The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [29]
And they fought because they had good reason to do so. Americans had not gone to war since the oppressions of the Crown had begun in the early 1760s because no one seemed to believe that there was a significant reason for a military engagement. The British had not attacked any of their militias and the navy had not bombarded any colonial port. Even the occupation of the British army, the quartering of soldiers in colonists’ homes, and the Boston Massacre in 1770 did not seem like justifications for an armed rebellion. There had been many reasons to wail about the British in newspapers and magazines and to stage rallies to protest restrictive trade laws and rising tax levies and to damn the king in round after round of beers at taverns, but none to actually fight a war. The brutal, bloody battles of Lexington and Concord changed all that. The Americans had been attacked by the British army and had to defend their country. It was that simple.
Newspapers from Georgia to Massachusetts hailed the brave soldiers of the brand new Continental Army. Despite the many vexations that the enlisted men caused them, Washington and his staff would always be proud of them. “I cherish those dear, ragged Continentals, whose patience will be the admiration of future ages and glory in bleeding with them,” wrote Colonel John Laurens, one of Washington’s top aides.18The generals who fought with them the longest, such as Nathanael Greene, respected the foot soldiers more than anyone else. “Our men are better than our officers,” he wrote.19
The soldiers who stayed with the army returned the confidence placed in them, assuring all that when it came time to fight they would be ready. Many felt just like a Connecticut private who wrote home of the men in arms just before the crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Day in 1776 that “You would be amazed to see the fine spirits they are in. The . . . troops are really well disciplined and you may depend will fight bravely . . . we shall do honour to ourselves.”20
MARCH TO QUEBEC
Chapter Seven
PRIVATE JEREMIAH GREENMAN AND BENEDICT ARNOLD
The War
Canada. The northern neighbor of the thirteen colonies was so vast that it could not even be properly charted on existing maps. The members of the Continental Congress, flush with successes at Lexington, Concord, and the valiant stand atop Bunker Hill, plus the ongoing siege of Boston, coveted Canada. Why not conquer it and annex it as the “fourteenth colony,” more than doubling the size of the “united colonies,” and removing the British from most of North America?
The idea was not a new one. In 1690, New England colonists, tired of raids by the Indians and their French allies, launched a two-pronged assault on the country, one on land to capture Montreal and another by sea to take Quebec. Men in both had to turn back when a smallpox epidemic struck the region. Again, in 1740, New England troops under the Crown’s flag captured Fort Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island, but had to cede it back to France. The British, with American volunteers, had captured Quebec and Montreal during the French and Indian War, which was waged between 1756 and 1763.
Now, in the fall of 1775, Canada beckoned once again. Congress feared an invasion by the British down the Richelieu River into Lake Champlain and then, following an overland march to Albany, on down the Hudson River to New York. It would permit the British to separate New England from the other colonies. Members of Congress had invited Canadians favorably disposed to the Revolution to sit in on some of their meetings concerning their country in an effort to gain their support for an invasion of Canada. That effort never materialized, but the delegates always believed that these men, and thousands of other Canadians, would lock arms with the Continental troops and rise up against the Crown as soon as the American army was within sight of their communities.1
The delegates were eager to strike Canada