Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  With the conquest so easily completed, the New England regiment had only one task remaining: to disarm, detain, and deport the indigenous Acadians to the mainland colonies. This extraordinary move— perhaps the first time in modern history a civilian population was forcibly removed as a security risk—ostensibly came as a consequence of the Acadians’ unwillingness to declare unqualified allegiance to George II. For the previous forty years the Acadians, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, had practiced their Catholic faith and retained possession of their lands in return for swearing only a highly limited loyalty oath that promised neutrality in all disputes between the Crowns of England and France. Now, worried about their potential for rebellion, Nova Scotia’s governor and provincial council tried to force the Acadians to take an oath of submission that would revoke their religious privileges and make them ordinary subjects of the British Crown. Thinking that this was just one more attempt to deprive them of their treaty rights by trickery—a tactic the English had tried before—the Acadians refused.

  They had no way of knowing that the governor and council intended to use any resistance as an excuse to get rid of them, and they were dumbfounded when the governor and council responded to their recalcitrance by imprisoning householders, declaring all their lands and cattle forfeit, and ordering them and their families deported from the province. In October the “Grand Dérangement” began. Most of the Acadians from the settlements along the Bay of Fundy were caught in the British trap and shipped out to England and the mainland colonies, where their families were scattered among the colonial population. Perhaps 5,400 were herded aboard ships and sent off with what few possessions they could carry. Those who could escape—perhaps seven to ten thousand—fled to the mainland or to the Île-St.-Jean (now Prince Edward Island), allied themselves with the Abenakis and Micmacs, and fought back as best they could, in the hope of regaining their homeland.10

  By the close of the campaign, the combination of deportations and flight had effectively depopulated Acadian Nova Scotia. The entire scheme, so chillingly reminiscent of modern “ethnic cleansing” operations, was executed with a coldness and calculation—and indeed an efficiency—rarely seen in other wartime operations. There are strong indications that William Shirley himself was the architect of deportation, and that his real intention was less to take Beauséjour and neutralize any Acadian military threat than to make the farms of the Acadians available to recolonization by New Englanders and other Protestant immigrants. There can at any rate be no doubt that New Englanders were the principal beneficiaries of the deportation. Even before the New England troops returned home, some had begun to contemplate returning to settle; beginning in 1760, they did. Before the end of 1763, no fewer than five thousand Yankee farmers and fishermen would move to Nova Scotia, taking over Acadian farmsteads and rechristening Acadian towns with English names.11

  If by the middle of August 1755 the Nova Scotia campaign seemed to the new commander in chief to be well on the way to unqualified success, Johnson’s expedition against Crown Point looked unlikely to get under way at all. By then Shirley knew that Braddock’s papers, which contained the complete plan of the campaigns, had been abandoned on the Monongahela battlefield. Thus there was at least a strong likelihood that the French knew all about Johnson’s intended attack on Fort St. Frédéric, and that Dieskau would send reinforcements to aid in its defense. Shirley had warned Johnson that, should strong French opposition appear, he was to be prepared to go on the defensive and protect Albany from possible attack. A quick strike toward Crown Point might still forestall French countermeasures, but it would not be until the beginning of September that Johnson’s forces would be encamped at the south end of Lac St. Sacrement, from which they were to embark by boat for Crown Point.12

  There had been many causes for delay, beginning with the competition for supplies that had hindered Shirley’s own departure from Albany. Hundreds of shallow-draft boats, or bateaux, had to be constructed to carry men and supplies from Albany northward to the Great Carrying Place beyond Saratoga (the site of Lydius’s old smuggling post); a new fort, called Fort Edward in honor of the duke of York, had to be built there as a base for supply; a portage road had to be cut from Fort Edward to Lac St. Sacrement, a distance of about sixteen miles; the boats and cannon and gear of the expedition had to be dragged from Fort Edward to the lake; and the troops themselves—about 3,500 men from the New England provinces and New York—had to receive at least some degree of training. Finally, although Shirley did not yet know it, Johnson was also distracted from preparing his army for movement by his demanding duties as a conspirator, for he was busy scheming with De Lancey and Pownall to have Shirley removed from command. On September 3, for example, shortly after joining his forces at the lake, Johnson spent a good deal of his day writing one letter to the earl of Halifax denouncing Shirley as a bad influence on Indian affairs, and another to Pownall denouncing him as “a bad Man abandoned to Passion & enslaved by resentment”—sentiments that he knew Pownall would pass along discreetly to his English contacts. 13

  As September began, then, Johnson’s provincials were still hauling bateaux, supplies, and munitions to the lake. Johnson’s Mohawk allies, led by Chief Hendrick, were just arriving in camp. Johnson himself had decided that it would be necessary to build an armed galley and erect one or perhaps two more forts before he could proceed safely against Crown Point. The weather was already turning cold and the campaigning season was fast slipping away, but his only lasting achievement to date had been the gesture—not unlike Céloron’s burials of the lead plates—of giving Lac St. Sacrement the new name of Lake George, as a means of claiming it for the English king. Never eager to seek combat and doubting his skills as a general, Johnson expected to go into winter quarters without facing the disagreeable prospect of battle.14

