Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  Arnold’s several hundred ragged men compared with Wolfe’s legions only in courage, and yet Arnold planned to use the same tactic that had succeeded before. Wolfe had provoked a skirmish outside the garrison’s perimeter, and General Montcalm had let himself be drawn into it. Arnold intended to get the British out from behind their walls so that the Canadians and their militia could seize the town and turn it over to Arnold. That was his plan.

  Benedict Arnold marched his band to the walls of Quebec and ordered them to give a cheer. The noise seemed to provoke curiosity inside the town, but nothing more. Britain’s commander, Sir Guy Carleton, had served as a subaltern with Wolfe and wasn’t going to be tricked by a stratagem the British had invented. Carleton had eighteen hundred men inside the fortress, but because he doubted the sympathies of the Canadians he kept his troops behind the walls. When Arnold sent a messenger to demand surrender, the British fired at the courier, who turned and ran back. Meanwhile, Arnold heard that even more British reinforcements were on the way. His men had ammunition for five rounds. Neither pride nor valor could argue against a timely retreat. Arnold took his men to a haven twenty miles above Quebec, set up camp at Pointe-aux-Trembles, and waited for General Montgomery to arrive. While there, Arnold received a message that General Washington had arrested the colonel who had given up the march and would try him for desertion. Washington believed that the Americans were now within the town walls, and he added that he hoped Arnold was enjoying the laurels that his hardships in taking Quebec had won for him.

  —

  The weeks during the autumn of 1775 when John Adams was away from home at the Continental Congress had been a melancholy time for his wife back in Braintree. On the first day of October, she lost her mother to an epidemic of dysentery. In November, she herself was struck by jaundice. She had expected her husband to return at any moment, but James Warren paid a call to tell her that the Congress would be staying in session another month. Abigail Adams resolved not to grieve.

  She was troubled, though, by the secrecy imposed at Philadelphia, which prevented her husband from sharing with her the debates going on there. Her lonely waiting was making her pessimistic, and she confided her doubts in a letter to John: “I am more and more convinced that Man is a dangerous creature, and that power, whether vested in many or few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, Give, give.” She worried that Americans had grown so comfortable without a government that they wouldn’t submit to any new order when it came. She was anxious about America’s future, whether it was as a monarchy or as a democracy.

  The Continental Congress was too distracted with logistics and finances to discuss the problems disturbing Abigail Adams. Members had just rejected giving a bonus to any soldier who enlisted in the winter army. But she was looking beyond the war’s end and asking, “How shall we be governed so as to retain our liberties? Can any government be free which is not administered by general stated laws? Who shall frame these laws? Who will give them force and energy?”

  —

  At thirty-seven, General Richard Montgomery was three years older than Benedict Arnold and just as tough. He had swept over Montreal and brought his column within a day’s march of Quebec, determined that soon he would join with Arnold and add the town to his conquests. His troops’ enlistments expired at the end of the year, and they were homesick and mutinous. After Arnold’s futile challenge at the walls, General Carleton had strengthened his forces to guarantee further that the Americans wouldn’t take the town. Since Montgomery had left behind eight hundred men to hold Montreal, he arrived with only three hundred soldiers. Colonel Arnold sent Montgomery a letter extolling Aaron Burr’s great spirit during the fatiguing march, and Montgomery accepted him on his staff. Burr spent his days drilling a unit of fifty men to climb ladders he intended to prop against the fortress walls.

  As Arnold had done, General Montgomery sent a flag demanding that Guy Carleton surrender. When that was ignored, he sent a threatening letter, but Carleton refused to negotiate. He would not parley, he said, with rebels. With that, Montgomery told his men, “To the storming we must come at last.” He would attack the lower town, and Arnold would lead an assault to the side. They would then join forces and assail the upper citadel while two sham attacks distracted Carleton elsewhere. Montgomery rejected Burr’s idea of scaling the walls by ladder.

