e new order.
Evidently, however, the respectable members of society were few, as the
great body of the English settlers joined in a petition for the repeal
of the Act on the ground that it deprived them of the incalculable
benefits of habeas corpus and trial by jury. The Montreal merchants,
whether, as Carleton commented, they "were of a more turbulent Turn, or
that they caught the Fire from some Colonists settled among them," were
particularly outspoken in the town meetings they held. In the older
colonies the opposition was still more emphatic. An Act which hemmed
them in to the seacoast, established on the American continent a Church
they feared and hated, and continued an autocratic political system,
appeared to many to be the undoing of the work of Pitt and Wolfe and
the revival on the banks of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi of a
serious menace to their liberty and progress.

Then came the clash at Lexington, and the War of American Independence
had begun. The causes, the course, and the ending of that great civil
war have been treated elsewhere in this series.* Here it is necessary
only to note its bearings on the fate of Canada.

* See "The Eve of the Revolution" and "Washington and His
Comrades in Arms" (in "The Chronicles of America").

Early in 1775 the Continental Congress undertook the conquest of Canada,
or, as it was more diplomatically phrased, the relief of its inhabitants
from British tyranny. Richard Montgomery led an expedition over the old
route by Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, along which French and Indian
raiding parties used to pass years before, and Benedict Arnold made a
daring and difficult march up the Kennebec and down the Chaudiere
to Quebec. Montreal fell to Montgomery; and Carleton himself escaped
capture only by the audacity of some French-Canadian voyageurs, who,
under cover of darkness, rowed his whaleboat or paddled it with their
hands silently past the American sentinels on the shore. Once down the
river and in Quebec, Carleton threw himself with vigor and skill into
the defense of his capital. His generalship and the natural strength
of the position proved more than a match for Montgomery and Arnold.
Montgomery was killed and Arnold wounded in a vain attempt to carry the
city by storm on the last night of 1775. At Montreal a delegation from
Congress, composed of Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles
Carroll of Carrollton, accompanied by Carroll's brother,