270

INVASION OF CANADA DETERMINED ON.

The Invasion of Canada determined on.—The repeated repulses of the British army, at Bunker Hill, by what they had too contemptuously called in the beginning, a 'mob of traitors,' changed the plan of the enemy, and, for a while, paralyzed their movements. Instead of crushing an insurrection, they found they had provoked a revolution, and a day of humiliation and blood had cost them the prestige of invincibility. Here a fact of great importance was first revealed,—that, while at no time could delay be favorable to the royal cause, it became one of the grandest allies of the patriots. The work of maintaining a disputed and despised sovereignty, could admit of no postponement; while the certainty of the ultimate establishment of Republicanism waxed stronger by every day's passage. There were more to-morrows left for the Colonists, than for the king, and a Fabius was at the head of the patriot army.

But Washington early saw when to strike, and the sagacity of his military judgment, and the alacrity of his unexpected movements, often made up for leanness of provisions, insufficiency of munitions, and scarcity of men. Knowing, however, that inaction had always proved the bane of armies, he was provoked to carry the war into Africa.'

He had determined to capture, or drive out the British army from Boston, and towards this object, he steadily directed all his efforts during the summer and autumn of 1775. The capture of the two fortresses on Lake Champlain-between the Lexington skirmish and the battle of Bunker Hill-had left the road open to the St. Lawrence, and the commander-in-chief believed it would be good policy to make a bold stroke in that direction, to defeat a union of the British forces in Canada with those on the Atlantic coast, and prevent that province from becoming a rendezvous for supplying the enemy with provisions and ammunition.

Acting in harmony, as he always did with the National Congress, at his suggestion a committee from that body, consisting of Dr. Franklin, Thomas Lynch, and Benjamin Harrison, proceeded in August from Philadelphia to Cambridge, where a well-devised plan was settled on for the invasion of Canada, which was carried out under Schuyler and Montgomery by the old route of Lakes George and Champlain, and by Arnold up the Kennebeck and Chaudiére.

Allen Captured and Sent to England in Heavy Irons.—After the capture of Ticonderoga and Crown Point in the previous year, Colonel Ethan Allen had pressed very warmly upon Washington the plan for an immediate invasion of Canada; and had his plan been adopted, so few and unprepared were the British forces in that province, it would most likely have been attended with complete success. St. John, on the Sorel, was the first military post within the Canadian line, and it was intended that Schuyler should carry the place; but conceiving the obstacles to be too great, he delayed the attack, till he could bring on more troops from Ticonderoga, and illness compelled him to return to Albany. The whole command

ARNOLD'S MARCH THROUGH THE wildernESS.

271

devolving upon General Montgomery, he early left his island intrenchment, and in September laid siege to St. John. The siege held out for more than a month. In the meantime daring enterprises were undertaker by small detachments; among others one of eighty men, under Ethan Allen, crossed the St. Lawrence, which, being unsuccessful, he was made prisoner, with several of his men, and sent to England in irons,' but Montgomery captured Montreal, and entered the city in triumph, November 13th. Governor Carlton made his escape with his forces on the English fleet, and took refuge in Quebec. The capture of Montreal was important to the commander, for among other spoils he found winter clothing for his soldiers during the severity of the winter; but in a letter to Congress he said that, 'till Quebec is taken, Canada is unconquered,' and he pressed on. It was a frightful winter, and many of his troops deserted. Ice had bound up the waters, and deep snow covered the whole region. Nothing, however, discouraged the intrepid commander, and he advanced down the banks of the river where he was to be joined by Colonel Benedict Arnold.

Arnold's March through the Wilderness.—With a thousand men Arnold had pressed on through a wilderness, impenetrable except to a dauntless spirit like himself, till, after one of the most wonderful marches recorded in military history, he stood with seven hundred and fifty worn and wasted, but still resolute soldiers, on the Plains of Abraham. Not the countenance of a friend or foe had been visible in that gloomy and dreadful wilderness march. Rivers and marshes covered with ice, had to be traversed, and often forded, with the whole command to the arm-pits in water or mud.' Neither hunger nor cold seemed to discourage his men, so magnetic was the control the leader held over his expedition. On the ninth of November, four days before Montgomery had entered Montreal, Arnold reached Point Levi, opposite the city of Quebec, with his half-naked followers armed with only four hundred muskets, and destitute of artillery. He crossed the St. Lawrence to Wolf's Cove, ascended to the Plains of Abraham, and sent a bold demand for the surrender of the city and the garrison. Soon the icy wind and intelligence of an intended sortie from the garrison, drove him from his bleak encampment,

The wounded, seven in number, entered the hospital: the rest were shackled together in pairs, and distributed among different transports in the river. But Allen, as the chief offender, was chained with leg irons weighing about thirty pounds; the shackles which encompassed his ankles, were so very tight and close that he could not lie down except on his back; and in this plight, thrust into the lowest part of a vessel, the captor of Ticonderoga was dragged to England, where imprisonment in Pendennis Castle could not abate his courage or his hope. -Bancroft, vol. viii. p. 184.

