Defending Quebec from an American attack.
A 1777 French map depicting the points of action in
and around Quebec.
To Arnold and his ragged men the fortress city must have
seemed a Gibraltar indeed, but with only about 600 men to do the job, Arnold
did not hesitate to summon the city to surrender. Allan MacLean, however, was unimpressed,
and both Arnold’s first and second messengers were greeted with an
eighteen-pound round shot, the first “splattering the American envoy with
dirt,” the second passing just over his head in “a very straight direction.”
Other grim facts faced Arnold. He had no artillery, only
five cartridges per man remained, and over 100 muskets were unserviceable. In
the light of the situation, he settled for a blockade of the city on its west
side. On 18 November the Americans got word that MacLean was planning a sortie
with 800 men. A council of war then concluded that even the blockade was no
longer practicable. The next day Arnold began withdrawing his whole force to
Pointe aux Trembles (Aspen Point) twenty miles upriver, where the men could
find shelter. On the same day that the Americans disappeared from the Plains of
Abraham (19 November), Guy Carleton entered Quebec to salvoes of saluting
cannon.
Two weeks passed before Brigadier General Richard
Montgomery, the overall force commander, arrived at Pointe aux Trembles. At
nine o’clock on the night of 2 December a boat put out in the dark from the
schooner that had just arrived from Montreal. Arnold waited to turn over
command to the respected Montgomery. In formal manner he stood in front of a
double-ranked honor guard lined up in the foot-deep snow. The flickering light
from torches reflected from the snow and lit up the rocky beach. When the bow
of the boat rasped across the rocks, commands rang out and Arnold’s detachment
snapped to attention and presented arms. Arnold saluted and Montgomery,
stepping ashore, returned the salute.
What Arnold’s men saw of their new commander—most of them on
the following day—they liked. “Noticeably pock-marked, but well-limbed, tall
and handsome, with an air and manner that designated the real soldier,”
recorded John Joseph Henry in his journal. Montgomery has been further
described as having “a bright, magnetic face, and winning manner.” There is no
doubt, too, that his air of command, while not inviting familiarity, was pleasant
yet forceful. What is more, Montgomery returned the men’s approbation. In a
letter to Schuyler (still in overall command of American forces in Canada) he
wrote, “I find Colonel Arnold’s corps an exceeding fine one, inured to fatigue
. . . there is a style among them much superior to what I have used to see in
this campaign.”
Montgomery had brought with him more than a pleasant manner.
In several other craft following his schooner were over 300 men and a supply of
ammunition, clothing, and provisions, as well as much-needed artillery. No
doubt the greatest morale builder for Arnold’s ragged, half-shod men was the
clothing. Montgomery had captured all the winter uniforms of the 7th and 26th
British regiments—long white overcoats, heavy leggings, moccasins, and cloth
caps with fur tails. With the initial distribution of the clothing Montgomery
made a short but effective speech, which was answered with huzzahs.
Montgomery and Arnold wasted no time in returning to Quebec
with their reorganized forces. They took up the siege, with Arnold’s positions
on the north in the Saint Roche suburbs that had been burned by Mac-Lean as
part of his defensive preparations, while Montgomery held the plains between
Saint Roche and Cape Diamond. Montgomery then sent a personal letter to
Carleton with the standard demand for surrender, this time using a woman as a
messenger, with instructions to hand it to no other than the governor himself.
But even she failed. He called for a drummer and commanded, “Take that pair of
tongs and throw it into the fire.” This done, he sent the woman back to
Montgomery.
Ten days later Montgomery tried again, with the same result.
Montgomery, however, was not relying on surrender demands; he was busy getting
his artillery batteries into position. On the night of 10 December his biggest
battery was set up 700 yards from the walls. The frozen ground prohibited
entrenching, so gabions were filled with snow, then soaked with water, which
froze them into solid walls. But Montgomery’s six- and twelve-pounder guns and
howitzers were too light to have an effect on the walls; no more, a Quebecois
commented, “than peas would have against a plank.”
