Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  The Siege of Niagara, July 10–25, 1759. This map of Fort Niagara and its outworks, from Rocque’s Set of Plans and Forts, shows the state of the siege as of about July 20, when the third battery was in place. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  Captain Pouchot was one of the most capable regular officers in America, and under ordinary conditions he would have been able to defend the fort and its crucial portage against any feasible assault. This was so for reasons that went beyond the impressive fortifications he had built. First of all, he had taken great care to cultivate relations with the Iroquois. The local band of Senecas had for so many years held a monopoly as carriers on the Niagara portage that he had had no reason to doubt their continued loyalty. They in turn had assured him he would have ample warning should any British force pass through Iroquoia to attack his post, and—since the timely communication of such intelligence had been the cornerstone of the Iroquois-French entente in the west for more than a half century—he had believed them.

  Secondly, Pouchot knew that the best time for a British attack had already passed. Niagara had been most vulnerable in the spring, before he had returned from Montréal with men to reinforce its winter garrison. When no British force appeared in May, and when his Seneca informants had brought him no word of any British movement in the Mohawk-Oswego corridor by the beginning of June, Pouchot had felt confident enough to send 2,500 of his 3,000 men off to reinforce Lignery at Fort Machault, in preparation for the planned summer’s campaign in the Ohio Valley. Vaudreuil had instructed him to detach this force, but Pouchot would doubtless have done it on his own authority, for he shared Vaudreuil’s strategic vision. If Lignery and his troops could descend the Allegheny before the British had a chance to build up their strength at the Forks, the French would regain command of the Ohio passage to Louisiana, Indian raids on the Virginia and Pennsylvania backcountry would resume, and the British would have to divert substantial numbers of men to frontier defense. New France would be saved from invasion, once again.6

  Therefore no one could have been more surprised than Captain Pouchot on July 6, when Iroquois warriors attacked a working party outside the walls of the fort: it was his first indication that anything out of the ordinary was afoot. Quickly ascertaining that thousands of British and American troops were landing nearby, he recalled his fatigue details, buttoned up the fort, and sent urgent word to Fort Machault for Lignery to return with the force intended for the Ohio Country. He had on hand fewer than five hundred men to defend his post, along with perhaps a hundred Indians—principally Senecas as bewildered as he was at seeing so many of their kinsmen in the company of an Anglo-American army. Now Pouchot needed time, a commodity that seemed all the more precious as the British opened their first siege trenches a half mile from the fort on July 10. Thus on the next day, although the etiquette of sieges scarcely sanctioned it, he called a truce to allow Kaendaé, the chief of the Niagara Senecas, to approach Johnson and his Iroquois supporters and see if he could dissuade them from participating in the attack.

  Kaendaé was astonished by what had taken place, and he berated Johnson—who merely smiled in response—for “having plunged his Nation into bad business.” Over the next three days, the Iroquois war chiefs endeavored to convince Kaendaé that continued support for the French was no longer tenable, while he in turn tried to persuade them that the wisest course was to let the Europeans fight their own battles and withdraw, along with his band, up the Niagara River as far as La Belle Famille. He almost succeeded. In the end Johnson managed to keep “his” Iroquois from taking Kaendaé’s advice by promising them the first chance to plunder the fort after it fell; even so, they took no active part in the siege after the conference ended on July 14. At this point Pouchot— reluctant to have within his walls warriors of dubious loyalty, who would at best be unenthusiastic fighters—permitted Kaendaé’s people to withdraw under a flag of truce. This episode, which nearly ended with the British-allied warriors joining the Niagara Senecas at La Belle Famille, puzzled Prideaux and Johnson, who worried that the Iroquois were about to resume their old preferences for neutrality. In fact the negotiations had served every purpose the Six Nations could have wished, for they had avoided the unacceptable prospect of fratricidal bloodshed at the same time that they had done nothing to improve the ability of the French to resist. 7

