Chapter 12…

Chapter 12

1756

Oswego

When, at the end of the last year, Shirley returned from his bootless Oswego campaign, he called a council of war at New York and laid before it his scheme for the next summer's operations. It was a comprehensive one: to master Lake Ontario by an overpowering naval force and seize the French forts upon it, Niagara, Frontenac, and Toronto; attack Ticonderoga and Crown Point on the one hand, and Fort Duquesne on the other, and at the same time perplex and divide the enemy by an inroad down the Chaudière upon the settlements about Quebec.[387] The council approved the scheme; but to execute it the provinces must raise at least sixteen thousand men. This they refused to do. Pennsylvania and Virginia would take no active part, and were content with defending themselves. The attack on Fort Duquesne was therefore abandoned, as was also the diversion towards Quebec. The New England colonies were discouraged by Johnson's failure to take Crown Point, doubtful of the military abilities of Shirley, and embarrassed by the debts of the last campaign; but when they learned that Parliament would grant a sum of money in partial compensation for their former sacrifices,[388] they plunged into new debts without hesitation, and raised more men than the General had asked; though, with their usual jealousy, they provided that their soldiers should be employed for no other purpose than the attack on Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Shirley chose John Winslow to command them, and gave him a commission to that effect; while he, to clinch his authority, asked and obtained supplementary commissions from every government that gave men to the expedition.[389] For the movement against the fort of Lake Ontario, which Shirley meant to command in person, he had the remains of his own and Pepperell's regiments, the two shattered battalions brought over by Braddock, the "Jersey Blues," four provincial companies from North Carolina, and the four King's companies of New York. His first care was to recruit their ranks and raise them to their full complement; which, when effected, would bring them up to the insufficient strength of about forty-four hundred men.

[Footnote 387: Minutes of Council of War held at New York, 12 and 13 Dec. 1755. Shirley to Robinson, 19 Dec. 1755. The Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated. Review of Military Operations in North America.]

[Footnote 388: Lords of Trade to Lords of the Treasury, 12 Feb. 1756. Fox to American Governors, 13 March, 1756. Shirley to Phipps, 15 June, 1756. The sum was £115,000, divided in proportion to the expense incurred by the several colonies; Massachusetts having £54,000, Connecticut £26,000, and New York £15,000, the rest being given to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.]

[Footnote 389: Letter and Order Books of General Winslow, 1756.]

While he was struggling with contradictions and cross purposes, a withering blow fell upon him; he learned that he was superseded in the command. The cabal formed against him, with Delancey at its head, had won over Sir Charles Hardy, the new governor of New York, and had painted Shirley's conduct in such colors that the Ministry removed him. It was essential for the campaign that a successor should be sent at once, to form plans on the spot and make preparations accordingly. The Ministry were in no such haste. It was presently announced that Colonel Daniel Webb would be sent to America, followed by General James Abercromby; who was to be followed in turn by the Earl of Loudon, the destined commander-in-chief. Shirley was to resign his command to Webb, Webb to Abercromby, and Abercromby to Loudon.[390] It chanced that the two former arrived in June at about the same time, while the Earl came in July; and meanwhile it devolved on Shirley to make ready for them. Unable to divine what their plans would be, he prepared the campaign in accordance with his own.

[Footnote 390: Fox to Shirley, 13 March, 1756. Ibid., 31 March, 1756. Order to Colonel Webb, 31 March, 1756. Order to Major-General Abercromby, 1 April, 1756. Halifax to Shirley, 1 April, 1756. Shirley to Fox, 13 June, 1756.]

His star, so bright a twelvemonth before, was now miserably dimmed. In both his public and private life he was the butt of adversity. He had lost two promising sons; he had made a mortifying failure as a soldier; and triumphant enemies were rejoicing in his fall. It is to the credit of his firmness and his zeal in the cause that he set himself to his task with as much vigor as if he, and not others, were to gather the fruits. His chief care was for his favorite enterprise in the direction of Lake Ontario. Making Albany his headquarters, he rebuilt the fort at the Great Carrying Place destroyed in March by the French, sent troops to guard the perilous route to Oswego, and gathered provisions and stores at the posts along the way.

Meanwhile the New England men, strengthened by the levies of New York, were mustering at Albany for the attack of Crown Point. At the end of May they moved a short distance up the Hudson, and encamped at a place called Half-Moon, where the navigation was stopped by rapids. Here and at the posts above were gathered something more than five thousand men, as raw and untrained as those led by Johnson in the summer before.[391] The four New England colonies were much alike in their way of raising and equipping men, and the example of Massachusetts may serve for them all. The Assembly or "General Court" voted the required number, and chose a committee of war authorized to impress provisions, munitions, stores, clothing, tools, and other necessaries, for which fair prices were to be paid within six months. The Governor issued a proclamation calling for volunteers. If the full number did not appear within the time named, the colonels of militia were ordered to muster their regiments, and immediately draft out of them men enough to meet the need. A bounty of six dollars was offered this year to stimulate enlistment, and the pay of a private soldier was fixed at one pound six shillings a month, Massachusetts currency. If he brought a gun, he had an additional bounty of two dollars. A powderhorn, bullet-pouch, blanket, knapsack, and "wooden bottle," or canteen, were supplied by the province; and if he brought no gun of his own, a musket was given him, for which, as for the other articles, he was to account at the end of the campaign. In the next year it was announced that the soldier should receive, besides his pay, "a coat and soldier's hat." The coat was of coarse blue cloth, to which breeches of red or blue were afterwards added. Along with his rations, he was promised a gill of rum each day, a privilege of which he was extremely jealous, deeply resenting every abridgment of it. He was enlisted for the campaign, and could not be required to serve above a year at farthest.

[Footnote 391: Letter and Order Books of Winslow, 1756.]

The complement of a regiment was five hundred, divided into companies of fifty; and as the men and officers of each were drawn from the same neighborhood, they generally knew each other. The officers, though nominally appointed by the Assembly, were for the most part the virtual choice of the soldiers themselves, from whom they were often indistinguishable in character and social standing. Hence discipline was weak. The pay--or, as it was called, the wages--of a colonel was twelve pounds sixteen shillings, Massachusetts currency, a month; that of a captain, five pounds eight shillings,--an advance on the pay of the last year; and that of a chaplain, six pounds eight shillings.[392] Penalties were enacted against "irreligion, immorality, drunkenness, debauchery, and profaneness." The ordinary punishments were the wooden horse, irons, or, in bad cases, flogging.

[Footnote 392: Vote of General Court, 26 Feb. 1756.]

Much difficulty arose from the different rules adopted by the various colonies for the regulation of their soldiers. Nor was this the only source of trouble. Besides its war committee, the Assembly of each of the four New England colonies chose another committee "for clothing, arming, paying, victualling, and transporting" its troops. They were to go to the scene of operations, hire wagons, oxen, and horses, build boats and vessels, and charge themselves with the conveyance of all supplies belonging to their respective governments. They were to keep in correspondence with the committee of war at home, to whom they were responsible; and the officer commanding the contingent of their colony was required to furnish them with guards and escorts. Thus four independent committees were engaged in the work of transportation at the same time, over the same roads, for the same object. Each colony chose to keep the control of its property in its own hands. The inconveniences were obvious: "I wish to God," wrote Lord Loudon to Winslow, "you could persuade your people to go all one way." The committees themselves did not always find their task agreeable. One of their number, John Ashley, of Massachusetts, writes in dudgeon to Governor Phipps: "Sir, I am apt to think that things have been misrepresented to your Honor, or else I am certain I should not suffer in my character, and be styled a damned rascal, and ought to be put in irons, etc., when I am certain I have exerted myself to the utmost of my ability to expedite the business assigned me by the General Court." At length, late in the autumn, Loudon persuaded the colonies to forego this troublesome sort of independence, and turn over their stores to the commissary-general, receipts being duly given.[393]

[Footnote 393: The above particulars are gathered from the voluminous papers in the State House at Boston, Archives, Military, Vols. LXXV., LXXVI. These contain the military acts of the General Court, proclamations, reports of committees, and other papers relating to military affairs in 1755 and 1756. The Letter and Order Books of Winslow, in the Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, have supplied much concurrent matter. See also Colonial Records of R.I., V., and Provincial Papers of N.H., VI.]

From Winslow's headquarters at Half-Moon a road led along the banks of the Hudson to Stillwater, whence there was water carriage to Saratoga. Here stores were again placed in wagons and carried several miles to Upper Falls; thence by boat to Fort Edward; and thence, fourteen miles across country, to Fort William Henry at Lake George, where the army was to embark for Ticonderoga. Each of the points of transit below Fort Edward was guarded by a stockade and two or more companies of provincials. They were much pestered by Indians, who now and then scalped a straggler, and escaped with their usual nimbleness. From time to time strong bands of Canadians and Indians approached by way of South Bay or Wood Creek, and threatened more serious mischief. It is surprising that some of the trains were not cut off, for the escorts were often reckless and disorderly to the last degree. Sometimes the invaders showed great audacity. Early in June Colonel Fitch at Albany scrawls a hasty note to Winslow: "Friday, 11 o'clock: Sir, about half an hour since, a party of near fifty French and Indians had the impudence to come down to the river opposite to this city and captivate two men;" and Winslow replies with equal quaintness: "We daily discover the Indians about us; but not yet have been so happy as to obtain any of them."[394]

[Footnote 394: Vaudreuil, in his despatch of 12 August, gives particulars of these raids, with an account of the scalps taken on each occasion. He thought the results disappointing.]

Colonel Jonathan Bagley commanded at Fort William Henry, where gangs of men were busied under his eye in building three sloops and making several hundred whaleboats to carry the army of Ticonderoga. The season was advancing fast, and Winslow urged him to hasten on the work; to which the humorous Bagley answered; "Shall leave no stone unturned; every wheel shall go that rum and human flesh can move."[395] A fortnight after he reports: "I must really confess I have almost wore the men out, poor dogs. Pray where are the committee, or what are they about?" He sent scouts to watch the enemy, with results not quite satisfactory. "There is a vast deal of news here; every party brings abundance, but all different." Again, a little later: "I constantly keep out small scouting parties to the eastward and westward of the lake, and make no discovery but the tracks of small parties who are plaguing us constantly; but what vexes me most, we can't catch one of the sons of----. I have sent out skulking parties some distance from the sentries in the night, to lie still in the bushes to intercept them; but the flies are so plenty, our people can't bear them."[396] Colonel David Wooster, at Fort Edward, was no more fortunate in his attempts to take satisfaction on his midnight visitors; and reports that he has not thus far been able "to give those villains a dressing."[397] The English, however, were fast learning the art of forest war, and the partisan chief, Captain Robert Rogers, began already to be famous. On the seventeenth of June he and his band lay hidden in the bushes within the outposts of Ticonderoga, and made a close survey of the fort and surrounding camps.[398] His report was not cheering. Winslow's so-called army had now grown to nearly seven thousand men; and these, it was plain, were not too many to drive the French from their stronghold.

[Footnote 395: Bagley to Winslow, 2 July, 1756.]

[Footnote 396: Ibid., 15 July, 1756.]

[Footnote 397: Wooster to Winslow, 2 June, 1756.]

[Footnote 398: Report of Rogers, 19 June, 1756. Much abridged in his published Journals.]

While Winslow pursued his preparations, tried to settle disputes of rank among the colonels of the several colonies, and strove to bring order out of the little chaos of his command, Sir William Johnson was engaged in a work for which he was admirably fitted. This was the attaching of the Five Nations to the English interest. Along with his patent of baronetcy, which reached him about this time, he received, direct from the Crown, the commission of "Colonel, Agent, and Sole Superintendent of the Six Nations and other Northern Tribes."[399] Henceforth he was independent of governors and generals, and responsible to the Court alone. His task was a difficult one. The Five Nations would fain have remained neutral, and let the European rivals fight it out; but, on account of their local position, they could not. The exactions and lies of the Albany traders, the frauds of land-speculators, the contradictory action of the different provincial governments, joined to English weakness and mismanagement in the last war, all conspired to alienate them and to aid the efforts of the French agents, who cajoled and threatened them by turns. But for Johnson these intrigues would have prevailed. He had held a series of councils with them at Fort Johnson during the winter, and not only drew from them a promise to stand by the English, but persuaded all the confederated tribes, except the Cayugas, to consent that the English should build forts near their chief towns, under the pretext of protecting them from the French.[400]

[Footnote 399: Fox to Johnson, 13 March, 1756. Papers of Sir William Johnson.]

[Footnote 400: Conferences between Sir William Johnson and the Indians, Dec. 1755, to Feb. 1756, in N.Y. Col. Docs., VII. 44-74. Account of Conferences held and Treaties made between Sir William Johnson, Bart., and the Indian Nations of North America (London, 1756).]

In June he went to Onondaga, well escorted, for the way was dangerous. This capital of the Confederacy was under a cloud. It had just lost one Red Head, its chief sachem; and first of all it behooved the baronet to condole their affliction. The ceremony was long, with compliments, lugubrious speeches, wampum-belts, the scalp of an enemy to replace the departed, and a final glass of rum for each of the assembled mourners. The conferences lasted a fortnight; and when Johnson took his leave, the tribes stood pledged to lift the hatchet for the English.[401]

[Footnote 401: Minutes of Councils of Onondaga, 19 June to 3 July, 1756, in N.Y. Col. Docs., VII. 134-150.]

When he returned to Fort Johnson a fever seized him, and he lay helpless for a time; then rose from his sick bed to meet another congregation of Indians. These were deputies of the Five Nations, with Mohegans from the Hudson, and Delawares and Shawanoes from the Susquehanna, whom he had persuaded to visit him in hope that he might induce them to cease from murdering the border settlers. All their tribesmen were in arms against the English; but he prevailed at last, and they accepted the war-belt at his hands. The Delawares complained that their old conquerors, the Five Nations, had forced them "to wear the petticoat," that is, to be counted not as warriors but as women. Johnson, in presence of all the Assembly, now took off the figurative garment, and pronounced them henceforth men. A grand war-dance followed. A hundred and fifty Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Delawares, Shawanoes, and Mohegans stamped, whooped, and yelled all night.[402] In spite of Piquet, the two Joncaires, and the rest of the French agents, Johnson had achieved a success. But would the Indians keep their word? It was more than doubtful. While some of them treated with him on the Mohawk, others treated with Vaudreuil at Montreal.[403] A display of military vigor on the English side, crowned by some signal victory, would alone make their alliance sure.

[Footnote 402: Minutes of Councils at Fort Johnson, 9 July to 12 July, in N.Y. Col. Docs., VII. 152-160.]

[Footnote 403: Conferences between M. de Vaudreuil and the Five Nations, 28 July to 20 Aug., in N.Y. Col. Docs., X. 445-453.]

It was not the French only who thwarted the efforts of Johnson; for while he strove to make friends of the Delawares and Shawanoes, Governor Morris of Pennsylvania declared war against them, and Governor Belcher of New Jersey followed his example; though persuaded at last to hold his hand till the baronet had tried the virtue of pacific measures.[404]

[Footnote 404: _Johnson to Lords of Trade, 28 May, 1756. Ibid., 17 July, 1756. Johnson to Shirley, 24 April, 1756. Colonial Records of Pa._, VII. 75, 88, 194.]

What Shirley longed for was the collecting of a body of Five Nation warriors at Oswego to aid him in his cherished enterprise against Niagara and Frontenac. The warriors had promised him to come; but there was small hope that they would do so. Meanwhile he was at Albany pursuing his preparations, posting his scanty force in the forts newly built on the Mohawk and the Great Carrying Place, and sending forward stores and provisions. Having no troops to spare for escorts, he invented a plan which, like everything he did, was bitterly criticised. He took into pay two thousand boatmen, gathered from all parts of the country, including many whale-men from the eastern coasts of New England, divided them into companies of fifty, armed each with a gun and a hatchet, and placed them under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel John Bradstreet.[405] Thus organized, they would, he hoped, require no escort. Bradstreet was a New England officer who had been a captain in the last war, somewhat dogged and self-opinioned, but brave, energetic, and well fitted for this kind of service.

[Footnote 405: Shirley to Fox, 7 May, 1756. Shirley to Abercromby, 27 June, 1756. London to Fox, 19 Aug. 1756.]

In May Vaudreuil sent Coulon de Villiers with eleven hundred soldiers, Canadians, and Indians, to harass Oswego and cut its communications with Albany.[406] Nevertheless Bradstreet safely conducted a convoy of provisions and military stores to the garrison; and on the third of July set out on his return with the empty boats. The party were pushing their way up the river in three divisions. The first of these, consisting of a hundred boats and three hundred men, with Bradstreet at their head, were about nine miles from Oswego, when, at three in the afternoon, they received a heavy volley from the forest on the east bank. It was fired by a part of Villiers' command, consisting, by English accounts, of about seven hundred men. A considerable number of the boatmen were killed or disabled, and the others made for the shelter of the western shore. Some prisoners were taken in the confusion; and if the French had been content to stop here, they might fairly have claimed a kind of victory; but, eager to push their advantage, they tried to cross under cover of an island just above. Bradstreet saw the movement, and landed on the island with six or eight followers, among whom was young Captain Schuyler, afterwards General Schuyler of the Revolution. Their fire kept the enemy in check till others joined them, to the number of about twenty. These a second and a third time beat back the French, who now gave over the attempt, and made for another ford at some distance above. Bradstreet saw their intention; and collecting two hundred and fifty men, was about to advance up the west bank to oppose them, when Dr. Kirkland, a surgeon, came to tell him that the second division of boats had come up, and that the men had landed. Bradstreet ordered them to stay where they were, and defend the lower crossing: then hastened forward; but when he reached the upper ford, the French had passed the river, and were ensconced in a pine-swamp near the shore. Here he attacked them; and both parties fired at each other from behind trees for an hour, with little effect. Bradstreet at length encouraged his men to make a rush at the enemy, who were put to flight and driven into the river, where many were shot or drowned as they tried to cross. Another party of the French had meanwhile passed by a ford still higher up to support their comrades; but the fight was over before they reached the spot, and they in their turn were set upon and driven back across the stream. Half an hour after, Captain Patten arrived from Onondaga with the grenadiers of Shirley's regiment; and late in the evening two hundred men came from Oswego to reinforce the victors. In the morning Bradstreet prepared to follow the French to their camp, twelve miles distant; but was prevented by a heavy rain which lasted all day. On the Monday following, he and his men reached Albany, bringing two prisoners, eighty French muskets, and many knapsacks picked up in the woods. He had lost between sixty and seventy killed, wounded, and taken.[407]

[Footnote 406: Détail de ce qui s'est passé en Canada, Oct. 1755 Juin, 1756.]

[Footnote 407: Letter of J. Choate, Albany, 12 July, 1756, in Massachusetts Archives, LV. Three Letters from Albany, July, Aug. 1756, in Doc. Hist, of N.Y., I. 482. Review of Military Operations. Shirley to Fox, 26 July, 1756. Abercromby to Sir Charles Hardy, 11 July, 1756. Niles, in Mass. His. Coll., Fourth Series, V. 417. Lossing, Life of Schuyler, I. 121 (1860). Mante, 60. Bradstreet's conduct on this occasion afterwards gained for him the warm praises of Wolfe.]

This affair was trumpeted through Canada as a victory of the French. Their notices of it are discordant, though very brief. One of them says that Villiers had four hundred men. Another gives him five hundred, and a third eight hundred, against fifteen hundred English, of whom they killed eight hundred, or an Englishman apiece. A fourth writer boasts that six hundred Frenchmen killed nine hundred English. A fifth contents himself with four hundred; but thinks that forty more would have been slain if the Indians had not fired too soon. He says further that there were three hundred boats; and presently forgetting himself, adds that five hundred were taken or destroyed. A sixth announces a great capture of stores and provisions, though all the boats were empty. A seventh reports that the Canadians killed about three hundred, and would have killed more but for the bad quality of their tomahawks. An eighth, with rare modesty, puts the English loss at fifty or sixty. That of Villiers is given in every proportion of killed or wounded, from one up to ten. Thus was Canada roused to martial ardor, and taught to look for future triumphs cheaply bought.[408]

[Footnote 408: Nouvelles du Camp établi au Portage de Chouaguen, première Relation. Ibid., Séconde Relation, 10 Juillet, 1756. Bougainville, Journal, who gives the report as he heard it Lettre du R.P. Cocquard, S.J., 1756. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 10 Juillet, 1756. Ursulines de Québec, II. 292. N.Y. Col. Docs., X. 434, 467, 477, 483. Some prisoners taken in the first attack were brought to Montreal, where their presence gave countenance to these fabrications.]

The success of Bradstreet silenced for a time the enemies of Shirley. His cares, however, redoubled. He was anxious for Oswego, as the two prisoners declared that the French meant to attack it, instead of waiting to be attacked from it. Nor was the news from that quarter reassuring. The engineer, Mackellar, wrote that the works were incapable of defence; and Colonel Mercer, the commandant, reported general discontent in the garrison.[409] Captain John Vicars, an invalid officer of Shirley's regiment, arrived at Albany with yet more deplorable accounts. He had passed the winter at Oswego, where he declared the dearth of food to have been such that several councils of war had been held on the question of abandoning the place from sheer starvation. More than half his regiment died of hunger or disease; and, in his own words, "had the poor fellows lived they must have eaten one another." Some of the men were lodged in barracks, though without beds, while many lay all winter in huts on the bare ground. Scurvy and dysentery made frightful havoc. "In January," says Vicars, "we were informed by the Indians that we were to be attacked. The garrison was then so weak that the strongest guard we proposed to mount was a subaltern and twenty men; but we were seldom able to mount more than sixteen or eighteen, and half of those were obliged to have sticks in their hands to support them. The men were so weak that the sentries often fell down on their posts, and lay there till the relief came and lifted them up." His own company of fifty was reduced to ten. The other regiment of the garrison, Pepperell's, or the fifty-first, was quartered at Fort Ontario, on the other side of the river; and being better sheltered, suffered less.

[Footnote 409: Mackellar to Shirley, June, 1756. Mercer to Shirley, 2 July, 1756.]

The account given by Vicars of the state of the defences was scarcely more flattering. He reported that the principal fort had no cannon on the side most exposed to attack. Two pieces had been mounted on the trading-house in the centre; but as the concussion shook down the stones from the wall whenever they were fired, they had since been removed. The second work, called Fort Ontario, he had not seen since it was finished, having been too ill to cross the river. Of the third, called New Oswego, or "Fort Rascal," he testifies thus: "It never was finished, and there were no loopholes in the stockades; so that they could not fire out of the fort but by opening the gate and firing out of that."[410]

[Footnote 410: Information of Captain John Vicars, of the Fiftieth (Shirley's) Regiment, enclosed with a despatch of Lord Loudon. Vicars was a veteran British officer who left Oswego with Bradstreet on the third of July. Shirley to Loudon, 5 Sept. 1756.]

Through the spring and early summer Shirley was gathering recruits, often of the meanest quality, and sending them to Oswego to fill out the two emaciated regiments. The place must be defended at any cost. Its fall would ruin not only the enterprise against Niagara and Frontenac, but also that against Ticonderoga and Crown Point; since, having nothing more to fear on Lake Ontario, the French could unite their whole force on Lake Champlain, whether for defence or attack.

