Meanwhile, outside Abercromby’s headquarters at the sawmill camp, a mile from the battle, Rufus Putnam worked alongside the other soldiers of his regiment, digging entrenchments, listening to the “constant peele of Cannon and Musquetry,” and worrying that he would be thought a coward for having occupied so safe a post during the battle. As evening came on, he decided to prove his courage by volunteering to carry ammunition forward to the troops; but “When I came to the Army they were Retreated into a Breast-work that Col. Williams’ men had builded [at the rear of the battlefield]. I was very much amazed to see so many of our men killed and wounded. The path all the way was full of wounded men. . . . [Then I returned to my] Regiment where I found them employed as before. [Soon thereafter,] the most of the Troops retreated into the Breast[work] which we had builded.” 9
General Abercromby, who had known of the battle only from the dispatches sent back by his commanders, had ordered attacks all day without seeing any of the consequences. Now, at nightfall, fearing a French counterattack, he began to comprehend what his army had suffered, with nearly two thousand dead and wounded. “It was therefore judged necessary,” he later reported to Pitt (prudently choosing the passive voice), “for the Preservation of the Remainder of so many brave Men, & not to run the risk of the Enemy’s penetrating into His Majesty’s Dominions, which might have been the Case if a Total Defeat had ensued, that we should make the best retreat possible.” Late that night he ordered his officers to muster their men and march them back to the bateaux. Unfortunately no one told the soldiers why they were retreating; haste compounded confusion, and fear and rumor fed on one another as men stumbled through the darkness. As the troops neared the landing place, anxiety exploded in panic and a stampede for the boats. “News came that the Enemy was Coming to fall upon us—Oh the Confusion we was in at that Time for we was in a poor Cituation for an Enemy to Attack us, Being Joyn’d to a Point of Land & the Battoos Lay Joyning to one another 15 deep from Land—The Cry of Enemy made our People Cry out & make Sad Lamentations [, but] We made the Best of our way off & Rec[eive]d not Hurt.” By dawn on July 9, the largest English army ever assembled in America was rowing for its life up Lake George, fleeing an enemy not a quarter its size—and not in pursuit. By sunset the ruin of Abercromby’s army collapsed, exhausted, beside the hulk of Fort William Henry.10
That Abercromby had crowned defeat with humiliation was apparent to everyone. “Shamefully retreated,” noted Artemas Ward, a Massachusetts lieutenant colonel, in a diary otherwise almost devoid of adverbs. “This Day,” the Reverend John Cleaveland of the Massachusetts provincials wrote on the tenth, “where ever I went I found people, officers and soldiers astonished that we left the French Ground and lamenting the strange conduct in coming off.” Private Joseph Nichols, too, thought it an “Astonishing Disappointment” but concluded that “we must Submitt for Twas Gods Holy will & Pleasure.” Like many other provincials, Nichols believed that the Lord had deprived them of the victory because he wanted to teach them humility and because he was chastising the regulars for their inveterate profanity and Sabbath-breaking. Private Nichols’s chaplain, John Cleaveland, did not disagree with such providentialist reasoning, but in looking for the proximate cause did not hesitate to blame “the General [and] his Rehoboam-Counsellors.” “We now begin to think Strongly,” he wrote on July 12, “that the Grand Expedition against Canada is laid aside and a Foundation is going to be made totally to impoverish our Country.” 11
Eventually the muddle of defeat and disorientation resolved itself when Abercromby ordered his troops to build a fortified camp next to Fort William Henry, but Rufus Putnam and his fellow soldiers saw only confusion in the weeks after the battle. “After our return from Fort Ticonderoga, we were employed in almost everything,” he wrote after nearly two weeks when he had been too busy to write at all: “in the building of Breast-works—and moving of our encampment from one place to another—had hardly time to pitch in one place before we were ordered to remove and pitch in another; and no body, to see us, would be able to tell what we were about.” 12
Provincials were by no means the only ones to find fault. Experienced regular officers were also sending home scathing accounts of the battle and its aftermath, and none was more violent in his censure than a cerebral and intemperate captain of the 44th Foot, Charles Lee:
