The Battles of Ticonderoga and Crown Point: 1775
Benedict Arnold, Ethan Allen, and the Green Mountain Boys ∙ The Seizure of Fort Ticonderoga ∙ The Seizure of Crown Point and St. John's ∙ A Bitter Pill to Swallow
The martially-minded Benedict Arnold (pictured here) had marched to Boston determined to win glory and honor, and he wasted no time hatching a plan to do exactly that. In 1758 Arnold had been a militiaman in the failed British-American attack on the French-held Fort Carillon; what better place to win laurels than against the British in the same fort? Arnold had been toying with the idea of taking Fort Ticonderoga ever since running into Colonel Samuel Parsons on his way to Cambridge. Parsons had been heading to Connecticut to recruit more men for the siege of Boston, and he’d lamented the lack of cannon the rebels could bring to bear on the British. The conversation sparked Arnold’s memories of Fort Ticonderoga, through which he’d traveled multiple times while on trading runs to Canada. He knew that the fort was in a sad state of disrepair and likely lightly manned. When Arnold reached the Grand American Army’s headquarters in Cambridge, he met with Artemas Ward – who had also participated in the failed 1758 attack on Fort Carillon – and argued for an attack on Ticonderoga to seize its cannons. He claimed ‘certain information’ (a flowery way of disguising an educated guess) that the fort possessed eighty heavy cannon, twenty brass pieces, and a dozen large mortars – as well as innumerable small arms and stores. At nearby Skenesboro there were three or four more brass guns. He alleged that the fort was ‘in a ruinous condition and has not more than fifty men at the most.’
The Massachusetts Committee of Safety mused over Arnold’s information. Beyond his suggestion at seizing the cannon, the Committee recognized the fort’s value. Not only did the fort contain sorely-needed military supplies, but it also dominated the best inland route from Canada to the colonies – hence its nickname ‘the Key to the Gateway of the Continent.’ The most efficient routes through the wilderness were by water, and from Canada southward this was by a series of waterways: first the St. Lawrence River, then the Richelieu River, then Lake Champlain, and on to Lake George. Where Lake George met Lake Champlain, the larger lake narrows to just half a mile, and at one point the two opposite headlands leave a passage of land less than a quarter mile wide. On this passage of land connecting the two rivers, on a hill rising a hundred feet above the water, sat the fort. Anyone wishing to use the waterways to travel between Canada and the British colonies would need to get past the fort; whoever commanded the fort commanded access in either direction. The French had been the first to recognize the location’s value, and in 1755 they built Fort Carillon on the site. The fort was laid out according to the plans of a brilliant French engineer by the name of Vauban, and it consisted of stone bastions surrounded by a star-shaped outer wall reinforced with glacis, counterscarps, covered ways, and demilunes. In 1758 the 4000 French in the fort held out against 6000 British regulars and 10,000 provincial troops under British General Abercrombie. The next year the British managed to take the fort from a much-weakened French force, but the French commander had the presence of mind to blow the fort before beating a harried retreat north. The British repaired the damage as best they could – though the fort would never again be as fortified as it was at its conception – and renamed it Fort Ticonderoga. After the French and Indian War, when Canada officially became British property, there was no longer a desperate need to control the waterways against an enemy presence to the north. The fort remained manned by a token skeleton garrison and used as a supply post on the wilderness route. It fell into disorder over the years: bastions crumbled, roofs leaked, and rotting doors sagged from rusted hinges. Now that conflict had erupted between the rebellious American colonies and Mother Britain, the British commander in Canada became a threat to the rebels. The waterway, the Massachusetts Committee understood, could enable Sir Guy Carleton in Quebec to send soldiers into the Hudson River Valley to cut the American colonies in half. The Committee had recognized this threat early in 1775, and they’d dispatched John Brown of Pittsfield to reconnoiter Montreal and Quebec. Brown reported, ‘One thing I must mention to be kept as a profound secret, the fort at Ticonderoga must be seized as soon as possible should hostilities be committed by the King’s troops.’
