The Revolutionary Battle of Valcour Island

An American lake battle 250 years ago bought the Patriots essential time the British couldn’t afford to lose.

T he survival of the American Revolution for nearly three years between its outbreak in April 1775 and the Patriots’ cementing of an alliance with France in February 1778 required a combination of bravery, resourcefulness, British miscalculations, and providential strokes of luck. At the Battle of Valcour Island, which took place 250 years ago today, all of those factors would converge to give Americans not victory but breathing room to continue the fight. The trio of men who led that defense never got the grand military glory they felt they deserved.

I’ve previously recounted the four great turns in the strategic situation after Lexington and Concord:

• The June 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill was a Pyrrhic victory for the British that left their main forces besieged in Boston for nine months and left a legacy of caution for the British field commanders.
• The March 1776 liberation of Boston, made possible by the daring May 1775 capture of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga and Henry Knox’s long march of that artillery train over the snows of Albany and the Berkshires, drove British forces out of Massachusetts. That didn’t end the war in New England, but it secured its nerve center from the enemy.
• The June 1776 Battle of Sullivan’s Island prevented the British from taking the crucial port of Charleston. Together with the December 1775 Battle of Great Bridge in Virginia and the February 1776 Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge in North Carolina, that secured the South from British occupation until the British invaded Georgia to launch a Southern campaign in December 1778. The Declaration of Independence followed barely a week after the defense of Charleston.
• The August 1776 Battle of Long Island broke the positive Patriot momentum, left New York City under British sway, and began the long attrition of George Washington’s original Continental Army — but it was also punctuated by a miraculous overnight escape for the army under cover of darkness and fog.

For four months after Long Island, Washington was on the run with his remaining army and his surviving brain trust (Knox, Charles Lee, Nathanael Greene, and Alexander Hamilton), fighting a series of rearguard actions north through Upper Manhattan and Westchester County, across the Hudson River, and then south into New Jersey. Washington’s desperate need for intelligence on the enemy’s movements led, on September 22, to 21-year-old amateur spy Nathan Hale’s capture in Flushing and his hanging in what is now Midtown Manhattan.

The Great Warpath

The American cause could survive a British foothold in Manhattan and Long Island. It would be much more dangerous for Britain to control the Hudson River and the line up Lake Champlain by which it connected Manhattan to Canada — a route of such long-standing strategic value that the Iroquois dubbed it “the Great Warpath.” British possession of the Great Warpath would cut Philadelphia off from Boston. It would break the road that Knox had taken with Fort Ticonderoga’s guns to end the long siege. It would deny the Continental Army access to Connecticut. Connecticut’s role in the Revolution is often neglected because it was rarely the site of significant combat. But it was the closest thing the infant nation had to an arsenal: a center of industry and shipbuilding.

The long, vertical north-south line of Lake Champlain marks the New York–Vermont border, with the northern banks of the lake across the Canadian border. Fort Ticonderoga straddles the narrow land bridge between the lake’s southern tip and Lake George, where it could threaten communications and portage of ships and supplies between both lakes. The fortified Crown Point sat at a choke point in Lake Champlain 10 miles north of that, albeit south of most of the lake. Tiny Valcour Island sat in the northern reaches of the lake, near the Canadian border:

The 1776 campaign for Lake Champlain would take place in the shadow of the biggest disaster yet to befall the Patriot cause: the invasion of Canada. Americans under General Richard Montgomery and his intrepid second-in-command, Benedict Arnold, tried to besiege Quebec in a driving snowstorm on New Year’s Eve and were repelled by the forces of British General Guy Carleton, with grievous losses to the Americans. Montgomery was killed and Arnold wounded, and Carleton was hailed a hero for saving Canada with a badly outnumbered local garrison. The American army made a dismal track home, ravaged by smallpox, but a lack of boats prevented Carleton from hounding them all to their end. A relief expedition under General John Sullivan, sent north by Washington with troops needed for the defense of New York City, accomplished little but bitter dissension when Sullivan assumed command. In the end, Sullivan returned south to fight valiantly and was captured at the Battle of Long Island.

In the northern theater, the usual dynamics of Revolutionary War command were inverted. The British, for once, had in Carleton a single supreme commander on the scene with unchallenged authority. The most senior British officer in North America, Carleton was a careful and methodical man who had seen hard combat in the Seven Years War, where he lost his good friend General James Wolfe in the successful 1759 British assault on Quebec. Carleton’s administrative gifts led to his appointment as governor of Canada in 1768. His second-in-command, John Burgoyne, arrived with thousands of reinforcements for the Canadian theater, shifting the balance of manpower. The more aggressive and charming “Gentleman Johnny” chafed under Carleton’s restraints, but there was no question who was in charge.

