How America Invaded Canada

Dan narrates the remarkable story of how George Washington's newly established Continental Army tried to conquer Canada in the brutal winter of 1775. The American Revolutionary forces believed their northern neighbour would surely welcome them as liberators, as they themselves fought off the yoke of British rule. Many imagined that these two vast territories were destined to unite into a single continental power. But what followed was a disastrous, freezing, chaotic nightmare. Written by Dan Snow, produced by McKenna Fernandez, and edited by Matthew Wilson and Dougal Patmore. Did you know you can watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:27Dan Snow?

  It was the first American attack on another country. It would be easy, predicted George Washington, the Americans would be welcomed as liberators. The target: Canada, their northern neighbours. Surely, these two vast territories should be fused into one continental-sized power. What followed was an ordeal, a nightmare of endurance, one of the most extraordinary stories in which the whole future of North America was at stake. It's a tale of bravery, stupidity and luck, a story of war in short, and how the Americans, in a blizzard, in the depths of winter, came a few city blocks away from conquering a massive empire.

• 2:11Dan Snow?

  250 years on from that dramatic campaign, this is Dan Snow's History Hit and the story of the American invasion of Canada.

• 2:33Dan Snow?

  The Green Mountain Boys, they had bonded in the past over their hatred of New Yorkers. These were frontiersmen who were staking out land in the wilderness west of New Hampshire, and they swore that they would never submit themselves to the rule of effete lawyers from Albany. They had come to the frontier explicitly to escape the rule of such bewigged sophisticates. The Green Mountain Boys, they chose their own leaders. They were headquartered in a tavern. They were tough. When New York administrators or surveyors came north to try and tame the majestic landscape what is now Vermont, the boys would chase them out of town with insults, threats, fists, and worse.

• 3:17Dan Snow?

  They were used to making their own facts on the ground. So when shots were fired in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord in the spring of 1775, and the American colonies went to war with their British colonial overlords, the Green Mountain Boys had the tools, the inclination, and the experience to act. In early May 1775, with Ethan Allen in command, these roughneck vigilantes set their sights on the British garrison at Fort Ticonderoga, near the southern tip of Lake Champlain, just at the northern edge of New York State. Just before they launched an assault, a gentleman named Benedict Arnold arrived in their camp,

• 3:59Dan Snow?

  having thrashed his poor horse to death on the Gallup North. This Benedict Arnold waved a piece of paper from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, saying that he, in fact, was instructed to take Fort Ticonderoga. The Green Mountain Boys laughed. They cared not for this piece of paper, but they let him go along for the ride. On May the 9th, after a very shambolic approach, they stormed the fort. The one British sentry attempted to fire his musket, but it fizzled out harmlessly. The boys rushed in. It turned out the garrison was made up of just two British officers and forty-six, mostly old and useless men. While the Green Mountain Boys then got absolutely smashed on the reservoir of spirits

• 4:43Dan Snow?

  they found in great barrels in the storehouses, Benedict Arnold looked to build on his triumph. He was muscular, an expert boxer, marksman and rider. He was said to be as brave a man who had ever lived. After a tough childhood he'd set up in New Haven, he ran some ships, he smuggled rum, molasses and timber in and out of the West Indies. That had put him at odds with the British government's attempt to regulate trade, to clamp down on smuggling. He'd steered a course for rebellion. Now it was this Benedict Arnold who now dragged any sober men he could find down to the lake shore, and he sent them north up the lake to Crown Point, the next British fort up the western shore on Lake Champlain.

• 5:28Dan Snow?

  The garrison of eleven men in that fort put up no serious resistance. His little force also seized a fine schooner with a taut rig and a corked hull. They renamed it Liberty. Now in charge of a little naval squadron, Benedict Arnold grew more ambitious. He heard that Fort St John at the very top of Lake Champlain was also very weakly defended, where the Richelieu River meets the lake. Weakly defended it might be, but of more importance was the fact that it wasn't in the rebellious colonies. It was in Canada. It was just north of the forty-fifth parallel, this line of latitude.

• 6:12Dan Snow?

  That was the demarcation line between New York State and Canada, or as I should call it, the British province of Quebec. So if he crosses this line, well, it would be an invasion, an absolutely unsanctioned invasion. But if Arnold had worried too much about arbitrary lines on maps and jurisdictions... He wouldn't have made all his money smuggling across all sorts of imperial borders. So he sailed right up this wonderful long lake on Liberty. He sailed straight across that Canadian border without any hesitation at all. And he attacked Fort St. John. The 14 man garrison there, well, they just gave up straight away. He stormed in, he destroyed lots of the stores and he returned south, feeling very pleased with himself,

• 6:54Dan Snow?

  having seized another nice ship, a sloop, George III, which he obviously renamed Enterprise. It was the first American attack on another country. It was the first American naval expedition and it was a success. It caused consternation across the British imperial world and beyond. It also drew the gaze of the rebellious colonies and their representatives who were meeting in the Philadelphia Congress. For a few weeks, it looked like they would just give all those captured forts back to the British. But then, well, why not keep them? Also, Canada, it seemed, was virtually undefended if these optimistic reports were to be believed.

• 7:35Dan Snow?

  Perhaps, thought people in Congress, they should build on this success. Perhaps Canada should join the 13 colonies, the Americans, in throwing off the British yoke. It became an accepted fact in the comfortable salons of distant Philadelphia that the British couldn't defend Canada. It would be a mere matter of marching in. Now, my goodness me, if I had a pound or a dollar or a euro or anything else for every time some enthusiastic politician has assured people that it would be a mere matter of marching in, I'd be a moderately wealthy guy. Philip of Spain with the Armada, Putin in Ukraine, Hitler, Napoleon, marching into Russia. And yet, here we go again.

• 8:17Dan Snow?

  Also, it was argued at the time, this could be a defensive offensive operation. A pamphlet was circulated by John Jay. He suggested that actually, a British led army bursting with bloodthirsty Catholic French speaking Canadians was about to advance south and crush American liberties. So this would be a preemptive strike. It was totally justified. Congress sent messages north to the Canadians. They offered hearty amity to them. But there was a threat beneath that friendly salutation. The Americans reminded their neighbours that they were a small people compared to those who with open arms invite you to fellowship.

• 9:00Dan Snow?

  It soon became very clear that open armed invitation to fellowship meant in practice the tramp of American boots on the ground, the screech of cannon axles, the pop of musketry, the noise and stench and mess of an army on the move. It meant invasion. The politicians in Philadelphia signed it off. George Washington signed it off. Orders were sent out. Officers and men were dispatched. The Americans would march north. It would be straightforward, Washington assured them. I trust you will have a feeble enemy to contend with. And here's the kicker, he wrote, and a whole province on your side. So he was saying they'd be welcomed as liberators.

• 9:43Dan Snow?

