Bigot never failed to keep the army supplied but he did it at a staggering expense to Crown and colony. Together with the skyrocketing costs of provisions, military expenditures sent the domestic economy of New France into an inflationary spiral that was entirely out of control by the beginning of 1758. At the end of King George’s War, the French treasury was annually spending 2,000,000 livres on Canada; by 1755, 6,000,000; and by the end of 1757, 12,000,000. Imperial administrators tried to stem the tide of Canadian paper money they believed was fueling this grotesque inflation by sending specie to pay the regulars and buy their provisions, but the appearance of gold and silver merely accelerated the rate of depreciation. Merchants speculating in grain sold only to the army, which could pay in gold, and refused to sell to fellow Canadians trying to pay in depreciated paper. This intensified food shortages and drove up prices on the open market; farmers began refusing to sell their produce for any price, hiding it from Bigot’s agents; and Gresham’s law operated inexorably to drive gold and silver out of circulation. When Bigot tried to salvage the situation by making it a crime to refuse payment in paper money, he only succeeded in aggravating the problem. The tons of coin shipped to New France simply vanished, melted down into plate by the bourgeois and buried by the peasants in hoards that would not be dug up again until peace had returned to their ravaged, hungry land. 8
None of this made the army easier to provision, and all of it helped convince Montcalm and his officers that they had been sent to defend a people so abandoned to self-interest that they were barely worth saving. Relations between Montcalm and the governor-general, never cordial, deteriorated. By the beginning of the campaign season in 1758 they were barely on speaking terms, communicating in letters that breathed an icy mutual contempt. Montcalm believed that Vaudreuil, technically his superior, was so committed to a strategy of using Indian allies and guerrilla warfare to defend Canada that he would do anything to undermine Montcalm’s more “civilized” strategies, which was mostly true; that Vaudreuil expected him to fail and intended to make him the scapegoat for the loss of New France when it occurred, which was not altogether untrue; and that Vaudreuil was in league with Bigot, which was false. Vaudreuil believed that Montcalm disdained him as a member of the Canadian aristocracy, which was true; that Montcalm did not appreciate the value of the Indians as allies, which was also true; and that Montcalm was militarily incompetent, which was not. Each complained copiously about the other in official dispatches. Eventually Montcalm felt it necessary to send two personal emissaries back to France—ostensibly to plead for more support, but in reality to make his case against Vaudreuil and Bigot. Vaudreuil rushed his own representative to Paris, in order to arrive ahead of Montcalm’s men.
The wrangling between Vaudreuil and Montcalm arose from an antagonism between Canadian provincials and representatives of the imperial metropole quite similar to the tension that produced such bitter disputes in the British colonies during Lord Loudoun’s regime. In the case of New France, however, there was no Pitt to decide the issue by recalling one of the contending parties. Despite all their mutual complaint and maneuvering, Louis XV decided to leave both in place, honoring Montcalm with promotion to lieutenant general, placating Vaudreuil with the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint-Louis, and urging the governor-general to consult closely with the commander in chief on all matters civil and military. Thus the weakness at the center that was already evident at the beginning of 1758 would only grow worse, while the shortages of men and supplies that so desperately straitened the defenders of New France would remain unrelieved.9
What neither Vaudreuil nor Montcalm realized was that the king and his ministers regarded their disputes as trivial because they were quietly writing North America out of France’s grand strategy. In the late winter and spring of 1758, the attention of Versailles and the military resources of France were both coming to center on the army in Hanover, the defense of the Channel coast against British raids, and the potential of mounting an invasion of England. No flood of foodstuffs, no tide of troops, would relieve the shortages that crippled New France. Insofar as warships would be employed in American waters in numbers large enough to be decisive, they would defend the valuable sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, not succor the hungry, unprofitable colony against which the English were about to fling such overwhelming force.