  The baron de Dieskau, however, had other plans. He had arrived at Québec on June 23 along with his troops and the marquis de Vaudreuil, the new governor-general of New France. Dieskau and Vaudreuil took stock of the situation that confronted them at the beginning of July— Braddock marching on Fort Duquesne, New Englanders driving the defenders from Fort Beauséjour, Shirley advancing toward Niagara, and Johnson preparing to proceed against Fort St. Frédéric—and saw that the greatest threat was the Niagara campaign, which if successful would destroy Canada’s ability to maintain its links to the western forts. Dieskau therefore assembled about four thousand French regulars, Canadians, and domiciled Indians at Montréal and by early August was ready to ascend the St. Lawrence and reinforce Fort Niagara. 15 At that point, however, Vaudreuil began receiving urgent, exaggerated reports of Johnson’s strength and movements and decided that he would have to divert Dieskau and about three thousand of his men to defend Fort St. Frédéric—the walls of which were in such bad repair that they would be unable to withstand even a brief cannonade. Thus just as the heartening news of Braddock’s defeat arrived at Montréal, Dieskau and his men set out for Lake Champlain and Crown Point, to mount a similar spoiling campaign against Johnson’s expedition.

  Fort Edward, New York. Shown here as it appeared in a collection of plans of North American forts published in London after the end of the war, Fort Edward evolved from a trading post on the upper Hudson into a substantial (if awkwardly sited) fort defended by nearly thirty cannon. Here it appears as what it became, the main supply base for staging operations on the Lake George–Lake Champlain corridor. From Mary Ann Rocque, A Set of Plans and Forts in America, Reduced from Actual Surveys (London, 1765). Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  Fort St. Frédéric, 1737–59. A formidable fort used as a base for raids by the French and their Indian allies against the New York and New England frontiers, this post at Crown Point was one of the most imposing elements in the defensive network of New France. The bombproof tower, or redoubt, shown here both from within the fort and from the lake, dominated the narrows of Lake Champlain, while the fort as a whole mounted
forty cannon. By 1755, however, the structure was in such bad repair that the French knew it would have to be abandoned in the event of siege; hence the urgent construction of Fort Carillon on the Ticonderoga peninsula, at the head of the lake. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  Arriving at Fort St. Frédéric, Dieskau sent out scouts to assess the situation of Johnson’s unsuspecting provincials. Their reports made him decide to mount a raid on the partially completed and lightly defended Fort Edward, destroying the boats, cannon, and supplies stored there before they could be used to stage an advance down the lake. Such a blow would be even more disabling than the one that Contrecoeur had recently dealt Braddock, for it would not only forestall any further threat to Crown Point, but would roll back New York’s and New England’s defenses to Albany itself. After consulting with the commander of his mixed contingent of Abenaki and Caughnawaga warriors—Captain Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, the same rugged officer who had brushed Washington off at Fort LeBoeuf in the winter of 1753—Dieskau determined to leave most of his regulars behind to defend Fort St. Frédéric and to make his raid with a force composed primarily of Canadians and Indians. This was, to say the least, a highly unconventional move for a European regular officer to make; it would never have occurred, for example, to Braddock. But Dieskau, who had once been an aide-de-camp to the great maréchal Arminius Maurice, comte de Saxe, had acquired from him a respect for the use of irregulars in Europe, and he seems to have accepted the similarity of Indians and Canadians to the partisans Saxe had used against the British army in Flanders during the War of the Austrian Succession.16 By September 4, he and fifteen hundred picked men—about two hundred regular grenadiers, six hundred Canadian militiamen, and seven hundred Abenakis and Caughnawaga Mohawks—had advanced to the confluence of Lake George and Lake Champlain, a strategic spot called Carillon by the French and Ticonderoga by the English. From there they paddled quietly southward to the end of South Bay, cached their canoes, and struck off through the woods toward Fort Edward.

  Late in the day on September 7, Dieskau and his men emerged from the forest on the portage road, three miles north of Fort Edward. There the Indians informed him that they would not attack a fort, no matter how poorly defended, but that they were willing to proceed against Johnson’s men at Lake George, who had not yet begun to fortify their camp. Dieskau, a flexible officer who had little choice in the matter anyway, changed his plans. The next morning, with his two companies of grenadiers marching up the road and Canadians and Indians flanking them in the woods, Dieskau turned north, toward Johnson’s camp.

