The fight with France for North America

Front matter

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Chapter I Page

The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle— Condition and Characteristics of the British- American Colonies and of Canada in 1750 1

French Designs against British Expansion— French Expedition to the Ohio Valley — The Acadians — Washington carries the English Protest to the Ohio— Fight at the " Great Meadows " — Beginning of the Struggle . . 40

Chapter III. 1754-1755

A British Force despatched to America — Braddock's Expedition to the Ohio — His Defeat on the Monongahela— His Death — Disastrous Results 75

Shirley occupies Oswego — Johnson's Futile Campaign on Lake George— (Deportation of the Acadians — Apathy of Pennsylvania— The British Frontiers wasted . . . 107

Formal Declaration of War between France and England — Montcalm sent to Canada — Lord Loudon takes Command of the British Forces — His Useless Campaign on Lake George — Montcalm captures Oswego 137

Difficulties in Forming a Ministry — Pitt succeeds to Power — French Attack repulsed on Lake George — Another British Force sails— Loudon's Futile Expedition against Louisbourg-Vrhe French capture Fort William Henry— The

Massacre ... 161

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER VII. 1757-1758

FACIE

Low Ebb of British Fortunes — Military Apathy in Middle and Southern Colonies— Official Corruption in Canada — Magnetic Influence of Pitt on British Affairs— Wolfe and Amherst— Siege and Capture of Louisbourg— Rejoicings in England 200

CHAPTER VIII. 1758

Abercromby takes Command in America — Large British Army gathers at Albany — Abercromby attacks Ticonderoga — Repulsed with Great Loss — Campbell of Inver-

CHAPTER IX. 1758

Bradstreet captures Frontenac — Forbes leads an Expedition against Fort Duquesne — Defeat of Grant and Highlanders near the Fort — Post, the Moravian Missionary — Forbes occupies Fort Duquesne — His Death . . = 260

The Expedition against Quebec under Wolfe — Difficulties of the Siege — Battle on the Plains of Abraham — Death of Wolfe and Montcalm— Surrender of the City . . . 288

CHAPTER XI. 1759

Flight of the French Army from Quebec— Murray in Command of the British Garrison— Amherst captures Ticonderoga and Crown Point — Prideaux takes Niagara . . 327

CHAPTER XII. 1759-1760

British Army winters in Quebec— French, under Levis, return and attack the City — Battle of St. Foy — Quebec relieved by British Ships — French Forces retire on Montreal — Murray ascends the St. Lawrence to Montreal— Amherst descends the River from Lake Ontario — Haviland, with Third Army, joins them from the South- Surrender of Montreal and the French possessions in North America to Great Britain 354 xn

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

TO FACE PAGE

William Pitt, Earl of Chatham . . .(Frontispiece)

Sir William Johnson 77

Montcalm 144

General Amherst 211

Admiral Boscawen 215

Burning of the two French ships in Louisbourg Harbour . 228

Old print of the head of Lake George 243

General Wolfe 288

Montreal in the days of French rule 379

LIST OF MAPS

TO FACE PAGE

Map showing the Two Military Highways between Canada

and the British Colonies 109

Map of Novia Scotia 123

Siege of Louisbourg, 1758 222

The Attack on Ticonderoga, July 8th, 1858 .... 239

Siege of Quebec, 1759 299

Canada and the British Colonies in 1750 . (End of volume)

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Chapter I

THE war of the Austrian succession, ever memorable to Englishmen for the fierce fights of Dettingen and Fontenoy, was brought to a close in August, 1748, by the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. For her lavish expenditure of blood and money, Great Britain had reaped little other profit than a qualified measure of renown. She had shown to the world, however, that nearly thirty years of peace had not robbed her soldiers of their ancient valour, even when handled, as they too often were, with conspicuous incapacity and officered by a system that took no cognizance of merit and was based almost wholly on favouritism and corruption.