CHAPTER 24
Montcalm Raises a Cross THE BATTLE OF TICONDEROGA
JULY 1758
FROM 1758 ONWARD, the French would fight to maintain their influence in continental Europe while the British would fight to conquer an empire, a difference in goals that would eventually prove decisive. Canada would only continue to grow weaker, more impossible to defend against the Anglo-American onslaught. Yet when the British opened the campaigns of 1758 not much seemed to have changed, for the first blow to be struck in Pitt’s monumental American offensive produced only the familiar result of defeat. With the possible exception of Braddock’s defeat, Montcalm’s encounter with General Abercromby at Fort Carillon on July 8 would result in Britain’s greatest humiliation of the war.
By the last week of June, Abercromby had established his headquarters beside the wreck of Fort William Henry, where he would preside over the assembly of the most formidable army yet seen in America. Over twelve thousand regulars and provincials were already on hand along with the eight hundred bateaux and ninety whaleboats they would need to transport them to a promontory called Ticonderoga, where Fort Carillon stood waiting. Among the privates in the camp was Rufus Putnam, who had no more than recovered from the ordeal of his winter’s desertion before reenlisting in the Massachusetts regiment of Timothy Ruggles. “Every thing here seems to carry the face of war on it,” he observed on June 28: “Ammunitions, Provisions and Artillery &c loading continually into the bateaux in order for Ticonderoga.” The loading took a week to complete, and while it was in progress another four thousand provincials arrived in camp, bringing more supplies and bateaux with them. At dawn on July 5 the expeditionary force, now sixteen thousand strong, boarded its boats and rowed north. Arrayed in four columns, the thousand small craft “covered the Lake from side to side,” in lines that “extended from Front to Rear full seven Miles.” By the next daybreak they were within sight of the French advance guard, a camp at the foot of Lake George just four miles from Fort Carillon. The French troops fled, abandoning “a considerable [amount] of valuable Baggage, which our men plundered,” wrote Rufus Putnam. Lord Howe, who had charge of the advance element, quickly rallied a party to pursue the retreating enemy. Before anyone quite knew what had happened he was dead, killed by a French musket ball in a confused skirmish in the woods.1
Lord Howe had been Pitt’s choice as the expedition’s second-in-command because he had all the vigor, youth, and dash that Abercromby lacked. Now “his death struck a great damp on the army,” for the soldiers had little faith in a commander in chief they commonly called “Granny.” Indeed, Howe’s death struck a considerable damp on Granny himself: “I felt it most heavily,” he reported, without exaggeration, to Pitt. Although the skirmish had taken place in the morning, Abercromby allowed his units to blunder aimlessly about in the forest for the rest of the day before ordering them back to the landing place to re-form. That night his soldiers lay on their arms less than two hours’ march from the fort, but the next day he marched them no more than halfway there, pausing at a French sawmill site two miles from Ticonderoga to establish an entrenched camp as a base for further operations. Although Abercromby ordered his men to make ready for an attack, neither he nor any of his senior officers had yet reconnoitered the fort and its defenses. “I can’t but observe since Lord How’s Death Business seams a little Stagnant,” a provincial surgeon named Caleb Rea observed in his diary that night, wondering, like the rest of the army, what would happen next. Only on the following morning, July 8, did Abercromby send forward an engineer to examine the French position; by then two full days had passed since the landings.2
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bsp; Abercromby’s delay gave Montcalm the gift of time, and he employed it well to prepare for the assault he knew could overwhelm Carillon’s defenses. He had arrived on June 30 to find the fort manned by “eight battalions of French regulars very weak . . . , forty men of La Marine, thirty-six Canadians ready to go to war, and fourteen Indians.” Their depleted food stock consisted of “provisions only for nine days, and for an emergency, 3600 rations of biscuits.” Over the next few days more men and rations arrived, but too few of each to make Carillon able to withstand a siege. On the morning of July 8 Montcalm had only 3,526 men, including just 15 Indian auxiliaries, to defend the post and less than a week’s supply of food. “Our situation is critical,” wrote Montcalm’s chief aide, Bougainville. “Action and audacity are our sole resources.” On the evening of the sixth, as Abercromby and his men remained inert at their landing place, Montcalm had ordered fieldworks to be laid out across the Ticonderoga promontory on high ground, about three-quarters of a mile north of the fort. Throughout the next day “the army was all busy working on the abatis outlined the previous evening.” “The officers, ax in hand, set the example” for their men, who “worked with such ardor that the line was in a defendable state the same evening.” 3
The “abatis” that the French built was a defensive barrier, so called both because it was made of felled trees, arbes abattus, and because it was intended to become the attackers’ abattoir. Above shallow entrenchments rose a log breastwork topped with sandbags, to shelter the defenders from enemy fire. Extending perhaps a hundred yards down a slope in front of it lay a tangle of felled trees with branches sharpened and interlaced to ensnare advancing infantrymen and make them easy targets for grapeshot and musket fire. Like a modern concertina-wire entanglement, the abatis made a highly effective barrier against frontal attack. Formidable as it was against infantry, however, it could not protect the fort from artillery fire.
