Differing Strategies of British and Colonials

As far as eye or mind could reach, a prodigious forest vegetation spread its impervious canopy over hill, valley and plain and wrapped the stern and awful waste in the shadows of the tomb.

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 22.

Nobody can read the letters of Washington at this time without feeling that the imputations of Forbes were unjust and that here, as elsewhere, his ruling motive was the public good.[1] Forbes himself, seeing the rugged and difficult nature of the country, began to doubt whether after all he had not better have chosen the old road of Braddock. He soon had an interview with its chief advocates, the two Virginia colonels, Washington and Burd and reported the result to Bouquet, adding: “I told them that, whatever they thought, I had acted on the best information to be had and could safely say for myself and believed I might answer for you, that the good of the service was all we had at heart, not valuing provincial interest, jealousies, or suspicions on single twopence.” It must be owned that, considering the slow and sure mode of advance which he had wisely adopted, the old soldier was probably right in his choice; since before the army could reach Fort Duquesne, the autumnal floods would have made the Youghiogany and the Monongahela impassable.

[1: Besides the printed letters, there is an autograph collection of his correspondence with Bouquet in 1758 (forming vol. 21,641, Additional Manuscripts, British Museum). Copies of the whole are before me.]

The Sir John mentioned by Forbes was the quartermaster-general, Sir John Sinclair, who had gone forward with Virginians and other troops from the camp of Bouquet to make the road over the main range of the Alleghanies, whence he sent back the following memorandum of his requirements: “Pickaxes, crows and shovels; likewise more whiskey. Send me the newspapers and tell my black to send me a candlestick and half a loaf of sugar.” He was extremely inefficient; and Forbes, out of all patience with him, wrote confidentially to Bouquet that his only talent was for throwing everything into confusion. Yet he found fault with everybody else and would discharge volleys of oaths at all who met his disapproval. From this cause or some other, Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen, of the Virginians, told him that he would break his sword rather than be longer under his orders. “As I had not sufficient strength,” says Sinclair, “to take him by the neck from among his own men, I was obliged to let him have his own way, that I might not be the occasion of bloodshed.” He succeeded at last in arresting him and Major Lewis, of the same regiment, took his place.

The aid of Indians as scouts and skirmishers was of the last importance to an army so weak in the arts of woodcraft and efforts were made to engage the services of the friendly Cherokees and Catawbas, many of whom came to the camp, where their caprice, insolence and rapacity tried to the utmost the patience of the commanders. That of Sir John Sinclair had already been overcome by his dealings with the provincial authorities; and he wrote in good French, at the tail of a letter to the Swiss colonel: “Adieu, my dear Bouquet. The greatest curse that our Lord can pronounce against the worst of sinners is to give them business to do with provincial commissioners and friendly Indians.” A band of sixty warriors told Colonel Burd that they would join the army on condition that it went by Braddock’s road. “This,” wrote Forbes, on hearing of the proposal, “is a new system of military discipline truly and shows that my good friend Burd is either made a cat’s-foot of himself, or little knows me if he imagines that sixty scoundrels are to direct me in my measures.”[2] Bouquet, with a pliant tact rarely seen in the born Briton, took great pains to please these troublesome allies and went so far as to adopt one of them as his son.[3] A considerable number joined the army; but they nearly all went off when the stock of presents provided for them was exhausted.

[2: The above extracts are from the Bouquet and Haldimand Papers, British Museum.]

[3: Bouquet to Forbes, 3 June, 1758.]

Forbes was in total ignorance of the strength and movements of the enemy. The Indians reported their numbers to be at least equal to his own; but nothing could be learned from them with certainty, by reason of their inveterate habit of lying. Several scouting-parties of whites were therefore sent forward, of which the most successful was that of a young Virginian officer, accompanied by a sergeant and five Indians. At a little distance from the French fort, the Indians stopped to paint themselves and practice incantations. The chief warrior of the party then took certain charms from an otter-skin bag and tied them about the necks of the other Indians. On that of the officer he hung the otter-skin itself; while to the sergeant he gave a small packet of paint from the same mystic receptacle. “He told us,” reports the officer, “that none of us could be shot, for those things would turn the balls from us; and then shook hands with us and told us to go and fight like men.” Thus armed against fate, they mounted the high ground afterwards called Grant’s Hill, where, covered by trees and bushes, they had a good view of the fort and saw plainly that the reports of the French force were greatly exaggerated.

[Journal of a Reconnoitring Party, Aug. 1758. The writer seems to have been Ensign Chew, of Washington’s regiment.]

Meanwhile Bouquet’s men pushed on the heavy work of road-making up the main range of the Alleghanies and, what proved far worse, the parallel mountain ridge of Laurel Hill, hewing, digging, blasting, laying fascines and gabions to support the track along the sides of steep declivities, or worming their way like moles through the jungle of swamp and forest. Forbes described the country to Pitt as an “immense uninhabited wilderness, overgrown everywhere with trees and brushwood, so that nowhere can one see twenty yards.” In truth, as far as eye or mind could reach, a prodigious forest vegetation spread its impervious canopy over hill, valley and plain and wrapped the stern and awful waste in the shadows of the tomb.

