Dan Snow's History Hit - How America Invaded (and Nearly Won) Canada

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Dan narrates the remarkable story of how George Washington's newly established Continental Army tried to conquer Canada in the brutal winter of 1775. The American Revolutionary forces believed their northern neighbour would surely welcome them as liberators, as they themselves fought off the yoke of British rule. Many imagined that these two vast territories were destined to unite into a single continental power. But what followed was a disastrous, freezing, chaotic nightmare.Written by Dan Snow, produced by McKenna Fernandez, and edited by Matthew Wilson and Dougal Patmore. Did you know you can watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It was the first American attack on another country. It would be easy, predicted George Washington. The Americans would be welcomed as liberators. The target, Canada, their northern neighbors. Surely these two vast territories should be fused into one continental-sized power. What followed was an ordeal, a nightmare of endurance, one of the most extraordinary stories, in which the whole future of North America was at stake. It's a tale of bravery's stupidity and life, a story of war in short, and how the Americans,

in a blizzard, in the depths of winter, came a few city blocks away from conquering a massive empire. 250 years on from that dramatic campaign, this is Dan Snow's history hit and the story of the American invasion of Canada. The Green Mountain Boys, they had bonded in the past over their hatred of New Yorkers. These were frontiersmen who were staking out land in the wilderness west of New Hampshire, and they swore that they would never submit themselves to the rule of effete lawyers from Albany. They had come to the frontier explicitly to escape the rule of such bewigged, sophisticates. The Green Mountain Boys, they chose their own leaders. They were headquartered in a tavern.

They were tough. When New York administrators or surveyors came north to try and tame the majestic landscape, what is now Vermont, the boys would chase them out of town with insults, threats, fists, and worse. They were used to making their own facts on the ground. So when shots were fired in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord in the spring of 1775 and the American colonies went to war with their British colonial overlords, the Green Mountain Boys had the tools, the inclination, and the experience to act. In early May, 1775, with Ethan Allen in command, these roughneck vigilantes set their sights

on the British garrison at Fort Ticonderoga near the southern tip of Lake Champaign. plain just at the northern edge of New York State. Just before they launched an assault, a gentleman named Benedict Arnold arrived in their camp, having thrashed his poor horse to death on the Gallup North. This Benedict Arnold waved a piece of paper from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, saying that he, in fact, was instructed to take Fort Ticonderoga. The Green Mountain Boys laughed. They cared not for this piece of paper. But they let him go along for the ride. On May the 9th, after a fairly shambolic approach, they stormed the fort. The one British century attempt to fire his musket, but it fizzled out harmlessly.

The boys rushed in. It turned out the garrison was made up of just two British officers and 46, mostly old and useless men. While the Green Mountain boys then got absolutely smashed on the reservoir of spirits, they found in great barrels in the storehouses, Benedict Arnold looked to build on his triumph. He was muscular, an expert boxer, marksman and rider. He was said to be as brave a man who had ever lived. After a tough childhood he'd set up in New Haven, he ran some ships, he smuggled rum, molasses and timber

in out of the West Indies. That had put him at odds with the British government's attempt to regulate trade to clamp down on smuggling. He'd steered a course for rebellion. Well, was this Ben O'Donald, who now dragged any sober men he could find, down to the lake shore, and he sent them north, up the lake, to crown point the next British fort up the western shore on Lake Champlain. The garrison of 11 men in that fort put up no serious resistance. His little force also seized a fine schooner with a taut rig and a corked

hull. They renamed it Liberty. Now in charge of a little naval squadron, Benedict Arnold grew more ambitious. He heard that Fort St. John at the very top of Lake Champlain was also very weakly defended, where the Richelieu River meets the lake. Weekly defend it might be, but of more importance was the fact that it wasn't in the rebellious colonies. It was in Canada. It was just north of the 45th parallel, this line of latitude. That was the demarcation line between New York State and Canada, or as I should call it, the British province of Quebec. So if he crosses this line, well, it would be an invasion, an absolutely unsanctioned invasion. But if Arnold had worried too much about arbitrary lines on maps and jurisdictions, he wouldn't have made all his money

smuggling across all sorts of imperial borders. So he sailed right up this wonderful long lake on liberty. He sailed straight across that Canadian border without any hesitation at all. And he attacked Fort St. John. The 14-man garrison there, well, they just gave up straight away. He stormed in, he destroyed lots of the stores, and he returned south, feeling very pleased of himself, having seized another nice ship, a sloop, George III, which he obviously renamed Enterprise. It was the first American attack on another country. It was the first American naval expedition, and it was a success. It caused consternation across the British imperial world and beyond. It also drew the gaze of the rebellious colonies and their representatives who were meeting in the Philadelphia Congress.

For a few weeks, it looked like they would just give all those captured forts back to the British, but then, well, why not keep them? Also, Canada, it seemed, was virtually undefended if these optimistic reports were to be believed. Perhaps, thought people in Congress, they should build on this success. perhaps Canada should join the 13 colonies, the Americans, in throwing off the British yoke. It became an accepted fact in the comfortable salons of distant Philadelphia that the British couldn't defend Canada. It would be a mere matter of marching in. Now, my goodness me, if I had a pound or a dollar or a euro or anything else for every time some enthusiastic politician has assured people that it would be a mere matter of marching in, I'd be a moderately wealthy guy.

Philip of Spain with the Armada, Putin and Ukraine, Hitler, Napoleon, marksing into Russia. And yet, here we go again. Also, it was argued at the time. This could be a defensive, offensive operation. A pamphlet was circulated by John Jay. He suggested that actually a British-led army bursting with bloodthirsty Catholic-French-speaking Canadians was about to advance South and crush American liberties. So, this would be a preemptive strike.

it was totally justified. Congress sent messages north to the Canadians. They offered hearty amity to them. But there was a threat beneath that friendly salutation. The Americans reminded their neighbours that they were a small people compared to those who with open arms invite you to fellowship. It soon became very clear that open-armed invitation to fellowship meant in practice, the tramp of American boots on the ground, the screech of cannon axles, the pop of musketry, the noise and stench and mess of an army on the move. It meant invasion. The politicians in Philadelphia signed it off. George Washington signed it off. Orders were sent out. Officers and men were dispatched. The Americans would march north.