Artillery was always the key to siege warfare, and there—in his train of sixteen cannon, eleven mortars, and thirteen howitzers, supplied with eight thousand rounds of ammunition—lay Abercromby’s greatest advantage. Because of the shortage of men and time, Montcalm had not secured Rattlesnake Hill (later renamed Mount Defiance), which rose about seven hundred feet above the lake, a little over a mile to the southwest of Carillon. If Abercromby chose to have a road cut up the side of the hill, and then to have two or three twelve-pounders hauled to its summit, Montcalm would be forced to withdraw—at least from the breastwork, the open rear of which would have been exposed to cannon fire, and perhaps from the fort itself. Even if he chose not to make use of the hill, Abercromby could still advance his howitzers to the edge of the clearing and smash the breastwork to splinters before launching an assault on the French lines. Montcalm’s decision to stake the defense of Ticonderoga on these hasty fortifications therefore represented a gamble of the most extreme sort.4
As it happened, the engineer whom Abercromby dispatched to survey the French lines on the morning of July 8 was a very junior lieutenant, and he made only a hasty inspection before returning to advise his chief that the works could be carried by storm.5 Abercromby did not bother to take a look himself, or to trouble Major William Eyre—the vastly experienced engineer who was acting commander of the 44th Regiment—for a second opinion. Nor did he evidently consult his new second-in-command, Colonel Thomas Gage, a physically brave if undynamic officer; or if he did, Gage did not manage to dissuade him from doing what indecisive eighteenth-century generals often did, convening his senior officers as a council of war to choose the method of attack. Traditionally in such councils, the commander set the limits of discussion by asking his assembled commanders to choose from a range of alternatives; depending on his temperament and eagerness to diffuse responsibility for the decision’s outcome, he might or might not regard himself as bound by their majority vote. In this case, Abercromby only asked his assembled subordinates whether they preferred to have the infantry attack the French lines in three ranks or four. The majority favored three. Abercromby thanked them for their counsel, then dismissed them to prepare for the assault. He did not order his field artillery forward from the landing place, where it remained. Infantry alone would bear the burden of battle.