The extraordinary privations suffered by the detachment under Arnold, which succeeded in making its way to Quebec, were endured by no one of its members with more cheerfulness and patience than by the stripling who had volunteered to join it. And this was one characteristic which was remarked in Burr through life, and which went a great way to maintain for him the respect of those immediately around him. He was not one of the repining kind, who wear out the patience of their neighbors with their catalogue of complaints, but bore all his misfortunes like a man.

When the party finally reached the Chaudière, and it became necessary to establish a communication with General Montgomery, Burr was the person selected for the task; and though so young, he acquitted himself of the hazardous duty of penetrating a country,the inhabitants of which adhered to the British power, and spoke a different language from his-with prudence and perfect success. Upon his arrival at the General's headquarters, he was immediately invited to assume a station near his person, in anticipation of the moment when he might be appointed an aide-de-camp. Burr thus became an actor in the unsuccessful assault upon Quebec; was present when Montgomery fell, and was the person who bore him upon his shoulders from the spot when retreat became necessary. His conduct throughout this trying affair, appears to have been marked with courage and with judgment. It established for him a high reputation at the time among the American troops, and undoubtedly deserved free and unqualified praise.—North American Review, July, 1839, p. 165.

and he ascended the St. Lawrence to Point au Trembles, twenty miles above Quebec, and there awaited the arrival of Montgomery. These brave Generals met on the first of December, 1775, and the woollen clothes which Mont gomery had brought from Montreal, were placed on the shivering limbs of Arnold's troops. The united forces then marched to Quebec.' '

Death of Montgomery, Dec. 31, 1775.-Montgomery was no stranger in those inhospitable regions. Sixteen years before, hardly yet escaped from his boyhood, he had passed through those same scenes by the side of Wolfe, who had far less to contend with than Montgomery had now. His army had melted away. Even after the arrival of Arnold's command, the ranks were so thinned that together they numbered little more than a thousand men and yet with this feeble band, who had left their blood tracks all along their march, he undertook to capture the strongest walled city in America. Winter had set in with a severity almost unknown even in that Hyperborean region; yet with an unquenchable ardor Montgomery thought only of success. Cannon planted on fields of ice had battered the walls of Quebec; but they resisted every shock, and he determined to carry the town by storm. As the gray light of the morning of the last day of the year 1775 came dimly creeping over the snow-wreathed city, his army advanced in four divisions. One was led by Arnold; another by Montgomery himself; while the others were merely ruses de guerre. Arnold pressed through into the city with the desperation of his well-known valor. But while he was struggling with what would seem to others an impossibility, he was suddenly wounded, and forced to retire. As the gallant Montgomery was leading on a detachment of his division up those rugged and dizzy heights, infusing his own soul into his brave comrades, a chance shot struck him dead. His body was borne away down the icy cliffs on the boy shoulders of the chivalric Aaron Burr. Four hundred of his men were killed or made prisoners but their fate was mitigated by the humanity of Carlton, which left a bright spot in the record of this disastrous campaign.

Fox Repels the Insult of Lord North to the Memory of Montgomery.— When the news of the heroic fall of Montgomery reached England, in reply

1 Lossing, Hist. of the U. S., pp. 241-242.

2 This

Monument is erected by order of Congress,

25th of January, 1776,

to transmit to posterity a grateful remembrance of the patriotic conduct, enterprise, and perseverance of

Major-General RICHARD MONTGOMERY, who, after a series of successes amid the most discouraging difficulties, Fell in the attack on QUEBEC, 31st December, 1775, aged 37 years. The following is the inscription upon a silver plate on the coffin: 'The State of New York, in honor of General Richard Montgomery, who fell gloriously fighting for the independence and liberty of the United States before the walls of Quebec the 31st of December, 1775, caused thes: remains of the distinguished

hero to be conveyed from Quebec, and deposited on the 8th day of July (1818), in St. Paul's Church, in the city of New York, near the monument erected to his memory by the United States.'

General Montgomery left no children, whom the State, in gratitude toward their father, distinguished with every mark of kindness and protection,' as Botta asserts. His widow survived him more than half a century. When at the house of his brother-in-law, the late Peter R. Livingston, at Rhinebeck, a few years ago, I saw an interesting memento of the lamented general. A day or two before he left home to join the army under Schuyler, he was walking on the lawn in the rear of his brother-in-law's mansion with the owner, and as they came near the house, Montgomery stuck a willow twig in the ground, and said, Peter, let that grow to remember me by.' It did grow, and is now a willow with a trunk at least ten feet in circumference, Lossing's Field Book of the Revolution, vol. i p. 201.

ENGLISH TALENT SIDES WITH AMERICA.

