Despite such misfires and misadventures, Montgomery—tall, bald, and Dublin-born—soon had the whip hand at St. Johns. Reinforcements streamed north across Lake Champlain in October, including Connecticut regiments and a New York artillery detachment with siege guns, bringing American strength to 2,700. Gunners built batteries south of the fort and across the Richelieu to the northeast. More than 350 men slipped ten miles down the river to fire a few cannonballs at the high-walled British fort at Chambly. The 84-man garrison promptly surrendered on October 18, handing over 124 barrels of gunpowder, 233 muskets, 6,600 cartridges in copper-hooped barrels, and ample stocks of flour, pork, and marine supplies.
“We have gotten six tons of powder which, with God’s blessing, will finish our business here,” Montgomery wrote Schuyler. No less ominous for St. Johns, a putative rescue force from Montreal—some eight hundred habitants, Indians, loyal merchants, and regulars—assembled on an island in the St. Lawrence on October 30, then beat across the river toward Longueuil in several dozen bateaux. Three hundred Americans rose up along the south bank to scourge the boats with musketry and grapeshot, killing between a few and a few dozen—depending on the account—without a single Yankee casualty. The bateaux scattered, the habitants and loyalists deserted in droves, and St. Johns’ last hope for salvation vanished.
Three hundred yards northwest of the beleaguered fort, yet another American battery had been hacked from the swamp and furnished with cannons, mortars, and a chest-high breastworks. Men lugged iron balls from the Richelieu on their shoulders or in slings made from their trousers, while gunners packed the newly acquired powder into cartridges and explosive shells. At ten a.m. on Wednesday, November 1—All Saints’ Day—the guns opened in concert with the battery across the river in a stupefying bombardment of a thousand balls and more than fifty shells, which by sunset had “knocked everything in the fort to shatters,” an American officer exulted. Montgomery halted the cannonade long enough to send a white flag to the gate, carried by a Canadian prisoner who swore upon the Holy Evangelist that the rescue force from Montreal had indeed been routed, that no more help was forthcoming, and that further resistance would bring “melancholy consequences.”
After a fifty-three-day siege, with sixty defenders killed or wounded, his food and powder all but gone, Major Preston had finally had enough. He stalled for a day by trying to squeeze concessions from the Americans. Would the honors of war be observed? Could officers keep their baggage? Sidearms? Why not permit the men to sail for England on parole? “Let me entreat you, sir, to spare the lives of a brave garrison,” Montgomery told him. The British would be “treated with brotherly affection” in Connecticut jails. Negotiations briefly broke down when the proposed articles of capitulation suggested that British “fortitude and perseverance” should have been “exerted in a better cause.” Preston declared that his men would rather “die with their arms in their hands than submit to the indignity of such a reflection.” Montgomery struck the clause but threatened to resume his bombardment “if you do not surrender this day.”
At eight a.m. on November 3, a wet, blustery Friday, Montgomery’s men shouldered their firelocks in a field south of the fort. A few wore smart uniforms, like the gunners in blue coats with buff facings; more sported drab yeoman togs and slouch hats. To the trill and rap of fife and drum, the defeated garrison marched six abreast with colors flying through the gate, some of them mud-caked, their feet bound in rags. First came the 26th Foot in brick-red coats with pale yellow facings; then the Royal Fusiliers with blue facings; then Royal Artillery troops in dark blue coats and once-white waistcoats, drawing two small guns; and finally sailors in pigtails, Indians in blankets and feathers, a few kilt-clad Scots, carpenters, cooks, servants, and a gaggle of women and fretful children. At least one officer kept a locket portrait of his lover hidden under his tongue in case the Yankees began to pilfer. Major Preston strutted to the front of the American ranks. “The tears run down his cheeks,” a Connecticut soldier reported, “and he cried like a child.” On Preston’s order the troops stacked their muskets—officers kept swords and sidearms—then shuffled into the waiting bateaux for the long journey across Champlain to captivity in New England.
More than three-quarters of the British regulars in Canada had now been captured or killed, along with virtually all of the trained artillerymen. The booty from St. Johns included seventeen fine brass guns, two brass howitzers, twenty-two iron guns, eight hundred stand of small arms, sails, pitch, tar, and precious nails. The cost of the long siege to the American invaders was steep—a hundred combat casualties and another thousand men, including their commanding general, sent back to New York with various ailments. But the front door to Canada had swung open, and thousands of additional Yankees stood ready to march through.
As the last of his captives vanished up the gray Richelieu, Brigadier General Montgomery took a moment to scribble his wife a note. “If I live,” he wrote, “you may depend upon it that I will see you this winter.”
That Richard Montgomery now prepared to finish conquering Canada for the American cause was no small irony, for as a young regular officer in an earlier life he had helped to conquer it for the British Empire. The youngest son of an Irish baronet, he was commissioned as an ensign after two years of college in Dublin, then devoted sixteen years to the king’s service, half of it in North America and the West Indies. Slender and lightly pocked, he blamed “the heat and severity” of combat in Martinique and Cuba in 1762 for the loss of his hair; he blamed a girlfriend for other disorders. “She has clapped me,” he wrote a fellow officer in 1769. “The flames of my passion have subsided with those of my urine.”
An end to the French war meant an end to promotions, and in 1772, after years as a captain—including wartime service at St. Johns and Montreal—Montgomery in disgust sold his commission for £1,500. “I have of late conceived a violent passion,” he wrote a cousin. “I have cast my eyes on America, where my pride and poverty will be much more at their ease.” Packing up his volumes of Hume, Montesquieu, and Franklin’s Experiments, as well as a new microscope, surveying equipment, and draftsman’s tools, he sailed for New York and bought a seventy-acre farm just north of Manhattan. Still only thirty-four, in July 1773 he married well: Janet Livingston was the eldest daughter of a prominent New York patriot judge who owned a thirteen-thousand-acre estate in Albany County. Elected to the New York Provincial Congress when political unrest turned to rebellion, Captain Montgomery abruptly found himself appointed a brigadier general; his “air and manner designated the real soldier,” one subordinate wrote. But the honor only deepened his Irish fatalism. He told a former British comrade of a premonition that he would die “by a pistol,” and before marching north he wrote his will. “I have been dragged from obscurity much against my inclination and not without some struggle,” he told Janet, adding that as soon as he could “slip my neck out of the yoke, I will return to my family and farm.”
That yoke still held him, and the ordeal at St. Johns—“half-drowned rats crawling through the swamp,” in his description—showed Montgomery how removed the Northern Army was from disciplined proficiency, regardless of its success in capturing the fort. After one contentious conference with his subordinates, he wrote on the minutes, “I can’t help observing to how little purpose I am [here].” To his brother-in-law he denounced “the badness