to preclude the need to rebuild Ticonderoga and other frontier defenses. Britain reportedly had fewer than seven hundred regulars scattered across Quebec; two of the four regiments posted there had been sent to Boston in 1774 at Gage’s request. Canada conceivably could be captured and converted into the fourteenth American province with fewer than two thousand troops in a quick, cheap campaign. Skeptics argued that an invasion would convert Americans into aggressors, disperse scarce military resources, and alienate both American moderates and British supporters of the colonial cause. Some recalled that during the last war, more than a million British colonists and regulars had needed six years, several of them disastrous, to subdue less than seventy thousand Canadians and their French allies.

      In late June, Congress finally ordered Major General Philip Schuyler, a well-born New Yorker, to launch preemptive attacks to prevent Britain from seizing Lake Champlain. He was authorized to “take possession of St. Johns, Montreal, and any other parts of the country” if “practicable” and if the intrusion “will not be disagreeable to the Canadians.” Under the guise of promoting continental “peace and security”—Congress promised to “adopt them into our union as a sister colony”—Canada was to be obliterated as a military and political threat. Most Canadians were expected to welcome the incursion, a fantasy not unlike that harbored by Britain about the Americans. This would be the first, but hardly the last, American invasion of another land under the pretext of bettering life for the invaded.

      Congress had denounced Catholics for “impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.” Now it found “the Protestant and Catholic colonies to be strongly linked” by their common antipathy to British oppression. In a gesture of tolerance and perhaps to forestall charges of hypocrisy, Congress also acknowledged that Catholics deserved “liberty of conscience.” If nothing else, the Canadian gambit caused Americans to contemplate the practical merits of inclusion, moderation, and religious freedom. The Northern Army, as the invasion host was named, was to be a liberating force, not a vengeful one.

      For two months little had gone right in the campaign. The Northern Army comprised twelve hundred ill-trained, ill-equipped, insubordinate troops, many without decent firelocks or gunsmiths at hand to fix them. When General Schuyler reached Ticonderoga at ten p.m. on a July evening, the lone sentinel tried unsuccessfully to waken the watch and the rest of the garrison. “With a penknife only,” Schuyler wrote Washington, “I could … have set fire to the blockhouse, destroyed the stores, and starved the people here.” Three weeks later, having advanced not a step farther north, he reported that he had less than a ton of gunpowder, no carriages to move his field guns, and little food. His men, scattered along the Hudson valley, seemed “much inclined to a seditious and mutinous temper.” Carpenters building flat-bottomed bateaux to cross Lake Champlain lacked timber, nails, pitch, and cordage. When Schuyler requested reinforcements, the New York Committee of Safety told him, “Our troops can be of no service to you. They have no arms, clothes, blankets, or ammunition; the officers no commissions; our treasury no money.”

      Tall, thin, and florid, with kinky hair and a raspy voice, Philip Schuyler was among America’s wealthiest and most accomplished men. The scion of émigré Dutch land barons, he owned twenty thousand acres from New York to Detroit, including a brick mansion on a ridge above Albany with a view of the Catskills and hand-painted wallpaper depicting romantic Roman ruins. His country seat on Fish Creek in Saratoga abutted sawmills and a flax plantation that spun linen. He spoke French and Mohawk, understood lumber markets, mathematics, boat-building, slave owning, navigation, hemp cultivation, СКАЧАТЬ