  That same evening Mohawk scouts brought Johnson the news that a substantial body of the enemy was lurking near Fort Edward. Men were set to improving the camp’s defenses—a breastwork reinforced with trees that had been felled to clear a field of fire around the lines—and the next morning Johnson, on the recommendation of his regimental commanders, sent a thousand provincials under Colonel Ephraim Williams of Massachusetts, along with a covering force of about two hundred Mohawk warriors, to reinforce Fort Edward. At about nine o’clock the column, with Chief Hendrick in the lead on horseback, marched out of the camp—toward Dieskau and his fifteen hundred raiders.17

  Dieskau knew they were coming, for a deserter whom his men had captured on the road earlier that morning had told them of the column’s advance. Now he blocked the road with his grenadier companies and positioned his Canadians and Indians in ambush ahead of them, choosing a spot about four miles south of the lake where the road dipped to pass along the floor of a ravine. Moving hurriedly, without flanking parties deployed because they did not expect to meet enemies until they neared Fort Edward, Hendrick’s Mohawks and Williams’s provincials blundered into the trap a few minutes after ten. Old Hendrick, at seventy-five the veteran of more than a half century of warfare and diplomacy, stopped when someone called out from the trees. Since the Canadian Mohawks and their New York kin generally refused to shed one another’s blood, it seems likely that a Caughnawaga warrior was trying to warn him of his peril. But Hendrick’s reply was cut short when from another quarter a shot rang out, triggering a general exchange of fire in which he and about thirty other Mohawks were killed. Within the jaws of the ambush and exposed to musketry on both flanks, Colonel Williams tried to lead an assault up a bank of the ravine; he too was killed together with about fifty of his men. Thus began the first skirmish of the Battle of Lake George, an episode New Englanders would come to call the “Bloody Morning Scout.”18

  In size and position, the forces engaged were similar to those at the Battle of the Monongahela, but the outcome was quite different. The Mohawks who had survived the first exchange of shots quickly began a measured retreat, fighting their way to the rear along with perhaps a hundred of Williams’s provincials. The rest of the column, provincials unencumbered by the discipline that had doomed Braddock’s regulars to stand their ground, ran for their lives. While there was nothing heroic about it, theirs was an eminently rational response and indeed one that saved the day. The sound of gunshots alerted the camp, and by the time the survivors came streaming back from the ambush, their compatriots had hastily reinforced the breastwork with bateaux and overturned supply wagons. The sole regular officer with the expedition, a captain of engineers named William Eyre, whom Braddock had assigned to supervise siege operations, quickly positioned four fieldpieces to cover the road. Dieskau’s men came on in hot pursuit, then pulled up short at the edge of the clearing. To one observer in Johnson’s camp, it seemed as if “the Enemy had been obliged to halt upon some Disputes among their Indians.”19

  That was more or less accurate. The Caughnawagas had lost their leader, for Legardeur de Saint-Pierre had been killed at the ambush; now they did not wish to attack an entrenched camp, the defenders of which included hundreds of their Mohawk kinsmen. The Abenakis would not go forward without the Caughnawagas, and neither would the Canadians, who “in general regulated themselves by the Conduct of the Ind[ia]ns when upon War parties with them.” Dieskau seized control of this shaky situation by ordering his two grenadier companies to form a close-order column and charge the guns at the entrance of the camp. He intended to shame the wavering Indians and Canadians into attack; directing them to disperse around the perimeter of the camp and fire from the cover of logs and stumps, he gave orders to swarm over the breastwork whenever the opportunity presented itself.20

  The Battle of Lake George, 1755. The three panels of this engraving, published at Boston by Samuel Blodget in 1756, depict (from left to right) the location of the battle by a map of the Hudson Valley and the head of Lake George; the horseshoe ambush of the “Bloody Morning Scout”; and Dieskau’s attack on the fortified camp. Although obviously schematic, Blodget’s view was based on eyewitness accounts and shows the battle, and even individual behavior, with surprising accuracy. Chief Hendrick appears mounted on a horse in the center panel, while the other Mohawks are shown kneeling and firing individually, from cover; the provincials either stand in ranks or fire by platoons. On the right, provincial troops under attack fire prone from behind the breastwork or stand upright within the camp; the Indians crouch in postures that grow lower to the ground the nearer they approach the firing line. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  From the edge of the clearing to the mouth of Captain Eyre’s battery was perhaps 150 yards. Dieskau’s grenadiers—the biggest, most imposing men of the Languedoc and La Reine Regiments, among the best soldiers in the French army—charged along the road across the clearing with bayonets fixed, six abreast, in a column 100 yards long. Magnificent in white uniforms and disciplined as only the cream of Europe’s proudest army could be, they were not halfway to their goal when the grapeshot charges of the English guns cut “Lanes, Streets, and Alleys” through them, annihilating their order and forcing them back. From cover at the edge of the woods, the Indians and Canadians fired steadily at the defenders through much of the afternoon, b
ut with little real effect. Dieskau, who sustained a crippling wound, remained on the field, but the failure of the charge and the loss of Legardeur had doomed the attack. After four or five hours of increasingly uncoordinated firing his men began to retreat without order. 21

  The provincials from the camp made little effort to pursue them beyond the clearing. As one witness explained, “The Day was declining—The Rout of the Enemy not certain,—The Country all a Wood,— our Men greatly fatigued, provided neither with Bayonets or Swords, undisciplined, & not very high spirited.” A sortie onto the battlefield, however, recovered the disconsolate Dieskau, “wounded in his Bladder,” along with about twenty other wounded men. The remainder of the attackers vanished into the forest’s lengthening shadows, making off for Fort St. Frédéric or returning to the site of the ambush to recover the captives they had left tied to trees.22