Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  Washington heard the story and sent for the woman that same night. Although he coaxed and threatened her, she would say nothing until Washington ordered her confined to jail, when she broke down and told her story. She was being kept by Dr. Benjamin Church, the newly appointed surgeon general of the American Army, and now she was pregnant by him. Dr. Church had written the coded letter.

  Because Washington was new to Massachusetts, the disclosure struck him as less preposterous than it did the many patriots who had served with Church for years on every crucial committee. To them, Church was the deacon’s son who had studied medicine at the London Medical College and returned home to give free inoculations to the poor during the smallpox epidemics. Now in his early forties, Church had been a charter member of the Long Room Club over the Edes and Gill print shop and had written the scathing attack on Francis Bernard that began “Fop, witling, favorite stampman, tyrant tool . . .” Church had examined the bleeding body of Crispus Attucks, and he and Dr. Joseph Warren had been among Samuel Adams’ favorite protégés. Adams had chosen him only two years earlier to speak at the anniversary of the Massacre.

  Washington summoned Church and at the same time sent men to seize his papers. Church had given a decade of service to the patriots and believed that his explanation would be accepted. He admitted writing the letter but said it was meant for his brother. When it was deciphered, General Washington would see for himself that there was nothing criminal about it. Washington’s aides returned to say they had found nothing incriminating at his house. Over and over, Dr. Church protested his innocence.

  A clergyman and a militia colonel each tried to break the code by counting its symbols and assigning to each one the letter that turned up equally often in English. Both amateur cryptographers came up with the same result: the note was filled with valuable military data. Its last line read, “Make use of every precaution or I perish.”

  George Washington conducted Church’s court-martial himself. Now patriots began to recall that Church had built a lavish country house at Raynham. How could he afford it? And his love affairs had been well known even before he took up with this latest expensive mistress. As another link, Church’s sister was married to John Fleeming, the Tory bookseller who had been John Mein’s partner. Paul Revere had watched disapprovingly as Church often dined with a British captain and one of the customs officials. But Revere felt he couldn’t question Dr. Church about that peculiar friendship, and Church told other patriots that he was gleaning military intelligence the British unwittingly let drop. Now Revere understood Church’s hasty flight into Boston immediately after the battle at Lexington. He felt he had been duped when the doctor pointed to the blood on his stockings. Revere had assumed that any man who would risk his life must be a friend to the cause. But a Boston clergyman told him that he had happened to see Church the day he left General Gage’s house and that the doctor and the general had parted like old friends.

  Whether he was driven by his debt or by doubt that the patriots could win, Church had apparently begun his spying in 1771, while Samuel Adams was struggling to keep the cause alive. The next year, Thomas Hutchinson had passed along gratifying news to Francis Bernard in London that the man who had written insultingly against Bernard had come over to the government’s side. As a trusted member of the Provincial Congress and its Committee of Safety, Church had reported regularly to General Gage on the patriots’ supply of powder and arms. When he had brought messages to the Continental Congress the previous spring, Church had lingered in Philadelphia to pick up information and had informed Gage about the debates over financing the new army.

  Despite his protests that he loved America, the evidence against Church was too strong to doubt. Washington’s court-martial found him guilty of holding criminal correspondence with the enemy. There were fewer supporting documents than the panel had expected, because a confederate had got to Church’s papers before they could be confiscated. The court left the terms of Church’s punishment to the provincial congress at Watertown, which ordered him confined to a jail in Connecticut. Washington had asked Congress to let him hang men for far lesser offenses, but in jail Church was denied only the use of pen and paper. On pleasant evenings he was allowed to ride through the countryside with a trustworthy guard. That concession was one sign of New England’s embarrassment that America’s first convicted spy was also one of her most illustrious patriots.

  —

  With autumn ending, Washington faced a problem more grave than the lack of gunpowder. The men who had flocked to Cambridge after the excitement of Lexington had enlisted in the army for six months and now wanted to go home. Thomas Hutchinson had once predicted that the colonists would always be farmers before they were soldiers and would return to their land for planting and harvest. With the British poised to break through Washington’s thin defensive line at any moment, he had to recruit a whole new army.

  The money he could offer wasn’t much inducement. Privates and drummers were given tents or barracks, their daily meals and a monthly pay of six and two thirds of a new currency called the American dollar. A civilian bachelor living simply would spend nine times that amount and not face British guns every day. All thirteen colonies had pledged to raise men, for his army. Yet he couldn’t, with a total population of two and a half million, recruit fifteen thousand men. On the last day of December the old army disbanded, and fewer than ten thousand replacements had signed up for the new year. A thousand of them were holdovers away on the furlough they had demanded in exchange for re-enlisting.

  Every day Washington could expect the twenty British regiments to overrun his sparse defenses. But every day his luck held. The reason was that Thomas Gage’s bloody victory at Breed’s Hill had destroyed his career. Because of the stalemate in Boston, George III called him “the mild general,” and in late September—about the time of the Benjamin Church scandal—Gage learned that he had been relieved of command. When he sailed from Boston two weeks later, few regretted his departure. The Tories were convinced that his replacement, General Howe, would strike where Gage had hesitated.

