The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ men after reinforcement by the Royal Navy, merchant seamen, and other armed loyalists, more than he’d expected. Although half were “obliged to bear arms against their inclination,” as Arnold wrote Montgomery, he calculated that two thousand attackers would be needed “to carry the town.” The informants also warned him that the defenders planned a sudden sally to catch him unawares.

      He ordered the men assembled, and at three a.m. on November 19 they staggered west on bloody feet for Pointe-aux-Trembles to await Montgomery. “Very cold morning,” Pierce told his diary. “Ground frozen very hard.” An armed two-masted snow passed them, heading down the St. Lawrence for Quebec; on deck, they would later learn, stood General Carleton in his habitant disguise.

      Having survived unspeakable hardship, many men desperately missed their homes and families. “God deliver me from this land of ignorance,” Pierce wrote, “and in his own due time return me once more where they can pronounce English.” Yet most recognized that more hardship lay ahead. “We have a winter’s campaign before us,” Captain Samuel Ward, Jr., told his family in Rhode Island. “But I trust we shall have the glory of taking Quebec!”

      Good news out of Canada sparked jubilation from Cambridge to Philadelphia and beyond. The invasion gambit had all but succeeded. General Montgomery controlled the Lake Champlain–Richelieu corridor, as well as Montreal and the western St. Lawrence valley. He soon would move east to join forces with Colonel Arnold, now hailed as an American Hannibal for a feat likened to crossing the Alps with elephants in midwinter.

      Canadian volunteers flocked to the American standard despite the clergy’s threat of eternal damnation. Some publicly acknowledged asking God to help les Bostonnais, as they called all Yankees. Habitants from sixteen parishes around Quebec City alone would assist the invaders by confiscating British supplies, detaining loyalists and overzealous priests, and ransacking the estates of wealthy seigneurs in a spate of score settling. Others provided firewood, built scaling ladders, and stood guard around American camps. “We can expect no assistance from the Canadian peasantry,” a Quebec merchant wrote. “They have imbibed a notion that if the rebels get entire possession of the country, they’ll be forever exempted from paying taxes.”

      For the American invaders, the delay in taking St. Johns was nettlesome. A quicker capture of Montreal in early fall might have bagged Carleton and permitted the seizure of defenseless Quebec in a swift coup de main. Aware that Britain would likely dispatch a robust force in the spring to recoup the empire’s losses in Canada, both Washington and Schuyler believed that Fortress Quebec must be quickly reduced in the coming weeks, then manned and fortified over the winter to withstand the anticipated assault. Although more than six tons of gunpowder had been sent to the Northern Army, mostly from South Carolina and New York, shortages persisted of everything from food and winter clothing to money and munitions.

      Still, with Montgomery and Arnold leading their “famine-proof veterans,” victory in the north seemed at hand. A Virginia congressman, Richard Henry Lee, spoke for many when he declared in Philadelphia, “No doubt is entertained here that this Congress will be shortly joined by delegates from Canada, which will then complete the union of fourteen provinces.”

       6.

       America Is an Ugly Job

      LONDON, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1775

      By late morning on Thursday, October 26, tens of thousands of high-spirited Londoners filled the streets around Parliament, lured by pleasant fall sunshine and the titillating expectation of trouble. Constables clustered outside the Swan tavern at Westminster Bridge and in St. James’s Park, and Foot Guards were issued ten musket cartridges apiece as a precaution. George III was to open a new session of Parliament this afternoon, but an American merchant named Stephen Sayre had been arrested at his Oxford Street house on suspicion of high treason; it was said that Sayre intended to kidnap the king, diverting his hijacked coach to the Tower, where bribed guards would lock the gates behind him and allow seditious rioters to ransack the arsenal. Skeptics declared that if such an outlandish plot existed, the conspirators should be sent to Bedlam asylum rather than to prison. But the authorities took no chances. Sayre himself had been dragged to the Tower, which “raised the curiosity of the public to an extravagant pitch,” the London Public Advertiser reported. “People imagine something very extraordinary is to happen.”

      The clock over the main entrance at St. James’s Palace touched two p.m. as the king emerged, swaddled in silk and ermine. “The crowd was very great in the courtyard to see His Majesty get into the state coach,” a Guards lieutenant wrote. “Everybody agrees that His Majesty never went to the House with such universal shouts of applause.” In fact, many hisses could be heard amid the cheers when the royal procession lurched from the palace, led by two horse grenadiers holding drawn swords and three coaches, each pulled by six horses and stuffed with nobles and gentlemen-in-waiting. Behind them followed Horse Guards in red and gold, then trumpeters, Yeomen of the guard, and fourteen liveried footmen in ranks of two. The gilded coach carrying the king was unlike anything in the empire or, perhaps, the world: twenty-four feet long, thirteen feet tall, and weighing four tons, it was drawn—at a glacial pace—by eight Royal Hanoverian Cream horses, each the color of buttermilk and at least fifteen hands high. On the roof, three carved cherubs representing England, Scotland, and Ireland supported a gilt crown, and painted allegorical panels on the doors evoked imperial grandeur. A gilded, fish-tailed sea god sat at each corner above the iron-rimmed wheels to signify Britain’s maritime might—appropriately, since the coach’s tendency to pitch, yaw, and oscillate made riding in it like “tossing in a rough sea,” as a later monarch would complain.

      A platoon of constables brought up the rear, scanning the crowd for kidnappers while George settled into his satin-and-velvet cushions. He could hear the hisses as well as the applause, but public disapproval rarely piqued him. He knew that most of his subjects were happy enough that fall. England had never harvested a finer wheat crop, bread prices were down, manufacturing was near full employment, and more money was changing hands in the kingdom “than at any other time since the memory of man,” as Lord Barrington put it. Annual deaths still exceeded christenings in London, but the gap had narrowed and Irish immigrants buoyed the population. Violent crime had dropped, and fewer debtors were being jailed. Life for many might still be nasty, brutish, and short, but less so.

      The Americans, by contrast, appeared perpetually angry. How long ago it seemed that Harvard College had offered cash prizes for the best poems commemorating George’s reign—for the best Latin verse in hexameters, the best Latin ode, the best English long verse. The king tried to ignore things that vexed or displeased him, like the petitions from Bristol and Liverpool urging reconciliation, which he consigned to the “Committee of Oblivion,” or the annoying letters from John Wesley, that Methodist, who warned that the Americans “will not be frightened.… They are as strong as you, they are as valiant as you.” In the summer George had refused to receive what the colonials called their Olive Branch Petition, imploring the king to stop the war, repeal the Coercive Acts, and effect “a happy and permanent reconciliation.” He would not treat with rebels.

      Lord North warned him that the insurrection had “now grown to such a height that it must be treated as a foreign war.” Casualty reports from Concord and Bunker Hill certainly bore out the first minister, not to mention the sour rumors from Canada. The king had responded in late August with a “Proclamation of Rebellion,” forbidding all commerce with the colonies and requiring every subject to help “in the suppression of such rebellion,” on pain of treason. The provincials were “misled by dangerous and ill designing men,” the king declared, “forgetting the allegiance which they owe to the power that has protected and supported them.” Heralds read the edict at Westminster, Temple Bar, the Royal Exchange, and elsewhere; СКАЧАТЬ