Blood in the Snow

Inside the forgotten invasion that could have rewritten the American Revolution. In the frigid winter of 1775, as the American Revolution struggled for momentum, a bold vision took shape: the invasion and liberation of Canada. If Quebec could be taken, General George Washington believed, Canada might rise as the Fourteenth Colony—and the trajectory of the entire war could shift. In Blood in the Snow, historian Phillip Thomas Tucker resurrects this dramatic and often overlooked campaign: the first foreign invasion in American history. Tucker traces the twin expeditionary forces—General Richard Montgomery’s veteran army advancing down Lake Champlain and Colonel Benedict Arnold’s rugged detachment hacking its way through the Maine wilderness—as they converged on Quebec for a desperate, high-stakes assault. Facing expiring enlistments, brutal winter weather, and overwhelming odds, the Americans gambled everything on a daring nighttime attack during a fierce snowstorm. What followed was a tragic epic: Montgomery’s death at the outset, Arnold’s wounding moments later, and the cascading collapse of the assault in the frozen, narrow streets of Quebec. Tucker paints the battle not merely as a military operation but as a haunting tale of ambition, sacrifice, and human endurance. With vivid detail and analytical depth, he restores the Quebec campaign to its rightful place as one of the Revolution’s most dramatic and consequential episodes—a story of courage and calamity that stands alongside the great military epics of history.