Descent of the St. Lawrence

As Wolfe had informed Pitt, his army was greatly weakened. Since the end of June his loss in killed and wounded was more than eight hundred and fifty.

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 27.

Perhaps he was as near despair as his undaunted nature was capable of being. In his present state of body and mind he was a hero without the light and cheer of heroism. He flattered himself with no illusions but saw the worst and faced it all. He seems to have been entirely without excitement. The languor of disease, the desperation of the chances and the greatness of the stake may have wrought to tranquillize him. His energy was doubly tasked: to bear up his own sinking frame and to achieve an almost hopeless feat of arms.

Audacious as it was, his plan cannot be called rash if we may accept the statement of two well-informed writers on the French side. They say that on the tenth of September the English naval commanders held a council on board the flagship, in which it was resolved that the lateness of the season required the fleet to leave Quebec without delay. They say further that Wolfe then went to the Admiral, told him that he had found a place where the heights could be scaled, that he would send up a hundred and fifty picked men to feel the way and that if they gained a lodgment at the top, the other troops should follow; if, on the other hand, the French were there in force to oppose them, he would not sacrifice the army in a hopeless attempt but embark them for home, consoled by the thought that all had been done that man could do. On this, concludes the story, the Admiral and his officers consented to wait the result.

[This statement is made by the Chevalier Johnstone and, with some variation, by the author of the valuable Journal tenu à l’Armée que commandoit feu M. le Marquis de Montcalm. Bigot says that, after the battle, he was told by British officers that Wolfe meant to risk only an advance party of two hundred men and to reimbark if they were repulsed.]

As Wolfe had informed Pitt, his army was greatly weakened. Since the end of June his loss in killed and wounded was more than eight hundred and fifty, including two colonels, two majors, nineteen captains and thirty-four subalterns; and to these were to be added a greater number disabled by disease.

The squadron of Admiral Holmes above Quebec had now increased to twenty-two vessels, great and small. One of the last that went up was a diminutive schooner, armed with a new swivels and jocosely named the “Terror of France.” She sailed by the town in broad daylight, the French, incensed at her impudence, blazing at her from all their batteries; but she passed unharmed, anchored by the Admiral’s ship and saluted him triumphantly with her swivels.

Wolfe’s first move towards executing his plan was the critical one of evacuating the camp at Montmorenci. This was accomplished on the third of September. Montcalm sent a strong force to fall on the rear of the retiring English. Monckton saw the movement from Point Levi, embarked two battalions in the boats of the fleet and made a feint of landing at Beauport. Montcalm recalled his troops to repulse the threatened attack; and the English withdrew from Montmorenci unmolested, some to the Point of Orleans, others to Point Levi. On the night of the fourth a fleet of flatboats passed above the town with the baggage and stores. On the fifth, Murray, with four battalions, marched up to the River Etechemin and forded it under a hot fire from the French batteries at Sillery. Monckton and Townshend followed with three more battalions and the united force, of about thirty-six hundred men, was embarked on board the ships of Holmes, where Wolfe joined them on the same evening.

These movements of the English filled the French commanders with mingled perplexity, anxiety and hope. A deserter told them that Admiral Saunders was impatient to be gone. Vaudreuil grew confident. “The breaking up of the camp at Montmorenci,” he says, “and the abandonment of the intrenchments there, the reembarkation on board the vessels above Quebec of the troops who had encamped on the south bank, the movements of these vessels, the removal of the heaviest pieces of artillery from the batteries of Point Levi, — these and the lateness of the season all combined to announce the speedy departure of the fleet, several vessels of which had even sailed down the river already. The prisoners and the deserters who daily came in told us that this was the common report in their army.”[1] He wrote to Bourlamaque on the first of September: “Everything proves that the grand design of the English has failed.”

[1: Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759.]

Yet he was ceaselessly watchful. So was Montcalm; and he, too, on the night of the second, snatched a moment to write to Bourlamaque from his headquarters in the stone house, by the river of Beauport: “The night is dark; it rains; our troops are in their tents, with clothes on, ready for an alarm; I in my boots; my horses saddled. In fact, this is my usual way. I wish you were here; for I cannot be everywhere, though I multiply myself and have not taken off my clothes since the twenty-third of June.” On the eleventh of September he wrote his last letter to Bourlamaque and probably the last that his pen ever traced. “I am overwhelmed with work and should often lose temper, like you, if I did not remember that I am paid by Europe for not losing it. Nothing new since my last. I give the enemy another month, or something less, to stay here.” The more sanguine Vaudreuil would hardly give them a week.

Meanwhile, no precaution was spared. The force under Bougainville above Quebec was raised to three thousand men.[2] He was ordered to watch the shore as far as Jacques-Cartier and follow with his main body every movement of Holmes’s squadron. There was little fear for the heights near the town; they were thought inaccessible.[3] Even Montcalm believed them safe and had expressed himself to that effect some time before. “We need not suppose,” he wrote to Vaudreuil, “that the enemy have wings;” and again, speaking of the very place where Wolfe afterwards landed, “I swear to you that a hundred men posted there would stop their whole army.”[4] He was right. A hundred watchful and determined men could have held the position long enough for reinforcements to come up.