  At two o’clock in the morning of the last day of 1775, the troops assembled in a blizzard and were issued bands of white paper to stick into their caps so that they would recognize one another through the darkness and the snow. Men printed fighting slogans on the cards. Those who had heard about Patrick Henry in Virginia wrote, “Liberty or death.”

  After a two-mile march, Montgomery approached Quebec’s outer defenses from the west. Captain Burr had kept up with him, but most of the troops lagged behind and Montgomery sent back messengers to hurry them along. At a wood barrier he ordered his carpenters to saw off the pickets while he rushed ahead with two dozen men. They came to a log house with holes in its walls for muskets. Inside waited a guard of British soldiers and sailors. When the Americans came within range, the British fired their weapons and touched off cannon loaded with grapeshot.

  Richard Montgomery was struck in the heart. In the first rank, only Aaron Burr and a French guide were left standing. The rest of the men ran for cover. With his last words General Montgomery tried to persuade his men to come back, and to Burr he said, “We shall be in the fort in two minutes.” Burr tried to drag Montgomery away, but the general was burly, and, with the snowdrifts, he couldn’t move him more than a few yards. The British found Montgomery’s dead body at daybreak.

  With Montgomery’s charge on the lower town repelled, the entire British garrison was free to ward off Arnold’s attack at the northeast. Arnold was again racing ahead, and his soldiers now knew that he would never say, “Go ahead, boys,” but always “Come on, boys,” called back to them over his shoulder. By the time he neared the Palace Gate, the storm was blowing more fiercely than ever. All of Quebec’s bells were ringing, and on both sides of the walls drums were beating. The Americans ran along the wall in single file, ducking their heads against the snow and cradling their muskets under their coats to keep their powder dry. At a passageway, British soldiers began firing down at them from houses on either side. Arnold was struck by a musket ball that broke his leg and pitched him forward into the snow. Pulling himself up, he tried to lead the charge on one leg. Men wanted to carry him from the field, but he would not leave until the main body of his men arrived and he could urge them forward. But they were too few. At the next barricade, some retreated, others were forced to surrender. Arnold was led limping to a military surgeon a mile from the battle. Even there, he wouldn’t let himself or the other wounded men be evacuated to the countryside. He called instead for his sword and two loaded pistols. If the British pursued him to his sickbed, Arnold vowed to kill as many as he could before they finished him off. As for retreat, he was adamant. “I have no thought of leaving this proud town until I first enter it in triumph.”

  —

  Ethan Allen had also found that other forts weren’t as vulnerable as Ticonderoga. Although he still held no commission from the Continental Congress, Allen had agreed to go north to recruit Canadians for General Montgomery. And by the time he got near Montreal, he had decided to assault the city on his own. On September 25 he had led a small band to its walls to demand surrender. As his troops got close they were struck by the absurdity of the challenge, and all but forty drifted away. When the British garrison opened fire, Allen and his men ran for nearly a mile before they were caught.

  As Ethan Allen turned his sword over to a British officer, a painted and nearly naked Indian tried to shoot him, but Allen got the officer between them, and the Indian didn’t fire. His escape left him content to be in custody, and he and his captors joked together as they escorted him to their barracks yard.

  That good fellowship soon evaporated. A British general, Richard
Prescott, demanded to know whether he was the same Colonel Allen who had taken Ticonderoga. When Allen said yes, Prescott swore, called him a rebel and shook his cane at him. Allen raised a fist and told the general to put his cane aside. At that, Prescott ordered his men to step forward with their bayonets drawn and stab to death the thirteen Canadians who had joined Allen in his raid. The prisoners had already begun to say their prayers when Allen bared his chest and told Prescott that since he was to blame for their mutiny, he should be the one to die.