Towards the end of June Abercromby and Webb arrived at Albany, bringing a reinforcement of nine hundred regulars, consisting of Otway's regiment, or a part of it, and a body of Highlanders. Shirley resigned his command, and Abercromby requested him to go to New York, wait there till Lord Loudon arrived, and lay before him the state of affairs.[411] Shirley waited till the twenty-third of July, when the Earl at length appeared. He was a rough Scotch lord, hot and irascible; and the communications of his predecessor, made, no doubt, in a manner somewhat pompous and self-satisfied, did not please him. "I got from Major-General Shirley," he says, "a few papers of very little use; only he insinuated to me that I would find everything prepared, and have nothing to do but to pull laurels; which I understand was his constant conversation before my arrival."[412]

[Footnote 411: Shirley to Fox, 4 July, 1756.]

[Footnote 412: Loudon (to Fox?), 19 Aug. 1756.]

Loudon sailed up the Hudson in no placid mood. On reaching Albany he abandoned the attempt against Niagara and Frontenac; and had resolved to turn his whole force against Ticonderoga, when he was met by an obstacle that both perplexed and angered him. By a royal order lately issued, all general and field officers with provincial commissions were to take rank only as eldest captains when serving in conjunction with regular troops.[413] Hence the whole provincial army, as Winslow observes, might be put under the command of any British major.[414] The announcement of this regulation naturally caused great discontent. The New England officers held a meeting, and voted with one voice that in their belief its enforcement would break up the provincial army and prevent the raising of another. Loudon, hearing of this, desired Winslow to meet him at Albany for a conference on the subject. Thither Winslow went with some of his chief officers. The Earl asked them to dinner, and there was much talk, with no satisfactory result; whereupon, somewhat chafed, he required Winslow to answer in writing, yes or no, whether the provincial officers would obey the commander-in-chief and act in conjunction with the regulars. Thus forced to choose between acquiescence and flat mutiny, they declared their submission to his orders, at the same time asking as a favor that they might be allowed to act independently; to which Loudon gave for the present an unwilling assent. Shirley, who, in spite of his removal from command, had the good of the service deeply at heart, was much troubled at this affair, and wrote strong letters to Winslow in the interest of harmony.[415]

[Footnote 413: Order concerning the Rank of Provincial General and Field Officers in North America. Given at our Court at Kensington, 12 May, 1756.]

[Footnote 414: Winslow to Shirley, 21 Aug. 1756.]

[Footnote 415: Correspondence of Loudon, Abercromby, and Shirley, July, Aug. 1756. Record of Meeting of Provincial Officers, July, 1756. Letter and Order Books of Winslow.]

Loudon next proceeded to examine the state of the provincial forces, and sent Lieutenant-Colonel Burton, of the regulars, to observe and report upon it. Winslow by this time had made a forward movement, and was now at Lake George with nearly half his command, while the rest were at Fort Edward under Lyman, or in detachments at Saratoga and the other small posts below. Burton found Winslow's men encamped with their right on what are now the grounds of Fort William Henry Hotel, and their left extending southward between the mountain in their front and the marsh in their rear. "There are here," he reports, "about twenty-five hundred men, five hundred of them sick, the greatest part of them what they call poorly; they bury from five to eight daily, and officers in proportion; extremely indolent, and dirty to a degree." Then, in vernacular English, he describes the infectious condition of the fort, which was full of the sick. "Their camp," he proceeds, "is nastier than anything I could conceive; their----, kitchens, graves, and places for slaughtering cattle all mixed through their encampment; a great waste of provisions, the men having just what they please; no great command kept up. Colonel Gridley governs the general; not in the least alert; only one advanced guard of a subaltern and twenty-four men. The cannon and stores in great confusion." Of the camp at Fort Edward he gives a better account. "It is much cleaner than at Fort William Henry, but not sufficiently so to keep the men healthy; a much better command kept up here. General Lyman very ready to order out to work and to assist the engineers with any number of men they require, and keeps a succession of scouting-parties out towards Wood Creek and South Bay."[416]

[Footnote 416: Burton to Loudon, 27 Aug. 1756.]

The prejudice of the regular officer may have colored the picture, but it is certain that the sanitary condition of the provincial camps was extremely bad. "A grievous sickness among the troops," writes a Massachusetts surgeon at Fort Edward; "we bury five or six a day. Not more than two thirds of our army fit for duty. Long encampments are the bane of New England men."[417] Like all raw recruits, they did not know how to take care of themselves; and their officers had not the experience, knowledge, or habit of command to enforce sanitary rules. The same evils were found among the Canadians when kept long in one place. Those in the camp of Villiers are reported at this time as nearly all sick.[418]

[Footnote 417: Dr. Thomas Williams to Colonel Israel Williams, 28 Aug. 1756.]

[Footnote 418: Bougainville, Journal.]

Another penman, very different from the military critic, was also on the spot, noting down every day what he saw and felt. This was John Graham, minister of Suffield, in Connecticut, and now chaplain of Lyman's regiment. His spirit, by nature far from buoyant, was depressed by bodily ailments, and still more by the extremely secular character of his present surroundings. It appears by his Diary that he left home "under great exercise of mind," and was detained at Albany for a time, being, as he says, taken with an ague-fit and a quinsy; but at length he reached the camp at Fort Edward, where deep despondency fell upon him. "Labor under great discouragements," says the Diary, under date of July twenty-eighth; "for find my business but mean in the esteem of many, and think there's not much for a chaplain to do." Again, Tuesday, August seventeenth: "Breakfasted this morning with the General. But a graceless meal; never a blessing asked, nor thanks given. At the evening sacrifice a more open scene of wickedness. The General and head officers, with some of the regular officers, in General Lyman's tent, within four rods of the place of public prayers. None came to prayers; but they fixed a table without the door of the tent, where a head colonel was posted to make punch in the sight of all, they within drinking, talking, and laughing during the whole of the service, to the disturbance and disaffection of most present. This was not only a bare neglect, but an open contempt, of the worship of God by the heads of this army. 'Twas but last Sabbath that General Lyman spent the time of divine service in the afternoon in his tent, drinking in company with Mr. Gordon, a regular officer. I have oft heard cursing and swearing in his presence by some provincial field-officers, but never heard a reproof nor so much as a check to them come from his mouth, though he never uses such language himself. Lord, what is man! Truly, the May-game of Fortune! Lord, make me know my duty, and what I ought to do!"

That night his sleep was broken and his soul troubled by angry voices under his window, where one Colonel Glasier was berating, in unhallowed language, the captain of the guard; and here the chaplain's Journal abruptly ends.[419]

[Footnote 419: I owe to my friend George S. Hale, Esq., the opportunity of examining the autograph Journal; it has since been printed in the Magazine of American History for March, 1882.]

A brother minister, bearing no likeness to the worthy Graham, appeared on the same spot some time after. This was Chaplain William Crawford, of Worcester, who, having neglected to bring money to the war, suffered much annoyance, aggravated by what he thought a want of due consideration for his person and office. His indignation finds vent in a letter to his townsman, Timothy Paine, member of the General Court: "No man can reasonably expect that I can with any propriety discharge the duty of a chaplain when I have nothing either to eat or drink, nor any conveniency to write a line other than to sit down upon a stump and put a piece of paper upon my knee. As for Mr. Weld [another chaplain], he is easy and silent whatever treatment he meets with, and I suppose they thought to find me the same easy and ductile person; but may the wide yawning earth devour me first! The state of the camp is just such as one at home would guess it to be,--nothing but a hurry and confusion of vice and wickedness, with a stygian atmosphere to breathe in."[420] The vice and wickedness of which he complains appear to have consisted in a frequent infraction of the standing order against "Curseing and Swareing," as well as of that which required attendance on daily prayers, and enjoined "the people to appear in a decent manner, clean and shaved," at the two Sunday sermons.[421]

[Footnote 420: The autograph letter is in Massachusetts Archives, LVI. no. 142. The same volume contains a letter from Colonel Frye, of Massachusetts, in which he speaks of the forlorn condition in which Chaplain Weld reached the camp. Of Chaplain Crawford, he says that he came decently clothed, but without bed or blanket, till he, Frye, lent them to him, and got Captain Learned to take him into his tent. Chaplains usually had a separate tent, or shared that of the colonel.]

[Footnote 421: Letter and Order Books of Winslow.]

At the beginning of August Winslow wrote to the committees of the several provinces: "It looks as if it won't be long before we are fit for a remove,"--that is, for an advance on Ticonderoga. On the twelfth Loudon sent Webb with the forty-fourth regiment and some of Bradstreet's boatmen to reinforce Oswego.[422] They had been ready for a month; but confusion and misunderstanding arising from the change of command had prevented their departure.[423] Yet the utmost anxiety had prevailed for the safety of that important post, and on the twenty-eighth Surgeon Thomas Williams wrote: "Whether Oswego is yet ours is uncertain. Would hope it is, as the reverse would be such a terrible shock as the country never felt, and may be a sad omen of what is coming upon poor sinful New England. Indeed we can't expect anything but to be severely chastened till we are humbled for our pride and haughtiness."[424]

[Footnote 422: Loudon (to Fox?), 19 Aug. 1756.]

[Footnote 423: Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated. Shirley to Loudon, 4 Sept. 1756. Shirley to Fox, 16 Sept. 1756.]

[Footnote 424: Thomas Williams to Colonel Israel Williams, 28 Aug. 1756.]

His foreboding proved true. Webb had scarcely reached the Great Carrying Place, when tidings of disaster fell upon him like a thunderbolt. The French had descended in force upon Oswego, taken it with all its garrison; and, as report ran, were advancing into the province, six thousand strong. Wood Creek had just been cleared, with great labor, of the trees that choked it. Webb ordered others to be felled and thrown into the stream to stop the progress of the enemy; then, with shameful precipitation, he burned the forts of the Carrying Place, and retreated down the Mohawk to German Flats. Loudon ordered Winslow to think no more of Ticonderoga, but to stay where he was and hold the French in check. All was astonishment and dismay at the sudden blow. "Oswego has changed masters, and I think we may justly fear that the whole of our country will soon follow, unless a merciful God prevent, and awake a sinful people to repentance and reformation." Thus wrote Dr. Thomas Williams to his wife from the camp at Fort Edward. "Such a shocking affair has never found a place in English annals," wrote the surgeon's young relative, Colonel William Williams. "The loss is beyond account; but the dishonor done His Majesty's arms is infinitely greater."[425] It remains to see how the catastrophe befell.

[Footnote 425: Colonel William Williams to Colonel Israel Williams, 30 Aug. 1756.]

Since Vaudreuil became chief of the colony he had nursed the plan of seizing Oswego, yet hesitated to attempt it. Montcalm declares that he confirmed the Governor's wavering purpose; but Montcalm himself had hesitated. In July, however, there came exaggerated reports that the English were moving upon Ticonderoga in greatly increased numbers; and both Vaudreuil and the General conceived that a feint against Oswego would draw off the strength of the assailants, and, if promptly and secretly executed, might even be turned successfully into a real attack. Vaudreuil thereupon recalled Montcalm from Ticonderoga.[426] Leaving the post in the keeping of Lévis and three thousand men, he embarked on Lake Champlain, rowed day and night, and reached Montreal on the nineteenth. Troops were arriving from Quebec, and Indians from the far west. A band of Menomonies from beyond Lake Michigan, naked, painted, plumed, greased, stamping, uttering sharp yelps, shaking feathered lances, brandishing tomahawks, danced the war-dance before the Governor, to the thumping of the Indian drum. Bougainville looked on astonished, and thought of the Pyrrhic dance of the Greeks.

[Footnote 426: Vaudreuil au Ministre, 12 Août, 1756. Montcalm à sa Femme, 20 Juillet, 1756.]

Montcalm and he left Montreal on the twenty-first, and reached Fort Frontenac in eight days. Rigaud, brother of the Governor, had gone thither some time before, and crossed with seven hundred Canadians to the south side of the lake, where Villiers was encamped at Niaouré Bay, now Sackett's Harbor, with such of his detachment as war and disease had spared. Rigaud relieved him, and took command of the united bands. With their aid the engineer, Descombles, reconnoitred the English forts, and came back with the report that success was certain.[427] It was but a confirmation of what had already been learned from deserters and prisoners, who declared that the main fort was but a loopholed wall held by six or seven hundred men, ill fed, discontented, and mutinous.[428] Others said that they had been driven to desert by the want of good food, and that within a year twelve hundred men had died of disease at Oswego.[429]

[Footnote 427: Vaudreuil au Ministre, 4 Août, 1756. Vaudreuil à Bourlamaque, Juin, 1756.]

[Footnote 428: Bougainville, Journal.]

[Footnote 429: Vaudreuil au Ministre, 10 Juillet, 1756. Résumé des Nouvelles du Canada, Sept. 1756.]

The battalions of La Sarre, Guienne, and Béarn, with the colony regulars, a body of Canadians, and about two hundred and fifty Indians, were destined for the enterprise. The whole force was a little above three thousand, abundantly supplied with artillery. La Sarre and Guienne were already at Fort Frontenac. Béarn was at Niagara, whence it arrived in a few days, much buffeted by the storms of Lake Ontario. On the fourth of August all was ready. Montcalm embarked at night with the first division, crossed in darkness to Wolf Island, lay there hidden all day, and embarking again in the evening, joined Rigaud at Niaouré Bay at seven o'clock in the morning of the sixth. The second division followed, with provisions, hospital train, and eighty artillery boats; and on the eighth all were united at the bay. On the ninth Rigaud, covered by the universal forest, marched in advance to protect the landing of the troops. Montcalm followed with the first division; and, coasting the shore in bateaux, landed at midnight of the tenth within half a league of the first English fort. Four cannon were planted in battery upon the strand, and the men bivouacked by their boats. So skilful were the assailants and so careless the assailed that the English knew nothing of their danger, till in the morning, a reconnoitring canoe discovered the invaders. Two armed vessels soon came to cannonade them; but their light guns were no match for the heavy artillery of the French, and they were forced to keep the offing.

Descombles, the engineer, went before dawn to reconnoitre the fort, with several other officers and a party of Indians. While he was thus employed, one of these savages, hungry for scalps, took him in the gloom for an Englishman, and shot him dead. Captain Pouchot, of the battalion of Béarn, replaced him; and the attack was pushed vigorously. The Canadians and Indians, swarming through the forest, fired all day on the fort under cover of the trees. The second division came up with twenty-two more cannon; and at night the first parallel was marked out at a hundred and eighty yards from the rampart. Stumps were grubbed up, fallen trunks shoved aside, and a trench dug, sheltered by fascines, gabions, and a strong abattis.

Fort Ontario, counted as the best of the three forts at Oswego, stood on a high plateau at the east or right side of the river where it entered the lake. It was in the shape of a star, and was formed of trunks of trees set upright in the ground, hewn flat on two sides, and closely fitted together,--an excellent defence against musketry or swivels, but worthless against cannon. The garrison, three hundred and seventy in all, were the remnant of Pepperell's regiment, joined to raw recruits lately sent up to fill the places of the sick and dead. They had eight small cannon and a mortar, with which on the next day, Friday, the thirteenth, they kept up a brisk fire till towards night; when, after growing more rapid for a time, it ceased, and the fort showed no sign of life. Not a cannon had yet opened on them from the trenches; but it was certain that with the French artillery once in action, their wooden rampart would be shivered to splinters. Hence it was that Colonel Mercer, commandant at Oswego, thinking it better to lose the fort than to lose both fort and garrison, signalled to them from across the river to abandon their position and join him on the other side. Boats were sent to bring them off; and they passed over unmolested, after spiking their cannon and firing off their ammunition or throwing it into the well.

The fate of Oswego was now sealed. The principal work, called Old Oswego, or Fort Pepperell, stood at the mouth of the river on the west side, nearly opposite Fort Ontario, and less than five hundred yards distant from it. The trading-house, which formed the centre of the place, was built of rough stone laid in clay, and the wall which enclosed it was of the same materials; both would crumble in an instant at the touch of a twelve-pound shot. Towards the west and south they had been protected by an outer line of earthworks, mounted with cannon, and forming an entrenched camp; while the side towards Fort Ontario was left wholly exposed, in the rash confidence that this work, standing on the opposite heights, would guard against attack from that quarter. On a hill, a fourth of a mile beyond Old Oswego, stood the unfinished stockade called New Oswego, Fort George, or, by reason of its worthlessness, Fort Rascal. It had served as a cattle pen before the French appeared, but was now occupied by a hundred and fifty Jersey provincials. Old Oswego with its outwork was held by Shirley's regiment, chiefly invalids and raw recruits, to whom were now joined the garrison of Fort Ontario and a number of sailors, boatmen, and laborers.

Montcalm lost no time. As soon as darkness set in he began a battery at the brink of the height on which stood the captured fort. His whole force toiled all night, digging, setting gabions, and dragging up cannon, some of which had been taken from Braddock. Before daybreak twenty heavy pieces had been brought to the spot, and nine were already in position. The work had been so rapid that the English imagined their enemies to number six thousand at least. The battery soon opened fire. Grape and round shot swept the intrenchment and crashed through the rotten masonry. The English, says a French officer, "were exposed to their shoe-buckles." Their artillery was pointed the wrong way, in expectation of an attack, not from the east, but from the west. They now made a shelter of pork-barrels, three high and three deep, planted cannon behind them, and returned the French fire with some effect.

Early in the morning Montcalm had ordered Rigaud to cross the river with the Canadians and Indians. There was a ford three quarters of a league above the forts;[430] and here they passed over unopposed, the English not having discovered the movement.[431] The only danger was from the river. Some of the men were forced to swim, others waded to the waist, others to the neck; but they all crossed safely, and presently showed themselves at the edge of the woods, yelling and firing their guns, too far for much execution, but not too far to discourage the garrison.

[Footnote 430: Bougainville, Journal.]

[Footnote 431: Pouchot, I. 76.]

The garrison were already disheartened. Colonel Mercer, the soul of the defence, had just been cut in two by a cannon-shot while directing the gunners. Up to this time the defenders had behaved with spirit; but despair now seized them, increased by the screams and entreaties of the women, of whom there were more than a hundred in the place. There was a council of officers, and then the white flag was raised. Bougainville went to propose terms of capitulation. "The cries, threats, and hideous howling of our Canadians and Indians," says Vaudreuil, "made them quickly decide." "This," observes the Reverend Father Claude Godefroy Cocquard, "reminds me of the fall of Jericho before the shouts of the Israelites." The English surrendered prisoners of war, to the number, according to the Governor, of sixteen hundred,[432] which included the sailors, laborers, and women. The Canadians and Indians broke through all restraint, and fell to plundering. There was an opening of rum-barrels and a scene of drunkenness, in which some of the prisoners had their share; while others tried to escape in the confusion, and were tomahawked by the excited savages. Many more would have been butchered, but for the efforts of Montcalm, who by unstinted promises succeeded in appeasing his ferocious allies, whom he dared not offend. "It will cost the King," he says, "eight or ten thousand livres in presents."[433]

[Footnote 432: Vaudreuil au Ministre, 20 Août, 1756. He elsewhere makes the number somewhat greater. That the garrison, exclusive of civilians, did not exceed at the utmost fourteen hundred, is shown by Shirley to Loudon, 5 Sept. 1756. Loudon had charged Shirley with leaving Oswego weakly garrisoned; and Shirley replies by alleging that the troops there were in the number as above. It was of course his interest to make them appear as numerous as possible. In the printed Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated, they are put at only ten hundred and fifty.]

[Footnote 433: Several English writers say, however, that fifteen or twenty young men were given up to the Indians to be adopted in place of warriors lately killed.]

The loss on both sides is variously given. By the most trustworthy accounts, that of the English did not reach fifty killed, and that of the French was still less. In the forts and vessels were found above a hundred pieces of artillery, most of them swivels and other light guns, with a large quantity of powder, shot, and shell. The victors burned the forts and the vessels on the stocks, destroyed such provisions and stores as they could not carry away, and made the place a desert. The priest Piquet, who had joined the expedition, planted amid the ruin a tall cross, graven with the words, In hoc signo vincunt; and near it was set a pole bearing the arms of France, with the inscription, Manibus date lilia plenis. Then the army decamped, loaded with prisoners and spoil, descended to Montreal, hung the captured flags in the churches, and sang Te Deum in honor of their triumph.

It was the greatest that the French arms had yet achieved in America. The defeat of Braddock was an Indian victory; this last exploit was the result of bold enterprise and skilful tactics. With its laurels came its fruits. Hated Oswego had been laid in ashes, and the would-be assailants forced to a vain and hopeless defence. France had conquered the undisputed command of Lake Ontario, and her communications with the West were safe. A small garrison at Niagara and another at Frontenac would now hold those posts against any effort that the English could make this year; and the whole French force could concentrate at Ticonderoga, repel the threatened attack, and perhaps retort it by seizing Albany. If the English, on the other side, had lost a great material advantage, they had lost no less in honor. The news of the surrender was received with indignation in England and in the colonies. Yet the behaviour of the garrison was not so discreditable as it seemed. The position was indefensible, and they could have held out at best but a few days more. They yielded too soon; but unless Webb had come to their aid, which was not to be expected, they must have yielded at last.

The French had scarcely gone, when two English scouts, Thomas Harris and James Conner, came with a party of Indians to the scene of desolation. The ground was strewn with broken casks and bread sodden with rain. The remains of burnt bateaux and whaleboats were scattered along the shore. The great stone trading-house in the old fort was a smoking ruin; Fort Rascal was still burning on the neighboring hill; Fort Ontario was a mass of ashes and charred logs, and by it stood two poles on which were written words which the visitors did not understand. They went back to Fort Johnson with their story; and Oswego reverted for a time to the bears, foxes, and wolves.[434]

[Footnote 434: On the capture of Oswego, the authorities examined have been very numerous, and only the best need be named. Livre d'Ordres, Campagne de 1756, contains all orders from headquarters. Mémoires pour servir d'Instruction à M. le Marquis de Montcalm, 21 Juillet; 1756, signé Vaudreuil. Bougainville, Journal. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 15 Juin, 1756 (designs against Oswego). Ibid., 13 Août, 1755. Ibid., 30 Août. Pouchot, I. 67-81. Relation de la Prise des Forts de Chouaguen. Bigot au Ministre, 3 Sept. 1756 Journal du Siége de Chouaguen. Précis des Événements, 1756. Montcalm au Ministre, 20 Juillet, 1756. Ibid., 28 Août, 1756. Desandrouins à----, même date. Montcalm à sa Femme, 30 Août. Translations of several of the above papers, along with others less important, will be found in N.Y. Col. Docs., X., and Doc. Hist. N.Y., I.

State of Facts relating to the Loss of Oswego, in London Magazine for 1757, p. 14. Correspondence of Shirley. Correspondence of Loudon. Littlehales to Loudon, 30 Aug. 1756. Hardy to Lords of Trade, 5 Sept. 1756. Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated. Declaration of some Soldiers of Shirley's Regiment, in N.Y. Col. Docs., VII. 126. Letter from an officer present, in Boston Evening Post of 16 May, 1757. The published plans and drawings of Oswego at this time are very inexact.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter 13

1756, 1757

Partisan War

Shirley's grand scheme for cutting New France in twain had come to wreck. There was an element of boyishness in him. He made bold plans without weighing too closely his means of executing them. The year's campaign would in all likelihood have succeeded if he could have acted promptly; if he had had ready to his hand a well-trained and well-officered force, furnished with material of war and means of transportation, and prepared to move as soon as the streams and lakes of New York were open, while those of Canada were still sealed with ice. But timely action was out of his power. The army that should have moved in April was not ready to move till August. Of the nine discordant semi-republics whom he asked to join in the work, three or four refused, some of the others were lukewarm, and all were slow. Even Massachusetts, usually the foremost, failed to get all her men into the field till the season was nearly ended. Having no military establishment, the colonies were forced to improvise a new army for every campaign. Each of them watched its neighbors, or, jealous lest it should do more than its just share, waited for them to begin. Each popular assembly acted under the eye of a frugal constituency, who, having little money, were as chary of it as their descendants are lavish; and most of them were shaken by internal conflicts, more absorbing than the great question on which hung the fate of the continent. Only the four New England colonies were fully earnest for the war, and one, even of these, was ready to use the crisis as a means of extorting concessions from its Governor in return for grants of money and men. When the lagging contingents came together at last, under a commander whom none of them trusted, they were met by strategical difficulties which would have perplexed older soldiers and an abler general; for they were forced to act on the circumference of a vast semicircle, in a labyrinth of forests, without roads, and choked with every kind of obstruction.

