Canadian Waters.
Throughout the Revolution, Congress entertained the illusion that Canada was ripe for the picking, hoping that freedom-craving Canadians would rally to the American call and join them in ousting their common British ruler. Strangely, Congress cast its rebellion against Protestant King George III as a struggle against the Catholicism that the British had allowed to continue in Canada. Rebels like Alexander Hamilton classified the tolerant Quebec Act of 1774 as an Intolerable Act because it had recognized the right of French Canadians to practice their Catholic faith and civil law. He asked, ‘Does not your blood run cold to think that an English Parliament should pass an Act for the establishment of arbitrary power and Popery in such an extensive country?’1 He warned that religious tolerance in Quebec would draw Catholics from throughout Europe, who would eventually destroy America. Sam Adams told a group of Mohawk Indians that the Quebec Act ‘to establish the religion of the Pope in Canada’ would mean that ‘instead of worshipping the only true God’, they would pay their dues to images made with their own hands. The rebel propagandist Thomas Paine claimed, ‘It was once the glory of Englishmen to draw the sword only in defense of liberty and the Protestant religion, or to extend the blessings of both to their unhappy neighbors …’ therefore ‘popery and French laws in Canada are but a part of that system of despotism, which has been prepared for the colonies.’
Massachusetts’ silversmith, engraver and artilleryman, Paul Revere, elaborated on this perspective by creating a cartoon for the Royal American Magazine called ‘The Mitered Minuet’.2 It was meant to tie detested popery to Britain’s Anglican Church. It depicted four contented-looking mitered Anglican Bishops, dancing a minuet around a copy of the Quebec Act to show their ‘approbation and countenance of the Roman religion’. Standing nearby are the authors of the Quebec Act – Governor Guy Carleton, the Earl of Bute, Lord North – while a devil with bat ears and spiky wings hovers behind them, whispering instructions.
This perspective motivated Congress to raise expeditions to make Canada the fourteenth colony of the American confederation. The key to Canada was control of its inland waterways, beginning with the St Lawrence River penetrating westward from Quebec to Montreal. At Sorel, the St Lawrence was joined on the south by the Richelieu River, which when rapids were passed, connected to Lake Champlain, and from its south end by Wood Creek to the Hudson River, creating a water route which since the Seven Years’ War had been dubbed the ‘Warpath of Nations’. Congress hoped that control over this route below Sorel would lead to the fall of Canada.
Congress put its first Canadian expedition together only five months after Lexington and Concord. An aggressive rebel army led by Brigadier General Richard Montgomery was sent up Lake Champlain into Canada. Quebec was totally unprepared for this invasion and thus the rebels carried all before them.3 The crucial fort and boatyard on the Richelieu at St Johns fell after a fifty-six-day siege, then Montreal was bloodlessly taken – Governor Carleton barely escaping down the St Lawrence River to defend Quebec. There he was besieged by Montgomery, joined by another force under Colonel Benedict Arnold that had reached there by way of Maine.
The British forces defending Canada against this rebel invasion were led by Governor Guy Carleton, a military man with talent for dealing with civilian matters. Carleton was born in Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1724.4 At the age of 18, he was commissioned a naval ensign, but then joined the First Foot Guards and by 1757 he had risen to lieutenant colonel. He first served in Canada during the Seven Years’ War, where he was a protégé of the brilliant James Wolf. For the Louisburg expedition of 1758 and the siege of Quebec a year later, Wolf chose Carleton as respectively his aide and quartermaster general. During Wolf’s siege of Quebec, Carleton provisioned the army and acted as an engineer, supervising cannon placement. He was wounded in the head and after Quebec’s fall, he returned to England to recuperate. Two years later, he was designated commander of the 72nd Regiment in an amphibious attack on Belle-ile-en-Mer, an island off the French coast. While the island was taken, Carleton was again wounded, this time seriously. A year later, he was a colonel in the British expedition that captured Havana, where he was wounded again, forcing his retirement from active service as the war came to an end.
Canadian Waters.
It was a surprise in April 1766, when Carleton was named acting Lieutenant Governor of Quebec as he was retired and lacked administrative experience.5 However, he had influence with the Duke of Richmond, the new Secretary of State for the North American Colonies. Carleton’s appointment included the title of commander of all troops stationed in Quebec. Still, he was only to assist the Governor of Canada, James Murry, also a veteran of Wolfe’s Quebec campaign. Carleton soon was at loggerheads with Murray. All Quebec officials, from the governor down, were unsalaried, forcing them to seek income from charging for services. The system naturally led to corruption and Carleton sought to reform it by introducing salaries for officials. Upset, Murray resigned in 1768 and Carleton replaced him. Four years later, he was promoted to major general and it was then that he drafted his thoughts on Canada, including toleration for Catholics, and restored French civil law, which became the basis for the Quebec Act. On his return to Quebec in September 1774, he carried the act with him to promulgate.