It would be straightforward. Washington assured them, I trust, you'll have a feeble enemy to intend with. And here's the kicker. He wrote, and a whole province on your side. So he was saying they'd be welcomed as liberators. In command of those liberators, in command of that first major U.S. foreign war, a war that, in fact, predates the birth of the Republic itself, but was not Benedict Arnold, and it was certainly not Ethan Allen and his green mountain hooligans. And altogether, more reliable gentleman was selected, Richard Montgomery. Now, it was a bit of an odd pick for command, because he'd made his name, trying to win Canada for the British Empire. And now here he was trying to prize it away from that empire's grip. He'd fought for King George

loyally all the way through the Seven Years' War in the 1750s and early 1760s. That seven years war, known in North America as the French Indian War, had seen him fight in North America. He'd fought in the Caribbean as well. But peacetime soldiering just wasn't for him. It was boring. It was low-paid. so he sold his commission in the army, and he emigrated. He'd only settled in the American colonies in 1772 three years before. But he'd quickly established a good reputation in New York society, and thanks to his military experience, when war did break out between the colonies and the British, he was made a brigadier general. His boss, so the man in overall command in this theatre of war, was Philip Schuyler. Yes, he of Hamilton fame, takes Philip Schuyler, the man

is loaded. He was loaded, and he was an aristocrat of colonial New York. He had glittering ancestry, but it also gained valuable military experience in the French Indian War, particularly doing logistics. And that's the important thing, trying to move men and supplies through this nightmarish landscape of Western New York and beyond. These two men showed up to Ticonderoga in mid-July to get this great enterprise underway. And they found absolutely, chaos. A bunch of unruly backwoodsmen were less than excited to greet their new well-heeled commanders. Skyler, the fancy New Yorker, and Montgomery, a man who'd been a British officer until three years before. They'd been very little in the way of planning and organizing for

an invasion across hundreds of miles of wilderness. There were no great big stockpals of food. There was a shortage of little boats needed to get up and down these lakes and rivers. Skyla did his best, and eventually north they sailed up the lake. On September 2nd, they set foot on Canadian soil. Skylar admitted the invasion force was rough and ready. It was also behind schedule. The first frost was two or three weeks away in those parts. The Americans, they really hoped to repeat the success that they'd enjoyed in the French-Indian War.

During that war, different thrusts had closed in on Canada, converged on Canada from different directions. This time, the British controlled the ocean, so there'd be no way of getting a fleet from the Atlantic up the St. Lawrence to get straight to Quebec. So instead, the Americans would push in from a different direction. You've got the force moving up here from Fort Ticonderoga. They're going up Lake Champlain, here we go, getting to Fort St. John right there, guarding the gateway to Canada. The other thrust, it is going to go to what is now Maine. They're going to go inland. try and get their way up the Kennebec River. They're going to cross the Appalachians, very high ground through here, the great watershed,

and then they're going to catch the Chaudier River down to Quebec. It was ambitious to say the least. So that was the plan anyway. What about the target? What are we really talking about when we refer to Canada? First of all, we should talk about it in this period as Quebec. That was the sort of official name, thanks to the very recent British legislation. Quebec stretched all the way from Labrador on the east coast, all the way down through the Great Lakes region, through the American Midwest, right to the bottom tip of Illinois.

So Canada included not only the chunks of territory to the north of the Great Lakes that we still refer to as Canada Day, but it also included most of Ohio and Michigan and Minnesota and Iowa and Missouri. It was a massive, massive piece of land, but it was very thinly populated by Europeans. The main area of settlement is along the valley of the St. Lawrence River. Coming along the St. Lawrence, we've got Quebec, where the river really narrows. It's a walled city on a very impressive promontory. And then we have got Tuare, a little bit further along. And then we get to Montreal, which was first established as a fur trading post on an island in the St. Lawrence, where another river flows into it. It was established there by Samuel de Champlain in 1611.

Beyond Montreal, you get rapids. So that's as far as big ships can really travel. Between these three towns, you can hardly call them cities, there were rural communities, and they're all dependent on the river. So farms are very thin strips leading down to the shore. There are very few roads. Everything went by river, except there was one decent road. Actually, that was the King's Road, which joined the three biggest towns. together along the side of the St. Lawrence. The important thing to say is that winters are invariably freezing cold. In fact, they're below freezing. There's a huge amount of snowfall in that St. Lawrence Valley. There were perhaps 100,000 settlers of European origin there, maybe 150,000 indigenous people

around the Great Lakes. We have indigenous groups. We have the Iroquois. And in the St. Lawrence Valley, we have the so-called seven nations. The people of Canada, the people of Quebec, or the ones of European origin, the vast majority were farmers. They're called habitants. They were ruled over by the aristocracy, the seigneurs. And then in these towns, you have some professionals. You've also got a recently arrived group, perhaps about 5,000 strong, who were British. They were largely Scottish or American colonial. And they're nearly all living in Quebec. and Montreal, in charge of keeping this massive chunk of territory in the British Empire is a man called Guy Carlton. He's also served in the Seven Years' War. He was highly regarded.

He was actually wounded badly in the battle outside the walls of Quebec, the famous battle that led to the capture of Quebec in 1759. General Wolfe had died in that battle. He was close to Carlton. He'd left him all his books. He'd left them a large sum of money in his will. Carlton went on to fight in France and the Caribbean, and he was made governor of this big province of the British Empire in 1768. He was tall. He was in his early 50s. He had an absolutely enormous nose, apparently, so I find that very relatable. And he had now, unfortunately, had a grand total of 1,000 regular soldiers. That's all, to defend an empire of, I think, around a million square miles, certainly as big as Western Europe. In this,

moment of crisis, he dashes to Montreal. That's where the threat seemed to be most real. That was where the Americans were advancing up Lake Champlain towards. And he found no fortifications. He found no fleet. There were about 600 British Redcoat soldiers. He found that there was a chunk of the population hoping he would lose. And the vast majority of French hobitant, the vast majority of French-speaking settlers, they didn't really give a damn either way. He called out the French militia, so that's farmers and hoping that part-time soldiers, the result was lackluster. Not that many people answered the call to arms. He called on some of the English-speaking community in Quebec. Around 70 men showed up. He was furious and he started trying to recruit

from any other sources he could find. There was a community of army veterans, people that had done their military service and are now retired, particularly in Nova Scotia to the east. They were mostly Scottish Highlanders, so they knew what they were doing. He also tried to tried to woo the indigenous tribes. Some of them were keen. In fact, some were too keen. A force of 1500, mainly Onondaga and Mohawk, presented themselves for action, hoping to be sort of launched across New England to wet their blades on Yankee skulls. They were disappointed when Coulton asked them to just assume a defensive posture, and most of them wandered home. Coulton's plan was pretty straightforward. He could not allow the Americans to thrust deep into the heart of the British

territory. Montreal, for example, was pretty much undefended. So he had to hold them in the south, near the frontier. He had to hold them here at Fort St. John. He sent every regular soldier and every volunteer he could scrape together to hold that pivotal frontier fort. In early September, American boats pushed up Lake Champlain up into the Richelieu River. It's the river that joins Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence eventually. It's like a great big highway running north-south.