Opposed to them was a trained army, well organized and commanded, focused at Montreal, and moving for attack or defence on two radiating lines,--one towards Lake Ontario, and the other towards Lake Champlain,--supported by a martial peasantry, supplied from France with money and material, dependent on no popular vote, having no will but that of its chief, and ready on the instant to strike to right or left as the need required. It was a compact military absolutism confronting a heterogeneous group of industrial democracies, where the force of numbers was neutralized by diffusion and incoherence. A long and dismal apprenticeship waited them before they could hope for success; nor could they ever put forth their full strength without a radical change of political conditions and an awakened consciousness of common interests and a common cause. It was the sense of powerlessness arising from the want of union that, after the fall of Oswego, spread alarm through the northern and middle colonies, and drew these desponding words from William Livingston, of New Jersey: "The colonies are nearly exhausted, and their funds already anticipated by expensive unexecuted projects. Jealous are they of each other; some ill-constituted, others shaken with intestine divisions, and, if I may be allowed the expression, parsimonious even to prodigality. Our assemblies are diffident of their governors, governors despise their assemblies; and both mutually misrepresent each other to the Court of Great Britain." Military measures, he proceeds, demand secrecy and despatch; but when so many divided provinces must agree to join in them, secrecy and despatch are impossible. In conclusion he exclaims: "Canada must be demolished, --Delenda est Carthago,--or we are undone."[435] But Loudon was not Scipio, and cis-Atlantic Carthage was to stand for some time longer.

[Footnote 435: Review of Military Operations, 187, 189 (Dublin, 1757).]

The Earl, in search of a scapegoat for the loss of Oswego, naturally chose Shirley, attacked him savagely, told him that he was of no use in America, and ordered him to go home to England without delay.[436] Shirley, who was then in Boston, answered this indecency with dignity and effect.[437] The chief fault was with Loudon himself, whose late arrival in America had caused a change of command and of plans in the crisis of the campaign. Shirley well knew the weakness of Oswego; and in early spring had sent two engineers to make it defensible, with particular instructions to strengthen Fort Ontario.[438] But they, thinking that the chief danger lay on the west and south, turned all their attention thither, and neglected Ontario till it was too late. Shirley was about to reinforce Oswego with a strong body of troops when the arrival of Abercromby took the control out of his hands and caused ruinous delay. He cannot, however, be acquitted of mismanagement in failing to supply the place with wholesome provisions in the preceding autumn, before the streams were stopped with ice. Hence came the ravages of disease and famine which, before spring, reduced the garrison to a hundred and forty effective men. Yet there can be no doubt that the change of command was a blunder. This is the view of Franklin, who knew Shirley well, and thus speaks of him: "He would in my opinion, if continued in place, have made a much better campaign than that of Loudon, which was frivolous, expensive, and disgraceful to our nation beyond conception. For though Shirley was not bred a soldier, he was sensible and sagacious in himself, and attentive to good advice from others, capable of forming judicious plans, and quick and active in carrying them into execution."[439] He sailed for England in the autumn, disappointed and poor; the bull-headed Duke of Cumberland had been deeply prejudiced against him, and it was only after long waiting that this strenuous champion of British interests was rewarded in his old age with the petty government of the Bahamas.

[Footnote 436: Loudon to Shirley, 6 Sept. 1756.]

[Footnote 437: The correspondence on both sides is before me, copied from the originals in the Public Record Office.]

[Footnote 438: "The principal thing for which I sent Mr. Mackellar to Oswego was to strengthen Fort Ontario as much as he possibly could." Shirley to Loudon, 4 Sept. 1756.]

[Footnote 439: Works of Franklin, I. 220.]

Loudon had now about ten thousand men at his command, though not all fit for duty. They were posted from Albany to Lake George. The Earl himself was at Fort Edward, while about three thousand of the provincials still lay, under Winslow, at the lake. Montcalm faced them at Ticonderoga, with five thousand three hundred regulars and Canadians, in a position where they could defy three times their number.[440] "The sons of Belial are too strong for me," jocosely wrote Winslow;[441] and he set himself to intrenching his camp; then had the forest cut down for the space of a mile from the lake to the mountains, so that the trees, lying in what he calls a "promiscuous manner," formed an almost impenetrable abatis. An escaped prisoner told him that the French were coming to visit him with fourteen thousand men;[442] but Montcalm thought no more of stirring than Loudon himself; and each stood watching the other, with the lake between them, till the season closed.

[Footnote 440: "Nous sommes tant à Carillon qu'aux postes avancés 5,300 hommes." Bougainville, Journal.]

[Footnote 441: Winslow to Loudon, 29 Sept. 1756.]

[Footnote 442: Examination of Sergeant James Archibald.]

Meanwhile the western borders were still ravaged by the tomahawk. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia all writhed under the infliction. Each had made a chain of blockhouses and wooden forts to cover its frontier, and manned them with disorderly bands, lawless, and almost beyond control.[443] The case was at the worst in Pennsylvania, where the tedious quarrelling of Governor and Assembly, joined to the doggedly pacific attitude of the Quakers, made vigorous defence impossible. Rewards were offered for prisoners and scalps, so bountiful that the hunting of men would have been a profitable vocation, but for the extreme wariness and agility of the game.[444] Some of the forts were well built stockades; others were almost worthless; but the enemy rarely molested even the feeblest of them, preferring to ravage the lonely and unprotected farms. There were two or three exceptions. A Virginian fort was attacked by a war-party under an officer named Douville, who was killed, and his followers were put to flight.[445] The assailants were more fortunate at a small stockade called Fort Granville, on the Juniata. A large body of French and Indians attacked it in August while most of the garrison were absent protecting the farmers at their harvest; they set it on fire, and, in spite of a most gallant resistance by the young lieutenant left in command, took it, and killed all but one of the defenders.[446]

[Footnote 443: In the public Record Office, America and West Indies, LXXXII., is a manuscript map showing the positions of such of these posts as were north of Virginia. They are thirty-five in number, from the head of James River to a point west of Esopus, on the Hudson.]

[Footnote 444: Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 76.]

[Footnote 445: Washington to Morris,--April, 1756.]

[Footnote 446: Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 232, 242; Pennsylvania Archives, II. 744.]

What sort of resistance the Pennsylvanian borderers would have made under political circumstances less adverse may be inferred from an exploit of Colonel John Armstrong, a settler of Cumberland. After the loss of Fort Granville the Governor of the province sent him with three hundred men to attack the Delaware town of Kittanning, a populous nest of savages on the Alleghany, between the two French posts of Duquesne and Venango. Here most of the war-parties were fitted out, and the place was full of stores and munitions furnished by the French. Here, too, lived the redoubted chief called Captain Jacobs, the terror of the English border. Armstrong set out from Fort Shirley, the farthest outpost, on the last of August, and, a week after, was within six miles of the Indian town. By rapid marching and rare good luck, his party had escaped discovery. It was ten o'clock at night, with a bright moon. The guides were perplexed, and knew neither the exact position of the place nor the paths that led to it. The adventurers threaded the forest in single file, over hills and through hollows, bewildered and anxious, stopping to watch and listen. At length they heard in the distance the beating of an Indian drum and the whooping of warriors in the war-dance. Guided by the sounds, they cautiously moved forward, till those in the front, scrambling down a rocky hill, found themselves on the banks of the Alleghany, about a hundred rods below Kittanning. The moon was near setting; but they could dimly see the town beyond a great intervening field of corn. "At that moment," says Armstrong, "an Indian whistled in a very singular manner, about thirty perches from our front, in the foot of the cornfield." He thought they were discovered; but one Baker, a soldier well versed in Indian ways, told him that it was only some village gallant calling to a young squaw. The party then crouched in the bushes, and kept silent. The moon sank behind the woods, and fires soon glimmered through the field, kindled to drive off mosquitoes by some of the Indians who, as the night was warm, had come out to sleep in the open air. The eastern sky began to redden with the approach of day. Many of the party, spent with a rough march of thirty miles, had fallen asleep. They were now cautiously roused; and Armstrong ordered nearly half of them to make their way along the ridge of a bushy hill that overlooked the town, till they came opposite to it, in order to place it between two fires. Twenty minutes were allowed them for the movement; but they lost their way in the dusk, and reached their station too late. When the time had expired, Armstrong gave the signal to those left with him, who dashed into the cornfield, shooting down the astonished savages or driving them into the village, where they turned and made desperate fight.

It was a cluster of thirty log-cabins, the principal being that of the chief, Jacobs, which was loopholed for musketry, and became the centre of resistance. The fight was hot and stubborn. Armstrong ordered the town to be set on fire, which was done, though not without loss; for the Delawares at this time were commonly armed with rifles, and used them well. Armstrong himself was hit in the shoulder. As the flames rose and the smoke grew thick, a warrior in one of the houses sang his death-song, and a squaw in the same house was heard to cry and scream. Rough voices silenced her, and then the inmates burst out, but were instantly killed. The fire caught the house of Jacobs, who, trying to escape through an opening in the roof, was shot dead. Bands of Indians were gathering beyond the river, firing from the other bank, and even crossing to help their comrades; but the assailants held to their work till the whole place was destroyed. "During the burning of the houses," says Armstrong, "we were agreeably entertained by the quick succession of charged guns, gradually firing off as reached by the fire; but much more so with the vast explosion of sundry bags and large kegs of gunpowder, wherewith almost every house abounded; the prisoners afterwards informing us that the Indians had frequently said they had a sufficient stock of ammunition for ten years' war with the English."

These prisoners were eleven men, women, and children, captured in the border settlements, and now delivered by their countrymen. The day was far spent when the party withdrew, carrying their wounded on Indian horses, and moving perforce with extreme slowness, though expecting an attack every moment. None took place; and they reached the settlements at last, having bought their success with the loss of seventeen killed and thirteen wounded.[447] A medal was given to each officer, not by the Quaker-ridden Assembly, but by the city council of Philadelphia.

[Footnote 447: Report of Armstrong to Governor Denny, 14 Sept. 1756, in Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 257,--a modest yet very minute account. A list of the Names of the Persons killed, wounded, and missing in the late Expedition against the Kittanning. Hazard, Pennsylvania Register, I. 366.]

The report of this affair made by Dumas, commandant at Fort Duquesne, is worth noting. He says that Attiqué, the French name of Kittanning, was attacked by "le Général Wachinton," with three or four hundred men on horseback; that the Indians gave way; but that five or six Frenchmen who were in the town held the English in check till the fugitives rallied; that Washington and his men then took to flight, and would have been pursued but for the loss of some barrels of gunpowder which chanced to explode during the action. Dumas adds that several large parties are now on the track of the enemy, and he hopes will cut them to pieces. He then asks for a supply of provisions and merchandise to replace those which the Indians of Attiqué had lost by a fire.[448] Like other officers of the day, he would admit nothing but successes in the department under his command.

[Footnote 448: Dumas à Vaudreuil, 9 Sept. 1756, cited in Bigot au Ministre, 6 Oct. 1756, and in Bougainville, Journal.]

Vaudreuil wrote singular despatches at this time to the minister at Versailles. He takes credit to himself for the number of war-parties that his officers kept always at work, and fills page after page with details of the coups they had struck; how one brought in two English scalps, another three, another one, and another seven. He owns that they committed frightful cruelties, mutilating and sometimes burning their prisoners; but he expresses no regret, and probably felt none, since he declares that the object of this murderous warfare was to punish the English till they longed for peace.[449]

[Footnote 449: Dépêches de Vaudreuil, 1756.]

The waters and mountains of Lake George, and not the western borders, were the chief centre of partisan war. Ticonderoga was a hornet's nest, pouring out swarms of savages to infest the highways and byways of the wilderness. The English at Fort William Henry, having few Indians, could not retort in kind; but they kept their scouts and rangers in active movement. What they most coveted was prisoners, as sources of information. One Kennedy, a lieutenant of provincials, with five followers, white and red, made a march of rare audacity, passed all the French posts, took a scalp and two prisoners on the Richelieu, and burned a magazine of provisions between Montreal and St. John. The party were near famishing on the way back; and Kennedy was brought into Fort William Henry in a state of temporary insanity from starvation.[450] Other provincial officers, Peabody, Hazen, Waterbury, and Miller, won a certain distinction in this adventurous service, though few were so conspicuous as the blunt and sturdy Israel Putnam. Winslow writes in October that he has just returned from the best "scout" yet made, and that, being a man of strict truth, he may be entirely trusted.[451] Putnam had gone with six followers down Lake George in a whale-boat to a point on the east side, opposite the present village of Hague, hid the boat, crossed northeasterly to Lake Champlain, three miles from the French fort, climbed the mountain that overlooks it, and made a complete reconnoissance; then approached it, chased three Frenchmen, who escaped within the lines, climbed the mountain again, and moving westward along the ridge, made a minute survey of every outpost between the fort and Lake George.[452] These adventures were not always fortunate. On the nineteenth of September Captain Hodges and fifty men were ambushed a few miles from Fort William Henry by thrice their number of Canadians and Indians, and only six escaped. Thus the record stands in the Letter Book of Winslow.[453] By visiting the encampments of Ticonderoga, one may learn how the blow was struck.

[Footnote 450: Minute of Lieutenant Kennedy's Scout. Winslow to Loudon, 20 Sept. 1756.]

[Footnote 451: Winslow to Loudon, 16 Oct. 1756.]

[Footnote 452: Report of a Scout to Ticonderoga, Oct. 1756, signed Israel Putnam.]

[Footnote 453: Compare Massachusetts Archives, LXXVI. 81.]

After much persuasion, much feasting, and much consumption of tobacco and brandy, four hundred Indians, Christians from the Missions and heathen from the far west, were persuaded to go on a grand war-party with the Canadians. Of these last there were a hundred,--a wild crew, bedecked and bedaubed like their Indian companions. Perière, an officer of colony regulars, had nominal command of the whole; and among the leaders of the Canadians was the famous bushfighter, Marin. Bougainville was also of the party. In the evening of the sixteenth they all embarked in canoes at the French advance-post commanded by Contrecoeur, near the present steamboat-landing, passed in the gloom under the bare steeps of Rogers Rock, paddled a few hours, landed on the west shore, and sent scouts to reconnoitre. These came back with their reports on the next day, and an Indian crier called the chiefs to council. Bougainville describes them as they stalked gravely to the place of meeting, wrapped in colored blankets, with lances in their hands. The accomplished young aide-de-camp studied his strange companions with an interest not unmixed with disgust. "Of all caprice," he says, "Indian caprice is the most capricious." They were insolent to the French, made rules for them which they did not observe themselves, and compelled the whole party to move when and whither they pleased. Hiding the canoes, and lying close in the forest by day, they all held their nocturnal course southward, by the lofty heights of Black Mountain, and among the islets of the Narrows, till the eighteenth. That night the Indian scouts reported that they had seen the fires of an encampment on the west shore; on which the whole party advanced to the attack, an hour before dawn, filing silently under the dark arches of the forest, the Indians nearly naked, and streaked with their war-paint of vermilion and soot. When they reached the spot they found only the smouldering fires of a deserted bivouac. Then there was a consultation; ending, after much dispute, with the choice by the Indians of a hundred and ten of their most active warriors to attempt some stroke in the neighborhood of the English fort. Marin joined them with thirty Canadians, and they set out on their errand; while the rest encamped to await the result. At night the adventurers returned, raising the death-cry and firing their guns; somewhat depressed by losses they had suffered, but boasting that they had surprised fifty-three English, and killed or taken all but one. It was a modest and perhaps an involuntary exaggeration. "The very recital of the cruelties they committed on the battle-field is horrible," writes Bougainville. "The ferocity and insolence of these black-souled barbarians makes one shudder. It is an abominable kind of war. The air one breathes is contagious of insensibility and hardness."[454] This was but one of the many such parties sent out from Ticonderoga this year.

[Footnote 454: Bougainville, Journal.]

Early in September a band of New England rangers came to Winslow's camp, with three prisoners taken within the lines of Ticonderoga. Their captain was Robert Rogers, of New Hampshire,--a strong, well-knit figure, in dress and appearance more woodsman than soldier, with a clear, bold eye, and features that would have been good but for the ungainly proportions of the nose.[455] He had passed his boyhood in the rough surroundings of a frontier village. Growing to manhood, he engaged in some occupation which, he says, led him to frequent journeyings in the wilderness between the French and English settlements, and gave him a good knowledge of both.[456] It taught him also to speak a little French. He does not disclose the nature of this mysterious employment; but there can be little doubt that it was a smuggling trade with Canada. His character leaves much to be desired. He had been charged with forgery, or complicity in it, seems to have had no scruple in matters of business, and after the war was accused of treasonable dealings with the French and Spaniards in the west.[457] He was ambitious and violent, yet able in more ways than one, by no means uneducated, and so skilled in woodcraft, so energetic and resolute, that his services were invaluable. In recounting his own adventures, his style is direct, simple, without boasting, and to all appearance without exaggeration. During the past summer he had raised a band of men, chiefly New Hampshire borderers, and made a series of daring excursions which gave him a prominent place in this hardy by-play of war. In the spring of the present year he raised another company, and was commissioned as its captain, with his brother Richard as his first lieutenant, and the intrepid John Stark as his second. In July still another company was formed, and Richard Rogers was promoted to command it. Before the following spring there were seven such; and more were afterwards added, forming a battalion dispersed on various service, but all under the orders of Robert Rogers, with the rank of major.[458] These rangers wore a sort of woodland uniform, which varied in the different companies, and were armed with smooth-bore guns, loaded with buckshot, bullets, or sometimes both.

[Footnote 455: A large engraved portrait of him, nearly at full length, is before me, printed at London in 1776.]

[Footnote 456: Rogers, Journals, Introduction (1765).]

[Footnote 457: Provincial Papers of New Hampshire, VI. 364. Correspondence of Gage, 1766. N.Y. Col. Docs., VII. 990. Caleb Stark, Memoir and Correspondence of John Stark, 386.]

[Footnote 458: Rogers, Journals. Report of the Adjutant-General of New Hampshire (1866), II. 158, 159.]

The best of them were commonly employed on Lake George; and nothing can surpass the adventurous hardihood of their lives. Summer and winter, day and night, were alike to them. Embarked in whaleboats or birch-canoes, they glided under the silent moon or in the languid glare of a breathless August day, when islands floated in dreamy haze, and the hot air was thick with odors of the pine; or in the bright October, when the jay screamed from the woods, squirrels gathered their winter hoard, and congregated blackbirds chattered farewell to their summer haunts; when gay mountains basked in light, maples dropped leaves of rustling gold, sumachs glowed like rubies under the dark green of the unchanging spruce, and mossed rocks with all their painted plumage lay double in the watery mirror: that festal evening of the year, when jocund Nature disrobes herself, to wake again refreshed in the joy of her undying spring. Or, in the tomb-like silence of the winter forest, with breath frozen on his beard, the ranger strode on snow-shoes over the spotless drifts; and, like Dürer's knight, a ghastly death stalked ever at his side. There were those among them for whom this stern life had a fascination that made all other existence tame.

Rogers and his men had been in active movement since midwinter. In January they skated down Lake George, passed Ticonderoga, hid themselves by the forest-road between that post and Crown Point, intercepted two sledges loaded with provisions, and carried the drivers to Fort William Henry. In February they climbed a hill near Crown Point and made a plan of the works; then lay in ambush by the road from the fort to the neighboring village, captured a prisoner, burned houses and barns, killed fifty cattle, and returned without loss. At the end of the month they went again to Crown Point, burned more houses and barns, and reconnoitred Ticonderoga on the way back. Such excursions were repeated throughout the spring and summer. The reconnoissance of Ticonderoga and the catching of prisoners there for the sake of information were always capital objects. The valley, four miles in extent, that lay between the foot of Lake George and the French fort, was at this time guarded by four distinct outposts or fortified camps. Watched as it was at all points, and ranged incessantly by Indians in the employ of France, Rogers and his men knew every yard of the ground. On a morning in May he lay in ambush with eleven followers on a path between the fort and the nearest camp. A large body of soldiers passed; the rangers counted a hundred and eighteen, and lay close in their hiding-place. Soon after came a party of twenty-two. They fired on them, killed six, captured one, and escaped with him to Fort William Henry. In October Rogers was passing with twenty men in two whaleboats through the seeming solitude of the Narrows when a voice called to them out of the woods. It was that of Captain Shepherd, of the New Hampshire regiment, who had been captured two months before, and had lately made his escape. He told them that the French had the fullest information of the numbers and movements of the English; that letters often reached them from within the English lines; and that Lydius, a Dutch trader at Albany, was their principal correspondent.[459] Arriving at Ticonderoga, Rogers cautiously approached the fort, till, about noon, he saw a sentinel on the road leading thence to the woods. Followed by five of his men, he walked directly towards him. The man challenged, and Rogers answered in French. Perplexed for a moment, the soldier suffered him to approach; till, seeing his mistake, he called out in amazement, "Qui êtes vous?" "Rogers," was the answer; and the sentinel was seized, led in hot haste to the boats, and carried to the English fort, where he gave important information.

[Footnote 459: Letter and Order Books of Winslow. "One Lydiass ... whom we suspect for a French spy; he lives better than anybody, without any visible means, and his daughters have had often presents from Mr. Vaudreuil." Loudon (to Fox?), 19 Aug. 1756.]

An exploit of Rogers towards midsummer greatly perplexed the French. He embarked at the end of June with fifty men in five whaleboats, made light and strong, expressly for this service, rowed about ten miles down Lake George, landed on the east side, carried the boats six miles over a gorge of the mountains, launched them again in South Bay, and rowed down the narrow prolongation of Lake Champlain under cover of darkness. At dawn they were within six miles of Ticonderoga. They landed, hid their boats, and lay close all day. Embarking again in the evening, they rowed with muffled oars under the shadow of the eastern shore, and passed so close to the French fort that they heard the voices of the sentinels calling the watchword. In the morning they had left it five miles behind. Again they hid in the woods; and from their lurking-place saw bateaux passing, some northward, and some southward, along the narrow lake.

Crown Point was ten or twelve miles farther on. They tried to pass it after nightfall, but the sky was too clear and the stars too bright; and as they lay hidden the next day, nearly a hundred boats passed before them on the way to Ticonderoga. Some other boats which appeared about noon landed near them, and they watched the soldiers at dinner, within a musket-shot of their lurking-place. The next night was more favorable. They embarked at nine in the evening, passed Crown Point unseen, and hid themselves as before, ten miles below. It was the seventh of July. Thirty boats and a schooner passed them, returning towards Canada. On the next night they rowed fifteen miles farther, and then sent men to reconnoitre, who reported a schooner at anchor about a mile off. They were preparing to board her, when two sloops appeared, coming up the lake at but a short distance from the land. They gave them a volley, and called on them to surrender; but the crews put off in boats and made for the opposite shore. They followed and seized them. Out of twelve men their fire had killed three and wounded two, one of whom, says Rogers in his report, "could not march, therefore we put an end to him, to prevent discovery."[460] They sank the vessels, which were laden with wine, brandy, and flour, hid their boats on the west shore, and returned on foot with their prisoners.[461]

[Footnote 460: Report of Rogers to Sir William Johnson, July, 1756. This incident is suppressed in the printed Journals, which merely say that the man "soon died."]