These proceedings must undoubtedly appear most astonishingly absurd to people who were at a distance, but they are still more glaringly so to us who were upon the spot. . . . There was one hill in particular which seem’d to offer itself as an ally to us, it immediately Commanded the lines from hence two small pieces of cannon well planted must have drove the French in a very short time from their breast work . . . but notwithstanding some of our Cannon was brought up & in readiness, this was never thought of, which (one wou’d imagine) must have occur’d to any blockhead who was not absolutely so far sunk in Idiotism as to be oblig’d to wear a bib and bells.13
The French, not least of all their commander, saw the Anglo-American retreat as a providential deliverance from evidently certain defeat and the loss of Canada itself. Montcalm at first believed the retreat was a ruse, and waited for two days after the battle before he sent out a battalion “to find what had become of the enemy army.” What the troops found—“wounded, provisions, abandoned equipment, shoes left in miry places, remains of barges and burned pontoons”—convinced Montcalm that his adversaries had indeed suffered a general collapse, even though at the close of the battle they had still had more than enough troops, cannon, ammunition, and supplies to besiege and destroy Fort Carillon. On the twelfth, while Cleaveland bitterly marked the parallels between Abercromby and Rehoboam, the worst of Israel’s kings, Montcalm and his men sang a Te Deum of thanksgiving. Even so hardheaded a rationalist as Montcalm’s chief aide, Bougainville, believed that “never ha[d] a victory been more especially due to the finger of Providence.” The marquis himself was moved to compose a Latin couplet and have it inscribed on a great cross, which he ordered erected at the breastwork:
Quid dux? Quid miles? Quid strata ingentia ligna?
En signum! En victor! Deus hic, Deus ipse triumphat.
To whom belongs this victory? Commander? Soldier? Abatis? Behold God’s sign! For only He Himself hath triumphed here.14
By the time Montcalm raised his cross, August was drawing to a close and he had dismissed his militiamen to harvest the grain in the Montréal district. Too strapped for men and provisions to take the offensive, Montcalm had spent the rest of the summer improving Carillon’s fortifications. Reconnaissance patrols sent to the head of Lake George brought back prisoners and intelligence that indicated that Abercromby, too, had gone on the defensive. Yet Montcalm knew that unless the war ended first, some other British officer would return to try again.15
It would be some weeks before Montcalm, lingering at Carillon, heard tell of providences more ominous than the one he had seen on July 8: the loss of Louisbourg and the destruction of Fort Frontenac. On the evening of September 6, the same day that couriers brought word of these defeats, Montcalm left for Montréal to confer with the man he now regarded as his enemy, Vaudreuil. The season was so far advanced that there was little chance that Canada itself would come under attack before the next spring. But the news of these defeats and the suspicion that Vaudreuil was conspiring against him filled Montcalm with dreadful forebodings. Perhaps his defeat of Abercromby had bought some time; but with the loss of Louisbourg, the destruction of Frontenac, and the prospect of yet another failed harvest, time now seemed to have become Britain’s most formidable ally. 16
CHAPTER 25
Amherst at Louisbourg
JUNE-JULY 1758
ALTHOUGH MONTCALM heard nothing of it until September, Louisbourg had been in British hands since July 26. Jeffery Amherst had begun operations against Cape Breton Island immediately upon his arrival, landing troops at Gabarus Bay about four miles southwest of the fortress on June 8. As they came ashore in heavy surf and un
der fire from entrenched French defenders, only luck prevented the British from suffering a defeat as devastating as Abercromby’s. Wolfe, who commanded the operation, thought it “a rash and ill-advised attempt to land,” and believed that it succeeded “by the greatest of good fortune imaginable.” Because the French fell back to the safety of the city once the landings were well under way, the British suffered only about a hundred casualties, and by the evening of that same day they had taken up positions in a long arc just outside the reach of Louisbourg’s guns. From that point onward, bad weather, rough terrain, and the determined opposition of the city’s defenders slowed the progress of the siege to a crawl. 1
