God Save Benedict Arnold, page 4
“The report of Ticonderoga’s being abandoned,” he wrote, “has thrown the Inhabitants here into the greatest Consternation.” If the insurrectionists pulled out, they would leave local citizens “at the mercy of the King’s Troops & Indians.” Militarily, he wrote, “Ticonderoga is the Key of this extensive Country.” By the time his letter reached Philadelphia, the delegates had already thought better of their timidity and rescinded their May 18 resolution.
* * *
THE CONFUSION OVER command partly resolved itself. As the number of Allen’s Green Mountain Boys dwindled, recruits arrived from Massachusetts to fill out Arnold’s regiment. The balance shifted.
Arnold had already decided that Crown Point was the more important of the two posts. It was the ideal location for blocking an invasion from the north and for launching naval operations against an approaching enemy. He established his headquarters there and left Allen at Ticonderoga.
At about the same time, the colony of Connecticut sent north a thousand infantrymen under Colonel Benjamin Hinman, a fifty-six-year-old veteran of the French and Indian War. But Hinman’s orders were unclear and his arrival did nothing to establish a chain of command. Meanwhile, Arnold threw himself into the critical work of preparing to meet the enemy.
At every point in his career, Arnold displayed a relentless and focused energy. Now he assigned men to put the two warships in proper shape to fight. He began to collect, clean, and catalogue the cannon at Crown Point in preparation for moving them to Boston. He sent scouts to St. Johns to gather information about enemy activities there. He had men dig cannonballs and sheets of lead out of the ruins of the fort. He assigned carpenters and other craftsmen to repair bateaux and barracks buildings and to construct the carriages needed to move the guns.
He also showed a consistent sensitivity to criticism and slights. In what might have been his earliest such complaint of the war, he wrote to Joseph Warren on May 19, “I have had intimations given me that some persons had determined to apply to you and the Provincial Congress to injure me in your esteem.”
On June 5, he again set out with his small Champlain flotilla and sailed northward. He entered the Richelieu River two days later. He was pursuing a habitual urge to gather intelligence. He also felt that extending the war into Canada would help secure the patriots’ position in the north. Knowing how few British troops currently defended the province, he thought the time might be ripe to launch an attack on St. Johns. He wanted to see for himself.
He spent several days in the river while scouts surveyed St. Johns. They reported that the three hundred British infantrymen there were busy entrenching the position. Intent on taking the offense, he went back to Crown Point to muster the larger force. As he landed, he was immediately pulled back into the command controversy. He found that a meeting led by Ethan Allen and including James Easton and most of the officers at the base was underway. Since according to military tradition only a commanding officer could call a council of war, Arnold was furious. He told the men that their discussion amounted to mutiny and that he would not allow them to usurp his authority.
Because most of the rank and file at Crown Point were men recruited for Arnold’s regiment, Allen and the others had to back down. Arnold ordered the guard doubled. The next day, Allen and his companions casually headed back to Ticonderoga. Because they had no pass to leave, a sentry sent them to Arnold. James Easton, who had previously raised questions about Arnold’s character, complained and tossed insults. Arnold followed his instinct as a sea captain. “I took the liberty of breaking his head,” Arnold wrote, “and on his refusing to draw like a gentleman … I kicked him very heartily, and ordered him from the point immediately.”
Arnold finally took action to reinforce his reputation, sending Eleazer Oswald to Philadelphia with a message to Congress. It was the first that body had heard of Arnold. In the letter, he detailed his activities, which included diplomatic overtures to various Indian groups and regular intelligence gathering in the north.
He suggested that an invasion of Canada would “discourage the enemies of American liberty.” He had devised a detailed plan for launching such an invasion. “I am positive 2000 Men might very easily effect it,” he wrote. He pointed out that in addition to guarding against invasion, such an operation would cut off the lucrative fur trade and deprive the British of Canadian wheat. He even suggested that it would be cost-effective, since it would be less expensive than rebuilding the lake forts. He wrote that Oswald would give further details.
Although still only a provincial colonel, Arnold offered to lead the Canadian expedition if no one else came forth. He would “answer for the success of it” provided that Congress furnished the men and supplies “without loss of time.” Congress would indeed put in place a plan to invade Canada, but it would not be the lightning strike that Arnold recommended, nor would the aggressive colonel be in command.
On June 18, Colonel Hinman came to Crown Point and tried to assert his authority. “But as he produced no regular order for the same,” Arnold noted, “I refused giving it up.”
Four days later, a committee from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress arrived. The colony was now determined to shed the responsibility and expense of involvement with the New York forts. While offering praise for Arnold, they ordered him to serve under Hinman and to account for his public expenditures since leaving Cambridge.
Because Arnold’s authority derived from his commission as a Massachusetts colonel, he could not dispute the order. But neither would he subordinate himself to Hinman nor cooperate with incompetent officers like Allen and Easton. Instead, he resigned his commission, stating that he could no longer hold it “with honor.” He prepared to leave Crown Point.
