 Chapter 1 of A Chronicle of Carlton. First Baron Dorchester was born at Strayborne, County Tyrone, on the 3rd of September, 1724, the anniversary of Cromwell's two great victories and death. He came of a very old family of English country gentlemen which had migrated to Ireland in the 17th century and intermarried with the other Anglo-Irish families equally devoted to the service of the British Crown. His father was Christopher Carlton of Newry in County Down. His mother was Catherine Ball of County Donegal. His father died comparatively young, and when he was himself fifteen his mother married the rector of Newry, the Reverend Thomas Skelton, whose influence over the six step-children of the household worked wholly for their good. At eighteen Guy received his first commission as Ensign in the 25th foot, then known as Lord Roth's Regiment, and now as the king's own Scottish borderers. At twenty-three he fought gallantly at the siege of Bergen-Op Zoom. Four years later, 1751, he was a lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. He was one of those quiet men whose sterling value is appreciated only by the few till some crisis makes it stand forth before the world at large. Pit, Wolf and George II all recognized his solid virtues. At thirty he was still some way down the list of lieutenants in the Grenadiers, while Wolf, two years his junior in age, had been four years in command of his battalion with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Yet he had long been, my friend Carlton, to Wolf. He was soon to become one of Pit's young men, and he was enough of a coming man to incur the king's displeasure. He had criticised the Henoverians, and the king never forgave him. The third George gloried in the name of Englishmen. But the first two were Henoverian all through, and for an English Guardsman to disparage the Henoverian army was considered next door to Lisey Majesty. Lady Dorchester burnt all her husband's private papers after his death in 1808, so we have lost some of the most intimate records concerning him. But grave Carlton appears so frequently in the letters of his friend Wolf that we can see his character as a young man in almost any aspect short of self-revelation. The first reference has nothing to do with affairs of state. In 1747, Wolf, aged twenty, writing to Miss Lisey, an English girl in Brussels, and signing himself, most sincerely your friend and admirer, says, I was doing the greatest injustice to the dear girls to admit the least doubt of their constancy. Perhaps with respect to ourselves there may be cause of complaint. Carlton, I'm afraid, is a recent example of it. From this we may infer that Carlton was less grave as a young man than Wolf found himself later on. Six years afterward Wolf strongly recommended him for a position which he had himself been asked to fill, that of military tutor to the young Duke of Richmond who was getting a company in Wolf's own regiment. Writing home from Paris in 1753 Wolf tells his mother that the Duke wants some skillful men to travel with him through the Low Countries and into Lorraine. I have proposed of my friend Carlton, whom Lord Albemarle approves of. Lord Albemarle was the British ambassador to France, so Carlton got the post and travelled under the happiest auspices, while learning the frontier on which the Belgian, French, and British allies were to fight the Germans in the Great World War of 1914. It was during this military tour of fortified places that Carlton acquired the engineering skill which a few years later proved of such service to the British cause in Canada. In 1754 George Washington, at that time a young Virginian officer of only twenty-two, fired the first shot in what presently became the Worldwide Seven Years War. The immediate result was disastrous to the British arms and Washington had to give up the command of the Ohio by surrendering fort necessity to the French on, of all dates, the Fourth of July. In 1755 came Braddock's defeat. In 1756 Montcom arrived in Canada and won his first victory at Oswego. In 1757 Wolf distinguished himself by formulating the plan which, if properly executed, would have prevented the British fiasco at Rochefort on the coast of France. But Carlton remained as undistinguished as before. He simply became Lieutenant Colonel commanding the seventy-second foot, now the Seaforth Highlanders. In 1758 his chance appeared to have come at last. Amherst had asked for his services at Louisburg, but the King had neither forgotten nor forgiving the remarks about the Hanoverians and so refused point-blank to Wolf's very great grief and disappointment. It is a public loss, Carlton's not going. Wolf's confidence in Carlton, either as a friend or as an officer, was stronger than ever. Writing to George Ward, afterwards the famous cavalry leader, he said, accidents may happen in the family that may throw my little affairs into disorder. Carlton is so good as to say he will give what help is in his power. May I ask the same favor of you, my oldest friend? Writing to Lord George Sackville, of whom we shall hear more than enough at the crisis of Carlton's career, Wolf said, Amherst will tell you his opinion of Carlton, by which you will probably be better convinced of our loss. Again we want grave Carlton for every purpose of the war. And yet again after the fall of Louisburg. If his majesty had thought proper to let Carlton come with us, as engineer it would have cut the matter much shorter and we might now be ruining the walls of Quebec and completing the conquest of New France. A little later on, Wolf blazes out with indignation over Carlton's suppression by a junior. Ken, Sir John Lignere, the commander-in-chief, allow his majesty to remain unacquainted with the merit of that officer, and can he see such a mark of displeasure without endeavouring to soften or clear the matter up a little? A man of honour has the right to expect the protection of his colonel and of the commander of the troops, and he can't serve without it. If I was in Carlton's place I wouldn't stay an hour in the army after being aimed at and distinguished in so remarkable a manner. But Carlton bided his time. In the beginning of 1759 Wolf was appointed to command the army destined to besiege Quebec. He immediately submitted Carlton's name for appointment as quartermaster general. Pitt and Lignere heartily approved, but the king again refused. Lignere went back a second time to no purpose. Pitt then sent him in for the third time saying, in atone meant for the king to overhear, tell his majesty that in order to render the general, Wolf, completely responsible for his conduct he should be made as far as possible inexcusable if he should fail, and whatever an officer entrusted with such a service of confidence request ought therefore to be granted. The king then consented. Thus began Carlton's long, devoted, and successful service for Canada, the empire, and the crown. Early in this memorable empire year of 1759 he sailed with Wolf and Saunders from Spithead. On the thirtieth of April the fleet rendezvoused at Halifax were Admiral Jerelle, second in command to Saunders, had spent the winter with the squadron intended to block the St. Lawrence directly navigation opened in the spring. Jerelle was a good commonplace officer, but very slow. He had lost many hands from sickness during a particularly cold season, and he was not enterprising enough to start cruising round Cabot Strait before the month of May. Saunders, greatly annoyed by this delay, sent him off with eight men of war on the fifth of May. Wolf gave him seven hundred soldiers under Carlton. These forces were sufficient to turn back, capture, or destroy the twenty-three French merchant men which were then bound for Quebec with supplies and soldiers as reinforcements for Montcom. But the French ships were a week ahead of Jerelle, and when he landed Carlton at Isle-aux-Caudraise on the twenty-eighth of May the last of the enemy's transports had already discharged her cargo at Quebec sixty miles above. Isle-aux-Caudraise, so named by Jacques Carche in fifteen-thirty-five, was a point of great strategic importance, for it commanded the only channel then used. It was the place Wolf had chosen for his winter quarters, that is, in case of failure before Quebec and supposing he was not recalled. None but a particularly good officer would have been appointed as its first commandant. Carlton spent many busy days here preparing an advanced base for the coming siege, while the subsequently famous Captain Cook was equally busy, a sounding of the channel of the Traverse, which the fleet would have to pass on its way to Quebec. Some of Jerelle's ships destroyed the French longshore batteries near this Traverse at the lower end of the island of Orleans, while the rest kept ceaseless watch to seaward, anxiously scanning the offing day after day to make out the colours of the first fleet up. No one knew what the French West India fleet would do, and there was a very disconcerting chance that it might run north and slip into the St. Lawrence ahead of Saunders, in the same way as the French reinforcements had slipped in ahead of Jerelle. Presently at the first streak of dawn on the twenty-third of June a strong squadron was seen advancing rapidly under a press of sail. Instantly the officers of the watch called all hands up from below. The bow-sons' whistles shrilled across the water as the seamen ran to quarters and cleared the decks for action. Carlton's camp was equally a stir. The guards turned out, the bugle sounded, the men fell in and waited. Then the flagship signalled ashore that the strangers had just answered correctly in private code that all was well and that Wolf and Saunders were abhorred. Next to Wolf himself Carlton was the busiest man in the army throughout the siege of Quebec. In addition to his arduous and very responsible duties as Quartermaster General he acted as Inspector of Engineers and as a Special Service Officer for work of an exceptionally confidential nature. As Quartermaster General he superintended the supply and transport branches. Considering that the army was operating in a devastated, hostile country a thousand miles away from its bases at Halifax and Lewisburg and that the interaction of the different services, naval and military, imperial and colonial required adjustment to a nicety at every turn. It is wonderful that so much was done so well with means which were far from being adequate. War prices, of course, ruled the British camp, but they compared very favourably with the famine prices in Quebec where most luxuries soon became unobtainable at any price. There were no canteen or camp follower scandals under Carlton. Then, as now, every soldier had a regulation ration of food and a regulation allowance for his service kit, but extras were always acceptable. The price list of these extras reads strangely to modern ears, but under the circumstances it was not exorbitant, and it was slightly tempered by being reckoned in Halifax currency of four dollars to the pound instead of five. The British Tommy Ackens, of that and many a later day, thought Canada, a wonderful country for making money, go a long way when he could buy a pot of beer for two pence and get back thirteen pence Halifax currency as change for his English shilling. Beef and ham ran from nine pence to a shilling a pound. Mutton was a little dearer. Salt butter was eight pence to one in three pence. Cheese was ten pence. Potatoes from five to ten shillings a bushel. A reasonable loaf of good soft bread cost six pence. So was a shilling a pound. Tea was prohibitive for all but the officers. Playing green tea and very bad was fifteen shillings. Couchon, twenty shillings. Heist and thirty. Leaf tobacco was ten pence a pound. Roll, one in ten pence. Snuff, two in three pence. Sugar was a shilling to eighteen pence. Lemons were six pence a piece. The non-intoxicating bad sprues beer was only two pence a quart and helped to keep off scurvy. Real beer, like wine and spirits, was more expensive. Bristol beer was eighteen shillings a dozen. Bad malt beer from Halifax, nine pence a quart. Rum and claret were eight shillings a gallon each. Port and Madeira, ten and twelve respectively. The term bad did not mean noxious but only inferior. It stood against every low-grade article in the price list. No goods were over-classified while Carleton was quartermaster general. The engineers were understaffed, undermanned, and overworked. There were no royal engineers as a permanent and comprehensive core till the time of Wellington. Wolf complained bitterly and often of the lack of men and materials for scientific siege work. But he relied on Carleton to good purpose in this respect as well as in many others. In his celebrated dispatch to Pitt he mentions Carleton twice. It was Carleton whom he sent to seize the west end of the island of Orleans so as to command the basin of Quebec, and Carleton whom he sent to take prisoners and gather information at Pointeaux Trembla, twenty miles above the city. Whether