Valcour Island
1776
On a long twilight evening in midsummer 1776, as rebels rushed to fortify New York City, the curtain dropped on the last scene of the Americans’ dramatic effort to conquer Canada. Benedict Arnold sat astride his horse at the north end of the Hudson-Champlain corridor witnessing the tragedy’s end. The town of St. John’s, which Arnold had raided the previous May, which Richard Montgomery had captured after an exhausting siege in November, was in flames. It would soon return to British control. Sparks danced into the gathering darkness. Arnold and his aide James Wilkinson spotted the forms of enemy grenadiers emerging from the trees.
Arnold’s trek through Maine, Montgomery’s sacrifice, the loss of five thousand American lives, all had come to naught. A force of British regulars and hired Hessians had landed in Quebec during the spring. Their goal was to retake Canada, drive south, meet with Howe’s huge army, and end the uprising. Governor Carleton had gone on the offensive. The Americans had scurried away from Quebec. “In the most helter skelter manner, we raised the siege, leaving everything,” noted Dr. Isaac Senter, who had marched over the mountains with Arnold and who had removed the bullet fragment from his leg after the failed attempt to storm the city.1
During May, they had retreated up the St. Lawrence. The men had become, Arnold wrote, “a great rabble.” Their commander, General John Thomas, died of smallpox on June 2. John Sullivan, arriving on the scene with 1,400 more men, took command. The New Hampshire lawyer had ordered an attack on the British at Three Rivers, ignorant of the fact that additional British reinforcements had arrived at this outpost halfway between Quebec and Montreal. Blindly crashing into the superior army, Sullivan’s men were routed in confusion. Arnold, recuperating from his wound at Montreal, understood the situation. “The junction of the Canadians with the Colonies—an object which brought us to this country,” he wrote, “is at an end.”2
Sullivan reluctantly hurried south along the Richelieu River, with the enemy close on his heels. He blamed his “dispirited Army” for his inability to hold back the British. Panic gripped men and officers. On a rumor of approaching Hessians, some troops ran off and “could not be Stopt.” Arnold abandoned Montreal and led his own force to join Sullivan’s men at St. John’s. Still limping, Arnold volunteered to command the rear guard while the patriots departed.
Now, the vanguard of the enemy army was bearing down on him. Arnold and his aide turned and spurred to the waterfront. The last of the Americans were piling into boats on the river, which flowed north from Lake Champlain, for the escape.
When Arnold had led the initial invasion northward, Canadian authorities had sneered at him as a “Horse Jockey” because he had traded the animals before the war. Although he loved a good mount, Arnold was determined to leave nothing behind for the victors. He put the barrel of his pistol to his horse’s head and killed it. He ordered a reluctant Wilkinson to do the same.
The two men scrambled to a waiting bateau. Arnold, the first American officer to arrive in Quebec, “pushed the boat off with his own hands” and climbed in, the last to leave. Canada fell entirely into British hands.
Hearing that his troops had almost captured Arnold, Lord Germaine, the British secretary of state for America, regretted the failure. Arnold, he wrote, “has shown himself the most enterprising man among the rebels.” George Washington was relieved. “It is not in the power of any man to command success,” he advised Arnold, “but you have done more—you have deserved it.”3
Lake Champlain, the long carrot-shaped glacial gouge with its south-pointing tap root, had for months served as the supply route for the northern army. Now it had become a potential path of invasion. Because the British could not sail their ships past the twelve-mile rapids north of St. John’s, they were temporarily blocked from falling on the fleeing Americans. But it was only a matter of time before they attacked southward along the lake.
During the first year of the war, Horatio Gates had helped to guide Washington through the jungle of administrative details required to organize an army from scratch. Striving and ambition came naturally to this man who had, against the odds, climbed the British officer ranks. He wanted a command of his own, and in June 1776, with the Canadian expedition in a shambles, Congress had raised him to the rank of major general and appointed him to head the American army there. When he arrived at Fort Ticonderoga early in July, he was dismayed to discover that there was no army in Canada. He began to give orders anyway. A miffed General Schuyler, still commander of the northern department, complained. John Hancock, the president of Congress, informed Gates that he would have to serve under the patrician, who was six years his junior and far less experienced in military affairs.