  In command of those liberators, in command of that first major US foreign war, a war that in fact predates the birth of the republic itself, but was not Benedict Arnold, and it was certainly not Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain hooligans, an altogether more reliable gentleman was selected, Richard Montgomery. Now, it was a bit of an odd pick for command because he'd made his name trying to win Canada for the British Empire. And now here he was trying to prize it away from that empire's grip. He'd fought for King George loyally all the way through the Seven Years' War in the 1750s and early 1760s. That Seven Years' War, known in North America as the French-Indian War, had seen him fight in North America, he'd fought in the Caribbean as well, but peacetime soldiering just wasn't for him.

• 10:28Dan Snow?

  It was boring, it was low paid. So he sold his commission in the army and he emigrated. He'd only settled in the American colonies in 1772, three years before, but he'd quickly established a good reputation in New York society. And thanks to his military experience, when war did break out between the colonies and the British, he was made a brigadier general. His boss, so the man in overall command in this theatre of war, was Philip Schuyler. Yes, he of Hamilton fame. Takes Philip Schuyler, the man is loaded. He was loaded, and he was an aristocrat of colonial New York. He had glittering ancestry, but he'd also gained valuable military experience in the French Indian War, particularly doing logistics.

• 11:12Dan Snow?

  And that's the important thing, trying to move men and supplies through this nightmarish landscape of western New York and beyond. These two men showed up to Ticonderoga in mid-July to get this great enterprise underway, and they found absolute chaos. A bunch of unruly backwoodsmen were less than excited to greet their new well-heeled commanders. Schuyler, the fancy New Yorker, and Montgomery, a man who'd been a British officer until three years before. There'd been very little in the way of planning and organising for an invasion across hundreds of miles of wilderness. There were no great big stockpiles of food, there was a shortage of little boats needed to get up and down these lakes and rivers.

• 11:56Dan Snow?

  Schuyler did his best, and eventually, north they sailed up the lake. On September the 2nd, they set foot on Canadian soil. Schuyler admitted the invasion force was rough and ready. It was also behind schedule. The first frost was two or three weeks away in those parts. The Americans, they really hoped to repeat the success that they'd enjoyed in the French Indian War. During that war, different thrusts had closed in on Canada, converged on Canada from different directions. This time, the British controlled the ocean, so there'd be no way of getting a fleet from the Atlantic up the St Lawrence to get straight to Quebec. So instead, the Americans would push in from a different direction.

• 12:37Dan Snow?

  You've got the force moving up here from Fort Ticonderoga, they're going up Lake Champlain. Here we go, getting to Fort St John, right there, guarding the gateway to Canada. The other thrust, it is going to go to what is now Maine. They're going to go inland, they're going to try and get their way up the Kennebec River. They're going to cross the Appalachians, very high ground through here, the great watershed. And then they're going to catch the Chaudier River down to Quebec. It was ambitious, to say the least. So that was the plan, anyway. What about the target? What are we really talking about when we refer to Canada? First of all, we should talk about it in this period as Quebec. That was the sort of official name, thanks

• 13:20Dan Snow?

  to very recent British legislation. Quebec stretched all the way from Labrador on the east coast, all the way down through the Great Lakes region, through the American Midwest, right to the bottom tip of Illinois. So Canada included not only the chunks of territory to the north of the Great Lakes that we still refer to as Canada today, but it also included most of Ohio and Michigan and Minnesota and Iowa and Missouri. It was a massive, massive piece of land, but it was very thinly populated by Europeans. The main area of settlement is along the valley of the St. Lawrence River. Coming along the St. Lawrence, we've got

• 14:02Dan Snow?

  Quebec, where the river really narrows. It's a walled city on a very impressive promontory. And then we have got Trois-Rivières, a little bit further along. And then we get to Montreal, which was first established as a fur trading post on an island in the St. Lawrence where another river flows into it. It was established there by Samuel de Champlain in 1611. Beyond Montreal, you get rapids. So that's as far as big ships can really travel. Between these three towns, you can hardly call them cities, they were rural communities, and they're all dependent on the river. So farms are very thin strips leading down to the shore. There are very few roads. Everything went by river, except there was one decent road, actually. That was the King's Road, which joined the three biggest towns together along

• 14:47Dan Snow?

  the side of the St. Lawrence. The important thing to say is that winters are invariably freezing cold. In fact, they're below freezing. There is a huge amount of snowfall in that St. Lawrence Valley. There were perhaps 100,000 settlers of European origin there, maybe 150,000 indigenous people around the Great Lakes. We have indigenous groups, we have the Iroquois, and in the St. Lawrence Valley, we have the so-called Seven Nations. The people of Canada, the people of Quebec, oh well, the ones of European origin, the vast majority were farmers, they're called habitants, inhabitants. They were ruled over by the aristocracy, the seigneurs. And then in these towns, you have

• 15:28Dan Snow?

  some professionals. You've also got a recently arrived group, perhaps about 5,000 strong, who were British. They were largely Scottish or American colonial, and they're nearly all living in Quebec and Montreal. In charge of keeping this massive chunk of territory in the British Empire is a man called Guy Carlton. He's also served in the Seven Years' War. He was highly regarded. He was actually wounded badly in the battle outside the walls of Quebec, the famous battle that led to the capture of Quebec in 1759. General Wolfe had died in that battle. He was close to Carlton. He'd left him all his books. He'd left him a large sum of money

• 16:10Dan Snow?

  in his will. Carlton went on to fight in France and the Caribbean, and he was made governor of this big province of the British Empire in 1768. He was tall. He was in his early 50s. He had an absolutely enormous nose, apparently, so I find that very relatable. And he had now, unfortunately, had a grand total of 1,000 regular soldiers. That's all, to defend an empire of, I think, around a million square miles, certainly as big as Western Europe. In this moment of crisis, he dashes to Montreal. That's where the threat seemed to be most real. That was where the Americans were advancing up Lake Champlain to wards. And he found no fortifications. He

• 16:54Dan Snow?

  found no fleet. There were about 600 British redcoat soldiers. He found there was a chunk of the population hoping he would lose. And the vast majority of French habitants, the vast majority of just French speaking settlers, they didn't really give a damn either way. He called out the French militia, so that's farmers and, you know, hoping that part-time soldiers. The result was lackluster, not that many people answered the call to arms. He called on some of the English-speaking community in Quebec. Around seventy men showed up. He was furious and he started trying to recruit from any other sources he could find. There was a community of army veterans, people that had done their military service and are now retired, particularly in Nova Scotia to the east. They were mostly Scottish Highlanders, so they knew what they were doing.

• 17:39Dan Snow?

