Episode 23: The Liberation

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode 23: The Liberation

Written by Jim Ambuske, Ph.D.
Published January 27, 2026

JIM AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE 

But by November, Carleton didn’t have enough soldiers to defend the city, even against a diseased and distressed rebel army. Montgomery threatened to raze it if he did not capitulate. The governor knew that his capture was a bargaining chip the British could not afford to spend, not with Quebec city still standing to guard the gates of the St. Lawrence River. With little confidence that the habitant would rally to the king’s standard, Carleton advised Montreal’s ruling merchant elite that “they might take care of themselves” and boarded the Gaspé to slip out of the city.  

AMBUSKE 

Nevertheless, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia had invited Quebec to send delegates to confer with its sister colonies on how best to resist Great Britain’s increasingly destructive policies and troubling signs that it meant to compel obedience by force. The British establishment and the French Canadian elite in Quebec twice declined Congress’s overtures by refusing to answer them. And without a provincial assembly in the colony, there were little means or motivation to form a renegade Provincial Congress in Quebec, as their old Puritan enemies had done in Massachusetts Bay.  

AMBUSKE 

New Englanders had many and good reasons to think that Nova Scotians might want to join the Patriot cause. But, once the civil war began in April 1775, and Congress created a Continental Army two months later, the rebels had strange reasons to hope that Quebec might be liberated from British hands and unite with the thirteen other rebelling provinces to become the fourteenth colony.  

AMBUSKE 

The invasion began in the summer heat of late August. Two rebel armies moved north, one from New York, the other from Maine, as autumn skies darkened and temperatures fell. By mid-November, after trudging through woods and over hard ground, with supplies running low and British forts stubbornly implacable, Montgomery finally arrived at Carleton’s door.

AMBUSKE 

The thirty-six-year-old former Redcoat had settled in northern New York in the early 1770s after selling his commission in the British army for £1,500. With no more major wars to fight after the end of Pontiac’s Uprising in the mid-1760s, Captain Montgomery’s prospects for promotion were thin. He was stationed in England for a time before giving up army life for a farm in New York and marrying into the powerful, and eventually rebel, Livingston family.  

AMBUSKE 

But war brought renewed possibilities, and soon the Continental Congress made the fatalist Captain Montgomery a Brigadier General.  

AMBUSKE 

As Montgomery and his beleaguered men fought their way north toward Montreal, they encountered unexpected assistance, if not outright support, from some French Canadian habitant, the common settlers who labored as tenant farmers for their feudal lords.

AMBUSKE 

Even some of Montreal’s French Canadian elite secretly inquired with Montgomery that October about what terms he might offer for the city’s surrender. Yet in the end, one of the old and notoriously duplicitous instigators of that inquiry thought better of it. He turned over Montgomery’s terms to Carleton, who promptly called in the town’s executioner to stomp on the unopened letter, and then burned it.  

AMBUSKE 

On the 13th, the merchants opened the gates, and the rebels marched in. 

AMBUSKE 

Three days later, a dying wind and rebel batteries nearly upended Carleton’s escape to Quebec city. 

AMBUSKE 

Near Sorel, where the Richelieu River empties into the St. Lawrence, a rebel British American officer sent a message to Carleton under a flag of truce, telling the fleeing governor that Montreal had fallen to Montgomery, and that if he and his retinue surrendered they would be “used with all due civility.” If they did not, cannon fire would make short work of them all.  

AMBUSKE 

Under cover of darkness the next night, Carleton stripped off his usual fine coat and blackened boots, and put on moccasins, a wool cap topped with a tassel, and a coarse blanket coat. The Ulster-born man completed his transformation from royal governor of Quebec into a French Canadian habitant by tying a ceinture fléchée, a colorful woven sash, around his waist. 

AMBUSKE 

The disguised governor and a few aides climbed over the railing of the Gaspé and onto a skiff with muffled oars, that quietly paddled them downriver over thirty miles to Trois-Rivières, where they boarded a small armed vessel that carried them the rest of the way to the city of Quebec and its citadel. 

AMBUSKE 

In the early morning hours of November 19th, the royal governor-turned-habitant could see his breath and an unwelcome sight. As his ship drifted with the current past a small settlement called The Aspen Point, for the groves of quaking trees that trembled in that place, Carleton could just make out the shadows and shapes of the second rebel army.

AMBUSKE 

Like him, that army was on its way to Quebec city, having survived on shoe leather and far worse, to liberate the people under their common king’s rule, and bring a revolution to Canada. 

AMBUSKE 

The dark waters swirled in the St. Lawrence River on the cold night of November 16, 1775. On board His Majesty’s Ship the Gaspé, Sir Guy Carleton, the governor of the colony of Quebec, was trapped and winter was coming.  

AMBUSKE 

Three days earlier and forty miles upriver, Carleton had barely managed to slip out of Montreal when the old city surrendered to a rebel British American army under the command of a fellow Irishman and former British officer named Richard Montgomery.

AMBUSKE 

Both men knew this North American world all too well. Carleton had been Major General James Wolfe’s quartermaster when the British captured Quebec city in September 1759; Montgomery had served in Major General Jeffrey Amherst’s army when the French surrendered Montreal in September 1760. The victories they had won in the heart of New France had now brought them back together on the opposite sides of a British civil war.

AMBUSKE 

Carleton was fifty-one years old as he contemplated the rebel artillery batteries firing from both sides of the shore at his ship and ten other vessels that had fled from Montreal when Montgomery’s army captured the city.

AMBUSKE 

In one sense, Quebec was his colony. A year before he found himself on board the Gaspé on that frustratingly windless night, surrounded by rebel forces, Carleton had returned to Quebec with the fruits of his labor done in London. The governor had been one of the key architects of the Quebec Act of 1774, a massive reform of the old French colony that restored French civil law in Quebec, protected the right of Catholic worship in the province, allowed French Canadian Catholics to serve in local governments, and extended the colony’s borders south to the Ohio River.