  But something about Boston seemed to sap the spirit, and William Howe had never wanted to fight in America. In fact, he had written home to tell those Nottingham voters who had sent him to Parliament that moderate Americans were in the majority here and would drop their resistance and obey Britain’s laws. And Howe had private reasons for lingering in Boston. He had taken a woman named Elizabeth Loring as his mistress. Her husband was a loyalist who cared nothing about being cuckolded so long as he was well paid, and Joshua Loring was assured his fortune when Howe named him to head Boston’s prisons. Wives who lent themselves to enriching their husbands were not always condemned, but the affair had provoked a popular verse:

  Sir William, he, snug as a flea,

  Lay all this time a-snoring

  Nor dreamed of harm, as he lay warm

  In bed with Mrs. ———.

  When General Howe heard that London was sending enough food and supplies for a proper campaign in the spring, he decided to stay warm in Boston and dream the winter away.

  Charles Lee

  COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG FOUNDATION

  Lee

  1775

  FOR BENEDICT ARNOLD, the weeks since his victory at Ticonderoga had been filled with humiliation and pain. He had pleaded with the Continental Congress to let him invade Canada. Instead, the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety turned over the command at Ticonderoga to another Connecticut colonel. That rebuff led Arnold to resign his commission. He asked, however, that the Provincial Congress reimburse him for the money he had advanced for America’s only victory. The legislature refused, advising Arnold to deal directly with the Continental Congress. When his unpaid soldiers heard that news, they mutinied, took Arnold prisoner and negotiated for themselves directly with Massachusetts. The men got their money, and Arnold was set free. He was ordered to report to Cambridge to settle his accounts.

  He went instead to New
Haven, where he learned that his wife had died. Although she had come to despise him, Peggy Arnold’s death sent him into a depression that was complicated by a siege of gout. Then, while his sister Hannah tended to his three children, the eldest only seven, Arnold went to Cambridge to clear up the question of his expenses. There his figures were repeatedly challenged and disallowed. The board of examiners agreed to pay him one hundred and ninety-five pounds—less than half what he had spent to capture two forts and a wealth of armaments.

  Arnold’s one consolation was a meeting in Cambridge at which he was able to propose to General Washington his latest plan: Arnold would lead an expedition through the wilderness and mountains of Maine, take Quebec by surprise and capture it for America. Once again other men had anticipated him. George Washington, though he was hampered by a lack of supplies and manpower, had already explored the idea of a diversion in Canada and had picked General Schuyler to lead it. Very well, said Arnold, he would take his men north to support Schuyler.

  The expedition was a belated attempt to enlist Canadians in America’s revolution. France had ceded Canada to Britain under the 1763 treaty that ended the French and Indian War. Eleven years later, with the Quebec Act of 1774, Lord North’s ministers tried to bind Canada closer to England by making concessions to its French Catholics. Even though Catholics already outnumbered British Protestants in Canada four hundred to one, the act brought in another eighty thousand French settlers by extending Canada’s boundaries south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi. Lord North had promised the Canadians a legislature, but held off creating one because he wanted to keep the French Catholics in the minority and there was no way of guaranteeing that. But Catholics could practice their religion so long as their priests recognized the political supremacy of George III.

  The Quebec Act had alarmed the American settlers who coveted the Ohio wilderness and had outraged New England Protestants with its leniency toward the Roman Catholic Church. Patriots like Samuel Adams traded on anti-Catholic sentiment as a tactic, but they also genuinely feared Rome’s power. Whig speakers told their audiences that the Quebec Act would lead to a new Inquisition and the burning of heretics in Massachusetts and New York. In October 1774, during its first session, the Continental Congress had denounced the Quebec Act. Yet its members now assumed the Canadians would fight with them against British tyranny, even though George III was granting them more liberties than France’s kings had ever done.

  George Washington was prepared to test the Canadian response. A message was drafted for him and translated into French. Then, given Washington’s past problem, General Charles Lee read it over for accuracy. “Let us run together to the same goal,” Washington’s appeal urged the Canadians. Because armed troops would be bearing the message, he tried to be reassuring: “The Great American Congress has sent an army into your province under the command of General Schuyler, not to plunder but to protect you.”

  The logistics behind Washington’s plan were formidable. General Schuyler had ordered Brigadier General Richard Montgomery to leave Ticonderoga and march north. Schuyler would join Montgomery at Crown Point. Together they would have seventeen hundred men. Washington also authorized Benedict Arnold to lead another eleven hundred soldiers along the Atlantic coast to the Kennebec River. It would be a punishing trek, and Washington advised Arnold to recruit volunteers during a parade at headquarters on September 6. Arnold’s own zeal and the promise of action after weeks of waiting in Cambridge contributed to the good response, and Washington also agreed to send several companies chosen by lot from the Pennsylvania and Virginia militia. A week later, Arnold’s men were ready to march. According to the best information, the British had only one company at Quebec but could draw on eleven hundred more troops, some of them Indians, from Montreal and other forts.