or not he revealed the whole of his final plan to Carleton is probably more than we shall ever know since Carleton's papers were destroyed. But we do know that he did not reveal it to any one else, not even to his three brigadiers, Moncton, Townsend, and Murray. Carleton was wounded in the head during the Battle of the Plains, but soon returned to duty. Wolf showed his confidence in him to the last. Carleton's was the only name mentioned twice in the will which Wolf handed over to Jervis, the future Lord St. Vincent, the night before the battle. I leave to Colonel Auton, Colonel Carleton, Colonel Howe, and Colonel Ward a thousand pounds each, all my books and papers, both here and in England, I leave to Colonel Carleton. Wolf's mother, who died five years later, showed the same confidence by appointing Carleton her executor. With the fall of Quebec in 1759 Carleton disappears from the Canadian scene till 1766. But so many pregnant events happened in Canada during these seven years, while so few happened in his own career that it is much more important for us to follow her history than his biography. In 1761 he was wounded at the storming of Port Andro during the attack on Belle Isle off the west coast of France. In 1762 he was wounded in Havana in the West Indies. After that he enjoyed four years of quietness at home. Then came the exceedingly difficult task of guiding Canada through twelve years of turbulent politics and most subversive war. CHAPTER NUMBER TWO OF A CRONICLE OF CARLTON This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mike Vendetti, MikeVendetti.com. A Chronicle of Carleton by William Wood, Chapter Two. GENERAL MURRY 1759-1766 Both armies spent a terrible winter after the Battle of the Plains. There was better shelter for the French and Montreal than for the British among the ruins of Quebec. But in the matter of food the positions were reversed. Nevertheless, the French gallantly refused the truths offered by Murray, who had now succeeded Wolfe. They were determined to make a supreme effort to regain Quebec in the spring and they were equally determined that the habitants should not be free to supply the British with provisions. In spite of a state of war, however, the French and British officers, even as prisoners and captors, began to make friends. They had found each other foreman worthy of this deal. A distinguished French officer, the commete D. Mallertuic, writing to Levis, Montcalm's successor said, I cannot speak too highly of General Murray, although he is our enemy. Murray, on his part, was equally loud and generous in his praise of the French. The Canadian seniors found new fellow gentlemen among the British officers. The priests and nuns of Quebec found many fellow Catholics among the Scottish and Irish troops and nothing but courteous treatment from the soldiers of every rank and form of religion. Murray directed that the complement of the hat should be paid to all religious processions. The Ursuline nuns knitted long stockings for the bare-legged Highlanders when the winter came on and presented each Scottish officer with an embroidered St Andrew's Cross. On the 30th of November, St Andrew's Day, the whole garrison won the regard of the town by giving up part of the rations for the hungry poor. While the inhabitants from the surrounding country presently began to find out that the British were honest to deal with and most humane, though sternly just as conquerors. In the following April, Levis made his desperate throw for victory and actually did succeed in defeating Murray outside the walls of Quebec. But the British fleet came up in May and that summer three British armies converged on Montréal where the last doomed remnants of French power on the St. Lawrence stood despairingly at bay. When Levis found his 2,000 effective French regulars surrounded by eight times as many British troops, he had no choice but to lay down the arms of France forever. On the 8th of September, 1760, his gallant little army was included in the capitulation of Montréal by which the whole of Canada passed into the possession of the British Crown. Great Britain had a different general idea for each one of the four decades which immediately followed the conquest of Canada. In the 60s, the general idea was to kill refractory old French ways with a double dose of new British liberty and kindness so that Canada might gradually become the loyal 14th colony of the Empire in America. But the fates were against this benevolent scheme. The French Canadians were firmly wedded to their old ways of life except insofar as the new liberty enabled them to throw off irksome duties and restraints while the new British speaking colonists were so few and mostly so bad that they became the cause of endless discord where harmony was essential. In the 70s the idea was to restore the old French Canadian life so that is not only to make Canada proof against the dissatisfaction of the 13 colonies but also make her a safe base of operation against rebellious Americans. In the 80s the great concern of the government was to make a harmonious whole out of two very widely differing parts the long settled French Canadians and the newly arrived United Empire loyalists. In the 90s each of these parts was set to work out its own salvation under its own provincial constitution. Carlton's is the only personality which links together all four decades. The would be American 60s, the French Canadian 70s, the Anglo-French Canadian 80s and the bi-constitutional 90s though as mentioned already Murray ruled Canada for the first seven years 1759 to 66. James Murray, the first British Governor of Canada, was a younger son of the 4th Thord Alebank. He was just over forty warm-hearted and warm-tempered and excellent French scholar and every inch a soldier. He had been a witness to the defence of Mont-Durant at the court-martial held to try the authors of the Wilchford Piasco in 1757. Wolf was also a witness on the other side, referred to him later as my old antagonist Murray. But Wolf knew a good man when he saw one and gave his full confidence to his old antagonist both at Lewisburg and Quebec. Murray was not born under a lucky star. He saw three defeats in three successive years. He began his service with the abortive attack on the Pestitennial Cartagenauga, where Wolf's father was present as Adjutant General. In mid-career, he lost the Battle of St. Foy, footnote. See the winning of Canada Chapter 7. See also for the best account of this battle and other events of the war between Wolf's victory and the surrender of Montreal. The fall of Canada by George M. Wrong, Oxford 1914. And his active military life ended with his surrender of Menorca in 1782, but he was generally distinguished for honor and steadfastness on all occasions and admiring contemporary, described him as a model of all the military virtues except prudence. But he had more prudence and less genius than his admirer thought, and he showed a mixed talent for general government. The problem before him was harder than his superiors could believe. He was expected to prepare for assimilation, some 65,000 new subjects who were mostly alien in religion and wholly alien in every other way. But for the moment, this proved the least of his many difficulties because no immediate results were required. While the war went on in Europe, Canada remained nominally a part of the enemy's domains. And so, of course, was subject to military rule. Sir Geoffrey Amherst, the British Commander-in-Chief in America, took up his headquarters in New York. Under him, Murray commanded Canada from Quebec. Under Murray, Colonel Burton commanded the District of Three Rivers, while General Gage commanded the District of Montreal, which then extended to the Western Wilds. Footnote C. The War Chief of the Ottawa's Chapter III. Murray's first great trouble arose in 1761. It was caused by an outrageous war office order that four pence a day should be stopped from the soldiers to pay for the ration they had already got free. Such gross injustices coming in time of war and applying to soldiers who richly deserved reward made the veterans mad with rage. Quebec promised to be the scene of a wild mutiny. Murray, like all his officers, thought to stopage nothing short of robbery. But he threw himself into the breach. He assembled the officers and explained that they must die to the last man rather than allow the mutineers a free hand. He then held a general parade at which he ordered the troops to march between two flags on pain of instant death, promising to kill with his own hands the first man who refused. He added that he was ready to hear and forward any well-formed complaint, but that since insubordination had been openly threatened he would insist on subordination being publicly thrown. Then, amid tense silence, he gave the word of command. Quick march! While every officer felt his trigger, to the immense relief of all concern, the men stepped off, marched straight between the flags and back to quarters, tamed. The criminal war office blunder was rectified and peace was restored in the ranks. Murray's report of 1762 gives us a good view of the Canada of that day and shows the attitude of the British towards their new possession. Canada had been conquered by Great Britain with some help from the American colonies for three main reasons. First, to strike a death blow at French domination in America. Secondly, to increase the opportunities of British seaborne trade. And thirdly, to enlarge the area available for British settlement. When Murray was instructed to prepare a report on Canada, he had to keep all this in mind for the government wished to satisfy the public both at home and in the colonies. He had to examine the military strength of the country and the disposition of its population in case of future wars with France. He had to satisfy the natural curiosity of men like the London merchants and he had to show how and where English-speaking settlers could go in and make Canada not only a British possession but the 14th British colony in North America. Burton and Gage were also instructed to report about their own districts of Three Rivers and Montreal. The documents they prepared were tacked on to Murray's by June 1762. The work was complete and sent to Amherst who sent it to England, napple time to be studied there before the opening of the impending negotiations for peace. Murray was greatly concerned about the military strength of Quebec, then as always the key to Canada. Like the unfortunate Montcom, he found the walls of Quebec badly built, badly placed and falling into ruins and he thought they could not be defended by 3,000 men against a well-conducted coup-demain. He proposed to crown Cape Diamond with a proper citadel which would overall the disaffected in Quebec itself and defend the place against an outside enemy long enough to let a British fleet come in to its relief. The rest of the country was defended by little garrisons at Three Rivers and Montreal as well as several small detachments distributed among the trading post where the white men and the red men met in the depth of the western wilderness. The relations between the British garrison and the French Canadians were so excellent that what Gage reported from Montreal might be taken as equally true of the rest of the country. The soldiers lived peaceably with the inhabitants and they reciprocally acquired an affection for each other. The French Canadians numbered 65,000 altogether. Exclusive of the fur traders and cour de bois, barely 15,000 lived in the three little towns of Quebec, Montreal and Three Rivers while over 50,000 lived in the country. Nearly all the officials had gone back to France. The three classes of greatest importance were the seniors, the clergy and the habitants. The lawyers were not of much account, the very commercial classes of less account still. The cour de bois and other fur traders formed an important link between the savage and the civilized life of the country. Apart from furs, the trade of Canada was comparatively small in the eyes of men like the London merchants, but the opportunity of fostering all the fur trade that could be carried out down the St. Lawrence was very well worthwhile and if there were no other existing trade worth capturing, there seemed to be some kinds worth creating. Murray held out well-grounded hopes of the fisheries and forests. A most immense cod fishery can be established in the river and Gulf of St. Lawrence. A rich tract of country on the south side of the Gulf will be settled and improved and a port or ports furnished with every material requisite to repair ships. He then went on to emulate the other kinds of fishery, the abundance of whales, seals, and walruses in the Gulf, and of salmon up all the tributary rivers. Burton recommends immediate attention to the iron mines behind three rivers. All the governors expect to create on the vast amount of harassed wealth and remind the home government that under French regime the king, when making out patents for the