AMBUSKE 

The Quebec Act accounted for the complicated and diverse sum of the British empire’s many parts, and the shifting meaning of subjecthood in an Empire of Liberty.

AMBUSKE 

But Protestant British Americans and land speculators had bristled at news of the reform, fearing a Catholic knife and popish tyranny at their backs, and the corruption of British liberty by Satan himself. It didn’t help that Parliament passed the new reform in the same months that it adopted coercive measures to punish Bostonians for the destruction of East India Company tea in their harbor. To British Americans, it was just the latest intolerable act.

AMBUSKE 

I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution.  

AMBUSKE 

Episode 23: The Liberation.  

AMBUSKE 

On October 26, 1774, the first Continental Congress invited the people of Quebec to resist British authority. 

AMBUSKE 

In a letter published in both French and English, one mostly written by the Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, Protestant British Americans bordering on open rebellion to the crown entreated George III’s newest subjects in Catholic French Canada to unite with them in defense of their British liberties.  

CONGRESS 

“A moment's reflection should convince you which will be most for your interest and happiness, to have all the rest of North-America your unalterable friends, or your inveterate enemies. The injuries of Boston have roused and associated every colony, from Nova-Scotia to Georgia. Your province is the only link wanting, to compleat the bright and strong chain of union.”

AMBUSKE 

That “bright and strong chain of union” would outshine any religious differences or discord that might exist between the Protestant east and the Catholic north because:

CONGRESS 

“We are too well acquainted with the liberality of sentiment distinguishing your nation, to imagine, that difference of religion will prejudice you against a hearty amity with us.”

AMBUSKE 

Twenty years earlier, and in the twenty years since, it was not all that difficult to imagine how differences of religion could prejudice one against the other. Catholic French Canadians need only look at the Protestant rage in British American newspapers after the passage of the Quebec Act, when many colonists believed that the Church of Rome had planted its corrupting tendrils in the hearts of the king’s ministers.

AMBUSKE 

That could now all be forgotten. There were more pressing matters at hand. Parliament had altered Quebec’s government with the Quebec Act just as it had mutilated the government of Massachusetts Bay. And therefore:

CONGRESS 

“we should consider the violation of your rights, by the act for altering the government of your province, as a violation of our own.”

AMBUSKE 

Congress did not ask the people of Quebec to rebel against their common king, only that they band together in towns and parishes to elect delegates to form their own provincial congress, and then send representatives to Philadelphia the following May, when a second Continental Congress would meet to chart a united path forward. 

AMBUSKE 

But when the new Congress convened on May 10, 1775, the rebellion in Boston had already begun, enterprising New Englanders had captured Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain that very same day Congress gaveled into session, and a union with Nova Scotia seemed more natural. Yet, Quebec was never far from the British American mind. 

JEFFERS LENNOX 

The revolution started because British subjects did not think that they were being treated like British subjects. They believed themselves to be the purest of British subjects. And you only would have to walk through South Carolina in the summer to see these Gentry wearing full British fashion like heavy coats and long pants. It's boiling hot. These are not sartorial choices for this kind of weather. It doesn't get like that in London, but they want to be seen as British. They want to present themselves as British. And when they feel like they're not being treated that way, this is when they start to get angry. They want to be treated like the true British subjects they are. And so we have the lead up to the revolution, but eventually, once the fighting starts in 1775 The idea is that this is a defense of war. The colonists are defending themselves as Britons, and are fighting to be recognized as Britons. Jeffers Lennox, Professor in the Department of History at Wesleyan University, from the very beginning, there's this division between the idea of an American Revolution and of a war for independence. Those are two different things. There's a big switch in and around early 1776 and I think Nova Scotia and Quebec are instrumental in understanding this switch.

RICK ATKINSON 

There is a pope that Canadians will align with the rebellion. I'm Rick Atkinson. I'm an author and military historian. Canada is very underpopulated at this point. There's only about 80,000 Canadians, almost exclusively in Quebec, most of them are French. Abitron, many of them have emigrated at some point from France. They speak French. They're Catholic. This is a problem for the Americans, partly because New Englanders in particular, have been fighting against the Canadians and their French allies and their Indian allies for 100 years.

AMBUSKE 

But fifteen years after New France fell to the British in a euphoric moment for the empire, as Congress now confronted the siege of Boston, and began claiming authority and wielding powers in ways its predecessor never had, to build a Continental Army in order to fight a war to an uncertain end, some British Americans turned their gaze to the provinces further north and wondered if Canada might fall again.

AMBUSKE 

So, why did rebelling British Americans invade Quebec in the early years of the war? Why didn’t they invade Nova Scotia? And how did early military success in Montreal lead to diplomatic defeats? 

AMBUSKE 

To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first to Philadelphia, to once again plead with Quebec to join the rebel cause, and contemplate sending continental armies to invade provinces in the far north, to conquer them into liberty.  

AMBUSKE 

We’ll then set out on campaign to capture Montreal and take Quebec city, marching over frozen ground and paddling through ice strewn rivers and lakes, in search of victory where most had known only defeat, before undertaking a diplomatic mission with a printer, a priest, a planter, and a politician to win over French Canadians to a British American revolution.

AMBUSKE 

On Monday, May 29, 1775, the Second Continental Congress tried once more to persuade the people of Quebec to stand with their fellow subjects against British tyranny. The first attempt had failed in 1774. 

LENNOX 

The Congress sends a letter which is addressed to the people of Quebec. Says, you know, I don't know if you're aware, but you do not have the rights of British subjects, because Quebec did not have an assembly. Quebec did not have trial by jury. They lay out all the things that Quebec is missing and that they should have as British subjects, and then they say, please send a delegate to Philadelphia so that you can participate in our conversations. And nobody comes. They don't send anybody. They don't even send a response.

AMBUSKE 

Now, in late May 1775, a committee led by New York delegate John Jay delivered a draft of a new letter for Congress’s approval.

LENNOX

Which sort of says you may have noticed that we wrote you a letter and you haven't come. We're still interested in you coming.