Thus the Committee didn’t shoo Arnold or his ideas away. He wasn’t the first to propose taking the fort, and his insistence on the fort’s strategic value wasn’t unique. The Committee listened attentively and approved his plan: if he could take Fort Ticonderoga, he could put a stop-gap in any of Carleton’s plans to dismember the colonies. On 3 May the Congress gave Arnold a colonel’s commission and authorized him to enlist ‘not exceeding 400’ men; he would perform a ‘secret service’ in marching to Ticonderoga, where he would ‘reduce the same,’ taking possession of ‘the cannon, mortars, stores,’ etc. The Committee emphasized that they reserved the right to dismiss the force ‘whenever they shall think proper.’ Arnold, elated at his commission, swiftly raised the men and set off at once. Upon reaching Stockbridge he was devastated to learn that another expedition was already marching on the fort. It turned out that Colonel Parsons, after meeting Arnold on the road and hearing Arnold’s musings on Fort Ticonderoga, had carried Arnold’s idea to a number of prominent Hartford citizens. These leading men then approached an infamous outlaw named Ethan Allen and offered him the job of taking Ticonderoga. Allen had consented to the mission. Arnold, incensed and alarmed that his plan had been stolen from him and entrusted to another, abandoned his picked men and raced ahead with a single servant to take charge of Allen’s command.
When Allen returned to Bennington, he held a conference with several settlers whose deeds to the land came from Governor Wentworth’s hands. The conference was held in Stephen Fay’s tavern, a two-and-a-half-story unpainted building known locally as ‘The Catamount Tavern’ because a stuffed mountain lion affixed to a twenty-foot-pole guarded the entrance. Allen, along with his brothers, cousins, brothers-in-law, and countless other settlers banded together as the ‘Green Mountain Boys’ and vowed to intimidate anyone foolish enough to serve as New York’s strong arm. They meant business, and it wasn’t long before they’d made a name for themselves. The next few years found them burning houses and haystacks and threatening the safety of anyone who vouched for New York’s rights to the land. When they went rampaging, they blackened their faces with soot and dressed as Indians to heighten the terror of their targets. New Yorkers came to loathe and fear Allen and his Boys; one New Yorker moaned, ‘They assemble themselves together in the nighttime and throw down all the Yorker fences, and [they] drive the cattle into the fields and meadows and destroy both grass and corn, and do every mischief they can think of.’ A New York surveyor quit his job for fear of coming across Allen, who was stalking ‘in the woods with another party black and dressed like Indians.’ Another New Yorker bitterly complained that the Green Mountains had become ‘a refuge for the vagabonds and banditti of the continent.’ When Allen was charged with assault twice in one month, he appeared in court and exposed ‘his naked body and in a threatening manner with his fist lifted up repeated these malicious words three times: “You like you do,” and also did with a loud voice say that he would spill the blood of any that opposed him.’ Allen delighted in cultivating an image that would strike horror into his opponents. When New York’s governor issued a proclamation he found distasteful, Allen issued a counter-proclamation in which he insisted that the Governor could ‘stick it in his ass.’ His feelings for the governor of New York weren’t something he hid up his sleeve; after burning down an enemy’s house, he shrieked, ‘Go your way now, and complain to that damned scoundrel your governor. God damn your governor, laws, king, council, and assembly!’ As far as Allen was concerned, the New York government was rotten from the top down.
Allen didn’t limit himself to the use of fear to cajole his enemies into compliance; he also saw the brilliance of humiliation. His biographer, Charles Jellison, reports a story of how a Dr. Samuel Adams of Arlington (a different Sam Adams than the one of Boston) had been captured by the Green Mountain Boys and carried to Fay’s Tavern where Allen orchestrated a staged courtroom where he presided as judge. The mock trial (unsurprisingly) ended with Dr. Adams being found guilty of being a public nuisance. The punishment would be public humiliation: he was tied to an armchair and hoisted by ropes to the top of the tavern’s cat-mounted signpost. Suspended twenty feet above the ground and eye-to-eye with the stuffed mountain lion, he dangled for hours while Bennington’s citizenry looked on. Ray Raphael captures the ‘spirit’ of these mock trials: ‘The rights of the accused were limited to an opportunity to apologize and repent. Hearings were conducted in taverns; juries adjourned to barns; prisoners were detained in outhouses. The trials were not about justice but politics: they mobilized support, they humiliated those who would not go along with the program, they intimidated the undecided with these blatant displays of power.’ Everything Allen did was calculated towards the end of inspiring fear and building his reputation. He knew that he didn’t need to be the most violent Mountain Man to accomplish his goals; he just needed to be seen as the most violent Mountain Man. One time he captured two New York sheriffs, locked them in separate rooms, and during the night he dangled effigies of the other outside their jail-rooms. Both sheriffs swore up and down that the other had been lynched. Allen allowed them to escape separately, and each fled for Albany to report of Allen’s brutality. When the ruse was discovered, the sheriffs were ashamed, and Allen’s reputation skyrocketed. Allen was a brute of a man who swore like a sailor and embraced the rough-and-tumble frontier lifestyle. His reputation became that of a god among the mountains, which is precisely what he wanted.