  He also tried to woo the indigenous tribes. Some of them were keen, in fact, some of them were too keen. A force of fifteen hundred, mainly Onondaga and Mohawk, presented themselves for action, hoping to be sort of launched across New England to wet their blades on Yankee skulls. They were disappointed when Carlton asked them to just assume a defensive posture and most of them wandered home. Carlton's plan was pretty straightforward. He could not allow the Americans to thrust deep into the heart of the British territory. Montreal, for example, was pretty much undefended. So he had to hold them in the south, near the frontier. He had to hold them here at Fort St. John. He sent every regular soldier and every volunteer he could scrape together

• 18:22Dan Snow?

  to hold that pivotal frontier fort. In early September, American boats pushed up Lake Champlain, up into the Richelieu River. It's the river that joins Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence eventually. It's a, it's like a great big highway running north, south. It leads straight from American territory into the heart of Canada. Once they get to Fort St. John, the Americans landed in a bog, naturally. The distinction between land and water at that time, in that place, was really not as clear as it is now. And there was a sort of stuttering start. There was a skirmish with some NATO Americans allied to the British. Now, these were expert woodsmen. They were a terrifying enemy on their own terrain.

• 19:05Dan Snow?

  And as a result, there were a few days of sort of incompetence and mind-changing, advances and retreats. And on one occasion, the Americans were spooked by some strange noises in the woods. Montgomery wrote to his wife, "Such a set of pusillanimous wretches never were collected. Could I with decency leave the army in its present situation, I would not serve an hour longer." The Americans came and went, at least twice as far as I can see, but by September the 18th, they were back with 2,000 men. This time, they meant business. Schuyler was ill, he was out of it. And when I say ill, I mean there was something really wrong with the man. He described "a copious scorbutic eruption" and "copious discharge from an internal impostume

• 19:50Dan Snow?

  in my breast." I have no idea what that means, but it sounds bad. And that's why he handed over command to Montgomery. The new commander, now he acted with much greater resolution. He ordered a proper siege. This fort was encircled, it was cut off. By the 18th of September, he had the garrison bottled up and he was spreading out through the surrounding countryside. He was sending out detachments to let the Canadians know that the great liberation had begun. Nearly all the locals seemed to roll their eyes and waited to see which side would win. They weren't going to campaign for the Americans, but they also weren't going to exactly carry out guerrilla attacks or lie across roads for the Brits either. They tried to remain as neutral as possible.

• 20:30Dan Snow?

  Eighteenth-century sieges have got a grim inevitability, a choreography. It's a matter of mathematics, the size of the cannon, the range, the supply of shot, time. And by the end of September, the first American battery was sighted and the first cannonballs were smashing into British defences. The net was closing. While that siege was getting underway, the extremely unreliable frontiersman and hero of the capture of Ticonderoga, Ethan Allen, remember him? He was looking for trouble up here in the north. Montgomery was obviously very keen to get rid of him, because he was sent out to sort of recruit Canadians, check out the lay of the land, and generally make

• 21:11Dan Snow?

  a nuisance of himself. Now Ethan Allen decided to try and win the war by himself, and he just went and attacked Montreal with about 80 men. It was a fiasco. Colton led out a handful of British regulars, who with the support of local volunteers, who we should say were obviously happier to defend their city from a clear threat outside the walls than they were to rally around when there was a sort of general threat to the province. Colton put the Americans to flight. Ethan Allen was captured. Colton had some momentum.

• 21:42Dan Snow?

  But he did absolutely nothing with it. He just didn't know how many Americans were roaming around to the south and southeast of Montreal. He didn't want to march into a trap. He had to be cautious. Back down here at Fort St. John's, well, things were looking bad for the defenders. The capture of Fort Ticonderoga, it had really transformed the balance of power in the colonies. That's because it had been packed with big cannons and mortars. Lots of them were hauled off to Boston, where they would force the British to abandon the city the following spring. But a few of those artillery pieces were sent north to batter the Canadian force into submission. The Americans manhandled one

• 22:21Dan Snow?

  called Old Sow into position. It was a mortar, so it was squat, it was heavy, and it shot explosive bombs high in the air, a big high arching trajectory that took them way over any fortifications before landing directly on top of their targets. The Old Sow was bronze, it weighed over two tonnes, and it lobbed shells thirteen inches in diameter. And it was not long before the Old Sow had destroyed buildings within the fort and forced the garrison to sleep in cellars. By mid-October, another battery had been established on the opposite side of the river from the fort. The British tried to row across that river and disrupt that work, but they were beaten off in a sharp skirmish with high casualties

• 23:04Dan Snow?

  on both sides. That battery then opened fire and it was brutally effective once it was operational. The British ship, the Royal Savage, was sunk on its moorings and more and more damage was being done to the fort. The noose was tightening in all senses. Then, on October the eighteenth, came shocking news. A fort further up the river, at Chambly, had surrendered to an American detachment. American ships had slipped past Fort St. John, going north up the river. In the dark, they'd fired a few shots at Fort Chambly, which had obligingly surrendered straight away. The Americans captured 124 barrels

• 23:44Dan Snow?

  of powder and nearly 250 muskets, plus other supplies. The British prisoners were brought down the river, back down here in boats, going past Fort St. John on their way to captivity in New England. The defenders of Fort St. John had to watch as their comrades sort of paraded past. Morale was pushed even lower. Confident now in their stocks of cannonballs and gunpowder, the Americans established a third battery on the north-west side of Fort St John. Carlton knew he had a matter of just a few days to save Fort St John. He leaves Montreal with about 130 redcoats, around 800 militiamen who he'd convinced

• 24:27Dan Snow?

  to serve, and straight away, as they're crossing the river from Montreal, they run straight into American frontiersmen on the far bank of the St Lawrence. They had dragged two small cannon from Fort Shomly, and they blasted Carlton's boat. The men were packed in the gunwales, they were caught out in the open, the water around those little boats was torn up by a welter of rounds, the wooden hulls, the flesh within them, lacerated. Pretty much the definition of sitting ducks. So Carlton, the British commander, just turned them around sharpish and headed back to Montreal. And all that meant that there would be no relief of Fort St John.

• 25:09Dan Snow?

  And for the defenders that fort, November the first was a particularly brutal day. There was a mighty bombardment, all three batteries around the fort now firing. A thousand cannonballs, 50 shells rained down on the fort. More buildings were smashed as the garrison huddled below the ground. By sunset, an American said it had knocked everything in the fort to tatters. The commander was informed by his staff that the fort had just eight days left of supplies if the men went on reduced rations. Montgomery sent a messenger to the fort. He was actually a captured Canadian, and he swore a holy oath. He said, "The reforce from Montreal has been repulsed. There is no help coming to you.

• 25:52Dan Snow?

  For the sake of humanity," Montgomery's messenger said, "you should surrender." Montgomery did not wish to blast, to crush, to vaporize, to disembowel any more Britons with his cannon. And he pointed out, if he was forced to storm the fort, he could not guarantee that prisoners would be taken. Nothing enrages men like storming into a breach, seeing their mates atomized by canister shot. When they got into the fort, they might not behave in a gentlemanly fashion. The garrison might be slaughtered. So the commander was faced with a tough choice. He wanted to fight on, but his officers, they forced him to bow to the inevitable. There was hardly any gunpowder left, and as I said, they were running out of food. So at eight AM on November the third, the garrison marched out.

• 26:37Dan Snow?