Montgomery sat down to evaluate his situation. His
conclusions were anything but pleasing. Since he lacked siege artillery, there
was no way to breach Quebec’s walls for an assault. He couldn’t dig siege
trenches and parallels in the frozen ground. Arnold’s men’s enlistments were up
at the end of December, and with the departure of the New England troops would
go the bulk of his force. No resupply of ammunition was forthcoming from the
colonies, and his Continental paper money was worthless in Canada. Moreover, he
couldn’t wait for spring, because it would bring the thaws that would break up
the ice in the Saint Lawrence, a sure herald of the coming of British
reinforcements.
The realistic Montgomery had long been aware that he could
never take Quebec by siege. As early as 4 November he had written Schuyler of
his intention to attack the Lower Town. So Montgomery the professional had no
trouble in deciding to take Quebec by storm. The other Montgomery, the leader
of a motley militia army, was having trouble securing popular approval (that
old New England convention) to attack. Many New Englanders held back because of
differences between their leaders, mainly between Arnold and Major John Brown.
Montgomery took the situation in hand by addressing the men at parade to such
obvious effect that their patriotism overcame their reluctance to join in the
proposed attack.
Montgomery and Arnold now had to wait for a dark night and
snow if his small force, now less than a thousand men, were to succeed in
storming the city. The night of 27 December was overcast and snow began to
fall. But while the Americans were moving to assembly areas the sky cleared and
the moon came out. Montgomery had to call off the attack, and after the weather
reports he got more bad news. A Rhode Island sergeant, Stephen Singleton, had
deserted and doubtless had carried the plan of attack to the British.
Montgomery revised the methods of attack but retained as the
main objective the Lower Town. He added two feints against Quebec’s western
walls. His new plan called for two converging attacks on the Lower Town. Arnold
would mount a northern attack from the suburbs of Saint Roche, smash through
the barriers at the north end of the Lower Town, and link up with Montgomery in
or near the street called Sault au Matelot. Montgomery’s attack would move
along the shoreline of the Saint Lawrence from Wolfe’s Cove, pass Cape Diamond,
break into the Lower Town, and head toward the Sault au Matelot. When the
converging forces had linked up, they would make a combined attack to take the
Upper Town. The two feints were to be made against Saint John’s gate (Porte
Saint Jean) and the Cape Diamond bastion. After the new plan had been confided
to senior officers, Montgomery had to continue waiting for his black night with
a snowstorm. That night was not long in coming.
Inside the fortress city, Carleton was well aware that the
Lower Town was Quebec’s most vulnerable section. He blocked the Sault au
Matelot with two formidable log barricades covered by cannon. To protect the
Lower Town in the south he erected palisades along the Saint Lawrence
shoreline. The inner one was covered by a battery of four three-pounder cannons
positioned in a blockhouse made from an old brewery. That little battery was
fated to have an effect on the coming battle out of all proportion to its size.
Carleton had assigned his forces defensive positions along the walls and inner
defenses, using to best advantage his 1,800 men.
Saturday morning, 30 December, was clear and cold, but in
the afternoon the sky darkened and a rising wind brought the first snowflakes.
By nightfall it was blowing a thick snow that increased with the darkness,
drifting to two and three feet. The snowfall was the common signal the American
units had been waiting for. At 2:00 A.M. on the last day of the year they began
moving to their assembly areas.
In the suburbs of Saint Roche, Benedict Arnold stood in a
shed under lantern light, peering over Captain Oswald’s shoulder while he
checked off the units as their captains reported in. In the south Richard
Montgomery had finished a letter to his wife Janet: “I wish it were well over
with all my heart, and I sigh for home like a New Englander.” For a moment this
man who loved farm life was back on his land at Kings Bridge. Then the soldier
took over; General Montgomery shrugged on his greatcoat and went out in the
storm to take command of his 300 men assembling on the Plains of Abraham.
