Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  It was there, in the ravine, that perhaps four hundred Indians, Canadians, and Frenchmen were resting and trying to regroup under their surviving officers when they were surprised by a column of New Hampshire provincials. About two hundred men under Captain William McGinnis had begun to march to the aid of Johnson’s camp from Fort Edward when the sounds of the battle had first been heard. Now, in deep dusk, they attacked the disorganized enemy “& made a great Slaughter amongst them.” Most of the French and Indian casualties of the day occurred in this final phase of the disjointed battle, which also occasioned more English casualties: not only were Captain McGinnis and two of his men killed, but so were all the prisoners the Caughnawagas and Abenakis had come back to collect. Several would later be found dead and scalped, still bound hand and foot. Unable to retreat with the prisoners in hand and unwilling to abandon them, the Indians had taken trophies that, while less valuable than captives, still offered evidence of their participation in the battle.23

  The fall of night ended both the Battle of Lake George and the Crown Point expedition of 1755. Johnson had taken a musket ball in one buttock and was in no shape to continue; nor were his men, who spent the next three days searching out and burying the dead, a gruesome and “most meloncoly Peace of busaness,” for the weather had turned fair and hot. Despite the fact that the battle could be regarded as a provincial victory— the French had been driven from the field, and the casualties on both sides were evenly balanced—demoralization beset the camp, and men began to sicken in large numbers. Although reinforcements soon arrived from Fort Edward, provisions remained short enough to forestall a new offensive; moreover, as soon as the plundering was done the Mohawks went home to conduct their condolence rituals, taking along prisoners to adopt—or torture and kill—as replacements for the dead.24

  Fort William Henry, New York. This view, from Rocque’s Set of Plans and Forts (1765), shows Captain Eyre’s design of a stout fort with four bastions, situated on a rise that falls steeply away, at the bottom (north) of the picture, to the lakeshore. A ditch, or dry moat, surrounds the fort on its other three sides. The cross-section view depicts, from the left, a two-story barracks with subterranean “bomb-proofs,” or casemates; the “curtain,” or wall, thirty feet thick and fifteen feet high, made of horizontally laid logs, infilled with earth and rubble; the “terre-plein,” or cannon platform, shielded by the parapet at the top of the wall; the “fraising,” a line of sharpened logs projecting horizontally from the parapet to discourage scaling parties; the ten-foot-deep ditch, along the bottom of which runs a palisade of sharpened logs eight or more feet in height; and, beyond the ditch, the fifty-yard-long, gently sloping “glacis,” an open field of fire that attackers would have to traverse before reaching the interior obstacles of ditch, stockade, and fraised wall. Cannon, sited along the wall in embrasures, were positioned both to fire at distant besiegers and to “enfilade,” or fire along the face of, the curtain. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  By late September, scouts sent down Lake George on reconnaissance missions were returning with reports that the French had begun to fortify Ticonderoga. At that point, even if Johnson and his officers had been eager to resume the expedition against Crown Point, they could not prudently have done so. As it happened, they were not eager. At a council of war on September 29, Johnson’s principal officers opted to build a fort sufficient to hold five hundred men in order to protect their position on the lake and prevent future attackers from gaining access to the road that now pointed like a gun barrel at Fort Edward, Saratoga, and Albany. The indispensable Captain Eyre accordingly began to lay out a substantial earth fort of four bastions, and the garrison undertook the huge tasks of excavation, woodcutting, and interior construction necessary to complete it. Fort William Henry—which Johnson named after the duke of Cumberland (William) and the duke of Gloucester (Henry), so as to honor as many princes of the blood royal as possible before the end of the campaign—would mark the limit of the Anglo-American advance for longer than anyone in England or its colonies could have expected. 25

  All that fall, the French and the English matched ax blow for ax blow and shovelful for shovelful as they raced winter and each other to build their forts. By the next spring, the French defensive position would be anchored by Fort Carillon at the north end of Lake George and the English position would be similarly held at the south by Fort William Henry. The beautiful, island-studded lake and the steep, forested hills along its shores would become avenues for raiders and invading armies as the two sides contended for the advantage that, for a long time to come, neither would be able to retain.

