by Dan Snow
The British troops are only too much exasperated; the enormous cruelties already committed and especially the base infraction of the capitulation of Fort William Henry are yet fresh in their minds. Such acts deserve, and if repeated will certainly meet, in future, the severest reprisals; all distinction will cease between Frenchmen, Canadians and Indians; all will be treated as a cruel and barbarous mob, thirsting for human blood.47
Bougainville, on behalf of Vaudreuil, assured Wolfe that there was no foundation in this report. ‘Your Excellency ought to have regarded as soldiers’ gossip the tales related…The fate of those three prisoners has been the same as that of all the others taken by the Indians; the king has ransomed them at considerable expense.’ He concluded icily that ‘the Marquis de Vaudreuil has not instructed me to respond to the menaces, invectives and accusations with which that letter abounds’.48
This incident turned out to be a ghoulish camp rumour but Wolfe’s men were nevertheless suffering badly at the hands of the Canadians and Native Americans. Hardly a day went by without the loss of another sentry or another group of off duty soldiers rummaging through the woods trying to supplement their diets. On 25 July Wolfe issued a final proclamation to the local people. It announced that ‘His Excellency, indignant at the little regard paid by the inhabitants of Canada to his proclamation…is determined no longer to listen to the sentiments of humanity which prompted him to solace people blind to their own interests.’ Sadly, ‘the Canadians have, by their conduct, proved themselves unworthy of the advantageous offers he held out to them’. From now on ‘he had issued orders to the Commanders of his Light Infantry and other officers, to proceed into the country and to seize and bring in the farmers and their cattle, and to destroy and lay waste what they shall judge proper’.49
From that point on Wolfe unleashed a wave of destruction along the length of the St Lawrence River. Many people at the time and since have seen this as an admission of failure. One French officer wrote that ’during the greatest part of the month of August, general Wolfe remained inactive in his camp upon the Falls of Montmorency, and confined his operations to the burning and plundering of what houses there were in the country he was master of, waiting the arrival of the forces under Mr Amherst, before he made any new attempts’.50 Vaudreuil also believed that Wolfe ‘no longer makes a secret of saying that the expedition to take Canada has failed’. He had given up hope of taking Quebec and the ‘only resource he has found in his despair is to pillage, ravage and burn the settlements which are near his army’.51 Wolfe did, indeed, have his doubts that he would take Quebec but his destruction of farms was not purely sadistic. He intended to weaken Canada so that its starving and demoralized inhabitants would fall easy prey to a British force in 1760. His own ‘Family Journal’ records that since his announcements ’had no effect in preventing the peasants from taking arms, and the acquisition of Quebec [was] very dubious, Mr Wolfe au pis aller [in the last resort] thought it would be a severe check on the colony to destroy the villages and settlements below’.52
Wolfe also justified the devastation by claiming that it was to ‘engage the Marquis de Montcalm to try the event of a battle to prevent the ravage, and partly in return for the many insults offered to our people by the Canadians’.53 Goading a well-fortified enemy to come out and fight by ravaging the countryside is a tactic so old that it is described in the Iliad. As to the second part, he now found himself fighting a full-scale counter-insurgency and acted accordingly. The guerrilla-style attacks on his men were destroying morale, sapping his manpower, and offending his sense of how war ought to be waged. Wars in north-west Europe, where Wolfe had served his apprenticeship, were altogether different. For generations peasants had watched competing empires, electorates, and kingdoms advance and recede. A change of regime made little impression on people’s existence. Few were prepared to risk their family’s lives in guerrilla attacks out of dynastic loyalty to the Habsburgs or Hohenzollerns. Armies traversed to and fro and tended to leave peasants enough grain to subsist on over the winter. There were notable examples of soldiers ravaging countryside but they were atypical, and condemned by all sides.54
North America was a different world. John Johnson wrote menacingly that when it became clear that the proclamations ‘had produced no good effect, and in order if possible to intimidate the enemy, [Wolfe] found it absolutely necessary to connive at some irregularities which were committed by our soldiers, by way of retaliation’.55 By the third week of August, Mackellar recorded wholesale destruction: ’We began to burn the habitations between St Joachim and the falls of Montmorency agreeably to the manifesto lately published.’56 British detachments roamed along the shoreline bringing destruction with them. The soldiers set to the task with undoubted enthusiasm. Montresor wrote to his father saying that the ‘desolation will afford us no small diversion to our soldiery who are all in charming health’.57 Wolfe shared his men’s hatred of the Canadians; the previous summer he had written to a friend saying that ‘though I am neither inhuman nor rapacious yet I own it would give me pleasure to see the Canadian vermin sacked and pillaged and justly repaid their unheard-of cruelty’.58 He was particularly disappointed in them during the summer of 1759. He had offered them a generous bargain. He had promised to protect their property and allow the unrestricted practice of their religion. By their continued violence they had refused his offer. Now they would suffer the consequences.