St. Lawrence, reserved the right of taking wood for shipbuilding and fortification from any of the signories. Agriculture was found to be in a very backward state. The habitants would rise no more than they required for their own use and for little local trade, but the fault was attributed to the gambling attractions of the fur trade, to the bad governmental system, and the frequent interruptions of the Corvée. It kind of forced labor, which was meant to serve the public interest, but which bigot and other Thieves officials always turned to their own private advantage. On the whole, the reports were most encouraging in the prospects. They held out to honest labor, trade, and government. While Murray and his lieutenants had been collecting information for the reports, the home government had been undergoing many changes for the worse. The master statesman Pitt had gone out of power, and the back-stairs politician Boot had come in. Pitt's bloody and expensive war, the war that more than any other laid the foundations of the present British Empire, was to be ended on any terms. The country could be persuaded to bear. Thus the end of the Seven Years War, or as the British part of it, was more correctly called the Maritime War, was no more glorious in statesmanship than its beginning had been in arms. But the spirit of its mighty heart still lived on in the Empire's grateful memories of Pitt and quickened the English-speaking world enough to prevent any really disgraceful surrender of the hard-won fruits of victory. The Treaty of Paris signed on the 10th of February, 1763, and the King's Proclamation, published in October, were duly followed by the inauguration of civil government in Canada. The incompetent Boot, anxious to get Pitt out of the way, tried to induce him to become the first British Governor of the New Colony. But Boot probably never dared to hope that Pitt would actually go out to Canada. But he did hope to lower his prestige by making him the holder of a Sincture at home. However this may be, Pitt, mightiest of all parliamentary ministers of war, refused to be made either a jobber or an exile, whereupon Murray's position was changed from a military command into that of Governor and Captain General. The changes which ensued in the laws of Canada were heartily welcomed, so far as the adoption of the human or criminal code of England was concerned. The new laws relating to debtor and creditor also gave general satisfaction, except, as we shall presently see, when they involved imprisonment for debt, but the tentative efforts to introduce English civil laws side by side with the old French code resulted in great confusion and much discontent. The land laws had become so unworkable under this dual system that they had to be left as they were. A court of common pleas was set up specially for the benefit of the French Canadians. If either party demanded a jury, one had to be sworn in. The French Canadians were to be jurors on equal terms with the king's old subjects. The Roman Catholic Church was completely tolerated, but not in any way established. Lord Egerman, in giving the king's instructions to Murray, reminded him that the Provisio in the Treaty of Paris as far as the laws of Great Britain permit would govern his action whenever disputes arose. It must be remembered that the last Jacobite rising was then a comparatively recent affair and that France was equally ready to upset either the Protestant succession in England or the British regime in Canada. The Indians were also an object of special solicitude in the royal proclamation. The Indians who live under our protection shall not be molested in the possession of such parts of our domains and territories as not having been ceded to or purchased by us are reserved to them. The home government was far in advance of the American colonists in its humane attitude towards the Indians. The common American attitude then, and long afterwards indeed, up to a time well within living memory, was that Indians were a kind of human vermin to be exterminated without mercy, unless of course more money was to be made out of them alive. The result was an endless struggle along the ever-receding frontier of the West. And, just at this particular time, conspiracy of Pontiac had brought about something like a real war. The story of this great effort of the Indians came to stem. The encroachments of the exterminating colonists is told in another chronicle of the present series. Footnote. The War Chief of the Ottawa's. The French traders in the West undoubtedly had a hand in stirring up the Indians, Pontiac. A sort of Indian Napoleon was undoubtedly cruel as well as crafty. And the Indians undoubtedly fought just as the ancestors of the French and British used to fight when they were at the corresponding stage of civil evolution. But the mere fact, but the mere fact that so many jealously distinct tribes united in this common cause proves how much they all must have suffered at the hands of the colonists. While Pontiac's war continued in the West, Murray had to deal with a political war in Canada, which rose to its height in 1764. The king's proclamation of the previous October had given expressed power to our governor that, so soon as the state and circumstances of the said colony will admit thereof, we shall call a general assembly in such a manner and form as is used in those colonies and provinces in America, which are under our immediate government. The intention of establishing parliamentary institutions was therefore perfectly clear, but it was equally clear that the introduction of each institution was to depend on circumstances. It is well to remember here that these circumstances were not held to warrant the opening of a Canadian parliament till 1792. Now the military government had a great success. There was every reason to suppose that civil government by a governor and council would be the next best thing and it was quite certain that calling a general assembly at once would defeat the very ends which such bodies were designed to serve. More than ninety-nine percent of the population were dead against the assembly, which was none of them understood and all distrusted. On the other hand, the clamorous minority of less than one percent were in favor only of a parliament from which the majority should be rigorously excluded even if possible as voters. The immense majority comprised the entire French-Canadian community. The absurdity, small minority, consisted mostly of Americanized camp following traitors who having come to fish in troubled waters naturally wanted the laws made to suit poachers. The British garrison, the governing officials, and the very few other English-speaking people of a more enlightened class all looked down on the renterous minority. The whole question resolved itself into this. Should Canada be handed over to the licensed exploitation of a few hundred low-class camp followers who had done nothing to win her for the British Empire, who were despised by those who had and who promised to be a dangerous thorn in the side of the new colony, what this ridiculous minority of grab-alls really wanted was not a parliament but a rump. Many of the representative assembly was ended in a rump. The grab-alls wished to begin with one and stop there. It might be supposed that such pretensions would defeat themselves, but there was a two-fold difficulty in the way of getting the truth understood by the English-speaking public on both sides of the Atlantic. In the first place, the French Canadians were practically dumb to the outside world. In the second, the vociferous rumpites had the ear of some English and more American commercial people who were not anxious to understand while the great mass of the general public were inclined to think if they ever thought at all that parliamentary government must mean more liberty for everyone concerned. A singularly apt commentary on the pretensions of the camp-followers is supplied by the famous or infamous presentment of the grand jury of Quebec. In October 1764, the moving spirits of this precocious jury were aspirants to membership in the strictly exclusive rumpish little parliament of their own seeking. The signatures of the French Canadian members was obtained by fraud as was subsequently approved by a sworn official protestation. The first presentment tells its own tale, as it refers to the only courts in which the French Canadian lawyers were allowed to plead. The great number of inferior courts are tiresome, litigious, and expensive to this poor colony. Then came a hit at the previous military rule that decrees of the military courts may be amended after having been confirmed by legal ordinance by allowing appeals if the matter decided exceeds ten pounds, which would put it out of the breach of the inferior courts and into the clutches of the king's old subjects. But the gist of it all was contained in the following. We represent that as the grand jury must be considered at present as the only body representative of the colony. We propose that the public accountants be laid before the grand jury at least twice a year. That the grand jury was to be purged of all its French Canadian members is evident from the addendum slipped in behind their backs. This addendum is a fine specimen of verbose, invictive against the church of Rome, the pope, bulls, briefs, absolutions, etc. The impaneling in grand and petty juries of poppist and pupish, recusants, convict, and so on. The presentment of the grand jury was presently followed by the humble petition of Your Majesty's most faithful and loyal subjects, British merchants and traders. In behalf of themselves and their fellow subjects' inhabitants of Your Majesty's province of Quebec, their fellow subjects did not of course include any poppist or poppish recusants, convict. Among the grievances and distresses enumerated were the oppressive and severely felt military government, the inability to reap the fruit of our industry under such a marionette as Murray, when one paragraph is accused of suppressing remonstroses in silence and in the next of threatening them with a rage and rudeness of language and demeanor as dishonorable to the trust he beholds of Your Majesty as painful to those who suffer from it. Finally, the petitioners solemnly warn His Majesty that their lives in the province are so very unhappy that we must be under the necessity of removing from it unless timely prevented by removal of the present governor. In forwarding this document Murray poured out the vials of his wrath on those assentuous fanatics trading here while he boldly championed the cause of the French Canadians, a race who could only be indulged with a few privileges which the laws of England deny to Roman Catholics at home would soon get the better of every national antipathy to their conquerors and become the most faithful and most useful set of men in this American Empire. While these charges and counter charges were crossing the Atlantic, another and much more violent trouble came to ahead as there were no barracks in Canada. Billeting was a necessity. It was made as little burdensome as possible and the houses of magistrates were made specifically exempt. This, however, did not prevent the magistrates from bating the military whenever they got to chance. Fines, imprisonments, and other sentences out of all proportion to the offense committed were heaped on every redcoat in much the same way as was then being practiced in Boston and other hotbeds of dissatisfaction. The redcoats had done their work in ridding America of the old French menace. They were doing it now in ridding the colonies of the last serious menace from the Indians, and so the colonists, having no further use for them, began trying to make the land they had delivered too hot to hold them. There were, of course, exceptions and the American colonists had some real as well as pretended grievances. But, wantingly, bating the redcoats had already become a most discredible general practice. Montreal was most in touch with the dissatisfied people to the south. It also had a magistrate of the name of Walker, the most rancorous of all the disaffected magistrates in Canada. This Walker, well mated to an equally rancorous wife, was the same man who entertained Benjamin Franklin and the other commissioners sent by Congress into Canada in 1776, the year in which both the American Republic and a truly British Canada were born. He would not have been flattered could he have seen the entry Franklin made about him and his wife in a diary which is still extant. The gist of it was that whatever the Walkers might be they would soon set to place by the years. Walker, of course, was foremost in the persecution of the redcoats and he eagerly seized this opportunity when an officer was billeted in a house where a brother magistrate happened to be living as a lodger. Under such circumstances the magistrate would not claim exemption. But this made no difference either to him or to Walker. Captain Payne, the gentleman whose presence enraged