Parkman Vol. 7, Chapter 21

While at one end of the lake the force of Abercromby was diminished by detachments and disease, that of Montcalm at the other was so increased by reinforcements that a forward movement on his part seemed possible.

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Previously in Montcalm and Wolfe, Volume 7 of the French in Canada series. Beginning Chapter 21.

Chapter 21

The rashness of Abercromby before the fight was matched by his poltroonery after it. Such was his terror that on the evening of his defeat he sent an order to Colonel Cummings, commanding at Fort William Henry, to send all the sick and wounded and all the heavy artillery to New York without delay.[1] He himself followed so closely upon this disgraceful missive that Cummings had no time to obey it.

[1: Cunningham, aide-de-camp of Abercromby, to Cummings, 8 July, 1758.]

The defeated and humbled troops proceeded to reoccupy the ground they had left a few days before in the flush of confidence and pride; and young Colonel Williams, of Massachusetts, lost no time in sending the miserable story to his uncle Israel. His letter, which is dated “Lake George (sorrowful situation), July ye 11th,” ends thus:

I have told facts; you may put the epithets upon them. In one word, what with fatigue, want of sleep, exercise of mind and leaving the place we went to capture, the best part of the army is unhinged. I have told enough to make you sick, if the relation acts on you as the facts have on me.”

In the routed army was the sturdy John Cleaveland, minister of Ipswich and now chaplain of Bagley’s Massachusetts regiment, who regarded the retreat with a disgust that was shared by many others. “This day,” he writes in his Diary, at the head of Lake George, two days after the battle, “wherever I went I found people, officers and soldiers, astonished that we left the French ground and commenting on the strange conduct in coming off.” From this time forth the provincials called their commander Mrs. Nabbycromby.[1] He thought of nothing but fortifying himself. “Towards evening,” continues the chaplain, “the General, with his Rehoboam counsellors, came over to line out a fort on the rocky hill where our breastwork was last year. Now we begin to think strongly that the grand expedition against Canada is laid aside and a foundation made totally to impoverish our country.” The whole army was soon entrenched. The chaplain of Bagley’s, with his brother Ebenezer, chaplain of another regiment, one day walked round the camp and carefully inspected it. The tour proved satisfactory to the militant divines and John Cleaveland reported to his wife: “We have built an extraordinary good breastwork, sufficient to defend ourselves against twenty thousand of the enemy, though at present we have not above a third part of that number fit for duty.” Many of the troops had been sent to the Mohawk and others to the Hudson.

[1: Trumbull, Hist. Connecticut, II. 392. “Nabby” (Abigail) was then a common female name in New England.]

In the regiment of which Cleaveland was chaplain there was a young surgeon from Danvers, Dr. Caleb Rea, who also kept a copious diary and, being of a serious turn, listened with edification to the prayers and exhortations to which the yeoman soldiery were daily summoned. In his zeal, he made an inquest among them for singers and chose the most melodious to form a regimental choir, “the better to carry on the daily service of singing psalms;” insomuch that the New England camp was vocal with rustic harmony, sincere, if somewhat nasal. These seemly observances were not inconsistent with a certain amount of disorder among the more turbulent spirits, who, removed from the repressive influence of tight-laced village communities, sometimes indulged in conduct which grieved the conscientious surgeon. The rural New England of that time, with its narrowness, its prejudices, its oddities, its combative energy and rugged, unconquerable strength, is among the things of the past, or lingers in remote corners where the whistle of the locomotive is never heard. It has spread itself in swarming millions over half a continent, changing with changing conditions; and even the part of it that clings to the ancestral hive has transformed and continues to transform itself.

The provincials were happy in their chaplains, among whom there reigned a marvelous harmony, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Congregationalists meeting twice a week to hold prayer-meetings together. “A rare instance indeed,” says Dr. Rea, “and perhaps scarce ever was an army blessed with such a set of chaplains before.” On one occasion, just before the fatal expedition, nine of them, after prayers and breakfast, went together to call upon the General. “He treated us very kindly,” says the chaplain of Bagley’s, “and told us that he hoped we would teach the people to do their duty and be courageous; and told us a story of a chaplain in Germany, where he was, who just before the action told the soldiers he had not time to say much and therefore should only say: ‘Be courageous; for no cowards go to heaven.’ The General treated us to a bowl of punch and a bottle of wine and then we took our leave of him.”

[For the use of the Diary of Chaplain Cleaveland, as well as of his letters to his wife, I am indebted to the kindness of Miss Abby E. Cleaveland, his descendant.]

When Cleaveland and the more gifted among his brethren preached of a Sunday, officers and men of the regulars, no less than the provincials, came to listen; yet that pious Sabbatarian, Dr. Rea, saw much to afflict his conscience. “Sad, sad it is to see how the Sabbath is profaned in the camp,” above all by “the horrid custom of swearing, more especially among the regulars; and I can’t but charge our defeat on this sin.”