Johnson outlines the instructions that he and the troops received from Wolfe. He was ordered to ‘distress all in his power, all those who had thus set at naught his lenity, and tenderness towards them’. He and his comrades were to ‘kill and destroy by every means they could’ all the cattle, grain supplies, orchards and ‘whatsoever else they found growing in the ground’. Johnson was even given permission to ‘despoil them of whatever moveables they could find in their possession’. Wolfe was, however, very precise as to the limits of this orgy of destruction and theft. ‘Churches, convents or places of public worship’ were to be left alone ‘under pain of death’. Almost as sacrosanct were the bodies of ‘young women and virgins’, the abuse of which would bring on ‘the severest punishment’. Johnson was also warned off ‘using ill the persons of ancient men or women, or helpless children’.59 These restrictions may have salved Wolfe’s conscience but they seem to have been only partially obeyed as his men swept along the banks of the river.
One of the first areas to feel the scourge was the parish of Baie St Paul, near the Île aux Coudres, about fifty miles downstream of Quebec. Joseph Gorham, the New England ranger, was the obvious choice as commander. The previous November he had helped the gifted Massachusetts soldier, George Scott, lay waste to the French settlements up the Petitcodiac River, and had submitted a report of the raid describing ‘his party a-burning and destroying the enemy’s substance’.60 Now he commanded a mixed group of the best of the rangers and some regulars. Knox writes that all the redcoats were volunteers.61 Gorham and his force, just under three hundred strong, were sent downriver. They were fired on by the British sloop Zephyr, possibly because its jumpy commander, Greenwood, had only just brought his little twelve-gun ship into the St Lawrence. Gorham rowed as close as he dared and roared at them to cease fire. Having corrected the mistake Greenwood accompanied Gorham further down the river. The first target was the bay of St Paul because of the ‘presumption’ the residents had shown by firing on the British as they had sailed up the St Lawrence over a month before.
At 0300 hours on the morning of 9 August Gorham’s men attacked out of the early morning murk. A hail of musketry from the shore killed one man and wounded another eight, but while the habitants reloaded the British force stormed ashore. A sergeant in the Louisbourg Grenadiers heard from a comrade who was on the raid that forty Canadians put up a stiff fight for two hours before being driven off. The British force then burnt the village, ‘consisting of about 50 fine houses and barns’, and killed their cattle.62 Piles of plunder were carried off including ‘books,
apparel and household stuff of various kinds’.63 Even fifty-five miles away Knox could tell that Gorham had been at work. He wrote that ‘a great smoke is perceived this morning on the north side, at a distance below Orleans: this is supposed to be occasioned by Captain Goreham’s detachment, who are burning the settlements abreast of the isle of Coudres’.64 Having suffered only nine casualties in the attack Gorham pressed on. He moved east twenty miles to Malbaie, where the Louisbourg Grenadier tells us ‘they destroyed a very pretty parish, drove off the inhabitants and stock without any loss’. Not satisfied Gorham crossed the St Lawrence, ‘destroyed part of the parish of St Ann’s [St Anne] and St Roan [St Roche], where were very handsome houses with farms, and loaded the vessels with cattle’.65 Wolfe watched the smoke and tried to guess where Gorham had attacked next. He wrote to Monckton on 14 August saying that ‘I hear Goreham has been at Mal Baye—and by the smoke on the south shore it is imagined that he has carried the terror of his arms even to that coast. I want him back.’66 Sensitive to his general’s every desire, Gorham returned on 15 August.
