AT 9 O’CLOCK ON THE morning of September 25, 1775, a French Canadian habitant banged on the main gate of Montreal. The Americans were coming, he blurted breathlessly to a British officer. As drums began to rattle out the alarm and a panicky crowd filled the Place d’Armes, the farmer told Sir Guy Carleton, governor general of Canada, that an American army had crossed the St. Lawrence during the night and was marching south down the island. The invaders numbered in the hundreds. They had already reached the suburb of Longue-Pointe, less than two miles away, and were taking up positions in barns and houses.

For weeks, Carleton had dreaded just such an attack. Fully one-third of the 9000 citizens of Montreal’s environs were transplanted New England merchants and their employees. Carleton’s spies had told himthat couriers from Boston were urging the expatriates to join the spreading struggle for American independence from Britain.

With only 34 regulars, a handful of Mohawk Indians, and about 30 officials from the Indian Bureau to defend the largest town in Canada, Carleton had threatened to burn Montreal—and its warehouses bulging with furs and wheat—unless the merchants helped defend it. After rounding up suspected American sympathizers and chaining them in ships in the harbor, he had already gathered his papers and was preparing to flee to Quebec, where he would make a last stand.

As word spread like a crown fire that the leader of the invading force was Ethan Allen, conqueror of two key British fortresses on Lake Champlain, Carleton placated the townsmen with hard money: he would pay volunteers half a Portuguese silver Johanna a day to join his militia. He had little alternative but to rely on these “shirtmen” and no other hope for timely relief. Of some 700 regulars in the combined 26th Cameronian Regiment of Foot and the 7th Royal Fusiliers assigned to garrison all of Canada, he had lost 80 men when they were taken prisoner during Allen’s raids on Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point. He had deployed most of his remaining regulars and 300 Mohawks to defend Fort St. John to the southeast, now bombarded by the cannon Allen had seized from the forts.

Carleton knew little about the boldness of Allen’s plan, how many men he could command, or just how he came to lead an invading army. In fact, Allen, instantly acclaimed by some (although not the Continental Congress) as America’s first war hero for his daring predawn attacks on the two Lake Champlain forts, had found himself caught in a crossfire of conflicting ideologies, officers, and orders. Contemporaries and historians alike viewed him as rash and impetuous, a violent frontiersman with an explosive temper. But his Canadian crusade shows that this portrait is too simple. New research reveals that American Gen. Richard Montgomery encouraged Allen to act, and that Allen was something of a victim—of conflicting orders from the Congress, of apparent abandonment by a fellow officer, and of circumstances themselves—in the drama that followed. Moreover, his