AMBUSKE 

The committee had originally addressed its letter to “The Oppressed Inhabitants of the Province of Quebec,” but an editor’s pen struck through “Provide of Quebec” and replaced it with simply “Canada.” The swap imagined a place called “Canada” that did not really exist in this moment, a subtle move by Congress to encompass more than just the people living in the old French colony of Quebec, but to also include kindred spirits in British Nova Scotia as well. 

AMBUSKE 

Yet, Congress fooled no one. Even a cursory reading of the letter by a British American or a French Canadian would have revealed that the “oppressed” people of Canada were really the “oppressed” people of Quebec.

AMBUSKE 

To their “Friends and Countrymen,” Congress ignored the past enmity between Protestant British America and Catholic French Quebec, claiming that:

CONGRESS 

“Since the conclusion of the late war, we have been happy in considering you as fellow-subjects, and from the commencement of the present plan for subjugating the continent, we have viewed you as fellow-sufferers with us.”

AMBUSKE 

Congress condemned the Quebec Act as a form of tyranny, an imperial reform that denied the people of that province a colonial assembly and trial by jury, something essential to the preservation of British liberty.

CONGRESS 

“By the introduction of your present form of government, or rather present form of tyranny, you and your wives and your children are made slaves. You have nothing that you can call your own, and all the fruits of your labour and industry may be taken from you, whenever an avaricious governor and a rapacious council may incline to demand them.”

AMBUSKE 

But the timing of Congress’s letter was no accident. Events had outpaced the delegates, not only with the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, but farther north along Lake Champlain, a landscape riddled with the ghosts of the Seven Years’ War.

AMBUSKE 

At dawn on May 10th, the same day that Congress gaveled into session, a small force led by two Connecticut-born men named Ethan Allan and Benedict Arnold surprised a small British garrison at Fort Ticonderoga and captured it without firing a shot. A day later they took the nearby fort at Crown Point. Within days Arnold and his men captured a gunboat on Lake Champlain, and moved on to harass Fort Saint-Jean along the Richelieu River, just miles southeast of Montreal.  

AMBUSKE 

Congress could not ignore the inconvenient truth that war had already come to Quebec’s borders, and sought to justify Allen and Arnold’s actions in hindsight as it tried to take command of the war. 

CONGRESS 

“Permit us again to repeat that we are your friends, not your enemies, and be not imposed upon by those who may endeavour to create animosities. The taking the fort and military stores at Ticonderoga and Crown-Point, and the armed vessels on the lake, was dictated by the great law of self-preservation. They were intended to annoy us, and to cut off that friendly intercourse and communication, which has hitherto subsisted between you and us. We hope it has given you no uneasiness, and you may rely on our assurances, that these colonies will pursue no measures whatever, but such as friendship and a regard for our mutual safety and interest may suggest.”

AMBUSKE 

Congress ordered the letter translated into French, with 1,000 copies printed and sent north. 

AMBUSKE 

The capture of the forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point raised a series of provocative possibilities.

AMBUSKE 

Two decades earlier, French, British, and Indigenous forces had fought fiercely over these forts and the lakes and rivers they guarded. On the one hand, they were the keys to preventing enemies from moving south down Lake Champlain and into the Hudson River Valley to ravage New England and New York. On the other hand, the forts could be a staging ground for invading Montreal and Quebec City.

AMBUSKE 

In either case, much would depend on what the Haudenosaunee would decide to do. Campaigning in the north would mean passing through Iroquoia.

AMBUSKE 

But while Congress waited for Quebec’s answer, settlers in Machias along the eastern coast of the Maine district captured a merchant vessel sent to purchase supplies for General Thomas Gage’s besieged soldiers in Boston, and killed the commanding officer of a British warship sent to escort it. 

AMBUSKE 

Flush with success, the townspeople of Machias proposed an expedition to seize Windsor, Nova Scotia, on its northern coast, and use it as a rallying point for the Patriot cause in the province.

LENNOX

So they say, this is easy. Let's just go get this province and chip away at the British hold so that we'll have better negotiating chips.

AMBUSKE 

In many ways, it wasn’t an outlandish idea. Parliament had invested heavily in Nova Scotia since the early 1760s, envisioning it as a model colony in British America, an attempt to correct the flaws present in the older colonies, and their weaker attachment to the Mother Country. For new settlers who arrived in the years after the Seven Years’ War, Nova Scotia was something of a blank slate, following the forced deportation of the French-speaking Acadian population a decade earlier. In these years the people of New England forged deep connections with the people of Nova Scotia.

ALEXANDRA MONTGOMERY 

In a lot of ways, the demographics would suggest that this is a place that is really ripe to join this Patriot revolutionary cause. I'm Dr. Alexandra Lee Montgomery. I am the director of the Center for Digital history at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. If we think about what are the demographics of Nova Scotia circa 1775 1776 we are 20 plus years removed from the onset, at least, to the deportation of the Acadians. We are some 10 years removed from the major efforts to re people the province with New Englanders, there is a smallish but significant New Englander presence. The vast, vast, vast majority of English speaking settlers are New Englanders, relatively recently arrived New Englanders who came in the 1760s the New England settlers that are in Nova Scotia are largely from Massachusetts and Connecticut, some Rhode Islanders, often from the west of those parts of the west of Massachusetts, rather than the east of Massachusetts. Chester, Nova Scotia has a substantial portion of folks from Harvard, Massachusetts.

AMBUSKE 

New England settlers and British emigrants had been attracted to Nova Scotia by rosy advertisements promising a fertile rich province on the edge of North America. In 1772, an advertisement appeared in Scottish newspapers praising Nova Scotia as a wonderful place for Scots emigrants, a province where they could raise cattle and grow grains, with convenient access to the cod fisheries off Newfoundland. The author claimed it was a far more suitable place for Scots to settle than North Carolina, where many Highlanders had emigrated in recent years. Similar prospects enchanted New Englanders looking for land.

AMBUSKE 

Nova Scotia also appealed to New Englanders because it had a provincial assembly. It first convened in 1758.

