Note 1271 — Chapter VIII

In this letter to Kirkland the assertion is made that the step was taken because of information received that "those who are inimical to us in Canada have been tampering with the natives." In the American Archives, 4th series, ii. p. 244, is a letter dated Montreal, March 29th, from J. Brown to Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, Committee of Correspondence of Boston, in which Brown's mission is betrayed even without his credentials. He was prospecting the ground with a view to future operations. He reports that "the Indians say they have been repeatedly applied to and requested to join with the king's troops to fight Boston, but have peremptorily refused, and still intend to refuse. They are a simple politick people, and say that if they are obliged, for their own safety, to take up arms on either side, they shall take part on the side of their brethren the English in New-England." In the same letter Brown states as a secret that Ticonderoga must be seized on the beginning of hostilities. Samuel Adams, one of the committee to whom Brown's letter was addressed, was also a member of the committee which drafted the letter to Kirkland. If Brown's letter did not reach Adams in time to inspire the suggestion of "tampering", it indicates at least the character of the rumors. The English writers (like Mahon, vi. 35) look upon the plea of "tampering" as a pretence; and Dartmouth, in July and August, 1775, called his orders retaliatory ones. We know that there was little for the colonists to apprehend from Carleton on this score. His opposition to the enlistment of Indians for service outside Canada drew forth complaints afterward from Guy Johnson (N. Y. Col. Docs., viii. p. 636). Still less was there cause for apprehension if the Caughnawagas were going to take sides with the colonists. It was probably understood that the statements of these Canadian Indians could not be implicitly relied upon.