Read Online The First American Army by Bruce Chadwick - Free Book Online

we were without any relief, we were obliged to surrender ourselves.” 3
    A Rhode Island company lost several men in a heavy musket fire from the ramparts as they advanced through the lower town but did not make it into the inner city. William Humphrey, a private in the regiment, wrote of the frustration of its members: “We rallied our men and tried to scale the second barrier, and not withstanding their utmost efforts, we got some of our ladders up but was obliged to retreat, our guns being wet, as not one to ten would fire; then we was concluded to retreat, which we did to the first barrier that we had took, and when we came there we found we could not retreat without losing all our men or at least most of them.” 4
    Jeremiah Greenman was in one of the other companies that fought their way into the lower town. He wrote, “With hearts undaunted to scale the walls we march on down to St. Roche,” and then to the lower town area of Quebec. They were easily spotted. “Alarm sounded and bells rang. They soon turned out and formed themselves along the ramparts. They kept a continual fire on us but we got up to their two-gun battery after losing a great number of men. We soon got into their battery, which was two nine pounders. We got in and took seventy prisoners. Then our men’s arms got wet and we could not do much.”
    Greenman’s unit was trapped. They soon learned that Montgomery had been killed and Arnold wounded. The attack had failed. Surrounded, they were forced to surrender to the British, as did between three and four hundred other Americans (fifty-one were killed and thirty-six wounded in the assault). Greenman was first marched to a Jesuit college in Quebec, opposite the cathedral there, and then to a convent, where he was put under guard, with others, as a prisoner of war.
    At first, Arnold did not know what happened to anyone after he was shot and went down in the snow. The general was carried back to a makeshift American hospital at St. Roche, where he received reports of the fighting. Despite the setbacks he had seen all around him in Quebec, he refused to order a retreat. The feisty Arnold was treated by Dr. Senter and did remain in the hospital, confined to bed, but he took two pistols with him and told Senter that he would fight it out with the British from his bed should they arrive.
Prisoner of War
    Upon his arrival at the convent on the evening of January 1, 1776, Greenman had to chuckle when his jailers presented him with a cup of rum and a biscuit and wished him a happy New Year. Some New Year.
    The prisoners there, all enlisted men, were given one pound of bread, a half pound of meat and six ounces of butter once a day, and a half pint of boiled rice each day. A resident of the town gave them a cask of wine for New Year’s.
    The enlisted men were kept in very cramped quarters. “Very uncomfortable,” wrote Greenman, “Not enough room to lay down to sleep.”
    He wrote too soon. A few days later the enlisted men were taken to another room in the convent that was smaller than their original chamber. The men tore up some partition boards in the new cell and burned them to give themselves more room. Two men didn’t need more room; they were clamped in irons following a conversation about escaping that was overheard by a guard. The promised food allowances had been forgotten and the men were served salmon, or “stinking salmon,” as Greenman put it.
    Some of the troops were housed in a jail that overlooked a square through which wooden wagons carried the blood-soaked bodies of dead Americans. They had been tossed on top of each other, their limbs splayed this way and that, and their wounds fresh. They were driven on the way to the “death house,” where the slain American soldiers would be dumped in a pile with their compatriots. Pvt. John Henry, somberly watching a procession of the wagons, began to cry when one drove past his cell window carrying a friend. He wrote, “Poor Nelson lay on top