Montgomery caught sight of the brief flare of the rockets
fired by Captain Jacob Brown to signal the launching of his feint attack
against the Cape Diamond bastion. He led the way down the steep, snow-heaped
path that descended from the plains down to Wolfe’s Cove, followed by his three
aides: Macpherson, Cheeseman, and Burr. Behind them came Colonel Donald
Campbell, the second in command. The storm had become a blizzard whose wind
carried the clanging of alarm bells in the city; the rockets had signaled the
alarm to the defenders.
The descent of the mile-long path had been harrowing enough
in the howling darkness, but the next two miles along the shoreline were even
worse. The frozen river had piled up massive heaps of ice slabs that forced the
single file of men to detour up against the rocky cliff sides at every turn.
The men carrying the clumsy scaling ladders had the hardest time of all because
they had to push or pull their ladders over the sharp slabs of ice or around
the snow-covered rocks on the steep slopes. And all the way the wind drove the
snow into eyes that were straining to find a way in the black night. Under
great difficulties, Montgomery passed Cape Diamond; farther on, near a limit
called the Prés de Ville, he could see through the driving snow the palisade of
the outer barrier.
The carpenters with the advance party quickly hacked and
sawed down four posts of the undefended palisade. The general was the first
through the opening, followed by his aides. Keeping left against the cliff
slope, Montgomery came around a curve to the second palisade. He took a saw
from a carpenter and cut through the first two posts himself. Followed by only
fifty men, he slipped through the opening and slowly made his way up the narrow
street. He reached a point where, peering through the falling snow, he could
make out the dim outline of a two-story building about a hundred paces ahead.
No guards or sentries were visible. Had they fled along with the defenders of
the palisades? He waved his storming party forward, drew his sword, and strode
ahead for about fifty paces. Then he broke into a run, the others at his heels.
A blinding yellow flash burst from the front of the blockhouse, and a burst of
grapeshot killed Montgomery instantly, shot through the head. He lay on his
back in the snow, one arm still extended, a dozen men dead behind his body. The
storming party had been wiped out; only Aaron Burr and a couple of others had
escaped unhurt.
That ended the attack. Colonel Campbell called a council of
officers who, it was said, “justified his receding from the attack.” The column
turned around, leaving the bodies of Montgomery and the others. It retraced its
grim path through the storm back to the Plains of Abraham. No word of Montgomery’s
death and the retreat reached Arnold or any of his men until after the battle.
At Saint Roche, Arnold checked off his units, finding only
Captain Dearborn’s company unaccounted for. Unwilling to wait any longer,
Arnold left orders for Dearborn to catch up, and, clutching a musket, he led
his column off in single file at 4:00 A.M. His advance guard consisted of
twenty-five men; following them came Captain John Lamb with forty artillerymen
dragging a six-pounder gun on a sled. Next came the three rifle companies led,
respectively, by Captain Morgan, Lieutenant Steele, and Captain Hendricks. The
main body consisted of the New England musketmen, followed by a mixed bag of
some forty Canadians and Indians. Arnold’s plan was to attack the first
barricade with Lamb’s cannon, then to send the riflemen to flank the barricade
on both sides.
Unknown to Arnold, the feint against Saint John’s gate
conducted by Colonel Livingston’s poorly motivated Canadians was a fiasco: the
men had fled as soon as their fire had been returned by the gate’s defenders.
Farther south, Captain Brown’s men did better. They stood their ground,
maintaining a rolling fire against the Cape Diamond bastion. As it turned out,
however, the feints fooled no one, least of all Carleton.
Arnold’s 600 men trotted along, keeping parallel to the
north wall, and were able to pass the Palace gate and a two-gun battery
undetected. However, where the advance party came abreast of a row of buildings
beyond the battery, a fierce fire of musketry broke out from the walls above
them, causing some casualties. There was no way to return the fire, so Arnold
pushed on, taking no time to attend to casualties. “Let the dead bury the dead”
had been the watchword from the start. So the column simply ran the gauntlet
for 600 yards under the galling fire.
