On April 19th the affair at Lexington, the commencement of a civil revolution, took place and rapidly the news of it spread. Montreal was well posted. The leaders of the provincial sympathizers here reported to the leaders of congress the easy fall of Canada to the insurgents. Canada was more feverishly coveted at this time than ever. In 1712 Dummers had written: “I am sure it has been the cry of the whole country ever since Canada was delivered up to the French,--Canada est delenda.” In 1756 Governor Livingston of New Jersey had cried: “Canada must be demolished--Delenda est Carthago,--or we are undone.” And now Canada was desired as the “fourteenth colony.” In Montreal those who had received in the coffee house John Brown, John Adams’ ambassador, were still keeping up communications led by Thomas Walker, Price and others. At last the Congressists thought the conquest was being made, relying on the presumed neutrality of the Canadians. Ticonderoga had fallen in the beginning of May to the revolutionary party under Ethan Allen’s self-constituted forces. The road to Canada was being cleared. Benedict Arnold, sailing from Ticonderoga, had arrived unexpectedly on the morning of the 18th of May at Fort St. John’s and captured the small war sloop there and took prisoners the sergeant and ten men in charge of the military garrison. A second landing was made by Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys at St. John’s on the 18th and 19th with a party said to be three hundred strong, as Carleton was informed at Quebec. There was great consternation in Montreal when the news of the seizure of Ticonderoga and Crown Point and the first capture of St. John’s was brought by Moses Hazen,[5] a merchant of Montreal now living near St. John’s. The military was immediately put in motion by Colonel Templer who dispatched Colonel Preston with a regiment of one hundred men of the Twenty-sixth and this would have cut off Allen’s descent up the lake with his bateaux had not Bindon, a friendly Montreal merchant, hurried on horseback from Longueuil to St. John’s to apprize Allen of the approach of the party from Montreal.[6]