  Six abreast, carrying their standards, their flags, their arms, their muskets at their shoulders, their fifes and drums playing. It was an honorable surrender by the standards of the time. Around seven hundred of these men then stacked their arms in a heap before their American captors. The commander of the fort wept openly. Then they clambered into waiting boats and went south to captivity in New England. A staggering proportion, something like seventy-five percent of all British regular troops in Canada had now been killed or captured.

• 27:17Dan Snow?

  And the all-important gateway to Canada, Fort St. John, had been torn open. The Americans had won a victory, but at a cost. Something like a thousand men had been lost to sickness as the army camped outside Fort St. John for sixty days. And time is the most precious and irredeemable commodity in war. Those autumnal days had slipped away. The conquest of Canada had stalled for two months outside the walls of St. John. The Americans were now in a hurry. Montgomery had to capture the colony. That meant Montreal, and it meant Quebec before winter. In the winter, and the depths of winter war would be effectively impossible in deep snow and sub-zero temperatures.

• 28:00Dan Snow?

  And on top of that, there was an arbitrary man-made deadline as well. Get this, many of Montgomery's men had only enlisted until the end of the year. That was it. So at midnight on the thirty-first of December, their contract would be up and they would be going home. He had two months. So he pushed north as fast as he could, but that was not very fast. It was slow going. It was bog. There were roads of sorts, there were felled trees lying one next to another, but after a year or two, they were just rotten away. The carriages carrying those heavy cannon, carrying supplies, just sank to their axles. Men sweated and cursed, they heaved them along. Montgomery was not impressed with his own army. He called them the sweepings of the street.

• 28:44Dan Snow?

  He was used to the discipline of the British Army, and he was amazed at seeing drunk officers, argumentative private soldiers. In this country, he wrote, "The private are generals, but not soldiers." I love it, you get a sense of how difficult it is moving through this landscape. If you just look at this map, there's a bit here that says, "This country, by reason of mountainous swamps and drowned lands, is impassable and uninhabited." It was very hard to move large bodies of men through Canada in the 18th century. Trouble is, Carlton, the British commander, was also feeling the pressure. He knew Montreal was indefensible. The wall was described as an eggshell. So he put every soldier in the garrison, and all the warlike stores he could scrape together,

• 29:29Dan Snow?

  on boats and sent them downriver, down the St Lawrence, towards Quebec, where he would make his last stand. Any cannon that he couldn't take, he spiked and threw them in the river. So it was that Montgomery marched unopposed into Montreal. His men apparently looked like ragged beggars. Montgomery says that even though they captured Montreal, they were mutinous. And he was a little bit mutinous too. He was desperate to go home. He wrote to his wife, "I am weary of power." And I think perhaps he didn't really understand power that well either, because he made a foolish decision when he was in Montreal. He left a particularly unpleasant character to run the show in Montreal, while he moved on to try and defeat the British.

• 30:11Dan Snow?

  And that destroyed any potential goodwill that the Canadians might have felt for their, well, their new American overlords. When you read about this campaign, you're struck by the fact that- Most people, most of the time, seem to be flirting with disaster. It's just one calamity after another. So for example, here, Carlton's fleet of boats reaches the town of Sorrel, and there's some quite tricky navigation through some islands as they go down the St Lawrence. And just as they reach that point, the wind died. They were dependent on the wind to push them through those shallows and a little bit of rapids. And the wind died at that point, they had to anchor for three days. Now, unfortunately for him, the Americans were controlling this south bank of the St Lawrence.

• 30:56Dan Snow?

  And an American messenger came out to his ships and threatened to bombard his fleet with their 32-pound guns. And Carlton knew that he would be lethally vulnerable. Unless there was a stiff westerly breeze to blast his fleet past those guns, he would be terribly vulnerable. Carlton was really feeling it. He wrote to his boss in London, "I shall try to retard the evil hour", i.e. the loss of the colony, i.e. he'll try and push it back as long as he could, but it feels like it's inevitable. He wrote, "All my hopes of succour now begin to vanish." So he is losing any hope that he has of keeping Canada.

• 31:34Dan Snow?

  More Invasion of Canada after this.

• 31:44Dan Snow?

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• 32:27Dan Snow?

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• 32:55Dan Snow?

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• 34:21Speaker 01

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipsum, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:07Dan Snow?

  Carlton's a remarkable character. He's that sort of cliché of an imperial Englishman. Although, in fact, like most imperial Englishmen, he is in fact Irish. He's from the Protestant Irish community. He was an Ulsterman. He came from a caste of soldiers. They're useless to everything else. The battlefield is their metier. And I can say that coming from a long line of the thugs myself. But when I say he was a cliché, what I mean is that he was ice-cold under pressure. He appeared to be unbending, rigid. Probably quite unpleasant to be around in normal times. But he was the absolutely ideal person to have in charge of what was an omni-shambles. He had few troops. He had these mutinous crews who did not want to be smashed by American iron. There was appalling weather.

• 35:51Dan Snow?

  He was in a vast wilderness thousands of miles from home. He was outnumbered. It was apparently hopeless. But even then, he never lost his cool in front of his men. Instead, what he did do is he disguised himself as a French-Canadian peasant. He put his moccasins on, little tassled cap. And he got in a little boat. He shot past the Americans and made his way down the river towards Quebec. Now, he didn't realise that all that time, the Americas been bluffing. There was no battery of American cannon. But the rest of his flotilla surrendered to those bluffing Americans. Thirty cannon, 120 soldiers, and 200 sailors. All fell into American hands.

• 36:34Dan Snow?

  As all this was going on, the snow had started to fall. Winter was coming. Montgomery had to get to Quebec. He wrote to his beloved wife. He said, "So far, Lady Luck had blessed him with good fortune. And he had one more favour to ask of her." After that, he promised his wife he was done. He cobbled together winter clothes from captured British uniforms. He borrowed money from a sympathetic merchant in Montreal, and he set off. So now you've got a situation where two shambolic, threadbare, tiny armies, really, would now fight it out for control of an absolutely enormous chunk of North America. Well, I say two, I say two armies. But actually, there are a few more troops at play in this theatre.

• 37:19Dan Snow?

  Because there was another American force. There was that second thrust. And that came as a very nasty surprise for the British governor. Carleton managed to sneak into Quebec in mid-November. The beleaguered garrison there were thrilled, someone finally had arrived to take charge. A British official wrote, "We saw salvation in his presence." And no doubt, in public, he played that optimistic part, but we know in private, he was deeply concerned. And he was also nervous about the enemy within. He was worried about Montgomery's army coming up from Montreal, but he was particularly shocked by the news that met him when he got to Quebec. There was another American army loose in the colony.

• 38:02Dan Snow?

