The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. As part of this, I’m writing monthly columns about the politics of the era, written the same way I’d write them today. The events described here took place in September1775. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter here:
Our troops are now on the march, just not where we thought they would be marching.
General George Washington is hunkered down outside of Boston, facing off against General Thomas Gage at Boston. This is where we all expected the next blow to fall.
Instead, we are told by reliable sources, that a Council of War has rejected Washington’s plan for a daring — but dangerous — amphibious assault on the British troops in Boston. Instead, Washington has reduced his force outside the Massachusetts capital and dispatched it northward to rally the French-speaking people of Quebec to our cause.
It is not our custom to criticize the military judgments of General Washington, but this cries out for an exception. This Quebec venture risks being a disaster that our tenuous enterprise can ill afford.
Let’s begin with the Council of War that Washington held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, only days ago on September 11. A summary of the war council that we have obtained lays out a dire situation. [Modern editor’s note: This comes from an actual report of Washington’s Council of War now in the National Archives.] Gunpowder is running low. So are the funds necessary to support a standing army.
Washington is rightly concerned that he will not be able to hold an army of farmers together once their enlistments expire and winter starts to set in. “Blankets in particular are much wanted,” the summary says. “The Soldiery grow impatient to get Home already — we shall find it a very hard Task to detain them when they feel the Severity of a Northern Winter without proper Covering.”
The choice before the council was whether to start building winter barracks — a “large and costly provision” that would require so much wood it would require consuming “Fences, Woods Orchards & even Houses” in the neighborhood — or launch an attack.
Washington laid out a plan to send men in flat-bottom boats — 50 apiece — across Back Bay to take on the British. Washington’s war council, we are told, rejected this gambit as unlikely to succeed. The army would build barracks instead, preferring to lose men through lack of re-enlistment than through a bloody battle.
This was not an unwise decision. Washington and his war council had learned — from British deserters and, yes, spies inside Boston — that the British had no plans of their own to attack until they were reinforced. Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether Gage’s army will be reinforced. The British already have 10,000 soldiers in North America (or on the way here), but British officials have been reluctant to divert troops from elsewhere. They have 7,000 in Ireland, a figure already considered dangerously low lest lower numbers tempt the Irish into rebellion. They have 23,000 in Britain itself, but that number is considered necessary for deterring both foreign adversaries (the French and Spanish are never to be trusted) and domestic rebels (such as Jacobites in Scotland who might wish to restore the vanquished Stuart family to the throne). There are another 7,700 troops scattered elsewhere, primarily the West Indies and the Mediterranean. Those would be drawn down and redirected to North America, but only at the risk that the French or Spanish would seize the opportunity — and some British possession, from Jamaica to Gibraltar.
The word from London is that King George III is carping at his prime minister, Lord North, for not doing enough to increase these numbers. “The misfortune is that at the beginning of this American business there has been an unwillingness to augment the army and navy,” the king wrote to Lord North in late August. The king had wanted to increase enlistments in Ireland: “This was objected to in Cabinet: If it had been adopted the army would have been at least two or three thousand stronger at this hour.” The cabinet, though, might have been wary of arming more Irish, lest those arms someday be turned against them. The king has railed that London merchants “are so thoroughly absorbed in their private interests” that they weren’t doing more to offer more aid to the crown.
The king, though, is not blameless. When some Scotsmen offered to raise regiments in return for an officer’s rank, he rejected the notion — he wanted more control over who would have commissions in what was supposed to be his army. Still, he railed that enlistments were running below their targets and demanded to know why. “The cause of Great Britain is not yet sufficiently popular,” Lord North told him. This was not an answer the king wanted to hear.
With the British paralyzed by inaction and political conflict, Washington’s war council has decided on a new venture. It has sent an army north to Quebec.
The Continental Congress has long been fascinated — too fascinated, some might say — by the prospect of winning over the 75,000 or so inhabitants who were, just a dozen years ago, subjects of the king of France until Britain won them in a war.
You may recall that in 1774 the Continental Congress — in a letter authored by a three- member committee that included Richard Henry Lee of Virginia — invited Quebec to send representatives to the next Congress. That letter advised the people of Quebec of five great rights that the British had denied their new subjects — an elected government, trial by jury, a right not to be jailed without legal procedure, a right to rent land, and freedom of the press.
“These are the rights, without which a people cannot be free and happy, and under the protecting and encouraging influence of which, these colonies have hitherto so amazingly flourished and increased,” the letter said. “These are the rights a profligate Ministry are now striving, by force of arms, to ravish from us, and which we are, with one mind, resolved never to resign but with our lives.”
The people of Quebec were not moved.
This past May, the Second Continental Congress sent a second letter to Quebec, inviting our “friends” to join us “in defense of our common liberty.”
The people of Quebec still remained unmoved.
So now we have sent an army to persuade them — or, in our view, to liberate them from their British oppressors.
I hate to sound like a pessimist but this seems unlikely to succeed.
The French inhabitants of Quebec were traumatized when France lost the war — and them, with it. They are not inclined to do anything to incur the wrath of their new British occupiers. They have no confidence in our cause, and see only risk in joining. Many of them pine for a return to the French empire and, in the meantime, wish both the British — and their English-speaking colonists to the south — to leave them alone. The odds that the people of Quebec will rise up to join our cause seem slight, yet we are now determined to try.
We now have General Richard Montgomery leading 3,000 men past Lake Champlain while General Benedict Arnold leads another 1,000 through the dense north woods in the Massachusetts land known as Maine.
Duty compels us to wish them well, but we must wonder: If Washington’s army around Boston is now officially detailed with preparing for winter, why do we have 4,000 men on the march toward a land where winter comes earlier and harder?
Modern editor’s note: The American expedition into Quebec ended in failure and is one of the reasons why Canada is a separate country today. General Montgomery was killed, but got a county in Virginia named after him.
Sources consulted: National Archives, Constitution Center, “The Last King of America” by Andrew Roberts.