By contrast, the Americans, even after Sullivan’s departure, had an unwieldy triumvirate. Supreme command lay with Philip Schuyler, a wealthy Albany landholder and merchant who spoke Dutch at home and was fluent in Mohawk. Washington regarded the 43-year-old Schuyler as an equal. Known today mainly as Hamilton’s father-in-law, Schuyler was a formidable character who would draw significant support in the 1777 wartime election for New York’s first elected governor, and he would later serve in the U.S. Senate. He had been in charge of the invasion of Canada but had been prevented by ill health from marching with the doomed army. Schuyler was a thoroughgoing military amateur but a master of logistics, administration, and diplomacy.

In the 35-year-old Arnold, Schuyler had a subordinate with extensive experience as a soldier and sailor but a difficult temperament. The Connecticut-born Arnold had owned his own ships before the war and had led the initial capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Vain, quarrelsome, reckless, fearless, endlessly resourceful, theatrical, amorous, and at his best in a crisis, Arnold is the sort of character who leaps off the page of any history book that tries to contain him. Also on the scene was General Arthur St. Clair of Pennsylvania.

Into this mix, Congress dispatched the 48-year-old Horatio Gates, a British Army veteran who had served with Washington in the fatal 1755 Braddock Expedition before moving to Virginia. Told by his New England backers in Congress (he was a favorite of John Adams) that he was being put in charge of the army invading Canada, Gates was deeply miffed to arrive and discover that he would have nothing to command: the invasion was over and its expeditionary army consisted mostly of infirmaries full of pox-ridden men and amputees. Schuyler eventually settled on a division of labor: Gates would command the land forces and Arnold would command ships on the lake, while Schuyler retained overall command.

Ironically, the one thing that drew Schuyler and Gates together was when they endorsed Arnold’s recommendation to abandon a forward position at Crown Point and consolidate their defenses at Fort Ticonderoga, after which Washington sent them a testy letter questioning the decision. The commander in chief eventually relented in the face of their unified assessment of the facts on the ground. Yet Crown Point was left guarded by a single regiment and would play a role in the drama to come.

The Shipbuilding Race

The Patriot plan of campaign was devised by Arnold and modified only lightly by Schuyler and Gates. Its two main prongs were to build a fleet and sail it north to contest control of Lake Champlain and simultaneously to strengthen and hold at all costs Fort Ticonderoga. Sick soldiers were also removed from the fort for reasons both of hygiene and morale.

In order to carry out Arnold’s characteristically aggressive plan for a naval offensive, a frantic flurry of shipbuilding began. Not for the last time, Americans would show their genius for rapid construction of numerous ships in wartime. Trees felled in the morning would be hulls and masts by sundown. At the other end of the lake, Carleton was doing the same thing. His vast advantage in resources was offset, as was often the case during the Revolution, by the long distances of ocean and Canadian wilderness between him and his government. He and Schuyler spent summer 1776 in a contest that strained their considerable gifts for assembling men and matériel, while their subordinates complained that what they provided was too little and too slow. Schuyler put his own personal fortune at stake to back the dubious credit of the Continental Congress in buying supplies — a system managed by an intrepid 23-year-old lawyer and future mayor of New York, Richard Varick, for whom a Manhattan street is now named. The governor of Connecticut sent shipbuilders, sailors, and a veteran sea captain, 53-year-old David Waterbury. But experienced seamen were hard to find as most of them preferred the chances for profit in privateers on the high seas to sailing on a lake.

Both fleets built low-lying gunboats, in addition to which the Americans built three galleys, which could be sailed or rowed. A key decision was whether to build a frigate, the largest class of warship. Schuyler and Gates rejected Arnold’s request to construct one, in order to concentrate their limited shipbuilding and seafaring resources on smaller ships. Carleton, thinking as always to ensure victory with superior preparation, built the huge frigate Inflexible, with guns and sailing speed to outmatch anything the Americans had. When the battle came, the British would have five warships to the Americans’ three. And, to Arnold’s surprise, Carleton did not neglect smaller and more maneuverable craft. While sources differ on the sizes of the flotillas, the British appear to have had 22 gunboats to the Americans’ 14, with a number of the British vessels manned by hardened Hessian gunners.