MONTGOMERY 

Part of the overall package of attempting to attract New Englanders in the first place is it is clear to the folks that are trying to attract these New Englanders that they are not going are not going to come If there is not a civil government. New Englanders are far too attached to assembly, quasi democratic forms of government. They're just not going to go. It's not going to be something that's interesting to them at all. So that's part of the package of making the colony more attractive to settlers.

AMBUSKE 

By the 1770s some Acadians have returned to Nova Scotia as well.

MONTGOMERY 

Many of whom are now working as tenant farmers on their former land, which, as you can imagine, has created a great deal of resentment. First, they were cleared from their lands. They've been in for generations and generations, and now they're allowed to come back, but as renters, some other guy, some like random council member, now owns the land, and they're being kept around for their knowledge of how to maintain the dike system for like pennies.

AMBUSKE 

It seemed like common sense, then, that Nova Scotia would make common cause with the provinces to the south.

MONTGOMERY 

We've got a bunch of New Englanders. Then we have a bunch of Acadians with not to say that the French folks in Quebec do not have resentments against the British. Obviously, they do. But there are some very present, very recent, very felt resentments among the Acadian population about very specifically the situation in which they are now finding themselves in so in many ways, on paper, at least, it looks like it should be, to me, a much more obvious 14th colony than Quebec.

AMBUSKE 

Despite pockets of persistent support and sympathy for their fellow subjects to the south, Nova Scotia’s close ties to Parliament and its poor financial reputation made the prospect of joining a rebellion increasingly unlikely.

MONTGOMERY 

The crucial thing to know about Nova Scotia is that it is not financially self sustaining. Parliamentary funds are what keeps the province afloat. The deportation of the Acadians completely wrecked the economy. They have not recovered from that. The New Englanders that were brought in just replace them. There are not as many of them, a non insignificant number of them, have returned to New England. There is a backflow migration as well, and the subsequent efforts to bring additional English speaking Protestants into the colony. Have all been failures of more or less a degree. And one of the interesting specificities of that failure too is that there was a massive Philadelphia land boom that included a lot of people who become founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin gets really involved in Nova Scotian land. A lot of his set does during the high Imperial crisis period, there becomes a shift in the imaginary of what Nova Scotia is in a very early period, in the immediate post Seven Years War period, it's a place of possibility. It's a place of future expansion. It's the future of British North America. We're going to incorporate Nova Scotia more fully. It's a sphere of action, a sphere of possible profit.

AMBUSKE 

But

MONTGOMERY 

As early as 1770 if not even earlier, it has become, in many ways, a stand in for everything that's wrong with the British Empire. A lot of people have lost a lot of money there

AMBUSKE 

In response to that rosy claim published in Scottish newspapers that Nova Scotia was a paradise, critics argued emigrants would “either starve or live in misery” in “that bleak and foreign clime.”

MONTGOMERY 

Even the fact that it's being parliamentary funded is part of what makes it so wrong. It stands in contrast to these good coastal settlement colonies, like Virginia, like Massachusetts, that are self created, self sustaining, do not need the British Empire. And Nova Scotia is sort of the dark opposite of that. It's a parasite. It's sucking away people. It's sucking away money. It's sucking away energy from the core of what it means to be a British North American. It's not a surprise why Nova Scotia does not join.

AMBUSKE 

Nor would the rebels force Nova Scotia to join. In early August 1775, George Washington, the new commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, weighed the merits of the plan by the townspeople of Machias, Maine to invade Nova Scotia. Jeffers Lennox explains:

LENNOX

Washington sees this, he understands what's happening, and he writes a response. When they ask him, Can we invade Nova Scotia? He writes a response, and he says, this would be a serious move, because this would be taking a defensive war and turning it into a war of American aggression, because Nova Scotia has never attacked us, sure they haven't sent delegates to Congress, but that's not a crime, and for us to invade, we then become the active party in this conflict. We're no longer just defending ourselves. He says no to that proposed invasion of Nova Scotia,

AMBUSKE 

Quebec was an entirely different matter. History had not been kind to would be British or British American invaders.

MONTGOMERY 

The thing to understand about the idea of invading Canada is that it's kind of, by this point, almost mimetic. There have been many invasions of Canada prior to this point. If you think about the long history of British and French warfare in North America, one of the first ones is 1690 which is a total disaster. The British try again in 1709 they get stuck in the mud in Albany, and then the fleet gets diverted. They try again in 1711 and the ships run aground in the St Lawrence River and 700 people die. It's something that has been proposed over and over and over again, including in the early American Revolution, but it only ever actually works once it works in the Seven Years' War, but that really is an outlier of all the times that it fails.

AMBUSKE 

One Catholic priest celebrated the failure of the British expedition in 1711 with a biting piece of poetry

PRIEST 

London, Boston, Manhattan and Albany, The Mahicans, the Schaghticokes, the Iroquois, What madness! These people without laws Agreed to cross the woods, To seize this colony.

MONTGOMERY 

The dismissiveness of tone of that, I think, is really central to just how much of an uphill battle this is from a strategic perspective, this is a hard thing. Taking Canada is not easy.

AMBUSKE 

But it was critical.

LENNOX 

Quebec is so important to controlling North America you want the St Lawrence River/

AMBUSKE 

And both the British and the rebelling British Americans knew that controlling the rivers and lakes in the northern borderlands that connected to the St. Lawrence River meant commanding the New York and New England backcountry. In happier times, those rivers and lakes were like arteries and veins connecting distant parts of a British body, but in times of conflict those same vessels could carry the disease of war.

AMBUSKE 

A month after Congress learned that ambitious New Englanders had captured forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point, prompting the delegates to send a second letter to the inhabitants of Quebec, Congress received intelligence that Governor Carleton was preparing to invade and was rallying Indigenous people to “take up the hatchet” against the united colonies.

AMBUSKE 

The report wasn’t entirely accurate. Carleton had barely enough British regulars and Canadian militia to defend his colony as it was, to say nothing about soldiers sufficient to mount an invasion. And though General Thomas Gage had written to Carleton two days after Lexington and Concord, encouraging him to make use of “Canadians and Indians…on the Frontiers of the Province of Massachusetts Bay,” Carleton had taken a more cautious and diplomatic approach, inviting Indigenous people to a conference in Montreal set for July.