that leads straight from American territory into the heart of Canada. Once they get to Fort St John, the Americans landed in a bog, naturally. The distinction between land and water at that time, in that place, was really not as clear as it is now. And there was a stuttering start, there was a skirmish with some Native Americans allied to the British. Now, these were expert woodsmen. They were a terrifying enemy on their own terrain. And as a result, there were a few days of sort of incompetence and mind-changing, advancing. and retreats, and on one occasion the Americans were spooked by some strange noises in the woods.

Montgomery wrote to his wife, Such a set of pusillanimous wretches never were collected. Could I, with decency, leave the army in its present situation? I would not serve an hour longer. The Americans came and went, at least twice, as far as I can see. But by September the 18th, they were back with 2,000 men. This time, they meant business. Schuyler was ill, he was out of it. And when I say ill, I mean, there was something really wrong with the man.

He described a copious scorbutic eruption and copious discharge from an internal impostume in my breast. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds bad. And that's why he handed over command to Montgomery. The new commander, he now acted with much greater resolution. He ordered a proper siege. This fort was encircled, it was cut off. By the 18th of September, he had the garrison bottled up, and he was spreading out through the surrounding countryside. He was sending out detachments to let the Canadians know that the great liberation had begun. Nearly all the locals seemed to roll their eyes and waited to see which side would win. They weren't going to campaign for the Americans, but they also weren't going to exactly carry out guerrilla attacks or lie across roads for the Brits either. They tried to

remain as neutral as possible. 18th century sieges have got a grim inevitability, a choreography. It's a matter of mathematics, the size of the cannon, the range, the supply of shot, time. And by the end of September, the first American battery was cited and the first cannonballs was smashing into British defences. The net was closing. Well, that seed was getting underway. The extremely unreliable frontiersman and hero of the capture of Ticonderoga, Ethan Allen, remember him? He was looking for trouble up here in the north. Montgomery was obviously very keen to get rid of him, because he was sent out to sort of recruit Canadians, check out the lie of the land, and generally make a nuisance of himself. Now, Ethan Allen decided

to try and win the war by himself. And he just went and attacked Montreal with about 80 men. It was a fiasco. Carlton led out a handful of British regulars, who with the support of local volunteers, who we should say were obviously happier to defend their city from a clear threat outside the walls than they were to rally around when there was a sort of general threat to the province. Carlton put the Americans to flight. Ethan Allen was captured. Carlton had some momentum. But he did absolutely nothing with it.

He just didn't know how many Americans were roaming around to the south and southeast of Montreal. He didn't want to march into a trap. He had to be cautious. Back down here at Fort St. John's, well, things were looking bad for the defenders. The capture of Fort Ticonderoga, it had really transformed the balance of power in the colonies.

That's because it had been packed with big cannons and mortars. Lots of them were hauled off to Boston, where they would force the British to abandon the city the following spring. But a few of those artillery pieces were sent north to batter the Canadian forts into submission. The Americans manhandled one called Old Sal into position. It was a mortar, so a squat, it was heavy, and it shot explosive bombs high in the end, a big high arching trajectory that took them. way over any fortifications before landing directly on top of their targets. The old sow was bronze,

it weighed over two tons, and it lobbed shells 13 inches in diameter. And it was not long before the old sow had destroyed buildings were in the fort and forced the garrison to sleep in cellars. By mid-October, another battery had been established on the opposite side of the river from the fort. The British tried to row across that river and disrupt that work, but they were beaten off in a sharp skirmish with high casualties on both sides. That battery then opened fire and it was brutally effective once it was operational.

The British ship, the Royal Savage, was sunk on its moorings and more and more damage was being done to the fort. The noose was tightening in all senses. Then, on October, the 18th,

came shocking news. A fort further up the river at Chambly had surrendered to an American detachment. American ships had slipped passed Fort St John, going north up the river. In the dark, they'd find a few shots at Fort Schombly,

which had obligingly surrendered straight away. The Americans captured 124 barrels of powder and nearly 250 muskets plus other supplies. The British prisoners were brought down the river, back down here in boats, going past Fort St. John on their way to captivity in New England. The defenders of Fort St. John had to watch as their comrades sort of parade past. Morale was pushed even lower. Confident now in their stocks of cannonpoles and gunpowder, the Americans established a third battery on the northwest side of Fort St John. Carlton knew he had a matter of just a few daves to save Fort St. John. He leaves Montreal with about 130 redcoats, around 800 militiamen who he'd convinced to serve, and straight away, as they're crossing the river

from Montreal, they run straight into American frontiersmen on the far bank of the St. Lawrence. They had dragged two small cannon from Fort Schombly, and they blasted Carlton's boats. The men were packed in the gunwales, they were caught out in the open, the water around those little boats was torn up by a welter of rounds, the wooden hulls, the flesh within them, lacerated. Pretty much the definition of sitting ducks. So Carlton, the British commander, just turned them around, sharpish, and headed back to Montreal. And all that meant that there would be no relief of Fort St. John. And for the defenders that fort, November 1st was a particularly brutal day.

There was a mighty bombardment, all three batteries around the fort now firing. A thousand cannonballs, 50 shells rained down on the fort. More buildings were smashed as the garrison huddled below the ground. By sunset, an American said it had knocked everything in the fort to tatters. The commander was informed by his staff that the fort had just eight days left of supplies if the men went on reduced rations. Montgomery sent a messenger to the fort. He was actually a captured Canadian, and he swore a holy oath.

He said, the reinforce for Montreal has been repulsed. There is no help coming to you. For the sake of humanity, Montgomery's messenger said, you should surrender. Montgomery did not wish to blast, to crush, to vaporize, to disembal any more Britons with his cannon. And he pointed out, if he was forced to storm the fort, he could not guarantee that prisoners would be taken. Nothing enrages men, like storming into a breach, seeing their mates atomized by canister shot. When they got into the fort, they might not behave in a gentlemanly fashion. The garrison might be slaughtered.