The men at Ticonderoga and nearby Crown Point were not fit to resist the British force that would inevitably advance along the lake. Smallpox had prostrated thousands and was claiming thirty lives a day. “The most descriptive pen cannot describe the condition of our army,” Schuyler wrote. “Sickness, disorder and discord reign.”4 An observer noted that it was “not an army but a mob.”
But Benedict Arnold had a plan. The rebels already possessed four armed warships on the lake: Arnold himself had grabbed the Enterprise and the Liberty during his campaign to capture Fort Ticonderoga. Montgomery had seized the Royal Savage the previous fall. Workmen at Ticonderoga had just finished building the Revenge. If the Americans could construct and arm more ships, they might keep control of the lake and block a British invasion. Lacking north-south roads, the enemy would have to build their own fleet to protect troop transports. This naval arms race would give the rebels a chance to rally, dig in, and reinforce. It would buy time.
The logic of the plan was obvious to Schuyler and Gates. Arnold, a nautical professional, was the man to make it a reality. Now a brigadier general, he had become intimate with the sea during his days as a merchant and smuggler. The experience had also shaped his personality—a sea captain needed backbone and dauntless self-mastery to exert his will over the rough men of a ship’s crew.
Schuyler had already directed the building of several gondolas. These open, flat-bottom gunboats, fifty feet long, were maneuverable, powered by both sails and long sweep oars. He had planned to use them as transports to supply the army in Canada.
In addition, Arnold wanted seventy-foot galleys, a common type of coastal warship fitted with a gun deck and a raised quarterdeck at the stern. They carried about two dozen powerful cannon that could fire a coordinated broadside. They were likewise propelled by oars as well as sails.
Arnold began to oversee the construction of the Champlain fleet at Skenesborough, a tiny village at the southern limit of the lake (now Whitehall, New York). At Ticonderoga, twenty-five miles north, workmen would fix the masts and install sails, rigging, and arms. The fleet was to be stationed at Crown Point, site of another fort on the lake ten miles north of Ticonderoga, ready to take on any British incursion.
Constructing ships at a post two hundred miles inland presented knotty problems. Sawyers worked their mills around the clock to shape the needed beams and planks. Everything else had to be scavenged, improvised, or begged for: canvas for sails, blocks and pulleys, rope, nails, oakum to caulk the hulls, and all the devices and fittings unique to the nautical trade. Arnold aptly summed up his frustration with the creaky supply system: “When you ask for a frigate, they give you a raft; ask for sailors, they give you tavern waiters; and if you want breeches, they give you a vest.”5
The shortage of experienced workmen frustrated the project. Arnold tried to teach house carpenters nautical construction. He pleaded with Congress to offer salaries sufficient to induce skilled shipwrights to venture to the interior. Even harder to come by were sailors. Few were willing to give up the potentially lucrative privateer trade to man oars on an inland lake.
Yet Arnold thrived on adversity, on inducing others to go beyond apparent limits. He had exercised this knack for leadership during the harrowing march to Quebec. He now threw himself into a frenzy of activity, moving from Skenesborough to Ticonderoga and Crown Point, ordering, urging, instructing, browbeating, and improvising. Slowly, the work advanced. Shipwrights finally arrived. They scrounged supplies from shipyards as far away as the Hudson River port at Poughkeepsie. Half-finished warships kept splashing down the ways into the lake.
The feud between Gates and Schuyler sputtered along all summer. Gates had grudgingly accepted Schuyler as overall commander in the north, then blamed the New Yorker for the shortages. He wrote peremptory letters to his superior, demanding supplies like powder, lead, and flints. “Pray hurry it up,” he added.
Arnold’s personality was another lightning rod for resentment. His men loved him; fellow officers often found him abrasive and arrogant. While Arnold had held sway in Montreal, he had requisitioned supplies needed by the army, sometimes at bayonet point. These transactions came back to haunt him during a complicated court-martial in late July, during which Arnold was accused of mishandling goods from a Montreal warehouse. Forced to deal with such pettiness during this critical period, Arnold erupted and challenged the judges to meet him on the dueling ground. Gates was alarmed when the court moved to have Arnold arrested, and he ordered the tribunal dissolved.
