a guarantee of their estates; to establish a free press; to allure the people of Canada by the prospect of a free trade with all nations; to set up a government for themselves, and join the federal union. John, the brother of Charles Carroll, a Jesuit, afterward archbishop of Baltimore, came with them in the hope of moderating the opposition of the Canadian clergy. The commissioners discovered on their arrival a general expectation that the Americans would be driven from the province; without hard money and a large army they could not ask the people to take part in the war.

Thomas arrived near Quebec on the first of May, and employed three days in ascertaining the condition of his command. He found one thousand six hundred men, including officers, beside three hundred whose enlistments had expired. The sick numbered nine hundred, chiefly of the small-pox which had raged among the Americans with extreme virulence, so that men feared to be near one another, and there were officers who advised to inoculate all of them who were liable to infection. Of efficient men there were but seven hundred ; and of these not more than three hundred could be rallied at any one place. In all the magazines there remained but about one hundred and fifty pounds of powder and six days' provisions.

On the fifth a council of war agreed unanimously to prepare for a retreat. The decision had been delayed too long. Early on the sixth, three British ships-of-war, which had forced their way up the St. Lawrence when it was almost impracticable from ice, came into the basin and landed their marines and that part of the twenty-ninth regiment which they had on board; and not far from noon, while the Americans were embarking their sick and their artillery, about one thousand men, in two divisions, sallying out of the gates of St. John and St. Louis, attacked the American sentinels and main guard. Thomas attempted to bring his men under arms; but, unable to collect more than two hundred and fifty on the plains, he directed a retreat to Deschambault, forty-eight miles above Quebec. The troops fled with precipitation, leaving their provisions, cannon, five hundred muskets, and about two hundred of their sick. Of these, one half crept away to the Canadian peasants, by

whom they were nursed with tenderness; Carleton, by proclamation, opened the general hospital to them all, with leave to return home on their recovery.

At Deschambault it was ordered that the half-starved army should not attempt to make a stand below Sorel. The English in pursuit burned the houses of the French who had befriended the rebels.

On the eighth the forty-seventh regiment arrived from Halifax, and, five days later, more transports and troops from Europe, while Thomas remained fifteen leagues below Montreal, at Sorel. That city was approached on the north-west, near the pass of the Cedars, by a party composed of forty regular troops from the station at Detroit, a hundred Canadians, and several hundred Indians. The troops which Arnold sent to the Cedars met with discomfitures till he went to their relief; the Indians violated capitulations by sacrificing American prisoners for their warriors who had fallen.

The American commissioners, Franklin and his colleagues, observed that the invaders had lost the affections of the Canadian people; that, for the want of hard money, they were distressed for provisions; that they were incapable of exact discipline, because sent for short periods of service; that, always too few in numbers, they were wasted by the small-pox; and they unanimously advised immediately to withdraw the army from Canada, fortify the passes on the lakes, and station Sullivan's brigade at Fort George.

But congress insolently enjoined Thomas to "display his military qualities and acquire laurels.” Of hard money it

sent forward all that it had, which was sixteen hundred sixtytwo pounds, one shilling and threepence; and, unable to collect more, it resolved to supply the troops in Canada with provisions and clothing from the other colonies. It voted the necessity of keeping possession of the country and of contesting every foot of ground, especially on the St. Lawrence below the mouth of the Sorel. But the campaign in Canada was decided before its votes were known.

At the end of May confusion prevailed in every department of the American army. Their number did not exceed four thousand men of whom three fourths had never had the

small-pox; many of their officers were incompetent. They were often without meat, and lived by levying contributions of meal.

In the blindness of helpless zeal, on the first day of June congress resolved "that six thousand militia be employed to reenforce the army in Canada, and to keep up the communication with that province;" it called upon Massachusetts to make up half that number, Connecticut one quarter, New Hampshire and New York the rest; and, with a useless dereliction from sound policy, it authorized the employment of Indians.

On that same day the first division of the Brunswick troops under Riedesel arrived with Burgoyne at Quebec, and, with the regiments from Ireland and others, put into the hands of Carleton an army of nine thousand nine hundred and eightyfour effective men.

