Parkman Vol. 7, Chapter 20

Massachusetts was extremely poor by the standards of the present day, living by fishing, farming and a trade sorely hampered by the British navigation laws. Her

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Previously in Montcalm and Wolfe, Volume 7 of the French in Canada series. Continuing Chapter 19.

Amherst answered that though he had meant at first to go to Quebec with the whole army, late events on the continent made it impossible; and that he now thought it best to go with five or six regiments to the aid of Abercromby. He asked Wolfe to continue to communicate his views to him and would not hear for a moment of his leaving the army; adding, “I know nothing that can tend more to His Majesty’s service than your assisting in it.” Wolfe again wrote to his commander, with whom he was on terms of friendship: “An offensive, daring kind of war will awe the Indians and ruin the French. Blockhouses and a trembling defensive encourage the meanest scoundrels to attack us. If you will attempt to cut up New France by the roots, I will come with pleasure to assist.”

Amherst, with such speed as his deliberate nature would permit, sailed with six regiments for Boston to reinforce Abercromby at Lake George, while Wolfe set out on an errand but little to his liking. He had orders to proceed to Gaspé, Miramichi and other settlements on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, destroy them and disperse their inhabitants; a measure of needless and unpardonable rigor, which, while detesting it, he executed with characteristic thoroughness. “Sir Charles Hardy and I,” he wrote to his father, “are preparing to rob the fishermen of their nets and burn their huts. When that great exploit is at an end, I return to Louisbourg and thence to England.” Having finished the work, he wrote to Amherst: “Your orders were carried into execution. We have done a great deal of mischief and spread the terror of His Majesty’s arms through the Gulf but have added nothing to the reputation of them.” The destruction of property was great; yet, as Knox writes, “he would not suffer the least barbarity to be committed upon the persons of the wretched inhabitants.”

[1: “Les Anglais ont très-bien traités les prisonniers qu’ils ont faits dans cette partie” [Gaspé, etc]. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 4 Nov. 1758.]

He returned to Louisbourg and sailed for England to recruit his shattered health for greater conflicts.

NOTE. Four long and minute French diaries of the siege of Louisbourg are before me. The first, that of Drucour, covers a hundred and six folio pages and contains his correspondence with Amherst, Boscawen and Desgouttes. The second is that of the naval captain Tourville, commander of the ship “Capricieux,” and covers fifty pages. The third is by an officer of the garrison whose name does not appear. The fourth, of about a hundred pages, is by another officer of the garrison and is also anonymous. It is an excellent record of what passed each day and of the changing conditions, moral and physical, of the besieged. These four Journals, though clearly independent of each other, agree in nearly all essential particulars. I have also numerous letters from the principal officers, military, naval and civil, engaged in the defense, — Drucour, Desgouttes, Houllière, Beaussier, Marolles, Tourville, Courserac, Franquet, Villejouin, Prévost and Querdisien. These, with various other documents relating to the siege, were copied from the originals in the Archives de la Marine. Among printed authorities on the French side may be mentioned Pichon, Lettres et Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Cap-Breton, and the Campaign of Louisbourg, by the Chevalier Johnstone, a Scotch Jacobite serving under Drucour.

The chief authorities on the English side are the official Journal of Amherst, printed in the London Magazine and in other contemporary periodicals and also in Mante, History of the Late War; five letters from Amherst to Pitt, written during the siege (Public Record Office); an excellent private Journal called An Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a Spectator, parts of which have been copied verbatim by Entick without acknowledgement; the admirable Journal of Captain John Knox, which contains numerous letters and orders relating to the siege; and the correspondence of Wolfe contained in his Life by Wright. Before me is the Diary of a captain or subaltern in the army of Amherst at Louisbourg, found in the garret of an old house at Windsor, Nova Scotia, on an estate belonging in 1760 to Chief Justice Deschamps. I owe the use of it to the kindness of George Wiggins, Esq., of Windsor, N.S. Mante gives an excellent plan of the siege operations and another will be found in Jefferys, Natural and Civil History of French Dominions in North America.

Chapter 20

In the last year London called on the colonists for four thousand men. This year Pitt asked them for twenty thousand and promised that the King would supply arms, ammunition, tents and provisions, leaving to the provinces only the raising, clothing and pay of their soldiers; and he added the assurance that Parliament would be asked to make some compensation even for these.[1] Thus encouraged, cheered by the removal of Loudon and animated by the unwonted vigor of British military preparation, the several provincial assemblies voted men in abundance, though the usual vexatious delays took place in raising, equipping and sending them to the field. In this connection, an able English writer has brought against the colonies and especially against Massachusetts, charges which deserve attention. Viscount Bury says: “Of all the colonies, Massachusetts was the first which discovered the designs of the French and remonstrated against their aggressions; of all the colonies she most zealously promoted measures of union for the common defense and made the greatest exertions in furtherance of her views.” But he adds that there is a reverse to the picture and that “this colony, so high-spirited, so warlike and apparently so loyal, would never move hand or foot in her own defense till certain of repayment by the mother country.”[2] The groundlessness of this charge is shown by abundant proofs, one of which will be enough. The Englishman Pownall, who had succeeded Shirley as royal governor of the province, made this year a report of its condition to Pitt. Massachusetts, he says, “has been the frontier and advanced guard of all the colonies against the enemy in Canada,” and has always taken the lead in military affairs. In the three past years she has spent on the expeditions of Johnson, Winslow and Loudon £242,356, besides about £45,000 a year to support the provincial government, at the same time maintaining a number of forts and garrisons, keeping up scouting-parties and building, equipping and manning a ship of twenty guns for the service of the King. In the first two months of the present year, 1758, she made a further military outlay of £172,239. Of all these sums she has received from Parliament a reimbursement of only £70,117 and hence she is deep in debt; yet, in addition, she has this year raised, paid, maintained and clothed seven thousand soldiers placed under the command of General Abercromby, besides above twenty-five hundred more serving the King by land or sea; amounting in all to about one in four of her able-bodied men.