From this point both sides of the St Lawrence, containing some of the finest farmland in Canada, were put to the torch. On 15 August Wolfe wrote to Monckton saying, ‘all the houses and barns between the Etchemin River and la Chaudiere may be burned whenever any opportunity offers’. The reason: ‘It is to very little purpose to with-hold the rod, seeing they are incorrigible, they have had Indians upon the Isle of Orleans, and have scalped four sailors very lately.’67 Later in August Wolfe shifted his attention to the settlements on twenty miles of the north shore between Montmorency and St Joachim. In early September Major John Scott, no stranger to village burning after his part in the expulsion of the Acadians, was sent with a motley band of redcoat volunteers, marines, and rangers to destroy the entire south coast. He was accompanied by a frigate and an armed sloop. Knox watched them go and recorded that their orders were to go ‘down the river, as far as there are any settlements’ and then ‘to lay waste to such parishes as shall presume to persist in their opposition’.68 Panet is utterly disdainful, every day his journal notes which stretch of the St Lawrence shoreline has been burnt. On 21 August he noted that ‘the English, following their laudable custom, have set fire to St Joachim’. Two nights later he could watch the ribbon of orange destruction stretching for miles from the walls of Quebec.69
Scott’s expedition sailed down to Kamouraska and marched back burning as they went. Scott reported that ’upon the whole we marched fifty two miles, and in that distance, burnt nine hundred and ninety eight good buildings, two sloops, two schooners, ten shalloops and several batteaus and small craft, took fifteen prisoners (six of them women and five of them children), killed five of the enemy, had one regular wounded, two of the rangers killed and four more of them wounded’.70
We get only small glimpses of the suffering of the people of the St Lawrence that summer. Passing references in journals allude to the horror of this full-scale counter-insurgency. The people were trapped between the dictates of Vaudreuil, enforced by his lethal war parties of Native Americans, or of Wolfe with his equally vicious bands of rangers who struck with impunity all along the valley of the St Lawrence. Knox wrote that at the very beginning of September some letters of Vaudreuil’s were intercepted, in which with ‘great hauteur’ he demanded that the priests of several of the downriver parishes ‘pay more respect to his commands for the time to come on pain of incurring his highest displeasure’. They were to stop being so disobedient, help any of Vaudreuil’s irregular soldiers, and hide their cattle more effectively in the woods, to deny them to the British.71
One priest who seems to have needed no encouragement from Vaudreuil was René Portneuf, the priest of St Joachim, on the north shore of the St Lawrence opposite the very eastern tip of the Île d’Orléans. He was Canadian born and had been responsible for the souls in this little community for twenty-four years. In spring 1759 the Quebec church had told its priests not to carry arms and had reminded them that their first duty was to their flocks, not to the regime. The Bishop, Henri Marie Dubreil de Pontbriand, was determined to preserve his church even if New France fell. He wrote to his priests in June and told them that if the British arrived in their parishes, they should greet them courteously and ask them to spare the lives of civilians and the property of the church. Most of the approximately two hundred priests in Canada obeyed this dictate. Historians have identified fifteen who did not and took up arms against the invader.