When the column reached the quay along the river, it had to
thread its way through a network of hawser cables stretching from houses and bollards
out to moored ships. After passing those obstacles, Arnold and the advance
party entered a narrow street where they were met with “a smart discharge of
musketry.” The riflemen took cover against the housefronts and returned the
fire. This was the first barricade, which, unknown to them, was only lightly
defended.
Arnold, with his usual dash, was everywhere, stopping the
useless fusillade against the barrier and organizing the assault to take the
barricade. Since Captain Lamb’s cannon had been abandoned back in a snowdrift Arnold
decided to lead a frontal assault himself. As he was shouting his commands for
men to follow him, he felt a rasp of pain that stopped him in his tracks. A
ricocheting bullet had struck his left leg below the knee, torn along the leg
bone, and lodged in his Achilles tendon. Though he tried to prop himself up on
his musket and shout the men forward, his men, seeing him wounded, held back.
As Arnold was being carried to the rear, Morgan came up. Though he was a
captain, the field officers turned over the command to him. Later he was to
acknowledge modestly that their acclaim “reflected credit on their judgement.”
Morgan shouted for a ladder to assault the barrier just as a
two-gun battery opened up on him. The first two volleys were ineffective.
Morgan led his men up the first ladder. He was almost over the barricade when a
blast from the defenders’ muskets hit the ladder and blew him backward. A
bullet went through his cap, another grazed his cheek, and his beard was singed
by powder grains. Morgan was back on his feet in a flash; he clambered up the
ladder again and flung himself over the top of the barricade. He tumbled to the
ground, rolled under the muzzle of a British cannon to dodge the bayonets, and
was saved only by Lieutenant Heth and Cadet Porterfield, who had swarmed over
the wall behind him. The defenders ran into a house and Morgan followed,
dashing around to the rear door. He declared them surrounded and took the
surrender of their Captain McCloud.
Morgan and his riflemen pressed on and entered the Sault au
Matelot. About two hundred yards down the narrow street they could see the
second barricade and the cannon platform behind it. Incredibly, the sally port
was open. While the Americans were still staring, they heard shouts of “Vive la
liberté!” from windows and doorways; the Québécois in the street were
demonstrably friendly. With the citizens sympathetic and the barricade
undefended, the way to the Lower Town was open.
Morgan then made his first mistake. In front of the
undefended barricade, in the first faint light of day, with the wind whipping
snow in their faces, he called a council of war. He was for going on, but his
officers counseled against a further advance. Later he would recall, “Here I was
overruled by sound judgment and good reasoning.” For one thing, his orders
specified that he was to wait for Montgomery. Further, he couldn’t take his 150
prisoners along. They outnumbered his riflemen, and if he released them they
could fall back to the first barricade and cut off his retreat. Both Montgomery
and the main body must be close behind, and when they all joined forces they
could take the Upper Town. So Morgan hesitated and gave in. “I gave up my own
opinion, and lost the town”—how simply put, and what a simple truth! He had
afforded Carleton, now aware of Montgomery’s disaster, time to dispatch Colonel
Caldwell to stop the Americans at the second barricade.
Morgan went back to find the main body. He found Lieutenant
Colonel Greene and Major Meigs with 200 men; all of them had been lost in side
streets and byways when their guides had failed them. Morgan led them forward
to the second barricade, and now, belatedly, decided to advance through the
obstacle to the Lower Town. Meanwhile, one of Colonel Caldwell’s officers was
massing a detachment behind the second barricade and preparing to sally out and
pin down the Americans. That officer, Lieutenant Anderson, debouched from the
gate and called on the Americans to surrender. Morgan snatched up a rifle and
shot him through the head. After a pause, the fiercest firefight of the battle
broke out. As Morgan’s men exchanged fusillades with the Canadians, others
packed down mounds of snow on which they could set their ladders. Morgan and
his best leaders—Hendricks, Steele, Humphreys, Heth, Greene, and Lamb among
them—tried to scale the barrier but were blasted back by a hail of grapeshot
and bullets.
