The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [30]
And who would lead such a dangerous mission?
Jeremiah Greenman, seventeen, from Newport, Rhode Island, was one of nearly seven hundred privates in a force of eleven hundred soldiers walking up gangplanks onto the decks of a fleet of eleven ships at a wharf at Newburyport, Massachusetts, on September 18, 1775. He had enlisted in the army just a few weeks before and had arrived in Cambridge just in time to be assigned to the Canadian expedition.
Greenman was impressed by the spirit of the men boarding the boats that day and even more taken by the rousing send-off they were given by a large and boisterous crowd of citizens gathered near the docks of the fishing town. He wrote of the scene in the journal he kept for the duration of the American Revolution, “Colors flying, drums a-beating and fifes a-playing, the hills and wharves covered [with people] bidding their friends farewell.”
Greenman and the Rhode Islanders, and the other soldiers, were confident, too, because they would march north under the leadership of one of the early heroes of the Revolution, Colonel Benedict Arnold. Washington needed a man of great fortitude and endurance who could command men on a wilderness trek as well as on the battlefield, a man the troops could trust and someone the people admired. That was Arnold.
Arnold was the man of the hour. The feisty colonel from Connecticut had earned headlines when, with Ethan Allen, he captured the “impregnable” Fort Ticonderoga on the southwestern shore of Lake Champlain earlier that spring. Arnold seemed to be everywhere during the early days of the war. Following his audacious conquest of Ticonderoga, he sailed up Lake Champlain and captured the British garrison at the Canadian town of St. John’s, seizing the British warship George anchored there.
He returned to Massachusetts surrounded by some minor controversy because he had become involved in a contentious dispute with Congress over the reimbursement of his personal expenses—he had few receipts—during his heroics at Fort Ticonderoga. At the time, few thought much about it.
Arnold, the son of a shipowner and great-great-grandson of the colonial governor of Rhode Island, had always thirsted for the military life. He joined a local militia company in New Haven, where he lived, in the early 1770s following years of traveling on land and on sea as a trader and was soon elected its captain. Arnold led his seventy-man company to Boston to join the army after the battles of Lexington and Concord. He was easily noticed. Colonel Arnold was about five feet, eight inches tall and possessed a compact, muscular frame. He had jet-black hair, bluegray eyes, and a hooked nose. He was extremely well dressed, a persuasive speaker, and had arrived as the commander of six dozen men. He was ready to fight, right now. In short, he was just the kind of man the Continental Army needed.
Later, Colonel Henry Livingston wrote of Arnold’s possible departure from the service in 1777, just after the battle of Saratoga, “I am much distressed that General Arnold’s determination to retire from the army . . . He is the life and soul of the troops . . . to him and to him alone is due the honor of our late victory.”2
People who met him grumbled about his egotism, hot temper, and self-congratulatory airs, but none of that really mattered because the army was woefully short of men with any military acumen at all. That experience was evident in his masterful planning for the assault on Ticonderoga and his leadership in the actual attack.3 Benedict Arnold got things done.
Washington