Louisbourg was a typical eighteenth-century fortress and no more than middle-sized by European standards, but so formidable in its New World setting that it had been called “the American Dunkirk” and “the Gibraltar of the North.” The fortress and two outlying artillery batteries guarded the entrance to a large, sheltered harbor within which eleven French warships (including five ships of the line) rode at anchor, displaying hundreds of cannon to discourage Admiral Boscawen’s Royal Navy fleet from trying to force an entrance. Two bastions (King and Queen) and two half-bastions (Dauphin and Princess) defended Louisbourg’s landward wall, mounting cannon that could sweep the outer defenses, glacis, and ditch clear of assaulting infantrymen. Manning the bastions and walls were eight battalions of regular infantry, twenty-four companies of troupes de la marine, and two companies of artillerists, plus the town militia and the sailors and marines from the ships in the harbor: in all nearly six thousand men. 2
The assault landing at Louisbourg, June 8, 1758. This sketch depicts the three divisions of the invading force just before troops under Wolfe’s command landed at the cove on the left. The French had, as an annotation says, “very Strong breast works and Cannon Mounted” along the shore. In heavy surf and under fire, Wolfe tried to call off the landing, but a boat commander misinterpreted the signal and ran his craft ashore anyway; seeing this accidental success, Wolfe reversed himself and led the remaining boats in, to land at the same point. That night the invaders established their siege camp in the vicinity of the creek (Fresh Water Brook) at the center, two miles from the city. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
Louisbourg was an impressive adversary, but like all Vauban-style fortresses, it was vulnerable to an attack conducted according to the principles of siege craft that Vauban himself had perfected. Every professional European officer knew the rules and rituals of that epitome of eighteenth-century civilized warfare, the siège en forme. Once the commander of the attacking force had formally notified the defending commander that he intended to invest his position, and after the defenders had responded with defiance (as honor demanded), the attackers would withdraw beyond cannon range to begin digging the network of trenches that would seal the fate of any fortress, unless relief came from outside. First a parallel trench, opposite one of the fortress walls; then a sap, or approach trench, running toward the wall; then a second parallel; another sap; a third parallel; and so on, until cannon, hauled forward through the trenches, could be brought close enough to form breaching batteries that would pound the walls and bastions of the fort to rubble.
The Siege of Louisbourg, June 8–July 26, 1758. This map, from Rocque’s Set of Plans and Forts, accurately depicts both the formidable land-side defenses of Louisbourg and the three parallels of the British siege lines, at the upper right. (The illustration is oriented with north at the bottom.) Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
As the besieging forces inched closer, protected by their trenches—or by gabions, huge earth-filled wicker baskets thrown up where the ground refused to yield to picks and shovels—the defenders would rain artillery and musket fire on them; launch spoiling raids, or sorties, from the fortress; and work day and night to repair the damage to the walls. Everything the defenders could do, however, only served to delay the inevitable, for no unrelieved fortress could indefinitely withstand a well-supplied siege. Vauban had calculated that a properly invested fortress should be able to hold out no longer than forty days if cut off from external aid.3 By the middle of the eighteenth century the virtual certainty of a siege’s outcome was so well known that these ponderous minuets almost never ended with the attackers storming through broken walls and slaughtering fortresses’ last starved defenders. Instead, garrison commanders who believed that they had satisfied the demands of honor generally asked to be granted terms of surrender that comported with the stoutheartedness of their defense. If the siege had been a long one, the victor would respond with terms like those Montcalm had offered at Fort William Henry in 1757: the defenders would be allowed to keep their colors, personal property, small arms, and perhaps even a symbolic cannon, and would be allowed to withdraw on parole—that is, having given their word that they would not appear in arms for a stated period—without being made prisoners of war.