At Fontenoy the twelfth regiment, to take a chance instance, was led into action by a captain. At Dettingen the major was in command, while James Wolfe, then a callow youth of sixteen, had to grapple as best he could with the onerous and responsible duties of adjutant, complaining bitterly in his letters of the lack of discipline. Marlborough's officers were dead or doting. Privilege and faction regulated the pay list, though it is well to remember that the beardless colonel died as freely and fought as courageously as the grey-haired subaltern. Let it ever be borne in mind, too, that the king himself and his burly son, the Duke of Cumberland, were

1 B

THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR

bright examples of this cardinal virtue of physical courage, and asked no man to dare what they would not dare themselves — nay, were only eager to. They, at least, were not responsible for the unwholesome thing that squandered human life and courted disgrace. If the Duke's level of capacity, moderate though it was, had been maintained throughout the service, there would not have been a great deal to complain of ; while to a modern monarch, who asks for nothing better than the heat of battle, and when in it bears himself right nobly, much may surely be forgiven, or ought to be. If George II. had been spoiling for war, and had personally contributed for no sufficient reason to the closing of Walpole's long and prosperous peace in 1739, the people at large, without his excuse — for Hanover was nothing to them — were equally bellicose. If the peace of 1748 left the country with little to show for its big bill, the renewal of the conflict eight years later proved in this matter of a profit and loss account a most singular and brilliant contrast. The mighty struggle commonly known as the Seven Years' War should be kept separate in Englishmen's minds from all other contests in which the nation has been engaged, for it lifted Great Britain from a constantly fluctuating position of more or less equality with rival powers to the first place among the nations of the world.1 It made her the permanent mistress of the seas and of a world empire unshaken by the military and social upheavals of Europe, whose territorial disputes and dynastic struggles seem by comparison almost trifling

1 The revolt of the American colonies may almost be called a domestic rupture. At any rate, it did not, as was expected, lower the position of Great Britain.

SUPREMACY IN NORTH AMERICA

but for the torrents of blood they caused to flow. Above all, it inspired her people with a sense of conscious power, of worthy pride sobered by the vast responsibilities that accompanied so great a position, and a self-confidence that was never again seriously shaken.

But as here we have to do only with the Western continent, and not with the contemporaneous founding of the Indian Empire, it will be enough to recall the main issue that was at stake in North America. Whether Canada— or, to speak more pertinently, what is now British North America — was to be French or English seems a sufficiently large question when weighed in the balance with the possession of Minorca or the boundary of a German duchy. But even this shrinks in importance when compared with the still greater issue of Anglo- Saxon or Gallic supremacy on the continent of North America.

Recent events at the sources of the Nile should stimulate our interest in a crisis of infinitely greater moment that a century and a half ago was solved by the gauge of battle. We know something nowadays of that kind of colonization, which consists in hauling up flags and map-making and tactics that are merely obstructive of a rival's industrial enterprise without the power of wholesome competition. It may be human and natural and entirely venial, but on that very account is only entitled to consideration on the same low plane — that of physical force. It is a far cry from Fashoda to the Ohio, from 1899 to 1754. But the most enthusiastic dreamer of African dreams will hardly contend that the Nile hinterland, even with Egypt thrown in, was com-

TREATY OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE

parable as a stake to the North American continent— a white man's country and a white man's climate.1 This, however, was the stake for which France played in the days of Louis XV., and, thus venturing, lost not only her former position, but her very existence as a transatlantic power.

Though nearly all Europe was in arms, it is with France and England that we are here alone concerned. Great as were the exertions put forth against other powers by these two nations, it was only each other that they had real cause to dread. Their respective armies might win or lose in the Low Countries or Germany, a million of human beings might perish, and torrents of blood might flow, and volumes of military history might be made ; but so far as the Western actors in it were concerned, it began and ended with the game of war, waged upon wholly frivolous or personal accounts. Except for the still far-off results of the military development of Prussia under Frederic, the destinies of the world were but little affected by the long misery and suffering under which Europe groaned. To France and England, at any rate, the issue was as nothing compared to that for which their scattered outposts were contending in the pathless forests of America, on the burning plains of India, among the fogs and ice-fields of the North.