273

to a eulogy passed upon him by Edmund Burke, after Lord North had denounced him as only a brave, able, humane and generous rebel,' exclaiming, 'Curse on his virtues; they have undone his country,' Fox uttered those noble words: 'The term rebel is no certain mark of disgrace. All the great asserters of liberty, the saviours of their country, the benefactors of mankind in all ages, have been called rebels. We owe the Constitution which enables us to sit in this House, to a rebellion.'

The Talent of England on the Side of the Colonies.-Although the king had a majority of two to one in the House of Commons, who obsequiously voted for every royal measure, yet the greatest talent in that imperial body was arrayed against him. Some of its clearest-headed men undisguisedly condemned the enlistment of foreign troops in subjugating the Colonies. 'We conceive,' said they, the calling in foreign forces to decide domestic quarrels, to be a measure both disgraceful and dangerous.' A grand principle was at stake, in which Englishmen were as deeply interested as the Colonists themselves. Fox, Rockingham, and all the strong men in the minority, defended the rights of the Colonies as the bulwark of English freedom. They declared that 'if America could not be retained with justice, England could not afford to keep her at all,'—that 'to hold the Colonies by force alone, would prove the overthrow of the British Constitution.' In the autumn, 1775, the Duke of Manchester said in the House of Lords, ‘The violence of the times has wrested America from the British crown, and spurned the jewel because the setting appeared uncouth:' while the bold Duke of Grafton, who knew that he could preserve his independence only at the cost of his office, reiterated his protest against the employment of foreign troops, and resigned the privy seal. It mattered not that the whole moral force of the empire was levelled against the policy of the king; no ministry could live without carrying it out. When it was thoroughly understood on both sides, that the will of the monarch and not the Constitution of England was the law of the land, the case was made up.

The Colonists Declared Outlaws.-Ever after, all the legislation of Parliament was directed against the Colonies as rebels, and of necessity, all the measures of the Colonial Congress contemplated the King of England as the enemy of America.

In the month of November, 1776, Parliament not only declared the Colonies rebels, but prohibited all intercourse with them; ignored their civil existence; authorized the destruction of their property on the high seas; and on the ruins of the whole system of social life in America, they erected the barbarous structure of martial law. A force of soldiers and seamen of more than fifty thousand men, was voted for the war in America; and after exhausting every agency of diplomacy, and seducing by the corrupting power of gold seventeen thousand German troops-brutal and bloodthirsty, ignorant and revengeful, despised by the regular troops of the British army, fit instruments

274

FINAL SEPARATION APPROACHING.

for the darkest and most infamous deeds of the darkest and most infamous of wars-seventeen thousand such mercenaries, were on their way to the American shores!

Tory and Indian Allies.-Two other elements befitting the occasion, and in harmony with the spirit of the undertaking, were also invoked. Every allurement to win them over to the side of the crown was presented to the American Tories—money, estates, the favor of the king, and all the influences that could be brought to bear, were enlisted. All the base, of course, yielded to the temptations; and with them, large numbers of men of rank and influence, who had held office under the crown, and who had large interests to protect, became the easy and early allies of the king. Every man in the Colonies who had his price, could command it. It was so when the first rupture took place, and it remained so till the close of the war.

But the British name was to receive a deeper stain from another cause, which I shall only touch on here, reserving for a future chapter its fuller illustration. From the outset one of the main reliances of Great Britain in the prosecution of the American war, was the employment of the savages of the soil. This dreadful policy was clearly and fully determined on when the war began; it never was departed from; it was never modified; it was steadily persisted in to the end, as the facts will hereafter show.

The Hour for the Final Separation Approaching.-The time had come for the outlawed Colonies to assert their rights in a way that could not possibly be misunderstood. There was no longer a peace party in America. On the 18th of September, John Adams wrote to his wife: There is no idea of submission here in anybody's head. . . . When the horrid news was brought here of the bombardment of Boston, which made us completely miserable for two days, we saw proofs both of the sympathy and the resolution of the continent. . . . War! war! war! was the cry, and it was pronounced in a tone that would have done honor to the oratory of a Briton, or a Roman. If it had proved true, you would have heard the thunder of an American Congress.' A week later he said: 'We have had as great questions discussed as ever engaged the attention of men, and an infinite number of them. At a still later date: 'No assembly ever had a greater number of great objects before them. Provinces, nations, empires, are small things before us. I wish we were good architects.' It was in this reverent and determined spirit that they built wiser than they knew.' Congress proved itself equal to the trial. One by one the ties which bound the two nations had given way. The fearful and timid had grown resolute; the feeble strong. The last plea for postponement of the issue had been heard. Henceforth it was to be deeds, not words. The secret of the nation's power, when it spoke, was to be the secret of the eloquence of Demosthenes-Action. A naval establishment had been commenced; a board of war, and one of finance appointed; commissions were issued to privateers; a declaration of the causes for taking up arms