The Battle of Quebec
A desperate attempt and snowy defeat
This continues my series marking the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution. Previously was Lord Dunmore’s Scheme on November 15, 1775; next is Common Sense on January 10, 1776.
Throughout fall 1775, the American Patriots’ Northern Army, led by General Montgomery, had been invading Canada. When we last glanced at them, on 13 November 1775, they had seized Montreal without a battle. The Canadian people there had been unwilling to fight for the royal governor, and happy to conclude terms of surrender with General Montgomery and welcome him into the city. Meanwhile, the royal governor, General Carlton, on 11 November, evacuated north to Quebec City.
Montgomery hoped to quickly see “a virtuous Provincial Convention assembled” (as he wrote in the terms of capitulation), and when Congress finally sent a committee north to investigate the Canadian situation, they urged “a free meeting of the people” which whether coming from the whole colony or part could send delegates to Congress. This was the same way the Patriots in the thirteen colonies had done things.
However, the Canadian sympathizers didn’t do it. There never was a Canadian Provincial Congress, or even Parish Congresses. No delegates were ever sent to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
I suspect this was because they just weren’t used to it. Canada, unlike the thirteen colonies, had never had an elected legislature. Even trial by jury were a new thing since the British had captured Canada in the French and Indian War. The local Patriots had mass meetings and committees of interested citizens, which was all they were used to. If they hesitated at anything more, and waited for guidance from General Montgomery or someone else, I’m not surprised.
But that guidance never came. Congress’s “Committee to the Northern Army” never came north of Fort Ticonderoga. General Montgomery wrote that he was “mortified” at this, but he barely spent any time on politics himself either. To his credit, he had military matters on his mind. He set up a military regime to keep Montreal secure, and quickly moved downriver to attack the last outpost of the British Army in Canada, where Governor Carlton had already fled: Quebec City.
Montgomery reached Quebec City on December 2nd, 1775, with an advance party of 500 men. Another small Patriot army of 600 under Benedict Arnold, coming from Boston via the Kennebec and Chaudière Rivers in what’s now Maine, had already arrived on November 14th but withdrawn without enough strength to attack or besiege. The united force, with more men arriving later from Montreal, began besieging Quebec on December 5th.
But in the meantime, Governor Carlton had provisioned Quebec City - which was already well-fortified - for a lengthy siege and expelled every man who wasn’t willing to take up arms for the King. That gave him perhaps 1800 armed men in all. He knew a British relief fleet was on the way and would probably come when the winter ice broke up in the St. Lawrence in May; if he could hold out till then, he and royal authority would be safe.
Montgomery and Arnold, too, knew they were playing against time. But they had a sooner deadline: Most of their troops’ enlistments would expire on January 1. They’d pleaded with Congress and the state legislatures for reinforcements, but very few had arrived yet. Between that, and how Quebec was well-provisioned, and how they were short on artillery (the cannons they did have were so light as to scarcely cause any turmoil inside the city), Montgomery and Arnold knew they would need to do something.
(Their sharpshooters did cause problems, but nowhere near enough to provoke distress.)
They declined to put the local Canadian Patriot troops in the front line, due to the urban Quebec residents’ distaste for the rural settlers; they were hoping for local sympathy to provoke a surrender. Montgomery proposed surrender on December 15; Carlton rebuffed him saying he would have “no manner of communication with rebels.”
Montgomery planned an attack on the Upper City of Quebec - on the hilltop, very well-protected, and the bastion of the British garrison - on Christmas Day; however, a prisoner (Joshua Wolf) and a deserter (I don’t know his name) both escaped and told Carlton of the plan. Montgomery, knowing of their escape, called off the attack.
He planned a new attack for New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1775. It would attack the lower town, a less-defended strip of merchants’ houses and warehouses by the riverside. It would gain far less - the upper town would still be able to hold out - but it was the only other option, on the last possible date before his troops’ enlistments expired.
But in the meantime, the Patriot army was facing another, even more deadly, enemy: smallpox.
We don’t know how the Great North American Smallpox Epidemic started. It had first been recorded in Massachusetts in early 1774, even as the Port of Boston was closed and Massachusetts began to rebel. It hadn’t been significant at first, but as the war broke out and the smallpox virus spread, it became much more of a worry. This smallpox epidemic would continue throughout the Revolution, and jump across North America slaughtering myriads of people both white, black, and Indian.
There wasn’t any treatment for smallpox. There never was, up until it was eradicated in 1977. At the time the Patriots’ Northern Army faced it in 1775, there wasn’t even any vaccination - Jenner first announced the vaccination in 1798, and it took a while for it to reach the Americas. The only thing that General Montgomery could do was to nurse the sick... and that demanded good conditions that were hard to come by in active campaigning and still surly if not hostile countryside. It also demanded nurses willing to get close to smallpox patients.
The one known way to protect oneself from smallpox was to have already had it. In Europe, where smallpox swept through the towns and countryside every several years, nurses for smallpox patients were people who’d survived it in the past. But the Americas were much less densely-populated, so there weren’t enough vulnerable people for smallpox to keep spreading. So, smallpox had scarcely been seen in most parts for decades. This meant, when it did show up again, there were few people who’d had it and thus few people able to safely nurse patients.