The peace, or so-called peace — more accurately described by some historians as an armed truce — which lasted from 1748 to 1756 witnessed the first stealthy

1 Since this chapter was written, the South African war has given us the picture of another great racial struggle ; the minor details of which are, at times, singularly suggestive of the Seven Years' War.

THE AMERICAN POLICY OF FRANCE

efforts of the French American policy, the awakening of England to her danger, and the actual opening of the struggle.

As a matter of fact, the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had not been signed, nor indeed actually formulated, when the French rulers of Canada, with the sympathy of their king and Government, commenced the operations from which they hoped so much. Their purpose, stated briefly, was to confine the future influence and territory of England to the thirteen colonies which lay at present a mere strip along the Atlantic coast. Behind the more northern of these the scope of Western development was limited, for obvious geographical and other reasons. The treaty Indians of the Six Nations occupied the rear of New England and New York ; while behind these, again, stretched the great water-way of the St. Lawrence and its lakes, which constituted the Canadian boundary. But at the back of all the other colonies, trending southwards and nearly parallel with the coast-line, the great range of the Alleghanies lifted its shaggy peaks. The limits of civilization had barely touched it. Nowhere had British settlement as yet aspired to leap this broad barrier of forest-covered mountains into the dreaded Indian-haunted wilderness beyond. The policy of France was to prevent it, if possible, ever doing so, and to make the rampart which nature and Indian hostility had already made so formidable still more effective by erecting a chain of military posts behind it. The French were well established on the St. Lawrence and its parent lakes. They had considerable settlements at the mouth of the Mississippi. Their cherished scheme was to connect the two by a long line of

STRENGTH OF THE RIVAL RACES

forest fortresses, to form firm alliances with the warlike Indians behind the Alleghanies, and to hold for themselves the vast Western territories, of whose value and extent their daring explorers had given them a due appreciation.

The English colonists may fairly be described as unconscious of these schemes or of their import. They had more than sufficient territory for their needs upon the east of the Alleghanies. The mass of them were stay-at-home farmers and planters. Neither Imperial dreams nor future divination were in keeping with their habit of thought. Frenchmen were but vague figures in the imagination of all men south of the Hudson, and the great West but a hazy expression. The British Government, too, troubled its head very little about its colonies ; and if in the latter there was a small handful of men who did divine a future so pregnant with vital issues, and raised the alarm, posterity has given them little more of honour than their contemporaries gave them of reward.

Before proceeding, however, to the story of the great struggle, it is indispensable that the reader should have some idea of the relative positions of the two parties to it in North America.

Now the French in Canada, exclusive of some 10,000 Acadians, who were nominally British subjects, numbered about 60,000 souls. The English colonists, on the other hand — or, to be more accurate, the colonial subjects of Great Britain in North America — were reckoned by the middle of the eighteenth century at nearly a million and a half. A fifth or a sixth of this number, to be sure, were negro slaves — a source of weakness rather than of strength. But, in any

THE THIRTEEN COLONIES

case, the preponderance of the British was so overwhelming that the notion of the French being a menace to their present security or a rival for future dominion seems at the first blush incredible. The test of numbers, however, was never a more fallacious one than in this particular case, nor is the apparent paradox at all simplified by the fact of the Englishman's robust personal qualities, both as a man, a soldier, and a colonist.

A short glance at the situation and distribution of the rival races will, I think, show that though the French aspirations were sufficiently audacious, they were very far from being hopeless. The French were concentrated at one point ; the British were scattered over an immense area. The former bowed unquestioningly to an autocratic rule ; the latter were divided into thirteen distinct self-governing commonwealths. While the Canadians were the obedient tools of king and Church, were generally poor, alert, and warlike, the English colonists were jealous of all authority, absorbed in trade and agriculture, and eminently peaceful. We have now grown so accustomed to think of the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of our former colonies as Americans and more or less a homogeneous nation, that it requires a mental effort, together with some little grasp of the old state of affairs, to prepare oneself for a proper appreciation of the struggle of 1755-60.

