A Winter of Discontent 1757-1758

Under the hollow gayeties of the ruling class lay a great public distress, which broke at last into riot.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in Montcalm and Wolfe, Volume 7 of the French in Canada series. Continuing Chapter 16.

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.[1] 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.”[2]

[1: Dépêches de Vaudreuil, 1757.]

[2: 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.[3] 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.”[4]

[3: Péan’s wife, mistress of Bigot]

[4: 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.

[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 horseflesh. 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.

[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.[5] This was to reconnoiter the place in preparation for a winter attack which Loudon had planned but which, like the rest of his schemes, fell to the ground.[6] 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.[7]

[5: Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 28 Mars, 1758.]

[6: Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758.]

[7: 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 defense 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 a
ll the prisoners and tying Lieutenant Phillips and his men to trees, hacked them to pieces.

From Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter 16 by Francis Parkman

To be continued.

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Preface to this book.

A very large amount of unpublished material has been used in its preparation, consisting for the most part of documents copied from the archives and libraries of France and England, especially from the Archives de la Marine et des Colonies, the Archives de la Guerre, and the Archives Nationales at Paris, and the Public Record Office and the British Museum at London. The papers copied for the present work in France alone exceed six thousand folio pages of manuscript, additional and supplementary to the “Paris Documents” procured for the State of New York under the agency of Mr. Brodhead. The copies made in England form ten volumes, besides many English documents consulted in the original manuscript. Great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, and other writings of persons engaged in the war have also been examined on this side of the Atlantic.

I owe to the kindness of the present Marquis de Montcalm the permission to copy all the letters written by his ancestor, General Montcalm, when in America, to members of his family in France. General Montcalm, from his first arrival in Canada to a few days before his death, also carried on an active correspondence with one of his chief officers, Bourlamaque, with whom he was on terms of intimacy. These autograph letters are now preserved in a private collection. I have examined them and obtained copies of the whole. They form an interesting complement to the official correspondence of the writer, and throw the most curious side-lights on the persons and events of the time.

Besides manuscripts, the printed matter in the form of books, pamphlets, contemporary newspapers, and other publications relating to the American part of the Seven Years’ War, is varied and abundant; and I believe I may safely say that nothing in it of much consequence has escaped me. The liberality of some of the older States of the Union, especially New York and Pennsylvania, in printing the voluminous records of their colonial history, has saved me a deal of tedious labor.

The whole of this published and unpublished mass of evidence has been read and collated with extreme care, and more than common pains have been taken to secure accuracy of statement. The study of books and papers, however, could not alone answer the purpose. The plan of the work was formed in early youth; and though various causes have long delayed its execution, it has always been kept in view. Meanwhile, I have visited and examined every spot where events of any importance in connection with the contest took place, and have observed with attention such scenes and persons as might help to illustrate those I meant to describe. In short, the subject has been studied as much from life and in the open air as at the library table.

BOSTON, Sept. 16, 1884.

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