In the Smithsonian is a remarkably intact gunboat from the Revolutionary War, named the Philadelphia. The museum has an online 3D tour that tells some of her history and lets you see more of what she was like. She was recovered from the bottom of Lake Champlain in 1935, where she had lain for over 150 years after being sunk by a British fleet during an important — though mostly forgotten — battle.
Continue reading “The “Philadelphia”: Relic of the Battle of Valcour Island”Tag: Benedict Arnold
The Battle of Quebec
“We shall certainly be attack’d the first dark night”, wrote Thomas Ainslie, a British customs official in the city of Quebec. The British had been warned by deserters that the American army was planning to attack, and they were on the alert.
Arnold’s March to Quebec: A Story of Daring…and Some Disaster
When the Revolutionary War began in Massachusetts, the Americans were defending their home turf. But only five months later, they were invading a colony that wasn’t involved in the war at all: Canada.
Canada had only been part of the British empire since the end of the French and Indian War in the previous decade, and most of the people who lived there (other than the Indians) were French Catholics, which made them quite different from most of the people in the other colonies. It wasn’t exactly a foreign country, but it wasn’t too far from it — and there were plenty of people alive who still remembered fighting the French. Now they were trying to convert the Canadians to their cause. As George Washington put it in a printed appeal to the Canadians:
We have taken up Arms in Defence of our Liberty, our Property, our Wives, and our Children, we are determined to preserve them, or die. We look forward with Pleasure to that Day not far remote (we hope) when the Inhabitants of America shall have one Sentiment, and the full Enjoyment of the Blessings of a free Government.
… The Cause of America, and of Liberty, is the Cause of every virtuous American Citizen; whatever may be his Religion or his Descent, the United Colonies know no Distinction but such as Slavery, Corruption and arbitrary Domination may create. Come then, ye generous Citizens, range yourselves under the Standard of general Liberty—against which all the Force and Artifice of Tyranny will never be able to prevail.
At first, the American revolutionary leaders hesitated to authorize an invasion of Canada, but finally they decided to go ahead with it. In New York, Generals Schuyler and Montgomery led the main invasion up Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River. But a smaller force — about 1,100 men — took what was supposed to be a shortcut through Maine.
They were led by bold Benedict Arnold. If you think that Benedict Arnold was a traitor, you’re right — but not in 1775. He was dedicated and daring then and for years afterward. And he had a plan.
Using a map that had been made around 1761 by a British officer, John Montresor, he planned to take a relatively small force in flat-bottomed boats called batteaux, and go up the rivers and through the wild, unsettled areas of Maine, and so take the city of Quebec by surprise.
It didn’t work nearly as well as they had hoped. For one thing, the “shortcut” — as often happens with shortcuts — wasn’t so short after all. Their batteaux had been hastily and poorly made; their food went bad and ran out. Sometimes they had to haul the batteaux up the swift, shallow streams with ropes and by holding on to the bushes along the banks. Sometimes they had to carry the batteaux (and all their equipment, including guns, food, ammunition and more) around waterfalls, or over hills from one river to the next. Nowadays we call that kind of thing a portage (which is a French word, pronounced por-TAWZH); back then they stuck with an English term and simply called it a “carrying place.” Arnold summed it up quite nicely when he said, “I have been much deceived in every Account of our Rout, which is longer, and has been attended with a Thousand Difficulties I never apprehended.”
Some of the companies in the rear decided to turn back, since food was rapidly running out (as I mentioned in my previous post). I won’t call them cowards, though; I wasn’t there, and I’ve never been in danger of starving to death. Some men did in fact die of hunger and disease.
At any rate, with great daring and perseverance, Arnold reached the St. Lawrence River with about 700 men in early November and looked at his goal — the city of Quebec — across the river. But it was just a little out of reach…
Notes
By the way, Maine was not its own colony, but there were some settlers there, and the region had its own name.
Sources
“Address to the Inhabitants of Canada, 14 September 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed September 29, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-01-02-0358. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 1, 16 June 1775 – 15 September 1775, ed. Philander D. Chase. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985, pp. 461–463.]
Montrésor, John. A map of the sources of the Chaudière, Penobscot, and Kennebec rivers. [?, 1761] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/74692578/.
“To George Washington from Colonel Benedict Arnold, 27–28 October 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed September 29, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0224. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, 16 September 1775 – 31 December 1775, ed. Philander D. Chase. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987, pp. 244–246.]
Food on Arnold’s March to Quebec
Lots of things didn’t work out as planned with Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Quebec, and food was one of them. The army took a lot of food with them, but perhaps not enough, and a lot of what they took got spoiled; for example, they had some barrels of dry bread, but water leaked into them, “swelled the bread, burst the casks, as well as soured the whole bread. The same fate attended a number of fine casks of peas.”
By early October, wrote surgeon Isaac Senter, the army had little more to eat than salt pork and flour. By late October, they hardly even had any of that. Senter recorded some memorable things that they ate.
October 25th: “I found them [a few soldiers who were giving up and turning back for fear of starving to death] almost destitute of any eatable whatever, except a few candles, which were used for supper, and breakfast the next morning, by boiling them in water gruel, &c.”
October 27th: “Our bill of fare for last night and this morning consisted of the jawbone of a swine destitute of any covering. This we boiled in a quantity of water, that with a little thickening constituted our sumptuous eating.”
November 1st: “Our greatest luxuries now consisted in a little water, stiffened with flour, in imitation of shoemakers’ paste, which was christened with the name of Lillipu. Instead of the diarrhea, which tried our men most shockingly in the former part of our march, the reverse was now the complaint, which continued for many days. We had now arrived as we thought to almost the zenith of distress. Several had been entirely destitute of either meat or bread for many days. … The voracious disposition many of us had now arrived at, rendered almost any thing admissible. In company was a poor dog, [who had] hitherto lived through all the tribulations, became a prey for the sustenance of the assassinators. This poor animal was instantly devoured, without leaving any vestige of the sacrifice. Nor did the shaving soap, pomatum [a salve or ointment that was used kind of like hair gel], and even the lip salve, leather of their shoes, cartridge boxes, &c., share any better fate…”
A soldier named Richard Vining wrote about eating an owl.
Fortunately, on November 2nd, some men who had gone ahead sent back some food from a Canadian settlement, and the soldiers “sat down, eat our rations, blessed our stars, and thought it luxury.”
Sources
The Journal of Isaac Senter on a Secret Expedition against Quebec.
The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence. Edited by John C. Dann.