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 […]
Just sixty days after the start of armed hostilities at Lexington Green, the Continental Congress’s decision to invade Canada resulted in one of the worst defeats in the War for Independence.[1] While exact casualty figures are difficult to discern, likely half of the American forces sent north were killed in battle, wounded, captured, or died […]
Many followers of the history of the American Revolution are aware of the attempted invasion of Canada by Colonial forces in late 1775. The attack failed, and American designs on Canada were thwarted, for a time anyway. This was not the end of their pursuit to incorporate Canada into the Revolution on the American side. […]
The once-promising Continental invasion of Canada was clearly headed for disaster by May 1776. With British forces chasing the American Army out of the Province of Quebec, Continental leaders started grappling with the fact that their ten-month strategic offensive in the north had failed. Canada would not be joining the Continental Congress as a fourteenth […]
On November 16, 1775, Robert Dixon lay dying not far from Quebec. Among the first American troops commissioned by the Continental Congress, he was a sergeant in Matthew Smith’s Company of Thompson’s Rifle Battalion. The previous July, he had walked with his company from the backcountry of Pennsylvania all the way to Boston, a distance […]
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 […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Mark R. Anderson on an accidental shooting at Fort Anne and its consequences that he uncovered while researching the Canadian campaign. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatches […]
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 […]
The debate over mandatory vaccination for Covid-19 has led to many articles referring to how George Washington handled a similar issue, this one involving smallpox, with the Continental Army early in the American Revolution. With the advantage of hindsight, the decision Washington made to fully inoculate (not vaccinate) his army may today seem obvious, but […]
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. […]
Most modern historical treatments of the American invasion of Canada disparage Brig. Gen. David Wooster for his leadership in Canada. A detailed examination of his command from January to May 1776, however, lends credence to an early biographer’s conclusion that “Gen. Wooster was censured by those who did not know the obstacles he had to […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews PhD student and JAR contributor Jonathan Bayer on his discovery of an account of the surrender of Quebec to American forces in 1776 that was not only not true but labeled in the Pennsylvania Evening Post as “Fake news.” New episodes of Dispatches are available for free […]
In 1776, the Pennsylvania Evening Post printed a letter, allegedly from Paris, which reported that American commander Benedict Arnold had captured the last major British stronghold in Canada, Quebec City.[1] While almost certainly not the first of its kind, this letter from the Post is one of the earliest examples of fake news during the Revolutionary […]
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 […]
When Ethan Allen described his defeat and capture outside Montreal at Longue Pointe on September 25, 1775, he observed that “it was a motley parcel of soldiery which composed both parties.” The enemy included Canadian Loyalists, British regulars, Indian Department officers, and a few Native warriors. In the autobiographical A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews historian, retired Air Force officer, and JAR contributor Mark R. Anderson on his research into the causes of Ethan Allen’s early defeat at Montreal. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American Revolution. Dispatches is a free podcast that puts a […]
During the American War of Independence, the British Army officer corps routinely relegated its surgeons and physicians to a secondary status among its ranks. A few regimental surgeons made contributions to medical science, but the vast majority were relatively unknown both in their time and today.[1] American military doctors fared a bit better, but are mostly […]