When the Hartford patriots approached Allen about leading the charge against Ticonderoga, he consented because he saw it as the best way to achieve his goals. The Green Mountain Boys controlled the western portions of the Green Mountains and were making gains eastward, but they knew that their progress would be hindered if British Regulars reinforcing New York were dispatched against them. The best way to preserve the land they’d won in the Green Mountains would be to prevent the British from reinforcing New York by way of Canada; by taking Ticonderoga, they would prevent such land-borne reinforcements. The Green Mountain Boys weren’t motivated by patriotic ideals or by arguments against taxation without representation; their reason for throwing in with the rebels went straight back to their original aims, namely preserving the Green Mountains for New Hampshire settlers.
The gathered roughnecks ogled him and then burst into laughter. They were heavily imbibed on ‘stonewall,’ a mixed drink of rum and cider, and they found it difficult to take the gaily-dressed Arnold seriously. They were ‘extremely rejoiced,’ one witness remembered, to hear that the Committee had endorsed the project, but they were ‘shockingly surprised when Colonel Arnold presumed to contend for the command of those forces that we had raised, who we had assured should go under the command of their own officers.’ The Green Mountain Boys balked at handing the reigns to this newcomer, but they were generous in extolling to him their entire plan. All the while Arnold ‘strenuously contended and insisted that he had a right to command them and all their officers.’ Arnold refused to back down, and his impetuousness ‘bred such a mutiny among the soldiers which had nearly frustrated our whole design, as our men were for clubbing their fire-locks and marching home.’ Cooler heads kept this from happening, and it was decided that the issue should be resolved by Allen, who was at Hand’s Cove. The crowd left the tavern, holstered their supplies, and began a midnight march to Hand’s Cove where, they hoped, Allen would settle the matter and put this boisterous Connecticut man in his place.
The Seizure of Fort Ticonderoga
They reached Hand’s Cove in the early morning on 10 May with the moon still high in the night sky. Arnold and Allen faced-off with upwards of two hundred of Allen’s men pressed in close. These men crowded around Arnold, fuming at the thought of serving under him because of a damned piece of paper from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, and they swore they would shoulder their arms and head home if Allen bent the knee. If that happened, the whole expedition would be ruined, since Arnold’s men were still marching far to the south. Allen listened to his men’s threats and Arnold’s assertions, and then he turned aside to one of his men and asked, ‘What shall I do with this damned rascal? Put him under guard?’ Arnold bristled at the threat, but it was an empty one, for Allen knew he couldn’t enchain a commissioned officer and get away with it. ‘Better go side-by-side,’ one of Allen’s men suggested, and this ‘joint command’ was the compromise upon which they settled. This compromise lacked teeth: Arnold knew that Allen’s men didn’t give a damn for him and his commission, but at the least he’d be able to march beside Allen when the attack commenced. That had to count for something.
All this would be for naught, of course, if they couldn’t reach the fort, and this was looking likely. Two miles of water separated Hand’s Cove from Fort Ticonderoga, and Herrick was running late on getting the boats up from Skenesboro. The sun’s first light was creeping out in the east when a scow appeared in the early dawn light, operated by a group of boys who’d heard news of the impending assault and wanted in on the action. Not long after, another boat with volunteer recruits arrived. They were low on boats, and not everyone would be able to cross in one go, but the dawning sun threatened to undo everything. Allen decided to push ahead with the boats he had: he, Arnold, and eighty-three men boarded shoulder-to-shoulder in the boats and began rowing to the fort. The boats beached half a mile below the fort just as the sun inched over the horizon. The boats were sent back to Hand’s Cove to pick up the rest of the men, but Allen wasn’t going to wait for them: he arranged his men in three ranks and gave them a fiery pep talk, reminding them that they’d been ‘a scourge and a terror to arbitrary power’ and that their ‘valor has been famed abroad.’ He was proud to lead them on ‘a desperate attempt, which none but the bravest of men dare undertake. You that will undertake voluntarily, poise your firelocks!’ Not a single man dared back down, and Allen and Arnold – Allen in his green coat with green epaulets and yellow breeches, and Arnold in his gaudy regalia – marched side-by-side down a heavily-forested road that skirted the lake and the fort’s east wall. Behind them stretched a line of roughneck frontiersmen and volunteer militia carrying firelocks, pistols, swords, knives, and even simple clubs; not a one of them had a bayonet. They wore buckskin clothes, beaver and coonskin hats, buckled shoes and moccasins.