All summer, Arnold had been itching to find out about British preparations at their own shipyards in St. John’s. He decided to make his way there and see for himself. This wasn’t exactly what Gates had in mind. As cautious as Arnold was impetuous, Gates had written to John Adams in the spring: “Our business is to defend the main chance, to attack only by detail, and when a precious advantage offers.”6 He reiterated the message to Benedict Arnold. “It is a defensive war we are carrying on.” He advised his aggressive subordinate to keep to the south end of the lake and avoid “wanton risk.” His job was to shield Ticonderoga from attack, a duty Arnold might find “monotonous.”
Arnold put his own interpretation on Gates’s orders. On August 24, with several of his galleys still under construction, he took the rest of the small fleet—a schooner, a sloop, one galley, and nine gondolas—and sailed north. A headwind and storm slowed his progress, but by the first week in September the fleet lurked at the very mouth of the Richelieu, barely a mile from the Canadian border.
As the forests took flame with autumn color and sailors shivered in the cramped open boats, Arnold tried to determine British strength and guess the intentions of Carleton, the smart, careful strategist who had gotten the better of him at Quebec. He sent out scouting parties to investigate the fleet the British general was assembling to protect his invasion force. He knew that the world’s leading naval power would have a full cohort of shipwrights and stores of nautical supplies in the holds of their ships on the St. Lawrence. But before they started construction, they would need to haul the material around the rapids to St. John’s.
While he awaited word, Arnold received a letter from his sister Hannah, who had taken over the care of his three sons after the death of his wife. He had not seen them in more than a year. She sent him several pairs of stockings, and reported that “Little Hal sends a kiss to Pa and says, ‘Auntie, tell my Papa he must come home, I want to kiss him.’”7 He also found out that George Washington’s army had been crushed on Long Island and was reeling before Howe’s massive invasion force.
As he awaited the British, Arnold demanded that Gates send the supplies that had been lacking all summer: ammunition, anchors, caulking irons, sail needles, pitch and tar, pine boards. Also “Rum, as much as you please; Clothing, for at least half the men in the fleet who are naked” and “One hundred seamen (no land-lubbers.)”8
His scouts returned to give Arnold a daunting picture of British strength: A 10,000-man invasion force, 27 war ships, 250 bateaux to carry the troops. With his own puny navy—barely 500 men on a dozen ships—he had no hope of stopping them.
Yet Arnold remained in his forward position, his men enduring the raw weather and the icy spray the lake spat at them. By October 7, three more galleys had joined the fleet. Arnold transferred from the schooner Royal Savage onto the galley Congress in order to command from a more maneuverable vessel. Always thinking, Arnold had his men erect screens of tree branches along the gunwales of the ships to protect them from small arms fire.
Any battle in the open water would favor the British, who wielded twice as many guns as the Americans. But Arnold had studied the lake thoroughly and sounded many of its bays. He now retired with his fleet to a haven twenty miles south of the Richelieu. He tucked the vessels into a channel three-quarters of a mile wide between the New York shore and Valcour Island. His ships could ride there out of sight from the lake. Shoals to the north would help protect him from a superior enemy. He planned to surprise the British armada as it passed.
* * *
On the brisk, windy morning of October 10, General Carleton’s ships, directed by Commodore Thomas Pringle, finally emerged from the river onto Champlain. Carleton had spent the summer and early autumn completing two ships that were guaranteed to give him mastery of the lake. One was the man-of-war Inflexible, a full-rigged battleship resplendent with three masts, tiers of square sails, and rows of powerful cannon. The other, the floating gun barge Thunderer, carried six massive 24-pounder guns that could outshoot any armament in Arnold’s fleet. Carleton, like General Howe, had assembled an overwhelming force.
His ships nudged south by a cold wind, Carleton probed carefully along the lake’s clutter of islands and coves, expecting to meet with Arnold’s fleet around every headland. He went to anchor for the night about fifteen miles south of the river, five miles north of the Americans’ concealed ships.