  It was a battered army, it was a pretty rough army, but it was a potent one. A few hundred, indescribably tough men, who had endured everything the wilderness could throw at them, and did something that no large body of troops had ever done before. Let's remind ourselves of the American plan, back in those long days of summer. We've got Schuyler and Montgomery there, heading up Lake Champlain towards Montreal. But then we've also got this other force, and that was one that Benedict Arnold had been lobbying for. He'd persuaded George Washington himself, in person, the pugnacious, dueling, smuggling, headstrong, physically tough leader of men. Arnold had convinced Washington that this was the back door into Canada.

• 38:47Dan Snow?

  George Washington had bought it. He'd made Arnold a Colonel, and he'd sent him off. So Arnold had set out from Boston with a thousand men in early September. They sailed up the east coast, apparently a very unpleasant voyage, everyone got seasick. And they'd arrived in what is now Georgetown, Maine, about here, on about the 20th of September. They'd ordered the construction of 200 small boats, or bateau, as they were called, which could each carry about six men and 600 pounds of supplies. But when he arrived here, he discovered that they were smaller and flimsier than hoped, and they hadn't been quite properly constructed. Anyway, he ordered 20 more.

• 39:28Dan Snow?

  Now with that fleet of boats, he headed north into the wilderness. He headed north up the Kennebec River. The route had been mapped, sort of. Arnold believed it was about 180 miles from there to Quebec. In fact, it was more like 300 miles. So generals in distant command centres thought that that route could be traversed by an army, a large body of men. It's just that no large body of men ever had traversed it before. It was a terrible gamble. But then, really, everything was a gamble in this first year of the American Revolutionary War. So why not? "Not a moment's time is to be lost," advised Washington. "The season will be considerably advanced."

• 40:13Dan Snow?

  Although the commanding chief was very confident that Quebec will fall into our hands. That's what the situation looked like to the great man behind his nice desk in his grand mansion in Cambridge. Arnold, it must be said, had some absolute heroes on this expedition, some of the officers underneath him. He had men like Daniel Morgan, who was described as a formidable border pugilist. He was a natural leader whose men said they would follow him into hell. And the next few weeks, he would ask them to. His cheek was scarred by a musket ball fired by an Indigenous warrior that had come close to blowing his jaw off in 1756. Henry Dearborn was another one. He was a champion wrestler. He'd fought to the end in the Battle of Bunker Hill. And Arnold would need heroes working for him because the task in front of them was

• 40:57Dan Snow?

  absolutely terrifying. Take this for an opener. As they went up the Kennebec River, they had to occasionally hoist all their boats out of the water to get past rapids or waterfalls or bits of rough water. At Fort Halifax, for example, they would take all their bateau out of the water, they'd carry them overland for a bit, then they rowed up five miles of rapids, then they hauled them up over a 100-foot cliff. And that was just a starter. Now, for those of you who did not spend your childhoods doing canoe trips with your Canadian grandpa, who looked like he was chiseled out of pure granite, and whose idea of a good time was to be completely and utterly lost in the back country. For those of you who have not hacked your way through the undergrowth so you could drag your tents and canoes and supplies and your food from one lake to another, all of which,

• 41:41Dan Snow?

  by the way, look exactly the same, while mosquitoes swarm around you so you can hardly breathe and you worry about the bears. Well, for those of you who have not done that, then you may not be familiar with this way of travelling. In short, this is the quintessential North American backcountry experience. It is how Indigenous people covered vast distances. It's how everyone got round before the coming of roads and railroads. But it is really hard. Those bateau were prone to capsized. The green wood that they were made out of warped, and that meant they became very heavy, and that meant they leaked, and the men were just bailing constantly. Water would spoil the provisions. The force amazingly ate nearly one and a half tonnes of food every single day. They really got

• 42:24Dan Snow?

  through the stuff. They had to stop and make repairs, and on the 9th of October, they set off from the last settlement on the American side of the border. The days that followed were days of struggle. They dragged and rowed and waded those boats up the Kennebec River. They dragged the boats up rapids using ropes. They lined the boats up through rapids. They carried the boats. They carried the supplies from river to lake, from river to lake again. Now, sometimes the men drank from the water of these lakes and voided their guts hours later. Weakened men fell by the wayside. Frozen rain fell on the already soaking, toiling men. Clothes and boots disintegrated. Feet that were wet and dirty all the time

• 43:08Dan Snow?

  started tingling. They grew red. They started itching, and then the skin just erupted. And the agonizing effect of what we now call trench foot really kicked in. Men crawled, unable to support their own body weight. By the 16th of October, they were on half rations. They tried to keep each other's spirits up by talking about spending a cozy winter among the nuns of Quebec. In the meantime, they waded through a swamp until they came to something called Dead River. The meanders of that river were so great that the advance guard was sometimes further from Quebec than those coming behind. Then came a storm, possibly a hurricane, we think, which uprooted trees, unleashed a downpour that sent the river up by eight feet overnight. Supplies were flooded. Tents were swept away. The landscape was

• 43:53Dan Snow?

  now just wetland, and they couldn't really tell where the course of the river was. A survivor called it a direful, howling wilderness. Arnold called a council of war, and it decided that he would press on with as many men as could be fed. The sick would be sent back to the south. So on they went. Thick snow fell. They were starving. One stage they killed a partridge and they split it 12 ways. Officers started to hoard supplies, they started falling out with each other. A rearguard unit simply turned around and went home without orders. Arnold's force was down to about 600 men. And a few days later, the advance guard reached the watershed of the Appalachian Mountains. It is the border.

• 44:36Dan Snow?

  Once across, Arnold went ahead with a very small group, desperately trying to secure supplies at the first Canadian settlement they came across. Now, after all the misery and challenges of going up, they faced a different challenge, which is going down. Because as they're going down these wild rivers, well, five of Arnold's bateau were destroyed, shooting some rapids, they almost went over a waterfall. Arnold was in a canoe that was wrecked, clinging to just two bateau. They arrived at the village of Satagan. And it's a Canadian village roughly where St. George, Quebec is now. Behind him, men were spread out along the trail. They were eating their belts and shoe leather, they staggered like drunks. Apparently, they followed bloodstains in the snow as their barefoot comrades broke trail.

• 45:21Dan Snow?

  Corpses littered the route. Now, over a couple of days, the survivors limped into Satagan. Witnesses said they were more like ghosts than men. Arnold had secured cows and flour and oatmeal. He managed to gather enough food and the men would rebuild their strength. An admirer of his wrote that this had been an undertaking above the race of men in this debauched age. He summoned some of the local indigenous people. He told them the Americans were liberators. They'd get rid of the Brits and then they'd leave the indigenous and the people of French origin, they'd leave them in peace. He attracted about 50 recruits that way. And his own men were growing stronger and they were getting fed and they were getting dry and they were resting. And then, it was about 60 miles from there to Quebec.

• 46:06Dan Snow?

  He sent scouts to the south and by the 8th of November, they were on the St Lawrence, overlooking Quebec. Now, the city of Quebec is magnificent, one of the most striking in North America. It is a stunning defensive position. It was fortified, unlike Montreal. The old town is on a superb natural defensive position. It's on top of a cliff skirted by the St Lawrence. It's on a promontory. It's protected on the south and the east by the St Lawrence River and from the north by the St Charles River. So it sticks out on a headland. There's the old town, the upper town, and then the lower town. So the lower town is like on the floodplain of the St Lawrence River, and that's full of wharves and overspill housing.