Riflemen broke into the lower story of a stone house from
which their fire could reach the defenders. The Canadian Colonel Caldwell saw
the tactical importance of the house and ordered a detachment to use a captured
ladder to get into the upper story before the Americans. The Canadians got
inside the second floor and drove the Americans from the house with their
bayonets. Other riflemen, firing from windows down the street, drove the
gunners from their firing platform. The Canadian musket fire now increased in
such intensity that the American toll of casualties rose. The American
officers, even Morgan, could no longer exhort their men to come out of the
houses and renew the attack.
Morgan ordered the men around him to take cover in the
houses while he conferred again with his senior officers. Morgan argued for
continuing the fight, but there was an unhesitating consensus for an immediate
retreat. Yet even then their fate was being sealed. Carleton, informed that
Colonel Caldwell’s Canadians were holding back the Americans, had ordered
Captain Laws with 200 men and two fieldpieces to move down from the Palace gate
and cut off the American rear from the direction of Sault au Matelot. Although
the overzealous Laws charged ahead of his men and became an American prisoner,
the rest of his men soon arrived. At a final hasty conference, Morgan urged the
commanders to try to cut their way out through Laws’s men, but a majority
insisted on holding out in the hope of being relieved by Montgomery.
By this time—sometime after 9:00 A.M.—Laws’s gunners had
gotten a nine-pounder in position where it could sweep the street or batter
down house walls. While the American officers continued to argue, men began to
give up, holding their musket butts out of doors and windows in sign of
surrender. Finally Lieutenant Colonel Greene, stepping in, made a formal offer
of surrender, and it was accepted. Americans were routed out of houses to be
lined up and marched away as prisoners.
But not Dan Morgan. He set his back against a housefront,
and with tears of rage and frustration streaming down his face, defied his
enemies. Canadians were calling on him to hand over his sword or be shot, while
his men were shouting at him, begging him to give up before he was killed. The
scene ended when Morgan spotted a man in black among the crowd of onlookers.
When Morgan was assured that the man was a priest, he bellowed, “Then I give my
sword to you. But not a scoundrel of these cowards shall take it out of my
hands.”
The three-hour battle for the Sault au Matelot was over.
With its end went all hope of taking Quebec by storm. The American losses were
60 killed or wounded and 426 captured. Among the prisoners were Captain
Dearborn’s entire company, which had been cut off while trying to catch up to
Arnold’s column and forced to surrender. Carleton’s losses were insignificant:
5 killed and 13 wounded out of his garrison of 1,800.
When one reflects on the failure to take Quebec by storm, it
is tempting to play the game of “what if.” What if the gallant Montgomery had
not been struck down? What if Arnold had not suffered the wound that removed
him from command? What if Morgan had shown the moral courage to match his
physical courage in the moment that called for bold decision? It may seem
reasonable to hypothesize that a reversal of any of those three misfortunes
might have made Canada a fourteenth colony. But after all, the hard reality is
that the attack on Quebec turned out to be what Wellington was to say of
Waterloo: “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” And that is how
Quebec must remain in history—a near thing.
What followed in the months after the failure at Quebec is a
dismal tale. An indomitable Arnold held out, trying to keep up the semblance of
a siege until he could get the reinforcements he pleaded for. When the
reinforcements eventually came, it was the old story of too little too late,
never enough at any time to enable Arnold and the commanders who succeeded him
to mount an effective offensive. The three generals who followed Arnold in
command—Wooster, Thomas, and Sullivan—ranged in performance from mediocre to
unfortunate. Then the arrival of General Burgoyne at Quebec in early May 1776
brought Carleton’s forces up to 13,000 men. The American effectives in Canada
never numbered over 5,000 at any time, although a total of 8,000 men had been
committed at various stages throughout the invasion.
Finally, after further severe reverses, the demoralized
remnants of the American army straggled into Crown Point in mid-July 1776. Just
ten months after the first expedition had left there to conquer Canada, the
invasion of Canada was over.