With Arnold’s resignation, his regiment was disbanded. Some of his men, feeling cheated out of back pay, staged a short mutiny. Arnold promised to make good what was owed out of his own pocket. Hinman resolved the dispute by enlisting Arnold’s men into a new regiment headed by Easton, the Massachusetts tavern keeper. The men, determined to receive their promised pay, had no choice but to go along. The handling of the affair disgusted Arnold, and he declared he had been treated badly by the unappreciative authorities.
* * *
AS A DEEPLY disappointed Arnold departed Crown Point on June 24, 1775, he noted in the final entry of his memorandum book: “Had a rumor of an engagement at Cambridge between the Regulars and the Provincials in which it is said there is many thousand killed on both sides.”
The rumor was true. On June 17, patriots had fought a battle at Bunker Hill on Charlestown peninsula across the bay from Boston. British authorities were stunned by their casualties, which totaled more than a thousand Britons killed or wounded, including eighty-one officers. The American attempt to gain control of the peninsula failed. Their own casualties were high. Charlestown was burned to the ground. The war had suddenly taken on a grim new seriousness.
Before Arnold left Crown Point, the citizens of the region presented him with a proclamation expressing their gratitude for his “uncommon vigilance, vigor, and spirit.” They lauded his “polite manner” and “generosity of soul, which nothing less than real magnanimity and innate virtue could inspire” and hoped he would receive “rewards adequate to your merit.”
In early July, Arnold traveled to Albany, where he lodged in the mansion of Philip Schuyler, an aristocrat who had been assigned to oversee the northern army and to supervise Ticonderoga and Crown Point. As the two men conferred about what should be done at the forts, Schuyler recognized Arnold’s keen strategic sense and devotion to the cause.
Schuyler had already received a letter from Colonel Hinman, clearly over his head at the forts, admitting, “I find myself unable to steer in this stormy situation,” and urging Schuyler to come north and set matters right.
Arnold admired Schuyler. The successful merchant from a venerable Dutch family was eight years older than he was, with the college education that he lacked and the refined manners that he aspired to. Schuyler had served as a supply officer in the British Army during the French and Indian War. He offered to make Arnold his adjutant. Arnold declined. He needed to go home first, then proceed to Boston to settle his accounts and recover the expenses he had incurred during the past three months.
During the time he spent at Albany, Arnold received grievous news from home. His beloved Peggy had died quite suddenly on June 19 at the age of thirty. Arnold’s grief was compounded when he learned that Peggy’s father, “Papa” Mansfield, who had been a friend and business partner, had died three days after his daughter.
“How soon our time will come we know not,” Arnold’s mother had written to him when he was at school. He had saved her letters, in which such reminders were frequent.
“Every recollection of past happiness heightens my present grief,” he wrote now, “which would be intolerable, were it not buried in the public calamity.”
Arnold packed up and prepared to return to New Haven, where his sister, Hannah, had assumed responsibility for his three boys. Along the way, more news of the public calamity reached him. One of the casualties of the bloody battle at Bunker Hill was Joseph Warren. The zealous thirty-four-year-old doctor had insisted on placing himself in the thick of the fighting. A British infantryman had shot him in the face while Warren was covering the retreat of his fellow soldiers.
Arnold had felt an instant bond with Warren when they met. His fate brought home the life-and-death gravity of the cause which they both had embraced with such eagerness. But however shaken, Arnold did not give in to depression or spend much time in mourning. “An idle life under my present circumstances,” he wrote to a friend, “would be but a lingering death.” After a short stay at New Haven, he set off for Boston once again. He was determined to find another role in the great drama unfolding around him.
4
The Welfare of the Continent
As they stepped into the river, the ice-cold current tore at their thighs. They steadied their boats along the bank of the Kennebec and heaved them onto land. Benedict Arnold and his men were about to climb the Norridgewock Falls, the longest portage so far. To the forlorn music of wind humming through stone pines, they unloaded barrels of salt pork, dried peas, and flour. They hoisted kegs of gunpowder, retrieved muskets, shouldered their burdens, and set out walking along an uneven trail that stretched more than a mile uphill.
A thousand men, a small army, were forcing their way through the forests and mountains of Maine. Their plan: to cross the divide into Canada, descend to the St. Lawrence River, and capture the fortified city of Quebec. The venture was so improbable, so audacious, that the enemy could barely conceive of the threat. The men were sure they would take the defenders by surprise. The people of the vast northern colony would join the Revolution. The war would end. America would be free.
But now, all was going wrong. Before they reached Norridgewock, they “were often obliged to haul the boats after us through rock and shoals,” noted Pennsylvania rifleman George Morison, “frequently up to our middle and over our heads in the water; and some of us with difficulty escaped being drowned.”
Although it was still early in the journey, their hastily made boats were “so badly constructed, that whether in or out of them we were wet.” Torn by the river rocks, pounded by rapids, the vessels were falling to pieces. Water that seeped in or sloshed over the gunwales had spoiled the salt fish lying in the bottoms of the boats, and had penetrated and ruined whole barrels of biscuits and peas. The men opened casks of salted beef to find the meat green and rancid.
