“Personal considerations would make me prefer a visit to Montreal to the attack of Kingston; but before I abandon this attack, which by my instructions I am ordered to make, it is necessary to my justification that you should by the authority of the President direct the operations of the army under my command particularly against Montreal.” The hint was strong that Wilkinson believed Armstrong to be trying to evade responsibility, as Armstrong believed Wilkinson to be trying to shirk it. Both insinuations were probably well-founded; neither Armstrong nor Wilkinson expected to capture Kingston, and still less Montreal. Wilkinson plainly said as much at the time. “I speak conjecturally,” he wrote; “but should we surmount every obstacle in descending the river we shall advance upon Montreal ignorant of the force arrayed against us, and in case of misfortune, having no retreat, the army must surrender at discretion.” Armstrong’s conduct was more extraordinary than Wilkinson’s, and could not be believed except on his own evidence. He not only looked for no capture of Montreal, but before writing his letter of October 19 to Wilkinson, he had given orders for preparing winter quarters for the army sixty or eighty miles above Montreal, and did this without informing Wilkinson. In later years he wrote:[240]-- “Suspecting early in October, from the lateness of the season, the inclemency of the weather, and the continued indisposition of the commanding general, that the campaign then in progress would terminate as it did,--‘with the disgrace of doing nothing, but without any material diminution of physical power,’--the Secretary of War, then at Sackett’s Harbor, hastened to direct Major-General Hampton to employ a brigade of militia attached to his command, in constructing as many huts as would be sufficient to cover an army of ten thousand men during the winter.” The order dated October 16 and addressed to the quartermaster-general,[241] prescribed the cantonment of ten thousand men within the limits of Canada, and plainly indicated the secretary’s expectation that the army could not reach Montreal. In other ways Armstrong showed the same belief more openly.