The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

was 270 miles, not 180, as he had told Washington, and the journey would take six weeks, not twenty days. Yet his fortitude and iron will won through. In late October, aware that his men were failing fast, he had lunged ahead with a small vanguard down the Chaudière, racing through the rapids—smashing three bateaux against the rocks and capsizing others—before reaching Sartigan, a hardscrabble settlement of whitewashed houses with thatched roofs and paper windows. Astonished Canadian farmers, he wrote, “received us in the most hospitable manner.” Arnold sent the horned cattle upriver, soon followed by mutton, flour, tobacco, and horses to evacuate the lame.

      In the coming days his troops straggled into Sartigan, “more like ghosts than men,” wrote one rifleman. Filthy, feeble, their clothes torn and their beards matted, they “resembled those animals of New Spain called ourang-outangs,” another man wrote. A captain told his family, “We have waded 100 miles.” Of the 1,080 who set out from Cambridge in September, about 400 had turned back, or had been sent home as invalids, or had died on the trek, their bones scattered as mileposts across the border uplands. “Our march has been attended with an amazing deal of fatigue,” Arnold told Washington, “… with a thousand difficulties I never apprehended.” The commanding general in reply would praise “your enterprising & persevering spirit,” adding, “It is not in the power of any man to command success, but you have done more—you have deserved it.”

      Ever aggressive, Arnold next resolved to seize Quebec immediately. Over the following week, as the men regained health and weight, he hired carpenters and smiths to make scaling ladders, spears, and grappling hooks. Firelocks were repaired, canoes purchased. Company by company, the men moved north to Pointe-Levy, three miles up the St. Lawrence from Quebec, where locals welcomed them with a country dance featuring bagpipes, fiddle music, and drams of rum. John Pierce wrote of his hosts, “They have their saints placed as big as life which they bow down to and worship as they pass them.”

      At nine p.m. on November 13, a calm, cold Monday with a late moonrise, the river crossing began in forty canoes. Carefully skirting two British warships that had recently appeared on the St. Lawrence—the Lizard, a frigate, and Hunter, a sloop—five hundred Americans landed at Wolfe’s Cove by four a.m. on Tuesday. They soon climbed the escarpment that nimble William Howe had scaled in 1759 to reach the Plains of Abraham, barely a cannon’s shot west of Quebec’s massive walls. Later in the day Arnold’s men paraded within a few hundred yards of the St. Louis Gate, marching to and fro, while shouting insults in a bootless effort to entice the defenders to fight in the open, just as Wolfe had baited the French sixteen years earlier.

      “They huzzahed thrice,” a British officer reported. “We answered them with three cheers of defiance, & saluted them with a few cannon loaded with grape & canister shot. They did not wait for a second round.” Arnold also dispatched a white flag with a written ultimatum: “If I am obliged to carry the town by storm, you may expect every severity practiced on such occasions.” The demand, a Canadian historian later complained, included “the usual mixture of cant, bombast, threats, and bad taste so characteristic of the effusions of this generation of American commanders.” British gunners answered with an 18-pound ball fired from the parapet, spattering Arnold’s envoy with mud.

      Even Colonel Arnold knew when the hour demanded prudence. He had no artillery, few bayonets, little cash, and almost a hundred broken muskets. A tally revealed that his men averaged only five reliable cartridges each. Informants told him the Quebec garrison had nearly nineteen hundred men after reinforcement by the Royal Navy, merchant seamen, and other armed loyalists, more than he’d expected. Although half were “obliged to bear arms against their inclination,” as Arnold wrote Montgomery, he calculated that two thousand attackers would be needed “to carry the town.” The informants also warned him that the defenders planned a sudden sally to catch him unawares.

      He ordered the men assembled, and at three a.m. on November 19 they staggered west on bloody feet for Pointe-aux-Trembles to await Montgomery. “Very cold morning,” Pierce told his diary. “Ground frozen very hard.” An armed two-masted snow passed them, heading down the St. Lawrence for Quebec; on deck, they would later learn, stood General Carleton in his habitant disguise.

      Having survived unspeakable hardship, many men desperately missed their homes and families. “God deliver me from this land of ignorance,” Pierce wrote, “and in his own due time return me once more where they can pronounce English.” Yet most recognized that more hardship lay ahead. “We have a winter’s campaign before us,” Captain Samuel Ward, Jr., told his family in Rhode Island. “But I trust we shall have the glory of taking Quebec!”

      Good news out of Canada sparked jubilation from Cambridge to Philadelphia and beyond. The invasion gambit had all but succeeded. General Montgomery controlled the Lake Champlain–Richelieu corridor, as well as Montreal and the western St. Lawrence valley. He soon would move east to join forces with Colonel Arnold, now hailed as an American Hannibal for a feat likened to crossing the Alps with elephants in midwinter.

      Canadian volunteers flocked to the American standard despite the clergy’s threat of eternal damnation. Some publicly acknowledged asking God to help les Bostonnais, as they called all Yankees. Habitants from sixteen parishes around Quebec City alone would assist the invaders by confiscating British supplies, detaining loyalists and overzealous priests, and ransacking the estates of wealthy seigneurs in a spate of score settling. Others provided firewood, built scaling ladders, and stood guard around American camps. “We can expect no assistance from the Canadian peasantry,” a Quebec merchant wrote. “They have imbibed a notion that if the rebels get entire possession of the country, they’ll be forever exempted from paying taxes.”

      For the American invaders, the delay in taking St. Johns was nettlesome. A quicker capture of Montreal in early fall might have bagged Carleton and permitted the seizure of defenseless Quebec in a swift coup de main. Aware that Britain would likely dispatch a robust force in the spring to recoup the empire’s losses in Canada, both Washington and Schuyler believed that Fortress Quebec must be quickly reduced in the coming weeks, then manned and fortified over the winter to withstand the anticipated assault. Although more than six tons of gunpowder had been sent to the Northern Army, mostly from South Carolina and New York, shortages persisted of everything from food and winter clothing to money and munitions.

      Still, with Montgomery and Arnold leading their “famine-proof veterans,” victory in the north seemed at hand. A Virginia congressman, Richard Henry Lee, spoke for many when he declared in Philadelphia, “No doubt is entertained here that this Congress will be shortly joined by delegates from Canada, which will then complete the union of fourteen provinces.”

       6.

       America Is an Ugly Job

      LONDON, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1775

      By late morning on Thursday, October 26, tens of thousands of high-spirited Londoners filled the streets around Parliament, lured by pleasant fall sunshine and the titillating expectation of trouble. Constables clustered outside the Swan tavern at Westminster Bridge and in St. James’s Park, and Foot Guards were issued ten musket cartridges apiece as a precaution. George III was to open a new session of Parliament this afternoon, but an American merchant named Stephen Sayre had been arrested at his Oxford Street house on suspicion of high treason; it was said that Sayre intended to kidnap the king, diverting his hijacked coach to the Tower, where bribed guards would lock the gates behind him and allow seditious rioters to ransack the arsenal. Skeptics declared that if such an outlandish plot existed, the conspirators should be sent to Bedlam asylum rather than to prison. But the authorities took no chances. Sayre himself had been dragged to the Tower, which “raised the curiosity of the public to an extravagant pitch,” the London Public Advertiser reported. “People imagine something very extraordinary is to happen.”

      The clock over the main entrance at St. James’s Palace touched two p.m. as the king emerged, swaddled in silk and ermine. “The crowd was very great in the courtyard to see His Majesty get into the state