[Footnote 461: Rogers, Journals, 20. Shirley to Fox, 26 July, 1756. "This afternoon Capt. Rogers came down with 4 scalps and 8 prisoners which he took on Lake Champlain, between 20 and 30 miles beyond Crown Point." Surgeon Williams to his Wife, 16 July, 1756.]

Some weeks after, Rogers returned to the place where he had left the boats, embarked in them, reconnoitred the lake nearly to St. John, hid them again eight miles north of Crown Point, took three prisoners near that post, and carried them to Fort William Henry. In the next month the French found several English boats in a small cove north of Crown Point. Bougainville propounds five different hypotheses to account for their being there; and exploring parties were sent out in the vain attempt to find some water passage by which they could have reached the spot without passing under the guns of two French forts.[462]

[Footnote 462: Bougainville, Journal.]

The French, on their side, still kept their war-parties in motion, and Vaudreuil faithfully chronicled in his despatches every English scalp they brought in. He believed in Indians, and sent them to Ticonderoga in numbers that were sometimes embarrassing. Even Pottawattamies from Lake Michigan were prowling about Winslow's camp and silently killing his sentinels with arrows, while their "medicine men" remained at Ticonderoga practising sorcery and divination to aid the warriors or learn how it fared with them. Bougainville writes in his Journal on the fifteenth of October: "Yesterday the old Pottawattamies who have stayed here 'made medicine' to get news of their brethren. The lodge trembled, the sorcerer sweated drops of blood, and the devil came at last and told him that the warriors would come back with scalps and prisoners. A sorcerer in the medicine lodge is exactly like the Pythoness on the tripod or the witch Canidia invoking the shades." The diviner was not wholly at fault. Three days after, the warriors came back with a prisoner.[463]

[Footnote 463: This kind of divination was practised by Algonkin tribes from the earliest times.]

Till November, the hostile forces continued to watch each other from the opposite ends of Lake George. Loudon repeated his orders to Winslow to keep the defensive, and wrote sarcastically to the Colonial Minister: "I think I shall be able to prevent the provincials doing anything very rash, without their having it in their power to talk in the language of this country that they could have taken all Canada if they had not been prevented by the King's servants." Winslow tried to console himself for the failure of the campaign, and wrote in his odd English to Shirley: "Am sorry that this years' performance has not succeeded as was intended; have only to say I pushed things to the utmost of my power to have been sooner in motion, which was the only thing that should have carried us to Crown Point; and though I am sensible that we are doing our duty in acting on the defensive, yet it makes no eclate [sic], and answers to little purpose in the eyes of my constituents."

On the first of the month the French began to move off towards Canada, and before many days Ticonderoga was left in the keeping of five or six companies.[464] Winslow's men followed their example. Major Eyre, with four hundred regulars, took possession of Fort William Henry, and the provincials marched for home, their ranks thinned by camp diseases and small-pox.[465] In Canada the regulars were quartered on the inhabitants, who took the infliction as a matter of course. In the English provinces the question was not so simple. Most of the British troops were assigned to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston; and Loudon demanded free quarters for them, according to usage then prevailing in England during war. Nor was the demand in itself unreasonable, seeing that the troops were sent over to fight the battles of the colonies. In Philadelphia lodgings were given them in the public-houses, which, however, could not hold them all. A long dispute followed between the Governor, who seconded Loudon's demand, and the Assembly, during which about half the soldiers lay on straw in outhouses and sheds till near midwinter, many sickening, and some dying from exposure. Loudon grew furious, and threatened, if shelter were not provided, to send Webb with another regiment and billet the whole on the inhabitants; on which the Assembly yielded, and quarters were found.[466]

[Footnote 464: Bougainville, Journal. Malartic, Journal.]

[Footnote 465: Letter and Order Books of Winslow. Winslow to Halifax, 30 Dec. 1756.]

[Footnote 466: Loudon to Denny, 28 Oct. 1756. Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 358-380. Loudon to Pitt, 10 March, 1757. Notice of Colonel Bouquet, in Pennsylvania Magazine, III. 124. The Conduct of a Noble Commander in America impartially reviewed (1758).]

In New York the privates were quartered in barracks, but the officers were left to find lodging for themselves. Loudon demanded that provision should be made for them also. The city council hesitated, afraid of incensing the people if they complied. Cruger, the mayor, came to remonstrate. "God damn my blood!" replied the Earl; "if you do not billet my officers upon free quarters this day, I'll order here all the troops in North America, and billet them myself upon this city." Being no respecter of persons, at least in the provinces, he began with Oliver Delancey, brother of the late acting Governor, and sent six soldiers to lodge under his roof. Delancey swore at the unwelcome guests, on which Loudon sent him six more. A subscription was then raised among the citizens, and the required quarters were provided.[467] In Boston there was for the present less trouble. The troops were lodged in the barracks of Castle William, and furnished with blankets, cooking utensils, and other necessaries.[468]

[Footnote 467: Smith, Hist. of N.Y., Part II. 242. William Carry to Johnson, 15 Jan. 1757, in Stone, Life of Sir William Johnson, II. 24, note. Loudon to Hardy, 21 Nov. 1756.]

[Footnote 468: Massachusetts Archives, LXXVI. 153.]

Major Eyre and his soldiers, in their wilderness exile by the borders of Lake George, whiled the winter away with few other excitements than the evening howl of wolves from the frozen mountains, or some nocturnal savage shooting at a sentinel from behind a stump on the moonlit fields of snow. A livelier incident at last broke the monotony of their lives. In the middle of January Rogers came with his rangers from Fort Edward, bound on a scouting party towards Crown Point. They spent two days at Fort William Henry in making snow-shoes and other preparation, and set out on the seventeenth. Captain Spikeman was second in command, with Lieutenants Stark and Kennedy, several other subalterns, and two gentlemen volunteers enamoured of adventure. They marched down the frozen lake and encamped at the Narrows. Some of them, unaccustomed to snow-shoes, had become unfit for travel, and were sent back, thus reducing the number to seventy-four. In the morning they marched again, by icicled rocks and ice-bound waterfalls, mountains gray with naked woods and fir-trees bowed down with snow. On the nineteenth they reached the west shore, about four miles south of Rogers Rock, marched west of north eight miles, and bivouacked among the mountains. On the next morning they changed their course, marched east of north all day, passed Ticonderoga undiscovered, and stopped at night some five miles beyond it. The weather was changing, and rain was coming on. They scraped away the snow with their snow-shoes, piled in it a bank around them, made beds of spruce-boughs, built fires, and lay down to sleep, while the sentinels kept watch in the outer gloom. In the morning there was a drizzling rain, and the softened snow stuck to their snow-shoes. They marched eastward three miles through the dripping forest, til they reached the banks of Lake Champlain, near what is now called Five Mile Point, and presently saw a sledge, drawn by horses, moving on the ice from Ticonderoga towards Crown Point. Rogers sent Stark along the shore to the left to head it off, while he with another party, covered by the woods, moved in the opposite direction to stop its retreat. He soon saw eight or ten more sledges following the first, and sent a messenger to prevent Stark from showing himself too soon; but Stark was already on the ice.

All the sledges turned back in hot haste. The rangers ran in pursuit and captured three of them, with seven men and six horses, while the rest escaped to Ticonderoga. The prisoners, being separately examined, told an ominous tale. There were three hundred and fifty regulars at Ticonderoga; two hundred Canadians and forty-five Indians had lately arrived there, and more Indians were expected that evening,--all destined to waylay the communications between the English forts, and all prepared to march at a moment's notice. The rangers were now in great peril. The fugitives would give warning of their presence, and the French and Indians, in overwhelming force, would no doubt cut off their retreat.

Rogers at once ordered his men to return to their last night's encampment, rekindle the fires, and dry their guns, which were wet by the rain of the morning. Then they marched southward in single file through the snow-encumbered forest, Rogers and Kennedy in the front, Spikeman in the centre, and Stark in the rear. In this order they moved on over broken and difficult ground till two in the afternoon, when they came upon a valley, or hollow, scarcely a musket-shot wide, which ran across their line of march, and, like all the rest of the country, was buried in thick woods. The front of the line had descended the first hill, and was mounting that on the farther side, when the foremost men heard a low clicking sound, like the cocking of a great number of guns; and in an instant a furious volley blazed out of the bushes on the ridge above them. Kennedy was killed outright, as also was Gardner, one of the volunteers. Rogers was grazed in the head by a bullet, and others were disabled or hurt. The rest returned the fire, while a swarm of French and Indians rushed upon them from the ridge and the slopes on either hand, killing several more, Spikeman among the rest, and capturing others. The rangers fell back across the hollow and regained the hill they had just descended. Stark with the rear, who were at the top when the fray began, now kept the assailants in check by a brisk fire till their comrades joined them. Then the whole party, spreading themselves among the trees that covered the declivity, stubbornly held their ground and beat back the French in repeated attempts to dislodge them. As the assailants were more than two to one, what Rogers had most to dread was a movement to outflank him and get into his rear. This they tried twice, and were twice repulsed by a party held in reserve for the purpose. The fight lasted several hours, during which there was much talk between the combatants. The French called out that it was a pity so many brave men should be lost, that large reinforcements were expected every moment, and that the rangers would then be cut to pieces without mercy; whereas if they surrendered at once they should be treated with the utmost kindness. They called to Rogers by name, and expressed great esteem for him. Neither threats nor promises had any effect, and the firing went on till darkness stopped it. Towards evening Rogers was shot through the wrist; and one of the men, John Shute, used to tell in his old age how he saw another ranger trying to bind the captain's wound with the ribbon of his own queue.

As Ticonderoga was but three miles off, it was destruction to stay where they were; and they withdrew under cover of night, reduced to forty-eight effective and six wounded men. Fourteen had been killed, and six captured. Those that were left reached Lake George in the morning, and Stark, with two followers, pushed on in advance to bring a sledge for the wounded. The rest made their way to the Narrows, where they encamped, and presently descried a small dark object on the ice far behind them. It proved to be one of their own number, Sergeant Joshua Martin, who had received a severe wound in the fight, and was left for dead; but by desperate efforts had followed on their tracks, and was now brought to camp in a state of exhaustion. He recovered, and lived to an advanced age. The sledge sent by Stark came in the morning, and the whole party soon reached the fort. Abercromby, on hearing of the affair, sent them a letter of thanks for gallant conduct.

Rogers reckons the number of his assailants at about two hundred and fifty in all. Vaudreuil says that they consisted of eighty-nine regulars and ninety Canadians and Indians. With his usual boastful exaggeration, he declares that forty English were left dead on the field, and that only three reached Fort William Henry alive. He says that the fight was extremely hot and obstinate, and admits that the French lost thirty-seven killed and wounded. Rogers makes the number much greater. That it was considerable is certain, as Lusignan, commandant at Ticonderoga, wrote immediately for reinforcements.[469]

[Footnote 469: Rogers, Journals, 38-44. Caleb Stark, Memoir and Correspondence of John Stark, 18, 412. Return of Killed, Wounded, and Missing in the Action near Ticonderoga, Jan. 1757; all the names are here given. James Abercromby, aide-de-camp to his uncle, General Abercromby, wrote to Rogers from Albany: "You cannot imagine how all ranks of people here are pleased with your conduct and your men's behavior."

The accounts of the French writers differ from each other, but agree in placing the English force at from seventy to eighty, and their own much higher. The principal report is that of Vaudreuil au Ministre, 19 Avril, 1757 (his second letter of this date). Bougainville, Montcalm, Malartic, and Montreuil all speak of the affair, placing the English loss much higher than is shown by the returns. The story, repeated in most of the French narratives, that only three of the rangers reached Fort William Henry, seems to have arisen from the fact that Stark with two men went thither in advance of the rest. As regards the antecedents of the combat, the French and English accounts agree.]

The effects of his wound and an attack of small-pox kept Rogers quiet for a time. Meanwhile the winter dragged slowly away, and the ice of Lake George, cracking with change of temperature, uttered its strange cry of agony, heralding that dismal season when winter begins to relax its grip, but spring still holds aloof; when the sap stirs in the sugar-maples, but the buds refuse to swell, and even the catkins of the willows will not burst their brown integuments; when the forest is patched with snow, though on its sunny slopes one hears in the stillness the whisper of trickling waters that ooze from the half-thawed soil and saturated beds of fallen leaves; when clouds hang low on the darkened mountains, and cold mists entangle themselves in the tops of the pines; now a dull rain, now a sharp morning frost, and now a storm of snow powdering the waste, and wrapping it again in the pall of winter.

In this cheerless season, on St. Patrick's Day, the seventeenth of March, the Irish soldiers who formed a part of the garrison of Fort William Henry were paying homage to their patron saint in libations of heretic rum, the product of New England stills; and it is said that John Stark's rangers forgot theological differences in their zeal to share the festivity. The story adds that they were restrained by their commander, and that their enforced sobriety proved the saving of the fort. This may be doubted; for without counting the English soldiers of the garrison who had no special call to be drunk that day, the fort was in no danger till twenty-four hours after, when the revellers had had time to rally from their pious carouse. Whether rangers or British soldiers, it is certain that watchmen were on the alert during the night between the eighteenth and nineteenth, and that towards one in the morning they heard a sound of axes far down the lake, followed by the faint glow of a distant fire. The inference was plain, that an enemy was there, and that the necessity of warming himself had overcome his caution. Then all was still for some two hours, when, listening in the pitchy darkness, the watchers heard the footsteps of a great body of men approaching on the ice, which at the time was bare of snow. The garrison were at their posts, and all the cannon on the side towards the lake vomited grape and round-shot in the direction of the sound, which thereafter was heard no more.

Those who made it were a detachment, called by Vaudreuil an army, sent by him to seize the English fort. Shirley had planned a similar stroke against Ticonderoga a year before; but the provincial levies had come in so slowly, and the ice had broken up so soon, that the scheme was abandoned. Vaudreuil was more fortunate. The whole force, regulars, Canadians, and Indians, was ready to his hand. No pains were spared in equipping them. Overcoats, blankets, bear-skins to sleep on, tarpaulins to sleep under, spare moccasons, spare mittens, kettles, axes, needles, awls, flint and steel, and many miscellaneous articles were provided, to be dragged by the men on light Indian sledges, along with provisions for twelve days. The cost of the expedition is set at a million francs, answering to more than as many dollars of the present time. To the disgust of the officers from France, the Governor named his brother Rigaud for the chief command; and before the end of February the whole party was on its march along the ice of Lake Champlain. They rested nearly a week at Ticonderoga, where no less than three hundred short scaling-ladders, so constructed that two or more could be joined in one, had been made for them; and here, too, they received a reinforcement, which raised their number to sixteen hundred. Then, marching three days along Lake George, they neared the fort on the evening of the eighteenth, and prepared for a general assault before daybreak.

The garrison, including rangers, consisted of three hundred and forty-six effective men.[470] The fort was not strong, and a resolute assault by numbers so superior must, it seems, have overpowered the defenders; but the Canadians and Indians who composed most of the attacking force were not suited for such work; and, disappointed in his hope of a surprise, Rigaud withdrew them at daybreak, after trying in vain to burn the buildings outside. A few hours after, the whole body reappeared, filing off to surround the fort, on which they kept up a brisk but harmless fire of musketry. In the night they were heard again on the ice, approaching as if for an assault; and the cannon, firing towards the sound, again drove them back. There was silence for a while, till tongues of flame lighted up the gloom, and two sloops, ice-bound in the lake, and a large number of bateaux on the shore were seen to be on fire. A party sallied to save them; but it was too late. In the morning they were all consumed, and the enemy had vanished.

[Footnote 470: Strength of the Garrison of Fort William Henry when the Enemy came before it, enclosed in the letter of Major Eyre to Loudon, 26 March, 1757. There were also one hundred and twenty-eight invalids.]

It was Sunday, the twentieth. Everything was quiet till noon, when the French filed out of the woods and marched across the ice in procession, ostentatiously carrying their scaling-ladders, and showing themselves to the best effect. They stopped at a safe distance, fronting towards the fort, and several of them advanced, waving a red flag. An officer with a few men went to meet them, and returned bringing Le Mercier, chief of the Canadian artillery, who, being led blindfold into the fort, announced himself as bearer of a message from Rigaud. He was conducted to the room of Major Eyre, where all the British officers were assembled; and, after mutual compliments, he invited them to give up the place peaceably, promising the most favorable terms, and threatening a general assault and massacre in case of refusal. Eyre said that he should defend himself to the last; and the envoy, again blindfolded, was led back to whence he came.

The whole French force now advanced as if to storm the works, and the garrison prepared to receive them. Nothing came of it but a fusillade, to which the British made no reply. At night the French were heard advancing again, and each man nerved himself for the crisis. The real attack, however, was not against the fort, but against the buildings outside, which consisted of several storehouses, a hospital, a saw-mill, and the huts of the rangers, besides a sloop on the stocks and piles of planks and cord-wood. Covered by the night, the assailants crept up with fagots of resinous sticks, placed them against the farther side of the buildings, kindled them, and escaped before the flame rose; while the garrison, straining their ears in the thick darkness, fired wherever they heard a sound. Before morning all around them was in a blaze, and they had much ado to save the fort barracks from the shower of burning cinders. At ten o'clock the fires had subsided, and a thick fall of snow began, filling the air with a restless chaos of large moist flakes. This lasted all day and all the next night, till the ground and the ice were covered to a depth of three feet and more. The French lay close in their camps till a little before dawn on Tuesday morning, when twenty volunteers from the regulars made a bold attempt to burn the sloop on the stocks, with several storehouses and other structures, and several hundred scows and whaleboats which had thus far escaped. They were only in part successful; but they fired the sloop and some buildings near it, and stood far out on the ice watching the flaming vessel, a superb bonfire amid the wilderness of snow. The spectacle cost the volunteers a fourth of their number killed and wounded.

On Wednesday morning the sun rose bright on a scene of wintry splendor, and the frozen lake was dotted with Rigaud's retreating followers toiling towards Canada on snow-shoes. Before they reached it many of them were blinded for a while by the insufferable glare, and their comrades led them homewards by the hand.[471]

[Footnote 471: Eyre to Loudon, 24 March, 1757. Ibid., 25 March, enclosed in Loudon's despatch of 25 April, 1757. Message of Rigaud to Major Eyre, 20 March, 1757. Letter from Fort William Henry, 26 March, 1757, in Boston Gazette, No. 106, and Boston Evening Post, No. 1,128. Abstract of Letters from Albany, in Boston News Letter, No. 2,860. Caleb Stark, Memoir and Correspondence of John Stark, 22, a curious mixture of truth and error. Relation de la Campagne sur le Lac St. Sacrement pendant l'Hiver, 1757. Bougainville, Journal. Malartic, Journal. Montcalm au Ministre, 24 Avril, 1757. Montreuil au Ministre, 23 Avril, 1757. Montcalm à sa Mère, 1 Avril, 1757. Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760.

The French loss in killed and wounded is set by Montcalm at eleven. That of the English was seven, slightly wounded, chiefly in sorties. They took three prisoners. Stark was touched by a bullet, for the only time in his adventurous life.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter 14

1757

Montcalm and Vaudreuil

Spring came at last, and the Dutch burghers of Albany heard, faint from the far height, the clamor of the wild-fowl, streaming in long files northward to their summer home. As the aerial travellers winged their way, the seat of war lay spread beneath them like a map. First the blue Hudson, slumbering among its forests, with the forts along its banks, Half-Moon, Stillwater, Saratoga, and the geometric lines and earthen mounds of Fort Edward. Then a broad belt of dingy evergreen; and beyond, released from wintry fetters, the glistening breast of Lake George, with Fort William Henry at its side, amid charred ruins and a desolation of prostrate forests. Hence the lake stretched northward, like some broad river, trenched between mountain ranges still leafless and gray. Then they looked down on Ticonderoga, with the flag of the Bourbons, like a flickering white speck, waving on its ramparts; and next on Crown Point with its tower of stone. Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the long procession of the Green Mountains; and, far beyond, on the dim verge of the eastern sky, the White Mountains throned in savage solitude. They passed over the bastioned square of Fort St. John, Fort Chambly guarding the rapids of the Richelieu, and the broad belt of the St. Lawrence, with Montreal seated on its bank. Here we leave them, to build their nests and hatch their brood among the fens of the lonely North.

Montreal, the military heart of Canada, was in the past winter its social centre also, where were gathered conspicuous representatives both of Old France and of New; not men only, but women. It was a sparkling fragment of the reign of Louis XV. dropped into the American wilderness. Montcalm was here with his staff and his chief officers, now pondering schemes of war, and now turning in thought to his beloved Château of Candiac, his mother, children, and wife, to whom he sent letters with every opportunity. To his wife he writes: "Think of me affectionately; give love to my girls. I hope next year I may be with you all. I love you tenderly, dearest." He says that he has sent her a packet of marten-skins for a muff, "and another time I shall send some to our daughter; but I should like better to bring them myself." Of this eldest daughter he writes in reply to a letter of domestic news from Madame de Montcalm: "The new gown with blonde trimmings must be becoming, for she is pretty." Again, "There is not an hour in the day when I do not think of you, my mother and my children." He had the tastes of a country gentleman, and was eager to know all that was passing on his estate. Before leaving home he had set up a mill to grind olives for oil, and was well pleased to hear of its prosperity. "It seems to be a good thing, which pleases me very much. Bougainville and I talk a great deal about the oil-mill." Some time after, when the King sent him the coveted decoration of the cordon rouge, he informed Madame de Montcalm of the honor done him, and added: "But I think I am better pleased with what you tell me of the success of my oil-mill."

To his mother he writes of his absorbing occupations, and says: "You can tell my dearest that I have no time to occupy myself with the ladies, even if I wished to." Nevertheless he now and then found leisure for some little solace in his banishment; for he writes to Bourlamaque, whom he had left at Quebec, after a visit which he had himself made there early in the winter: "I am glad you sometimes speak of me to the three ladies in the Rue du Parloir; and I am flattered by their remembrance, especially by that of one of them, in whom I find at certain moments too much wit and too many charms for my tranquillity." These ladies of the Rue du Parloir are several times mentioned in his familiar correspondence with Bourlamaque.