[2: Journal du Siége (Bibliothêque de Hartwell). Journal tenu à l’Armée, etc. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759.]

[3: Pontbriand, Jugement impartial.]

[4: Montcalm à Vaudreuil, 27 Juillet. Ibid., 29 Juillet, 1759.]

The hundred men were there. Captain de Vergor, of the colony troops, commanded them and reinforcements were within his call; for the battalion of Guienne had been ordered to encamp close at hand on the Plains of Abraham.[5] Vergor’s post, called Anse du Foulon, was a mile and a half from Quebec. A little beyond it, by the brink of the cliffs, was another post, called Samos, held by seventy men with four cannon; and, beyond this again, the heights of Sillery were guarded by a hundred and thirty men, also with cannon.[6] These were outposts of Bougainville, whose headquarters were at Cap-Rouge, six miles above Sillery and whose troops were in continual movement along the intervening shore. Thus all was vigilance; for while the French were strong in the hope of speedy delivery, they felt that there was no safety till the tents of the invader had vanished from their shores and his ships from their river. “What we knew,” says one of them, “of the character of M. Wolfe, that impetuous, bold and intrepid warrior, prepared us for a last attack before he left us.”

[5: Foligny, Journal mémoratif. Journal tenu à l’Armée, etc.]

[6: Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759.]

Wolfe had been very ill on the evening of the fourth. The troops knew it and their spirits sank; but, after a night of torment, he grew better and was soon among them again, rekindling their ardor and imparting a cheer that he could not share. For himself he had no pity; but when he heard of the illness of two officers in one of the ships, he sent them a message of warm sympathy, advised them to return to Point Levi and offered them his own barge and an escort. They thanked him but replied that, come what might, they would see the enterprise to an end. Another officer remarked in his hearing that one of the invalids had a very delicate constitution. “Don’t tell me of constitution,” said Wolfe; “he has good spirit and good spirit will carry a man through everything.”[7] An immense moral force bore up his own frail body and forced it to its work.

[7: Knox, II. 61, 65.]

Major Robert Stobo, who, five years before, had been given as a hostage to the French at the capture of Fort Necessity, arrived about this time in a vessel from Halifax. He had long been a prisoner at Quebec, not always in close custody and had used his opportunities to acquaint himself with the neighborhood. In the spring of this year he and an officer of rangers named Stevens had made their escape with extraordinary skill and daring; and he now returned to give his countrymen the benefit of his local knowledge.[8] His biographer says that it was he who directed Wolfe in the choice of a landing-place.[9] Be this as it may, Wolfe in person examined the river and the shores as far as Pointe-aux-Trembles; till at length, landing on the south side a little above Quebec and looking across the water with a telescope, he descried a path that ran with a long slope up the face of the woody precipice and saw at the top a cluster of tents. They were those of Vergor’s guard at the Anse du Foulon, now called Wolfe’s Cove. As he could see but ten or twelve of them, he thought that the guard could not be numerous and might be overpowered. His hope would have been stronger if he had known that Vergor had once been tried for misconduct and cowardice in the surrender of Beauséjour and saved from merited disgrace by the friendship of Bigot and the protection of Vaudreuil.[10]

[8: Letters in Boston Post Boy, No. 97 and Boston Evening Post, No. 1,258.]

[9: Memoirs of Major Robert Stobo. Curious but often inexact.]

[10: See supra, p. 186.]

The morning of the seventh was fair and warm and the vessels of Holmes, their crowded decks gay with scarlet uniforms, sailed up the river to Cap-Rouge. A lively scene awaited them; for here were the headquarters of Bougainville and here lay his principal force, while the rest watched the banks above and below. The cove into which the little river runs was guarded by floating batteries; the surrounding shore was defended by breastworks; and a large body of regulars, militia and mounted Canadians in blue uniforms moved to and fro, with restless activity, on the hills behind. When the vessels came to anchor, the horsemen dismounted and formed in line with the infantry; then, with loud shouts, the whole rushed down the heights to man their works at the shore. That true Briton, Captain Knox, looked on with a critical eye from the gangway of his ship and wrote that night in his Diary that they had made a ridiculous noise. “How different!” he exclaims, “how nobly awful and expressive of true valor is the customary silence of the British troops!”

In the afternoon the ships opened fire, while the troops entered the boats and rowed up and down as if looking for a landing-place. It was but a feint of Wolfe to deceive Bougainville as to his real design. A heavy easterly rain set in on the next morning and lasted two days without respite. All operations were suspended and the men suffered greatly in the crowded transports. Half of them were therefore landed on the south shore, where they made their quarters in the village of St. Nicholas, refreshed themselves and dried their wet clothing, knapsacks and blankets.

From Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter 27 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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