The one way to protect against smallpox was variolation: intentionally giving a healthy person a small dose of smallpox virus in hopes he’d have a mild case, recover, and be immune for the rest of his life. This often killed people - in the previous American epidemic, in 1721 Boston, 2% of variolated people died - but that was still far better than the 10-30% death rates from standard smallpox.
Later on, in 1777, at Valley Forge, General Washington - looking back at Montgomery’s experience, among others - would order all the Continental Army variolated. Leaving the army un-variolated would risk too many of his men being sick with smallpox at the wrong time just before a battle.
But two years earlier, in 1775, General Montgomery knew that variolation would take too long.
For several weeks, a soldier being variolated would be sick with smallpox. It’d be a mild case, usually, but still one that left him unable to fight. Montgomery, facing Quebec in December 1775, didn’t have that time. His men’s enlistments were about to expire, and there was a sizeable British force in front of him, and he must have sensed that Canadians’ loyalty - as many other people’s had in other campaigns throughout history - depended on success.
So, Montgomery prohibited variolation.
Many soldiers did it anyway, and they only added to the sick count. Montgomery had maybe 10,000 troops in Canada in the Northern Army in all; we can only guess how few were still able to fight on New Year’s Eve.
So, taking the troops healthy enough to fight, in the middle of a blizzard, Montgomery attacked.
It wasn’t a good plan. Two columns would attack Lower Town, one from each end, one under him and another under Arnold; the third under Colonel James Livingston and Brown would feint an attack on St. Jean’s Gate in Upper Town. None of those forces could help each other if one of them got into trouble. But it was probably the best he could do.
Brown fired flares to signal the attack at 5 AM. In the first hour, things went very wrong: British soldiers firing a cannon from a blockhouse killed both Montgomery and his aide-de-camp. In the chaos, the now senior officer of that column, Colonel Donald Campbell of New York, ordered a withdraw.
On the other side of Lower Town, a musket shot hit General Arnold in the leg, felling him and sending him back to a hospital. His officers pressed on and captured several positions in house-to-house fighting, but Carlton - with troops from the opposite side after Campbell’s withdrawal - outflanked them and forced them back. A British sortie cut off their retreat, and the last of Arnold’s column surrendered around dawn.
The Patriot attack on Quebec had failed utterly.
Arnold, taking command from his sickbed (as the senior officer after Montgomery’s death), ordered Patriot-leaning militia captains to send reinforcements at once to prevent a collapse. It would be prevented - for the moment.
Meanwhile in the rest of America, on New Year’s Day 1776, George Washington and the Patriot army still besieging Boston finally learned that King George - back in late October - had declared the colonies officially in rebellion. Enraged, they ceremonially burned the king’s proclamation. “We were determined to shake off all connections with,” Washington wrote, “a tyrant and his diabolical ministry.”
Enlistments were expiring in that army as well, but many reenlisted - perhaps as many as 9,000 out of 16,000 soldiers. Smallpox was also present there (in besieged Boston too), and Washington’s army was just as vulnerable as Montgomery’s. But, in a friendly countryside where troops could be nursed - and in organized camps which could to some extent be quarantined - its effects were less severe.
Down south, throughout late November and December 1775, local Patriot and Loyalist militia in South Carolina skirmished in what became known as the “Snow Campaign” (due to a snowstorm late in the campaign.) The Patriots won, with minimal deaths on each side, cementing Patriot control of South Carolina.
In Virginia, darker events were happening. In mid-December 1775, the Virginian Patriot army had stormed into Norfolk and driven the royal governor Dunmore and his multiracial Loyalist/British army to ships offshore. However, he would periodically be secretly resupplied from Tories in Norfolk. In frustration, on New Year’s Day, Dunmore began to shoot at the Patriot army near the docks, trying to burn out their strongpoint. But meanwhile, the Patriots set fire to Tory houses in the city. The flames spread, burning out almost all of Norfolk. Dunmore was driven away from Norfolk, but almost all the city’s inhabitants were rendered homeless, and the city would not recover till after the Revolution.
The Canadian Campaign would hang on for months more into 1776, with Montreal in American hands and a small Patriot force under Arnold camped outside Quebec with many still sick with smallpox. Arnold, and the other Patriots in Canada, seemed to think that the Patriots could still take and hold the colony.
But there was never again any realistic attempt to seize Quebec City. Montgomery’s attack was a near-forlorn hope - but looking from an outside view, it might have been the only chance he had. In theory, the Continental Congress or General Washington could’ve sent another army to Canada afterwards - but in reality, with many other concerns on their minds, they didn’t. And without that new army, Arnold had no hope of attacking Quebec.
With Quebec still in British hands, the British could, and did, send a relief fleet in the spring. As soon as the relief fleet arrived - on May 6th, 1776 - the Patriot presence in Canada was quickly rolled up.
The New Year’s Eve attack represents the last semi-realistic hope of the Patriots taking Canada.