The brisk north breeze continued the next morning. Snow whitened the peaks of the Adirondack Mountains to the west. Arnold called a council of war on the Congress. His second in command, General David Waterbury, a Connecticut militia leader, argued that the channel behind Valcour was a trap, the British fleet too powerful to oppose. He favored a fighting retreat to the south, where they could protect the bastion at Ticonderoga as ordered. Arnold overruled him. He would fight where he was.
Arnold had an uncanny ability to inspire men. The heat of his passion kindled their own. Neither he nor his nervous subordinates could imagine the wild ferocity of an all-out naval battle, yet he made the coming fight appear to them something that no man would want to miss.
Carleton’s fleet came down the lake that morning, ready for battle but still unsure where they might encounter the Americans. His flagship Maria led the flotilla, followed by the majestic Inflexible and three other warships. Weighed down by a single large cannon in the bow, each of the two dozen gunboats nodded to every wave. Bringing up the rear were more than four hundred Indians paddling thirty-foot-long war canoes. Sailors rowed longboats loaded with provisions. The squadron stretched out as the wind hurried the warships southward and the rowers strained their backs to keep up.
Carleton came even with Valcour Island. Where were the Americans? Arnold kept his fleet arrayed in an arc across the hidden channel, ready to aim all his firepower on any vessel that entered. When the first British ships were two miles past, he sent a small squadron onto the lake to incite the fleet. Spotting the American schooner Royal Savage, the British vessels immediately came about. Now they had to beat back into the wind to join battle, a difficult feat for the square-rigged Inflexible, nearly impossible for the flat-bottomed Thunderer. But the forty-foot-long gunboats were able to pivot nimbly and open fire.
The Royal Savage never regained the channel. Blasted by British guns, she lost part of her rigging and ground to a halt on a submerged rock ledge at the end of the island. She would be captured and recaptured several times during the day.
Powerful in the open water, the Inflexible was a helpless giant when attempting to thread a narrow channel. The more maneuverable schooners Maria and Carleton approached to within a few hundred yards of the American line and opened fire. The British gunboats joined in, their ordnance operated by skilled German artillerymen.
Eighteenth-century naval battles were unimaginably violent. Ships could support the weight of huge cannon and carry them to an intimate range. Guns with the power to throw a cannonball a mile blasted enemy vessels from less than a hundred yards. The confined interiors of the ships turned hellish. The firing in close quarters numbed men’s ears; smoke burned their eyes. Cannonballs punched through hulls with an explosion of splinters, lacerating limbs. Decks turned slippery with blood.
As the air screamed, Arnold, his face blackened by gunpowder, ran from gun to gun on the Congress, carefully aiming the cannon. He pointed one heavy piece and barked the order to fire. The explosion sent a five-inch iron ball hurling across the water. It passed directly between two men on the quarterdeck at the Maria. The shock wave knocked Guy Carleton’s younger brother Thomas to the deck and left him bleeding from both ears. This was no fluke—men were sometimes killed by near misses. Carleton himself, although unhurt physically, was stunned by this supersonic angel of death. He allowed Commodore Pringle to direct the ship back down the channel. The Maria did not stop until she was safely two miles up the lake.
Carleton had neglected to draw up any plan of battle in advance. Each British captain was left to improvise. As the afternoon progressed, the fight turned into a waterborne melee, with British gunboats and American galleys and gondolas darting forward to fire, returning to the line to reload. By now, Indians were shooting from both banks, waiting to capture or tomahawk any American forced ashore.
The enemy “continued a very hot fire with round and grape-shot,” Arnold reported.9 Smoke wafted on the wind. The noise of the firing echoed down the lake. The raw militia fifty miles away at Crown Point knew from the distant booms that the fate of the lake—and their own fate—hung in the balance.
At five o’clock, Arnold watched as the captain of the mighty Inflexible finally managed to zigzag his ship into the channel. The firing from both sides reached a mad crescendo as the ship’s big guns pounded the American line.
Only darkness brought an end to the shrieking madness. Carleton’s ships and gunboats pulled back and formed a line across the mouth of the channel. For a time, Arnold could make them out in the light of the flames that had engulfed the Royal Savage. Then all faded to blackness. An autumnal fog unrolled a deep quiet over the water.
