On the third of November, after a siege of fifty days, St. John’s was captured, with one hundred Canadians and nearly five hundred British regulars, more than half the force in Canada. John André was among the number. General Carleton, who attempted to cross the St. Lawrence river, and come to the aid of St. John’s, was thrust back by the “Green Mountain Boys” and a part of the 2d New York Regiment.
The treatment of prisoners illustrates the condition of this army. It was not a part of the Cambridge army, as was Arnold’s, but the contributions promised largely by New York, and directly forwarded by Congress. One regiment mutinied because Montgomery allowed the prisoners to retain their extra suit of clothing, instead of treating it as plunder. Schuyler’s and Montgomery’s Orderly Books and letters show that even officers refused to take clothing and food to suffering prisoners until peremptorily forced to do it. Washington was constantly advised of the existing conditions; and when both Schuyler and Montgomery regarded the prosecution of their expeditions as hopeless, with such troops, and proposed to resign, the Commander-in-Chief thus feelingly, almost tenderly, wrote: “God knows there is not a difficulty you both complain of which I have not in an eminent degree experienced; that I am not, every day, experiencing; but we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish. Let me therefore conjure you both, to lay aside such thoughts; thoughts injurious to yourselves, and extremely so to your country, which calls aloud for gentlemen of your abilities.”
On the twelfth of November, Montgomery reached the open city of Montreal; and the larger of the two Canadian expeditions reached its proposed destination. But before the month of November closed, the American force “wasted away,” until only about eight hundred men remained. Expiration of enlistments was at hand. Men refused to re-enlist. Even the “Green Mountain Boys” returned home. This was not the total loss to Montgomery. Officers and men were all alike fractious, dictatorial, and self-willed. They claimed the right to do just as they pleased, and to obey such orders only as their judgment approved. General Carleton escaped from the city in disguise, and reached Quebec on the nineteenth. There was no possibility of following him; and the work laid but for Montgomery, had been done, although at great cost and delay.
Prof. Charles G. D. Roberts, of King’s College, Nova Scotia, in his “History of Canada” (1897),[[2]] uses this language: “General Carleton fled in disguise to Quebec, narrowly escaping capture, and there made ready for his last stand. In Quebec he weeded out all those citizens who sympathized with the rebels, expelling them from the city. With sixteen hundred men at his back, a small force indeed, but to be trusted, he awaited the struggle.”
[2]. Lamson, Wolfe & Co., Publishers, Boston.
Meanwhile Arnold, after unexampled sufferings and equal heroism, had reached Point Levi, opposite Quebec, on the ninth of November, only to find that the garrison had been strengthened, and that he was stranded, in the midst of a severe winter, upon an inhospitable, barren bluff. The strongest fortress in America, defended by two hundred heavy cannon, and the capture of which had been the inspiration of his adventurous campaign, was in full sight. Every condition which Washington had declared to be essential to success had failed of realization. On the fifth of October Washington wrote to Schuyler: “If Carleton is not driven from St. John’s, so as to be obliged to throw himself into Quebec, it must fall into our hands, as it is left without a regular soldier, as the captain of a brig from Quebec to Boston says. Many of the inhabitants are most favorably disposed to the American cause, and that there is there the largest stock of ammunition ever collected in America.” On the same day he also writes “Arnold expected to reach Quebec in twenty days from September twenty-sixth, and that Montgomery must keep up such appearances as to fix Carleton, and prevent the force in Canada from being turned on Arnold; but if penetration into Canada be given up, Arnold must also know it, in time for retreat.” And again: “This detachment (Arnold’s) was to take possession of Quebec, if possible; but at any rate, to make a diversion in favor of Schuyler.”
But Arnold, on the sixteenth day of October, when, as he advised Washington, he expected to advance upon Quebec, was struggling with quagmires, swamps, fallen trees, rain and mud, snow and ice, about Deer river, and had not even reached Lake Megantic. Men waded in icy water to their armpits; some froze to death: others deserted. Enos, short of provisions, as he claimed, marched three hundred men back to Cambridge. And Arnold, himself, twenty-five days too late, stood upon Point Levi, in the midst of a furious tempest of wind, rain, and sleet, only to realize the substantial failure of his vaunted expedition. Most of his muskets were ruined, and but five rounds of ammunition remained for the few men that were with him in this hour of starvation and distress. Two vessels-of-war lay at anchor in the stream. And yet, such was his indomitable energy, with thirty birch-bark canoes he crossed the river, gained a position on the Heights of Abraham, and sent to the fortress an unnoticed demand for surrender. Then, retiring to Point Aux Trembles, he sent a messenger to Montgomery asking for artillery and two thousand men, for prosecution of a siege. Montgomery, leaving in command General Wooster, who arrived at Montreal late in November, started down the river with about three hundred men and a few pieces of artillery, and clothing for Arnold’s men; landing at Point Aux Trembles about December first, making the total American force only one thousand men. On the sixth day of December, a demand for surrender having been again unanswered, the little army advanced to its fate. Four assaulting columns were organized. All failed, and Montgomery fell in a gallant but desperate attempt to storm the citadel itself. Morgan and four hundred and twenty-six men, nearly half of the entire command, were taken prisoners. Only the grand nerve of Montgomery brought the army to the assault in this forlorn-hope affair,—for such it was. Three of Arnold’s captains refused to serve under him any longer; and mutiny, or the entire ruin of the army, was the alternative to the risks of ruin in battle. Arnold had a knee shattered by a bullet, and the remnants of the army fell back, harmless, to the garrison, and amid snow, ice, and proximate starvation, awaited future events.
The treatment of the prisoners by General Carleton, and the burial, with honors of war, of his old comrade under Wolfe, the brave Montgomery, savors of the knightly chivalry of mediæval times. When his officers protested at such treatment of rebels, his response, lofty in tone and magnanimous in action, was simply this: “Since we have in vain tried to make them acknowledge us as brothers, let us at least send them away disposed to regard us as cousins.”
Almost at the same hour of the day when Carleton passed through Point Aux Trembles, on his escape to Quebec, Washington having heard of Montgomery’s arrival at Montreal, was writing to Congress, as follows: “It is likely that General Carleton will, with what force he can collect after the surrender of the rest of Canada, throw himself into Quebec, and there make his last effort.”
With Arnold three miles from Quebec, intrenched as well as he was able to intrench, confining his operations to cutting off supplies to the city and keeping his five hundred survivors from starving or freezing, and Carleton preparing for reënforcements as soon as the ice might break up in the spring, the invasion of Canada for conquest came to a dead halt. The invasion of the American Colonies was to follow its final failure.