AMBUSKE 

Nevertheless, to Congress the mere suggestion that Carleton might convince warriors to come south, and the implication that he might retake Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point to clear a path for British forces into New England and New York, prompted the delegates to act.

AMBUSKE 

On June 27th, Congress authorized Major General Philip Schuyler to capture or destroy British boats and artillery on Lake Champlain and the nearby rivers. And there was more. If he found it “practicable, and that it will not be disagreeable to the Canadians,” he was ot “iimmediately take possession of St. Johns, Montreal, and any other parts of the country, and pursue any other measures in Canada, which may have a tendency to promote the peace and security of these Colonies.”

AMBUSKE 

In other words, Schuyler was ordered to invade Quebec.

AMBUSKE 

Those directives rested on the assumption that the invasion would “not be disagreeable to the Canadians,” that the inhabitants of Quebec would welcome the rebels as liberators. 

LENNOX

They assume that French Canadians will jump at the chance to fight Great Britain, and they would say you were just at war with these guys 10 years ago. France and Britain are historical enemies. We are giving you an opportunity to go to war against Britain.

AMBUSKE 

Only time would tell if the “oppressed inhabitants of Canada” would accept that invitation. 

AMBUSKE 

As the rebel British Americans gathered supplies, recruited men, and scrounged around for the latest maps of Quebec, Sir Guy Carleton and Guy Johnson welcomed 1,600 Huron, Mohawk, and other Indigenous peoples to Montreal in July for talks about the rebellion in the southern provinces.

AMBUSKE 

In 1775, both the British and the rebelling British Americans understood that Indigenous decisions would profoundly shape Quebec’s future. British success in conquering Quebec in the Seven Years’ War had rested in part on the willingness of the Haudenousanne to break their neutrality and ally with the British, and the choices made by other peoples like the Delaware to abandon the French.

LENNOX

Indigenous nations, the Six Nations and the Wabanaki Confederacy, they are not fighting the American Revolution. They are working with an entirely different calculus, because what they want to do is protect their Indigenous homelands and protect their way of life, and whatever side they think is going to allow them to do that, or whichever side they can work closely with to do that they will support the Haudenosaunee had done this over the course of the 17th and 18th century. They had worked the line between how to maintain some sort of alliances with the French and some sort of alliances with the English in a way that will just keep this conflict outside of their homelands. You can describe it as an act of neutrality. We think of neutrality as just staying out of it, but it's not. You can be actively neutral. You can take actions that will balance out the powers on both sides.

AMBUSKE 

Negotiating with Native peoples meant paying careful attention to Indigenous diplomatic ceremonies and customs. Brightening the chain of friendship and forging mutually beneficial relationships required time and deliberate efforts.

LENNOX

Diplomatic traditions and ceremonies are really important for indigenous delegates. The way you conduct yourself in a council meeting, for example, has real world implications for whether or not this relationship will end up working the British generally, and this then falls to British Americans and patriots. It takes them more time to figure out that they have to conduct themselves in terms of indigenous diplomacy and not in terms of European diplomacy. What the American delegates want to do is show up and. Start talking. What's the deal going to be? Can we get out of here? We want to figure out how we're going to interact, and then we've got other things to do for indigenous delegates. It's about no no, we show up and we've walked several days weeks to get here. We need a big meal. Let's eat together. Let's exchange gifts. Let's spend tomorrow getting to know each other a little bit better and doing additional ceremonies so that we can clear the air and prepare the ground for a fruitful discussion. There's lots of ceremonies, and most of these you have to actually talk your way through. You have to wipe your eyes clear, you have to open your ears. You have to mend hearts to get rid of any anger that people are bringing. The exchange of gifts is obviously really important.

AMBUSKE 

When the 1,600 Native delegates arrived in Montreal in July, Governor Carleton found that some were eager to attack the rebels. Guy Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern District, and some of his deputies had warned them that the rebels meant to deprive them of their fishing and hunting grounds now that they had possession of Crown Point and Ticonderoga.

AMBUSKE 

Johnson came with several Mohawk delegates, a nation long allied with the British due in no small measure to the efforts of Johnson’s uncle, the late Sir William, and William’s wife, the Mohawk leader Molly Brandt.

AMBUSKE 

To the disappointment of some delegates, Carleton urged them to remain neutral in this emerging British civil war. He believed that asking them to raid in New York and New England would only inflame the conflict, when the British hoped they could bring it to a rapid end. He asked that they remain within Quebec’s borders and keep watch for rebel activities, but to not take the offensive. An exchange of presents confirmed the understanding.

AMBUSKE 

The rebels wanted to keep the Mohawk and the rest of the Six Nations Iroquois out of the conflict as well. Invading Quebec would take the rebels close to, if not through, Iroquoia, especially the lands of the Mohawk and the Oneida.  

AMBUSKE 

In July, a missionary named Samuel Kirkland, who had close ties with the Oneida, met with some Six Nations representatives on Congress’s behalf, urging them “to remain at home, and not join either side, but to keep the hatchet buried deep.”

AMBUSKE 

When General Schuyler learned that Governor Carleton had called together Native peoples in Montreal, he rushed to Albany in mid-August to convene a gathering of nearly 400 Indigenous leaders, including Oneidas and Tuscaroras, as well as some Mohawks. Schuyler, who spoke Mohawk, explained that the colonists were fighting a defensive war to regain their rights as British subjects, and that the rebels had no interest in conquest. After days of discussion, ceremonies, and deliberations, a Mohawk leader known to the colonists as Abraham delivered their decision:

Abraham 

“Now therefore attend, and apply your ears closely. We have fully considered this matter. The resolutions of the Six Nations are not to be broken or altered. When they resolve, the matter is fixed. This then is the determination of the Six Nations, not to take any part, but as it is a family affair, to sit still and see you fight it out.”