His station obliged him to maintain a high standard of living, to his great financial detriment, for Canadian prices were inordinate. "I must live creditably, and so I do; sixteen persons at table every day. Once a fortnight I dine with the Governor-General and with the Chevalier de Lévis, who lives well too. He has given three grand balls. As for me, up to Lent I gave, besides dinners, great suppers, with ladies, three times a week. They lasted till two in the morning; and then there was dancing, to which company came uninvited, but sure of a welcome from those who had been at supper. It is very expensive, not very amusing, and often tedious. At Quebec, where we spent a month, I gave receptions or parties, often at the Intendant's house. I like my gallant Chevalier de Lévis very much. Bourlamaque was a good choice; he is steady and cool, with good parts. Bougainville has talent, a warm head, and warm heart; he will ripen in time. Write to Madame Cornier that I like her husband; he is perfectly well, and as impatient for peace as I am. Love to my daughters, and all affection and respect to my mother. I live only in the hope of joining you all again. Nevertheless, Montreal is as good a place as Alais even in time of peace, and better now, because the Government is here; for the Marquis de Vaudreuil, like me, spent only a month at Quebec. As for Quebec, it is as good as the best cities of France, except ten or so. Clear sky, bright sun; neither spring nor autumn, only summer and winter. July, August, and September, hot as in Languedoc: winter insupportable; one must keep always indoors. The ladies spirituelles, galantes, dévotes. Gambling at Quebec, dancing and conversation at Montreal. My friends the Indians, who are often unbearable, and whom I treat with perfect tranquillity and patience, are fond of me. If I were not a sort of general, though very subordinate to the Governor, I could gossip about the plans of the campaign, which it is likely will begin on the tenth or fifteenth of May. I worked at the plan of the last affair [Rigaud's expedition to Fort William Henry], which might have turned out better, though good as it was. I wanted only eight hundred men. If I had had my way, Monsieur de Lévis or Monsieur de Bougainville would have had charge of it. However, the thing was all right, and in good hands. The Governor, who is extremely civil to me, gave it to his brother; he thought him more used to winter marches. Adieu, my heart; I adore and love you!"

To meet his manifold social needs, he sends to his wife orders for prunes, olives, anchovies, muscat wine, capers, sausages, confectionery, cloth for liveries, and many other such items; also for scent-bags of two kinds, and perfumed pomatum for presents; closing in postscript with an injunction not to forget a dozen pint-bottles of English lavender. Some months after, he writes to Madame de Saint-Véran: "I have got everything that was sent me from Montpellier except the sausages. I have lost a third of what was sent from Bordeaux. The English captured it on board the ship called 'La Superbe;' and I have reason to fear that everything sent from Paris is lost on board 'La Liberté.' I am running into debt here. Pshaw! I must live. I do not worry myself. Best love to you, my mother."

When Rigaud was about to march with his detachment against Fort William Henry, Montcalm went over to La Prairie to see them. "I reviewed them," he writes to Bourlamaque, "and gave the officers a dinner, which, if anybody else had given it, I should have said was a grand affair. There were two tables, for thirty-six persons in all. On Wednesday there was an Assembly at Madame Varin's; on Friday the Chevalier de Lévis gave a ball. He invited sixty-five ladies, and got only thirty, with a great crowd of men. Rooms well lighted, excellent order, excellent service, plenty of refreshments of every sort all through the night; and the company stayed till seven in the morning. As for me, I went to bed early. I had had that day eight ladies at a supper given to Madame Varin. To-morrow I shall have half-a-dozen at another supper, given to I don't know whom, but incline to think it will be La Roche Beaucour. The gallant Chevalier is to give us still another ball."

Lent put a check on these festivities. "To-morrow," he tells Bourlamaque, "I shall throw myself into devotion with might and main (à corps perdu). It will be easier for me to detach myself from the world and turn heavenward here at Montreal than it would be at Quebec." And, some time after, "Bougainville spent Monday delightfully at Isle Ste. Hélène, and Tuesday devoutly with the Sulpitian Fathers at the Mountain. I was there myself at four o'clock, and did them the civility to sup in their refectory at a quarter before six."

In May there was a complete revival of social pleasures, and Montcalm wrote to Bourlamaque: "Madame de Beaubassin's supper was very gay. There were toasts to the Rue du Parloir and to the General. To-day I must give a dinner to Madame de Saint-Ours, which will be a little more serious. Péan is gone to establish himself at La Chine, and will come back with La Barolon, who goes thither with a husband of hers, bound to the Ohio with Villejoin and Louvigny. The Chevalier de Lévis amuses himself very much here. He and his friends spend all their time with Madame de Lenisse."

Under these gayeties and gallantries there were bitter heart-burnings. Montcalm hints at some of them in a letter to Bourlamaque, written at the time of the expedition to Fort William Henry, which, in the words of Montcalm, who would have preferred another commander, the Governor had ordered to march "under the banners of brother Rigaud." "After he got my letter on Sunday evening," says the disappointed General, "Monsieur de Vaudreuil sent me his secretary with the instructions he had given his brother," which he had hitherto withheld. "This gave rise after dinner to a long conversation with him; and I hope for the good of the service that his future conduct will prove the truth of his words. I spoke to him with frankness and firmness of the necessity I was under of communicating to him my reflections; but I did not name any of the persons who, to gain his good graces, busy themselves with destroying his confidence in me. I told him that he would always find me disposed to aid in measures tending to our success, even should his views, which always ought to prevail, be different from mine; but that I dared flatter myself that he would henceforward communicate his plans to me sooner; for, though his knowledge of the country gave greater weight to his opinions, he might rest satisfied that I should second him in methods and details. This explanation passed off becomingly enough, and ended with a proposal to dine on a moose's nose [an estimed morsel] the day after to-morrow. I burn your letters, Monsieur, and I beg you to do the same with mine, after making a note of anything you may want to keep." But Bourlamaque kept all the letters, and bound them in a volume, which still exists.[472]

[Footnote 472: The preceding extracts are from Lettres de Montcalm à Madame de Saint-Véran, sa Mère, et à Madame de Montcalm, sa Femme, 1756, 1757 (Papiers de Famille); and Lettres de Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 1757. See Appendix E.]

Montcalm was not at this time fully aware of the feeling of Vaudreuil towards him. The touchy egotism of the Governor and his jealous attachment to the colony led him to claim for himself and the Canadians the merit of every achievement and to deny it to the French troops and their general. Before the capture of Oswego was known, he wrote to the naval minister that Montcalm would never have dared attack that place if he had not encouraged him and answered his timid objections.[473] "I am confident that I shall reduce it," he adds; "my expedition is sure to succeed if Monsieur de Montcalm follows the directions I have given him." When the good news came he immediately wrote again, declaring that the victory was due to his brother Rigaud and the Canadians, who, he says, had been ill-used by the General, and not allowed either to enter the fort or share the plunder, any more than the Indians, who were so angry at the treatment they had met that he had great difficulty in appeasing them. He hints that the success was generally ascribed to him. "There has been a great deal of talk here; but I will not do myself the honor of repeating it to you, especially as it relates to myself. I know how to do violence to my self-love. The measures I took assured our victory, in spite of opposition. If I had been less vigilant and firm, Oswego would still be in the hands of the English. I cannot sufficiently congratulate myself on the zeal which my brother and the Canadians and Indians showed on this occasion; for without them my orders would have been given in vain. The hopes of His Britannic Majesty have vanished, and will hardly revive again; for I shall take care to crush them in the bud."[474]

[Footnote 473: Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 13 Août, 1756.]

[Footnote 474: Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 1 Sept. 1756.]

The pronouns "I" and "my" recur with monotonous frequency in his correspondence. "I have laid waste all the British provinces." "By promptly uniting my forces at Carillon, I have kept General Loudon in check, though he had at his disposal an army of about twenty thousand men;"[475] and so without end, in all varieties of repetition. It is no less characteristic that he here assigns to his enemies double their actual force.

[Footnote 475: Ibid., 6 Nov. 1756.]

He has the faintest of praise for the troops from France. "They are generally good, but thus far they have not absolutely distinguished themselves. I do justice to the firmness they showed at Oswego; but it was only the colony troops, Canadians, and Indians who attacked the forts. Our artillery was directed by the Chevalier Le Mercier and M. Frémont [colony officers], and was served by our colony troops and our militia. The officers from France are more inclined to defence than attack. Far from spending the least thing here, they lay by their pay. They saved the money allowed them for refreshments, and had it in pocket at the end of the campaign. They get a profit, too, out of their provisions, by having certificates made under borrowed names, so that they can draw cash for them on their return. It is the same with the soldiers, who also sell their provisions to the King and get paid for them. In conjunction with M. Bigot, I labor to remedy all these abuses; and the rules we have established have saved the King a considerable expense. M. de Montcalm has complained very much of these rules." The Intendant Bigot, who here appears as a reformer, was the centre of a monstrous system of public fraud and robbery; while the charges against the French officers are unsupported. Vaudreuil, who never loses an opportunity of disparaging them, proceeds thus:--

"The troops from France are not on very good terms with our Canadians. What can the soldiers think of them when they see their officers threaten them with sticks or swords? The Canadians are obliged to carry these gentry on their shoulders, through the cold water, over rocks that cut their feet; and if they make a false step they are abused. Can anything be harder? Finally, Monsieur de Montcalm is so quick-tempered that he goes to the length of striking the Canadians. How can he restrain his officers when he cannot restrain himself? Could any example be more contagious? This is the way our Canadians are treated. They deserve something better." He then enlarges on their zeal, hardihood, and bravery, and adds that nothing but their blind submission to his commands prevents many of them from showing resentment at the usage they had to endure. The Indians, he goes on to say, are not so gentle and yielding; and but for his brother Rigaud and himself, might have gone off in a rage. "After the campaign of Oswego they did not hesitate to tell me that they would go wherever I sent them, provided I did not put them under the orders of M. de Montcalm. They told me positively that they could not bear his quick temper. I shall always maintain the most perfect union and understanding with M. le Marquis de Montcalm, but I shall be forced to take measures which will assure to our Canadians and Indians treatment such as their zeal and services merit."[476]

[Footnote 476: Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 23 Oct. 1756. The above extracts are somewhat condensed in the translation. See the letter in Dussieux, 279.]

To the subject of his complaints Vaudreuil used a different language; for Montcalm says, after mentioning that he had had occasion to punish some of the Canadians at Oswego: "I must do Monsieur de Vaudreuil the justice to say that he approved my proceedings." He treated the General with the blandest politeness. "He is a good-natured man," continues Montcalm, "mild, with no character of his own, surrounded by people who try to destroy all his confidence in the general of the troops from France. I am praised excessively, in order to make him jealous, excite his Canadian prejudices, and prevent him from dealing with me frankly, or adopting my views when he can help it."[477] He elsewhere complains that Vaudreuil gave to both him and Lévis orders couched in such equivocal terms that he could throw the blame on them in case of reverse.[478] Montcalm liked the militia no better than the Governor liked the regulars. "I have used them with good effect, though not in places exposed to the enemy's fire. They know neither discipline nor subordination, and think themselves in all respects the first nation on earth." He is sure, however, that they like him: "I have gained the utmost confidence of the Canadians and Indians; and in the eyes of the former, when I travel or visit their camps, I have the air of a tribune of the people."[479] "The affection of the Indians for me is so strong that there are moments when it astonishes the Governor."[480] "The Indians are delighted with me," he says in another letter; "the Canadians are pleased with me; their officers esteem and fear me, and would be glad if the French troops and their general could be dispensed with; and so should I."[481] And he writes to his mother: "The part I have to play is unique: I am a general-in-chief subordinated; sometimes with everything to do, and sometimes nothing; I am esteemed, respected, beloved, envied, hated; I pass for proud, supple, stiff, yielding, polite, devout, gallant, etc.; and I long for peace."[482]

[Footnote 477: Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, 11 Juillet, 1757.]

[Footnote 478: Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, 1 Nov. 1756.]

[Footnote 479: Ibid., 18 Sept. 1757.]

[Footnote 480: Ibid., 4 Nov. 1757.]

[Footnote 481: Ibid., 28 Août, 1756.]

[Footnote 482: Montcalm à Madame de Saint-Véran, 23 Sept. 1757.]

The letters of the Governor and those of the General, it will be seen, contradict each other flatly at several points. Montcalm is sustained by his friend Bougainville, who says that the Indians had a great liking for him, and that he "knew how to manage them as well as if he had been born in their wigwams."[483] And while Vaudreuil complains that the Canadians are ill-used by Montcalm, Bougainville declares that the regulars are ill-used by Vaudreuil. "One must be blind not to see that we are treated as the Spartans treated the Helots." Then he comments on the jealous reticence of the Governor. "The Marquis de Montcalm has not the honor of being consulted; and it is generally through public rumor that he first hears of Monsieur de Vaudreuil's military plans." He calls the Governor "a timid man, who can neither make a resolution nor keep one;" and he gives another trait of him, illustrating it, after his usual way, by a parallel from the classics: "When V. produces an idea he falls in love with it, as Pygmalion did with his statue. I can forgive Pygmalion, for what he produced was a masterpiece."[484]

[Footnote 483: Bougainville à Saint-Laurens, 19 Août, 1757.]

[Footnote 484: Bougainville, Journal.]

The exceeding touchiness of the Governor was sorely tried by certain indiscretions on the part of the General, who in his rapid and vehement utterances sometimes forgot the rules of prudence. His anger, though not deep, was extremely impetuous; and it is said that his irritation against Vaudreuil sometimes found escape in the presence of servants and soldiers.[485] There was no lack of reporters, and the Governor was told everything. The breach widened apace, and Canada divided itself into two camps: that of Vaudreuil with the colony officers, civil and military, and that of Montcalm with the officers from France. The principal exception was the Chevalier de Lévis. This brave and able commander had an easy and adaptable nature, which made him a sort of connecting link between the two parties. "One should be on good terms with everybody," was a maxim which he sometimes expressed, and on which he shaped his conduct with notable success. The Intendant Bigot also, an adroit and accomplished person, had the skill to avoid breaking with either side.

[Footnote 485: Événements de la Guerre en Canada, 1759, 1760.]

But now the season of action was near, and domestic strife must give place to efforts against the common foe. "God or devil!" Montcalm wrote to Bourlamaque, "we must do something and risk a fight. If we succeed, we can, all three of us [you, Lévis, and I], ask for promotion. Burn this letter." The prospects, on the whole, were hopeful. The victory at Oswego had wrought marvels among the Indians, inspired the faithful, confirmed the wavering, and daunted the ill-disposed. The whole West was astir, ready to pour itself again in blood and fire against the English border; and even the Cherokees and Choctaws, old friends of the British colonies, seemed on the point of turning against them.[486] The Five Nations were half won for France. In November a large deputation of them came to renew the chain of friendship at Montreal. "I have laid Oswego in ashes," said Vaudreuil; "the English quail before me. Why do you nourish serpents in your bosom? They mean only to enslave you." The deputies trampled under foot the medals the English had given them, and promised the "Devourer of Villages," for so they styled the Governor, that they would never more lift the hatchet against his children. The chief difficulty was to get rid of them; for, being clothed and fed at the expense of the King, they were in no haste to take leave; and learning that New Year's Day was a time of visits, gifts, and health-drinking, they declared that they would stay to share its pleasures; which they did, to their own satisfaction and the annoyance of those who were forced to entertain them and their squaws.[487] An active siding with France was to be expected only from the western bands of the Confederacy. Neutrality alone could be hoped for from the others, who were too near the English safely to declare against them; while from one of the tribes, the Mohawks, even neutrality was doubtful.

[Footnote 486: Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 19 Avril, 1757.]

[Footnote 487: Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, 24 Avril, 1757; Relation de l'Ambassade des Cinq Nations à Montreal, jointe á la lettre précédente. Procès-verbal de différentes Entrevues entre M. de Vaudreuil et les Deputés des Nations sauvages du 13 au 30 Déc. 1756. Malartic, Journal. Montcalm á Madame de Saint-Véran, 1 Avril, 1757.]

Vaudreuil, while disliking the French regulars, felt that he could not dispense with them, and had asked for a reinforcement. His request was granted; and the Colonial Minister informed him that twenty-four hundred men had been ordered to Canada to strengthen the colony regulars and the battalions of Montcalm.[488] This, according to the estimate of the Minister, would raise the regular force in Canada to sixty-six hundred rank and file.[489] The announcement was followed by another, less agreeable. It was to the effect that a formidable squadron was fitting out in British ports. Was Quebec to be attacked, or Louisbourg? Louisbourg was beyond reach of succor from Canada; it must rely on its own strength and on help from France. But so long as Quebec was threatened, all the troops in the colony must be held ready to defend it, and the hope of attacking England in her own domains must be abandoned. Till these doubts were solved, nothing could be done; and hence great activity in catching prisoners for the sake of news. A few were brought in, but they knew no more of the matter than the French themselves; and Vaudreuil and Montcalm rested for a while in suspense.

[Footnote 488: Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, Mars, 1757.]

[Footnote 489: Ministerial Minute on the Military Force in Canada, 1757, in N.Y. Col. Docs., X. 523.]

The truth, had they known it, would have gladdened their hearts. The English preparations were aimed at Louisbourg. In the autumn before, Loudon, prejudiced against all plans of his predecessor, Shirley, proposed to the Ministry a scheme of his own, involving a possible attack on Quebec, but with the reduction of Louisbourg as its immediate object,--an important object, no doubt, but one that had no direct bearing on the main question of controlling the interior of the continent. Pitt, then for a brief space at the head of the Government, accepted the suggestion, and set himself to executing it; but he was hampered by opposition, and early in April was forced to resign. Then, followed a contest of rival claimants to office; and the war against France was made subordinate to disputes of personal politics. Meanwhile one Florence Hensey, a spy at London, had informed the French Court that a great armament was fitting out for America, though he could not tell its precise destination. Without loss of time three French squadrons were sent across the Atlantic, with orders to rendezvous at Louisbourg, the conjectured point of attack.

The English were as tardy as their enemies were prompt. Everything depended on speed; yet their fleet, under Admiral Holbourne, consisting of fifteen ships of the line and three frigates, with about five thousand troops on board, did not get to sea till the fifth of May, when it made sail for Halifax, where Loudon was to meet it with additional forces.

Loudon had drawn off the best part of the troops from the northern frontier, and they were now at New York waiting for embarkation. That the design might be kept secret, he laid an embargo on colonial shipping,--a measure which exasperated the colonists without answering its purpose. Now ensued a long delay, during which the troops, the provincial levies, the transports destined to carry them, and the ships of war which were to serve as escort, all lay idle. In the interval Loudon showed great activity in writing despatches and other avocations more or less proper to a commander, being always busy, without, according to Franklin, accomplishing anything. One Innis, who had come with a message from the Governor of Pennsylvania, and had waited above a fortnight for the General's reply, remarked of him that he was like St. George on a tavern sign, always on horseback, and never riding on.[490] Yet nobody longed more than he to reach the rendezvous at Halifax. He was waiting for news of Holbourne, and he waited in vain. He knew only that a French fleet had been seen off the coast strong enough to overpower his escort and sink all his transports.[491] But the season was growing late; he must act quickly if he was to act at all. He and Sir Charles Hardy agreed between them that the risk must be run; and on the twentieth of June the whole force put to sea. They met no enemy, and entered Halifax harbor on the thirtieth. Holbourne and his fleet had not yet appeared; but his ships soon came straggling in, and before the tenth of July all were at anchor before the town. Then there was more delay. The troops, nearly twelve thousand in all, were landed, and weeks were spent in drilling them and planting vegetables for their refreshment. Sir Charles Hay was put under arrest for saying that the nation's money was spent in sham battles and raising cabbages. Some attempts were made to learn the state of Louisbourg; and Captain Gorham, of the rangers, who reconnoitred it from a fishing vessel, brought back an imperfect report, upon which, after some hesitation, it was resolved to proceed to the attack. The troops were embarked again, and all was ready, when, on the fourth of August, a sloop came from Newfoundland, bringing letters found on board a French vessel lately captured. From these it appeared that all three of the French squadrons were united in the harbor of Louisbourg, to the number of twenty-two ships of the line, besides several frigates, and that the garrison had been increased to a total force of seven thousand men, ensconced in the strongest fortress of the continent. So far as concerned the naval force, the account was true. La Motte, the French admiral, had with him a fleet carrying an aggregate of thirteen hundred and sixty cannon, anchored in a sheltered harbor under the guns of the town. Success was now hopeless, and the costly enterprise was at once abandoned. Loudon with his troops sailed back for New York, and Admiral Holbourne, who had been joined by four additional ships, steered for Louisbourg, in hopes that the French fleet would come out and fight him. He cruised off the port; but La Motte did not accept the challenge.

[Footnote 490: Works of Franklin, I. 219. Franklin intimates that while Loudon was constantly writing, he rarely sent off despatches. This is a mistake; there is abundance of them, often tediously long, in the Public Record Office.]

[Footnote 491: Loudon to Pitt, 30 May, 1757. He had not learned Pitt's resignation.]

The elements declared for France. A September gale, of fury rare even on that tempestuous coast, burst upon the British fleet. "It blew a perfect hurricane," says the unfortunate Admiral, "and drove us right on shore." One ship was dashed on the rocks, two leagues from Louisbourg. A shifting of the wind in the nick of time saved the rest from total wreck. Nine were dismasted; others threw their cannon into the sea. Not one was left fit for immediate action; and had La Motte sailed out of Louisbourg, he would have had them all at his mercy.

Delay, the source of most of the disasters that befell England and her colonies at this dismal epoch, was the ruin of the Louisbourg expedition. The greater part of La Motte's fleet reached its destination a full month before that of Holbourne. Had the reverse taken place, the fortress must have fallen. As it was, the ill-starred attempt, drawing off the British forces from the frontier, where they were needed most, did for France more than she could have done for herself, and gave Montcalm and Vaudreuil the opportunity to execute a scheme which they had nursed since the fall of Oswego.[492]

[Footnote 492: Despatches of Loudon, Feb. to Aug. 1757. Knox, Campaigns in North America, I. 6-28. Knox was in the expedition. Review of Mr. Pitt's Administration (London, 1763). The Conduct of a Noble Commander in America impartially reviewed (London, 1758). Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs, II. 49-59. Answer to the Letter to two Great Men (London, 1760). Entick, II. 168, 169. Holbourne to Loudon, 4 Aug. 1757. Holbourne to Pitt, 29 Sept. 1757. Ibid., 30 Sept. 1757. Holbourne to Pownall, 2 Nov. 1757. Mante, 86, 97. Relation du Désastre arrivé à la Flotte Anglaise commandée par l'Amiral Holbourne. Chevalier Johnstone, Campaign of Louisbourg. London Magazine, 1757, 514. Gentleman's Magazine, 1757, 463, 476. Ibid., 1758, 168-173.

It has been said that Loudon was scared from his task by false reports of the strength of the French at Louisbourg. This was not the case. The Gazette de France, 621, says that La Motte had twenty-four ships of war. Bougainville says that as early as the ninth of June there were twenty-one ships of war, including five frigates, at Louisbourg. To this the list given by Knox closely answers.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter 15

1757

Fort William Henry

"I am going on the ninth to sing the war-song at the Lake of Two Mountains, and on the next day at Saut St. Louis,--a long, tiresome, ceremony. On the twelfth I am off; and I count on having news to tell you by the end of this month or the beginning of next." Thus Montcalm wrote to his wife from Montreal early in July. All doubts had been solved. Prisoners taken on the Hudson and despatches from Versailles had made it certain that Loudon was bound to Louisbourg, carrying with him the best of the troops that had guarded the New York frontier. The time was come, not only to strike the English on Lake George, but perhaps to seize Fort Edward and carry terror to Albany itself. Only one difficulty remained, the want of provisions. Agents were sent to collect corn and bacon among the inhabitants; the curés and militia captains were ordered to aid in the work; and enough was presently found to feed twelve thousand men for a month.[493]

[Footnote 493: Vaudreuil, Lettres circulates aux Curés et aux Capitaines de Milice des Paroisses du Gouvernement de Montreal, 16 Juin, 1757.]

