As the English divisions advanced, one by Oswego, one by Lake Champlain, and the third by Quebec, they afforded to the French a fine opportunity for the strategic movement from a centre against converging lines; but the garrison was too weak to hope for success in either direction, and therefore awaited the enemy within their works.

Montreal, being but slightly fortified, was soon reduced, and with it fell the French empire erected in this country at infinite labor and expense.
At the first outbreak of the American Revolution, it was so obviously important to get possession of the military works commanding the line of Lake Champlain, that expeditions for this purpose were simultaneously fitted out by Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The garrisons of these works were taken by surprise.

This conquest, says Botta, the able and elegant historian of the Revolution, "was no doubt of high importance, but it would have had a much greater influence upon the course of the whole war, if these fortresses, _which are the bulwarks of the colonies_, had been defended in times following, with the same prudence and valor with which they had been acquired." In the campaign of 1775, an army of two thousand seven hundred and eighty-four effective men, with a reserve of one thousand at Albany, crossed the lake and approached the fortress of St.John's about the 1st of September.

The work was garrisoned by only about five or six hundred regulars, and some two hundred militia.