So the commander was faced the tough choice. He wanted to fight on, but his officers, they forced him to bow to the inevitable. There was hardly any gunpowder left, and as I said, they were running out of food. So at 8 a.m. on November the 3rd, the garrison marched out. Six abreast carrying their standards, their flags, their arms, their muskets at their shoulders, their fiefs and drums playing. It was an honourable surrender by the standards of the time. Around 700 of these men then stacked their arms.

arms in a heap before their American captors. The commander of the fort wept openly. Then they clambered into waiting boats and went south to captivity in New England. A staggering proportion, something like 75% of all British regular troops in Canada had now been killed or captured. And the all-important gateway to Canada, Fort St John, had been torn open. The Americans had won a victory, but at a cost, something like a thousand men had been lost to sickness as the army camped outside Fort St John for 60 days. And time is the most precious and irredeemable commodity in war. Those autumnal days had slipped away. The conquest of Canada had stalled for two months outside the walls of St John. The Americans were now in a hurry.

Montgomery had to capture the colony. That meant Montreal and it meant Quebec before winter. In the winter, in the depths of winter, war would be effectively impossible in deep snow and sub-zero temperatures. On top of that, it was an arbitrary man-made deadline as well. Get this. Many of Montgomery's men had only enlisted until the end of the year. That was it. So at midnight on the 31st December, their contract would be up and they would be going home. He had two months. So he pushed north as fast as he could, but that was not very fast. It was slow-going. It was bog. There were roads of sorts

that sort of felled trees lying one next to another but after a year or two they were just rotten away. The carriages carrying those heavy cannon carrying supplies just sank to their axles. Men sweated and cursed, they heaved them along.

Montgomery was not impressed with his own army. He called them the sweepings of the street. He was used to the discipline of the British army and he was amazed at seeing drunk officers, argumentative private soldiers. In this country, wrote, the privates are generals, but not soldiers. I love it. You get a sense how difficult is moving through this landscape. You just look at this map. There's a bit here that says,

this country, by reason of mountainous swamps and drowned lands, is impassable and uninhabited. It was very hard to move large bodies of men through Canada in the 18th century. Straubles Carlton, the British commander, was also feeling the pressure. He knew Montreal was indefensible. The wall was described as an eggshell. So he put every soldier in the garrison and all the warlike stores he could scrape together on boats and sent them down river, down the St. Lawrence towards Quebec, where he would make his last stand. Any cannon that he couldn't take, he spiked and threw them in the river. So it was that Montgomery marched unopposed into Montreal. His men apparently looked like ragged beggars. Montgomery says,

that even though they captured Montreal, they were mutinous. And he was a little bit mutinous too. He was desperate to go home. He wrote to his wife, I am weary of power. And I think perhaps he didn't really understand power that well either, because he made a foolish decision when he was in Montreal. He left a particularly unpleasant character to run the show in Montreal while he moved on to try and defeat the British. And that destroyed any potential goodwill that the Canadians might have felt for their, well, their new American overlords. When you read about this campaign, you're struck by the fact that most people, most of the time, seem to be flirting with disaster. It's just one calamity after another. So, for example, here, Carlton's fleet of boats

reaches the town of Sorrel, and there's some quite tricky navigation through some islands as they go down the St. Lawrence. And just as they reached that point, the wind died. They were dependent on the wind to push them through those shallows and a little bit of rapids. And the wind died at that point, they had to anchor for three days. Now, unfortunately for him, the Americans were controlling this South Bank of the St. Lawrence. And the American messenger came out to his ships and threatened to bombard his fleet with their 32-pound guns. And Coulton knew that he would be lethally vulnerable. Unless there was a stiff westerly breeze to blast his fleet past those guns, he would be terribly vulnerable. Coulton was really feeling it. He wrote to his boss in London,

I shall try to retard the evil hour, i.e. the loss of the colony. He'll try and push it back as long as he could, but it feels like it's inevitable. He wrote, all my hopes of succour now begin to vanish. So he is losing any hope that he has of keeping Canada. More invasion of Canada after this. Carlton's a remarkable character. He's that sort of cliché of an imperial Englishman, although, in fact, like most imperial Englishman, he is in fact Irish.

He's from the Protestant Irish community. He was an Ulsterman. He came from a cast of soldiers. They're useless to everything else. The battlefield is their metier, and I can say that coming from a long line of the thugs myself. But when I say he was a cliche, what I mean is that. he was ice cool under pressure. He appeared to be unbending, rigid, probably quite unpleasant to be around in normal times, but he was the absolutely ideal person to have in charge of what was an

omni shambles. He had few troops. He had these mutinous crews who did not want to be smashed by American iron. There was appalling weather. He was in a vast wilderness, thousands of miles from home. He was outnumbered. It was apparently hopeless. But even then, he never lost his cool in front of his men. Instead, what he did do is he disguised himself as a French-Canadian peasant. He put his moccasins on, little tasseled cap, and he got in a little boat, he shot past the Americans and made his way down the river towards Quebec.

Now, he didn't realize that all that time the America's been bluffing. There was no battery of American cannon, but the rest of his flotilla surrendered to those bluffing Americans. 30 cannon, 120 soldiers and 200 sailors all fell into American hands. As all this was going on, the snow had started to fall. Winter was coming. Montgomery had to get to Quebec. He wrote to his beloved wife. He said, so far Lady Luck had blessed him with good fortune, and he had one more favour to ask of her. After that he promised his wife, he was done. He cobbled together winter clothes from captured British uniforms, he borrowed money from a sympathetic merchant in Montreal, and he set off.

So now he got a situation where two shambolic, threadbare, tiny armies, really, would now fight it out for control of an absolutely enormous chunk of North America. Well, I say two, I say two armies, but actually there are a few more troops at play in this theatre. because there was another American force. There was that second thrust. And that came as a very nasty surprise for the British governor. Carlton had managed to sneak into Quebec in mid-November. The beleaguered garrison there were thrilled. Someone finally had to take charge.

A British official wrote, We saw salvation in his presence. And no doubt in public he played that optimistic part. But we know in private he was deeply concerned. And he was also nervous about the enemy within. He was worried about Montgomery's army coming up from Montreal, but he was particularly shocked by the news that met him when he got to Quebec. There was another American army loose in the colony.

It was a battered army, it was a pretty rough army, but it was a potent one. A few hundred, indescribably tough men who had endured everything the wilderness could throw at them and did something that no large body of troops had ever done before. Let's remind us of the American plan back in those long days of summer. We've got Skylar and Montgomery there heading up Lake Champlain towards Montreal, but then we've also got this other force. And that was one that Benedict Arnold had been lobbying for.