It would have been well had the harmony that prevailed among the chaplains found its counterpart among the men of the sword; but between the British regular officers and those of the provinces there was anything but an equal brotherhood. It is true that Pitt, in the spirit of conciliation which he always showed towards the colonies, had procured a change in the regulations concerning the relative rank of British and provincial officers, thus putting them in a position much nearer equality; but this, while appeasing the provincials, seems to have annoyed the others. Till the campaign was nearly over, not a single provincial colonel had been asked to join in a council of war; and, complains Cleaveland, “they know no more of what is to be done than a sergeant, till the orders come out.” Of the British officers, the greater part had seen but little active service. Most of them were men of family, exceedingly prejudiced and insular, whose knowledge of the world was limited to certain classes of their own countrymen and who looked down on all others, whether domestic or foreign. Towards the provincials their attitude was one of tranquil superiority, though its tranquility was occasionally disturbed by what they regarded as absurd pretension on the part of the colony officers. One of them gave vent to his feelings in an article in the London Chronicle, in which he advanced the very reasonable proposition that “a farmer is not to be taken from the plough and made an officer in a day;” and he was answered wrathfully, at great length, in the Boston Evening Post, by a writer signing himself “A New England Man.” The provincial officers, on the other hand and especially those of New England, being no less narrow and prejudiced, filled with a sensitive pride and a jealous local patriotism and bred up in a lofty appreciation of the merits and importance of their country, regarded British superciliousness with a resentment which their strong love for England could not overcome. This feeling was far from being confined to the officers. A provincial regiment stationed at Half-Moon, on the Hudson, thought itself affronted by Captain Cruikshank, a regular officer; and the men were so incensed that nearly half of them went off in a body. The deportment of British officers in the Seven Years War no doubt had some part in hastening on the Revolution.

What with levelling Montcalm’s siege works, planting palisades and grubbing up stumps in their bungling and laborious way, the regulars found abundant occupation. Discipline was stiff and peremptory. The wooden horse and the whipping-post were conspicuous objects in the camp and often in use. Caleb Rea, being tender-hearted, never went to see the lash laid on; for, as he quaintly observes, “the cries were satisfactory to me, without the sight of the strokes.” He and the rest of the doctors found active exercise for such skill as they had, since fever and dysentery were making scarcely less havoc than the bullets at Ticonderoga. This came from the bad state of the camps and unwholesome food. The provincial surgeons seem to have been very little impressed with the importance of sanitary regulations and to have thought it their business not to prevent disease but only to cure it. The one grand essential in their eyes was a well-stocked medicine-chest, rich in exhaustless stores of rhubarb, ipecacuanha and calomel. Even this sometimes failed. Colonel Williams reports “the sick destitute of everything proper for them; medicine-chest empty; nothing but their dirty blankets for beds; Dr. Ashley dead, Dr. Wright gone home, low enough; Bille worn off his legs, — such is our case. I have near a hundred sick. Lost a sergeant and a private last night.”[2] Chaplain Cleaveland himself, though strong of frame, did not escape; but he found solace in his trouble from the congenial society of a brother chaplain, Mr. Emerson, of New Hampshire, “a right-down hearty Christian minister, of savory conversation,” who came to see him in his tent, breakfasted with him and joined him in prayer. Being somewhat better, he one day thought to recreate himself with the apostolic occupation of fishing. The sport was poor; the fish bit slowly; and as he lay in his boat, still languid with his malady, he had leisure to reflect on the contrasted works of Providence and man, — the bright lake basking amid its mountains, a dream of wilderness beauty and the swarms of harsh humanity on the shore beside him, with their passions, discords and miseries. But it was with the strong meat of Calvinistic theology and not with reveries like these, that he was accustomed to nourish his military flock.

[2: Colonel William Williams to Colonel Israel Williams, 4 Sept. 1758.]

While at one end of the lake the force of Abercromby was diminished by detachments and disease, that of Montcalm at the other was so increased by reinforcements that a forward movement on his part seemed possible. He contented himself, however, with strengthening the fort, reconstructing the lines that he had defended so well and sending out frequent war-parties by way of Wood Creek and South Bay, to harass Abercromby’s communications with Fort Edward. These parties, some of which consisted of several hundred men, were generally more or less successful; and one of them, under La Corne, surprised and destroyed a large wagon train escorted by forty soldiers. When Abercromby heard of it, he ordered Rogers, with a strong detachment of provincials, light infantry and rangers, to go down the lake in boats, cross the mountains to the narrow waters of Lake Champlain and cut off the enemy. But though Rogers set out at two in the morning, the French retreated so fast that he arrived too late. As he was on his way back, he was met by a messenger from the General with orders to intercept other French parties reported to be hovering about Fort Edward. On this he retraced his steps, marched through the forest to where Whitehall now stands and thence made his way up Wood Creek to old Fort Anne, a relic of former wars, abandoned and falling to decay. Here, on the neglected “clearing” that surrounded the ruin, his followers encamped. They counted seven hundred in all and consisted of about eighty rangers, a body of Connecticut men under Major Putnam and a small regular force, chiefly light infantry, under Captain Dalzell, the brave officer who was afterwards killed by Pontiac’s warriors at Detroit.

From Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter 21 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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