A year later, Carleton had just received word of Lexington and Concord, when he was informed that Ticonderoga and Crown Point had been taken by rebels. He had previously sent two regiments to help General Gage in Boston, leaving him with only 800 regulars in Quebec, whose boundaries extended to the Mississippi River.6 While mission Indians might support his forces, Carleton was reluctant to use them because he believed Indian support would help the rebels, as the Indians could not fight without committing atrocities. Many rural French Canadians, whom he had courted with the Quebec Act, failed to rally in their local militias and he soon learned not to depend on them. While the authorities in London had promised reinforcements for Canada, none arrived in 1775.
The city of Quebec had a history that was inseparable from the St Lawrence River, which connected it to the Atlantic world. The town’s location was chosen for its maritime qualities: the large basin on the edge of the city could accommodate more than 100 ships annually, the narrowness of the St Lawrence at the city made it easy to control navigation. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the first concessions were established along Quebec’s shoreline, where the landowners designated their property with cedar post fencing.7 Here the early port developed, protected by two cannon platforms constructed in 1660 and 1690 at Pointe aux Roches. A Royal Battery was built a year later. An attack by the English in 1690 justified these defenses.
Quebec became divided between an Upper and Lower Town, the former being the administrative and religious center, while the latter hugged the waterfront, the domain of merchants and sailors. The harbor front grew in the eighteenth century as two batteries were installed on private wharves: the Dauphine Battery in 1709 and later the Pointe à Carcy Battery. The port took on a rectilinear shape, with a small cove in the west, the Cul-deSac, where a shipyard was developed from 1746.8 Here were warehouses and at least two dockyards, one in the Cul-de-Sac and the other in Palace Quarter along the St Charles River. After 1759, the Royal Battery would be abandoned and the land sold for warehouses and a quay, reflecting the city’s increasing interest in trade.
An idea of who the defenders of Quebec were can be gleaned from a proclamation issued by Carleton on November 22, 1775. He asked that all persons who wished to leave Quebec do so by December 1 to cut down on the number who would have to be fed during a siege. Still, 5,000 non-combatant civilians remained. The defenders included 873 militia, the majority of them French Canadians, 230 Loyalists of the Royal Highland Emigrants and only 70 Royal Fusiliers. An important contingent, serving onshore from the ships were 400 mariners and 35 marines, a combined group which rose to 480.9 Essentially, the defense of Quebec depended on French Canadian militia and sailors.
As to the navy, Captain Thomas MacKenzie of the sloop Hunter had been sent from Boston to Quebec by Admiral Samuel Graves.10 The escort, Lizard, Captain John Hamilton, had come to protect the Jacob, which brought supplies to the defenders and agreed to stay after it was unloaded. During the siege, the Hunter and Lizard would be the chief navy ships, operating around the city, returning fire from rebel batteries.
From November 1775, through the winter and spring, Major General Philip Schuyler attempted to supply the rebel armies besieging Quebec with reinforcements, food and powder. His chief staging area above Albany was Fort George, at the head of Lake George, from which supplies could be portaged at Ticonderoga and loaded on vessels to sail up Lake Champlain.11
Schuyler fumed that his army was rife with corruption. When Seth Warner recruited his second Continental regiment for the relief of Canada, Schuyler provided bounties for 736 recruits, yet when they arrived in Canada, Warner’s men numbered only 417. Warner was not the first rebel officer who was forced to pad his accounts.
Previously, in September, Schuyler had led the invading army against the Richelieu River defenses, but his ill heath intervened and he was forced to return to Ticonderoga, leaving Montgomery in charge. By December, Montgomery was besieging Quebec from the Plains of Abraham and made fun of Carleton’s defensive force: ‘the wretched garrison [consists] of sailors unacquainted with the use of arms, of citizens incapable of soldiers’ duty, & of a few miserable emigrants.’12 He was soon to learn how wrong he was. A rebel attack on the city on New Year’s Eve in a snow storm was soundly defeated. It focused on the lower town, where Montgomery was killed and Benedict Arnold wounded. The command of the attackers was left to a group of officers of whom Captain Daniel Morgan was most conspicuous. With their firearms too wet to discharge, the rebels surrendered, though Morgan, in tears of rage, refused to give them his sword and would have been killed had he not handed it to a priest, who was a bystander in the crowd.
At the beginning of 1776, Arnold held on stubbornly outside the city, continuing the siege of Quebec with the remains of his army as Carleton still had only sailors and city militia to defend Quebec’s extensive fortifications. He was unsure that his forces were capable of dislodging them.