  CHAPTER 11

  British Politics, and a Revolution in European Diplomacy

  1755

  THREE THOUSAND miles away, the duke of Newcastle shuddered at the news from America. In the middle of July, word reached London that Boscawen had failed to intercept the whole of the French reinforcement, while the action in which he had succeeded—the seizure of several hundred soldiers and two ships belonging to a crown with which England was still technically at peace—seemed certain to provoke hostilities with France. On July 18, Charles de Levis, duc de Mirepoix, French ambassador to the court of St. James, left London in a fury. Not long afterward, in August, word arrived of Braddock’s defeat. Without realizing any substantial gain, the British had muddled their way into the posture of an international aggressor, while the French had landed sufficient men and arms to defend Canada and enable Onontio’s allies to threaten the frontier of every American colony from New Hampshire to North Carolina. British policies had, in short, handed both the casus belli and the strategic advantage to France, giving the French court occasion and motive to declare war. Newcastle’s relations with the man he blamed for these disasters—the duke of Cumberland—had deteriorated so far that they had become the subject of common gossip. At home, the British government was paralyzed; abroad, Britain’s diplomatic position was in disarray.1

  Newcastle faced two difficulties, both intractable: a constitutional-political problem that immobilized the government and threatened his position as prime minister; and a diplomatic problem that prevented him from strengthening himself politically. Newcastle was hamstrung as prime minister because as a peer of the realm he could not sit in the House of Commons. The duke desperately needed someone he could trust to build a reliable majority among the M.P.s, but there were only two possible candidates for the job, and in different ways they both spelled trouble. One was Henry Fox, secretary at war and the protégé of the hated duke of Cumberland. Fox was a superb parliamentary manipulator but also a libertine and opportunist—a man whose deficiencies of character and excesses of ambition, no less than his ties to Cumberland, made him an unattractive partner. Moreover, Fox was no orator: an immense handicap for a war leader, who needed not only to be able to manage the votes of the placemen in the Commons but also to inspire loyalty to government policies among the independent backbenchers— the rustic squires without whose support no war effort could long be sustained.

  The other possible leader in the Commons was William Pitt, a man of astonishing oratorical power and equally astonishing, almost megalomaniacal, ambition. Newcastle detested Pitt personally, for Pitt loved nothing more than to ridicule Newcastle’s policies in the Commons; but what made him even less attractive was Pitt’s close connection to the heir apparent, the teenaged boy who would one day become George III. It was a trait almost as genetically fixed in the Hanoverian kings as their protuberant eyes, prominent noses, and petulant expressions to loathe those princes in line to succeed them. Pitt was closely associated with the Leicester House faction (as politicians allied with the dowager princess of Wales and her household were called, after her residence) and thus was offensive to the king, who would never admit those whom he regarded as enemies to his inner circle. And there was, finally, Pitt’s celebrated disdain for the day-to-day management of political affairs in the Commons. Brilliant orator that he wa
s, he had no patience for the mundane concerns of patronage and voting discipline that insured the stability of all eighteenth-century British governments. Neither Fox nor Pitt offered an easy alternative for Newcastle, and his basic timidity kept him from making a firm commitment to either. So long as he could not forge a lasting alliance with one or the other, however, he could not control the Commons, and thus could not govern. This problem would go unresolved for a dangerously long time.2

  Because Newcastle had little influence over American military initiatives that originated with Cumberland, he hoped to avert war in Europe by the one means still under his control, diplomacy. In this effort the problems and complexities he faced were staggering, but in the end they could be reduced to a single cause: the electorate of Hanover. Ever since 1714, when the British throne had passed into the reliably Protestant hands of the Hanoverian kings, the fortunes of Great Britain had been tied to those of the small north German state that had been their home. The first two Georges were adamant that Britain protect Hanover militarily in time of war. This insistence had led to the construction of a durable alliance system on the Continent, by which Britain aligned itself with Holland and Austria in order to preserve Hanover against seizure by France and France’s ally, Prussia.3