AMBUSKE 

The Six Nations’ decision to remain neutral for now in this “family affair” cleared a path for Schuyler and his immediate subordinate, Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, to advance toward Montreal.

AMBUSKE 

The two made for an odd pair. Schuyler, a New York-born man of Dutch extraction, was the scion of one of the colony’s oldest and most powerful landed families. His aristocratic airs didn’t always sit well with the farmers under his command. The Irish-born Montgomery, a former British officer, possessed a constant sense of impending doom.  

AMBUSKE 

With Schuyler in Albany negotiating with the Six Nations, Montgomery learned in late August that the British were arming boats at Fort Saint-Jean to send up the Richelieu River and into Lake Champlain. He began moving down the river with 1,200 men, a small schooner, and other boats toward the fort, eighty miles away.

AMBUSKE 

Though Schuyler was in overall command, most of the decisions would fall to Montgomery. When he joined Montgomery in early September outside the walls of Fort Saint-Jean, Schuyler had brought with him broadsides printed in French assuring French Canadians that Congress had sent the army north for their benefit. But the major general was laboring with bouts of rheumatism. By mid-September, it left him too weak to walk, let alone direct an invasion. He was sent back upriver to Ticonderoga.

AMBUSKE 

By then, Montgomery and his small army had laid siege to Fort Saint-Jean, one that would last fifty-three days. It nearly ended in a rebel defeat, but reinforcements arrived in late October with food, artillery, and gunpowder. Montgomery’s men beat back an 800-man relief force of British regulars, habitant, Native warriors, and merchants, before pounding the fort with artillery. Inside, the British regulars, Canadian militia, tradesmen, women, and children were running out of food and hope. Major Preston, its commander, surrendered to Montgomery on November 3rd.

AMBUSKE 

Ten days later, Montgomery threatened to raze Montreal to the ground, Governor Carleton fled down the St. Lawrence River to Quebec city disguised as a habitant, and Montreal’s merchants opened its gates to the rebels.

AMBUSKE 

Montgomery and his men entered a city founded in the seventeenth century that they would still recognize in our own time.

LENNOX

Montreal was founded to be a religious settlement, but that only lasted for a couple of years until they realized that, oh, this is actually the perfect economic place. It's a great place because indigenous nations don't have to travel as far to trade to Quebec. We can cut them off before they go to New York. So it very quickly becomes a trade hub. You can go to Montreal today and wander through Old Montreal, and it's beautiful, and you see lots of the buildings that would have been there at the time. It has become, it's more English. It becomes the English mercantile center.

AMBUSKE 

Montreal’s importance as a trading hub helps to explain why:

LENNOX

They fall really quickly. Montreal doesn't actually fight when it gets invaded. It just sort of surrenders as a trading place. The trade is going to continue one way or the other.

AMBUSKE 

Montreal’s willingness to do business with the rebels gave the invading British Americans a false sense of hope that their province would join their cause.

LENNOX

The Patriots are a little bit confused, because when they get there, lots of French Canadians are willing to sell them stuff. They are happy to engage in trade, and they see this as an economic opportunity. They're not taking sides. They're also selling stuff to the British war has always made money. There's always opportunities for people to make money in war.

AMBUSKE 

The reception that the rebels found among French Canadian farmers and laborers bolstered their spirits as well. Much to Montgomery’s delight, and Carleton’s dismay, some of the habitant assisted if not openly supported the invaders.  

AMBUSKE 

The habitants lived and labored in a feudal world established by the French in the seventeenth century. They rented farms from great landed proprietors, called seigneurs, and were obligated to perform corvée, specific labor tasks on certain days of the year.

AMBUSKE 

As Montgomery’s army turned east toward Quebec City, many habitant resisted British attempts to conscript them into service. Others convened secret meetings, pledging to deny the British their support. French Canadian women privately warned husbands and sons not to join British regiments, and publicly shamed and mocked British soldiers who had been captured by the rebels. 

AMBUSKE 

That support would amount to nothing, however, if Montgomery and a second rebel army approaching from the east could not take Quebec City. Here’s Rick Atkinson:

ATKINSON 

The eastern prong is a relatively small force commanded by a colonel named Benedict Arnold, and they are going to march through the main wilderness, which is real wilderness in those days, and attacked directly at Quebec from the south.

AMBUSKE 

Encouraged by the news of Montgomery’s progress in September, George Washington appointed Arnold to lead this small army to Quebec. 

AMBUSKE 

They might as well have been marching into hell. Marching overland through the Maine woods and paddling through its many rivers, a distance he miscalculated by almost 100 miles, Arnold and his men weathered disease, flash floods brought on by a Nor-easter, the cold, snow, and starvation. Supply trains turned back. By October, they were running out of food and living on reduced rations. They ate what they could find in the forest, which wasn’t much this time of year, and boiled and gnawed on leather. A Newfoundland dog accompanied the army until it too became food.  

AMBUSKE 

French Canadian farmers saved the army from starvation. Arnold managed to purchase a herd of cattle from a nearby settlement, sating his men, allowing them to press on to Quebec City.

AMBUSKE 

In mid-November 1775, sixteen years after Major General James Wolfe and his British army rode the falling tide down the St. Lawrence River on a nearly-moonless night to confront the Marquis de Montcalm and French forces at Quebec, British American rebels climbed up onto the Plains of Abraham and began laying siege to the city. But:

ATKINSON 

It's late in 1775 winter is coming. Winters, proverbially, in Canada, are ferocious. The enlistments of many of the soldiers are expiring. Sickness is set in smallpox, which is known as the king of terrors. It's the great killer of armies. Historically, has begun to infect the ranks.

AMBUSKE 

Montgomery hoped to entice Governor Carleton to give battle on the Plains of Abraham much as Wolfe had done to Montcalm all those years before. But as Wolfe’s quartermaster during that campaign, Carleton had been here before. He had enough food to withstand a siege through the winter, and the rebels did not have enough artillery to drive from out behind the safety of the citadel’s walls.