* * *
Arnold called his captains to a war council in his cabin. A makeshift surgery during the fighting, the room still reeked of human blood. The reports were all bad: Every ship had been damaged, one gondola was sinking, a dozen cannonballs had pierced the Congress. The men had expended three-quarters of their gunpowder during the seven-hour battle. Crewmen and officers lay dead. The survivors could not continue the fight. The battered fleet, all summer in the making, was doomed. They had to surrender.
No, Arnold told them. They would escape. As the fog thickened, he ordered every captain to mark the stern of his craft with white chalk and to hang a shrouded lantern so that its light fell only on this smudge. By following the boat in front, the ships could maintain a line, hug the shore and perhaps sneak past the enemy.
The escape resembled Washington’s daring retreat after the Battle of Long Island six weeks earlier. The rowers muffled their oars. The men held their breath. As they glided through the dark, they could hear voices and laughter from the enemy ships. By morning they were seven miles south of Valcour Island.
Carleton awoke to the amazing news that Arnold had “given us the slip.” His naval officers were humiliated. They struggled south against a head wind, determined to finish the upstart American fleet.
As darkness fell on the day after the battle, Arnold’s fleeing crewmen continued to row through stinging sleet. Weary muscles could not propel the heavy craft fast enough. The British armada bore down on them the next day. General Waterbury, aboard the galley Washington, wanted permission to remove his wounded and blow up the ship. Arnold refused. But as the Inflexible came within range and its guns began to pound his vessel, Waterbury lowered his flag in surrender.
Arnold was determined not to give up. He traded shots with seven enemy ships as he worked his galley southward. Finally, he steered the Congress and the remaining gondolas into a bay too shallow for the pursuing vessels. The British continued to fire. Seeing the war suddenly arrive on his doorstep, local farmer Benjamin Kellogg decided to flee with his family. Rowing a boat into the bay, they “fell in between Arnold’s fleet and the British fleet,” his daughter Sally later remembered, “but happy for us the balls went over us. We heard them whis.” The family made it to Fort Ticonderoga.10
Arnold’s men dumped their guns overboard and ran the boats onto the beach. He ordered them to set fire to the vessels with their flags still flying defiantly. He organized the 150 men who had escaped and took off through the woods, carrying the wounded on litters cut from sails. The next day, he reached Crown Point, indefensible against the approaching navy. He ordered the docks and barracks burned and the position abandoned. By four o’clock, he was at Fort Ticonderoga, having endured three days without sleeping or eating.
Benedict Arnold had been beaten. Eighty men were dead, many more wounded, one hundred and twenty taken prisoner. Most of the fleet was gone, only five vessels remained afloat. The British, in just a few days, had taken complete control of Lake Champlain. Some criticized Arnold for what they saw as a costly disaster. One officer wrote a facetious letter noting that “General Arnold, our evil genius to the north, has, with a good deal of industry, got us clear of all our fine fleet.”11
But battles are not decided by comparing casualty lists—they are won and lost in the minds of the commanders. Arnold’s ambitious effort to build a fleet on the lake had forced Carleton to do the same. The battle at Valcour Island, like the cannonball that had skimmed past his head, had rattled the British general’s nerves. The fighting had damaged the British fleet and checked his momentum. Instead of looking forward toward Albany, he now looked back to his supply line from Canada. Instead of dreaming about trading war stories with General Howe in New York City, he imagined himself caught in a prolonged winter siege of Fort Ticonderoga. After two weeks of indecision, the cautious Carleton called off the invasion. He would wait until next year.
In order to buy time, Arnold had first built, then sacrificed, America’s first navy. The crushing blow from the north, though painful, had glanced off. Relieved of the pressure, Gates could now release needed troops to aid Washington’s beleaguered army in New York.
History was kinder to Arnold’s effort at Valcour Island than were some of his contemporaries. The nineteenth-century naval strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote: “Save for Arnold’s flotilla, the British would have settled the business. The little American navy was wiped out, but never had any force, big or small, lived to better purpose.”12
The war would go on.