  Pouchot had bought a little time, but his adversaries had not ceased to drive their trenches forward during the cease-fire. After Kaendaé’s Senecas passed through the lines to safety on the fourteenth, British cannoneers opened fire from an advanced battery less than 250 yards from Fort Niagara’s glacis. Now the garrison’s only hope lay in the arrival of Lignery’s relief force from Fort Machault. On the seventeenth, British howitzers began shelling the fort from across the Niagara River, enfilading the works from the rear and dominating the river- and lakefront approaches. By day and night the digging continued, until on the afternoon of the twentieth heavy guns opened fire from a breaching battery sited murderously close (80 yards) to the fort’s covered way. At that point even the sudden death of General Prideaux—the back of his head blown off when he stepped in front of a mortar, while visiting a battery at dusk—could not slow the progress of the siege. Sir William Johnson assumed command, but his limited capacities as a field commander could not slow operations that continued as if by their own momentum. 8

  By the twenty-third the Anglo-American trenches had crawled almost the whole length of the peninsula; the nearest lay within musket range of the fort’s outer defenses. Inside the walls, red-hot shot and mortar bombs fell in a lethal hail. Shell-shocked men, sleepless for days, were refusing to mount the walls. All the guns in the battery of the main bastion had been blown off their carriages and a great hole had been shot through the parapet; unable to make proper repairs under fire, the defenders were reduced to cramming bales of furs and skins into the breach.9

  At this point, when all seemed lost, Lignery’s relief force appeared in the Niagara River above the falls. In all there may have been as many as sixteen hundred French, Canadians, and Indians; they seemed to one observer like “a floating island, so black was the river with bateaux and canoes.” Pouchot’s hopes soared; but Johnson, whose Indian observers had also kept him well informed, had time to order out a force to block the road from the portage to the fort. By the following morning Johnson had sent Iroquois emissaries to warn Lignery’s Indian allies of what was waiting for them. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Eyre Massey of the 46th Regiment had had time to construct a log breastwork and abatis across the road near La Belle Famille and to position approximately 350 regulars and a hundred New York provincials behind it. An approximately equal number of Iroquois warriors, acting on their own initiative, quietly took up positions in the surrounding woods.10

  When Lignery’s force came marching down the road toward the British at about eight o’clock, his Indian allies had heeded the Iroquois messengers’ warning and decided not to participate in the battle. It was, therefore, perhaps six hundred French regulars, troupes de la marine, and Canadian militiamen who charged the British abatis and, at a range of about thirty yards, ran headlong into volley after volley of British musket fire. Only about a hundred men, mostly wounded, survived long enough to be taken prisoner; among them were nineteen officers and cadets, including one of the most experienced of New France’s Indian diplomats, Joseph Marin de La Malgue. The remainder, who broke and ran for their lives, were pursued by Iroquois warriors who, it would seem, either killed or captured most of them; the French would report that at least 344 men were killed or captured, but the number may have been much higher. Lignery himself—veteran of more than a dozen campaigns, hero of the Battle of the Monongahela, and the last commander of Fort Duquesne—was found among the French wounded in the abatis. He lived long enough to realize that no French expedition would ever take back the Ohio Country.11

  Captain Pouchot’s field telescope revealed that a battle had taken place a
t La Belle Famille, but it could not disclose the totality of Lignery’s defeat. He learned of that only when the British ceased shelling the fort late in the afternoon and sent an emissary to invite him to surrender with guarantees of personal safety for his men but without the honors of war. Pouchot, his last hope gone, accepted Johnson’s terms on July 25. Over the next two days he and his garrison were loaded aboard British bateaux for transportation to New York, and imprisonment. Many would be repatriated to France; Pouchot himself would be exchanged in December and return to help defend Canada once again.