AMBUSKE 

The invaders were also losing the support, or at least the business, of the habitants and local merchants. The paper money that Congress had issued to support the campaign was all but worthless by December.

LENNOX 

When the Patriots run out of money to buy things, the French Canadians stop offering them things. And here again, the British Americans are wondering, like, why is that this relationship has changed? The French Canadians are saying, well, because we're not your allies. We are commercial partners, and if you don't have money, you can't take anything. It's at this point that a lot of patriots get angry and they will just loot houses. They'll take what they need, and this does nothing to win over French Canadians who Congress is still hopeful that they will come around and support the cause.

AMBUSKE 

Word of Montgomery and Arnold’s siege of Quebec City had given hope to the Congress that Quebec would soon become the 14th colony, but almost as soon as the delegates learned of their near triumph, they received news of disaster.

AMBUSKE 

In Montgomery and Arnold’s council of war:

ATKINSON 

the decision is made, the only way we can win over Canada is a direct assault on fortress Quebec, and it is a fortress. It's got big walls. It's the only foothold that the British have left in Canada at this point. And so on the 31st of December, 1775 a sneak attack is launched from several quarters that fails.

AMBUSKE 

As dawn broke on the last day of the year, Montgomery and the rebel army began an attack on Quebec City in a blinding snow storm. Musket balls and cannon fire rained down on them as they approached. From near Wolfe’s Cove on the St. Lawrence River, Montgomery led 300 New Yorkers cautiously toward what appeared to be a series of abandoned fortifications. Enemy soldiers were not their only concern; thick ice made for treacherous walking.  

AMBUSKE 

A first building was abandoned, a second was not. Hiding behind a wall, nearly 40 British and Canadian soldiers unleashed a volley of musket balls and grape shot on the advancing British Americans. Montgomery and several others were killed instantly. The rest of the day did not go much better.

ATKINSON 

Arnold, who's his second in command, is badly wounded. He's shot through the knee. The whole thing is a fiasco, and many of the American soldiers who are not killed are captured and will spend months in a dungeon in Quebec. And the long and the short of it is that subsequently, even though Arnold maintains a siege of Quebec until spring, the British are going to send reinforcements and they're going to chase the rump end of that American army back up the St Lawrence River and right out of Canada. It is a disaster of the First Order.

AMBUSKE 

The death of General Montgomery and the defeat of the rebel army outside the walls of Quebec City disheartened but did not dissuade Congress from its conviction that Quebec should join the united colonies. The rebels still had Montreal in their possession, with Benedict Arnold as its military governor.

AMBUSKE 

The delegates sent a third letter to the “oppressed” people of that province. In January 1776, they asked their fellow subjects to see Montgomery’s defeat as a difficult, but minor, setback. 

CONGRESS 

“The best of causes are subject to vicissitudes; and disappointments have ever been inevitable. Such is the lot of human nature. But generous souls, enlightened and warmed with the sacred fire of liberty, become more resolute, as difficulties increase; and surmount with irresistible ardour every obstacle that stands between them and the favourite object of their wishes.”

AMBUSKE 

Congress reassured them that

CONGRESS 

“We will never abandon you to the unrelenting fury of your and our enemies. Two battalions have already received orders to march to Canada, a part of which are now on their route.”

AMBUSKE 

And once again encouraged them

CONGRESS 

“to elect deputies to form a provincial assembly; and that said assembly be instructed to appoint delegates to represent them in this Congress.”

AMBUSKE 

Congress made no mention of religion in this third letter. In the previous two, the delegates had smoothed over the old, and still very present, hostilities between Protestants and Catholics, in their attempts to convince the people of Quebec that they were part of a common cause.  

AMBUSKE 

But Congress hadn’t helped its case when: 

LENNOX

They send a letter to Great Britain, addressed to Great Britain, and they just slam Catholics. They just talk about how Great Britain's not doing enough to protect its own island and North America from these bloodthirsty Catholics, and they just don't assume that that letter is going to make its way to England and then make its way back across the Atlantic. And French Canadians will read this, and they'll see the duplicity

AMBUSKE 

As the delegates waited once again for a response that would never come, they pursued an alternative strategy to keep hold of Montreal.

LENNOX

Montgomery and Arnold try to capture Quebec City. Obviously, Montgomery is killed. Arnold is wounded. The Continental Army behaves horribly outside of Quebec on purpose, they sort of launch a terror campaign against the French Canadians. They get sick with smallpox and various other ailments, and they retreat. And it's at that point that Congress is like, Maybe we should try diplomacy.

AMBUSKE 

In February 1776, Congress named Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and John Carroll as peace commissioners, to persuade through diplomacy where force had failed.

LENNOX

Franklin has this mild obsession with Canada, broadly as we think of Canada today. He was a land speculator in Nova Scotia. He does have sort of like an ethno nationalist mindset, and he doesn't want the French near at all, because he just can't imagine English and French getting along. But his trip to Montreal comes after the failed invasion.

AMBUSKE 

A year earlier, Franklin had been part of secret talks in London to avoid a civil war. Now, he was being sent north to invite Quebec to join the rebel side of it.

LENNOX

Franklin is the most famous person in the world, so it makes sense that he lead this commission. He doesn't want to go. He's not optimistic at all. He's feeling sick on the trip up, and he writes these letters that I've always read as just kind of dark humor letters, but he's writing letters saying goodbye to people being like, I don't imagine myself coming back for this trip. I think I'm going to die. Just want to let you know that I think of you fondly.

AMBUSKE 

As the commission made its way north from Saratoga in mid-April, Franklin wrote to Josiah Quincy:

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

“I begin to apprehend that I have undertaken a Fatigue that at my Time of Life may prove too much for me, so I sit down to write a few Friends by way of Farewell.”

LENNOX

He goes up with Charles Carroll of Carrollton and his cousin John Carroll so those two are important because they're Catholics. These are Maryland Catholics.

AMBUSKE 

Charles Carroll of Carrolton was one of the wealthiest men in British America, with a vast Maryland plantation with hundreds of enslaved people.