  The Great Commoner. William Pitt (1708–78); an engraving after a portrait painted in the studio of William Hoare, published in London c. 1757. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  Newcastle’s “System” had survived the Wars of the Spanish and the Austrian Successions, and its preservation virtually obsessed him; yet it had been slowly, inexorably disintegrating since the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. The Dutch were too ground down by misfortune and military losses to welcome the renewal of hostilities between France and Britain and were unable in 1755 to recognize any compelling interest in joining a dispute over who should control the wilds and savages of North America. The Austrians, as we have seen, regarded the recovery of Silesia from Prussian control as an object of such importance that they had already begun to explore a possible rapprochement with France.

  Desperate to maintain the Austrian alliance and to keep Prussian attentions turned away from Hanover, Newcastle had proposed a treaty with Austria’s ally, Russia, early in 1755. In return for a great subsidy (£100,000 annually in peacetime, £500,000 annually in the event of war), Russia was to keep an army ready to invade East Prussia. Newcastle hoped that the threat of war on his eastern frontiers would keep Frederick II, king of Prussia, from attacking Hanover. Newcastle knew, of course, that neither Russia nor Austria could keep France from overrunning the electorate if it chose to do so. Thus he undertook to shore up Hanover’s defenses by concluding subsidy treaties with the rulers of various German states, in effect negotiating contracts to retain their armies as mercenary forces in the event of war. To Hanover itself went a subsidy of £50,000 annually to increase its army by 8,000 troops; to the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, £60,000 to provide 8,000 men if war broke out; to the margrave of Ansbach and the bishop of Würzburg, more money for more mercenaries.

  All this diplomatic activity may have helped increase the security of Hanover, but it did nothing to calm the French, who at this point were refraining from a formal declaration of war solely to build up their navy to the point that it could oppose Britain’s on the high seas. Finally, because in the House of Commons Pitt and his followers denounced the subsidy treaties as prostitutions of English interests and treasure to the maintenance of a petty German state, the only purpose Newcastle’s diplomacy served in parliamentary politics was to make him perpetually vulnerable to the loss of his majority. 4

  Throughout the summer of 1755, as disaster followed disaster and Pitt heaped scorn on the ministry and its measures, subsidies grew so unpopular in the Commons that eventually Newcastle’s own Chancellor of the Exchequer refused to release money to Hesse without a special act of Parliament. Such crippling opposition finally drove Newcastle into alliance with Henry Fox, who joined the government in November as secretary of state for the Southern Department and manager of the ministry’s interests in the Commons. Once formed, the Fox-Newcastle partnership seemed to work wonders. In a rancorous debate on the subsidy policy begun on November 13, Pitt lashed the ministry mercilessly, ridiculing the partnership of Newcastle and Fox as “the conflux of the Rhône and Saône; this a gentle, feeble, languid stream, and though languid, of no depth—the other, an impetuous torrent.” Such brilliant vituperation would have earned him the acclamation of the House in the previous session, but now that Fox was protecting the duke’s interests in the Commons, Pitt’s speech was only the noisy prelude to a vote by which the M.P.s affirmed their support for subsidies by a two-to-one margin. With barely a pause to relish this crushing defeat of a man he hated, Newcastle unceremoniously turned him and his supporters out of their offices. If the new alliance with Fox could not permanently silence Pitt, Fox’s deft parliamentary management had at least shown that Pitt’s disruptive potential could be contained. 5

