The television series The American Revolution by Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein currently streaming on PBS gives a valuable overview of the founding era and may entice viewers to look more deeply at the personalities of some of the participants.
Richard Montgomery (1738-1775) has interested me because he was connected to the area of the Hudson Valley where I live. And he’s someone who emerges from the past as a distinct personality, someone who had been seared by war long before the Revolution.
The son of Anglo-Irish gentry, Montgomery joined the British army at seventeen. During the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War) of the 1750s, he endured the full range of slaughter and misery. He fought against the French, against Spaniards in Havana, and against Native Americans in the wilderness around Detroit.
In the 1770s, Montgomery left the British army, and moved to America. He said he just wanted to be a farmer. He married the wealthy heiress Janet Livingston in 1773. The couple settled in Rhinebeck, in Dutchess County, NY, and bought a farm. His wife wanted children. He did not. Melancholy, the eighteenth-century term for depression, haunted him. “My happiness is not lasting,” he wrote. “It has no foundation.”
Yet when the Revolutionary War brok
e out, he signed on to defend his adopted country. “Honor calls me.” He was made a brigadier general in the Continental Army. Before he left to fight against his former comrades, he said, “‘Tis a mad world, my masters, I once thought so, now I know it.”
Montgomery was assigned to lead the Invasion of Canada in 1775. His force got off to a late start. A lengthy siege near Montreal delayed them further. When they finally prevailed, they still had to march north and take the walled city of Quebec.
Montgomery’s foreboding continued. In his letters to Janet, he often included the phrase, “If I live . . .” When she expressed her concern, he admonished her not to send him “whining letters” that “lower my spirits.”
He arrived at Quebec in early December. He joined a small army that had been led over the mountains of Maine by Benedict Arnold. Winter was rapidly descending on the patriot force.
Tall, slender, balding, with a handsome, slightly pockmarked face, Montgomery was beloved for “his manliness of soul, heroic bravery, and suavity of manners.” He knew that he must act. Most of his troops had enlisted only through December and would soon be free to depart.
He felt the strain. “I must go home,“ he wrote to his commander. “I am weary of power and totally want that patience and temper so requisite for such a command.” Yet he decided to take the city by storm.
“Fortune favors the brave,” Montgomery told his officers. Privately, he admitted that in war events often “baffle the sanguine expectations of poor mortals.”
Quebec sat on a rocky prominence at the end of a peninsula. Montgomery would personally lead an advance party along the path between the bottom of the bluff and the St. Lawrence River. Arnold would advance on the other side of the city with the main force. They waited for a storm, hoping it would mask their movement.
On December 30, it began to snow. A screeching gale swept in from the northeast. Word went out for the men to be ready at midnight. They would attack on the last day of 1775.
At four in the morning, rockets fired to coordinate the separate attacks. Artillerymen working mortars began to lob bombs into the city. The time for action had come. Montgomery led his men down the steep path to the river. He took the lead. The soldiers strung out behind him. The bitter wind took their breath away.
They reached a barricade built to protect the town. Carpenters hacked an opening. Beyond it, officers spotted a two-story blockhouse, its black gun portals staring blankly. Nothing moved. Montgomery chose to advance.
As he rushed through the barricade with the lead unit, defenders in the blockhouse greeted them with the roar of a cannon. Charges of grape shot “mowed them down like grain,” one of the defenders observed. Montgomery and six of his officers were torn apart.
The fallen general instantly became a martyr, a symbol of the sacrifice that was required to win liberty. The fall of a great man testified to the seriousness of the Cause. “Weep, America,” one officer wrote, “for thou hast lost one of thy most virtuous and bravest sons!”
America wept. Congress voted to erect a monument in Montgomery’s honor. “In the death of this gentleman,” George Washington wrote, “America has sustained a heavy loss.”
Janet Montgomery never remarried. She lived for half a century, treasuring the memory of the man she called “an angel sent to us for a moment.” Childless, she corresponded with some of the many children named for her late husband, encouraging them to live up to his virtues.
Americans had entered the conflict convinced that free warriors fighting for liberty could vanquish professional soldiers. The notion held both truth and falsehood.
Spirit and patriotism had made up, in part, for discipline and experience. But the amateur soldiers who attacked Quebec had learned a lesson that Montgomery had understood before they started — that war is cruel, fortune fickle, liberty costly.
Read more about the 1775 Invasion of Quebec.
Illustrations, from above: “Arnold’s column is shattered in fierce street fighting during the Battle of Quebec” by the Canadian artist Charles William Jefferys, 1916; Brigadier-General Richard Montgomery’s troops prepare to embark for the invasion of Canada from Crown Point in a 1902 drawing by Sydney Adamson (courtesy Library of Congress); Montgomery planning his assault on Quebec (colored engraving from 1858 after a painting by Alonzo Chappel; and John Trumbull’s “Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec,” 1786.
A very well-done, interesting piece.
Season’s greetings from Marge in Chestertown, Md., who has relatively early ancestors who lived in upstate NY.
Have a look at the remains of the liberty ship named after him, with 1400 tonnes of explosives still aboard off the coast of Kent, UK!