The adjectives leveled Benedict Arnold’s way by contemporaries and historians leave little room for doubt. Though he inspired devotion among those serving under him, the man rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Prickly, heavy-handed and arrogant, he seemed to thrive on personal confrontation with those who differed with him. The famous clash between […]
June 9, 1776: The colonel and the preacher exchanged concerned glances as they crouched in the swamp. They were spattered in mud, exhausted, and cut off from their unit. Visibility was poor through the trees, but they could hear the crack of musket fire nearby . . . the enemy was getting close. They saw […]
In January 1792 forty-three-year-old Arthur Bowler left Halifax, Nova Scotia, on his second Transatlantic journey. Captured in Africa almost thirty years earlier, enslaved in Newport, Rhode Island, for nearly twenty years, a free man for ten, he was returning to Africa. He left fragmentary clues buried in archives on three continents which illuminate an “ordinary” […]
When the fighting between the British and American forces broke out on April 19, 1775, just one month prior to the start of the Second Continental Congress no one was sure just where things were going or how they were going to turn out, but one thing was acutely on everyone’s mind at the time. […]
Despite the imperative nature of his unusual name, Remember Baker has garnered significantly less historical attention than fellow Green Mountain Boys Ethan Allen and Seth Warner. Baker seemed destined for an important role in the Revolutionary War, but his life was cut short in an August 22, 1775 incident across the Quebec border. As a result of […]
In the months following the end of the American Revolutionary War, British authorities in Canada desperately required supplies for refugee Loyalists slated to be resettled in that northern colony. The cross-border market that they targeted to meet these supply demands was ironic. They looked southward to a region of the United States that, during the […]
On the third day of November 1775, Brig. Gen. Richard Montgomery and his Continental army triumphantly concluded a taxing two-month siege with the surrender of British Fort St. Johns and its 600-man garrison. Their invasion of Canada had finally gained momentum. A week later, the Continentals assembled on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, ready […]
Throughout history, changes in political order have often been accompanied by the destruction of the old regime’s images and monuments. The July 9, 1776 destruction of King George III’s New York City statue is the most famous and persistent image of such iconoclasm in the American Revolution. In that particular event, after a public reading of […]
In early May 1775, with the Revolutionary War not even one month old, western Massachusetts Patriot leaders and their Stockbridge Indian neighbors developed a plan to use diplomacy to neutralize a looming danger in the north. Stockbridge ambassadors would take a peace message from their community to the New England colonists’ traditional Native enemies in Canada. […]
On June 8, 1776, New York’s Capt. Joseph McCracken presented to the Albany Committee of Correspondence a payroll of men “employed in the taking of Ticonderoga” along with an account of expenses and disbursements. After the required certifications, the committee recommended that it be paid.[1] Questions remain as to why Albany County paid these Charlotte […]
When twenty-three-year-old Capt. Ebenezer Sullivan nobly volunteered himself as a prisoner-exchange hostage in the last weeks of the Canadian invasion, he had no way to foresee the devastating trials and tribulations that he would face as a result of his courageous decision. At the time, he was one of almost five hundred Continentals captured by […]
At the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, there is an exhibit in the core gallery examining the choices, opportunities and constraints of African Americans in Virginia in 1781. Titled “Sometimes, freedom wore a red coat” it seeks to educate people on the effect the British Army had on operating in areas where slavery […]
The war for all practical purposes was over when hostilities ended with a cease fire negotiated by the Americans, British, French, and Spanish in January 1783.[1] In New York, on June 19, British Brig. Gen. Samuel Birch wrote Commander-in-Chief Sir Guy Carleton that he had failed in his mission to locate and apprehend Capt. Cornelius […]
The American invasion of Quebec of 1775-1776 failed to achieve its primary objective: to bring into the fold what the Continental Congress referred to as “the only link wanting, to compleat the bright and strong chains of union.”[1] While Canada would not join its southern brethren in outright rebellion, the Americans’ campaign furnishes important insight into […]
“The Radeau was magnificently decked out today; from her two masts were flying the English flag and in honor of the nation of Braunschweig, the flag of Braunschweig.”[1] What is the military, legal, sovereign, naval, and practical significance of raising two national flags[2] on the same fighting vessel, as was done in Canada on June […]
The fleeting invasion of Canada in 1775, though often consigned to a bit-part in the American Revolutionary drama, proved vital to the emergence of American nationhood. The abortive attack at the walls of Quebec City on New Year’s Eve was one of the first of many major setbacks for the Continental Army and ensured there […]
In early 1775, the town major of Quebec decided to pay a visit to Gen. Thomas Gage in Boston. William Dunbar had been an officer in the 44th Regiment of Foot during the French and Indian War, and although he had sold his regimental commission after that conflict ended, he settled in Canada and been […]
The radeau (French, singular for “raft”) was co-opted for eighteenth century warfare on and along Lake George and Lake Champlain, to deal with the challenges of wilderness, inland waterways. The radeau’s design was unique, incorporating a pragmatic approach to the problem of transportation and concentration of ship-mounted artillery in a self-contained transport in shallow water. The […]
Almost forty years ago, I led a team of nautical archaeologists in the study of the steamboat Phoenix, which had burned on Lake Champlain the night of September 4, 1819. In researching the Phoenix’s history, I came across the reference that “in July, 1818 the remains of General Richard Montgomery, the dashing American leader who […]
Many people involved in the American Revolution played but a short role in the long war. A John Babcock, for example, apparently served as an ensign in Capt. Peter Ruttan’s Company of the 4th Battalion, New Jersey Volunteers, but was taken prisoner previous to his actually being commissioned, and he never served again. All that […]
