A Considerable Reputation

Benedict Arnold. Point Levi, in the Province of Quebec. Wednesday, 8 November 1775.

A Continental expedition into Canada, intended to take Quebec, failed before the city in the closing days of 1775; its commander was killed and the survivors withdrew, weakened by smallpox and exposure. Benedict Arnold, who had led a second column through the Maine wilderness and was wounded in the assault, emerged from the campaign with a considerable reputation.

The Universal Register: The Four-Year War

He came out of the trees above Point Levi a little before four in the afternoon, with the light already going, and stood on the bank and looked at Quebec; and the men coming out of the woods behind him stopped too, one after another, and stood in a ragged line along the edge of the bluff and looked at it with him.

It was exactly where he had left it. He knew that was a foolish thought and he had it anyway. He had come up this river before the war with a deck cargo of horses, and stood on the quay in the Lower Town haggling with a Frenchman over the price of a mare, and looked up at the same rock and the same walls and the same steeples, and thought it the finest town he had ever seen and a very good place to sell a horse. It stood on its cape across a mile of grey water, the Upper Town on the heights behind its walls and the Lower Town crowded along the foot of the cliff among its warehouses and wharves, and the smoke of its chimneys went straight up into the cold, because there was no wind. In the river between him and it two of the King’s ships lay at anchor, a frigate and a sloop, with their ports shut and their boats out.

Behind him there were something over five hundred men, with more coming in from the settlements all evening. He had taken eleven hundred into the wilderness.

He did not let himself count the difference often. He counted it now, because he would have to write it to General Washington tonight, and he wanted it right.

At Fort Western they had loaded eleven hundred men into two hundred bateaux with forty-five days’ provisions and a map. Colburn’s green pine boats leaked until the bread was paste, the salt fish rotten and much of the powder wet. The map promised a hundred and eighty miles. It had been nearer three hundred and fifty.

He remembered the Great Carrying Place, twelve miles of portage with the boats on the men’s shoulders and the bog to their knees. He remembered the Dead River, slow and black for a week and then, after rain, risen in a night through the camp in the dark, so that men woke in water and lost their muskets and their shoes and in one or two cases their wits. On the twenty-fourth of October Enos’s captains voted to turn back. Enos voted to go on and went back with them anyway, taking four hundred and fifty men and most of the flour. He had a good deal to say about Colonel Enos and had said none of it yet. He was keeping it.

A company spent two days waist-deep in a swamp where the map had promised a way through. On the Chaudière Arnold lost three boats in the first mile of white water. At last he reached Sartigan, bought cattle and sent them back to his men. He remembered their faces when they saw the beasts coming.

They had eaten Captain Dearborn’s dog before that. They had eaten the whole of it, Dearborn told him afterwards with something like pride, and pounded up the bones for broth. They had boiled their moccasins and their shot pouches and the leather of their cartridge boxes, and eaten candles, and somebody had eaten his shaving soap and said it was the best of the lot. Some of them had died in the woods of nothing in particular, sitting down beside the track and declining to get up again; and the men behind had stepped round them, because there was nothing else to be done, and because they knew by then that the men who stopped were the men who died.

He had not stopped. He did not think of himself as a man who suffered, particularly. He thought of himself as a man who arrived.

He was thirty-four, and would be thirty-five in January, and he had been a widower since June.

Margaret had died while he argued over accounts on Lake Champlain. The letter reached him after the burial. In summer he stood at her grave, held the three boys and gave Hannah money for them and the shop. Then he went to Cambridge to ask for this command. When he stood still he thought of the grave. Quebec gave him somewhere to go.

He thought about the boys more than he thought about her. That troubled him when he noticed it, so he tried not to notice it.

The other thing he tried not to notice was how much he wanted this. He had wanted things all his life, and got most of them by wanting them harder than the next man, and he had learned not to let anybody see the size of it. At Ticonderoga in May he had let it be seen, and Ethan Allen had walked off with the glory, and the committee with his commission and much of his money. The newspapers printed Allen’s name. Quebec would be different. Montgomery was somewhere between the Richelieu and Montreal taking forts; he meant to have the town before Montgomery could arrive to share it. He could already see the report in print.

There had been a petition, he knew, in the summer. He had read of it at Cambridge: the Congress had sent the King a very humble paper by the hand of a Mr Penn, praying his Majesty to be reconciled. Arnold supposed the King had used it to light his fire. It made no odds to him either way. Petitions were what lawyers did while other men walked through the woods.

It blew for three days, and on the night of the thirteenth it dropped.

Somebody in the town had had every boat on the south shore burned or carried across before he came, but the habitants had canoes put by in their barns, as habitants did, and would sell them to anybody with hard money and a civil tongue, and he had both, the money being for the most part his own. They crossed in the dark in thirty-odd canoes, five and six men to a canoe, between the frigate and the sloop, near enough the frigate to hear a man laugh on her deck and another tell him to hold his noise. A guard boat came down on them in the middle of the river and they fired into it and it went away. They landed at the cove where Wolfe had landed sixteen years before, and went back for more, and before it was light five hundred of them had climbed the path Wolfe had climbed, and stood on the plain where he had stood, in the cold, and looked at the same walls.