He'd persuaded George Washington himself in person, the pugnacious, jewelling, smuggling, headstrong, physically tough leader of men. Arnold had convinced Washington that this was the back door into Canada. George Washington had bought it. He'd made Arnold a colonel, and he'd sent him off. So, Arnold had set out from Boston with 1,000 men in early September. They sailed up the East Coast, apparently a very unpleasant voyage, everyone got seasick, and they'd arrived in what is now Georgetown, Maine, about here, on about the 20th of September.

They'd ordered the construction of 200 small boats, or batto, as they were called, which could each carry about six men and 600 pounds of supplies. But when he arrived here, he discovered that they were smaller and flimsy than hoped, and they hadn't been quite properly constructed. Anyway, he ordered 20 more. Now, with that fleet of boats, he headed north into the wilderness. He headed north up the Kennebec River. The route had been mapped, sort of.

Arnold believed it was about 180 miles from there to Quebec. In fact, it was more like 300 miles. So, generals in distant command centres thought that that route could be traversed by an army, a large body of men. It's just that no large body of men ever had traversed it before. It was a terrible gamble. But then really everything was a gamble in this first year of the American Revolutionary War. So why not?

Not a moment's time is to be lost, advised Washington. The season will be considerably advanced, although the commandant-in-chief was very confident that Quebec will fall into our hands. That's what the situation looked like to the great man behind his nice desk in his grand mansion in Cambridge. Arnold, it must be said, had some absolute heroes on this expedition,

some of the officers underneath him. He had men like Daniel Morgan who were described as a formidable border pugilist. He was a natural leader whose men said they would follow him into hell. And the next few weeks, he would ask them to. His cheek was scarred by a musketball, fired by an indigenous warrior.

They'd come close to blowing his jaw off in 1756. Henry Dearborn was another one. He was a champion wrestler. He'd fought to the end in the Battle of Bunker Hill. And Arnold would need heroes working for him because the task in front of them was absolutely terrifying. Take this for an opener. As they went up the Kennebec River,

they had to occasionally hoist all their boats out of the water to get past rapids or waterfalls or bits of rough water. At Fort Halifax, for example, they would take all their batow out the water. carry them overland for a bit, then they rode up five miles of rapids, then they hauled them up over a hundred-foot cliff, and that was just a starter. Now, for those of you who did not spend your childhoods doing canoe trips with your Canadian grandpa, who looked like he was chiseled out of pure granite, and whose idea of a good time was to be completely and utterly lost in the

backcountry, for those of you who have not hacked your way through the undergrowth, so you could drag your tents and canoes and supplies and your food from one lake to another, all of which, by the way, look exactly the same, while mosquitoes swarm around you so you can hardly breathe and you worry about the bears. Well, for those of you who have not done that, then you may not be familiar with this way of travelling. In short, this is the quintessential North American backcountry experience. It is how indigenous people covered vast distances. It's how everyone got round before the coming of roads and railroads. But it is really hard. Those batto were prone to capsize. The green wood that they were made out of warped. And that meant they became

very heavy and they meant they leaked and the men were just bailing constantly. Water would spoil the provisions. The force amazingly ate nearly one and a half tons of food every single day. They really got through the stuff. They had to stop and make repairs. And on the 9th of October, they set off from the last settlement on the American side of the border. The days that followed were days of struggle. They dragged and rode and waded those boats up, the Kennebec River. They dragged the boats up rapids using ropes. They lined the boats up through rapids. They carried the boats. They carried the supplies from river to lake, from river to lake again. Now, sometimes the men drank from the water of these lakes and voided their guts hours later.

Weakened men fell by the wayside. Frozen rain fell on the already soaking, toiling men. Clothes and boots disintegrated. Feet that were wet and dirty all the time, started tingling, they grew red, they started itching, and then the skin just erupted, and the agonising effect of what we now call trench foot really kicked in. Men crawled, unable to support their own body weight. By the 16th of October, they were on half-rations. They tried to keep each other's spirits up by talking about spending a cozy winter among the nuns of Quebec. In the meantime, they waded through a swamp until they came to something called Dead River. The meanders of that river, was so great that the advance guard were sometimes further from Quebec than those coming behind. Then came a storm, possibly a hurricane, we think, which uprooted trees, unleashed a downpour that sent the river up by eight feet overnight. Supplies were flooded, tents were swept away, the landscape was now just wetland, and they couldn't really tell where the course of the river was. A survivor called it a direful, howling wilderness. Arnold called a council of war. and it was decided that he would press on with as many men as could be fed. The sick would be sent

back to the south. So on they went. Thick snow fell. They were starving. At one stage, they killed a partridge, and they split it 12 ways. Officers started to hoard supplies. They started falling out with each other. A rearguard unit simply turned around and went home without orders. Arnold's force was down to about 600 men, and a few days later, the advance guard reached the watershed of the Appalachian Mountains. It is the border. Once across, Arnold went ahead with a very small group desperately trying to secure supplies at the first Canadian settlement they came across. Now, after all the misery and challenges are going up, they face a different challenge, which is going down. Because as they're going down these wild rivers, well, five of Arnold's

battle were destroyed, shooting some rapids, they almost went over a waterfall. Arnold was in a canoe that was wrecked, clinging to just two batto, they arrived. at the village of Sartagan, and it's a Canadian village, roughly where St. George, Quebec is now. Behind him, men were spread out along the trail. They were eating their belts and shoe leather. They staggered like drunks. Apparently, they followed bloodstains in the snow as their barefoot comrades broke trail. Corpses littered the route. Now, over a couple of days, the survivors limped in to Sartagan. Witnesses said they were more like ghosts than men. Arnold had secured cows and flour and oatmeal. He managed to gather enough food and the men would rebuild their

strength. An admirer of his wrote that this had been an undertaking above the race of men in this debauched age. He summoned some of the local indigenous people. He told that the Americans were liberators. They'd get rid of the Brits and then they'd leave the indigenous and the people of French origin. He'd lead them in peace. He attracted about 50 recruits that way and his own men were growing stronger and they were getting fed and they were getting dry and they were arresting. And then it was about 60 miles from there to Quebec. He sent scouts to the South, and by the 8th of November, they were on the St. Lawrence, overlooking Quebec. Now, the city of Quebec is magnificent, one of the most striking in North America.

