On August 4, 1776, Colonel Arthur St. Clair wrote to Dr. Jonathan Potts with good news. French Canadian informants had brought explosive intelligence to Fort Ticonderoga: a French fleet had sailed up the St. Lawrence River, and the British troops at Fort Saint-Jean were fleeing north. The news must have been a relief for the garrison, but that relief would not last long. By August 6, 1776—250 years ago today—the illusion of the French fleet and the British retreat was beginning to crumble.
On August 6, James Wilkinson, now serving on the newly christened Mount Independence, wrote to General Philip Schuyler in Albany. If Schuyler was at all buoyed by the informants’ report, this letter brought him back down to earth. “A Scout has… arrived from Canada”, Wilkinson writes, “who justifies our suspicion of our French Informants by differing with them on the most essential representations.”
Wilkinson does not give details from the report of the Continental Army scout, saying that “as Mr. Cuyler was an Auditor of the whole narrative I shall omit mentioning particulars”. Mr. Cuyler was likely Jacob or Abraham Cuyler, both of whom served on Albany’s Committee of Correspondence. Schuyler could get the full report in person from Cuyler once he returned from Ticonderoga. This report was likely much closer to the truth: there was no French fleet in the St. Lawrence, and the British were still at Fort Saint-Jean with no sign of a retreat.
Wilkinson’s letter may have been a disappointment to Schuyler, but it likely wasn’t a shock. The reference to “our suspicion of our French informants” suggests that not everyone had trusted their story. Incidents like this were common in wartime. Scouts and informants arrived with conflicting information, truth mixed with mistakes and outright falsehoods. The job of the army’s officers was to find the truth and determine what to act on. In this case, the false story did not derail the Americans. Rather than relaxing, they continued to reinforce Ticonderoga’s defenses.
Learn more about this letter (object ID MS.2085) on the Ticonderoga Online Collections database: https://fortticonderoga.catalogaccess.com/archives/30090