[1: Pitt to the Colonial Governors, 30 Dec. 1757.]

[2: Bury, Exodus of the Western Nations, II, 250, 251.]

Massachusetts was extremely poor by the standards of the present day, living by fishing, farming and a trade sorely hampered by the British navigation laws. Her contributions of money and men were not ordained by an absolute king but made by the voluntary act of a free people. Pownall goes on to say that her present war-debt, due within three years, is 366,698 pounds sterling and that to meet it she has imposed on her self taxes amounting, in the town of Boston, to thirteen shillings and twopence to every pound of income from real and personal estate; that her people are in distress, that she is anxious to continue her efforts in the public cause but that without some further reimbursement she is exhausted and helpless.[3] Yet in the next year she incurred a new and heavy debt. In 1760 Parliament repaid her £59,575.[4] Far from being fully reimbursed, the end of the war found her on the brink of bankruptcy. Connecticut made equal sacrifices in the common cause, — highly to her honor, for she was little exposed to danger, being covered by the neighboring provinces; while impoverished New Hampshire put one in three of her able-bodied men into the field.[5]

[3: Pownall to Pitt, 30 Sept. 1758 (Public Record Office, America and West Indies, LXXI.) “The province of Massachusetts Bay has exerted itself with great zeal and at vast expense for the public service.” Registers of Privy Council, 26 July, 1757.]

[4: Bollan, Agent of Massachusetts, to Speaker of Assembly, 20 March, 1760. It was her share of £200,000 granted to all the colonies in the proportion of their respective efforts.]

[5: Address to His Majesty from the Governor, Council and Assembly of New Hampshire, Jan. 1759.]

In June the combined British and provincial force which Abercromby was to lead against Ticonderoga was gathered at the head of Lake George; while Montcalm lay at its outlet around the walls of the French stronghold, with an army not one fourth so numerous. Vaudreuil had devised a plan for saving Ticonderoga by a diversion into the valley of the Mohawk under Lévis, Rigaud and Longueuil, with sixteen hundred men, who were to be joined by as many Indians. The English forts of that region were to be attacked, Schenectady threatened and the Five Nations compelled to declare for France.[6] Thus, as the Governor gave out, the English would be forced to cease from aggression, leave Montcalm in peace and think only of defending themselves.[7] “This,” writes Bougainville on the fifteenth of June, “is what M. de Vaudreuil thinks will happen, because he never doubts anything. Ticonderoga, which is the point really threatened, is abandoned without support to the troops of the line and their general. It would even be wished that they might meet a reverse, if the consequences to the colony would not be too disastrous.”

[6: Lévis au Ministre, 17 Juin, 1758. Doreil au Ministre, 16 Juin, 1758. Montcalm à sa Femme, 18 Avril, 1758.]

[7: Correspondance de Vaudreuil, 1758. Livre d’Ordres, Juin, 1758.]

The proposed movement promised, no doubt, great advantages; but it was not destined to take effect. Some rangers taken on Lake George by a partisan officer named Langy declared with pardonable exaggeration that twenty-five or thirty thousand men would attack Ticonderoga in less than a fortnight. Vaudreuil saw himself forced to abandon his Mohawk expedition and to order Lévis and his followers, who had not yet left Montreal, to reinforce Montcalm.[8] Why they did not go at once is not clear. The Governor declares that there were not boats enough. From whatever cause, there was a long delay and Montcalm was left to defend himself as he could.

[8: Bigot au Ministre, 21 Juillet, 1758.]

He hesitated whether he should not fall back to Crown Point. The engineer, Lotbinière, opposed the plan, as did also Le Mercier.[9] It was but a choice of difficulties and he stayed at Ticonderoga. His troops were disposed as they had been in the summer before; one battalion, that of Berry, being left near the fort, while the main body, under Montcalm himself, was encamped by the saw-mill at the Falls and the rest, under Bourlamaque, occupied the head of the portage, with a small advanced force at the landing-place on Lake George. It remained to determine at which of these points he should concentrate them and make his stand against the English. Ruin threatened him in any case; each position had its fatal weakness or its peculiar danger and his best hope was in the ignorance or blundering of his enemy. He seems to have been several days in a state of indecision.

[9: N.Y. Col. Docs., X 893. Lotbinière’s relative, Vaudreuil, confirms the statement. Montcalm had not, as has been said, begun already to fall back.]

In the afternoon of the fifth of July the partisan Langy, who had again gone out to reconnoiter towards the head of Lake George, came back in haste with the report that the English were embarked in great force. Montcalm sent a canoe down Lake Champlain to hasten Lévis to his aid and ordered the battalion of Berry to begin a breastwork and abattis on the high ground in front of the fort. That they were not begun before shows that he was in doubt as to his plan of defense; and that his whole army was not now set to work at them shows that his doubt was still unsolved.

From Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter 20 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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