  And yet Newcastle’s policies, secure at last, were even then in the process of bringing down the whole alliance system on which the duke had lavished such attention and energy. In Berlin, King Frederick brooded on the likely effects of the Anglo-Russian treaty and the possible consequences of the entente that was rumored to be developing between his old enemy, Austria, and his old ally, France. Frederick—who, it was said, feared Russia more than God—accordingly directed his diplomats to find a means of coming to terms with Great Britain. By the beginning of the new year, what would six months earlier have been unfathomable was quickly coming to pass: a treaty of friendship between Prussia and Britain. Under the Convention of Westminster, signed January 16, 1756, the Crowns of Britain and Prussia mutually pledged that neither would invade or distress the other. Should any aggressor disturb the tranquillity of “Germany”—a term vague enough to cover both Hanover and Prussia—they would unite to oppose the invader. The Convention of Westminster was not a formal defensive alliance, nor was it intended to do more than secure Hanover from attack. Prussia was to remain neutral in the present disputes between France and Britain. Unlike all the ministry’s previous treaties, this one required no peacetime subsidies: here, at last, was a means of protecting Hanover that would cost the Exchequer not a farthing.6

  What the convention did cost England, of course, was its alliance with Austria. Or, more properly, it removed all obstacles to the final dissolution of the alliance and permitted the formal reversal of alignments known as the Diplomatic Revolution. Now the negotiations between the courts of Maria Theresa and Louis XV, previously conducted with such discretion and secrecy, moved rapidly and openly toward completion. When word of the convention arrived at Versailles in early February, the French Council of State repudiated the alliance with Prussia, clearing the way for formal rapprochement with Austria. On May 1, 1756, Austrian and French diplomats signed the Convention of Versailles, a mutual defense pact that mirrored the Convention of Westminster. By this agreement, the French agreed to come to Austria’s aid, should it come under attack; while by a special article the Austrians were freed from any reciprocal responsibility to support the French in their present dispute with Great Britain.

  The combination of the two conventions should, reasonably, have immunized Europe against a war spreading from North America. Hanover had been made as secure as any flat and virtually indefensible country could be; Austria’s anxieties at the prospect of a Prussian attack had been allayed as fully as a defensive alliance with the greatest land power in Europe could allay them. France and Britain might now attack one another’s colonies and shipping at will, but only a truly bizarre— indeed almost unthinkable—act could disturb the peace of Europe. The only thing that could shatter the new equilibrium would be for the king of Prussia to attack Austria, and that would be the act of a madman. Frederick had a large and capable army, it was true, but it was no match for the army of France, let alone for those of France and Austria togethe
r. Moreover, Frederick’s country was poor and had a population of less than four million; the combined populations of France and Austria were ten times as large.7 No one doubted Frederick’s boldness, but everyone knew that he was not fool enough to launch an attack that would give Maria Theresa all the excuse she would need to recover her beloved Silesia, at last.

  Thus in the first month or two of 1756, the duke of Newcastle could look around him at affairs that seemed to be stabilizing; indeed, the future looked almost rosy. Although it had not been a result he had intended when he undertook his diplomatic offensive, and although George II had been unhappy to witness the demise of an Austrian alliance to which his family had been devoted, the new alignment of Britain with Prussia seemed to promise both security for Hanover and a limitation of hostilities with France. Pitt, neutralized in Parliament, had been driven with his remaining few supporters into noisy, ineffectual opposition. The disarray in America remained to be attended to, and the alliance that he had been compelled to forge with Fox and Cumberland promised to make the resolution of those problems personally unpleasant. Nonetheless, Newcastle had more reason to feel secure, and even optimistic, than at any time in the previous year.8

  The reckoning on America came in January. On the seventh a meeting of the cabinet considered the pleas from the colonies for further military aid and examined a plan Halifax had drawn up to centralize, coordinate, and expand the war effort. Having received reports from William Johnson and Thomas Pownall denouncing Shirley as a meddler in Indian affairs and a poor commander, Halifax recommended that a new commander in chief be sent from England with expanded powers, and that Johnson receive a new commission, directly from the king, appointing him as colonel of the Six Nations. The ministers generally agreed with these suggestions, although they dismissed as excessively expensive the remainder of Halifax’s program, which called for the creation of a royally funded central storehouse for provisions, the reinforcement of the regulars in the colonies, and the raising of large numbers of provincial troops.9