Immediately thereafter British skirmishers—Gage’s light infantry regiment (the 80th Foot), Major Robert Rogers’s ranger companies, and a battalion of Massachusetts light infantry—moved up to the edge of the abatis, driving in the French pickets and taking up sniping positions. This vanguard of light infantry and rangers, men trained to aim and fire individually and practiced in fighting from cover, testified to the tactical adaptations that had taken place in the British service since Braddock’s defeat. But the plan of attack suggested that for Abercromby not much had changed after all. He intended to use his most thoroughly disciplined troops in the most thoroughly conventional way: by arraying them in three long, parallel lines and sending them straight up against the French barricade. They were, his orders said, “to march up briskly, rush upon the Enemy’s fire, and not to give theirs, untill they were within the Enemie’s Breastwork.” By noon the eight regular battalions designated to make the assault were moving into position backed by the six provincial regiments that were to act as reserves.6
The attack began half an hour later with a signal that sent more than a thousand light troops rushing forward into the abatis, taking cover among the trees and firing at the enemy’s position. Behind them, as sunlight flashed from the barrels and bayonets of their muskets, seven thousand men in brilliant scarlet formed ranks along battalion fronts and dressed right to straighten their lines. Moving at the quick step to the beat of the drum and (because the Inniskillings were on the right wing and the first battalion of the Black Watch was in the center) the wail of bagpipes, the regulars marched uphill toward the French breastwork. Despite its intended precision, the attack began raggedly: the battalions on the British right entered the abatis before the units in the center and on the left had finished dressing their ranks. It was a bad start. As the redcoats came within range, the French at the breastwork opened fire, and the abatis began to earn its name.
“Trees were fell down in Such Manner that it Broke our Batallions before we got near the Breastwork,” wrote Major Eyre. “All [that] was left for each Commanding Officer of A Reg[imen]t to do, was to support & march up as quick as they could get Upon their Ground And so on to the Intrenchm[en]t.” But the fragmented battalions, with their men struggling forward through a nightmare of branches and stumps and musketry, never reached the breastwork. In attack after attack, the magnificently disciplined redcoats advanced into the barrier, only to be “Cut . . . Down Like Grass,” according to a Massachusetts private, Joseph Nichols, who watched from the ranks of Colonel Jonathan Bagley’s regiment, at the edge of the field. “Our Forces Fell Exceeding Fast,” he wrote. “It was Surprizing to me to think [that] more of ye Regiments Should be Drawn up to the Breast work for Such Slaughter.” An ensign in another company of the same regiment agreed. “The fier began very hot,” he wrote: “the Regalors hove down thair pak and fixed their bayarnits came up in order stod and fit very corage[ous]ly. . . . [T]he fi[gh]t came on very smart it held about eaght [h]ours a soreful Si[gh]t to behold the Ded men and wounded Lay on the ground having Som of them legs thir arms and other Lims broken others shot threw the body and very mortly wounded to hear thar cris and se thair bodis lay in blod and the earth trembel with the fier of the smal arms was a mornfull [h]our as ever I saw.”7
If to look on this shambles was mournful, to march into it must have been hell. “Our orders were to [run] to the breast work and get in if we could,’ ” a survivor later remembered.
But their lines were full, and they killed our men so fast, that we could not gain it. We got behind trees, logs and stumps, and covered ourselves as we could from the enemy’s fire. The ground was strewed with the dead and dying. It happened that I got behind a white-oak stump, which was so small that I had to lay on my side, and stretch myself;
the balls striking the ground within a hand’s breadth of me every moment, and I could hear the men screaming, and see them dying all around me. I lay there some time. A man could not stand erect without being hit, any more than he could stand out in a shower, without having drops of rain fall upon him; for the balls came by handsfull. It was a clear day—a little air stirring. Once in a while the enemy would cease firing a minute or two, to have the smoke clear away, so that they might take better aim. In one of these intervals I sprang from my perilous situation, and gained a stand which I thought would be more secure, behind a large pine log, where several of my comrades had already taken shelter but the balls came here as thick as ever. One of the men raised his head a little above the log, and a ball struck him in the centre of the forehead. . . . We lay there till near sunset and, not receiving orders from any officer, the men crept off, leaving all the dead, and most of the wounded.8
The Battle of Ticonderoga, July 8, 1758. This superb topographical rendering by a French engineer shows Fort Carillon’s commanding position on the Ticonderoga peninsula, at the head of Lake Champlain. The Anglo-American positions are sketched in a semicircle outside the log breastwork and abatis (“made in ten hours,” according to the legend) that surround the heights of Carillon, three-quarters of a mile north of the fort. The battalions of troupes de terre that took part in the defense are shown in order of battle between the fort and the breastwork. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
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