• 46:48Dan Snow?

  If you want to attack Quebec, you've really got to do it from the plains of Abraham, from the west. That is where General Wolf had won his famous victory. That's where he breathed his last only 16 years before. It's mad to think that victorious coalition, the British and their American colonial allies, had now broken apart, fractured, and those broken parts were converging on Quebec once again to settle the fight that their victory there had ignited. The commander in Quebec had heard reports of Americans on the south bank of the river, on the far bank. So he'd ordered all the boats on the south bank removed, and inside that walled city had a garrison of around about a thousand sailors, soldiers, and militiamen.

• 47:33Dan Snow?

  Benedict Arnold's men crossed the St Lawrence River in the evening of the 13th of November, about 500 men across the St Lawrence in three waves. They landed not far from where General Wolf had landed in 1759. The British guard boats on the river had failed to stop them. He then climbed up to the plains of Abraham and he made camp. They debated storming Quebec that very night, but instead they held off. They paraded in front of the walls of Quebec and they hurled insults, and they made an offer that if Quebec surrendered, all private property would be protected. The British inside the city, they did debate it. There was food to last the garrison and the 5,000 citizens of Quebec until the spring. The walls were reasonably strong and they outnumbered the Americans.

• 48:18Dan Snow?

  The siege was still pretty loose, so that meant that firewood and food could still get into the city. The Council of War voted unanimously that they would not surrender, they would hold out. In fact, they fired a cannonball that splattered Arnold's waiting messenger with mud. In fact, the British went on the offensive. They planned to sort it out, take the fight to the Americans. And Arnold's men got wind of this and they retreated. They realised they were outnumbered, they only had about five rounds each for their muskets, and indeed, many of those muskets were broken after that long march. And so instead, they marched twenty miles up the St Lawrence and waited for Montgomery's Americans marching up from Montreal. As they marched, or they staggered, a boat slipped past running east, the opposite direction.

• 49:02Dan Snow?

  And on board was the governor Carlton and his peasants get up. When he arrived at Quebec, the last redoubt, he listened to reports of Arnold's force with consternation. That was the last thing he needed. The scene was set for the final showdown. On December the third, Montgomery and his men arrived. They actually came up the river on ships captured from the British, skirting chunks of ice that were floating on the river's surface. And he came ashore to the cheers of Arnold's troops lining the bank. And where might they cheer? It was an astonishing achievement. The two different thrusts had met up in the heart of Canada, as intended by the wildly optimistic and very vague plan. Thanks their astonishing resilience, Arnold's men had made that impossible crossing of

• 49:46Dan Snow?

  the Appalachians, while Montgomery had blasted his way past the British along the traditional invasion corridor. Now, for an 18th century army that had only existed since that summer, it was very impressive. Certainly, across the thirteen colonies, many people rejoiced. A delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia stood up and said, "No doubt is entertained here that this congress will shortly be joined by delegates from Canada, which will then complete the union of fourteen provinces." But there's always doubt in war, particularly this one. Because this was one of those military operations in which nothing was achieved until everything was achieved. Because without Quebec, without this city, the Americans would have failed.

• 50:31Dan Snow?

  The British Navy would bring reinforcements in the spring and the Americans would be swept back to where they'd come from. The Americans had to take Quebec, they had to lock the British out of Canada. And they had to do so in the next four weeks.

• 50:45Dan Snow?

  More Invasion of Canada, after this.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card.

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  The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all.

• 51:08Speaker 03

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• 51:13Speaker 01

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• 51:27Speaker 03

  Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do.

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• 51:38Speaker 01

  Subject to credit approval. Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 52:26Dan Snow?

  So the combined force made its way along the St. Lawrence back to Quebec. It's now about 1,000 strong. It was cold, it was savagely cold. They had their moccasins stuffed with hay for warmth. They were dressed in captured British red coats and greatcoats. And they would have looked the same, really, as the British they were fighting, which is a visual reminder that in many ways this was a civil war. I'm always struck by the fact the officers travelled in slaves. Very Christmasy. The bells of their harnesses jingling away in festive fashion as they slid across the last 20 miles. That brought them to the walls of Quebec. There, they found the garrison on top of their 60-foot-high walls with full enough bellies, plenty of artillery, and no intention of of marching out of their defences. It wasn't clear to the attackers that the walls were actually quite weak with age,

• 53:11Dan Snow?

  and there weren't enough British troops to protect them properly. They even struggled to find the keys to one of the gates at one point. We're not talking Stalingrad here. Montgomery got his American troops to shoot arrows into the city over the walls with messages on those arrows for merchants within the city who he thought might be willing collaborators. He got a local woman to carry a message to Carlton, but Carlton threw it on the fire, and then he threw the woman out of the city. And alongside her, he actually sent out lots of people he thought might be fifth colonists, grumblers, pacifists, people that are pro-American. He just sent them straight out into the Canadian winter. He carefully husbanded his few reliable troops. He did about 300 redcoats, they were the professionals, and about 50 marines off some Royal Navy ships that were tied up there for the winter.

• 53:55Dan Snow?

  Other members of the garrison, though, much less dependable. There were some Newfoundland fishermen, then there were the local French-speaking Canadians. Carlton organised daily drill and musket practice. Sergeants swore and chivvied as men with their cold fingers went through the endless, complicated cycle of fire, reload, ram, close the pan, shoulder musket, fix bayonet, take up, rest, thumbs moving a few inches, slide your palm up and down the stock, one foot drop back, bring it forward. Those individuals were slowly, gradually forged into a machine, hopefully capable of unleashing a storm of lead to annihilate the enemy in front of them. Sailors were offered three pounds to enlist as a soldier, plus a nice, warm greatcoat.

• 54:37Dan Snow?