those boars, was seized and thrown into goal. The Chief Justice granted a writ of habeas corpus. But the mischief was done and the resentment waxed high. The French Canadian Seniors sympathized with Payne which added fuel to the magistral frame and Murray, senting dangers, summoned the whole bunch down to Quebec. But before this bench of bumbles started some masked men seized Walker in his own house and gave him a good sound thrashing. Unfortunately they split the fair reprisal by cutting off his ear. That night the news had run round Montreal and made a straight for Boston and Quebec. Feeling ran high and higher still when a few weeks later the civil magistrates vented their rage on several redcoats by imposing sentences exceeding even the utmost limits of their previous vindictive action. Montreal had become panic stricken. Leased to soldiers baited past endurance should break out in open violence. Murray drove up. Post-Haste from Quebec ordered the afflicted regiment to another station, reproved the offending magistrates and reestablished public confidence official and private rewards were offered to any witness who would identify Walker's assailants but in vain. The smoldering fire burst out again under Carlton but the mystery was never cleared up. Things had now come to a crisis. The London merchants knowing nothing about the internal affairs of Canada backed the petition of the Quebec traders who were quite unworthy of such support from men of real business probability and knowledge. The magistratal fraction in Canada advertised their side of the case all over the colonies and in any sympathetic quarter they could find in England. The seniors sent home a warm difference of Murray and Murray himself sent from a very able Swiss officer in the British Army. The home government thus had plenty of contradictory at dividends before it in 1765. The result was that Murray was called home in 1766 rather in a spirit of open-minded and sympathetic inquiry into his conduct than with any idea of censuring him. He never returned to Canada but as he held the titular governorship some time longer he was afterwards employed in positions of great responsibility and trust. The verdict of the home authorities was clearly given in his favour. The troublesome year of 1764 saw another innovation almost as revolutionary compared with the old regime as the introduction of civil government itself. This was the issue of the first newspaper in Canada where indeed it was also the first printed thing of any kind. Nova Scotia had produced an earlier paper the Halifax Gazette which lived an internment life from 1752 to 1800 but no press had ever been allowed in New France. The new documents that required printing had always been done in the mother country. Brown and Gilmore two Philadelphians were thus undertaking a pioneer business when they announced that our design is in case we are fortunate enough to succeed early in this spring to settle in this city Quebec in the capacity of printers and forthwith to publish a weekly newspaper in French and English the Quebec Gazette which first appeared on the 21st of the following June has continued to the present time. Though it is now daily and is known as the Quebec Chronicle centurion papers are not common in any country and those that have lived over a century and a half are very few indeed. So the Quebec Chronicle which is the second surviving senior in America is also among the great press seniors of the world. The original number is one of the curiosities of journalism. The publishers felt tolerably sure of having what was then considered a good deal of recent news for the 300 readers during the open season but knowing that the supply would be both short and stale in winter they held out prospects of a Canadian tattler or spectator. Without however being rash enough to promise a supply of addisons and steels their announcement made curious reading at the present day. The rigor of winter preventing the arrival of ships from Europe and in a great measure interrupting the ordinary intercourse from the southern provinces. It will be necessary in a paper designed for general perusal and public utility to provide some things of general entertainment independent of foreign intelligences. We shall therefore on such occasions present our readers with such originals both in prose and verse as will please the fancy and instruct the judgment and here we beg leave to observe that we shall have nothing so much at heart as the support of virtue and morality and the noble cause of liberty the refined amusements of literature and the pleasing veins of all well pointed wit shall also be considered as necessity to this collection interspersed with chosen pieces and curious essays extracted from the most celebrated authors so that blending philosophy with politics history etc the youth of both sexes will be improved and persons of all ranks agreeably and usefully entertained and upon the whole we will labor to attain to all the exactness that so much variety will permit and give as much variety as will consist with a reasonable exactness and as this part of our project cannot be carried into execution without the correspondence of the ingenious we shall take all opportunities of acknowledging our obligations to those who take the trouble of furnishing any matter which shall tend to entertainment or instruction our intentions to please the whole without offense to any individual will be better evidenced by our practice than by writing volumes on the subject this one thing we begged maybe believe that party prejudice or private scandal will never find a place in this paper end of chapter two recorded by Mike Venditti Mike Venditti dot com chapter three of a chronicle of Carlton this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox dot org recording by Mike Venditti Mike Venditti dot com a chronicle of Carlton by William Wood chapter three Governor Carlton 1776 to 1774 the twelve years of Carlton's first administration naturally fall into three distinct periods of equal length during the first he was busily employed settling as many difficulties as he could examining the general state of the country and gradually growing into the change that was developing in the minds of the home government the change that is from the Americanizing sixties to the French Canadian seventies during the second period he was in England helping to shape the famous Quebec act during the third he was defending Canada from American attack and aiding the British counterstroke by every means to his power on the 22nd of September 1766 Carlton arrived to Quebec and began his 30 years experience as a Canadian administrator by taking over the government from Colonel Irving who had held it since Murray's departure in the spring Irving had succeeded Murray simply because he happened to be the senior officer present at the time Carlton himself was technically Murray's Lieutenant till 1768 but neither of these facts really affected the course of Canadian history the council the magistrates and the traders each presented the new governor with an address containing the usual professions of loyal devotion Carlton remarked in his dispatch that these separate addresses and the marked absence of any united address showed how much the population was divided he also noted that a good many of the English speaking minority had objected to the address on account of their own opposition to the Stamp Act and that there had been some broken heads in the consequence troubles enough soon engaged his anxious attention troubles over the Indian trade the rights and wrongs of the Canadian Jesuits the wounded dignity of some members of the council and the still smoldering and ever mysterious Walker affair the strife between Canada and the 13 colonies over the Indian trade of the West remained the same in principle as under the old regime the conquests had merely changed the old rivalry between two foreign powers into one between two widely differing British possessions and this because of the general unrest among the Americans made the competition more bitter if possible than ever the Jesuits pressed their claims for recognition for their original estates and their compensation but their order had fallen on evil days all over the world it was not popular even in Canada and the arrangement was that while the existing members were to be treated with every consideration the society itself was to be allowed to die out the offended counselors went so far as to present Carlton with the remonstrance which Irving himself had the misfortune to sign Carlton had consulted some members on points with which they were especially acquainted members who had not been consulted there upon protested to Irving who assured them that Carlton must have done so by accident not design but when Carlton received a joint letter in which they said as you are pleased to signify to us by Colonel Irving that it was accident not intention he at once replied as Lieutenant Colonel Irving has signified to you that the part of my conduct you think worthy of your reprehension happened by accident let him explain his reasons for so doing he had no authority from me Carlton then went on to say that he would consult any men of good sense truth candor and impartial justice whenever he chose no matter whether they were counselors or not the Walker affair which now broke out again was much more serious than the storm in the Council's teacup it agitated the whole of Canada and threatened to range a population of Montreal and Quebec into two irreconcilable factions the civil and the military for the whole of the two years since Murray had been called upon to deal with it cleverly presented versions of Walker's views had been spread all over the colonies and worked into influential opposition circles in England the invictives against the red coats and their friends the singliners were of the usual abusive type but they had an unusually powerful effect at that particular time in the 13 colonies as well as in what their authors hoped to make a 14th colony after a fashion of their own and they'd look plausible enough to mislead a good many moderate man in the mother country to Walker's case was that he had an actual witness as to the identity of his assailants in the person of McGovige a discharged soldier who laid information against one civilian three British officers and the celebrated French Canadian leader Le Corne's D Saint-Luc all the accused were arrested in their beds in Montreal and thrown into the common goal Walker objected to bail on the plea that his life would be in danger if they were allowed at large. He also sought to postpone the trial in order to punish the accused as much as possible guilty or innocent but William Hay the chief justice and able and upright man would consent to postpone it only on condition that bail should be allowed so the trial proceeded when the grand jury threw out the case against one of the personers Walker let loose with such a flood of virulent abuse that modern men were turned against him in the end all were unerbally acquitted while McGovige who was proved to have been a false witness from the first was convicted of perjury Carlton remained absolutely impartial all through and even dismissed Colonel Irving and another member of the Council for heading a petition on behalf of the military prisoners the Walker affair was an instance of a bad case in which the law at least worked well but there were many others in which it did not what with the costume de Paris which is still quoted in the province of Quebec the other complex cities of the old French law the doubtful meanings drawn from the capitulation the treaty the proclamation and the various ordinances the instinctive opposition between the French Canadians and the English speaking civilians and finally what with the portents of subversive charge that were already beginning to overshadow all America what with all this and more Carlton found himself faced with a problem no man could have solved to the satisfaction of everyone each side in a lawsuit took whatever amalgam milk French and English codes was best for its own argument but generally speaking the ingrained feeling of the French Canadians was against any change of their own laws that was not visibly and immediately beneficial to their own particular interest moreover the use of the unknown English language the worthlessness of the rapacious English speaking magistrates and the detested innovation of imprisonment for debt all combined to make every part of English civil law hated simply because it happened to be English and not French the home authorities were anxious to find some workable compromise in 1767 Carlton exchanged several important dispatches with them and in 1768 they sent out Maurice Morgan to study the report after consultation with the Chief Justice and other well instructed persons Morgan was an infecatable and clear-sided man who deserves to be greatly remembered by both races for he was a good friend both to the French