Carleton used the respite to reorganize his disordered troops. It was slowly becoming obvious that the threat to his right flank had disappeared, and he could now concentrate his men better. When Morgan finally got impatient and roused his men again, Carleton was ready.

The Americans pulled themselves through the twisting streets leading to Upper Town as musket fire poured down on them from houses and barricades. The snow for which they had so ardently hoped also worked in favor of the defenders hidden behind their positions. Carleton, meanwhile, maneuvered some men into the unmanned barricade, which had been abandoned by the Americans. The colonists were cut off.

The fight went on for three hours as the American column, stretched along the streets, was gradually broken down into smaller and smaller pockets. Ever defiant, Morgan simply refused to surrender and dared the British to come and take his sword. He eventually turned it over to a very frightened priest. Virtually the entire force was captured, except for those like Arnold who were wounded early and sent to the rear.

Arnold himself endured the crude medical care of his day valiantly and reassured the Canadians that his troops had taken Lower Town and that the time was ripe to join the revolution. The Canadians were less than convinced. After dawn, Arnold got word that the British were moving toward the hospital. He tried to rouse some men for defense, but they responded with an apathy born of suffering, and little was done. Fortunately, Carleton became overly cautious and recalled his men, although there is no doubt their attack would have totally destroyed Arnold’s force had they pressed it.

With that, the attack on Québec frittered to an end. The total American casualties came to 454, of which 440 were in Arnold’s command. All 14 of the casualties in Montgomery’s force came from the single cannon shot. Arnold lost 35 troops killed, 33 wounded and 372 taken prisoner, including Daniel Morgan. (Aaron Burr seems to have been ill at the time of the attack, although Arnold later claimed in a letter that he had acquitted himself well both before and afterward.) British losses were a mere 20 killed and wounded. The fledgling American army had suffered its first defeat on the battlefield.

The rest of the adventure was anti-climactic, if long and drawn out. On January 10, 1776, Arnold was promoted to brigadier general and given overall command of what remained of the rebel forces outside Québec. He refused to quit the field and with a handful of men–just 50 to 75–put the city ‘under siege’ again for the remainder of the winter while he recovered from his wound. The siege was, naturally, wholly ineffective, but Carleton decided to sit tight and await reinforcements as soon as the river became navigable. During an exchange of gunfire, which occurred intermittently throughout the siege, Suzannah Grier was shot and killed on April 13.

Arnold was relieved on April Fool’s Day, 1776, by Brig. Gen. David Wooster, whose boorish behavior antagonized everyone, including Washington, who was miles away. Wooster was relieved on May 1 by Maj. Gen. John Thomas, who learned on the following day that 15 British ships were coming up the St. Lawrence to relieve the city. On May 5, he officially lifted the siege and was preparing his troops for an orderly withdrawal when the first three ships, bearing 400 British troops, approached Québec and spotted the blue flag that Carleton had said he would fly as a signal that his garrison was still holding out. Once the first reinforcements had debarked, Carleton combined them with a roughly equal number of his own troops and led them toward Thomas’ men, who panicked and fled, leaving much of their equipment behind. Québec was now safe for the landing of fresh troops–a total of 9,000 British and 4,400 Hessian and Brunswick soldiers, under the overall command of Maj. Gen. John Burgoyne.

Thomas and his ragged, starving troops retreated to Sorel, where he contacted smallpox on May 21. He died on June 2, and Brig. Gen. John Sullivan, who had just arrived with a column of New York troops, took overall command of the haggard army.

Arnold, meanwhile, remained busy despite the blow to his pride over the loss of command. He was made commandant of Montréal and, while serving in that capacity, led a small expedition that — mostly through bluff but also with a good bit of generalship–secured the release of hundreds of American prisoners from a larger British force. He then returned to Québec, where Sullivan informed him of the arrival of thousands of the expected British reinforcements. In retrospect, it is obvious that the British would never have allowed Arnold to hold Québec, and thus Canada, even had the American expedition been fully successful during the winter and even if Arnold had 2,000 men in the city. Finally realizing the hopelessness of the situation, Arnold agreed that it was time to quit Canada. With the fiasco clearly over, Arnold told Sullivan he would be content to be the last American to leave the country.

The surviving Americans followed Montgomery’s route back down to Fort Ticonderoga. On the summer evening of June 18, the Canadian border town of St. Johns was burning fiercely along the waterfront, put to the torch by a retreating army. Between the banks of the Sorel River the remnants of the expedition rowed south toward safety. Only two Americans remained in St. Johns. When they heard the beating of British drums in the distance, the men shot their horses and one, Captain James Wilkinson, climbed into a canoe, grabbing a paddle. The second waited until his aide settled in, then pushed off the canoe and climbed in himself. That second man was Brig. Gen. Benedict Arnold, making good on his vow to be the last to leave Canada.

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This article was written by Lee Enderlin and originally published in the August 1999 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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