The reader will not resent, I trust, being reminded of the fact that the thirteen colonies whose growing power the French so dreaded, and thus dreading tried to stifle, are represented, with some slight modifications, by the thirteen original States of the Union. They may be seen in the map of to-day

INTER-COLONIAL JEALOUSY

much as they were in the old French wars, trailing down the Atlantic coast from the Canadian border to the then Spanish province of Florida.

Not one of these thirteen commonwealths had any sort of constitutional link with its neighbour. The only tie that bound them together was their common allegiance to the Crown. They were for the most part jealous of each other, and more often inclined to thwart than to promote mutual interests. Some had affinities of race and creed, and in matters nonadministrative more readily coalesced ; while others, again, cherished towards one another a positive aversion. Each colony had, at some period during the preceding century, begun life upon its own account, and had grown up quite independently of its neighbour and after its own fashion. Some of them, indeed, in the elementary stages of existence had gone so far as to indulge in mimic conflicts, and over the matter of boundaries there was perennial friction. This long straggling line of jealous and often jarring commonwealths resting on the sea-coast was the base of British action against the compact, military colony of France ; and a most unsatisfactory base it for a long time proved.

The four New England provinces with that of New York had the friendly but uncertain Six Nations and the French, with their bloodthirsty, so-called Christian Indians, more or less perpetually upon their flank. The rest, from Pennsylvania to infant Georgia, with rare exceptions, had forgotten the earlier horrors of Indian warfare, and had scarcely so much as even set eyes upon a Frenchman. Their pioneers had straggled through the forests that covered, as with a mantle, all Eastern America to the foot - hills

THE WEST NOT YET CONSIDERED

of the Alleghanies ; but colonial life in its active and vital sense still clustered along the sea-coast, or hugged the waterways that led there. Between the Alleghanies and the ocean most of the colonies had a territory, roughly approximating to the size of England, with a population of but one or two hundred thousand souls in each. Their people wanted plenty of elbow-room, particularly to the southward, where negro labour was largely used ; but even in such case the time had hardly come when lust of land prompted perilous enterprises. Society was not yet dense enough to produce a surplus who considered it worth while to cross the mountains and renew the fight with a fiercer wilderness and a more formidable, for better armed, savage than their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had waged war against in the days of the Stuarts and William of Orange. Men who had a sufficient livelihood, too, were less feverish and more contented in those times than in later ones. Nor were they much better equipped for subduing the savage and the wilderness in the days of the Georges than they had been in those of the Tudors and Stuarts. Those all-powerful factors of civilization — steam and electricity — were undreamt of. Machinery and scientific road -making were in their infancy. It is not surprising that Virginia, for instance, with a white population of 200,000, and a territory between the mountains and the sea as large as England, and as generally habitable, should have troubled itself little with thoughts of distant adventure. There was no incentive whatever for the Virginian, or Carolinian, or Marylander of 1750 to cross the Ohio watershed and fight the most formidable savage warrior that the world has

THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES

ever seen, for the privilege of growing corn and hay, or stock, that he could not get to any market, even if he lived to make the attempt. The average colonist of those days, leading, south of the Hudson at any rate, a humdrum, comfortable life, cannot be blamed if he failed to grasp the situation, or read the map of America as we read it now, and was inclined to look upon the reputed schemes of wandering Frenchmen as hardly worthy the attention of practical men, till the rude awakening came.

A glance at the map will show that the New England colonies, at that time four in number, together with New York, had no outlet to the then scarcely known and little appreciated West. As I have said, they had behind them the famous " Six Nations," a leading factor in the American politics of that day, by far the most powerful Indian combination, and at the same time the most in touch with colonial civilization. Unlike the other Indian tribes, their sympathies had been consistently pro-English. But even so, they may be said to have held, in some sort, the balance of power between the English and the French, which latter nation were perpetually intriguing for their alliance.

Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, standing in the order named as regards relative importance, constituted the Puritan colonies of that day, Vermont and Maine being carved out of them later. These provinces alone understood, though perhaps not very perfectly, the art of combination for offensive and defensive war. They were practically homogeneous in stock and creed and habits of thought. Both the Indian and the Frenchman were still for them a burning reality, and they knew

THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES

them only too well. They were much the most warlike group of the British colonies, not from choice, but from necessity. Their origin and Puritan tone of life are so familiar as to be hardly worth an allusion ; but the vulgar error of supposing the New Englanders to be all of humble extraction, while the Southern colonists had a monopoly of blood, cannot be sufficiently held up to ridicule. Numbers of cadets of arms-bearing and land-owning families went to New England, but both political and social life was there cast in democratic lines, and local conditions did not favour the acquisition of great estates. An influential and higher class of varied origin arose in New England as in the South, but they had to maintain their position by superior force of character and intellect, perhaps, rather than by superior estate. At the same time, as near an approach to social equality as is possible among an educated and civilized community existed in New England. Local government was highly organized, and politics a matter of universal interest. People lived in communities, very much under the eye of their neighbours, and of a public opinion to which no slight deference was paid.

This latter was narrow, vigorous, and at times tyrannical, and strongly influenced by a religious bigotry that bordered on fanaticism. Tempered by modern progress and a high education, the New England character has broadened into a type whose good points are greatly in the ascendant. In the colonial period the asperities of the average New Englander were uppermost, his virtues less evident to his fellow-colonists, by whom he was cordially disliked ; while the same antipathetic feeling dis-

NEW ENGLANDERS AS SOLDIERS

tinguishes the sentiments of all English travellers of that day.1 In education, however, at that time the New Englanders as a community were far in advance of the rest of the continent, and, for that matter, of the rest of the world. Indigence and ignorance were almost unknown ; and though there were no rich people, there were scarcely any who were very poor. The same religious and political zeal which had created their schools, churches, and local governments made some sort of military organization easier for them than for their more apathetic neighbours.

At the same time, while better constituted for raising, feeding, and paying regiments, their social system contained in itself drawbacks to military efficiency not so obvious in the other colonies. Every private, whether farmer, fisherman, or mechanic, was a politician, and, though ready to fight, watched with jealous eye lest his terms of service, often loaded with conditions, were in danger of being infringed. Still worse, perhaps, the officers were chosen by the men they were to command — not a bad plan in a company of experienced bush-fighters bound on perilous enterprise, but one fatal to discipline when extended to a whole army of raw militiamen. Massachusetts was far the most powerful of the New England colonies, while Connecticut was easily second. These provinces, moreover, had produced both writers and preachers whose fame had crossed the Atlantic. They had performed, too, more than one spontaneous feat of arms which did them credit and gained them the thanks of the mother

1 The higher class of Bostonians are usually exempted from the strictures of these travellers.

THE COLONY OP NEW YORK

country. In the very last war, in the year 1745, and at a moment of depression to British arms in Europe, their raw militia, with the help of the fleet, had attacked and captured the great French fortress of Louisbourg. In the coming war they were to far eclipse the efforts of all the other colonies combined, and twenty years later, in that of the Revolution, were to hold an only less decisive lead. Yet in 1860 the seceding States of the South had so far forgotten American history as to prof ess a conviction that "The Yankees would not fight." The awakening was bitter, as we all know.

New York to some extent had shared with the Puritan colonies the perils of French and Indian neighbourhood, and like them had been compelled, only in a less degree, to organize and to fight. She was widely different, however, both in origin and composition. The Hudson River was her great artery, and along its banks for the most part the life of the colony throbbed. The city at its mouth was then, as now, the most light-hearted and cosmopolitan upon the Atlantic coast. Its population was somewhat heterogeneous, but the English and the Dutch largely preponderated, and alone influenced the life and tone of the colony. On the seaboard nearly all trace of the early jealousy that had not unnaturally distinguished the two races had disappeared with the tie of a common danger, a common Protestantism and a free government. The cast of society was aristocratic and in curious contrast to the Anglo-Dutch peoples of South Africa. The Hollanders were indeed partly responsible for the tone. Great estates upon the Hudson had been originally granted to Dutch gentlemen on condition of their settling