It is a stunning defensive position. It was fortified, unlike Montreal. The old town is on a superb natural defensive position. It's on top of a cliff skirted by the St. Lawrence. It's not a promontory. It's protected on the south and the east by the old. the St. Lawrence River, and from the north by the St. Charles River. So it sticks out on a headland. There's the old town, the upper town, and then the lower town. So the lower town, it's like on the

floodplain of the St. Lawrence River, and that's full of wharves and overspill housing. If you want to attack Quebec, you've really got to do it from the plains of Abraham, from the west. That is where General Wolfe had won his famous victory. That's where he breathed his last, only 16 years before, it's mad to think that victorious coalition, the British and their American colonial allies, had now broken apart, fractured. And those broken parts were converging on Quebec once again to settle the fight that their victory there had ignited. The commander in Quebec had heard reports of Americans on the South Bank of the River, on the Far Bank. So he'd ordered all the boats in the South Bank removed. And inside that walled city

He had a garrison of around about 1,000 sailors, soldiers, and militiamen. Belizex Island's men crossed the St. Lawrence River in the evening of the 13th November. About 500 men across the St. Lawrence in three waves. They landed not far from where General Wolfe had landed in 1759. The British guardboats on the river had failed to stop them. He then climbed up to the plains of Abraham, and he made camp. They debated storming Quebec that very night, but instead they held off. They paraded in front of the walls of Quebec, and they held insults, and they made an offer

that if Quebec surrendered, all private property would be protected. The British inside the city, they did debate it. There was food to last the garrison and the 5,000 citizens of Quebec until the spring. The walls were reasonably strong, and they outnumbered the Americans. The siege were still pretty loose, that meant that firewood and food could still get into the city. The Council of War voted unanimously that they would not surrender. render, they would hold out. In fact, they fired a cannonball that splattered Arnold's waiting messenger with mud. In fact, the British went on the offensive. They planned to sorty out and take the

fight to the Americans. And Arnold's men got wind of this and they retreated. They realized they're upnumbered. They only had about five rounds each for their muskets. And indeed, many of those muskets were broken after that long march. And so instead, they marched 20 miles up the St. Lawrence and waited for Montgomery's Americans marching up from Montreal. As they marched, or they staggered, a boat slipped past running east, the opposite direction. And on board was the governor, Carlton, and his peasants get up. When he arrived at Quebec, the last redoubt, he listened to reports of Arnold's force with consternation. That was the last thing he needed.

The scene was set for the final showdown. On December the 3rd, Montgomery and his men arrived. They actually came up the river on ships captured. from the British, skirting chunks of ice that were floating on the river's surface, and he came ashore to the cheers of Arnold's troops lining the bank, and where might they cheer? It was an astonishing achievement. The two different thrusts had met up in the heart of Canada, as intended by the wildly optimistic and very vague plan. Thanks their astonishing resilience, Arnold's men had made that impossible crossing of the Appalachians,

while Montgomery had blasted his way past the British along the traditional invasion corridor. Now, for an 18th century army that had only existed since that summer, it was very impressive. Certainly, across the 13 colonies, many people rejoiced. A delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia stood up and said, No doubt is entertained here that this Congress will shortly be joined by delegates from Canada, which will then complete the union of 14 provinces. But there's always doubt in war, particularly this one, because this was one of those military operations in which nothing

was achieved until everything was achieved. Because without Quebec, without this city, the Americans would have failed. The British Navy would bring reinforcements in the spring and the Americans would be swept back to where they'd come from. The Americans had to take Quebec. They had to lock the British out of Canada. And they had to do so in the next four weeks. More invasion of Canada after this. So the combined force made its way along the St. Lawrence back to Quebec. It's now about a thousand strong. It was cold. It was savagely cold. They had their mocks and stuffed with hay for warmth. They were dressed in captured British red coats and great coats. And they would have looked the same really as the British they were fighting, which is a visual reminder that

in many ways this was a civil war. I've always struck by the fact the officers traveled in sleighs, very Christmassy. The bells of their harnesses jingling away in festive fashion as they slid across the last 20 miles that brought them to the walls of Quebec. There they found the garrison on top of their 60-foot high walls with full enough bellies, plenty of artillery, and no intention of marching out of their defences. It wasn't clear to the attackers that the walls were actually quite weak with age, and there weren't enough British troops to protect them properly. They even struggled to find the keys to one of the gates at one point. We're not talking Stalingrad here. Montgomery got his American troops to shoot arrows into the city over the walls

with messages on those arrows for merchants within the city who he thought might be willing collaborators. He got a local woman to carry a message to Carlton, but Carlton threw it on the fire, and then he threw the woman out of the city. And alongside her, actually sent out lots of people he thought might be fifth colonists, grumblers, pacifists, people that are pro-American. He just sent them straight out into the Canadian winter. He carefully husbanded his few reliable troops. He had about 300 redcoats, they were the professionals, in about 50 Marines off some Royal Navy ships that were tied up there for the winter.

Other members of the garrison, though, much less dependable. There were some Newfoundland fishermen, and there were the local French-speaking Canadians. Coulton organised daily drill and musket practice. Sargent swore and chivied as men with their cold fingers went through the endless, complicated cycle of fire, reload, ram, close the pan, shoulder musket, fixed bayonet, take up, rest, thumbs moving a few inches, slide your palm up and down the stock, one foot drop back, bring it forward. Those individuals

were slowly, gradually forged into a machine, hopefully capable of unleashing a storm of lead to annihilate the enemy in front of them. Sailors were offered three pounds to enlist as a soldier, plus a nice warm greatcoat. Everyone was told to sleep in their clothes, weapons at hand. cannon from those naval ships were manhandled ashore, windows in the towns were blocked up, carpenters built barricades to block up the streets. Carlton knew what he was doing, and he also had one more trick up his sleeve. In November, to the scurl of the bagpipes, over 200 men marched into Quebec. The dressing between the rank and farm might have looked a bit ragged because these men were out of practice.

They were retirees. Decades before, they had been born in the school. Scottish Highlands. These were men forged in the glens and islands of that hard country. They were raised to use dirk their knives and their longswords. They were raised to answer the call of their lead, their clan chief, to fight for their clan. These men were older now, and their stubble would have been shot through with whites. They had the odd limp among them. But they had a set to their jaw that spoke of a lifetime of war and survival. Some of these men had survived the blizzard of lead and iron on Colloden Moor 40 years before. They'd fought against King George on that day.

