Chapter 18
“In the Name of the Great Jehovah…”
As if the Massachusetts Provincial Congress did not have enough to occupy its attention that spring around Boston, there was animated talk about acquiring Canada. This was not a new thought. Despite two centuries of exploration and settlement by France, Canada had long been the object of British dreams of colonial expansion. The European wars of the earlier eighteenth century between Great Britain and France had always involved warfare along their tenuous colonial borders from the Great Lakes to Nova Scotia.
Many of those rebels now gathering around Boston who were middle-aged had received their military training in some manner or another during the French and Indian War. Some had sailed to Nova Scotia to storm Louisbourg with the dashing General Wolfe. Others had climbed with him onto the Plains of Abraham, outside Quebec. A great many more had battled in their own backyards, up and down the watery reaches of the Hudson River and Lake Champlain. Their sacrifices had helped Great Britain acquire Canada, and it was memories of those sacrifices that had further inflamed anti-British sentiments after the adversarial Quebec Act.
“Massachusettensis… threatens you with the vengeance of Great-Britain,” John Adams warned, and added that the country would “support her claims by her fleets and armies, Canadians and Indians.”1 To many, the Canadian part of this vengeance appeared every bit as real as the Indian portion, and anyone with the slightest sense of geography knew very well the direct route from which it was likely to come.
The Hudson River, flowing south from the Adirondacks to the gateway of New York, and Lakes George and Champlain, draining north down the Richelieu River to the Saint Lawrence, had long been a path of migration, trade, and warfare. In the 1700s, this watery corridor was to colonial America what the Mississippi River and its many tributaries would become to American expansionism a century later. Control the Hudson-to-Champlain corridor and one controlled the most direct line between New York and Quebec; an adversary who did so might also neatly sever the limb of New England from the trunk of the other colonies.
The French had understood this well as they advanced southward from what they called Fort Carillon, at the southern end of Lake Champlain, in the summer of 1757. After the capture of Fort William Henry—made infamous by The Last of the Mohicans—the French chose to hunker down at Fort Carillon and make it a fortress, but this threat only intensified British efforts to capture it. Abercromby’s ill-fated assault of 1758 failed miserably and cost the young Lord Howe his life, but the following year, the French blew up the fort rather than surrender it. General Jeffery Amherst renamed the post Ticonderoga and set about rebuilding it.
By the spring of 1775, absent any French threat from what was now British Canada, Fort Ticonderoga had fallen into a dismal state of disrepair. It was also severely undermanned. The prize of Ticonderoga, however, was not just its strategic location but also dozens of heavy cannons that had been dragged there two decades before by both the French and British. Many were aging relics, but given the meager resources of the yet-to-be-formed Continental Army, they would make a treasure trove of rebel artillery.