The emissaries of the Governor had been busy all winter among the tribes of the West and North; and more than a thousand savages, lured by prospect of gifts, scalps, and plunder, were now encamped at Montreal. Many of them had never visited a French settlement before. All were eager to see Montcalm, whose exploit in taking Oswego had inflamed their imagination; and one day, on a visit of ceremony, an orator from Michillimackinac addressed the General thus: "We wanted to see this famous man who tramples the English under his feet. We thought we should find him so tall that his head would be lost in the clouds. But you are a little man, my Father. It is when we look into your eyes that we see the greatness of the pine-tree and the fire of the eagle."[494]

[Footnote 494: Bougainville, Journal.]

It remained to muster the Mission Indians settled in or near the limits of the colony; and it was to this end that Montcalm went to sing the war-song with the converts of the Two Mountains. Rigaud, Bougainville, young Longueuil, and others were of the party; and when they landed, the Indians came down to the shore, their priests at their head, and greeted the General with a volley of musketry; then received him after dark in their grand council-lodge, where the circle of wild and savage visages, half seen in the dim light of a few candles, suggested to Bougainville a midnight conclave of wizards. He acted vicariously the chief part in the ceremony. "I sang the war-song in the name of M. de Montcalm, and was much applauded. It was nothing but these words: 'Let us trample the English under our feet,' chanted over and over again, in cadence with the movements of the savages." Then came the war-feast, against which occasion Montcalm had caused three oxen to be roasted.[495] On the next day the party went to Caughnawaga, or Saut St. Louis, where the ceremony was repeated; and Bougainville, who again sang the war-song in the name of his commander, was requited by adoption into the clan of the Turtle. Three more oxen were solemnly devoured, and with one voice the warriors took up the hatchet.

[Footnote 495: Bougainville describes a ceremony in the Mission Church of the Two Mountains in which warriors and squaws sang in the choir. Ninety-nine years after, in 1856, I was present at a similar ceremony on the same spot, and heard the descendants of the same warriors and squaws sing like their ancestors. Great changes have since taken place at this old mission.]

Meanwhile troops, Canadians and Indians, were moving by detachments up Lake Champlain. Fleets of bateaux and canoes followed each other day by day along the capricious lake, in calm or storm, sunshine or rain, till, towards the end of July, the whole force was gathered at Ticonderoga, the base of the intended movement. Bourlamaque had been there since May with the battalions of Béarn and Royal Roussillon, finishing the fort, sending out war-parties, and trying to discover the force and designs of the English at Fort William Henry.

Ticonderoga is a high rocky promontory between Lake Champlain on the north and the mouth of the outlet of Lake George on the south. Near its extremity and close to the fort were still encamped the two battalions under Bourlamaque, while bateaux and canoes were passing incessantly up the river of the outlet. There were scarcely two miles of navigable water, at the end of which the stream fell foaming over a high ledge of rock that barred the way. Here the French were building a saw-mill; and a wide space had been cleared to form an encampment defended on all sides by an abattis, within which stood the tents of the battalions of La Reine, La Sarre, Languedoc, and Guienne, all commanded by Lévis. Above the cascade the stream circled through the forest in a series of beautiful rapids, and from the camp of Lévis a road a mile and a half long had been cut to the navigable water above. At the end of this road there was another fortified camp, formed of colony regulars, Canadians, and Indians, under Rigaud. It was scarcely a mile farther to Lake George, where on the western side there was an outpost, chiefly of Canadians and Indians; while advanced parties were stationed at Bald Mountain, now called Rogers Rock, and elsewhere on the lake, to watch the movements of the English. The various encampments just mentioned were ranged along a valley extending four miles from Lake Champlain to Lake George, and bordered by mountains wooded to the top.

Here was gathered a martial population of eight thousand men, including the brightest civilization and the darkest barbarism: from the scholar-soldier Montcalm and his no less accomplished aide-de-camp; from Lévis, conspicuous for graces of person; from a throng of courtly young officers, who would have seemed out of place in that wilderness had they not done their work so well in it; from these to the foulest man eating savage of the uttermost northwest.

Of Indian allies there were nearly two thousand. One of their tribes, the Iowas, spoke a language which no interpreter understood; and they all bivouacked where they saw fit: for no man could control them. "I see no difference," says Bougainville, "in the dress, ornaments, dances, and songs of the various western nations. They go naked, excepting a strip of cloth passed through a belt, and paint themselves black, red, blue, and other colors. Their heads are shaved and adorned with bunches of feathers, and they wear rings of brass wire in their ears. They wear beaver-skin blankets, and carry lances, bows and arrows, and quivers made of the skins of beasts. For the rest they are straight, well made, and generally very tall. Their religion is brute paganism. I will say it once for all, one must be the slave of these savages, listen to them day and night, in council and in private, whenever the fancy takes them, or whenever a dream, a fit of the vapors, or their perpetual craving for brandy, gets possession of them; besides which they are always wanting something for their equipment, arms, or toilet, and the general of the army must give written orders for the smallest trifle,--an eternal, wearisome detail, of which one has no idea in Europe."

It was not easy to keep them fed. Rations would be served to them for a week; they would consume them in three days, and come for more. On one occasion they took the matter into their own hands, and butchered and devoured eighteen head of cattle intended for the troops; nor did any officer dare oppose this "St. Bartholomew of the oxen," as Bougainville calls it. "Their paradise is to be drunk," says the young officer. Their paradise was rather a hell; for sometimes, when mad with brandy, they grappled and tore each other with their teeth like wolves. They were continually "making medicine," that is, consulting the Manitou, to whom they hung up offerings, sometimes a dead dog, and sometimes the belt-cloth which formed their only garment.

The Mission Indians were better allies than these heathen of the west; and their priests, who followed them to the war, had great influence over them. They were armed with guns, which they well knew how to use. Their dress, though savage, was generally decent, and they were not cannibals; though in other respects they retained all their traditional ferocity and most of their traditional habits. They held frequent war-feasts, one of which is described by Roubaud, Jesuit missionary of the Abenakis of St. Francis, whose flock formed a part of the company present.

"Imagine," says the father, "a great assembly of savages adorned with every ornament most suited to disfigure them in European eyes, painted with vermilion, white, green, yellow, and black made of soot and the scrapings of pots. A single savage face combines all these different colors, methodically laid on with the help of a little tallow, which serves for pomatum. The head is shaved except at the top, where there is a small tuft, to which are fastened feathers, a few beads of wampum, or some such trinket. Every part of the head has its ornament. Pendants hang from the nose and also from the ears, which are split in infancy and drawn down by weights till they flap at last against the shoulders. The rest of the equipment answers to this fantastic decoration: a shirt bedaubed with vermilion, wampum collars, silver bracelets, a large knife hanging on the breast, moose-skin moccasons, and a belt of various colors always absurdly combined. The sachems and war-chiefs are distinguished from the rest: the latter by a gorget, and the former by a medal, with the King's portrait on one side, and on the other Mars and Bellona joining hands, with the device, Virtues et Honor."

Thus attired, the company sat in two lines facing each other, with kettles in the middle filled with meat chopped for distribution. To a dignified silence succeeded songs, sung by several chiefs in succession, and compared by the narrator to the howling of wolves. Then followed a speech from the chief orator, highly commended by Roubaud, who could not help admiring this effort of savage eloquence. "After the harangue," he continues, "they proceeded to nominate the chiefs who were to take command. As soon as one was named he rose and took the head of some animal that had been butchered for the feast. He raised it aloft so that all the company could see it, and cried: 'Behold the head of the enemy!' Applause and cries of joy rose from all parts of the assembly. The chief, with the head in his hand, passed down between the lines, singing his war-song, bragging of his exploits, taunting and defying the enemy, and glorifying himself beyond all measure. To hear his self-laudation in these moments of martial transport one would think him a conquering hero ready to sweep everything before him. As he passed in front of the other savages, they would respond by dull broken cries jerked up from the depths of their stomachs, and accompanied by movements of their bodies so odd that one must be well used to them to keep countenance. In the course of his song the chief would utter from time to time some grotesque witticism; then he would stop, as if pleased with himself, or rather to listen to the thousand confused cries of applause that greeted his ears. He kept up his martial promenade as long as he liked the sport; and when he had had enough, ended by flinging down the head of the animal with an air of contempt, to show that his warlike appetite craved meat of another sort."[496] Others followed with similar songs and pantomime, and the festival was closed at last by ladling out the meat from the kettles, and devouring it.

[Footnote 496: Lettre du Père ...(Roubaud), Missionnaire chez les Abnakis, 21 Oct. 1757, in Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, VI. 189 (1810).]

Roubaud was one day near the fort, when he saw the shore lined with a thousand Indians, watching four or five English prisoners, who, with the war-party that had captured them, were approaching in a boat from the farther side of the water. Suddenly the whole savage crew broke away together and ran into the neighboring woods, whence they soon emerged, yelling diabolically, each armed with a club. The wretched prisoners were to be forced to "run the gauntlet" which would probably have killed them. They were saved by the chief who commanded the war-party, and who, on the persuasion of a French officer, claimed them as his own and forbade the game; upon which, according to rule in such cases, the rest abandoned it. On this same day the missionary met troops of Indians conducting several bands of English prisoners along the road that led through the forest from the camp of Lévis. Each of the captives was held by a cord made fast about the neck; and the sweat was starting from their brows in the extremity of their horror and distress. Roubaud's tent was at this time in the camp of the Ottawas. He presently saw a large number of them squatted about a fire, before which meat was roasting on sticks stuck in the ground; and, approaching, he saw that it was the flesh of an Englishman, other parts of which were boiling in a kettle, while near by sat eight or ten of the prisoners, forced to see their comrade devoured. The horror-stricken priest began to remonstrate; on which a young savage fiercely replied in broken French: "You have French taste; I have Indian. This is good meat for me;" and the feasters pressed him to share it.

Bougainville says that this abomination could not be prevented; which only means that if force had been used to stop it, the Ottawas would have gone home in a rage. They were therefore left to finish their meal undisturbed. Having eaten one of their prisoners, they began to treat the rest with the utmost kindness, bringing them white bread, and attending to all their wants--a seeming change of heart due to the fact that they were a valuable commodity, for which the owners hoped to get a good price at Montreal. Montcalm wished to send them thither at once, to which after long debate the Indians consented, demanding, however, a receipt in full, and bargaining that the captives should be supplied with shoes and blankets.[497]

[Footnote 497: Journal de l'Expédition contre le Fort George [William Henry] du 12 Juillet au 16 Août, 1757. Bougainville, Journal. Lettre du P. Roubaud.]

These unfortunates belonged to a detachment of three hundred provincials, chiefly New Jersey men, sent from Fort William Henry under command of Colonel Parker to reconnoitre the French outposts. Montcalm's scouts discovered them; on which a band of Indians, considerably more numerous, went to meet them under a French partisan named Corbière, and ambushed themselves not far from Sabbath Day Point. Parker had rashly divided his force; and at daybreak of the twenty-sixth of July three of his boats fell into the snare, and were captured without a shot. Three others followed, in ignorance of what had happened, and shared the fate of the first. When the rest drew near, they were greeted by a deadly volley from the thickets, and a swarm of canoes darted out upon them. The men were seized with such a panic that some of them jumped into the water to escape, while the Indians leaped after them and speared them with their lances like fish. "Terrified," says Bougainville, "by the sight of these monsters, their agility, their firing, and their yells, they surrendered almost without resistance." About a hundred, however, made their escape. The rest were killed or captured, and three of the bodies were eaten on the spot. The journalist adds that the victory so elated the Indians that they became insupportable; "but here in the forests of America we can no more do without them than without cavalry on the plain."[498]

[Footnote 498: Bougainville, Journal. Malartic, Journal. Montcalm à Vaudreuil, 27 Juillet, 1757. Webb to Loudon, 1 Aug. 1757. Webb to Delancey, 30 July, 1757. Journal de l'Expédition contre le Fort George. London Magazine, 1757, 457. Miles, French and Indian Wars. Boston Gazette, 15 Aug. 1757.]

Another success at about the same time did not tend to improve their manners. A hundred and fifty of them, along with a few Canadians under Marin, made a dash at Fort Edward, killed or drove in the pickets, and returned with thirty-two scalps and a prisoner. It was found, however, that the scalps were far from representing an equal number of heads, the Indians having learned the art of making two or three out of one by judicious division.[499]

[Footnote 499: This affair was much exaggerated at the time. I follow Bougainville, who had the facts from Marin. According to him, the thirty-two scalps represented eleven killed; which exactly answers to the English loss as stated by Colonel Frye in a letter from Fort Edward.]

Preparations were urged on with the utmost energy. Provisions, camp equipage, ammunition, cannon, and bateaux were dragged by gangs of men up the road from the camp of Lévis to the head of the rapids. The work went on through heat and rain, by day and night, till, at the end of July, all was done. Now, on the eve of departure, Montcalm, anxious for harmony among his red allies, called them to a grand council near the camp of Rigaud. Forty-one tribes and sub-tribes, Christian and heathen, from the east and from the west, were represented in it. Here were the mission savages,--Iroquois of Caughnawaga, Two Mountains, and La Présentation; Hurons of Lorette and Detroit; Nipissings of Lake Nipissing; Abenakis of St. Francis, Becancour, Missisqui, and the Penobscot; Algonkins of Three Rivers and Two Mountains; Micmacs and Malecites from Acadia: in all eight hundred chiefs and warriors. With these came the heathen of the west,--Ottawas of seven distinct bands; Ojibwas from Lake Superior, and Mississagas from the region of Lakes Erie and Huron; Pottawattamies and Menomonies from Lake Michigan; Sacs, Foxes, and Winnebagoes from Wisconsin; Miamis from the prairies of Illinois, and Iowas from the banks of the Des Moines: nine hundred and seventy-nine chiefs and warriors, men of the forests and men of the plains, hunters of the moose and hunters of the buffalo, bearers of steel hatchets and stone war-clubs, of French guns and of flint-headed arrows. All sat in silence, decked with ceremonial paint, scalp-locks, eagle plumes, or horns of buffalo; and the dark and wild assemblage was edged with white uniforms of officers from France, who came in numbers to the spectacle. Other officers were also here, all belonging to the colony. They had been appointed to the command of the Indian allies, over whom, however, they had little or no real authority. First among them was the bold and hardy Saint-Luc de la Corne, who was called general of the Indians; and under him were others, each assigned to some tribe or group of tribes,--the intrepid Marin; Charles Langlade, who had left his squaw wife at Michillimackinac to join the war; Niverville, Langis, La Plante, Hertel, Longueuil, Herbin, Lorimier, Sabrevois, and Fleurimont; men familiar from childhood with forests and savages. Each tribe had its interpreter, often as lawless as those with whom he had spent his life; and for the converted tribes there were three missionaries,--Piquet for the Iroquois, Mathevet for the Nipissings, who were half heathen, and Roubaud for the Abenakis.[500]

[Footnote 500: The above is chiefly from Tableau des Sauvages qui se trouvent à l'Armée du Marquis de Montcalm, le 28 Juillet, 1757. Forty-one tribes and sub-tribes are here named, some, however, represented by only three or four warriors. Besides those set down under the head of Christians, it is stated that a few of the Ottawas of Detroit and Michillimackinac still retained the faith.]

There was some complaint among the Indians because they were crowded upon by the officers who came as spectators. This difficulty being removed, the council opened, Montcalm having already explained his plans to the chiefs and told them the part he expected them to play.

Pennahouel, chief of the Ottawas, and senior of all the Assembly, rose and said: "My father, I, who have counted more moons than any here, thank you for the good words you have spoken. I approve them. Nobody ever spoke better. It is the Manitou of War who inspires you."

Kikensick, chief of the Nipissings, rose in behalf of the Christian Indians, and addressed the heathen of the west. "Brothers, we thank you for coming to help us defend our lands against the English. Our cause is good. The Master of Life is on our side. Can you doubt it, brothers, after the great blow you have just struck? It covers you with glory. The lake, red with the blood of Corlaer [the English] bears witness forever to your achievement. We too share your glory, and are proud of what you have done." Then, turning to Montcalm: "We are even more glad than you, my father, who have crossed the great water, not for your own sake, but to obey the great King and defend his children. He has bound us all together by the most solemn of ties. Let us take care that nothing shall separate us."

The various interpreters, each in turn, having explained this speech to the Assembly, it was received with ejaculations of applause; and when they had ceased, Montcalm spoke as follows: "Children, I am delighted to see you all joined in this good work. So long as you remain one, the English cannot resist you. The great King has sent me to protect and defend you; but above all he has charged me to make you happy and unconquerable, by establishing among you the union which ought to prevail among brothers, children of one father, the great Onontio." Then he held out a prodigious wampum belt of six thousand beads: "Take this sacred pledge of his word. The union of the beads of which it is made is the sign of your united strength. By it I bind you all together, so that none of you can separate from the rest till the English are defeated and their fort destroyed."

Pennahouel took up the belt and said: "Behold, brothers, a circle drawn around us by the great Onontio. Let none of us go out from it; for so long as we keep in it, the Master of Life will help all our undertakings." Other chiefs spoke to the same effect, and the council closed in perfect harmony.[501] Its various members bivouacked together at the camp by the lake, and by their carelessness soon set it on fire; whence the place became known as the Burned Camp. Those from the missions confessed their sins all day; while their heathen brothers hung an old coat and a pair of leggings on a pole as tribute to the Manitou. This greatly embarrassed the three priests, who were about to say Mass, but doubted whether they ought to say it in presence of a sacrifice to the devil. Hereupon they took counsel of Montcalm. "Better say it so than not at all," replied the military casuist. Brandy being prudently denied them, the allies grew restless; and the greater part paddled up the lake to a spot near the place where Parker had been defeated. Here they encamped to wait the arrival of the army, and amused themselves meantime with killing rattlesnakes, there being a populous "den" of those reptiles among the neighboring rocks.

[Footnote 501: Bougainville, Journal.]

Montcalm sent a circular letter to the regular officers, urging them to dispense for a while with luxuries, and even comforts. "We have but few bateaux, and these are so filled with stores that a large division of the army must go by land;" and he directed that everything not absolutely necessary should be left behind, and that a canvas shelter to every two officers should serve them for a tent, and a bearskin for a bed. "Yet I do not forbid a mattress," he adds. "Age and infirmities may make it necessary to some; but I shall not have one myself, and make no doubt that all who can will willingly imitate me."[502]

[Footnote 502: Circulaire du Marquis de Montcalm, 25 Juillet, 1757.]

The bateaux lay ready by the shore, but could not carry the whole force; and Lévis received orders to march by the side of the lake with twenty-five hundred men, Canadians, regulars, and Iroquois. He set out at daybreak of the thirtieth of July, his men carrying nothing but their knapsacks, blankets, and weapons. Guided by the unerring Indians, they climbed the steep gorge at the side of Rogers Rock, gained the valley beyond, and marched southward along a Mohawk trail which threaded the forest in a course parallel to the lake. The way was of the roughest; many straggled from the line, and two officers completely broke down. The first destination of the party was the mouth of Ganouskie Bay, now called Northwest Bay, where they were to wait for Montcalm, and kindle three fires as a signal that they had reached the rendezvous.[503]

[Footnote 503: Guerre du Canada, par le Chevalier de Lévis. This manuscript of Lévis is largely in the nature of a journal.]

Montcalm left a detachment to hold Ticonderoga; and then, on the first of August, at two in the afternoon, he embarked at the Burned Camp with all his remaining force. Including those with Lévis, the expedition counted about seven thousand six hundred men, of whom more than sixteen hundred were Indians.[504] At five in the afternoon they reached the place where the Indians, having finished their rattlesnake hunt, were smoking their pipes and waiting for the army. The red warriors embarked, and joined the French flotilla; and now, as evening drew near, was seen one of those wild pageantries of war which Lake George has often witnessed. A restless multitude of birch canoes, filled with painted savages, glided by shores and islands, like troops of swimming water-fowl. Two hundred and fifty bateaux came next, moved by sail and oar, some bearing the Canadian militia, and some the battalions of Old France in trim and gay attire: first, La Reine and Languedoc; then the colony regulars; then La Sarre and Guienne; then the Canadian brigade of Courtemanche; then the cannon and mortars, each on a platform sustained by two bateaux lashed side by side, and rowed by the militia of Saint-Ours; then the battalions of Béarn and Royal Roussillon; then the Canadians of Gaspé, with the provision-bateaux and the field-hospital; and, lastly, a rear guard of regulars closed the line. So, under the flush of sunset, they held their course along the romantic lake, to play their part in the historic drama that lends a stern enchantment to its fascinating scenery. They passed the Narrows in mist and darkness; and when, a little before dawn, they rounded the high promontory of Tongue Mountain, they saw, far on the right, three fiery sparks shining through the gloom. These were the signal-fires of Lévis, to tell them that he had reached the appointed spot.[505]

[Footnote 504: État de l'Armée Française devant le Fort George, autrement Guillaume-Henri, le 3 Août, 1757. Tableau des Sauvages qui se trouvent à l'Armée du Marquis de Montcalm, le 28 Juillet, 1757. This gives a total of 1,799 Indians, of whom some afterwards left the army. État de l'Armée du Roi en Canada, sur le Lac St. Sacrement et dans les Camps de Carillon, le 29 Juillet, 1757. This gives a total of 8,019 men, of whom about four hundred were left in garrison at Ticonderoga.]

[Footnote 505: The site of the present village of Bolton.]

Lévis had arrived the evening before, after his hard march through the sultry midsummer forest. His men had now rested for a night, and at ten in the morning he marched again. Montcalm followed at noon, and coasted the western shore, till, towards evening, he found Lévis waiting for him by the margin of a small bay not far from the English fort, though hidden from it by a projecting point of land. Canoes and bateaux were drawn up on the beach, and the united forces made their bivouac together.

The earthen mounds of Fort William Henry still stand by the brink of Lake George; and seated at the sunset of an August day under the pines that cover them, one gazes on a scene of soft and soothing beauty, where dreamy waters reflect the glories of the mountains and the sky. As it is to-day, so it was then; all breathed repose and peace. The splash of some leaping trout, or the dipping wing of a passing swallow, alone disturbed the summer calm of that unruffled mirror.

About ten o'clock at night two boats set out from the fort to reconnoitre. They were passing a point of land on their left, two miles or more down the lake, when the men on board descried through the gloom a strange object against the bank; and they rowed towards it to learn what it might be. It was an awning over the bateaux that carried Roubaud and his brother missionaries. As the rash oarsmen drew near, the bleating of a sheep in one of the French provision-boats warned them of danger; and turning, they pulled for their lives towards the eastern shore. Instantly more than a thousand Indians threw themselves into their canoes and dashed in hot pursuit, making the lake and the mountains ring with the din of their war-whoops. The fugitives had nearly reached land when their pursuers opened fire. They replied; shot one Indian dead, and wounded another; then snatched their oars again, and gained the beach. But the whole savage crew was upon them. Several were killed, three were taken, and the rest escaped in the dark woods.[506] The prisoners were brought before Montcalm, and gave him valuable information of the strength and position of the English.[507]

[Footnote 506: Lettre du Père Roubaud, 21 Oct. 1757. Roubaud, who saw the whole, says that twelve hundred Indians joined the chase, and that their yells were terrific.]

[Footnote 507: The remains of Fort William Henry are now--1882--crowded between a hotel and the wharf and station of a railway. While I write, a scheme is on foot to level the whole for other railway structures. When I first knew the place the ground was in much the same state as in the time of Montcalm.]