But their clan chiefs had then made peace, and they were happy enough to fight for the same King George in America a decade later, and another King George now. After their service in North America, they'd been rewarded with land in Canada, and they'd probably found farming in that hostile environment no easier than fighting in it. But now here they were, like old buddies in a high movie gathering for one last job. They answered the call of their king. They came to support their mates to protect their farms, and perhaps, just perhaps, for the chance to hear the pipes keening in their ears once more, for the feel of their dirks in their hands, the adrenaline in their bodies. I'm sure some of them would have missed the rawness and simplicity of war

as they cleared rocks from barren fields with their lumpen sons and scolding wives. Montgomery, opened fire on the walls of Quebec with his cannon, and his sharpshooters attempt to pick off defenders on the walls. In response, the British artillery fired back. One cannonball killed Montgomery's horse that was pulling his sleigh across the plains of Abraham. Another British cannon destroyed a battery that Montgomery was trying to build. It wasn't a great start.

Montgomery tried one more bluff. He sent a messenger offering generous peace terms to the garrison. Carlton didn't even let him into the city. Now, remember, Montgomery needs to finish the siege by the 31st December, He did not have time for a full, lengthy siege. It would have to be a violent assault. He was going to storm Quebec. The weather was horrific.

It was a famously cold winter. But Montgomery wanted to take advantage of this. He would attack under the cover of a blizzard. And by the way, there was one more reason to act fast. A new enemy was stalking his men. His force was being decimated by smallpox, more effective really than any enemy army. It sliced through his ranks.

He had to build not one but two pox hospitals. The rumor is that Carlton had to be. sent out a sex worker with smallpox to knowingly infect the American army. I cannot vouch for that story's truth, but that is the story that is told. By Christmas, Montgomery only had about 800 fit men, plus a few Canadians. The Americans had found a French-speaking priest. They'd paid him some money, they'd promised to make him a bishop, and in return, he told the French inhabitants that they would not, in fact, go to hell if they helped the Americans. But Montgomery was losing men all the time. The Americans were cold and hungry, some of them just found Benetton

were really annoying, and they were deserting to the British. Some of those deserters were even hoisted up on ropes over the walls. On the afternoon of the 30th December, a storm blew in. This was Montgomery's chance, and he issued his orders. He would lead 300 New Yorkers around the south edge of the city to the so-called lower town, which was at the level of the St. Lawrence. Benedict Arnold, meanwhile, would strike from the north, and he would also aim for the lower town, whilst other units faked an assault on the powerful walls from the plains of Abraham. Montgomery hoped that they would seize the lower town, and that might force the upper town, the oldest fortified heart of Quebec, to surrender. Just past 4 a.m., on the last day of the

year. A British century standing on the walls saw two red rockets exploding like fireworks above him. He bellowed, turn out, turn out, and the bells of the many churches and monasteries of Quebec began to clang summoning defenders from their beds. Montgomery led his 300 men along the riverbank, crawling over boulders, climbing cliffs above the river to avoid the big sheets of ice that the river had carelessly strewn across the route. He was trying to sneak into the lower town of Quebec from this southern side. Montgomery's men cut through a barricade that blocked off the river, but beyond that lay a strong point with a cannon in it. Montgomery raised his sword and charged. Now, there is a rule in this life. If you want a job doing properly, you get the

Royal Navy to do it. And that night, it was Montgomery's enormous bad luck to choose a point of offences manned by Royal Navy sailors with three small cannon. Helping them out, I should say, was about 30 French-speaking Quebec militiaman who deserve a mention to. These men watched Montgomery coming across the no-man's land. They waited for the Americans were 50 yards out, and only then did they touch their slow matches to the little mounds of gunpowder atop the top of the barrels of their guns. Bolts of flame shot down to ignite the powder beneath, and the three cannons spat their lethal load at the attackers. A British witness simply wrote, shrieks and groans followed the discharge. When the smoke cleared away, there was not a soul to be seen. Montgomery was hit in the head

and killed instantly. Most of the men with him went down too. Montgomery had been made a major general. He'd been promoted for a success at Fort St John and Montreal, but he'd never received news of that promotion. He was dead before the letter could reach him. In a snowstorm far from home, on New Year's Eve, in a war that he could not have imagined that he'd be fighting five years before. He'd written to his wife before he left. I've been dragged from obscurity much against my inclination and not without some struggle. He told her that at the very first opportunity he would slip my neck out of the yoke, I will return to my family and farm. He never would. Nor would Captain Jacob Cheeseman, his aide-de-de-con, who would want to look his best for the attack and had

slip some gold coins into his pockets that anyone finding him could arrange a proper burial. Another aide, 20-year-old John McPherson, left the letter to be sent in the event of his death. It was written to his father, and it was sent after this attack. If you receive this, it'll be the last this hand will ever write to you. I experience no reluctance in this cause. Those men now lay dead on the frozen ground. The remainder of Montgomery's men retreated. Had they pushed on, they may have panicked those defenders into flight,

but that well-timed cannon volley had blasted any bravery out of those Americans, and back they went. Now, on the other side of the city, from the north side, Benedict Arnold was leading his column through the snow. They had to abandon a sledge with a cannon on it after it got stuck in a snowdrift. The British sentries on the walls caught sight to them, and they opened up a withering fire. Men fell in the snow, their corpses freshly dusted with flakes within minutes.

Captain Jonas Hubbard had survived the hell that was Bunker Hill, but few men got that lucky twice in one year, and he was now felled in this narrow lane. March on, he shouted with his last strength. They got to a 10-foot-high barricade protecting the side of the lower town, but without cannon, they had no choice other than to launch a heroic frontal assault. Through the snow they searched, The night illuminated by the flash of hundreds of gunpowder explosions in musket pans,

the spit of that flame coming out of the muzzles of the muskets, lanterns bobbling about in the hands of charging men, grenades landing among them, killing, stunning, blinding, men peering through the darkness, trying to regain their night vision after a searing flash of white and orange. Arnold was knocked down, he took a bullet to the ankle. Daniel Morgan jumped into his role. He bellowed for a ladder, lented against the barricade here, and he was the first up. A musket fired at him so close that the blast burned his face. A ball grazed his cheek, another passed through his hat. It blasts him off the wall.

Up he went again. He got on top. He rolled under a cannon to avoid the bayonet searching for his vitals. These men followed and they overwhelmed the decidedly half-hearted defenders. Some of the defenders ran. Others threw down their weapons and discovered they'd always been keen fans of Thomas Payne. About 30 prisoners were taken. The Americans were on a roll. or they should have been, but instead they paused. They paused to allow the stragglers that had been lost in the blizzard to catch up. They paused to kind of get their bearings. Morgan raged at his officers to push on.