The road bent around the fort, leading to an open wicket gate on the south side. The south side’s ramparts were, as Phelps had discovered and as Arnold had asserted, in appalling condition. It was no mean feat for the men to clamber over the ruins and enter the fort, surprising the lone sentry guarding the curtained entrance. The stunned sentry drew a bead on the men swarming over the southern wall and pulled his trigger, but the gun flashed in the pan. He cursed and fled into a covered walkway that led into the fort’s main courtyard, shouting for help. His shouts were drowned out by the rebels who hallooed and shrieked like Indians. Another sentry managed to lunge at one of Allen’s officers with a bayonet, wounding him, but Allen dispatched him with a thwack on the head with the flat of his sword. The sentry crumpled, seeing stars, and Allen roughly manhandled him to his feet and demanded to know the way to the officer’s quarters. The dazed sentry had little choice: the garrison, though awakened, wasn’t willing to step out and fight. He agreed to show the way. Allen ordered the men to draw up in two lines, back-to-back, and to guard the fort’s courtyard as he and Arnold and a few picked men followed the sentry to a staircase located in the west barracks.
As they began ascending the steps, the door at the top of the stairwell opened, and standing behind the doorway in shadow was Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham. He wore a coat and waistcoat but with his breeches in hand. Feltham later recounted the episode:
I was awakened by numbers of shrieks and the words, “No quarter, no quarter,” from a number of armed rabble. I jumped up [and] ran to knock at Captain Delaplace’s door and to receive his orders or wake him. The door was fast. The room I lay in being close to Captain Delaplace’s, I stepped back, put on my coat and waistcoat and returned to his room, there being no possibility of getting to the men, as there were numbers of the rioters on the bastions of the wing of the fort on which the door of my room and back door of Captain Delaplace’s room led. With great difficulty I got into his room [from] which there was a door down by stairs into the area of the fort. I asked Captain Delaplace, who was just now up, what I should do and offered to force my way, if possible, to our men. On opening this door, the bottom of the stairs was filled with the rioters and many were forcing their way up, knowing the commanding officer lived there.
Allen saw Feltham in the doorway and shouted, ‘Come out of there, you damned old skunk!’ (Some witnesses assert that he called Feltham a ‘rat,’ others a ‘bastard.’) Feltham, heart hammering in his throat, demanded to know who they were and by what authority they’d invaded the fort. Allen, according to his own likely-embroidered account, asserted that he invaded the fort by ‘In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!’ Allen demanded he surrender the fort, but this wasn’t within Feltham’s authority to do; he informed Allen that he would need to get the surrender from Captain de la Place, and Allen generously consented to give de la Place time to get dressed. He’d been awakened from bed in his nightcap and insisted on dressing before they discussed terms. When the meeting took place, Allen demanded that the Captain surrender ‘the fort and all the effects of George the Third,’ promising that refusal to do so would result in the massacre of every man, woman, and child in the fort. De la Place gave Allen his sword and ordered the garrison to parade without arms.
The captured garrison consisted of a mere two officers, two artillerymen, a handful of sergeants, and forty-four privates, most of whom were in no condition to fight. The garrison also supported twenty-four women and children. These captured enemy were supplemented by those taken by Herrick at Skenesboro: the bounty from there included Major Skene himself, a Captain, and two Lieutenants of the British army. Herrick’s prisoners, plus those taken from Ticonderoga, would be sent under guard to Hartford, Connecticut. Having won the fort, Allen’s men lost themselves – as so many victorious armies do – in ransacking and pillaging. ‘There is here at present,’ Arnold wrote to the Continental Congress the next day, ‘near one hundred men, who are in the greatest confusion and anarchy, destroying and plundering private property, committing every enormity and paying no attention to public service.’