Canadians before the Quebec Act and the United Empire Laurelist just before their great migration when he was Carlton Secretary at New York in 1769 the official correspondence entered the secret and confidential stage with a dispatch from the home government to Carlton suggesting a House of Representatives to which practically speaking the towns would send Protestant members in the country district Roman Catholics in 1770 Carlton sailed for England he carried a good deal of hard-won experience with him both on his both on this point and many others he went home with a strong opinion not only against an assembly but against any immediate attempts at anglinization in any form the royal instructions that had accompanied his commission as Captain General and Governor-in-Chief in 1768 contained directions for establishing the Church of England with a view to converting the whole population to its tenants later on to its tenants later on but no steps had been taken and needless to say the French Canadians remained as Roman Catholic as ever an increasingly important question soon to overshadow all others was defense in April 1768 Carlton had proposed the restoration of a seniorial militia system all the lands here are held of his majesty's castle of Saint Louis the governor's official residence in Quebec the oath which evasals Seniors take is very solemn and binding they are obliged to appear in arms for the king's defense in case his provinces attacked Carlton pointed out that a hundred men of the Canadian seniorial families are being kept on full pay in France ready to return and raise the Canadians at the first opportunity on the other hand there are only about 70 of these officers in Canada who have been in the French service not one of these has been given a commission in the king's Georgia service nor is there one who from any motive whatever is induced to support his government the few French Canadians raised for Pontiac's war had of course been properly paid during the continuance of their active service but they had been disbanded like mere Magdalesia afterwards without either guarantees of half pay for their officers this naturally made the class from which officers were drawn think that no career was open to them under the union jack and turned their thoughts towards France where their fellows were enjoying full pay without a break what made this more serious was the weakness of the regular garrisons all of which put together numbered only 1627 men Carlton calculated that about 500 of the king's old subjects were capable of bearing arms though most of them were better at talking than fighting he had nothing but contempt for the flimsy wall around Montreal and relied little more on the very defective works at Quebec thus with all his wonderful equanimity grave Carlton left Canada with no light heart when he took six month leave of absence in 1770 and he would have been more anxious still if he could have foreseen that his absence was so prolonged to no less than four years he had however two great satisfactions he was represented at Quebec by the most dead fast lieutenant the quiet alert discreet and determined at carma hay and he was leaving Canada after having given proof of a diff's interdence which was worthy of the elder pit himself when pit became paymaster general of England he had once declined to use the two chief perquisites of his office the interest on the government balance and the half percent commission on foreign subsidies though both were regarded as a kind of indirect salary when Carlton became governor of Canada he had once issued a proclamation abolishing all the fees and perquisites attached to his position and explained his action to the home authorities in the following words there is a certain appearance of dirt a sort of meanness in exacting fees on every occasion I think it necessary for the king's service that his representatives should be thought unsullied Murray who had accepted the fees at first took umbrage but Carlton soon put matters straight with him the fact was that fees and even certain perquisites were no dishonor to receive as they nearly always formed a recognized part and often the whole of a perfectly legal salary but fees and perquisites could be abused and they did lead to misunderstandings even when they were not abused while fixed salaries were free from both objections so Carlton surrounded by shamelessly rapacious magistrates and the whole vile camp falling gang as well as by French Canadians who had suffered from the robberies of bigot and his like decided to sacrifice everything but his indispensable fixed salary in order that even the most malicious critics could not bring any accusation however falls against the man who represented Britain and her king an interesting personal side note which was not without considerable effect on Canadian history took place in the middle of Carlton's four years stay in England he was 48 and still a bachelor tradition whispers that these long years of single life were the result of a disappointing love affair with Jane Carlton a pretty cousin when both he and she were young however that may be he now proposed to lady Ann Howard whose father the Earl of effington was one of his greatest friends but he was doomed to a second though doubtless very minor disappointment lady Ann who probably looked on grave Carlton as a sort of amiable middle-aged uncle had fallen in love with his nephew whom she presently married and with whom she afterwards went to Canada where her husband served under the rejected uncle himself what added spice to this particular situation was the fact that Carlton actually married the younger sister of the two youthful lady Ann when Lady Ann rejoined her sister and her bosom friend Miss Seymour after the disconcerting interview with Carlton she explained her tears by saying they were due to her having been obliged to refuse the best man on earth I only wish he had given me the chance there for the time the matter ended Carlton went back to his official duties and furtherance of the Quebec act his nephew and the elder sister made mutual love lady Maria held her tongue but Miss Seymour had not forgotten and one day she mustered up the courage to tell Carlton this story of the more fool you this decided him to act at once he proposed was accepted and lived happily married for the rest of his long life Lady Maria was small fair haired and blue-eyed which heightened her girlish appearance when like Madame D. Chaplin when she came to Canada with a husband more than old enough to be her father but she had been brought up in Versailles she knew all the artistic races of the old regime and her slight upright figure erect as any soldiers to her dying day almost matched her husband's stalwart form in dignity of carriage the queen act of 1774 the Magna Carta of French Canadian race finally passed the house of lords on the 18th of June the general idea of the act was to reverse the unsuccessful policy of ultimate assimilation with the other American colonies by making Canada a distinctly French Canadian province the maritime provinces with a population of more than some 30,000 were to be as English as they chose but a greatly enlarged Quebec with a population of 90,000 and stretching far into the unsettled west was to remain equally French Canadian though the rights of what was then thought would be a perpetual English speaking minority were to be safeguarded in every reasonable way the whole country began the American colonies and the domains of the Hudson's Bay Company was included in this new Quebec which comprised a southern half of what is now the Newfoundland Labrador particularly the whole of modern provinces of Quebec and Ontario and all the western lands between the Ohio and the Great Lakes as far as the Mississippi that is the modern American states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin the act gave Canada the English criminal code it recognized most of the French civil law including the sequin aerial tenure of land Roman Catholics were given the free exercise of the religion subject to the king's supremacy as defined by an act made in the first year of the Queen Elizabeth which act with magnificently prophetic outlook on the future British Empire was to apply to all the Dominions and countries which then did or thereafter should belong to the imperial crown the Roman Catholic clergy were authorized to collect their accustomed dues and rights from members of their own community the new oath of allegiance to the crown was silent about differences of religion so that Roman Catholics might take it without question the clergy's and senior audience were thus restored to an acknowledged leadership in church and state those who wanted a parliament were distinctly told that it is at present inexpedient to call an assembly and the council of an a seventeen to twenty three members all appointed by the crown would attend to local government and have power to levy taxes for roads and public buildings only and held in free and common stockage were to be dealt with by the laws of England as well as all property which could be freely willed away a possible establishment of the church of England was provided for but never put in operation in some ways the act did in other ways it did not fulfill the objectives of its framers it was undoubtedly a generous concession to the leading French Canadians it did help to keep Canada both British and Canadian and it did open the way for the what ought to have been a crushing attack on the American Revolutionary Forces but it was not and neither it nor any other act could possibly have been at that late hour completely successful it conciliated the signores and the parochial clergy but it did not and it could not also consolidate the lesser town folks and the habitants for the last fourteen years the habitants had been gradually drifting away from their former habits of obedience and former obligation towards their leaders in church and state the leaders had lost their old followers the followers had found new leaders of their naturally enough there was great satisfaction among the signores and the clergy with a general feeling among the government supporters both in England and Canada that the best solution of very refractory problem had been found at last on the other hand the opposition in England nearly everyone in the American colonies and the great majority of English speaking peoples in Newfoundland and maritime provinces and Canada itself were dead against the act while the habitants resenting the privileges already reaffirmed in favor of the signores and clergy and suspicious of further changes in the same unwelcome direction were neutral at the best and hostile at the worst the American colonists would have been angered in any case but when they saw Canada proper made as unlike a fourteenth colony as could be and when they also saw the gates of the coveted western lands closed against them by the same detested act the last of the five intolerable acts to which they most objected their fury knew no bounds they cursed the king the pope and the french canadiens with as much violence as any temporal or spiritual rulers have ever caused heretics and rebels the infamous anterianical ministry in England was accused of contemptible subservience to the bloodthirsty idolorus and hypothetical creed of the french canadiens to think that people who were religion had spread murder persecution and revolt throughout the world were to be entrenched along the Saint Lawrence was bad enough but to see the crown protection given to the Indian lands which the Americans considered their own western birthright was infinitely worse with the king of England to steal the valley of the Mississippi in the same way as the king of France it was easy to be wise after the event and hard to follow any council of perfection but it must always be subject of a keen if unwavering regret that the french canadiens were not guaranteed their own way of life within the limits of the modern province of Quebec immediately after the capitulation of Montreal in seventeen sixty they would then have entered the British empire as a whole people on terms which they must all have understood to be exceedingly generous from any conquering power in which they would have soon found out to be far better than anything they had experienced under the government of France in return for such unexampled generosity they might have become convinced defenders of the only flag in the world which they could possibly live as french canadiens the relations to each other to the rest of a changing canada and to the empire would have followed the natural course of political evolution with the burning questions of language laws and religion safely removed from general controversy in after years the rights of the english-speaking minority would of course have been still better safeguarded under this system than under the distracting series of half measures which took its place there should have been no question of a parliament