The next barricade was unguarded, it looked like, but his subordinates wanted to wait to just get their bearings before they moved on. I was overruled by hard reasoning, wrote Morgan later. To these arguments, I sacrificed my own opinion and lost the town. When they eventually set off, there was a thin dawn trying to light up the sky. and they swept along behind Morgan through the warehouses and the streets of this lower town. This was the moment which would determine the fate of Canada. These were the men who'd crossed the Appalachians.

It was said about them that they were famine-proof. At that moment, I think they felt iron-proof too. In their hats, these men had stuck a scrap of paper with liberty or death scrawled across it. In their hands were their muskets largely useless in the snow other than brackets for the bayonets on top of them. They arrived at this second barricade. A few minutes earlier, they might have swept the defenders aside. There were a few dozen British redcoats along with largely French-speaking militia unit. There had been, I think, a mixed morale among those manning that barricade. These militiamen,

they were farmers, they were boatsmen, they were craftmen, they were not convinced they wanted to exchange bayonet thrust with these superhuman wilderness warriors. But just before Morgan arrived at this barricade, so did the British reinforcements. Now these were those former Scottish Highland soldiers, alongside them, a bunch more Royal Navy sailors. And in British Imperial history, when the sailors team up with the Highlanders, I'm afraid it is thoughts and prayers for the opposition. The redcoats were placed in a double line behind the barricade. There was a cannon situated to fire down the street.

The Highlanders took up positions in buildings either side of the street. They turned it into a trap. They turned to a killing zone. Morgan raced forward. A naval officer invited him to surrender. Morgan shot him dead. Then the British opened up. From in front, behind the barricade, from either side, there was a blizzard of iron and lead falling on them as thick as snowflakes. Down went the key officers. Civilians screamed as bloody war suddenly invaded their quiet street.

Morgan died inside a house for shelter. One by one, his men surrendered. He refused to do so. He was the only man left. He held out, and eventually the British found a priest who he's prepared to hand his sword to. tears of rage in his eyes rather than surrender to a hated British officer. Meanwhile, Carlton sent down reinforcements to counterattack. Downraised another group of Highlanders, their clan songs on their lips, the old thrill of battle coursing through their blood. They seized back this captured barricade here and trapped all the remaining Americans still inside the lower town.

It was over. The enemy had been repulsed with slaughter, in the words of Carlton. A British soldier wrote in his journal, A glorious day for us, and as complete a little victory as ever was gained. But Carlton remains cautious. He kept his men inside the city. There were those who said he could have wiped out the American army

if he'd given his men free reign. In fact, the Americans issued muskets to the men in hospital beds and expectation of the attack. But that kind of talk is cheap. It's easy for those of us who don't feel the burden of commands on our shoulders like Carlton did. He was a man at that stage entirely responsible for the fate of an empire.

Every soldier that he lost was one that he couldn't replace. So, he was cautious. He had 500 Americans captive inside Quebec, or dead in the streets, frozen stiff as boards within hours, or who had fallen through cracks in the frozen St. Lawrence Ice during the retreat. He'd lost only six or so men. Another 100 Americans woke up next morning and declared their periods of enlistment over, and they marched home. Arnold had only a few hundred men left.

He asked the American force in Montreal for reinforcements, but they said they had none to send. They were fearful of an uprising. He sent messages to Washington, begging him for reinforcements. He had none to send, and he was actually considering resigning at the time. Poor old Skyler, battling his poor health in upstate New York, he didn't dare to send any troops. The indigenous peoples, the Mohawk Valley were looking quite threatening. Some troops were found from the rebellious colonies and sent to Canada, but they arrived, exhausted. Their clothes shredded, feet bleeding after long journeys across hostile terrain.

The Spring Thor brought plenty of professional troops right up the St. Lawrence on Royal Navy ships. The frigate surprise was first, others followed, and the Americans retreated. Montreal, well, it hadn't thrived under American occupation. That American governor had slapped a tax on the people there, one which we should note they had not voted for. So that taxation without representation went down badly and undermined one of the key American selling points. amazingly, the American Centre Committee, including the mighty Benjamin Franklin to Montreal at this period, to see if the situation could be fixed. But it could not be fixed. And that committee immediately sailed right back down and headed back to Philadelphia. There was some back and

forward in the spring and summer of 1776. Again, you see small groups of sickened men blundering around this landscape, not knowing where the enemy was or what their intentions were. But in essence, the British had the upper hand. They could push more reinforcements more easily into Canada via the St. Lawrence than the Americans could. And slowly the British reconquered their province. In late June, Benedict Arnold shot his own horses, boarded the last boat at of St. John's, and pushed that boat out from the shore himself. He was the last American to leave Canada. They would be fighting the following year. The British would swoop down Lake Champlain from Canada to be humiliated at Saratoga. We will be covering that on this podcast extensively,

so make sure you subscribe. And the year after that, Congress authorized another invasion of Canada. That Frenchman fighting for the Americans, the Marquis de Lafayette was given command, but lack of men and bateau and supplies meant it never even took place. That didn't stop the Americans asking for Canada in the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. And at that Congress, at that conference, the British side to keep hold of Canada. They kept hold of a territory that its red coats had bled for, had crissed crossed with blistered feet and empty stomachs. I mentioned a previous podcast in my Canada being the 51st State podcast. In fact, some of Canada,

or as we said, the British province of Quebec, it did get handed over. The Americans did successfully conquer some of it. The British agreed to relinquish all of their land to the south of the Great Lakes and to the east of the Mississippi. So that's Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois. They were all shorn from the British province and they were given to the young American Republic with the stroke of a pen. Their fate decided, in part by men of unimaginable toughness, who'd slogged out in savage skirmishes across that wilderness, but really mostly in the calculating minds of the pampered statesmen, thousands of miles away, very different men.

Once who thought it natural, they were entitled to swap great swathes of territory across multiple continents over a fancy table in Paris. As a result, Canada, as we know it, would remain part of the British Empire. The Americans had failed to conquer it outright. 1775. But as we've seen, in that year, they came very, very close. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. You know, you could have watched this episode and others on YouTube. That's right. You can peek behind the curtain of how we record this podcast on our YouTube channel. Very exciting new development here. Just click

the link in the show notes and head over to subscribe. New YouTube releases every Friday, friends. miss out.