The Seizure of Crown Point
The 'joint operation' that seized Fort Ticonderoga was just the tip of the sphere; with the fort under their belts, the feuding leaders set about expanding their victory throughout the area. Two days later, on 12 May, the garrison of Crown Point – numbering less than a dozen men – surrendered to Lieutenant Warner of the Green Mountain Boys. Warner’s assault met no opposition, and among the captured redcoats they pilfered a number of cannon. The next day, the schooners and bateaux from Skenesboro finally arrived along with fifty recruits ‘enlisted on the road.’ With their numbers growing, Allen and Arnold set their eyes on a St. Johns, a nearby frontier post on the Richelieu River just beyond Lake Champlain. Arnold seized sole command by virtue of the fact that he, unlike Allen, had experience in naval vessels. Arnold took charge of picked men and set out with one of the captured schooners and a pair of bateaux; when the winds dropped en route, the sailed schooner was becalmed. An irritated Arnold abandoned the schooner to a handful of volunteers knowledgeable with sailing, and he and the remaining thirty-five men paddled their way forward in the two bateaux. They rowed through the night and in the morning of 17 May took St. John’s paltry garrison – a single sergeant and fourteen men – by surprise. The dilapidated fort wasn’t worth much; the true prize was a small fleet of bateaux and a seventy-ton sloop, the Betsy, equipped with two brass six-pounders. Arnold had no intentions of holding the fort, as a good-sized force of British soldiers was stationed just twelve miles away at Chambly. He rushed to pack the valuable stores into four bateaux, manned the sloop, and set off on the return leg to Crown Point after firing the rest of the captured fleet. The formerly-becalmed schooner had joined them, and they made a handsome party; no doubt Arnold couldn’t wait to gloat over Allen once he returned to Crown Point.
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| the ruins of Fort Crown Point today |
As it was, he didn’t have to wait that long: en route to Crown Point, his ragtag fleet was met by a naval force led by Allen, who had determined after-the-fact to assist Arnold in taking St. Johns. The two rival fleets saluted one another with three volleys, and Arnold beamed as he informed Allen that St. Johns had fallen and that its garrison was enchained in the sloop’s hold. Allen scoffed at how Arnold had abandoned the fort and vowed to reoccupy and hold it come what may. In order to accomplish this, though, he needed help from Arnold: his men were hungry, and in his haste to set off for St. Johns he’d forgotten to pack food. Arnold warned Allen against reoccupying the fort, as reinforcements from Chambly would undoubtedly be arriving soon, if they hadn’t already, but in good spirit he shared his provisions with Allen’s force. The two bid farewell, and Arnold continued on to Crown Point while Allen eagerly sailed for St. Johns. Allen beat the redcoats to the fort, but not long after he learned that Arnold hadn’t been bluffing about British reinforcements. Rather than hunkering down in the rundown fort, Allen decided to ambush the reinforcements. He and his men hatched a plan to catch the reinforcements unawares, and then they waited – and waited – and waited. After three days and nights with food running out, apprehension took root among Allen’s men. When the redcoats finally came to within two miles of the fort, anxiety got the best of Allen, and he ordered his men to hastily withdraw from the fort. As they were jumping into the boats, six enemy fieldpieces fired on them. Round-shot splashed into the river and thumped into the beachhead, and Allen’s men frantically pushed off, taking unsteady potshots at the woods-shrouded enemy as they crossed the river. Three men were left behind to be captured by the British. Arnold would make one more attempt to take and hold St. Johns, but he’d be driven off by a heavily-bolstered garrison.
Arnold wrote to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety asserting that he had a hundred men under his command – Allen’s men, he claimed, had ‘in general’ gone home – and he proudly declared that he was determined to hold Crown Point until he received wagons and draught animals to remove the captured cannon. He wrote that he had armed the captured sloop from St. Johns with ‘carriage guns’ in case the British launched a naval counter-attack against the fort. Allen planned on taking another paltry fort named Pointe au Fer, and he wrote the New York Congress, ‘I will lay my life on it, that, with 1500 men and a proper train of artillery, I will take Montreal… [It] would be no insuperable difficulty to take Quebec.’ Arnold and Allen, ever competing for glory, would’ve likely launched more campaigns – but then came orders direct from the Continental Congress ordering them to put a halt to their victories. They would hold Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point but would not make any more inroads against British forts. Most galling of all to the feuding rivals was the fact Congress left neither of them in charge – command over the forts was given to General Philip Schuyler.