in the immediate future then with the people of Ontario by the united empire loyalist and the growth of the maritime provinces on the other side Quebec could have entered Carlton's proposed confederation in the nineties to her own and everyone else's best advantage on the other hand the delay of 14 years after the capitulation of 1760 and the unwarrantable extension of the provincial boundaries were cardinal errors of the most disastrous kind the delay filled with a futile attempt by mistaken americanization bred doubts and dissensions not only between the two races but between the different kinds of french canadiens when the hour of trial came disintegration had already gone too far the mistake about the boundaries was equally bad the western wilds ought to have been administered by a lieutenant governor under the supervision of a governor general even leasing them to a short term of years to the Hudson Bay Company would have been better than annexing them to a preposterous province of Quebec American colonists would have doubtless objected to either alternative but both could have been defended on sound principles of administration while the sudden invasion of a new and inflated Quebec into the colonial hinterlands was little less than a declaration of war the whole problem bristled with enormous difficulties and the circumstances under which it had to be faced made an ideal solution impossible but an earlier Quebec act without its outrageous boundary clause would have been well worth the risk of passing for the delay had led many french canadians to suppose however falsely that the empire's need might always be their opportunity and this idea however repugnant to their best minds and better feelings has persisted among their extreme particulars until the present day end of chapter three chapter four the chronicle of Carlton this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Mike Vendetti Mike Vendetti.com a chronicle of Carlton by William Wood chapter four the invasion 1775 Carlton's first eight years as governor of Canada were almost entirely occupied with civil administration the next four were equally occupied with war so much so indeed that the Quebec act could not be put in force on the first of May 1775 as provided for in the act itself but only bit by bit much later on there was one short session of the new legislative council which opened on the 17th of August but all men's minds were even then turned towards the Montreal frontier once the American invasion threatened to overspread the whole country and make its opening session the last that might ever be held most of the members were soon called away from the council chamber to the field no further session could be held either that year or the next and Carlton what's obliged to nominate the judges himself the 15 years of peace were over Canada had once more become an object of contention between two fiercely hostile forces the war of the American Revolution was a long and exceedingly complicated struggle and its many varied fortunes naturally had a profound effect on those of Canada but Canada was directly engaged in no more than the first three campaigns when the Americans invaded her in 1775 and 76 and when the British used her as the base from which to invade the new American Republic in 1777 these first three campaigns formed a purely civil war within the British Empire on each side stood three parties opponents were ranged against each other in the mother country in the 13 colonies and in Canada in the mother country the king and his party government were reigned against the opposition and all who held radical or revolutionary views here the strife was merely political but in the 13 colonies the forces of the crown were engaged against the forces of the new continental congress the small minority of colonists who were afterwards known as the united empire loyalist cited with the crown majority stood with the congress the rest kept as selfishly neutral as they could among the English speaking civilians in Canada many of whom were now of a much better class than the original camp followers the active loyalist comprised only the smaller half the larger half cited with the Americans as was only natural seeing that most of them were immigrants from the 13 colonies but by no means all of these sympathizers were ready for a fight among the French Canadians the loyalists included very few besides the seniors the clergy and a handful of educated people in Montreal three rivers and Quebec the mass of the inhabitants were more or less neutral but many of them were anti-british at first while most of them were anti-American afterwards events moved quickly in 1775 on the 19th of April the shot heard round the world was fired at Lexington in massachusetts on the first day of May the day appointed for the inauguration of the Quebec the statue of the king of Montreal was grossly defaced and hung with a cross a necklace of potatoes and a placard bearing the inscription here's the Canadian pope and English fool the only pop root kinda edly so English large rewards were offered for the detection of the culprits but without avail excitement ran high in many an argument ended with a bloody nose meanwhile three Americans were plotting an attack along the old line of Lake Champlain two of them were outlaws from the colony of New York which was then disputing with the neighboring colony of New Hampshire the possession of the Lawless Region in which all three had taken a refuge and which afterwards became Vermont Ethan Allen the gigantic leader of the wild green mountain boys had a price on his head Seth Warner his assistant was an outlaw of somewhat humbler kind Benedict Arnold the third invader came from Connecticut he was a horse dealer carrying on business with Quebec and Montreal as well as the West Indies he was just 34 an excellent rider a dead shot and a very fair sailor and captain of a crack militia company immediately after the affair at Lexington he had turned out his company reinforced by undergraduates from Yale and seized the New Haven powder magazine and marched over to Cambridge where the massachusetts committee men took such a fancy to him that they made him a colonel on the spot with full authority to raise men for an immediate attack on Tigonderota the opportunities seemed too good to be lost though the continental congress was not thin in favor of attacking Canada as its members hoped to see the Canadians throw off the yoke of empire on their own account the British posts on Lake Champlain were absurdly undermanned Tigonderota contained 200 cannon but only 40 men none of whom expected an attack crown point had only a sergeant and a dozen men to watch its 113 pieces Fort George at the head of Lake George was no better off and nothing more had been done to man the fortifications at St. John's in Reshu where there was an excellent sloop as well as many cannon in charge of the usual sergeants guard this one of preparation was no fault of Carleton's he had frequently reported home on the need of more men now he had less than a thousand regulars to defend the whole country and not another man was to arrive till the spring of next year when gauge was hard pressed for reinforcements at Boston in the autumn of 1774 Carleton had immediately sent him two excellent battalions that could ill be spared from Canada but when Carleton himself made a similar request in the autumn of 1775 Admiral Graves to his lasting dishonor refused to sail to Quebec so late as October the first moves of the three Americas smacked strongly of a well-staged extravaganza in which the smart Yankees never failed to score off the Dunderheaded British the Green Mountain boys assembled on the east side of the lake spies walked in and out of Tigonderota exactly opposite and reported to Ethan Allen that the Commandant and his whole garrison of 40 unsuspecting men would make an easy prey Allen then sent 80 men down to Skakesboro now Whitehall at the southern end of the lake to take the tiny post there and bring back boats for the crossing on the 10th of May when Arnold turned up with his colonels commission but without the 400 men had authorized him to raise Allen however had made himself a colonel too with Warner as his second in command so there were no less than three colonels for 230 men Arnold claimed the command by virtue of his Massachusetts commission but the Green Mountain boys declared they would follow no colonels but their own and so Arnold after being threatened with arrest was appointed something like chief of the staff on the understanding that he would make himself generally useful with the boats this appointment was made at dawn on the 10th of May just as the first 80 men were advancing to the attack after crossing over under cover of night the British sentries musket misfire whereupon he and the guard were rushed while the rest of the garrison were surprised in their beds Ethan Allen who knew the fort thoroughly hammered on the commander's door and summoned him to surrender in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress the astonished Commandant seeing that resistance was impossible put on his dressing gown and paraded his disarm garrison as prisoners of war Seth Warner presently arrived with the rest of Allen's men and soon became the hero of Crown Point which he took with the whole of his 13 men and 113 canon then Arnold had his own turn in command of an expedition against the sergeant's guard canon stores fort and sloops at St. John's on the ratio all of which he captured in the same absurdly simple way when he came sailing back the three victorious commanders paraded all their men and fired off many staggering false aids of joy in the meantime the Continental Congress at Philadelphia with a delightful touch of unconscious humor was gravely debating the following resolution which was passed on the 1st of June that no expedition or incursion ought to be undertaken or made by any colony or body of columnists against or into Canada the same Congress however found reasons enough for changing its mind before the month of May was out the British forces in Canada had already begun to move towards the threatened frontier they had occupied and strengthened St. John's and the Americans were beginning to fear least the command of Lake Champlain might fall into British hands on the 27th of May the Congress closed the phase of individual raids and inaugurated the phase of regular invasion by commissioning General Shuler to pursue any measures in Canada that may have a tendency to promote the peace and security of these colonies Philip Shuler was a distinguished member of the family whose head had formulated the glorious enterprise of conquering New France in 8689 footnote see in this series the fighting governor so it was quite in line with the family tradition for him to be under orders to take position of St. John's Montreal and any other parts of the country provided always adds the cautious Congress that General Shuler finds it practical and it will not be disagreeable to the Canadians a few days later Arnold was trying to get a currency from the convention of New York whose members just then happened to be thinking of giving commissions to his rivals the leaders of the Green Mountain boys well to make the complication quite complete these boys themselves at every intention of electing officers on their own account in the meantime Connecticut determined not to be forestalled by either friend or foe ordered a thousand men to Ticonderoga and commissioned a general called Wooster to command them thus her Libre son the seeds of the dissensions between Congress troops and colony troops which nearly drove Washington mad Shuler reached Ticonderoga in mid-July and assumed his position as congressional commander in chief unfortunately for the good of the service he had only a few hundred men with him so Wooster who had a thousand thought himself the bigger general of the two the Connecticut men followed Wooster's lead by jeering at Shuler's men from New York while the Vermonters added to the confusion by electing Seth Warner instead of Ethan Allen in mid-August a second congressional general arrived making three generals and a half a dozen colonels for less than 1500 troops this third general was Richard Montgomery an ardent rebel of 38 who had been a captain in the British army he had sold his commission bought an estate on the Hudson and married a daughter of the Livingston's the Livingston's headed the Anglo-American Revolutionist in the colony of New York as the Shuler's headed the Knickenbacher Dutch and was soon to take the field at the head of the American Patriots in Canada Montgomery was brother to the captain Montgomery of the 43rd who was the only British officer to disgrace himself during Wolf's Quebec campaign which he did by murdering his French-Canadian prisoners at Chateau Richere because they had fought disguised as Indians footnote see the passing of New France page 118 Richard Montgomery was a much better man than his savage brother though