Even with the help of teams of oxen lent by local settlers, they would spend a week forcing the Norridgewock precipice. Then, leaving behind the last dwellings of European-Americans, they would continue up the river through a wilderness of virgin forest.
Late September and they were already feeling the breath of winter. “What we most dreaded,” wrote Abner Stocking, a twenty-two-year-old Connecticut private who had fought at Bunker Hill, “was the frost and cold from which we began to suffer considerably.”
In the brittle evening air, they heard the honking of great wedges of geese heading south. Nightly frosts had made the hardwood trees explode in orange and yellow. Now the leaves were taking flight in the wind. Now it was the first of October. Now they were finding their wet clothing frozen as thick as panes of glass in the morning—“very disagreeable,” a soldier recorded. Now they were entering the limitless woodland that still dominated the continent.
“Now,” wrote Private Caleb Haskell, “we are learning to be soldiers.”
* * *
BENEDICT ARNOLD WAS responsible for their lives. Determined to succeed against the odds, he spent a week at Norridgewock, keeping order, hurrying the army ahead, making light of the difficulties to come, talking confidence to his men. He had thought the entire trip to Canada would take three weeks. They had already used up two of those weeks, and the hardest part of the journey was just beginning.
After his success at Fort Ticonderoga, Arnold was surprised to find that his honor had been questioned. His enemies had maligned him. Congressman Silas Deane, one of Arnold’s few friends in politics, wrote, “I think he has deserved much and received little, or less than nothing.” Here was his opportunity to vindicate himself.
“Upon your conduct and courage,” George Washington had told him, “and that of the officers and soldiers detached on this expedition, not only the success of the present enterprise, and your own honor but the safety and welfare of the whole continent may depend.”
The whole continent. After his rude dismissal at Ticonderoga and the sudden death of his wife, Arnold had traveled to Massachusetts to clear his accounts and plunge back into the war of rebellion. All during the sultry month of August, he had negotiated with the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. With the death of his friend Joseph Warren, he had to deal with Benjamin Church, another Boston physician. Church questioned many of his expenditures and dismissed half of them.
Ostensibly a fervent patriot and member of the Sons of Liberty, Church would be uncovered a few months later as a spy who had been funneling the patriots’ secrets to British general Thomas Gage. He would be banished from the colonies for his treason.
George Washington, on the other hand, was impressed by Arnold’s achievements on Lake Champlain. He ignored Arnold’s dispute with the Massachusetts authorities and the gossip spread by Arnold’s enemies. He was anxious to meet this dynamic officer and was not disappointed when Arnold walked into his headquarters overflowing with ideas and information. The two men quickly formed a bond. Both were practical businessmen, not intellectuals. Like Arnold, Washington saw the answer to the current crisis in aggressive military action. The commander in chief was on the lookout for an energetic man he could trust.
Although America was careening toward all-out war, Congress continued to dither as the delegates chased the mirage of reconciliation. During July, they passed the so-called Olive Branch Petition, expressing their hope that “the former harmony between [Britain] and these colonies may be restored.” King George scoffed at the appeal and in August declared the colonies to be in open rebellion.
In talks with Washington, Arnold emphasized the weakness of the British forces in Canada. Even before the fighting at Lexington, General Gage had ordered Guy Carleton, the governor of that province, to send more than half the troops under his command to Boston to deal with possible rebellion there. This left a skeleton army to defend the vast territory to the north. Arnold pushed for an invasion.
Congressmen were nervous about taking on an expensive operation that would demolish the idea that Americans were only defending themselves against British aggression. But as weeks passed, their view shifted. Taking Canada would reduce the enemy presence in America to the British toehold in Boston. In the event of reconciliation, Canada could serve as a critical bargaining chip.
The conclusion, John Adams noted, was “that it is best to go, if we can be assured that the Canadians will be pleased with it, and join us.” At the end of August, the congressional delegates issued orders to General Philip Schuyler to invade Canada via Lake Champlain if he found it “practicable” and if it would not be “disagreeable to the Canadians.”
It would take time for Schuyler to form an army and make his move. In the end, illness would prevent his leading the attack. Washington didn’t want to wait. Far better to strike before the British had a chance to prepare. He focused on an intriguing idea that had been discussed in camp and that Arnold now laid before him. Native Americans had on occasion used a forest path through the Maine mountains to navigate the north country. The French knew of it, and British officer John Montresor had drawn a rough map during the French and Indian War. Washington envisioned a classic pincer movement, with one attack coming up Lake Champlain and another through Maine.
The commander in chief knew that organizing and moving an army with all its baggage over rough terrain was immensely difficult. He needed a leader of exceptional resourcefulness and imagination. He put his trust in Arnold and made him a full colonel in the nascent Continental Army. His only qualm, which he warned Arnold about, was Arnold’s assertive nature. Washington knew of the disputes that had broken out at Ticonderoga. Once in Canada, he insisted, Arnold must remain strictly subordinate to the chain of command.
* * *
TERRAIN AND TIMING both dictated a light, mobile army without field cannon or excess supplies. Once over the mountains, the men would have to procure provisions from the local inhabitants. Surprise was the key to their strategy.
