Free The First American Army by Bruce Chadwick Page A

and locked in irons and interrogated, as were other prisoners. One frightened man divulged the entire scheme.
    The revenge of their British jailers was swift. All of the men were confined in thick, heavy leg irons or handcuffs, which Greenman wrote were “very uncomfortable.” Head counts were now taken twice a day to make certain that no one had escaped. Rations were cut and a new kind of biscuit was given to the men. “We think they was poisoned,” Greenman said of the biscuits after most of the men became sick shortly after eating them.
    The men demanded medical care after vomiting up the biscuits. They received it, but the only medicine they wound up with was the common physic that doctors on both sides gave men to make them purge themselves. “[It] proved that we was poisoned,” insisted a bitter Greenman, who, like the others, vomited even more after taking the medicine.
    Here, again, the men, miserable in their irons, talked endlessly of the attack by Arnold that they were certain would be launched at any moment. It was their only hope, but as March faded into April and then early May, Greenman abandoned that dream and lamented. “We are almost ready to give up, fearing they will not come.”
    Any hopes they maintained of an American attack to free them were ended harshly on May 6. Just after the sun rose that morning, the prisoners looked out their windows on an astonishing sight—three large British warships (the frigates
Surprise
and
Iris
and the sloop
Martin
) majestically sailing up the St. Lawrence right at them, their big canvass sails unfurled and billowing in the Canadian wind, the first of fifteen ships in a fleet. Greenman observed, “Three ships came into the harbor with reinforcements of about one thousand men at which time all the bells in the city rang.”
    The troops did not disembark and march into Quebec, as Greenman expected, but, in a preplanned, surprise maneuver, charged directly at the American camp on the Plains of Abraham, shocking the Continental Army. Governor Carleton directed a force of two hundred men from the ships and seven hundred of his own soldiers in the charge. The Americans fled in confusion after a short battle that the men in the Dauphin Jail watched in utter depression. Their last hope for salvation seemed to flee along with their army.
    Greenman was dejected and angry at his comrades at the same time. He wrote, “If they had only known how bad it was to be a prisoner they would never have retreated [without] giving battle.”
    The twelve warships behind the
Surprise, Iris,
and
Martin
arrived the next day, with more troops and cannon. Throughout the month, additional vessels landed in Quebec; some troop transports and some supply ships. Their jailers told them that the new army was led by Britain’s best general, the flamboyant “Gentleman” Johnny Burgoyne, and that he rode at the head of an army of over seven thousand men. First they were going to chase and destroy the American troops, now under the command of General John Thomas, and then turn toward Montreal and wipe out the Americans holding it. The city was under the command of Arnold, who had moved there in early May.
    The news crushed Greenman. “Here we live very discontented and quite out of hope of ever being relieved,” he wrote in late September, adding later that “they are keeping us in such a hole not fit for dogs much more for men.”
    He was certain that he would never go home and might spend years in the Dauphin Jail, but he was wrong. Governor Guy Carleton decided that he was better off without the prisoners because it was too costly to house, feed, and guard them. During the first week of June, Carleton walked into the Dauphin Jail, surrounded by his armed guards, and stood a few yards from Greenman as he addressed the men.
    They could go home, and shortly, he told them, as long as they promised to remain there and not rejoin the American army and fight against the British. It was that simple.