  Everyone was told to sleep in their clothes, weapons at hand. Cannon from those naval ships were manhandled ashore. Windows in the towns were blocked up. Carpenters built barricades to block up the streets. Carlton knew what he was doing, and he also had one more trick up his sleeve. In November, to the skirl of the bagpipes, over two hundred men marched into Quebec. The dressing between the rank and farm might have looked a bit ragged because these men were out of practice. They were retirees. Decades before, they'd been born in the Scottish Highlands. These were men forged in the glens and islands of that hard country. They were raised to use dirk, their knives, and their longswords. They were raised to answer the

• 55:22Dan Snow?

  call of their laird, their clan chief, to fight for their clan. These men were older now, and their stubble would have been shot through with white, the odd limp among them. But they had a set to their jaw that spoke of a lifetime of war and survival. Some of these men had survived the blizzard of lead and iron on Colloden Moor forty years before. They'd fought against King George on that day. But their clan chiefs had then made peace, and they were happy enough to fight for the same King George in America a decade later, and another King George now. After their service in North America, they'd been rewarded with land in Canada, and they'd probably found farming in that hostile environment

• 56:04Dan Snow?

  no easier than fighting in it. But now here they were, like old buddies in a heist movie, gathering for one last job. They answered the call of their king. They came to support their mates, to protect their farms, perhaps, just perhaps, for the chance to hear the pipes keening in their ears once more, for the feel of their dirks in their hands, the adrenaline in their bodies. I'm sure some of them would have missed the rawness and simplicity of war, as they cleared rocks from barren fields with their lumpen sons and scolding wives. Montgomery opened fire on the walls of Quebec with his cannon, and his sharpshooters attempted to pick off defenders on the walls. In response, the British artillery

• 56:47Dan Snow?

  fired back. One cannonball killed Montgomery's horse that was pulling his sleigh across the plains of Abraham. Another British cannon destroyed a battery that Montgomery was trying to build. It wasn't a great start. Montgomery tried one more bluff. He sent a messenger offering generous peace terms to the garrison. Carlton didn't even let him into the city. Now, remember, Montgomery needs to finish this siege by the thirty-first December. He did not have time for a full, lengthy siege. It would have to be a violent assault. He was going to storm Quebec. The weather was horrific. It was a famously cold winter. But Montgomery wanted to take advantage of this. He would attack under the cover of a blizzard. And by the way, there was one more reason to act fast. A new enemy was stalking his men.

• 57:28Dan Snow?

  His force was being decimated by smallpox, more effective really than any enemy army. It sliced through his ranks. He had to build not one but two pox hospitals. The rumor is that Carlton had sent out a sex worker with smallpox to knowingly infect the American army. I cannot vouch for that story's truth, but that is the story that is told. By Christmas, Montgomery only had about 800 fit men, plus a few Canadians. The Americans had found a French-speaking priest. They'd paid him some money, they'd promised to make him a bishop, and in return, he told the French inhabitants that they would not in fact go to hell if they helped the Americans. But Montgomery was losing men all the time. The Americans were cold and hungry, or some of them just found Benedict Arnold really annoying, and they were deserting to the British.

• 58:13Dan Snow?

  Some of those deserters were even hoisted up on ropes over the walls. On the afternoon of the 30th of December, a storm blew in. This was Montgomery's chance, and he issued his orders. He would lead 300 New Yorkers around the south edge of the city to the so-called Lower Town, which was at the level of the St. Lawrence. Benedict Arnold meanwhile would strike from the north, and he would also aim for the Lower Town, whilst other units faked an assault on the powerful walls from the Plains of Abraham. Montgomery hoped that they would seize the Lower Town, and that might force the Upper Town, the oldest fortified heart of Quebec, to surrender.

• 58:58Dan Snow?

  Just past 4 a.m. on the last day of the year, a British sentry standing on the walls saw two red rockets exploding like fireworks above him. He bellowed, "Turn out, turn out!" And the bells of the many churches and monasteries of Quebec began to clang, summoning defenders from their beds. Montgomery led his 300 men along the riverbank, crawling over boulders, climbing cliffs above the river to avoid the big sheets of ice that the river had carelessly strewn across the route. He was trying to sneak into the Lower Town of Quebec from this southern side. Montgomery's men cut through a barricade that blocked off the river, but beyond that lay a strong point with a cannon in it. Montgomery raised his sword and charged.

• 59:44Dan Snow?

  Now, there is a rule in this life. If you want a job doing properly, you get the Royal Navy to do it. And that night, it was Montgomery's enormous bad luck to choose a point of offences manned by Royal Navy sailors with three small cannon. Helping them out, I should say, was about thirty French-speaking Quebec militiamen who deserve a mention too. These men watched Montgomery coming across the no man's land. They waited until the Americans were fifty yards out, and only then did they touch their slow matches to the little mounds of gunpowder atop the barrels of their guns. Bolts of flame shot down to ignite the powder beneath, and the three cannons spat their lethal load at the attackers. A British witness simply wrote, shrieks and groans followed the discharge.

• 1:00:30Dan Snow?

  When the smoke cleared away, there was not a soul to be seen. Montgomery was hit in the head and killed instantly. Most of the men with him went down too. Montgomery had been made a Major General. He'd been promoted for his success at Fort St John and Montreal, but he'd never received news of that promotion. He was dead before the letter could reach him. In a snowstorm far from home on New Year's Eve, in a war that he could not have imagined that he'd be fighting five years before, he'd written to his wife before he left, "I have been dragged from obscurity much against my inclination, and not without some struggle." He told her that at the very first opportunity, "He would slip my neck out of the yoke. I will return to my family and farm."

• 1:01:16Dan Snow?

  He never would. Nor would Captain Jacob Cheeseman, his aide de camp, who would want to look his best for the attack and had slipped some gold coins into his pockets that anyone finding him could arrange a proper burial. Another aide, twenty-year-old John McPherson, left the letter to be sent in the event of his death. It was written to his father, and it was sent after this attack. "If you receive this, it'll be the last this hand will ever write to you. I experience no reluctance in this cause."

• 1:01:48Dan Snow?

  Those men now lay dead on the frozen ground. The remainder of Montgomery's men retreated. Had they pushed on, they may have panicked those defenders into flight, but that well-timed cannon volley had blasted any bravery out of those Americans, and back they went. Now, on the other side of the city, from the north side, Benedict Arnold was leading his column through the snow. They had to abandon a sledge with a cannon on it after it got stuck in a snowdrift. The British sentries on the walls caught sight of them, and they opened up a withering fire. Men fell in the snow, their corpses freshly dusted with flakes within minutes. Captain Jonas Hubbard had survived the hell that was Bunker Hill, but few men got that lucky twice in one year, and he was now felled in this narrow lane.

• 1:02:33Dan Snow?

  "March on!" he shouted with his last strength. They got to a ten-foot-high barricade protecting the side of the lower town, but without cannon, they had no choice other than to launch a heroic frontal assault. Through the snow they searched, the night illuminated by the flash of hundreds of gunplatter explosions in musket pans, the spit of that flame coming out of the muzzles of the muskets, lanterns bobbling about in the hands of charging men, grenades landing among them, killing, stunning, blinding, men peering through the darkness, trying to regain their night vision after searing flash of white and orange. Arnold was knocked down, he took a bullet to the ankle. Daniel Morgan jumped into his role. He bellowed for a ladder, leant it against the barricade here, and he was the first up.

• 1:03:18Dan Snow?

  A musket fired at him so close that the blast burned his face, a ball grazed his cheek, another passed through his hat, it blasted him off the wall. Up he went again. He got on top, he rolled under a cannon to avoid the bayonets searching for his vitals. These men followed, and they overwhelmed the decidedly half-hearted defenders. Some of the defenders ran, others threw down their weapons and discovered they'd always been keen fans of Thomas Paine. About thirty prisoners were taken, the Americans were on a roll, or they should have been, but instead they paused. They paused to allow the stragglers that had been lost in the blizzard to catch up, they paused to kind of get their bearings. Morgan raged his officers to push on. The next barricade was unguarded, it looked like, but his subordinates wanted to wait to just get their bearings before they moved on.