PENNSYLVANIA

them with dependants in semi-feudal fashion. The Patroon families were few in number, but perhaps the nearest approach to a feudal aristocracy in North America. English families who had achieved wealth and distinction or had official positions intermarried with these, while there was a tendency in the older parts of the colony for broad acres and gentility to identify themselves together and to hold aloof from the mass of the people. In spite of the strong Dutch element, the prevailing creed was Anglican. The succession of William of Orange to the English throne, and still more perhaps a zealous Protestantism and a lively dread of both the Indians and Catholic French, had produced a loyalty that, with some notable exceptions, was in a fashion more ardent than that of the republican Puritans of New England. Nor did the admirable Huguenot element, which found here a hearty welcome and freedom from persecution, in any way dissent from the attachment to a Government that made their lives once again worth living. No stratum of provincial life was greatly agitated by religious or political dogmas. It was an easy-going, prosperous, but perhaps slightly colourless community, which at its capital went to balls and plays and made merry according to its degree without any fear of the village deacon or the Quaker legislator.1 New Jersey, or the Jerseys — for it was once divided — and Delaware, were colonies of secondary importance, and somewhat polyglot in population ; communities of farmers of various nationalities,

1 This description would not apply to the Dutch of Albany and the Upper Hudson, concerning whom see a later note.

THE SOUTHERN COLONIES

lacking in any characteristics that one can take hold of without undue elaboration.

Pennsylvania, on the other hand, from her size, prosperity, and large population, was of great importance. As a military factor, however, she was almost a cipher — a condition due, of course, to the powerful Quaker element in her population. What was not Quaker was very largely German, stupid for the most part, speaking only its own language, and always indifferent to everything but its own personal concerns. To the back country on the Alleghanies the stream of a more virile population, to be sure, had been long finding its way from the north-east of Ireland, about whom a word will be said later. But Pennsylvania, as a whole, was fat, prosperous, and fanatically pacific. Her seaboard counties were fertile and well farmed, while if Boston was the most serious, and New York the most worldly, Philadelphia was the most comfortable of colonial capitals. Fight Indians or Frenchmen, however, more particularly as they were tolerably safe themselves, its people would not : a sore point enough with their neighbours, as we shall see later on.1

Maryland and Virginia may, for purposes of general description, be fairly classed together. Negro slavery was a feature in all the colonies, but it was not till the traveller reached Maryland that he found it a leading factor in social and economic life. Then,

1 Pennsylvania had been originally settled by Swedes in 1627. They were forcibly subjugated in 1655 by the neighbouring Dutch of New Amsterdam (New York), who themselves passed under English rule in 1664. Philadelphia and Pennsylvania proper were founded by Penn in 1682.

VIRGINIA

as a century later, though in a less marked degree, the slave line, which was identical with the northern boundary of the old Catholic province, divided Anglo- Saxon America in half. The Southern colonies were already diverging upon lines so similar to one another, and so at variance with the rest, as to give them in time quite a reasonable pretext for posing as a separate nation. In 1750, however, things had not gone nearly so far. Yet Virginia was even then so pronounced a type of the Southern provinces that a brief description of her condition will enable us to dismiss the others with a word.

As Massachusetts was the oldest and most powerful of all the Northern colonies, so was Virginia the oldest and most influential of the Southern group. Her people were almost wholly of English stock, and at this time numbered nearly 200,000, with more than half as many negro slaves. They were a community of agriculturists, divided into three practically distinct social grades. There were no towns worth mentioning, and no trade to speak of. The production of tobacco, and the foodstuffs necessary to those who grew it, was the sole industry ; the ownership of land and negroes the test by which men were graded. Upon the basis of this an aristocracy arose, which was to some extent crystallized by laws of primogeniture and entail. All the world knows Virginia was the cavalier colony, and knowing this much has been greatly addicted to exaggerating its significance. Virginia was first settled neither by political nor religious refugees, nor yet by idealists of any kind. Its early colonists were Englishmen by blood, in no way discontented with English institutions, but on the contrary anxious to reproduce as