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.

Phillip Thomas Tucker, PhD, is a writer and historian who has edited and authored more than 180 books. After earning his PhD in 1990 from St. Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, he took a position as civilian historian with the Department of Defense and specialized in air force history. His previous books include Kings Mountain; Alexander Hamilton and the Battle of Yorktown, October 1781; Saving Washington's Army; Death at the Little Bighorn; Pickett's Charge; How the Irish Won the American Revolution; George Washington's Surprise Attack; Exodus from the Alamo; and Father of the Tuskegee Airmen, John C. Robinson. He lives in central Florida.