  Prescott thought for a moment. “I will not execute you now,” he said, “but you shall grace a halter at Tyburn, God damn you.” He ordered Allen bound hand and foot and taken to a schooner christened the Gaspee in honor of the ship burned in Rhode Island. Allen’s leg irons weighed thirty pounds and were so tight around his ankles that he could lie only on his back with a sea chest as his bed. Each day the crew baited him and mocked his rage. Once, when he bit a nail off his handcuffs, Allen heard his jailor say, “Damn him, can he eat iron?” After that, a padlock was added to his chains. Six weeks passed before Allen was sent to England for trial.

  —

  Across the Channel from Ethan Allen’s British prison, Louis XVI and his court in Versailles were intrigued by Britain’s effort to crush the rebellion in America, but news reaching France was slow and unreliable. Since he was only twenty-one—about the age of George III when he had taken his throne—Louis relied heavily on his foreign minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. The count held no affection for the colonies. As a form of government, he admired pure despotism. But since France’s defeat by the British in 1763 Vergennes had hated them. “I tremble, I shake,” he told a friend, “I even turn purple at the very thought of England.” Although the two nations were now at peace, Vergennes hoped to exploit Britain’s troubles as long as it could be done discreetly. For that, he needed a spy.

  The French ambassador in London came up with a candidate. The ambassador, the Comte de Guines, was no favorite of Vergennes and held his post because Queen Marie Antoinette found him amusing. Since Guines was both obese and a dandy, he had two sets of breeches—those for days he would be sitting down, and much snugger ones for days when protocol would keep him standing. Each morning, the count climbed onto two chairs and lowered himself into the appropriate breeches, held by two servants. Guines was an annoyance to a diplomat as shrewd and dedicated as Vergennes. But he agreed to the ambassador’s choice, the Chevalier Julien Achard de Bonvouloir.

  A childhood accident had lamed Bonvouloir, but that wouldn’t hinder him in this assignment. Vergennes agreed to pay the twenty-six-year-old two hundred livres. That was no fortune when the queen had just spent two hundred and fifty thousand livres for two bracelets and dismissed the sum as trifling. But Bonvouloir would also receive a distinction he coveted: a commission in the infantry. He had once visited America. Now, upon his return to Philadelphia, he sought out a Frenchman who introduced him to Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin set up a meeting with the Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence, which was entrusted with establishing a foreign policy for the colonies.

  Franklin’s lingering hesitation about breaking with England had vanished in the bloodshed at Breed’s Hill. Three weeks after the battle, Franklin drafted a short note to one of his closest friends in London, the publisher William Straham:

  MR. STRAHAM,

  You are a member of Parliament and one of that majority which has doomed my country to destruction. You have begun to burn our towns and murder our people. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations! You and I were long friends. You are now my enemy, and I am Yours,

  B. FRANKLIN

  Even in outrage, Franklin was prudent. The note was not sent.

  Because of his prestige, the Congress had named Franklin to several committees, including the Committee of Secret Correspondence. Its other members were more cautious men, including John Dickinson and John Jay of New York. Since meeting with Bonvouloir would be their first contact with a foreign agent, they took precautions against being found out by the British, and on the night of December 18, 1775, each of the five committee members went to Carpenters’ Hall by a different route.

  Before he left France, Bonvouloir had been told to claim that he was a private citizen with well-placed friends at court who would entertain any requests that the Congress might make. He also had been given clear limits to his authority. He was to gather as much military and political intelligence as possible. He was to let the Congress know that France sympathized with the American cause and would not intervene in Canada. And he was to offer the Americans, once they became independent, free use of French ships for their trading.

  The game was delicate on both sides. Dickinson was one of those delegates resisting any rash claim of American independence, but even he admitted that the colonies could not win without aid from Europe, especially from France. And yet the French worried about committing themselves to the rebels, who might then give in and rejoin the mother country. If that happened, Louis XVI would be at war with both England and America.

  The Americans doubted that this callow Frenchman carried much authority, but over the course of three meetings they probed for answers. Did the French court hold a favorable opinion of the American cause? George Washington required two competent French engineers. How could the colonies get them? Would France trade military supplies for products made in America? The colonies could already get French armaments by way of the West Indies, but the price was exorbitant. Cargo worth 90,000 dollars when it left a French port fetched 240,000 by the time it reached Boston.