• 1:04:03Dan Snow?

  "I was overruled by hard reasoning," wrote Morgan later. "To these arguments, I sacrificed my own opinion and lost the town." When they eventually set off, there was a thin dawn trying to light up the sky, and they swept along behind Morgan through the warehouses and the streets of this lower town. This was the moment which would determine the fate of Canada. These were the men who'd crossed the Appalachians. It was said about them that they were famine-proof, and at that moment, I think they felt iron-proof too. In their hats, these men had stuck a scrap of paper with liberty or death scrawled across it. In their hands were their muskets, largely useless in the snow, other than brackets for the bayonets on top of them. They arrived at this second barricade.

• 1:04:46Dan Snow?

  A few minutes earlier, they might have swept the defenders aside. There were a few dozen British redcoats, along with largely French-speaking militia unit. There had been, I think, a mixed morale among those manning that barricade. These militiamen, they were farmers, they were boatsmen, they were craftsmen, they were not convinced they want to exchange bayonet thrusts with these superhuman wilderness warriors. But, just before Morgan arrived at this barricade, so did the British reinforcements. Now, these were those former Scottish Highland soldiers, alongside them, a bunch more Royal Navy sailors. And in British imperial history, when the sailors team up with the Highlanders, I'm afraid it is thoughts and prayers for the opposition. The redcoats were placed in a double line behind the barricade.

• 1:05:29Dan Snow?

  There was a cannon situated to fire down the street. The Highlanders took up positions in buildings either side of the street. They turned it into a trap, they turned it a killing zone. Morgan raced forward, a naval officer invited him to surrender, Morgan shot him dead. Then the British opened up, from in front, behind the barricade, from either side, there was a blizzard of iron and lead falling on them as thick as snowflakes. Down went the key officers. Civilians screamed as bloody war suddenly invaded their quiet street. Morgan died inside a house for shelter. One by one, his men surrendered, he refused to do so. He was the only man left, he held out, and eventually the British found a priest who he's prepared to hand his sword to, tears of rage in his eyes.

• 1:06:12Dan Snow?

  Rather than surrender to a hated British officer. Meanwhile, Carlton sent down reinforcements to counter-attack. Down raced another group of Highlanders, their clan songs on their lips, the old thrill of battle coursing through their blood. They seized back this captured barricade here and trapped all the remaining Americans still inside the lower town. It was over. The enemy had been repulsed with slaughter, in the words of Carlton. A British soldier wrote in his journal, "A glorious day for us, and as complete a little victory as ever was gained." But Carlton remains cautious. He kept his men inside the city. There were those who said he could have wiped out the American army if he'd given his men free rein. In fact, the Americans issued muskets to the men in hospital beds in expectation of

• 1:06:56Dan Snow?

  the attack. But that kind of talk is cheap. It's easy for those of us who don't feel the burden of commands on our shoulders like Carlton did. He was a man at that stage entirely responsible for the fate of an empire. Every soldier that he lost was one that he couldn't replace. So, he was cautious. He had 500 Americans captive inside Quebec, or dead in the streets, frozen stiff as boards within hours, or who'd fallen through cracks in the frozen St. Lawrence ice during the retreat. He'd lost only six or so men. Another hundred Americans woke up next morning and declared their periods of enlistment over, and they marched home. Arnold had only a few hundred men left. He asked the American force in Montreal for reinforcements, they said they had none to send.

• 1:07:40Dan Snow?

  They were fearful of an uprising. He sent messages to Washington begging him for reinforcements. He had none to send, and he was actually considering resigning at the time. Poor old Skylar, battling his poor health in upstate New York, he didn't dare to send any troops. The indigenous peoples, the Mohawk Valley, were looking quite threatening. Some troops were found from the rebellious colonies and sent to Canada, but they arrived exhausted, their clothes shredded, feet bleeding after long journeys across hostile terrain.

• 1:08:06Dan Snow?

  The spring thaw brought plenty of professional troops right up the St Lawrence on Royal Navy ships. The frigate Surprise was first, others followed, and the Americans retreated. Montreal, well, it hadn't thrived under American occupation. That American governor had slapped a tax on the people there, one which we should note, they had not voted for. So that taxation without representation went down badly and undermined one of the key American selling points. Amazingly, the Americans sent a committee, including the mighty Benjamin Franklin, to Montreal at this period to see if the situation could be fixed. But it could not be fixed, and that committee immediately sailed right back down and headed back to Philadelphia. There was some back and forward in the spring and

• 1:08:49Dan Snow?

  summer of 1776. Again, you see small groups of sickened men blundering around this landscape, not knowing where the enemy was or what their intentions were. But in essence, the British had the upper hand. They could push more reinforcements more easily into Canada via the St Lawrence than the Americans could, and slowly the British reconquered their province. In late June, Benedict Arnold shot his own horses, boarded the last boat at a St John's and pushed that boat out from the shore himself. He was the last American to leave Canada. There would be fighting the following year. The British would swoop down Lake Champlain from Canada to be humiliated at Saratoga. We will be covering that on this podcast extensively, so make sure you subscribe. And the year after that, Congress

• 1:09:32Dan Snow?

  authorized another invasion of Canada. That Frenchman fighting for the Americans, the Marquis de Lafayette, was given command, but lack of men and bateau and supplies meant it never even took place. That didn't stop the Americans asking for Canada in the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. And at that Congress, at that conference, the British decided to keep hold of Canada. They kept hold of a territory that its redcoats had bled for, had crisscrossed with blistered feet and empty stomachs. But as I mentioned in a previous podcast, in my Canada being the 51st state podcast, in fact, some of Canada, or as we say, the British province of Quebec, it did get handed over. The Americans did successfully conquer some of it. The British agreed to relinquish all of their

• 1:10:13Dan Snow?

  land to the south of the Great Lakes and to the east of the Mississippi. So that's Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois. They were all shorn from the British province, and they were given to the young American republic with the stroke of a pen. Their fate decided. In part by men of unimaginable toughness who'd slogged out in savage skirmishes across that wilderness, but really mostly in the calculating minds of the pampered statesmen thousands of miles away, very different men, ones who thought it natural, they were entitled to swap great swathes of territory across multiple continents over a fancy table in Paris. As a result, Canada as we know it would remain part of the British Empire.

• 1:10:55Dan Snow?

  The Americans had failed to conquer it outright in 1775. But as we've seen, in that year, they came very, very close. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. You know, you could have watched this episode and others on YouTube. That's right. You can peek behind the curtain of how we record this podcast on our YouTube channel. Very exciting new development here. Just click the link in the show notes and head over to subscribe. New YouTube releases every Friday, friends. Don't miss out.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

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• 1:12:30Dan Snow?

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