Jack Kelly - Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty

On the mild evening of one of the longest days of 1776, a brigadier general of the rebel army strode the bank of the Richelieu River. He barked orders and urged on the beleaguered troops. A soldier, his face a macabre mask of pustules, stumbled toward the broken wharfs of St. Johns, Quebec. Fever had lofted his mind to nightmare. He peered through crusted lids at the coins of light winking from the surface of the river. His companion, who remembered his own bout with the pox, helped him climb over the gunwale of a flat-bottomed rowboat, where he joined twenty other men resting on thwarts or slumped between them.

The riverside smelled of desolation, of woodsmoke and smoldering pitch and animal carcasses. Gnats stitched the air. Soldiers swatted clouds of blood-hungry mosquitoes. The men imagined the distant tramp of boots, British infantrymen in scarlet coats, armed grenadiers hurrying forward to kill them. A few civilians clutching paltry treasures boarded boats bound for the unknown.

The armys commander, thirty-six-year-old New Hampshire lawyer John Sullivan, had already departed upstream to supervise the procession of vessels that were ferrying back and forth to withdraw his beaten men. Two weeks earlier in distant Philadelphia, Richard Henry Lee had proposed to Congress that the colonies declare themselves independent states. His words made the hearts of patriots leap, but the men of the northern army knew only fear and defeat.

The few remaining American soldiers ranged through the demolished settlement with flaming brands, anointing anything that would burn. The patriots, who had lately dreamed of adding Canada to the thirteen colonies, now only prayed they could return to their own country alive.

St. Johns lay twenty-five miles north of the border of what was still known as the United Colonies. The town center was dominated by a small bastion, a stone barracks and magazine surrounded by two redoubts of earth and logs. A fetid ditch and a maze of trenches completed the fortification. The villages few dwellings, shops, and warehouses had been burned, its bridges and mills smashed.

Frenchmen had erected Fort St. Jean more than a generation earlier to guard the waterway that led into Canada from the British colonies to the south. The now blasted settlement lay on a stretch of fertile farm fields and wetlands at the top of a series of rapids. The Richelieu flowed northward out of Lake Champlain and down to the St. Lawrence River.

The general directing the retreat at St. Johns was Benedict Arnold, an early hero of the year-old conflict. His leaden jaw, meaty confidence, and agate eyes gave him the aspect of a professional pugilist. Although he walked with a limp, he did not carry himself like a defeated man.

The landscape was familiar to himnot that long ago he had traded here regularly. He had wrangled herds of shaggy Canadian steeds onto ships, selling them for a profit in the West Indies. British lords dismissed him as a horse jockey. How the devil could such a plebeian, they muttered, have the gall to

Fourteen months, a lifetime, had passed since Arnold left his business in the care of his sister and rushed off to join the wild patriotic response that greeted the violence at Lexington and Concord. The previous autumn, he had led a band of American soldiers over the Maine mountains to attack Quebec City, gaining a reputation as one of the most audacious of the patriot officers, Americas Hannibal. Now he was overseeing the last days of that spent venture.

Every war starts with enthusiasm, followed by a sober recognition of the reality, the cost, and the horror. In Canada, Benedict Arnold had seen men die and had suffered a serious wound to his left leg. He had endured an extraordinarily brutal winter, with drifts of snow creeping toward the top of Quebecs high walls. He had watched smallpox scythe whole companies, had described his men as neglected by Congress below; pinched with every want here.

In early May 1776, while Arnold was still recuperating from his injury in Montreal, the first of ten thousand British redcoats had landed at Quebec. Their appearance sparked a disgraceful rout. Fleeing Americans abandoned sick comrades, looted supplies, and ran away in the most helter skelter manner, leaving behind muskets, ammunition, even clothes.

An orderly retreat in the face of the enemy is one of the most difficult of military maneuvers, and in a prolonged contest, one of the most essential. Arnold had looked on in dismay as the shattered and demoralized American army arrived at Sorel, where the Richelieu joined the St. Lawrence. He vowed to do everything possible to keep possession of this country, which has cost us so much blood and expense.

In a last-ditch effort to stem the retreat, General Sullivan had boldly sent his men down the St. Lawrence to attack a superior enemy force at Three Rivers. Appointed for his connections rather than his competence, Sullivan had little military experience to draw on. The American attackers were hurled back, losing three hundred men in the process. The disaster made Sullivan conclude that he commanded a dispirited Army, filled with horror at the thought of seeing their enemy.

Five days later, on June 13, Arnold wrote to Sullivan, advising him to get out of Canada while he still had an army to lead. The junction of the Canadians with the colonies, an object which brought us into this country is now at an end. His advice, he insisted, was not motivated by fear for his personal safety: I am content to be the last man who quits this country, and fall, so that my country rise. But let us not fall together.