stubborn portages. By the time they reached Canada, they had lost at least a third of their men, and the rest were starving and frostbitten. They were joined on December 2 by Gen. Richard Montgomery, who had just conquered Montreal. In Montgomery’s train were his young aide, Aaron Burr, and Capt. John Lamb of Stratford, another man who became great friends with Arnold. On the fifth, the combined force set up camp on the Plains of Abraham just west of the fortified city, above the icy Saint Lawrence River. The British troops stationed inside the citadel had much bigger cannon, and the Americans could not set up a proper battery to bombard the walls. So, on December 31, during a blinding snowstorm, they attacked.58
While Montgomery’s troops scaled the bastion of Cape Diamond on the southwest corner of the city walls, Lamb bombarded the citadel with his mortars to give Arnold cover as he made a direct attack around the north side to the lower town. Cannonballs smashed through snow banks, and a musket ball smashed into Arnold’s leg, bouncing off the bone and splintering it. His men tried to carry him off, but he concentrated on commanding their safe retreat while blood flowed down his leg. Finally, weakened by blood loss, he allowed his men to drag him to the makeshift hospital.59 Oswald and Lamb attempted to keep up the hopeless assault, but grapeshot hit Lamb in the face, ripping his cheek bone and knocking him unconscious and destroying the sight in his left eye.60 Though the soldiers continued assaulting the defenses, they were left without support and could not hold their gains. Lamb and a small band were captured before they could retreat.
From his bed, Arnold waited to hear the fate of his men. Meanwhile, his old Freemason master and the man who held the keys of the powder house back in New Haven, David Wooster, was coming with a relief expedition. Arnold wrote him, “In the attack I was shot through the leg and was obliged to be carried to the Hospital, ware I soon heard the disagreeable news that the General [Montgomery] was defeated at Cape Diamond.”61 It was worse than that: Montgomery had been shot on the walls of the citadel, and his men had fled in panic.
As the siege of Quebec dragged on, Arnold slowly recovered from his leg wound. As at Ticonderoga, Arnold made enemies among the other officers, but this time he also made friends, like he did with the paroled Lamb during their mutual convalescence. In battle, soldiers had to be sure their comrades had their back, and men like Oswald and Lamb had his.62 One lonely midnight at the hospital Arnold penned a long letter to another friend, Silas Deane, saying, “I have often sat down to write you, and as often been prevented by matters of consequence crowding upon me, which I could not postpone.”63 Deane had become closer to Arnold after Ticonderoga, writing that the brave Colonel “has deserved much and received little or less than nothing.”64 And Arnold needed friends now, telling Deane that the fight for Canada looked more and more like a disaster. The American reinforcements under David Wooster did arrive, but they were not enough. When British reinforcements began arriving in May and June, Arnold and his comrades were pushed southwest back up the Saint Lawrence, and down into New York.
There was one piece of good news—Americans had finally dragged cannons from Ticonderoga across the snow-covered mountain paths to Boston, and the bombarded British had fled. But with reinforcements arriving on the continent, including tens of thousands of German mercenaries, unpleasant times seemed ahead for the Americans. If England was going to have this kind of help, the Americans needed help too. It was time to call on an old enemy, the French, who hated the British far more than the Americans did. The man they chose for the job was none other than Silas Deane, despite his previous lack of diplomatic experience. The thirty-eight-year-old man left for France in March 1776 and arrived with orders to get supplies, enlist men into service, and if possible involve France and other European nations in the war. He wrote a sorrowful farewell letter to his wife, saying, “It matters but little, my Dear, what part we act, or where, if we act it well.”65
Once he settled into an apartment on the Rue de l’Universite in Paris, he met the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, and then Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the French polymath who wrote The Marriage of Figaro. Deane appealed to Beaumarchais, who got his hands on 3 million livre, including 1 million from Louis XVI’s personal coffers, to purchase one hundred cannons, countless guns, and twenty-five thousand uniforms. Eventually 6 million livre worth of supplies got around the British blockades in the early years of the war.66
Deane also recruited young French aristocrats for the American army, more for their money than their military prowess. But one would defy those expectations: the nineteen-year-old Gilbert de Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. He had learned military science and riding at Versailles and stood at the door of Deane’s humble apartment on the Rue de l’Universite, asking to fight for human dignity.67 Deane gave him the rank of major general to satisfy the young Frenchman’s family, and he sailed for America.68 Meanwhile, Arthur Lee of Virginia and Benjamin Franklin arrived. Franklin was already famous in Europe due to his popular Autobiography, and he began working on the more serious problem of involving the French government in the war.
While Deane was in Philadelphia and France, his brother Barnabas kept his Connecticut business going, connecting with Nathaniel Shaw and Governor Trumbull under the auspices of the Secret Committee of the Continental Congress. Letters flew to and from Congress and Lebanon, Weathersfield and New London. Shaw collected cargos from the port and distributed goods to his friends, who sent them on.69 Shaw wrote to the Huntingtons in Norwich: “Must inform you that I have been oblig’d to supply the Continental Troops Quartered in this Town, from Newport who have almost consumed the whole, and I must be oblig’d to call on you for sum more [flour] also for sum work.”70 He had to balance the needs of the local people with the needs of Governor Trumbull and of George Washington’s army.
Washington himself arrived at Shaw’s granite mansion in New London on April 9, 1776, on his way from Boston to New York. He had been there twenty years earlier during the French and Indian War, while serving as a colonel in the British army.71 He remembered old Captain Shaw well and was happy to meet his son, bringing seventeen bottles of wine and eating a huge meal on creamware dishes at the mahogany dining table, along with Gen. Nathanael Greene and Cdre. Ezekial Hopkins. Washington and the three men planned the naval war before the exhausted commander in chief retired to old Temperance Shaw’s maroon and mustard bedroom.72
Norwich lawyer Samuel Huntington, now in Congress, had finally sent official instructions for privateers, giving them permission to attack British ships.73 Shaw had already been arranging these expeditions for a year, but it was nice to have official permission from the new government. His job was to get supplies and take enemy ships, and these two duties often coincided. Jonathan Mix, now recovered from broken ribs received on the march to Canada, joined one of these expeditions out of New London during the spring of that year, joining the fleet under Commodore Hopkins. They sailed to the Bahamas, landed at Nassau, stormed the fort, and took the governor of the islands prisoner. As new British ships arrived, the American navy took them one by one, building up a store of supplies. When the ships were full, they sailed back to New London, slipping past the British fleet at the end of the Sound and depositing a huge supply of cannons, arms, and ammunition, which, as Mix said, “proved to be of great and timely use to our country.”74 Shaw used some of the captured cannons for defenses in Groton and New London, sent others to Newport, and shipped mortars and shells to Washington in New York.
Despite successes like this, Shaw settled in for a long war. He voted to restrict gunpowder use even for shooting game, to inoculate the populace for smallpox, and to provide for soldiers’ families. He also secured the town records in the western hills, a move that kept them safe from the burning four years later, and at a full town meeting approved the Articles of Confederation “as being the most effectual measures whereby the freedom of said states may be secured and their independency established on a solid and permanent basis.”75 He often used his own money to supply the defense of the city and the troops and often went without payment from Congress.76
William Ledyard became Shaw’s