  General Washington told Arnold to send an express messenger back to Cambridge if problems arose during the march. When no messenger appeared, Washington was reassured rather than anxious. General Montgomery, who had served under James Wolfe during the successful British assault on Quebec in 1759, was indignant at the low quality of his American troops. He said that the brazen Yankees were all generals and not one a soldier. New Yorkers were worse. Their lax morals shocked Montgomery, and he found them “the sweepings of the streets.” Yet he forged ahead, capturing two forts to the north of Lake Champlain—one at Chambly on October 20 and another at St. Johns two weeks later.

  Benedict Arnold was paying the price for choosing the more rugged route. Aaron Burr, who had charmed Dorothy Quincy at his uncle’s house, had been commissioned a captain and had joined Arnold’s expedition despite letters from home filled with such encouragements as “You will die, I know you will die.” When a rider caught up with the marching column to say that Burr’s uncle had ordered him home, Burr threatened to have the messenger hanged if he bothered him again. But when the weather turned foul in October, it seemed likely Burr’s family would be proved right. Benedict Arnold’s men were slogging through rain and snow over half-frozen swamps and were fording rivers so swollen and fast-running that they whipped the army’s supplies out of their canoes. Arnold’s only guide was his memories of a trip he had once made to Quebec as a trader and the old journal of a British engineer.

  The daily rations for Arnold’s advance riflemen fell to half an inch of raw pork and half a biscuit to last them from the Kennebec River to the walls of Quebec, and they had no sure idea how far that was. The brambles and the small firs had become so thick that the men were scrambling along on all fours like dogs. They were eating dog, too. A captain surrendered his great black Newfoundland, which had been a company favorite, and the men ate every bit, including the entrails. They collected the bones, pounded them to dust and brewed a greenish broth for the next day. Some men tried to make soup from their deerskin moccasins, but no matter how long they boiled them they were still leather. Starved men sat down on the ground and were dead within minutes.

  When one rifleman shot a duck, the others in his ten-man party boiled it in a kettle along with their last bits of pork, each marked with its owner’s name. They drank the broth for supper, ate the boiled pork for breakfast and cut the duck into ten parts. As one man turned his back, the leader held up a portion—a wing, a leg, the neck—and asked, “Whose shall this be?” The man called out a soldier’s name. For dinner the next day, they ate those shares of duck. The day after that, they ate nothing.

  When a man’s boots wore out, he wrapped his sore feet in flour bags and kept marching. For thread the men pulled up cedar root, and during the portages they patched their dugouts with pitch scraped from pine trees. Sickness cut the eleven hundred men to nine hundred and fifty. The few women marching with their husbands expected no favors. As the army moved across one frozen pond, the ice broke and the men had to wade through the freezing water with their rifles raised above their heads. When her turn came, Mrs. Greer, a large and respectable sergeant’s wife, hitched up her skirts to the waist, and even the New Yorkers didn’t make a joke about it.

  By the time Colonel Arnold caught up with his forward companies their supplies were exhausted. He brought food, and men wept when they saw the cattle herded into camp. Arnold wrote optimistically to Washington that his provisions would last twenty-five days and that he expected to reach the waters of the Chaudière River in ten days, which would put him within striking distance of Quebec. At the Chaudière on October 27 Arnold received heartening political news. Two Indians brought him a letter saying that the people of Quebec rejoiced at his approach and would join the Americans in subduing the British forces.

  From Arnold’s positive report General Washington assumed that Arnold would be in Quebec on November 5, But when that day came, Arnold was facing new problems. He now had only six hundred and fifty men, many of them shivering in their shirts from the winter winds. French settlers told him that the British had burned all the boats on the St. Lawrence River to stop his troops from getting across. He ordered men to bring up the
canoes from their last river crossing. In the past eight weeks, Arnold and his men had traveled nearly six hundred miles, through swampland one third of the way and carrying boats and baggage on their shoulders for forty miles. At times, one day’s food had lasted a week. Now the men straggling to Arnold’s side looked across the St. Lawrence to a disheartening sight.

  In the harbor below the walled heights of Quebec was a British frigate with twenty-six guns and a warship, the Hornet, with another sixteen. The ships had arrived the day before, bringing five hundred men to reinforce the town. His informants continued to assure Arnold that all of the Canadians, except for a hundred staunch Tories, would greet his arrival by throwing down their weapons. Arnold needed the encouragement. On the same day, he discovered that all three companies of his rear detachment had decided that they didn’t have enough provisions to continue and had headed back to Cambridge.

  Arnold’s shortage of boats was more critical now than it had been at Ticonderoga. For a week, he had to send men as far away as twenty miles to buy birchbark and canvas while every day the British went on improving their defenses. At last Arnold had enough boats for five hundred men, but a storm forced him to delay again. It was 9 P.M. on November 13, 1775, before Arnold and his canoes slipped past the British ships on the river and landed at Wolfe’s Cove. At daybreak, Arnold led the men up a steep path to an expanse of land called the Plains of Abraham. General James Wolfe had stood there sixteen years before, at the head of thousands of well-equipped British troops and with twenty-two ships to control the St. Lawrence. General Wolfe had taken Quebec from the French. But in the hour of his victory he had died, quoting from Thomas Gray, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”