Having secured his magazines at Raystown and built a fort there named Fort Bedford, Bouquet made a forward movement of some forty miles, crossed the main Alleghany and Laurel Hill and, taking post on a stream called Loyalhannon Creek, began another depot of supplies as a base for the final advance on Fort Duquesne, which was scarcely fifty miles distant.

Vaudreuil had learned from prisoners the march of Forbes and, with his usual egotism, announced to the Colonial Minister what he had done in consequence. “I have provided for the safety for Fort Duquesne.” “I have sent reinforcements to M. de Ligneris, who commands there.” “I have done the impossible to supply him with provisions and I am now sending them in abundance, in order that the troops I may perhaps have occasion to send to drive off the English may not be delayed.” “A stronger fort is needed on the Ohio; but I cannot build one till after the peace; then I will take care to build such a one as will thenceforth keep the English out of that country.” Some weeks later he was less confident and very anxious for news from Ligneris. He says that he has sent him all the succors he could and ordered troops to go to his aid from Niagara, Detroit and Illinois, as well as the militia of Detroit, with the Indians there and elsewhere in the West, — Hurons, Ottawas, Pottawattamies, Miamis and other tribes. What he fears is that the English will not attack the fort till all these Indians have grown tired of waiting and have gone home again.[3] This was precisely the intention of Forbes and the chief object of his long delays.

[3: Vaudreuil au Ministre, Juillet, Août, Octobre 1758.]

He had another good reason for making no haste. There was hope that the Delawares and Shawanoes, who lived within easy reach of Fort Duquesne and who for the past three years had spread havoc throughout the English border, might now be won over from the French alliance. Forbes wrote to Bouquet from Shippensburg: “After many intrigues with Quakers, the Provincial Commissioners, the Governor, etc. and by the downright bullying of Sir William Johnson, I hope I have now brought about a general convention of the Indians.”[4] The convention was to include the Five Nations, the Delawares, the Shawanoes and other tribes, who had accepted wampum belts of invitation and promised to meet the Governor and Commissioners of the various provinces at the town of Easton, before the middle of September. This seeming miracle was wrought by several causes. The Indians in the French interest, always greedy for presents, had not of late got enough to satisfy them. Many of those destined for them had been taken on the way from France by British cruisers and the rest had passed through the hands of official knaves, who sold the greater part for their own profit. Again, the goods supplied by French fur-traders were few and dear; and the Indians remembered with regret the abundance and comparative cheapness of those they had from the English before the war. At the same time it was reported among them that a British army was marching to the Ohio strong enough to drive out the French from all that country; and the Delawares and Shawanoes of the West began to waver in their attachment to the falling cause. The eastern Delawares, living at Wyoming and elsewhere on the upper Susquehanna, had made their peace with the English in the summer before; and their great chief, Teedyuscung, thinking it for his interest that the tribes of the Ohio should follow his example, sent them wampum belts, inviting them to lay down the hatchet. The Five Nations, with Johnson at one end of the Confederacy and Joncaire at the other, — the one cajoling them in behalf of England and the other in behalf of France, — were still divided in counsel; but even among the Senecas, the tribe most under Joncaire’s influence, there was a party so far inclined to England that, like the Delaware chief, they sent wampum to the Ohio, inviting peace. But the influence most potent in reclaiming the warriors of the West was of a different kind. Christian Frederic Post, a member of the Moravian brotherhood, had been sent at the instance of Forbes as an envoy to the hostile tribes from the Governor and Council of Pennsylvania. He spoke the Delaware language, knew the Indians well, had lived among them, had married a converted squaw and, by his simplicity of character, directness and perfect honesty, gained their full confidence. He now accepted his terrible mission and calmly prepared to place himself in the clutches of the tiger. He was a plain German, upheld by a sense of duty and a single-hearted trust in God; alone, with no great disciplined organization to impel and support him and no visions and illusions such as kindled and sustained the splendid heroism of the early Jesuit martyrs. Yet his errand was no whit less perilous. And here we may notice the contrast between the mission settlements of the Moravians in Pennsylvania and those which the later Jesuits and the Sulpitians had established at Caughnawaga, St. Francis, La Présentation and other places. The Moravians were apostles of peace and they succeeded to a surprising degree in weaning their converts from their ferocious instincts and warlike habits; while the Mission Indians of Canada retained all their native fierceness and were systematically impelled to use their tomahawks against the enemies of the Church. Their wigwams were hung with scalps, male and female, adult and infant; and these so-called missions were but nests of baptized savages, who wore the crucifix instead of the medicine-bag and were encouraged by the Government for purposes of war.[5]

[4: Forbes to Bouquet, 18 Aug. 1758.]

[5: Of the Hurons of the mission of Lorette, Bougainville says: “Ils sont toujours sauvages autant que ceux qui sont les moins apprivoisés.” And yet they had been converts under Jesuit control for more than four generations. The case was no better at the other missions; and at St Francis it seems to have been worse.]

From Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter 22 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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