  Benjamin Franklin led the negotiations. Fifty years earlier, at the age of twenty, he had returned from his first trip to England with a set of rules to govern his life. He would live frugally and work industriously. He would speak truthfully, with one exception—he would never speak badly of any man, no matter how much the man deserved it. Instead, he would always try to excuse men’s faults and speak of whatever good he knew about them. Franklin had held to those resolutions and become one of the celebrated men of his age. Under his spell, Bonvouloir went beyond his instructions and promised to send the French engineers, although he resisted committing France to an alliance.

  But Bonvouloir’s report after the final meeting on December 27 showed how thoroughly he had been captivated. He neglected to write his secret passages in milk as Guines had instructed him. Instead, his enthusiasm came tumbling out in the form of facts Franklin had supplied.

  “Everyone here is a soldier,” Bonvouloir wrote. “The troops are well clothed, well paid and well armed. They have more than fifty thousand regular soldiers, and an even larger number of volunteers who do not wish to be paid. Judge how men of this caliber will fight.” He offered a prediction: “Independence is a certainty for 1776.”

  George Washington’s army that December stood closer to five thousand than to fifty.

  At Versailles, Vergennes called a meeting of the king’s advisers to debate France’s policy. The heads of both the army and the navy opposed any action that might draw France into another war with England. The comptroller of finances said he greatly admired the colonists—“America is the hope of the human race and can become its model”—but with France facing a deficit of twenty million livres that year, they couldn’t afford to help finance the rebellion. All the same, Vergennes had been so impressed by Bonvouloir’s statistics that in his report to the king he wrote, “England is the natural enemy of France; and she is an avid enemy, ambitious, unjust, brimming with bad faith.” As the debate at the French court went on, Vergennes would try to persuade Louis XVI that England’s goal was the humiliation and ruin of France.

  —

  In Cambridge, General Washington had no sympathy for men as rash or ambitious as Ethan Allen. He wrote to General Schuyler that he hoped Allen’s capture would teach a lesson to any other officers who were tempted to try to outshine their generals. Washington’s own inactivity was gnawing at him, b
ut recruitment for the winter was slow and supplies were scarce. General Charles Lee tried his own method of coercing farmers and shopkeepers to remain with the army. He assembled the Connecticut militia at his door and asked those men who would not stay even four days past their enlistment to step forward. When three quarters of them did, General Lee formed them in a hollow square, moved into its center and addressed them: “Men, I do not know what to call you. You are the worst of all creatures.”

  Cursing, he threatened to run every one of them up Bunker Hill, which was now heavily fortified with British guns. If they refused to go, he would order them gunned down by his own riflemen. When Lee ran out of oaths, he left to draft a warning to innkeepers along the route to Connecticut not to feed or shelter the men as they made their way home. He posted a copy on his door. During the night, someone took it down and put up another notice announcing that General Lee was a fool.

  George Washington heard from a friend that some members of the Continental Congress, particularly New Englanders impatient to see the British run out of Boston, were criticizing him for passivity. But with no resources, Washington could take no action and could not defend himself without calling attention to the army’s precarious situation. He was mortified and had to assure himself often of his integrity. He did have the encouragement of his wife, who had never before traveled outside Virginia but had come to Cambridge to pass the winter with him. By January 1776 the Washingtons had been married for seventeen companionable years. Three years earlier, Sally Fairfax had sailed for England with her husband to settle his estate. Whatever the outcome of the war, it was unlikely that Washington would see her again. Though he might never forget his days with Sally at Belvoir, he now had a wife who was willing to share the privations of camp life and who could disarm New England’s wives. James Otis’ sister, Mercy Warren, was often tart, but she praised Martha Washington’s gentleness and candor and pronounced her exactly the woman to soften a hero’s private hours.