LENNOX

And John Carroll is actually a priest. He's a Catholic priest. John Carroll is also not optimistic, but for different reasons. I don't think he believes ideologically that they should have invaded Canada at all, or that they should be going now, because the French Canadians have not gone through the steps that demonstrate that they would be interested in this. They never came to Congress. They have not objected to the British in the way that many of the Patriots had. And so he thinks this is a mistake. They all go up. It takes them like a month to get there. They arrive in Montreal, they're all treated well.

AMBUSKE 

Benedict Arnold welcomed them to Chateau Ramezay on April 29th

CHARLES CARROLL 

“When we landed, we were received by General Arnold in the most polite and friendly manner, conducted to headquarters, where a genteel company of ladies and gentlemen had assembled to welcome our arrival. As we went from the landing place to the general’s house, the cannon of the citadel fired in our honour as the commissioners of congress.”

LENNOX

Samuel Chase is in charge of just figuring out what's happening with a patriot army, trying to look into what they need because they're starving. They don't have enough food. They don't have enough supplies.

AMBUSKE 

The peace commissioners, the Carrolls, in particular, faced a tall order.

LENNOX

Charles Carroll and John Carroll are there to convince the Catholics and the bishops that they should join the cause, and this is where the British did a really good job of winning over the church hierarchy. Around the same time that this commission arrives, the bishop of Quebec issues official declaration that anyone siding with the Patriots will be excommunicated from the church. They're very serious about protecting the British John Carroll still goes around and they're trying to tell Catholics that, like, Look, you will be okay if you join Congress and the rebelling colonies. And they're able to say, look, we're Catholic and we're here, and there's lots of Catholics in Maryland. That was a colony founded for Catholics in British North America, and they're trying to reassure all these French Canadians. The problem is, at the same time, there's a number of Catholic priests who had just been run out of upstate New York by the patriots who are also in Montreal, able to tell French Canadians, no, no, no, I'm only here because the Patriots hated me and made me leave where I was. So we can't really trust what's happening or what you're being told by John Carroll,

AMBUSKE 

As for Franklin,

LENNOX

Honestly, I think he half asses the whole trip. His job was diplomacy. He needs to try to win over French Canadian diplomatic figures and the higher echelon of society in Montreal, and he only stays for 11 days. Takes him a month to get there. He wanders around Old Montreal. He does meet some people, and then he very quickly throws his hands up and says, I'm going back home. And he gets back on a cart, and they take him to a boat, and then he makes his way in reverse, all the way back to Philadelphia. He's sick, but his sister, Jane Mecham, writes a note, and she says, I think what is ailing my brother is that these French Canadians just don't get it. And he's so dejected. Actually, I think it's just an episode of gout. I think that's why it doesn't feel well. But she sees it as one of the reasons why he's feeling what he is is because he's disappointed that he's been unsuccessful in this attemp.

AMBUSKE 

he rest of the peace commission soon followed Franklin’s lead and returned home. Arnold and the Continental Army would abandon Montreal a month later.

AMBUSKE 

Congress and the army may have found some support among the habitant and French Canadian merchants willing to trade, and believed that the Quebec Act was an instrument of tyranny, but struggled to understand that they lived in a different British America.

Jeffers Lennox 

Americans don't understand that French Canadians don't want an assembly. They've never had an assembly that's not part of their political ideology. They don't want a trial by jury. They want a trial by Judge. And you can find these little moments where the French Canadians are saying things like, why would we want 12 dumb farmers deciding our fate when we could have one experienced judge, someone who's trained in the law? That's who we want making these kinds of decisions

AMBUSKE 

And in the search for meaning in the wake of defeat, came harder questions. 

LENNOX

The timing of the failed invasion of Quebec that happens just around the same time that Thomas Paine publishes common sense. There are certainly patriots before that time that had independence on their mind, but I'm not convinced that that was the goal in late 1775 what the failure in Canada makes clear is that this is not going to be a war of Northern expansion. This is not going to be a war of taking British colonies, or all British colonies from Great Britain as a way of leveraging our argument. The failure of Quebec forces a lot of the diplomatic class, perhaps more than settlers themselves, to rethink like, Well, okay, so what are we doing here? We are not going to beat Great Britain. We're not going to push them off the continent. So what are our other options? We've been fighting we're not doing particularly well. We're losing these important battles that we thought would be pretty easy to win. We can no longer say we're fighting to just be good Britons, because now we are actively trying to destroy British colonies.

AMBUSKE 

 On November 7, 1775, four days after Major Preston surrendered Fort Saint-Jean to General Montgomery, and over seven hundred miles to the south, Virginia’s Royal Governor, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore took a bold step to win his colony back for the crown.

AMBUSKE 

Only a year earlier, many Virginians had lauded their governor for leading a successful war against the Shawnee and other Native peoples in the Ohio Country, a war to claim the west for Virginians, at the expense of their rival Pennsylvanians, and its Indigenous inhabitants. 

AMBUSKE 

But now, rebel Virginians had driven Dunmore aboard a British warship from which he still presumed to govern.  

AMBUSKE 

When the king’s subjects revolted earlier in the spring, Dunmore had threatened to use a weapon that Virginians and other British Americans who held property in human beings most feared: a slave insurrection.

AMBUSKE 

Now, in the interest of defending the crown, Dunmore believed the time had come to offer liberty and freedom to the enslaved. 

AMBUSKE 

Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

AMBUSKE 

I’m your host, Dr. Jim Ambuske. 

AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE 

Head to r2studios.org to find a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading.

AMBUSKE 

Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick.  

AMBUSKE 

Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent.   AMBUSKE:  Our lead audio editor for this episode is Curt Dahl of cd squared.

AMBUSKE 

Annabelle Spencer is our graduate assistant. Special thanks to Amber Pelham.

AMBUSKE 

Our thanks to Rick Atkinson, Jeffers Lennox, and Alexandra Lee Montgomery for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.

AMBUSKE 

Thanks also to our voice actors Emmanuel Dubois, Evan McCormick, John Terry, and John Winters. 

AMBUSKE 

Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.