All our

The small-pox seized Thomas, and he died just a month and a day after taking the command round Quebec. Sullivan, arriving with his party at Sorel on the fifth, found the retreat in safe progress, the heavy baggage and most of the artillery already removed to St. John's and Chambly. Assuming the command, he ordered all who were on the retreat to turn about and follow him, and the cannon to be brought back. "I assure you and the congress," he reported through Washington to congress on the sixth, "that I can in a few days reduce the army to order and put a new face to our affairs here. operations ought to be down the river." He sent a detachment, under a subordinate general, with one fourth of his whole force to Three Rivers, through a country with which he was unacquainted, and in ignorance of the strength and the positions of the enemy. A peasant made known to the English their approach. Twenty-five newly arrived transports, laden with troops, had, by Carleton's directions, been piloted past Quebec without stopping; and they arrived at Three Rivers just in time to take part in repelling the attack which was gallantly begun by Wayne. The Americans were driven back to Sorel, losing more than two hundred men, chiefly as prisoners, saving the rest only by Carleton's want of alertness.

The remains of the American army encamped at Sorel did not exceed two thousand five hundred men; about a thousand

more were at other stations, but most of them under inoculation. Sickness, want of food, defeat, the threefold superiority of the British in numbers and their incomparable superiority in appointments, made resistance impossible. A council of field officers all but unanimously advised retreat; Arnold, Antill, and Hazen, who were not present, were of the same mind. On the fourteenth the fleet with the British forces was coming up the river under full sail; when, an hour or a little more before their arrival, Sullivan, who was both brave and alert, broke up his camp, taking away with him everything, even to a spade. The guard at Berthier retreated by land, leaving nine boats behind.

From Mon

At Chambly all the boats and baggage were brought over the rapids, except three heavy pieces of cannon. treal, Arnold, with the knowledge of the commissioners of congress, had sent off merchandise taken from the inhabitants; when the enemy came within twelve miles, he crossed with three hundred men to La Prairie. All that was left of the invading army met on the seventeenth at St. John's, half of them being sick, almost all destitute of clothing, and having no provisions except salt pork and flour. On the eighteenth the emaciated, half-naked men, languidly pursued by a column under Burgoyne, escaped to Isle-Aux-Noix.

On the day on which Sullivan halted at Isle-aux-Noix, Gates, who had been elected a major-general, was appointed to take command of the forces in Canada. Already at Albany the question arose, whether the command would revert to Schuyler the moment the army should be found south of the Canada line.

At Isle-aux-Noix the men fit for duty remained for eight days, till the invalids could be taken to Crown Point. They made the voyage in leaky boats which had no awnings, with no food but raw pork and hard bread or unbaked flour. A physician who was an eye-witness said: "At the sight of so much privation and distress, I wept till I had no more power to weep." Early in July the fragments of the army of Canada reached Crown Point. Everything about them was infected with the pestilence. "I did not look into a tent or a hut," says Trumbull, "in which I did not find either a dead or dying

man." Of about five thousand men, housed under tents or rudely built sheds or huts of brush, exposed to the damp air of the night, full half were invalids; more than thirty new graves were made every day. In a little more than two months the northern army lost by desertion and death more than five thousand men.

The reduction of the southern colonies was to have been finished before that of Canada.

Martin, the governor of North Carolina, had repeatedly offered to raise a battalion from the Scottish Highlanders in that colony, and declared himself sure of the allegiance of the regulators, as of men weary of insurrection and scrupulous about their oaths. Again and again he importuned to be restored to his old rank in the army as lieutenant-colonel, promising the greatest consequences from such an appointment. He could not conceal that "the frenzy" had taken possession of all classes of men around him; yet he promised the ministry that with ten thousand stand of arms, to be sent immediately from England, with artillery, ammunition, money, some pairs of colors, a military commission for himself, and the aid of two regiments, he would force a connection with the interior and raise not the Highlanders alone, but the people of the upper country in such overwhelming numbers as to restore order in the two Carolinas, "hold Virginia in awe," and recover every colony south of Pennsylvania. In England his advice was listened to, except that rank in the army was refused him.

Making himself busy with the affairs of his neighbors, Martin wrote to the British ministry in midsummer 1775: "The people of South Carolina forget entirely their own weakness and are blustering treason; while Charleston, that is the head and heart of their boasted province, might be destroyed by a single frigate. In charity to them and in duty to my king and country, I give it as my sincere opinion that the rod of correction cannot be spared." A few weeks later, Lord William Campbell chimed in with him, reckoning up the many deadly perils by which they were environed: "the Indians;" "the disaffected back-country people;" their own social condition "where their slaves were five to one;" and the power of Britain from the sea.