Benedict Arnold's Navy by James L. Nelson

Author:James L. Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2006-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

"Not the most trifling service can be procured …"

When Franklin, Chase, and Carroll discovered the truth of the Americans' situation in Canada, they abandoned their original mission. The want of hard currency and the miserable state of the army had so compromised the colonies' standing in Quebec Province that coaxing the Canadians into the American fold was an impossible task.

In their first report to Congress, written two days after their arrival in Montreal, the commissioners wrote,

It is impossible to give you a just idea of the lowness of the Continental credit here, from the want of hard money and the prejudice it is to our affairs. Not the most trifling service can be procured without an assurance of instant pay in silver and gold.

By way of example, the commissioners discovered that the express rider they had sent from St. John's requesting carriages from Montreal had been stopped at La Prairie because the ferryman refused to accept the rider's Continental dollars. If a friend of the Americans, a Mr. McCartney, had not happened by and changed a paper dollar for silver, the carriages would never have been sent.

It was a sobering lesson in the economics of occupation, but one that American military leaders in Canada had been trying for months to make Congress understand. Arnold, Montgomery, Wooster, and Schuyler had written Congress on that point. Moses Hazen, who, as a Canadian, was well positioned to understand the Canadian mind-set, had urged Congress in person to send a respectable army, led by able generals and provided with "a suitable supply of hard cash." Commenting on the time when hard money had been available, Hazen wrote of his fellow Canadians, "The ready assistance which they gave us on all occasions, by men, carriages or provisions, was most remarkable."

By the time the commissioners arrived, that remarkable assistance had evaporated. The Americans' cash had dwindled, but their need for provisions had remained, forcing them to take by force what the Canadians would not sell for paper money. "The peasantry in general have been ill-used," Hazen wrote,

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