On the Bristol-bound merchantman, Polly, in late December, Lieutenant Thomas Pringle had carried Carleton’s dispatches to London.13 They contained the news that he was defending Quebec against two rebel armies that besieged it. Since this was the last dispatch received from Carleton, at the beginning of the year the Admiralty was unaware of whether the city had fallen or not.
At the Admiralty, First Lord Sandwich and Rear Admiral Hugh Palliser decided to respond immediately, equipping a small squadron to reach Canada quickly. It consisted of the 50-gun Isis, the frigates Surprise and Triton, the sloop of war Martin, three victuallers and two large navy transports with supplies; enough to support 3,000 men for three months. The squadron carried only 200 regulars of the 29th Regiment, as supply and naval support were regarded as most needed at Quebec. The commodore was Charles Douglas, who was ordered by Sandwich to put to sea immediately ‘as the fate of Quebec depends on it’.14
This first relief squadron left in early February 1776, facing the dangers of an Atlantic winter crossing. Ice would be abundant in the Gulf of St Lawrence, so the squadron had to force its way through thick pack ice – which many thought was impossible. Passing through icebergs in April, the ships’ ropes were frozen, so that they ‘appeared as if rigged with ropes of crystal, nearly four times their usual diameter’, requiring that they be thawed.15 Once on the St Lawrence River, the dispersed ships made for the small port of Kamouraska on the southern mainland and then reformed at Isle Coudres in the river. Douglas was at Coudres by May 3, 1776 and took command of the ships as they arrived. The Surprise was sent ahead to Quebec three days later and was welcomed by a boat from the Lizard. Soon Douglas with the Isis and Martin arrived at the city. The entire mid-winter voyage had taken only seven weeks. It has been argued that the navy’s relief of Quebec ‘was a momentous victory, arguably more significant than the original capture of 1759 …’.16
With the arrival, Carleton marched out of Quebec’s gates with 850 of the garrison into the Plains of Abraham, driving the besieging rebels before him. They fled, leaving stores, ordnance, and General John Thomas’ ‘dinner which he had left at the fire, [which] served as a refreshment to the [British]’.17 The Surprise and Martin were sent above Quebec to annoy the rebel’s retreat westward along the St Lawrence. Carleton kept pressure on the fleeing Continental army, sending ships up to Trois-Rivières on May 22, carrying troops from his garrison under Loyalist Allan Maclean.18 Further reinforcements would appear at Quebec when the Niger and three transports arrived from Halifax, carrying the 47th Regiment, sent by General William Howe from his Boston evacuation army. General Thomas would command the rebel retreat (until his death from smallpox), as Benedict Arnold was now charged with the defense of Montreal.
After the first relief force left Britain, a more substantial force was organized in late March to carry an extensive army and battery train from Ireland to Canada. The escort warships for the thirty-nine transports were the Carysfort, Pearl, Juno and Blonde.19 The army included about 3,000 German troops furnished by the reigning Duke of Brunswick and the Prince of Waldeck. Carleton was to use the reinforcements as he sought fit, although General John Burgoyne,commander of these troops, was to advise him on the invasion of Lake Champlain. Among those in this rescue fleet would be Lieutenant Pringle, now in command of the armed ship Lord Howe.
By June 1, ships of the second relief convoy begun to appear at Quebec. Burgoyne in the frigate Blonde was amongst them.20 Some of them did not even anchor at Quebec’s basin but carried on up the St Lawrence. Those soldiers that had gained their land legs were sent on ships under General Simon Fraser to Trois-Rivieres, so that five days later, the pursuing British force numbered almost 1,000. Their St Lawrence supply line stretched back to Quebec. At last, Carleton had enough troops to chase the rebels from Canada.
In two weeks, navy ships were at Sorel, which the rebels promptly abandoned. Carleton then forced the rebel army to St Johns. The navy reached Montreal, though it failed to bag the main rebel army, which escaped by way of St Johns to Lake Champlain. Lieutenant William Digby of the 53rd Regiment observed:
Thus was Canada saved with much less trouble than was expected … We [now] had everything to build, battows to convey the troops over, and armed schooners and sloops to oppose theirs [and] the undertaking was … persevered with the greatest dispatch possible.21
As the Continental army retreated down Lake Champlain, it disintegrated. By July 2, the rebel army was back at Crown Point. Continental army doctor Lewis Bebee explained the disaster in these terms: ‘God seems to be greatly angry with us, he appears to be incensed against us, for our abominable wickedness.’22 When the army retreated further to Ticonderoga, Bebee found an epidemic of smallpox raging, while British Indian raiders were nipping at their heels. Thus ended the only invasion of Canada Congress would be able to mount.