The most celebrated was René Portneuf. On 20 August Vaudreuil wrote to him thanking him for the intelligence that he was sending to Quebec about the British movements. He wrote that ‘the proceedings of the British, although violent and contrary to the laws of man’, did not surprise him as they ‘are due to the recognition of the uselessness of the whole campaign’. The inhabitants must, however, continue to offer the ‘liveliest opposition to the British’. He apologized that he could spare no reinforcements because of the need for every last man in Quebec.72
Three days later the curé appears in Knox’s journal. He had heard that ‘a priest, with about four score of his parishioners, have fortified themselves in a house a few miles to the eastward of our camp’. Knox had heard that ‘they indiscreetly pretend to brave our troops’. Menacingly, he reports that ‘a detachment of light infantry, with a field piece and a howitzer, are to be sent to reduce them’.73
This party was commanded by Captain Alexander Montgomery. When he landed he found a letter waiting for him from Portneuf. In it the Canadian priest acknowledged that Montgomery was fighting ‘for his king and for glory’ and as a result he hoped that Montgomery would understand that he was ‘fighting for his poor parishioners, and defending his country’.74 Portneuf had misjudged his adversary. One story goes that Montgomery was deeply embittered by the loss of a brother during the horrific frontier fighting of the previous few years and he, like his commander Wolfe, was in no mood to tolerate Canadian resistance.
The British officer moved a cannon into a position to bombard the priest’s stronghold. In the meantime he placed his troops in the edges of the nearby woods to wait. Details are confused but it appears that after a short bombardment the Canadians were flushed out and ran straight into the ambush. There was a desperate hand-to-hand fight. Some of the Canadians surrendered, others were killed. Malcolm Fraser, who had already been shocked earlier in the summer by the brutality of British troops, wrote that ‘the barbarous Captain Montgomery’ ordered that the prisoners ‘be butchered in a most inhuman and cruel manner’. Fraser was appalled; he could see ‘no excuse for such an unparalleled piece of barbarity’.75
All the sources agree that their priest commander was killed and scalped along with the rest of them. Ramezay heard that Portneuf’s men ‘were treated very badly’. However, their leader, ‘whom the English no doubt suspected of having stirred up this handful of men, was treated even more cruelly’. ‘The English,’ Ramezay reported, ‘cut off his head in cold blood and in front of his miserable inhabitants.’76 Three days later a burial certificate was drawn up by the priest of the neighbouring parish where Portneuf was interred; the church and presbytery of St Joachim having been destroyed in the fighting. It states that Portneuf was ‘massacred by the British on the 23rd, being at the head of his parish to defend it against the incursions and hostilities which the enemy was carrying on against it’.77
Despite Wolfe’s disgust at scalping when he had first arrived in the St Lawrence, the long brutal summer had clearly eroded his proscription of it. On 27 July he had issued a general order which stated that ‘the General strictly forbids the inhuman practice of scalping, except when the enemy are Indians, or Canadians dressed like Indians’.78 Knox suggests that this order was put into practice, claiming that the reason Portneuf’s men were ‘treated with such cruelty proceeded from the wretched parishioners having disguised themselves like Indians’.79 By this point in the campaign that meant instant death. By August British troops regarded the Canadi
an people and their Native allies with utter hatred. As increasing numbers of friends and comrades fell to Canadian scalping knives or rifles, British troops lashed out in punitive raids against farms and communities, which embittered the habitants still further. Townshend records that by August Wolfe ‘gave it out in orders that if any soldier chooses to go out in the Woods and lay in Ambush for the Indians and bring in an Indian Scalp [he] should have 5 Guineas reward’.80 By the beginning of September one British soldier wrote that ‘scalping is practised on both sides; as it is likewise by our ranging parties, who scour all the country’.81
Although there was a creeping acceptance of scalping, as long as the victims were the despised Native Americans, attempts were still made to protect civilians who were clearly non-combatants. Wolfe was determined that his men would not kill women or children. Amherst also prohibited scalping in certain circumstances. A soldier in his army recorded the policy for scalping: ‘it is the general orders that no scouting party or others in the army under his command shall, whatsoever opportunity they may have, scalp any women or children belonging to the enemy’.82 In both Amherst’s and Wolfe’s army these orders were interpreted flexibly by the rangers and redcoats who struck village after village in dawn raids. Women and children often suffered the same fate as their husbands and fathers. Montcalm was livid: ‘The English, imitating the ferocity of our Indians, have scalped a few inhabitants of the south coast,’ his journal reports. ‘Are we to believe that a nation of laws is determined to mutilate corpses in cold blood? This barbarism would have been abolished among the Indians if they had proved themselves possible of correction.’83