In a race of logistics, supply, and construction, the human element of command still mattered. Arnold had taken the measure of Carleton and concluded that he was a careful and methodical man. If he was apt to come prepared, he could be counted on not to move before he had everything ready. Even though the Inflexible was built and launched in an astounding 28-day spurt, its construction cost the British a delay of nearly a month in heading into the lake. That time was crucial to the naval battle. Not only did it give Arnold the initiative in getting his fleet into position (and gave the Americans time to get the three galleys to join the gunboats, who had set sail without them), it also allowed him three weeks unmolested at sea to chart the winding path of the lake and pick his place to make a stand. The British, by contrast, lacked accurate maps of Lake Champlain and were compelled to put the Inflexible immediately to sea before its crew had even learned the ship. Carleton’s loss of time was even more costly to his campaign.

In war, what doesn’t happen is often as important as what does. Schuyler, long experienced in dealing with the Iroquois, conducted a key diplomatic mission over the summer to keep the bulk of the Six Nations neutral. That neutrality would not last into 1777, but it bought crucial peace at the American rear.

The Valcour campaign would be a vivid reminder of why Arnold would be accounted among the greatest of American heroes had he kept faith with the cause. But the signs of his Greek-tragic flaws were in full view all along. In August, amid the whirlwind of preparations, he brought soldiers up on charges before a court-martial and clashed so badly with the members of the court that he threatened to challenge them to duels and they wanted him jailed for contempt. Gates had to dissolve the court-martial, explaining to Congress that “the United States must not be deprived of that excellent officer’s services at this important moment.”

The Waiting Game

In early October, Arnold brought his fleet up to Isle La Motte in the north of the lake to goad the British into giving chase. Carleton sailed south aboard the Maria, commanded by Thomas Pringle. He brought with him 800 Native Americans in war canoes whose main purpose was to go ashore and pursue any American sailors who abandoned ship. But he left behind Burgoyne and his troop ships, fearing to bring forward his ground forces until the sea had been cleared.

As seafaring men, Pringle and his commanders expected that if Arnold didn’t drop all the way back to Fort Ticonderoga (which he didn’t, as it would have foiled the entire point of his strategy), he would face them 7 miles south, at Cumberland Bay, a wide stretch of the lake where ships could take the wind in their sails and maneuver into position. But Arnold, knowing that his flotilla would be outnumbered, outgunned, and faced with superior seamen, wanted the exact opposite: a narrow channel in which the British would not be able to bring all of their gunnery to face the Americans at once. So he scouted out the coast of Valcour Island as his preferred place to give battle. With unfamiliar shoals and confounding crosswinds, it would keep the Inflexible and most of the other big British ships stranded at the edge of the battle. Arnold even took the reckless but calculated step of letting the British get to his south, apparently cutting off his avenue of escape, in order to position them where the winds were least favorable to the big ships. The site of the battle was 25 miles south of the Canadian border and 50 miles north of Crown Point.

Entering the battle on October 11, it was Pringle’s turn to make an unconventional choice, one that went so badly that his lieutenants later argued that it should have resulted in his being sent before a firing squad. He issued no general orders. Perhaps he couldn’t believe that this was where Arnold would fight, or perhaps the unfamiliar terrain and uneven odds led him to conclude that an organized formation would be unwieldy and that his commanders were better left to their own initiative. The result was a decided lack of organization in the British lines.

Arnold, choosing the galley Congress as his flagship, recognized that his crew was inexperienced and spent much of the battle personally aiming each of the guns, running hither and yon across the deck in a distinctive blue uniform that made him a target for the British. He managed to get off one cannon shot that nearly hit Carleton. While the general kept his sangfroid, the near miss induced Pringle to move the Maria farther out of the line of fire — another decision for which he would be excoriated.

The British minted their own hero that day: 19-year-old midshipman Edward Pellew, who would later become an admiral and earn a peerage during the Napoleonic Wars. The schooner Carleton was the one British sailing ship to force its way forward into the thick of the fight, making it a prime target for American gunners who had trouble hitting the low-lying gunboats of their opposite numbers. The captain of the Carleton was knocked unconscious (Pellew’s quick thinking alone kept the crew from deeming the captain dead and pitching him overboard). Pellew took command and at one point personally tied a rope that none of his crew would dare to reach under heavy fire, so that the Carleton could be towed out of the crossfire after an hour in the American vortex had wrecked its rigging.