as the sequel proves he was by no means the perfect hero his American admirers would have the world believe his great value at Ticonderoga was his professional knowledge and his adore in the cause he espoused his presence changed the spirit of the camp it sadly needed change such a set of pusillanimous wretches never were collected is his own description in a despairing letter to his wife the army in fact was all parts and no whole and all the parts were mere untrained militia or over the spirit of the town meeting ruled the camp even a battery could not be moved without consulting a council of war Shuler though far more phlegmatic than Montgomery agreed with him heartily on this and many other exasperating points if job had been a general in my situation his memory had not been so famous for patience worn out by his worries Shuler fell ill and was sent to command the base at Albany Montgomery then succeeded to the command of the forces destined for the front the plan for invasion approved by Washington was first to sweep the line of the Richelieu by taking St. John's chamberly then to take Montréal next to secure the line of the St. Lawrence and finally to besiege Quebec Montgomery's forces were to carry out all the preliminary parts alone but Arnold was to join him at Quebec after advancing across country from the Kennebec to the Chaudere with a flying column of Virginians and New Englanders Carlton opened the melancholy little session of the new Legislative Council at Quebec on the very day Montgomery arrived at Tygon de Roga the 17th of August when he closed it to take up the defense of Canada the prospect was already black enough though it grew blacker still as time went on immediately on hearing the news of Tygon de Roga Crown Point and St. John's at the end of May he had sent every available man from Quebec to Montreal whence Colonel Templer had already sent off 140 men to St. John's while calling for volunteers to follow the Seguinarial class came forward at once but all attempts to turn out the militia and mass proved utterly futile 14 years of kindly British rule had loosened up the old French bonds of government and the habitants were no longer united as part of one people with the seniorists and the clergy the rebels had been busy spreading insidious perversions of the Belated Quebec Act poisoning the minds of the habitants against the British government and filling their imaginations with all sorts of terrifying doubts the habitants were ignorant credulous and superstitious to the last degree the most absurd stories obtained ready credence and ran like wild fire through the province 7000 Russians were said to be coming up the St. Lawrence rather as friends or foes mattered nothing compared with the awful fact that they were all outlandish bogies Carleton was said to have a plan for burning alive every habitant he could lay his hands on Montgomery's thousand were said to be 5000 with many more to follow and later on when Arnold's men came up the Kennebec it was satisfactory to explain to most of the habitants that it was no good resisting dead shot riflemen who were bulletproof themselves Carleton issued proclamations the seniors waived their swords the clergy thundered from their pulpits but all in vain two months after the American exploits on Lake Champlain Carleton gave a guinea to the sentry mounted in his honor by the local militia colonel M.D. Toniclure because this man was the first genuine habitant he had yet seen armed in the whole district of three rivers what must Carleton have felt when the home government authorized him to raise 6000 of his majesty's loyal French-Canadian subjects for immediate service and informed him that the arms and equipment for the first 3000 were already on the way to Canada seven years earlier it might have seen possible to raise French-Canadian counterparts of those Highland regiments which Wolf had recommended and Pitt had so cordially approved Carleton himself had recommended this excellent scheme at the proper time but though the home government even then agreed with him they thought such a measure would raise more parliamentary and public clamor than they could safely face the chance once lost was lost forever Carleton had done what he could to keep the enemy at arms length from Montreal by putting every available man into Chambrion St. John's he knew nothing of Arnold's force till it actually reached Quebec in November Quebec was thought secure for the time being and so was left with a handful of men under crema hay Montreal had a few regulars and a hundred royal immigrants mostly old Highlanders who had settled along the New York frontier after the conquest for the rest it had many American and a few British sympathizers sped it up fly at each other's throat and a good many neutrals ready to curry favor with the winners Sorrell was a mere post without any effective garrison Chambrion was held by only 80 men under Major Stomford but its strong stone fort was well armed and quite proof against anything except siege artillery while its little garrison consisted of good regulars who were well provisioned for a siege the mass of Carleton's little force was at St. John's under Major Preston who had 500 men of the 7th and 26th Royal Falsilliers and Camara Indians 80 gunners and 120 volunteers mostly French Canadian gentlemen Preston was an excellent officer and his 700 men were able to give a very good account of themselves as soldiers but the fort was not nearly so strong as the one in Chamberlain it had no natural advantages of position and was short of both stores and provisions the three successive steps for Montgomery to take were St. John's Chambrion and Montreal but the natural order of events was completely upset by that headstrong Yankee Ethan Allen who would have his private war at Montreal and by that comparable British officer Major Stomford who would not defend Chambrion. Montgomery laid siege to St. John's on the 18th of September but made no substantial progress for more than a month he probably had no use for Allen at anything like a regular siege so Allen and a Major Brown went on to preach politics and concert arising with men like Livingston and Walker Livingston as we have seen already belong to a leading New York family which was very active in the rebel cause and Livingston Walker Allen and Brown would have made a dangerous anti-British combination if they could only have worked together but they could not. Livingston hurried off to join Montgomery with 400 patriots who served their cause fairly well till the invasion was over. Walker had no military qualities whatsoever so Allen and Brown were left to their own dis-united devices. Montreal seemed an easy prey it had plenty of rebel sympathizers. Nearly all the surrounding habitants were either neutrals or inclined to side with the Americans though not as fighting men. Carlton's order to bring in all the leaders so as to prevent an escalate of the walls had met with general opposition and evasion. Nothing seemed wanting but a good working plan Brown or possibly Allen himself then hit upon the idea of treating Montreal very much as Allen had treated Ticonderoga. In any case Allen jumped at it. He jumped so far indeed that he first stalled Brown who failed to appear at the crucial moment. Thus on the 24th of September Allen found himself alone at long point with a hundred and twenty men in face of three times as many under the Redondo Major Cardin a skilled veteran who had won Wolf's admiration years before. Cardin's force included thirty regulators 240 militiamen and some Indians probably not over a hundred strong. The militia were mostly of the singuino class with a following of habitants and townsmen of both French and British blood. Cardin broke Allen's flanks rounded up his center and won the little action easily though at the expense of his own most useful life. Allen was very indignant at being handcuffed and marched off like a common prisoner after having made himself a colonel twice over but Carleton had no respect for self-commissioned officers and had no soldiers to spare for guarding dangerous rebels. So he shipped Allen off to England where the eccentric warrior was confined in Pendetland's castle near Falmorth in Cornwell. This affair small as it was revived British hopes in Montreal and induced a few more militiamen and Indians to come forward but within a month more was lost at Chambley than had been gained at Montreal. On the 18th of October a small American Detachment attacked Chambley with two field guns and induced it to surrender on the 20th. If ever an officer deserved to be shot it was Major Stupford who tainly surrendered his well armed and well provided fort to an insignificant force after a flimsy resistance of only thirty six hours without even taking the trouble to throw his stores into the river that flowed beside his strong stone walls. The news of this disgraceful surrender diligently spread by rebel sympathizers frightened the Indians away from St. John's thus depriving Major Preston the commandant of his best couriers at the very worst time but the evil did not stop there for nearly all the few French Canadian militiamen whom the most distant seniores had been able to get under arms deserted en masse with many threats against anyone who should try to turn them out again. Chambley is only a short day's march from Montreal to the west and St. John's to the south so its capture meant that St. John's was entirely cut off from Richelieu to the north and dangerously exposed to being cut off from Montreal as well. Its ample stores and munitions of war were a priceless boon to Montgomery who now redoubled his efforts to take St. John's but Preston held out bravely for the remainder of the month while Carlton did his best to help him. A fort nine earlier Carlton had arrested that fire-band Walker who had previously refused to leave the country though Carlton had given him the chance of doing so. Mrs. Walker was much a rebel as her husband interviewed Carlton and noted in her diary that he said many severe things in very soft and polite terms. Carlton was firm. Walker's actions, words, and correspondence all proved him a dangerous rebel whom no governor could possibly leave at large without breaking his oath of office. Walker who had himself caused so many outrageous arrests now not only resisted the legal arrest of his own person but fired on the little party of soldiers who had been sent to bring him to Montreal. The soldiers then began to burn him out whereupon he carried his wife to the window from which the soldiers rescued her. He then surrendered and was brought to Montreal where the sight of him as a prisoner made a considerable impression on the waiverers. A few hundred neighboring militiamen were scraped together. Every one of the handful of regularers who could be spared was turned out and Carlton set off to the relief of St. John's but Seth Warner's Green Mountain boys reinforced by many more sharpshooters prevented Carlton from landing at Longmille opposite Montreal. The remaining Indians began to slink away. The French Canadian militiamen deserted fast thirty or forty of a night. There were not two hundred regularers available for a march across country and on the thirtieth Carlton was forced to give up and despair. Within the week St. John surrendered with six hundred and eighty-eight men who were taken south as prisoners of war. Preston had been completely cut off and threatened with starvation as well, so when he destroyed everything likely to be needed by the enemy he had done all that could be expected of a brave and capable commander. It was the third of November when St. John surrendered. Ten days later Montgomery occupied Montreal and Arnold landed at Wolf's Cove just above Quebec. The race for the possession of Quebec had been a very close one. The race for the capture of Carlton was to be closer still and on the fate of either depended the immediate and perhaps ultimate fate of Canada. The race for Quebec had been none the less desperate because the British had not known of the danger from the south till after Arnold had suddenly emerged from the wilds of Maine and was well on his way to the mouth of the Chaudière which falls into the St. Lawrence seven miles above the city. Arnold's subsequent change of sides earned him the excretion of the Americans but there can be no doubt whatever that if he had got through in time to capture Quebec he would have become a national hero of the United States. He had the advantage of leading picked men though nearly three hundred faint hearts did turn back halfway but even with picked men his feet was one of surprising excellence. His force went in eleven hundred strong. It came out reduced by desertion as well as almost incredible hardships with barely seven hundred. It began its toilsome ascent of the Quebec towards the end of September carrying six week supplies in the bad hastily built boats on the men's backs. David Morgan and his Virginia Rifleman led the way. Aaron Burr was present as a