A Bitter Pill to Swallow
Benedict Arnold, ever striving after glory and immortality, could hardly believe it when he learned that Congress’ delegates received the news of his triumph not with celebration but with embarrassment. Fort Ticonderoga’s fall carried the war from Boston’s outskirts into New York and its northern frontier; any hoped-for positive response to the Olive Branch Petition would be made mute when news of Ticonderoga’s fall reached London. New York and Connecticut’s delegates denied any responsibility in the affair, and Congress ordered the king’s cannons and property to be kept safe at the southern end of Lake George until ‘the former harmony with Great Britain and these colonies so ardently wished for is restored.’ Conservative concerns about Ticonderoga’s impact on reconciliation were underscored by New York’s rage over its borders being violated by a neighboring colony’s army. Most of Congress’ members came from the ‘colonial elite,’ and Arnold’s unauthorized march on Ticonderoga was made all the more galling by the fact that it was successful. The delegates recognized that centralized control over the provinces was needed if the war was to be conducted in a professional – or, in other words, ‘European’ – manner. Historian John E. Ferling notes that ‘Congress, a body drawn almost exclusively from the colonial elite, wanted to wage this war with an army modeled along the lines of Europe’s rigidly hierarchical armies, the sort of military organization that would symbolize, and help to sustain, the existing social distinctions that most congressmen thought essential to a well-ordered society.’
Just a few days after Congress ordered Arnold to stay in place, it issued a letter to ‘the oppressed inhabitants of Canada’ and urged the Canadians to join the American struggle for a ‘common liberty.’ Congress acknowledged the French Canadians as ‘fellow-subjects’ who had been made ‘slaves’ by the passage of the Quebec Act; in that fell swoop, the Canadians became ‘fellow-sufferers’ to her American brethren. To emphasize this point, Congress forbade the invasion of Canada by any colonial armies. Congress’ propaganda didn’t work: the Canadians couldn’t forget the American reaction to the Quebec Act, and they could read the Act itself. Their Catholic liberties and way of life was anathema in the colonies but preserved under the Quebec Act. It was in their best interest to live quiet lives under British rule, and most Canadians were happy to do so. They balked at the idea of linking arms with the democratically-inclined Protestant Americans and their loathing of anything even resembling Catholicism. Congress knew their letter to Canada was sowing to the wind, and nearly a month later it reversed its decree after learning that Sir Guy Carleton was determined to retake the forts and was soliciting help from the Six Nations Indians to do just that. Congress authorized General Philip Schuyler – recently appointed head of the Northern Department – to invade and hold Canada before Carleton and his Indian allies could lay waste to the northern colonies.
Schuyler’s appointment would’ve been particularly galling to Arnold, who had earlier proposed to invade Canada, declaring that he would give his own life to take Montreal and Quebec. This wouldn’t be the last time Arnold was overlooked by his superiors, and such oversight burned like gall in his stomach. Though a staunch patriot, the constant slighting would wear him down to the point of contemplating switching sides: if the patriots didn’t value him, perhaps the British would. Arnold’s eventual treason has earned him a bad rap in American history, which makes it easy to overlook the fact that prior to his betrayal of the American Cause, he was viewed by-and-large as a soldier of incredible merit. The historian Christopher Ward notes that Arnold was ‘original in his ideas, audacious in action, quick to form his plans, and swift to execute them.’ It was his imperiousness and arrogance, however, that created friction between him and his superiors. He was ‘restive under orders [and] possessed of a passionate belief in his own judgment and in his own superior ability as a soldier.’ Though he had good claim to such high opinions of himself, no one likes a blustering, self-entitled braggart; it isn’t surprising that he won few friends among the upper echelons of the American army. What he lacked in popularity from his superiors he made up for in devotion from the men under his command. He was beloved by his soldiers, principally because he led his men forward rather than ‘leading from the rear.’ A soldier under his command during the future Saratoga Campaign recounted, ‘[Arnold] was our fighting general, and a bloody fellow he was. He didn’t care for nothing, he’d ride right on. It was “Come on, boys!” [rather than] “Go, boys!” He was as brave a man as ever lived.’ Arnold would show exemplary valor in his future expedition against Quebec, in actions on Lake Champlain, in his relief of Fort Stanwix, and in his engagements during the Saratoga Campaign. If it weren’t for his eventual treason, Benedict Arnold would doubtlessly be praised as perhaps the second greatest soldier of the Revolution right beneath Washington.
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