The British boarded and captured the Royal Savage, which had previously been Arnold’s flagship and was still full of his papers, but they were driven off. For eight brutal hours, the firefight continued, with bodies blasted in half and men speared by splinters until everyone on both sides was coal-black with gunpowder and nearly deafened by the din. Merely by showing up and fighting at such length, Arnold had deceived the British into thinking that the Americans had far more ammunition and powder than they really had left. As night fell, the two sides disengaged. The British, to prevent the Americans from retaking the now abandoned Royal Savage, set it ablaze and let its gunpowder magazine explode. With the battered American fleet trapped in a cul-de-sac and low on ammunition, Carleton and Pringle would finish it off in the morning.

Fog and Flight

Arnold had other plans. He swiftly organized the Americans to slip right out past the British fleet in the dead of night. Oars were covered in shirts, pulleys greased, moaning wounded men hidden below decks, and only a single shielded lantern led the way. The busted eardrums of the British no doubt helped the silent flotilla. So did, just as on Long Island, the providential arrival of a dense fog. The British, not knowing the channel, would have been hesitant to navigate the narrow shoals blind, but Arnold and his men knew the way. By now, the fog must have seemed to the Americans like the Red Sea of Exodus, rescuing them from their pursuers.

They were further aided in this escape by the psychology of battle. Men on both sides were exhausted, crashing after the adrenaline rush of eight hours of combat — a dynamic that hit commanders as well as sailors and gunners. The British, anticipating more fighting the next day and focused on passing more ammunition down the line, felt no urgency to keep a diligent watch all night. The Americans, desperate to escape from a trap, rowed through the fog with every ounce of fear they had. The British ate; the Americans went through the night without food and rowed without cease all the next day.

Once the shock of having lost their prey wore off the next morning, Carleton and Pringle gave chase. In the open waters, the Inflexible could put on more speed than the Americans could match. Along the way, Waterbury and his ship were captured, and the American galleys were wrecked in firefights. By the end of the pursuit, Arnold ended up burning his remaining vessels to keep them out of British hands. Like Washington at Long Island, he was the last man ashore at the other end. But he found inlets and channels that thwarted the British time and again, and he baited Pringle into wasting time by firing at galleys while the smaller boats escaped with the crews, after which Arnold blew up the galleys. Waterbury’s was the only ship captured, and Arnold led the bulk of his men home alive. They reached Fort Ticonderoga at 4 a.m. on October 14.

Anticlimax

Crown Point was abandoned, albeit not before the Americans had destroyed its barracks, depriving the British of shelter. Now, Gates and his men waited inside Fort Ticonderoga for the British to arrive. Schuyler scrambled to rally the militia to his defense and sent frantic requests to neighboring governors. Sick soldiers even returned from the hospital, determined to die with their comrades. But the blow never came.

The reasons why included Carleton’s temperament and experience, the delays bought by Arnold and the building of the Inflexible, the lessons of previous battles, and most of all that great commander “General Winter.” The British were operating far inland, defying the traditional British way of war as it has existed since Richard the Lionheart, which demanded a secure, fortified line of supply to the Royal Navy before the army would advance an inch. Carleton remembered well the 1758 British siege of Fort Ticonderoga (then the French Fort Carillon), which had cost terrible British casualties because it was started prematurely without a full complement of artillery. And he worried that a long siege in the advancing winter, with lengthy supply lines, would punish his men the same way that the siege of Quebec had destroyed the Americans. When snow began to fall on November 1, he fell back.

Carleton had counted the cost of everything but time. Like the French at the Battle of Puebla, he had lost time he could never get back. The Americans had lost every battle, but they had delayed a British advance until 1777. It was a dearly bought success. Twenty-five percent of the American force at Valcour Island were casualties or captured. But the time needed to further fortify Fort Ticonderoga and prepare for another campaign in 1777 was crucial.

Dishonor

Other than Pellew, few of the commanders were spared from recrimination and disgrace. Carleton was knighted for his prior service but then sacked in favor of Burgoyne. Burgoyne, who sailed home to Britain on news of the death of his wife, vented his spleen to General Henry Clinton (who was nursing similar frustrations), furious at Carleton for abandoning Crown Point. But Burgoyne himself would surrender humiliatingly to Gates at Saratoga the following fall. Pringle was haunted by second-guessers.

Schuyler was cashiered by Congress and replaced with Gates — whose laurels as the hero of Saratoga in 1777 turned after the disgrace of his flight from Camden in 1780. St. Clair was blamed for failures in that campaign and served long enough in the army to command its worst defeat in history, in 1791, against the Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware tribes. Waterbury never forgave Arnold for hanging him out to dry and be captured. Arnold, passed over for promotions, let his many grievances fester until he turned traitor in 1780.

If the aftertaste was bitter, however, Americans can still give thanks to the men of Valcour in 1776.