Shattered American Army Retreats from Canada to Crown Point

# The Shattered American Army Retreats from Canada to Crown Point

In the autumn of 1775, the Continental Congress had authorized one of the most ambitious military ventures of the early Revolution: a two-pronged invasion of Canada designed to bring the northern British province into the fold of rebellion and, more practically, to eliminate it as a staging ground for attacks into the American colonies. One column, commanded by Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, advanced north along the traditional Lake Champlain–Richelieu River corridor, capturing Montreal in November. The other, led by Colonel Benedict Arnold, undertook an extraordinary and punishing march through the Maine wilderness to reach Quebec. When the two forces converged outside the walls of Quebec City in late December, they launched a desperate New Year's Eve assault in a blinding snowstorm. The attack was a catastrophe. Montgomery was killed, Arnold was badly wounded in the leg, and hundreds of American soldiers were killed or captured. What remained of the American force settled into a feeble siege outside Quebec's walls, waiting for reinforcements that would arrive too few and too late.

Through the bitter winter and into the spring of 1776, the American position in Canada deteriorated steadily. Arnold, though hobbled by his wound, worked tirelessly to hold the army together, but he lacked the men, supplies, and artillery to pose any real threat to the British garrison inside Quebec. When reinforcements did trickle northward, they brought with them something far more destructive than any British cannonade: smallpox. The virus swept through the Continental ranks with terrifying speed, incapacitating entire regiments. Dysentery and other camp diseases compounded the misery. Soldiers who had marched north with visions of liberating Canada now lay shivering in makeshift hospitals, too weak to fight or even retreat without assistance. Command of the American forces in Canada passed through several hands, including Brigadier General David Wooster and then Major General John Thomas, who himself succumbed to smallpox in June 1776. Major General John Sullivan arrived to take charge, but by then the situation was beyond salvaging.

The arrival of British reinforcements under General Guy Carleton in May sealed the Americans' fate. Carleton, the capable governor of Quebec, pushed the weakened Continental forces out of their positions methodically, and what had begun as a slow withdrawal became an increasingly desperate retreat. The Americans fell back from Quebec to Sorel, from Sorel to Montreal, and from Montreal to Saint-Jean, abandoning each position as the British pressed southward. Sullivan managed to avoid complete destruction of the army, but the retreat was harrowing—marked by disorder, starvation, and the constant suffering of the sick and dying who had to be carried or carted along muddy roads and waterways.

By late June and into the summer of 1776, the shattered remnants of the invasion force straggled south down Lake Champlain and reached Crown Point, New York. The garrison that assembled there bore almost no resemblance to the confident army that had departed the previous year. Thousands were ill, morale had collapsed, and supplies were critically short. Crown Point and nearby Fort Ticonderoga became the last line of defense against a potential British advance down the Champlain corridor into the Hudson Valley—a strategic nightmare that, if realized, could have severed New England from the rest of the colonies.

The importance of holding this line was not lost on the Continental leadership. Benedict Arnold, despite the failures in Canada, threw himself into the urgent task of building a makeshift fleet on Lake Champlain to contest British control of the waterway. His efforts culminated in the Battle of Valcour Island in October 1776, where his small flotilla was largely destroyed but succeeded in delaying Carleton's advance long enough that the British commander decided it was too late in the season to continue south. That delay proved consequential; it gave the Americans a full winter to regroup, and when the British did advance the following year under General John Burgoyne, the Americans were prepared enough to engineer the stunning victory at Saratoga in 1777—the triumph that brought France into the war. The broken, disease-ravaged army that limped into Crown Point in the summer of 1776 had suffered one of the Revolution's most demoralizing defeats, yet its survival, and the determination of the men who held that thin defensive line, helped preserve the possibility of American independence.