George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 8

[186] placed, he would have erected one at the distance

Chap. LII.} 1775. Oct.

of four hundred yards from the north side of the fort; but the judgment of the army was against him. ‘I did not consider,’ said he, ‘I was at the head of troops who carried the spirit of freedom into the field and think for themselves;’ and saving appearances by consulting a council of war, he acquiesced in their reversing his opinion. In John Lamb, the captain of a New York company of artillery, he found ‘a restless genius, brave, active, and intelligent, but very turbulent and troublesome.’

Anxious to relieve St. John's, Carleton, after the capture of Allen, succeeded in assembling about nine hundred Canadians at Montreal; but a want of mutual confidence and the certainty that the inhabitants generally favored the Americans, dispirited them, and they disappeared by desertions, thirty or forty of a night, till he was left almost as forlorn as before. The Indians, too, he found of little service; ‘they were easily dejected, and chose to be of the strongest side, so that when they were most wanted they vanished.’ But history must preserve the fact that, though often urged to let them loose on the rebel provinces, in his detestation of cruelty, he would not suffer a savage to pass the frontier.

In this state of mutual weakness, the inhabitants of the parishes of Chambly turned the scale. Ranging themselves under James Livingston of New York, then a resident in Canada, and assisted by Major Brown, with a small detachment from Montgomery, they sat down before the fort in Chambly, which, on the eighteenth of October, after a siege of a day and a half was ingloriously surrendered by the English