Wolfe had come up this river with a fleet and an army and taken the town, and died, and been painted. Arnold had seen the print. Everybody had seen the print.

He paraded them in the morning in plain sight of the walls, five hundred scarecrows in what was left of their clothes, and they gave three cheers, and the garrison answered with a gun. He sent an officer with a flag to summon the town in the name of the Congress, and the flag was fired on. He sent it again the next day, and it was fired on again. Then he had the cartridges counted, and found that most of the powder had been wetted in the Dead River and dried in the Chaudière and was good for nothing, and that his army had, by the kindest reckoning, about five rounds a man.

On the nineteenth he took them twenty miles up the river to Pointe-aux-Trembles to wait for Montgomery, and from the road they watched a vessel come down the river under all the sail she could carry and go on round the point to the town. He found out a week later who had been in her. It was the Governor, General Carleton, who had slipped out of Montreal ahead of Montgomery in a habitant’s coat and come down to hold Quebec himself.

Montgomery came down the river at the beginning of December with three hundred men and some guns and a store of clothing out of the King’s magazines at Montreal: coats and breeches and good wool stockings and fur caps, which were handed out to men who had marched three hundred and fifty miles in linen, and which were, a great many of them, red. Arnold watched his army put on the King’s uniform in the snow and laugh at itself and stop shivering, and found that he did not care in the least what colour it was.

He had been ready to dislike Montgomery, and could not manage it. The General was a tall, quiet Irishman of thirty-seven, who had been a captain in the King’s army at Louisbourg and the Havana, and had sold out, and married into the Livingstons of New York, and wanted nothing in the world but to farm on the Hudson; and he had come to this, he told Arnold the first evening, because the Congress had asked him and he could not think of a reason to refuse that he could say out loud. He had none of Arnold’s hunger. He did not seem to need anybody to know his name. He took the command as a matter of course, because it was his, and then treated Arnold as though the march had been the finest thing done in the war, and said so before the officers; and Arnold, who had been ready for anything except that, went back to his quarters that night and could not remember when anybody had last said such a thing of him in front of anybody.

The siege, such as it was, lasted the month.

They could not dig, because the ground was iron, so they built their batteries of snow, packed into baskets and soaked with water until it froze, and dragged the guns up behind them; and their guns, which were small, struck the walls of Quebec and did nothing to them, and the guns of Quebec, which were not small, struck the walls of snow and went straight through. Montgomery sent a letter into the town summoning it, by a woman of the suburbs who was willing to carry it, and Carleton had the letter put on the fire unread and sent the woman back to say so. He would receive nothing from rebels. He had been Wolfe’s quartermaster at this same town in fifty-nine, and he and Montgomery had served in the same army in the same war, under the same colours; and he would not break the seal of a letter with Montgomery’s name at the foot of it.

Arnold thought that very fine, in its way. He would have done the same.

Then the smallpox came into the camp, out of the suburbs or out of the town or from nowhere anybody could name, and the men began to go down with it in the first week of December and went on going down; and every week the New England men looked at the calendar, because their enlistments ran out with the year. On the first of January they would be free to go home, and most of them meant to. Montgomery did not blame them. Nor, much, did Arnold. But it meant that whatever was to be done must be done in December, and in the dark, and in weather that would blind the walls; and so the army, which had prayed for fine weather since September, began to pray for a storm.

It came on the afternoon of the thirtieth, out of the north-east, a snow so thick and fine that by dark a man could not see the man in front of him; and at two in the morning of the last day of the year they were turned out and told.

Every man had a slip of paper pinned to his cap with Liberty or Death written on it, so that in the dark and the snow, in coats that were half of them the King’s red, they should know each other from the garrison. Arnold had thought it a good notion when Montgomery’s people proposed it, and thought so still, watching the pale slips go past him in the lantern light like a field of moths.

The plan was Montgomery’s, and it was a good one. Two feints at the walls of the Upper Town to draw the garrison, and two true attacks on the Lower Town, from either end, along the foot of the cliff where there were no walls to stop them: Montgomery from the west, along the river under Cape Diamond, and Arnold from the east, out of the suburb of Saint-Roch and along the strand under the ramparts, to meet in the middle of the Lower Town and go up the hill together into the Upper. Rockets would be the signal. When they went up, everybody went.

They went up a little after four.

He led from the front, because that was where he led from, with the advance party of thirty men and a field-piece on a sledge behind them that Captain Lamb’s gunners dragged as far as the first great drift and then had to leave in it. The way ran along the bottom of the cliff, between the walls above and the river ice below, and as soon as they were under the walls the walls woke. The noise was enormous. The bells of the town were ringing, all of them, and the drums beating to arms, and the ramparts above were a long line of flashes firing down into the snow at nothing, at the noise, at the sound of five hundred men trying to run in drifts to their knees. Men fell. He could not see who. He could see the snow, and the backs in front of him, and the slips of paper.