young volunteer. The portages were many and tiring. The settlements were few at first and then wanting altogether. Early in October the drenched portagers were already sleeping in their frozen clothes. The boats began to break up. Quantities of provisions were lost. Soon there was scarcely anything left but flour and salt pork. It took nearly a fortnight to get past the great carrying place in sight of Mount Bigelow Rock, bog and freezing slime told on the men, some of whom began to fall sick, then came the chain of ponds leading into Dead River. Then the last climb up to the height of land beyond which lay the headwaters of the Chaudirère, which takes its rise in Lake Magantic. There were sixty miles to go beyond the lake and a badly broken sixty miles they were. Before the first settlement of French Canadians could be reached there was no trail. Provisions were almost at an end. Sickness increased and sick began to die. And what was it all for? A chance to get killed. The end of the march was Quebec, impregnable. On the twenty-fourth of October Arnold with fifteen other men began a race against time, a race against starvation, by pushing on ahead in a desperate effort to find food. Within a week he had reached the first settlement after losing three of his five boats, with everything in them, three days later and not one day too soon. The French Canadians met his several hundred famishing men, with a drove of cattle and plenty of provisions. The rest of the way was toilsome enough, but it seemed easy by comparison. The habitants were friendly, but very shy about enlisting in spite of Washington's invitation to range yourselves under the standard of general liberty. The Indians were more responsive and nearly fifty joined on their own terms. By the eighth of November Arnold was marching down the south shore of St. Lawrence from the Chardonnayre to Point-Lévis, in full view of Quebec. He had just received a dispatch ten days old from Montgomery, by which he learned that St. John's was expected to fall immediately and that Shuler was no longer with the army at the front. But he could not tell when the junction of forces would be made, and he saw at once that Quebec was on the alert because every boat had been either destroyed or taken over to the other side. The spring and summer had been anxious times enough in Quebec, but the autumn was a great deal worse. Bad news kept coming down from Montreal. The disaffected got more and more restless and began to act as though no opposition might be shown the rebel forces. And in October it did seem as if nothing could be done to stop the invaders. There were only a few hundred militiamen that could be depended on. The regulars under Colonel McLean had gone up to help Carlton on the Montreal frontier. The fortifications were in no state to stand a siege, but Carmehame was full of steadfast energy. He had mustered the French Canadian militia in September 11th. The very day Arnold was leaving Cambridge in Massachusetts for his dataing raid against Quebec. These men had answered the call far better in the city of Quebec than anywhere else. There was also a larger proportion of English-speaking loyalists, more than in Montreal. But no transports brought troops up the St. Lawrence from Boston or the mother country, and no vessel brought Carlton down. The loyalists were, however, encouraged by the presence of two small men of war, one of which, the Hunter, had been the guideship for Wolfsboat the night before the Battle of the Plains. Some minor reinforcements also kept arriving. Veterans from the border settlements and a hundred and fifty men from Newfoundland. On the 3rd of November, the day St. John surrendered to Montgomery, an intercepted dispatch had worn Carmehame of Arnold's approach and led him to seize all the boats on the south shore opposite Quebec. This was by no means the first precaution. He had sent some men forty miles up the Chaudret as soon as the news of the raids on Lake Champlain and St. John's had arrived at the end of May. Thus, though neither of them had anticipated such a bolt from the blue, both Carleton and Carmehame had taken all the reasonable means within their most restricted power to provide against unforeseen contingencies. Arnold's chance of surprising Quebec had been lost ten days before he was able to cross the St. Lawrence, and when the inhabitants on the south shore were helping his men to make scaling ladders, the British garrison on the north had already become too strong for him. But he was indefatigable in collecting boats and canoes at the mouth of the Chaudret air, and at other points higher up than Carmehame's men had reached when on their mission of destruction or removal, and he was as capable as ever when on the pitch-black night of the 13th he led his little flotilla through the gap between the two British men of war, the Hunter and the Lizard. The next day he marched across the plains of Abraham and saluted Quebec with three cheers. But meanwhile Colonel McLean, who had set out to help Carleton at Montreal and turn back on hearing the news of St. John's, had slipped into Quebec on the 12th, so Arnold found himself with less than seven hundred effectives against an eleven hundred British who were now behind the walls. After vainly summoning the city to surrender, he retired to point, on Trembel's, more than twenty miles up the north shore of the St. Lawrence, there to await the arrival of the victorious Montgomery. Meanwhile, Montgomery was racing for Carleton, and Carleton was racing for Quebec. Montgomery's advance guard had hurried on to Sorrell at the mouth of Rachelot, forty-five miles below Montreal, to mount guns that would command the narrow channel through which the fugitive governor would have to pass on his way to Quebec. They had ample time to set the trap for an incessant northeaster, blew up the St. Lawrence day after day and held Carleton fast in Montreal while only a league away. Montgomery's main body was preparing to cross over. Escape by land was impossible, as the Americans had Berthier on the north shore and had won over the inhabitants all the way down from Montreal on both sides of the river. At last, on the afternoon of the eleventh, the wind shifted. Immediately a single cannon shot was fired. A bugle sounded, a fall in, and the whole military establishment of Montreal formed up in the Barrick Square. 130 officers and men, all told. Carleton rung to the soul as one of his officers wrote home, came on parade firm, unshaken, and serene. The little column then marched down to the boats through shattered streets of timid neutrals and scowling rebels. A few loyalists who came to say goodbye to Carleton at the wharf might well have thought it was the last handshake they would ever get from a British captain general and Governor-in-Chief, as they saw him step aboard in the dreary dusk of the November afternoon. And if he and they had known the worst, they might well have thought their fate was sealed, for neither of them then knew that both sides of the St. Lawrence were occupied in force at two different places, on the perilous way to Quebec. The little flotella of eleven vessels got safely down to with a hundred miles of serrell, when one grounded and delayed the rest till the wind failed altogether at noon on the twelfth. The next three days had blew upstream without a break. No progress could be made as there was no room to attack in the narrow passages opposite Serrell. On the third day an American floating battery suddenly appeared, firing hard. Behind it came a boat with a flag of truce and the following summons from Colonel Easton, who commanded Montgomery's advance guard at Serrell. Sir, by this you will learn that General Montgomery is in possession of the Fortress Montreal. You are very sensible that I am in procession at this place. And that from the strength of the United Colonies on both sides your own situation is rendered very disagreeable. I am therefore induced to make you the following proposal. Is that if you will resign your fleet to me immediately without destroying the effects on board, you and your men shall be used with due civility, together with women and children, on board. To this I shall expect your direct and immediate answer. Should you neglect, you will carefully take the consequences which will follow. Carleton was surprised and well he might be. He had not supposed that Montgomery's men were in any such commanding position, but like Carmahay at Quebec he refused to answer. Whereupon Easton's batteries opened from both the south shore and from the Isle St. in Glace. Carleton's heaviest gun was a nine pounder, while Easton had four twelve pounders, one of them mounted on a rowing battery that soon forced the British to retreat. The skipper of the schooner containing the powder magazine wanted to surrender on the spot, especially when he heard that the Americans were getting some hot shot ready for him. But Carleton retreated upstream, twelve miles above Sorrell to Laverterie, just above Berthier on the north shore, where on attempting to land he was driven back by some Americans and habitants. Next morning the sixteenth a fateful day for Canada. The same Major Brown who had failed Ethan Allen at Montreal came up with a flag of truce to propose that Carleton should send an officer to see for himself how well all chance of escape had now been cut off. The offer was accepted, and Brown explained the situation from the rebel point of view. This is my small battery, and even if you should chance to escape I have a grand battery at the mouth of the Sorrell ratio, which will infallibly sink all of your vessels. Wait a little till you see the thirty-two pounders that are now within half a mile. There was a good deal of Yankee Bluff in this warning, especially as the thirty-two pounders could not be mounted in time, but the British officers seemed perfectly satisfied that the way was completely blocked, and so the Americans felt sure that Carleton would surrender the following day. Carleton however was not the man to give in till the very last, and one desperate chance still remained. His flotilla was doomed, but he might still get through alone without it. One of the French Canadian skippers, better known as Le Tour the Wild Pigeon, then his own name as Bouchette, because of his wonderfully quick trips, was persuaded to make a dash for freedom. So Carleton, having ordered Prescott his second in command not to surrender the flotilla before the last possible moment, arranged for his own escape on a whaleboat, it was with an infinite precaution that he made his preparations as the enemy, though confident of taking him, were still on the alert to prevent such a prize from slipping through their fingers. He dressed like a habitant, from head to foot, pulling on a tasseled bonnet rouge and an effete who plays, gray homespun, suit of clothes, with a red sash and bottle savages like Indians moccasins. The crew got in and plied their muffled oars, noiselessly down to the narrow passage between the Isle of St. Ignoines and the Isle of Dupas, where they slipped the oars and leaned over the side to paddle past the nearest battery with the palms of their hands, and it was a moment of breathless excitement for the hope of Canada was in their keeping, and no turning back was possible. But the American centuries saw no forty French Canadians gliding through the dark November night and heard no suspicious noises above the regular ripple of the eddying island current, one tenths half hour, and all was over. The oars were run out again, and the men gave way with a will, and three rivers was reached safely in the morning. Here Carlton met Captain Napierre, who took him aboard the armed ship Fell, in which he continued his journey to Quebec. He was practically safe aboard the Fell, for Arnold had neither an army strong enough to take Quebec, nor any craft big enough to fight a ship, but the flotilla above Sorrell was doomed. After throwing all its power into the St. Lawrence, it surrendered on the nineteenth, the very day Carlton reached Quebec. The astonished Americans were furious when they found that Carlton had slipped through their fingers after all. They got Prescott, whom they hated, and they released Walker, whom Carlton was taking as a prisoner to Quebec. But no friends and foes like Walker and Prescott could make up for the loss of Carlton, who was the heart, as well as the head of Canada, at Bay. The exaltation of the British more than matched the disappointment of the Americans. Thomas Ansey, collector of customs and captain of militia at Quebec, only expressed the feelings for all his fellow loyalists when he made the following entry in an extraordinary, accurate diary he kept throughout those troublesome times. On the nineteenth, the happy day for Quebec, to the unspeakable joy of the friends of the government, and to the utter dismay of the abetters of sedation and rebellion, General Carlton arrived in the fell armed ship accompanied by an armed schooner. We saw our salvation in his