More than any other siege of the war in America, Louisbourg in 1758 offered the opportunity to operate in strict accordance with these rules. The city held out steadfastly for more than six weeks against besiegers whose techniques conformed exactly to the precepts Vauban had set down in his essay On the Attack and Defense of Fortified Places. Immediately after landing on June 8, the British began to dig their first parallel trenches. By the twelfth Wolfe had driven the last of the defenders back to the city from the outlying works and batteries around the harbor. On the nineteenth the first British cannon opened fire, from extreme range, on the city’s bastions and the ships in the harbor. The digging of parallels and saps went forward relentlessly until, on July 3, batteries had been erected within six hundred yards of the city’s landward wall. By the sixth British shells—mortar bombs and incendiaries—were falling within the walls of the city. In growing desperation, and without much effect, the French tried launching night sorties against the enemy batteries. Day after day the shelling continued; night after night the digging went on. On July 21, a red-hot cannonball struck one of the French ships of the line at anchor in the harbor and detonated the powder in its magazine. The vessel and its two nearest neighbors burned to the water line.4
By this time fire was taking as inexorable a toll on the city as on the ships. On July 22 the King’s Bastion, key to the landward defenses of the city, burned; under a rain of red-hot shot from the British guns, buildings within the walls were going up in flames faster than fire crews could put them out. On the night of the twenty-fifth, concealed by a heavy fog, sailors from Boscawen’s fleet entered the harbor in boats and boarded the two remaining ships of the line, burning one and towing the other to safety across the harbor. The capture of this second vessel—the sixty-four–gun Bienfaisant, which was not only the last surviving line-of-battle ship but also the squadron’s flagship—struck a heavy blow to the morale of Louisbourg’s defenders. But it was the next twelve hours, during which at least a thousand rounds of British shot and shell landed within the city, that convinced Louisbourg’s governor, the chevalier de Drucour, that further resistance was folly. Already nearly a third of the defending garrison was out of action, since four hundred soldiers had been killed under the bombardment and more than thirteen hundred had been incapacitated by wounds or disease. Thus on the morning of the twenty-sixth, with only four serviceable cannon left in the last working battery of the last bastion, with six British ships of the line making sail to enter the harbor and shell the town from its undefended water side, and with a breaching battery preparing to open fire on the landward wall at close range, Drucour hoisted a flag of truce and asked for terms. He had done all that he could to satisfy the conventions of honor and military professionalism. The well-learned etiquette of siege craft gave him confidence that the British would grant his garrison the honors of war.5
And yet, in ways Drucour had not yet grasped, the siege of Louisbourg had only superficially conformed to civilized European practice. At least one Englishman reali
zed with shock on the very day of the landings that this was no ordinary encounter between professionals. Surveying the French lines after the defenders had fled back to the city, a naval officer had found “the Bodies of one hundred & odd French Regulars & two Indians, which our Rangers Scalped”—a gruesome token of the intention to repay the massacre of Fort William Henry in kind.6 The rangers who accompanied the expedition were mainly men from Massachusetts, and some were veterans of the 1757 campaign, but this episode in fact demonstrated more than a few New Englanders’ desire to settle scores. In a letter to his uncle, Wolfe himself casually and approvingly mentioned the English policy of massacring whatever Indians they encountered. As for the savages, he wrote, “I take them to be the most contemptible canaille upon earth. Those to the southward are much braver and better men; these are a dastardly set of bloody rascals. We cut them to pieces whenever we found them, in return for a thousand acts of cruelty and barbarity.”7
But the legacy of Fort William Henry in fact extended beyond the hunting down and slaughter of the Micmacs and Abenakis in alliance with the French, for in the end the heroism of the defenders and the civilians who had endured weeks of bombardment counted for nothing.
The capture of the Bienfaisant. Admiral Boscawen ordered two detachments of sailors to enter the harbor in boats on the night of July 25 to capture the only two surviving French men-of-war. In this splendid 1771 mezzotint the Prudent, aground at left, has been set ablaze; meanwhile, the Bienfaisant, already wearing the Union Jack, is being towed out of cannon range as the harborside batteries open an ineffectual fire. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
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