The Indian who was killed was a noted chief of the Nipissings; and his tribesmen howled in grief for their bereavement. They painted his face with vermilion, tied feathers in his hair, hung pendants in his ears and nose, clad him in a resplendent war-dress, put silver bracelets on his arms, hung a gorget on his breast with a flame colored ribbon, and seated him in state on the top of a hillock, with his lance in his hand, his gun in the hollow of his arm, his tomahawk in his belt, and his kettle by his side. Then they all crouched about him in lugubrious silence. A funeral harangue followed; and next a song and solemn dance to the booming of the Indian drum. In the gray of the morning they buried him as he sat, and placed food in the grave for his journey to the land of souls.[508]

[Footnote 508: Lettre du Père Roubaud.]

As the sun rose above the eastern mountains the French camp was all astir. The column of Lévis, with Indians to lead the way, moved through the forest towards the fort, and Montcalm followed with the main body; then the artillery boats rounded the point that had hid them from the sight of the English, saluting them as they did so with musketry and cannon; while a host of savages put out upon the lake, ranged their canoes abreast in a line from shore to shore, and advanced slowly, with measured paddle-strokes and yells of defiance.

The position of the enemy was full in sight before them. At the head of the lake, towards the right, stood the fort, close to the edge of the water. On its left was a marsh; then the rough piece of ground where Johnson had encamped two years before; then a low, flat, rocky hill, crowned with an entrenched camp; and, lastly, on the extreme left, another marsh. Far around the fort and up the slopes of the western mountain the forest had been cut down and burned, and the ground was cumbered with blackened stumps and charred carcasses and limbs of fallen trees, strewn in savage disorder one upon another.[509] This was the work of Winslow in the autumn before. Distant shouts and war-cries, the clatter of musketry, white puffs of smoke in the dismal clearing and along the scorched edge of the bordering forest, told that Lévis' Indians were skirmishing with parties of the English, who had gone out to save the cattle roaming in the neighborhood, and burn some out-buildings that would have favored the besiegers. Others were taking down the tents that stood on a plateau near the foot of the mountain on the right, and moving them to the entrenchment on the hill. The garrison sallied from the fort to support their comrades, and for a time the firing was hot.

[Footnote 509: Précis des Événements de la Campagne de 1757 en la Nouvelle France.]

Fort William Henry was an irregular bastioned square, formed by embankments of gravel surmounted by a rampart of heavy logs, laid in tiers crossed one upon another, the interstices filled with earth. The lake protected it on the north, the marsh on the east, and ditches with chevaux-de-frise on the south and west. Seventeen cannon, great and small, besides several mortars and swivels, were mounted upon it;[510] and a brave Scotch veteran, Lieutenant-Colonel Monro, of the thirty-fifth regiment, was in command.

[Footnote 510: État des Effets et Munitions de Guerre qui se sont trouvés au Fort Guillaume-Henri. There were six more guns in the entrenched camp.]

General Webb lay fourteen miles distant at Fort Edward, with twenty-six hundred men, chiefly provincials. On the twenty-fifth of July he had made a visit to Fort William Henry, examined the place, given some orders, and returned on the twenty-ninth. He then wrote to the Governor of New York, telling him that the French were certainly coming, begging him to send up the militia, and saying: "I am determined to march to Fort William Henry with the whole army under my command as soon as I shall hear of the farther approach of the enemy." Instead of doing so he waited three days, and then sent up a detachment of two hundred regulars under Lieutenant-Colonel Young, and eight hundred Massachusetts men under Colonel Frye. This raised the force at the lake to two thousand and two hundred, including sailors and mechanics, and reduced that of Webb to sixteen hundred, besides half as many more distributed at Albany and the intervening forts.[511] If, according to his spirited intention, he should go to the rescue of Monro, he must leave some of his troops behind him to protect the lower posts from a possible French inroad by way of South Bay. Thus his power of aiding Monro was slight, so rashly had Loudon, intent on Louisburg, left this frontier open to attack. The defect, however, was as much in Webb himself as in his resources. His conduct in the past year had raised doubts of his personal courage; and this was the moment for answering them. Great as was the disparity of numbers, the emergency would have justified an attempt to save Monro at any risk. That officer sent him a hasty note, written at nine o'clock on the morning of the third, telling him that the French were in sight on the lake; and, in the next night, three rangers came to Fort Edward, bringing another short note, dated at six in the evening, announcing that the firing had begun, and closing with the words: "I believe you will think it proper to send a reinforcement as soon as possible." Now, if ever, was the time to move, before the fort was invested and access cut off. But Webb lay quiet, sending expresses to New England for help which could not possibly arrive in time. On the next night another note came from Monro to say that the French were upon him in great numbers, well supplied with artillery, but that the garrison were all in good spirits. "I make no doubt," wrote the hardpressed officer, "that you will soon send us a reinforcement;" and again on the same day: "We are very certain that a part of the enemy have got between you and us upon the high road, and would therefore be glad (if it meets with your approbation) the whole army was marched."[512] But Webb gave no sign.[513]

[Footnote 511: Frye, Journal of the Attack of Fort William Henry. Webb to Loudon, 1 Aug. 1757. Ibid., 5 Aug. 1757.]

[Footnote 512: Copy of four Letters from Lieutenant-Colonel Monro to Major-General Webb, enclosed in the General's Letter of the fifth of August to the Earl of Loudon.]

[Footnote 513: "The number of troops remaining under my Command at this place [Fort Edward], excluding the Posts on Hudson's River, amounts to but sixteen hundred men fit for duty, with which Army, so much inferior to that of the enemy, I did not think it prudent to pursue my first intentions of Marching to their Assistance." Webb to Loudon, 5 Aug. 1757.]

When the skirmishing around the fort was over, La Corne, with a body of Indians, occupied the road that led to Fort Edward, and Lévis encamped hard by to support him, while Montcalm proceeded to examine the ground and settle his plan of attack. He made his way to the rear of the entrenched camp and reconnoitred it, hoping to carry it by assault; but it had a breastwork of stones and logs, and he thought the attempt too hazardous. The ground where he stood was that where Dieskau had been defeated; and as the fate of his predecessor was not of flattering augury, he resolved to besiege the fort in form.

He chose for the site of his operations the ground now covered by the village of Caldwell. A little to the north of it was a ravine, beyond which he formed his main camp, while Lévis occupied a tract of dry ground beside the marsh, whence he could easily move to intercept succors from Fort Edward on the one hand, or repel a sortie from Fort William Henry on the other. A brook ran down the ravine and entered the lake at a small cove protected from the fire of the fort by a point of land; and at this place, still called Artillery Cove, Montcalm prepared to debark his cannon and mortars.

Having made his preparations, he sent Fontbrune, one of his aides-de-camp, with a letter to Monro. "I owe it to humanity," he wrote, "to summon you to surrender. At present I can restrain the savages, and make them observe the terms of a capitulation, as I might not have power to do under other circumstances; and an obstinate defence on your part could only retard the capture of the place a few days, and endanger an unfortunate garrison which cannot be relieved, in consequence of the dispositions I have made. I demand a decisive answer within an hour." Monro replied that he and his soldiers would defend themselves to the last. While the flags of truce were flying, the Indians swarmed over the fields before the fort; and when they learned the result, an Abenaki chief shouted in broken French: "You won't surrender, eh! Fire away then, and fight your best; for if I catch you, you shall get no quarter." Monro emphasized his refusal by a general discharge of his cannon.

The trenches were opened on the night of the fourth,--a task of extreme difficulty, as the ground was covered by a profusion of half-burned stumps, roots, branches, and fallen trunks. Eight hundred men toiled till daylight with pick, spade, and axe, while the cannon from the fort flashed through the darkness, and grape and round-shot whistled and screamed over their heads. Some of the English balls reached the camp beyond the ravine, and disturbed the slumbers of the officers off duty, as they lay wrapped in their blankets and bear-skins. Before daybreak the first parallel was made; a battery was nearly finished on the left, and another was begun on the right. The men now worked under cover, safe in their burrows; one gang relieved another, and the work went on all day.

The Indians were far from doing what was expected of them. Instead of scouting in the direction of Fort Edward to learn the movements of the enemy and prevent surprise, they loitered about the camp and in the trenches, or amused themselves by firing at the fort from behind stumps and logs. Some, in imitation of the French, dug little trenches for themselves, in which they wormed their way towards the rampart, and now and then picked off an artillery-man, not without loss on their own side. On the afternoon of the fifth, Montcalm invited them to a council, gave them belts of wampum, and mildly remonstrated with them. "Why expose yourselves without necessity? I grieve bitterly over the losses that you have met, for the least among you is precious to me. No doubt it is a good thing to annoy the English; but that is not the main point. You ought to inform me of everything the enemy is doing, and always keep parties on the road between the two forts." And he gently hinted that their place was not in his camp, but in that of Lévis, where missionaries were provided for such of them as were Christians, and food and ammunition for them all. They promised, with excellent docility, to do everything he wished, but added that there was something on their hearts. Being encouraged to relieve themselves of the burden, they complained that they had not been consulted as to the management of the siege, but were expected to obey orders like slaves. "We know more about fighting in the woods than you," said their orator; "ask our advice, and you will be the better for it."[514]

[Footnote 514: Bougainville, Journal.]

Montcalm assured them that if they had been neglected, it was only through the hurry and confusion of the time; expressed high appreciation of their talents for bush-fighting, promised them ample satisfaction, and ended by telling them that in the morning they should hear the big guns. This greatly pleased them, for they were extremely impatient for the artillery to begin. About sunrise the battery of the left opened with eight heavy cannon and a mortar, joined, on the next morning, by the battery of the right, with eleven pieces more. The fort replied with spirit. The cannon thundered all day, and from a hundred peaks and crags the astonished wilderness roared back the sound. The Indians were delighted. They wanted to point the guns; and to humor them, they were now and then allowed to do so. Others lay behind logs and fallen trees, and yelled their satisfaction when they saw the splinters fly from the wooden rampart.

Day after day the weary roar of the distant cannonade fell on the ears of Webb in his camp at Fort Edward. "I have not yet received the least reinforcement," he writes to Loudon; "this is the disagreeable situation we are at present in. The fort, by the heavy firing we hear from the lake, is still in our possession; but I fear it cannot long hold out against so warm a cannonading if I am not reinforced by a sufficient number of militia to march to their relief." The militia were coming; but it was impossible that many could reach him in less than a week. Those from New York alone were within call, and two thousand of them arrived soon after he sent Loudon the above letter. Then, by stripping all the forts below, he could bring together forty-five hundred men; while several French deserters assured him that Montcalm had nearly twelve thousand. To advance to the relief of Monro with a force so inferior, through a defile of rocks, forests, and mountains, made by nature for ambuscades,--and this too with troops who had neither the steadiness of regulars nor the bush-fighting skill of Indians,--was an enterprise for firmer nerve than his.

He had already warned Monro to expect no help from him. At midnight of the fourth, Captain Bartman, his aide-de-camp, wrote: "The General has ordered me to acquaint you he does not think it prudent to attempt a junction or to assist you till reinforced by the militia of the colonies, for the immediate march of which repeated expresses have been sent." The letter then declared that the French were in complete possession of the road between the two forts, that a prisoner just brought in reported their force in men and cannon to be very great, and that, unless the militia came soon, Monro had better make what terms he could with the enemy.[515]

[Footnote 515: Frye, in his Journal, gives the letter in full. A spurious translation of it is appended to a piece called Jugement impartial sur les Opérations militaires en Canada.]

The chance was small that this letter would reach its destination; and in fact the bearer was killed by La Corne's Indians, who, in stripping the body, found the hidden paper, and carried it to the General. Montcalm kept it several days, till the English rampart was half battered down; and then, after saluting his enemy with a volley from all his cannon, he sent it with a graceful compliment to Monro. It was Bougainville who carried it, preceded by a drummer and a flag. He was met at the foot of the glacis, blindfolded, and led through the fort and along the edge of the lake to the entrenched camp, where Monro was at the time. "He returned many thanks," writes the emissary in his Diary, "for the courtesy of our nation, and protested his joy at having to do with so generous an enemy. This was his answer to the Marquis de Montcalm. Then they led me back, always with eyes blinded; and our batteries began to fire again as soon as we thought that the English grenadiers who escorted me had had time to re-enter the fort. I hope General Webb's letter may induce the English to surrender the sooner."[516]

[Footnote 516: Bougainville, Journal. Bougainville au Ministre, 19 Août, 1757.]

By this time the sappers had worked their way to the angle of the lake, where they were stopped by a marshy hollow, beyond which was a tract of high ground, reaching to the fort and serving as the garden of the garrison.[517] Logs and fascines in large quantities were thrown into the hollow, and hurdles were laid over them to form a causeway for the cannon. Then the sap was continued up the acclivity beyond, a trench was opened in the garden, and a battery begun, not two hundred and fifty yards from the fort. The Indians, in great number, crawled forward among the beans, maize, and cabbages, and lay there ensconced. On the night of the seventh, two men came out of the fort, apparently to reconnoitre, with a view to a sortie, when they were greeted by a general volley and a burst of yells which echoed among the mountains; followed by responsive whoops pealing through the darkness from the various camps and lurking-places of the savage warriors far and near.

[Footnote 517: Now (1882) the site of Fort William Henry Hotel, with its grounds. The hollow is partly filled by the main road of Caldwell.]

The position of the besieged was now deplorable. More than three hundred of them had been killed and wounded; small-pox was raging in the fort; the place was a focus of infection, and the casemates were crowded with the sick. A sortie from the entrenched camp and another from the fort had been repulsed with loss. All their large cannon and mortars had been burst, or disabled by shot; only seven small pieces were left fit for service;[518] and the whole of Montcalm's thirty-one cannon and fifteen mortars and howitzers would soon open fire, while the walls were already breached, and an assault was imminent. Through the night of the eighth they fired briskly from all their remaining pieces. In the morning the officers held a council, and all agreed to surrender if honorable terms could be had. A white flag was raised, a drum was beat, and Lieutenant-Colonel Young, mounted on horseback, for a shot in the foot had disabled him from walking, went, followed by a few soldiers, to the tent of Montcalm.

[Footnote 518: Frye, Journal.]

It was agreed that the English troops should march out with the honors of war, and be escorted to Fort Edward by a detachment of French troops; that they should not serve for eighteen months; and that all French prisoners captured in America since the war began should be given up within three months. The stores, munitions, and artillery were to be the prize of the victors, except one field-piece, which the garrison were to retain in recognition of their brave defence.

Before signing the capitulation Montcalm called the Indian chiefs to council, and asked them to consent to the conditions, and promise to restrain their young warriors from any disorder. They approved everything and promised everything. The garrison then evacuated the fort, and marched to join their comrades in the entrenched camp, which was included in the surrender. No sooner were they gone than a crowd of Indians clambered through the embrasures in search of rum and plunder. All the sick men unable to leave their beds were instantly butchered.[519] "I was witness of this spectacle," says the missionary Roubaud; "I saw one of these barbarians come out of the casemates with a human head in his hand, from which the blood ran in streams, and which he paraded as if he had got the finest prize in the world." There was little left to plunder; and the Indians, joined by the more lawless of the Canadians, turned their attention to the entrenched camp, where all the English were now collected.

[Footnote 519: Attestation of William Arbuthnot, Captain in Frye's Regiment.]

The French guard stationed there could not or would not keep out the rabble. By the advice of Montcalm the English stove their rum-barrels; but the Indians were drunk already with homicidal rage, and the glitter of their vicious eyes told of the devil within. They roamed among the tents, intrusive, insolent, their visages besmirched with war-paint; grinning like fiends as they handled, in anticipation of the knife, the long hair of cowering women, of whom, as well as of children, there were many in the camp, all crazed with fright. Since the last war the New England border population had regarded Indians with a mixture of detestation and horror. Their mysterious warfare of ambush and surprise, their midnight onslaughts, their butcheries, their burnings, and all their nameless atrocities, had been for years the theme of fireside story; and the dread they excited was deepened by the distrust and dejection of the time. The confusion in the camp lasted through the afternoon. "The Indians," says Bougainville, "wanted to plunder the chests of the English; the latter resisted; and there was fear that serious disorder would ensue. The Marquis de Montcalm ran thither immediately, and used every means to restore tranquillity: prayers, threats, caresses, interposition of the officers and interpreters who have some influence over these savages."[520] "We shall be but too happy if we can prevent a massacre. Detestable position! of which nobody who has not been in it can have any idea, and which makes victory itself a sorrow to the victors. The Marquis spared no efforts to prevent the rapacity of the savages and, I must say it, of certain persons associated with them, from resulting in something worse than plunder. At last, at nine o'clock in the evening, order seemed restored. The Marquis even induced the Indians to promise that, besides the escort agreed upon in the capitulation, two chiefs for each tribe should accompany the English on their way to Fort Edward."[521] He also ordered La Corne and the other Canadian officers attached to the Indians to see that no violence took place. He might well have done more. In view of the disorders of the afternoon, it would not have been too much if he had ordered the whole body of regular troops, whom alone he could trust for the purpose, to hold themselves ready to move to the spot in case of outbreak, and shelter their defeated foes behind a hedge of bayonets.

[Footnote 520: Bougainville au Ministre, 19 Août, 1757.]

[Footnote 521: Bougainville, Journal.]

Bougainville was not to see what ensued; for Montcalm now sent him to Montreal, as a special messenger to carry news of the victory. He embarked at ten o'clock. Returning daylight found him far down the lake; and as he looked on its still bosom flecked with mists, and its quiet mountains sleeping under the flush of dawn, there was nothing in the wild tranquillity of the scene to suggest the tragedy which even then was beginning on the shore he had left behind.

The English in their camp had passed a troubled night, agitated by strange rumors. In the morning something like a panic seized them; for they distrusted not the Indians only, but the Canadians. In their haste to be gone they got together at daybreak, before the escort of three hundred regulars had arrived. They had their muskets, but no ammunition; and few or none of the provincials had bayonets. Early as it was, the Indians were on the alert; and, indeed, since midnight great numbers of them had been prowling about the skirts of the camp, showing, says Colonel Frye, "more than usual malice in their looks." Seventeen wounded men of his regiment lay in huts, unable to join the march. In the preceding afternoon Miles Whitworth, the regimental surgeon, had passed them over to the care of a French surgeon, according to an agreement made at the time of the surrender; but, the Frenchman being absent, the other remained with them attending to their wants. The French surgeon had caused special sentinels to be posted for their protection. These were now removed, at the moment when they were needed most; upon which, about five o'clock in the morning, the Indians entered the huts, dragged out the inmates, and tomahawked and scalped them all, before the eyes of Whitworth, and in presence of La Corne and other Canadian officers, as well as of a French guard stationed within forty feet of the spot; and, declares the surgeon under oath, "none, either officer or soldier, protected the said wounded men."[522] The opportune butchery relieved them of a troublesome burden.

[Footnote 522: Affidavit of Miles Whitworth. See Appendix F.]

A scene of plundering now began. The escort had by this time arrived, and Monro complained to the officers that the capitulation was broken; but got no other answer than advice to give up the baggage to the Indians in order to appease them. To this the English at length agreed; but it only increased the excitement of the mob. They demanded rum; and some of the soldiers, afraid to refuse, gave it to them from their canteens, thus adding fuel to the flame. When, after much difficulty, the column at last got out of the camp and began to move along the road that crossed the rough plain between the entrenchment and the forest, the Indians crowded upon them, impeded their march, snatched caps, coats, and weapons from men and officers, tomahawked those that resisted, and, seizing upon shrieking women and children, dragged them off or murdered them on the spot. It is said that some of the interpreters secretly fomented the disorder.[523] Suddenly there rose the screech of the war-whoop. At this signal of butchery, which was given by Abenaki Christians from the mission of the Penobscot,[524] a mob of savages rushed upon the New Hampshire men at the rear of the column, and killed or dragged away eighty of them.[525] A frightful tumult ensued, when Montcalm, Lévis, Bourlamaque, and many other French officers, who had hastened from their camp on the first news of disturbance, threw themselves among the Indians, and by promises and threats tried to allay their frenzy. "Kill me, but spare the English who are under my protection," exclaimed Montcalm. He took from one of them a young officer whom the savage had seized; upon which several other Indians immediately tomahawked their prisoners, lest they too should be taken from them. One writer says that a French grenadier was killed and two wounded in attempting to restore order; but the statement is doubtful. The English seemed paralyzed, and fortunately did not attempt a resistance, which, without ammunition as they were, would have ended in a general massacre. Their broken column straggled forward in wild disorder, amid the din of whoops and shrieks, till they reached the French advance-guard, which consisted of Canadians; and here they demanded protection from the officers, who refused to give it, telling them that they must take to the woods and shift for themselves. Frye was seized by a number of Indians, who, brandishing spears and tomahawks, threatened him with death and tore off his clothing, leaving nothing but breeches, shoes, and shirt. Repelled by the officers of the guard, he made for the woods. A Connecticut soldier who was present says of him that he leaped upon an Indian who stood in his way, disarmed and killed him, and then escaped; but Frye himself does not mention the incident. Captain Burke, also of the Massachusetts regiment, was stripped, after a violent struggle, of all his clothes; then broke loose, gained the woods, spent the night shivering in the thick grass of a marsh, and on the next day reached Fort Edward. Jonathan Carver, a provincial volunteer, declares that, when the tumult was at its height, he saw officers of the French army walking about at a little distance and talking with seeming unconcern. Three or four Indians seized him, brandished their tomahawks over his head, and tore off most of his clothes, while he vainly claimed protection from a sentinel, who called him an English dog, and violently pushed him back among his tormentors. Two of them were dragging him towards the neighboring swamp, when an English officer, stripped of everything but his scarlet breeches, ran by. One of Carver's captors sprang upon him, but was thrown to the ground; whereupon the other went to the aid of his comrade and drove his tomahawk into the back of the Englishman. As Carver turned to run, an English boy, about twelve years old, clung to him and begged for help. They ran on together for a moment, when the boy was seized, dragged from his protector, and, as Carver judged by his shrieks, was murdered. He himself escaped to the forest, and after three days of famine reached Fort Edward.

[Footnote 523: This is stated by Pouchot and Bougainville; the latter of whom confirms the testimony of the English witnesses, that Canadian officers present did nothing to check the Indians.]

[Footnote 524: See note, end of chapter.]

[Footnote 525: Belknap, History of New Hampshire, says that eighty were killed. Governor Wentworth, writing immediately after the event, says "killed or captivated."]

The bonds of discipline seem for the time to have been completely broken; for while Montcalm and his chief officers used every effort to restore order, even at the risk of their lives, many other officers, chiefly of the militia, failed atrociously to do their duty. How many English were killed it is impossible to tell with exactness. Roubaud says that he saw forty or fifty corpses scattered about the field. Lévis says fifty; which does not include the sick and wounded before murdered in the camp and fort. It is certain that six or seven hundred persons were carried off, stripped, and otherwise maltreated. Montcalm succeeded in recovering more than four hundred of them in the course of the day; and many of the French officers did what they could to relieve their wants by buying back from their captors the clothing that had been torn from them. Many of the fugitives had taken refuge in the fort, whither Monro himself had gone to demand protection for his followers; and here Roubaud presently found a crowd of half-frenzied women, crying in anguish for husbands and children. All the refugees and redeemed prisoners were afterwards conducted to the entrenched camp, where food and shelter were provided for them and a strong guard set for their protection until the fifteenth, when they were sent under an escort to Fort Edward. Here cannon had been fired at intervals to guide those who had fled to the woods, whence they came dropping in from day to day, half dead with famine.