The first barrier was at a place called the Sault-au-Matelot, a narrow street between houses with a timber wall across it and two guns behind. He was almost at it, with his sword out, shouting for the ladders, when something hit him below the left knee like a mallet and the leg went out from under him.

He did not fall. He would remember that afterwards with a certain satisfaction. He staggered, and caught himself against the wall of a house, and stood on the other leg and went on shouting; and it was only when the boot began to fill, and the cold began to come up out of it into the rest of him, that he understood he was not going to be able to walk up that street.

Morgan came past him, enormous in the dark, and Arnold caught him by the arm.

Morgan, who said the drummer had miscounted his four hundred and ninety-nine lashes and left the King owing him one, took the command in a dozen words. He swore and went forward with his riflemen. Arnold heard the barrier guns fire once, then the shouting pass over them. They had carried it.

Two men took him back. They took him back the way they had come, along the foot of the walls and under the fire, with one of his arms round each of their necks, against the stream of the rear companies coming up; and all the way, as the men went past him in the dark, he told them to push on, push on, the barrier was taken, Morgan was in the town; and they cheered him as they went by, and he did not let them see his face.

The General Hospital stood outside the walls on the Saint-Charles, a long stone house belonging to the Augustinian nuns, who nursed the wounded of both armies with perfect impartiality and disapproved of all of them. Dr Senter cut the ball out of his leg on a table in a room full of nuns and candles, and it was a long business, because the ball had gone in below the knee and travelled and lodged deep in the calf, and Arnold held the edge of the table and talked to Senter the whole time about the arrangements for the guard, so that he should not make any other kind of noise.

Then he lay on a bed and waited, and the news came in the way news comes after a battle: in pieces, out of order, half of it wrong.

The feints had been made. The rockets had been seen. Morgan was over the first barrier and in the Lower Town, and had taken prisoners, a great many, more than he had men to guard. Morgan was at the second barrier. Morgan was waiting at the second barrier for Montgomery, as the plan required, and Montgomery had not come. Then a man came in from the west side with his face the colour of the snow and said that the General’s column had gone in along the river under Cape Diamond to a blockhouse at a place called Près-de-Ville, and that the blockhouse had fired one gun, one gun loaded with grape, at forty yards; and that the General had been at the front, as he always was; and that after that one gun the officers who were left had ordered the column back, and it had gone back, and the General had not come back with it.

Arnold asked who had seen him fall. The man said young Burr had seen it: Burr, who had walked through the wilderness with Arnold’s column and gone over to the General’s staff the moment there was a General to go over to. Burr said the General was dead in the snow, with his aide and Captain Cheeseman beside him, and that he had tried to bring the body off and could not, because it was too heavy and the fire too hot.

Arnold lay and looked at the ceiling.

Morgan had held on at the second barrier until it was light, in a narrow street with the houses on both sides of it full of the garrison firing down, waiting for Montgomery, who was dead; and then the garrison had come out of a gate behind him and closed the street at the other end; and at about ten in the morning, with no way forward and none back, Morgan had surrendered, with more than four hundred men. They said he had stood with his back to a wall and wept with rage and dared any of them to come and take his sword, and in the end had given it to a priest, because he would not give it to an Englishman.

Some time in the afternoon a party came out of the Palace Gate towards the hospital, and the men about Arnold’s bed began to talk of carrying him off to the rear. He would not be carried. He had his pistols loaded and laid on the blanket beside him, and his sword, and every man in the building who could hold a musket given one and put at a window; and he told them that if the garrison wanted the General Hospital it could come and take it from a man in bed and see how it liked it. The party, which had come out for Lamb’s gun in the drift and not for him at all, took the gun and went back inside.

At midnight the enlistments ran out. Arnold listened to a man along the ward calling for his mother in a voice worse than screaming. Those of his men who could walk were free to go in the morning. More than four hundred were prisoners inside the walls.

He had a few hundred men left fit to stand, counting what remained of Montgomery’s. He had no General. He had no powder to speak of and no hope of any before the spring, and the smallpox, and a town in front of him that had just beaten him in the only way that counted, and behind him three hundred and fifty miles of wilderness that he was not going to walk back through: not now, not on this leg, not ever.

He was the senior officer before Quebec. It came to him some time towards morning that he was, as of that night, the commander of what was left of the army besieging it, and he lay and looked at the thought for a long while from several sides.

He had asked Wooster at Montreal for reinforcements. Next he must report to Washington and Congress. The march nobody had thought possible, the scarecrows on the Plains of Abraham, the assault in the snow: he knew how to put it. Montgomery dead at the front; Arnold wounded, still cheering the men on. He could make Philadelphia see it from this bed. He lay with the hole in his leg and began choosing the words. It was a complete defeat, and it would make his name, and he knew it and could not make himself sorry.

He would tell Hannah the wound was easy. And that he had no thoughts of leaving this proud town until he entered it in triumph. The first was a lie. The second he meant.

A little before dawn the nuns’ bell rang for the first office of the day, thin and steady through the snow, and the sisters went past the foot of his bed in the dark in a file, not looking at him, to pray for the souls of the dead of both armies, and for the living, and, since they were thorough, for him.