On the morning after the massacre the Indians decamped in a body and set out for Montreal, carrying with them their plunder and some two hundred prisoners, who, it is said, could not be got out of their hands. The soldiers were set to the work of demolishing the English fort; and the task occupied several days. The barracks were torn down, and the huge pine-logs of the rampart thrown into a heap. The dead bodies that filled the casemates were added to the mass, and fire was set to the whole. The mighty funeral pyre blazed all night. Then, on the sixteenth, the army reimbarked. The din of ten thousand combatants, the rage, the terror, the agony, were gone; and no living thing was left but the wolves that gathered from the mountains to feast upon the dead.[526]

[Footnote 526: The foregoing chapter rests largely on evidence never before brought to light, including the minute Journal of Bougainville,--document which can hardly be commended too much,--the correspondence of Webb, a letter of Colonel Frye, written just after the massacre, and a journal of the siege, sent by him to Governor Pownall as his official report. Extracts from these, as well as from the affidavit of Dr. Whitworth, which is also new evidence, are given in Appendix F.

The Diary of Malartic and the correspondence of Montcalm, Lévis, Vaudreuil, and Bigot, also throw light on the campaign, as well as numerous reports of the siege, official and semi-official. The long letter of the Jesuit Roubaud, printed anonymously in the Lettres Édifiantes et Curieuses, gives a remarkably vivid account of what he saw. He was an intelligent person, who may be trusted where he has no motive for lying. Curious particulars about him will be found in a paper called, The deplorable Case of Mr. Roubaud, printed in the Historical Magazine, Second Series, VIII. 282. Compare Verreau, Report on Canadian Archives, 1874.

Impressions of the massacre at Fort William Henry have hitherto been derived chiefly from the narrative of Captain Jonathan Carver, in his Travels. He has discredited himself by his exaggeration of the number killed; but his account of what he himself saw tallies with that of the other witnesses. He is outdone in exaggeration by an anonymous French writer of the time, who seems rather pleased at the occurrence, and affirms that all the English were killed except seven hundred, these last being captured, so that none escaped (Nouvelles du Canada envoyées de Montréal, Août, 1757). Carver puts killed and captured together at fifteen hundred. Vaudreuil, who always makes light of Indian barbarities, goes to the other extreme, and avers that no more than five or six were killed. Lévis and Roubaud, who saw everything, and were certain not to exaggerate the number, give the most trustworthy evidence on this point. The capitulation, having been broken by the allies of France, was declared void by the British Government.

The Signal of Butchery. Montcalm, Bougainville, and several others say that the massacre was begun by the Abenakis of Panaouski. Father Martin, in quoting the letter in which Montcalm makes this statement, inserts the word idolâtres, which is not in the original. Dussieux and O'Callaghan give the passage correctly. This Abenaki band, ancestors of the present Penobscots, were no idolaters, but had been converted more than half a century. In the official list of the Indian allies they are set down among the Christians. Roubaud, who had charge of them during the expedition, speaks of these and other converts with singular candor: "Vous avez dû vous apercevoir ... que nos sauvages, pour être Chrétiens, n'en sont pas plus irrépréhensibles dans leur conduite."]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter 16

1757, 1758

A Winter of Discontent

Loudon, on his way back from Halifax, was at sea off the coast of Nova Scotia when a despatch-boat from Governor Pownall of Massachusetts startled him with news that Fort William Henry was attacked; and a few days after he learned by another boat that the fort was taken and the capitulation "inhumanly and villanously broken." On this he sent Webb orders to hold the enemy in check without risking a battle till he should himself arrive. "I am on the way," these were his words, "with a force sufficient to turn the scale, with God's assistance; and then I hope we shall teach the French to comply with the laws of nature and humanity. For although I abhor barbarity, the knowledge I have of Mr. Vaudreuil's behavior when in Louisiana, from his own letters in my possession, and the murders committed at Oswego and now at Fort William Henry, will oblige me to make those gentlemen sick of such inhuman villany whenever it is in my power." He reached New York on the last day of August, and heard that the French had withdrawn. He nevertheless sent his troops up the Hudson, thinking, he says, that he might still attack Ticonderoga; a wild scheme, which he soon abandoned, if he ever seriously entertained it.[527]

[Footnote 527: Loudon to Webb, 20 Aug. 1757. London to Holdernesse, Oct. 1757. Loudon to Pownall, 16 [18?] Aug. 1757. A passage in this last letter, in which Loudon says that he shall, if prevented by head-winds from getting into New York, disembark the troops on Long Island, is perverted by that ardent partisan, William Smith, the historian of New York, into the absurd declaration "that he should encamp on Long Island for the defence of the continent."]

Webb had remained at Fort Edward in mortal dread of attack. Johnson had joined him with a band of Mohawks; and on the day when Fort William Henry surrendered there had been some talk of attempting to throw succors into it by night. Then came the news of its capture; and now, when it was too late, tumultuous mobs of militia came pouring in from the neighboring provinces. In a few days thousands of them were bivouacked on the fields about Fort Edward, doing nothing, disgusted and mutinous, declaring that they were ready to fight, but not to lie still without tents, blankets, or kettles. Webb writes on the fourteenth that most of those from New York had deserted, threatening to kill their officers if they tried to stop them. Delancey ordered them to be fired upon. A sergeant was shot, others were put in arrest, and all was disorder till the seventeenth; when Webb, learning that the French were gone, sent them back to their homes.[528]

[Footnote 528: Delancey to [Holdernesse?], 24 Aug. 1757.]

Close on the fall of Fort William Henry came crazy rumors of disaster, running like wildfire through the colonies. The number and ferocity of the enemy were grossly exaggerated; there was a cry that they would seize Albany and New York itself;[529] while it was reported that Webb, as much frightened as the rest, was for retreating to the Highlands of the Hudson.[530] This was the day after the capitulation, when a part only of the militia had yet appeared. If Montcalm had seized the moment, and marched that afternoon to Fort Edward, it is not impossible that in the confusion he might have carried it by a coup-de-main.

[Footnote 529: Captain Christie to Governor Wentworth, 11 Aug. 1757. Ibid., to Governor Pownall, same date.]

[Footnote 530: Smith, Hist. N.Y., Part II. 254.]

Here was an opportunity for Vaudreuil, and he did not fail to use it. Jealous of his rival's exploit, he spared no pains to tarnish it; complaining that Montcalm had stopped half way on the road to success, and, instead of following his instructions, had contented himself with one victory when he should have gained two. But the Governor had enjoined upon him as a matter of the last necessity that the Canadians should be at their homes before September to gather the crops, and he would have been the first to complain had the injunction been disregarded. To besiege Fort Edward was impossible, as Montcalm had no means of transporting cannon thither; and to attack Webb without them was a risk which he had not the rashness to incur.

It was Bougainville who first brought Vaudreuil the news of the success on Lake George. A day or two after his arrival, the Indians, who had left the army after the massacre, appeared at Montreal, bringing about two hundred English prisoners. The Governor rebuked them for breaking the capitulation, on which the heathen savages of the West declared that it was not their fault, but that of the converted Indians, who, in fact, had first raised the war-whoop. Some of the prisoners were presently bought from them at the price of two kegs of brandy each; and the inevitable consequences followed.

"I thought," writes Bougainville, "that the Governor would have told them they should have neither provisions nor presents till all the English were given up; that he himself would have gone to their huts and taken the prisoners from them; and that the inhabitants would be forbidden, under the severest penalties, from selling or giving them brandy. I saw the contrary; and my soul shuddered at the sights my eyes beheld. On the fifteenth, at two o'clock, in the presence of the whole town, they killed one of the prisoners, put him into the kettle, and forced his wretched countrymen to eat of him." The Intendant Bigot, the friend of the Governor, confirms this story; and another French writer says that they "compelled mothers to eat the flesh of their children."[531] Bigot declares that guns, canoes, and other presents were given to the Western tribes before they left Montreal; and he adds, "they must be sent home satisfied at any cost." Such were the pains taken to preserve allies who were useful chiefly through the terror inspired by their diabolical cruelties. This time their ferocity cost them dear. They had dug up and scalped the corpses in the graveyard of Fort William Henry, many of which were remains of victims of the small-pox; and the savages caught the disease, which is said to have made great havoc among them.[532]

[Footnote 531: "En chemin faisant et même en entrant à Montréal ils les ont mangés et fait manger aux autres prisonniers." Bigot au Ministre, 24 Août, 1757.

"Des sauvages out fait manger aux mères la chair de leurs enfants." Jugement impartial sur les Opérations militaires en Canada. A French diary kept in Canada at this time, and captured at sea, is cited by Hutchinson as containing similar statements.]

[Footnote 532: One of these corpses was that of Richard Rogers, brother of the noted partisan Robert Rogers. He had died of small-pox some time before. Rogers, Journals, 55, note.]

Vaudreuil, in reporting what he calls "my capture of Fort William Henry," takes great credit to himself for his "generous procedures" towards the English prisoners; alluding, it seems, to his having bought some of them from the Indians with the brandy which was sure to cause the murder of others.[533] His obsequiousness to his red allies did not cease with permitting them to kill and devour before his eyes those whom he was bound in honor and duty to protect. "He let them do what they pleased," says a French contemporary; "they were seen roaming about Montreal, knife in hand, threatening everybody, and often insulting those they met. When complaint was made, he said nothing. Far from it; instead of reproaching them, he loaded them with gifts, in the belief that their cruelty would then relent."[534]

[Footnote 533: Vaudreuil au Ministre, 15 Sept. 1757.]

[Footnote 534: Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760.]

Nevertheless, in about a fortnight all, or nearly all, the surviving prisoners were bought out of their clutches; and then, after a final distribution of presents and a grand debauch at La Chine, the whole savage rout paddled for their villages.

The campaign closed in November with a partisan exploit on the Mohawk. Here, at a place called German Flats, on the farthest frontier, there was a thriving settlement of German peasants from the Palatinate, who were so ill-disposed towards the English that Vaudreuil had had good hope of stirring them to revolt, while at the same time persuading their neighbors, the Oneida Indians, to take part with France.[535] As his measures to this end failed, he resolved to attack them. Therefore, at three o'clock in the morning of the twelfth of November, three hundred colony troops, Canadians and Indians, under an officer named Belêtre, wakened the unhappy peasants by a burst of yells, and attacked the small picket forts which they had built as places of refuge. These were taken one by one and set on fire. The sixty dwellings of the settlement, with their barns and outhouses, were all burned, forty or fifty of the inhabitants were killed, and about three times that number, chiefly women and children, were made prisoners, including Johan Jost Petrie, the magistrate of the place. Fort Herkimer was not far off, with a garrison of two hundred men under Captain Townshend, who at the first alarm sent out a detachment too weak to arrest the havoc; while Belêtre, unable to carry off his booty, set on his followers to the work of destruction, killed a great number of hogs, sheep, cattle, and horses, and then made a hasty retreat. Lord Howe, pushing up the river from Schenectady with troops and militia, found nothing but an abandoned slaughter-field. Vaudreuil reported the affair to the Court, and summed up the results with pompous egotism: "I have ruined the plans of the English; I have disposed the Five Nations to attack them; I have carried consternation and terror into all those parts."[536]

[Footnote 535: Dépêches de Vaudreuil, 1757.]

[Footnote 536: Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 12 Fév. 1758. Ibid., 28 Nov. 1758. Bougainville, Journal. Summary of M. de Belêtre's Campaign, in N.Y. Col. Docs., X. 672. Extravagant reports of the havoc made were sent to France. It was pretended that three thousand cattle, three thousand sheep (Vaudreuil says four thousand), and from five hundred to fifteen hundred horses were destroyed, with other personal property to the amount of 1,500,000 livres. These official falsehoods are contradicted in a letter from Quebec, Daine au Maréchal de Belleisle, 19 Mai, 1758. Levis says that the whole population of the settlement, men, women, and children, was not above three hundred.]

Montcalm, his summer work over, went to Montreal; and thence in September to Quebec, a place more to his liking. "Come as soon as you can," he wrote to Bourlamaque, "and I will tell a certain fair lady how eager you are." Even Quebec was no paradise for him; and he writes again to the same friend: "My heart and my stomach are both ill at ease, the latter being the worse." To his wife he says: "The price of everything is rising. I am ruining myself; I owe the treasurer twelve thousand francs. I long for peace and for you. In spite of the public distress, we have balls and furious gambling." In February he returned to Montreal in a sleigh on the ice of the St. Lawrence,--a mode of travelling which he describes as cold but delicious. Montreal pleased him less than ever, especially as he was not in favor at what he calls the Court, meaning the circle of the Governor-General. "I find this place so amusing," he writes ironically to Bourlamaque, "that I wish Holy Week could be lengthened, to give me a pretext for neither making nor receiving visits, staying at home, and dining there almost alone. Burn all my letters, as I do yours." And in the next week: "Lent and devotion have upset my stomach and given me a cold; which does not prevent me from having the Governor-General at dinner to-day to end his lenten fast, according to custom here." Two days after he announces: "To-day a grand dinner at Martel's; twenty-three persons, all big-wigs (les grosses perruques); no ladies. We still have got to undergo those of Péan, Deschambault, and the Chevalier de Lévis. I spend almost every evening in my chamber, the place I like best, and where I am least bored."

With the opening spring there were changes in the modes of amusement. Picnics began, Vaudreuil and his wife being often of the party, as too was Lévis. The Governor also made visits of compliment at the houses of the seigniorial proprietors along the river; "very much," says Montcalm, as "Henri IV. did to the bourgeois notables of Paris. I live as usual, fencing in the morning, dining, and passing the evening at home or at the Governor's. Péan has gone up to La Chine to spend six days with the reigning sultana [Péan's wife, mistress of Bigot]. As for me, my ennui increases. I don't know what to do, or say, or read, or where to go; and I think that at the end of the next campaign I shall ask bluntly, blindly, for my recall, only because I am bored."[537]

[Footnote 537: Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 22 Mai, 1758.]

His relations with Vaudreuil were a constant annoyance to him, notwithstanding the mask of mutual civility. "I never," he tells his mother, "ask for a place in the colony troops for anybody. You need not be an Oedipus to guess this riddle. Here are four lines from Corneille:--

"'Mon crime véritable est d'avoir aujourd'hui Plus de nom que ... [Vaudreuil], plus de vertus que lui, Et c'est de là que part cette secrète haine Que le temps ne rendra que plus forte et plus pleine.'

Nevertheless I live here on good terms with everybody, and do my best to serve the King. If they could but do without me; if they could but spring some trap on me, or if I should happen to meet with some check!"

Vaudreuil meanwhile had written to the Court in high praise of Lévis, hinting that he, and not Montcalm, ought to have the chief command.[538]

[Footnote 538: Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 16 Sept. 1757. Ibid., au Ministre de la Guerre, même date.]

Under the hollow gayeties of the ruling class lay a great public distress, which broke at last into riot. Towards midwinter no flour was to be had in Montreal; and both soldiers and people were required to accept a reduced ration, partly of horse-flesh. A mob gathered before the Governor's house, and a deputation of women beset him, crying out that the horse was the friend of man, and that religion forbade him to be eaten. In reply he threatened them with imprisonment and hanging; but with little effect, and the crowd dispersed, only to stir up the soldiers quartered in the houses of the town. The colony regulars, ill-disciplined at the best, broke into mutiny, and excited the battalion of Béarn to join them. Vaudreuil was helpless; Montcalm was in Quebec; and the task of dealing with the mutineers fell upon Lévis, who proved equal to the crisis, took a high tone, threatened death to the first soldier who should refuse horse-flesh, assured them at the same time that he ate it every day himself, and by a characteristic mingling of authority and tact, quelled the storm.[539]

[Footnote 539: Bougainville, Journal. Montcalm à Mirepoix, 20 Avril, 1758. Lévis, Journal de la Guerre du Canada.]

The prospects of the next campaign began to open. Captain Pouchot had written from Niagara that three thousand savages were waiting to be let loose against the English borders. "What a scourge!" exclaims Bougainville. "Humanity groans at being forced to use such monsters. What can be done against an invisible enemy, who strikes and vanishes, swift as the lightning? It is the destroying angel." Captain Hebecourt kept watch and ward at Ticonderoga, begirt with snow and ice, and much plagued by English rangers, who sometimes got into the ditch itself.[540] This was to reconnoitre the place in preparation for a winter attack which Loudon had planned, but which, like the rest of his schemes, fell to the ground.[541] Towards midwinter a band of these intruders captured two soldiers and butchered some fifteen cattle close to the fort, leaving tied to the horns of one of them a note addressed to the commandant in these terms: "I am obliged to you, sir, for the rest you have allowed me to take and the fresh meat you have sent me. I shall take good care of my prisoners. My compliments to the Marquis of Montcalm." Signed, Rogers.[542]

[Footnote 540: Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 28 Mars, 1758.]

[Footnote 541: Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758.]

[Footnote 542: Journal de ce qui s'est passé en Canada, 1757, 1758. Compare Rogers, Journals, 72-75.]

A few weeks later Hebecourt had his revenge. About the middle of March a report came to Montreal that a large party of rangers had been cut to pieces a few miles from Ticonderoga, and that Rogers himself was among the slain. This last announcement proved false; but the rangers had suffered a crushing defeat. Colonel Haviland, commanding at Fort Edward, sent a hundred and eighty of them, men and officers, on a scouting party towards Ticonderoga; and Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche, of the twenty-seventh regiment, joined them as volunteers, no doubt through a love of hardy adventure, which was destined to be fully satisfied. Rogers commanded the whole. They passed down Lake George on the ice under cover of night, and then, as they neared the French outposts, pursued their way by land behind Rogers Rock and the other mountains of the western shore. On the preceding day, the twelfth of March, Hebecourt had received a reinforcement of two hundred Mission Indians and a body of Canadians. The Indians had no sooner arrived than, though nominally Christians, they consulted the spirits, by whom they were told that the English were coming. On this they sent out scouts, who came back breathless, declaring that they had found a great number of snow-shoe tracks. The superhuman warning being thus confirmed, the whole body of Indians, joined by a band of Canadians and a number of volunteers from the regulars, set out to meet the approaching enemy, and took their way up the valley of Trout Brook, a mountain gorge that opens from the west upon the valley of Ticonderoga.

Towards three o'clock on the afternoon of that day Rogers had reached a point nearly west of the mountain that bears his name. The rough and rocky ground was buried four feet in snow, and all around stood the gray trunks of the forest, bearing aloft their skeleton arms and tangled intricacy of leafless twigs. Close on the right was a steep hill, and at a little distance on the left was the brook, lost under ice and snow. A scout from the front told Rogers that a party of Indians was approaching along the bed of the frozen stream, on which he ordered his men to halt, face to that side, and advance cautiously. The Indians soon appeared, and received a fire that killed some of them and drove back the rest in confusion.

Not suspecting that they were but an advance-guard, about half the rangers dashed in pursuit, and were soon met by the whole body of the enemy. The woods rang with yells and musketry. In a few minutes some fifty of the pursuers were shot down, and the rest driven back in disorder upon their comrades. Rogers formed them all on the slope of the hill; and here they fought till sunset with stubborn desperation, twice repulsing the overwhelming numbers of the assailants, and thwarting all their efforts to gain the heights in the rear. The combatants were often not twenty yards apart, and sometimes they were mixed together. At length a large body of Indians succeeded in turning the right flank of the rangers. Lieutenant Phillips and a few men were sent by Rogers to oppose the movement; but they quickly found themselves surrounded, and after a brave defence surrendered on a pledge of good treatment. Rogers now advised the volunteers, Pringle and Roche, to escape while there was time, and offered them a sergeant as guide; but they gallantly resolved to stand by him. Eight officers and more than a hundred rangers lay dead and wounded in the snow. Evening was near and the forest was darkening fast, when the few survivors broke and fled. Rogers with about twenty followers escaped up the mountain; and gathering others about him, made a running fight against the Indian pursuers, reached Lake George, not without fresh losses, and after two days of misery regained Fort Edward with the remnant of his band. The enemy on their part suffered heavily, the chief loss falling on the Indians; who, to revenge themselves, murdered all the wounded and nearly all the prisoners, and tying Lieutenant Phillips and his men to trees, hacked them to pieces.

Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche had become separated from the other fugitives; and, ignorant of woodcraft, they wandered by moonlight amid the desolation of rocks and snow, till early in the night they met a man whom they knew as a servant of Rogers, and who said that he could guide them to Fort Edward. One of them had lost his snow-shoes in the fight; and, crouching over a miserable fire of broken sticks, they worked till morning to make a kind of substitute with forked branches, twigs, and a few leather strings. They had no hatchet to cut firewood, no blankets, no overcoats, and no food except part of a Bologna sausage and a little ginger which Pringle had brought with him. There was no game; not even a squirrel was astir; and their chief sustenance was juniper-berries and the inner bark of trees. But their worst calamity was the helplessness of their guide. His brain wandered; and while always insisting that he knew the country well, he led them during four days hither and thither among a labyrinth of nameless mountains, clambering over rocks, wading through snowdrifts, struggling among fallen trees, till on the fifth day they saw with despair that they had circled back to their own starting-point. On the next morning, when they were on the ice of Lake George, not far from Rogers Rock, a blinding storm of sleet and snow drove in their faces. Spent as they were, it was death to stop; and bending their heads against the blast, they fought their way forward, now on the ice, and now in the adjacent forest, till in the afternoon the storm ceased, and they found themselves on the bank of an unknown stream. It was the outlet of the lake; for they had wandered into the valley of Ticonderoga, and were not three miles from the French fort. In crossing the torrent Pringle lost his gun, and was near losing his life. All three of the party were drenched to the skin; and, becoming now for the first time aware of where they were, they resolved on yielding themselves prisoners to save their lives. Night, however, again found them in the forest. Their guide became delirious, saw visions of Indians all around, and, murmuring incoherently, straggled off a little way, seated himself in the snow, and was soon dead. The two officers, themselves but half alive, walked all night round a tree to keep the blood in motion. In the morning, again toiling on, they presently saw the fort across the intervening snowfields, and approached it, waving a white handkerchief. Several French officers dashed towards them at full speed, and reached them in time to save them from the clutches of the Indians, whose camps were near at hand. They were kindly treated, recovered from the effects of their frightful ordeal, and were afterwards exchanged. Pringle lived to old age, and died in 1800, senior major-general of the British army.[543]

[Footnote 543: Rogers, two days after reaching Fort Edward, made a detailed report of the fight, which was printed in the New Hampshire Gazette and other provincial papers. It is substantially incorporated in his published Journals, which also contain a long letter from Pringle to Colonel Haviland, dated at Carillon (Ticonderoga), 28 March, and giving an excellent account of his and Roche's adventures. It was sent by a flag of truce, which soon after arrived from Fort Edward with a letter for Vaudreuil. The French accounts of the fight are Hebecourt à [Vaudreuil?], 15 Mars, 1758. Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, 10 Avril, 1758. Bougainville, Journal. Relation de l'Affaire de Roger, 19 Mars, 1758. Autre Relation, même date. Lévis, Journal. According to Lévis, the French force consisted of 250 Indians and Canadians, and a number of officers, cadets, and soldiers. Roger puts it at 700. Most of the French writers put the force of the rangers, correctly, at about 180. Rogers reports his loss at 125. None of the wounded seem to have escaped, being either murdered after the fight, or killed by exposure in the woods. The Indians brought in 144 scalps, having no doubt divided some of them, after their ingenious custom. Rogers threw off his overcoat during the fight, and it was found on the field, with his commission in the pocket; whence the report of his death. There is an unsupported tradition that he escaped by sliding on his snow-shoes down a precipice of Rogers Rock.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us