  The massacre that Pouchot had feared would follow the surrender never came. The Iroquois contented themselves with the plunder of Niagara and its outlying storehouses, which contained furs, skins, and trade goods of vast value. Having lost few or no warriors in the siege, they had no pressing need to adopt more captives than those they had taken after the engagement on the portage road. Most of all, however, their docility reflected the Six Nations’ need to maintain the goodwill of the British, on whom they necessarily had to depend if they hoped to regain influence on the Ohio.12

  With the French safely gone, Johnson moved quickly to consolidate control over the west end of Lake Ontario before his Indians too took their leave. Dispatching whaleboats to reconnoiter Fort Toronto, he learned that the garrison had burned it and retreated. Immediately therefore he set about establishing friendly relations with the local Chippewas, in the hope (he informed Amherst) of “Settling an Alliance between Us & them distant Nations” of the pays d’en haut. With this accomplished, and with little interest in hanging about to superintend the repair of Fort Niagara, Johnson handed command over to a regular lieutenant colonel and returned to Oswego. Amherst, anxious to have in charge a commander who knew something about running an army, dispatched his best administrator, Brigadier General Thomas Gage, to take command of the western posts. Sir William would linger yet a while at Oswego, where he could more efficiently attend to the activities at which he excelled: the management of Indian affairs, the pursuit of his business interests, and the cultivation of his laurels. He had held his last military command of the war.13

  Although the French would post a small detachment at Cataraqui to observe the Anglo-Americans, the loss of Niagara effectively rolled back their western frontier to Oswegatchie, about 115 miles upriver from Montréal. Montcalm, realizing the danger of invasion by way of the upper St. Lawrence, sent his second-in-command, the chevalier de Lévis, along with as many troops as he could spare from Québec, to defend Montréal. But the British had already delivered their greatest blow in the west, for Gage was too cautious to risk sending troops from Oswego down the St. Lawrence.

  The effects of Niagara’s loss thus would be felt not at Montréal but in the posts that remained on the Great Lakes and the Ohio. The French now had no choice but to abandon Forts Presque Isle, LeBoeuf, and Machault. The settlements in the Illinois Country would remain under French control but would have to shift for themselves; they would have no further communication with New France during the war. Similarly, the forts and trading posts on the upper Great Lakes, from Detroit to Michilimackinac and beyond, would also remain awhile in French hands, but the British occupation of the Niagara portage meant that they would only wither for lack of supplies. No western commandant would persuade any of the Indians of the pays d’en haut to send warriors to Canada’s aid. For the first time in its history, New France would face its enemies alone.

  CHAPTER 35

  General Amherst Hesitates TICONDEROGA AND CROWN POINT

  JULY-AUGUST 1759

  JEFFERY AMHERST learned of Prideaux’s death and Niagara’s fall on Saturday night, August 4, when he was busy taking possession of Fort St. Frédéric at Crown Point, the spot a dozen or so miles from Ticonderoga where Lake Champlain narrows to a dramatic strait, then widens to dominate the broad Champlain Valley to the north. This was the second post the French had blown up and abandoned at his approach, a circumstance for which he was grateful but one that left him puzzled and ill at ease. Amherst, never inclined to show his emotions anyway, responded to this uncertainty as he typically did, by clamming up—and slowing down.

  For a variety of reasons Amherst had been late in taking the field. The Niagara expedition and his own had shared a common base of supply, in Albany, and despite John Bradstreet’s expertise as quartermaster general, even that gifted officer could only attend to one major task at a time. The New England provincials, on whose axes, picks, and shovels Amherst would have to rely in the sieges he expected to direct, had as usual arrived slowly. Finally, Amherst habitually preferred security to speed. Before he felt ready to venture even as far as the head of Lake George, he had improved the road from Fort Edward and built a fortified way station at Half-way Brook. Once he established his base camp at the lake, he had spent a month assembling matériel and beginning construction on the new post, Fort George, that was to replace Fort William Henry. As a consequence of so much deliberation and attention to detail, it had been July 21 before Amherst’s men boarded their bateaux and pulled oars for Ticonderoga. The seven battalions of regulars and nine of New England provincials in his command, plus nine companies of rangers and a train of artillery, amounted to about ten thousand men: many fewer than Abercromby had taken down the lake the previous year, and, in the mind of the commander in chief, another reason to proceed with caution.1

  Fort Edward to Ticonderoga, 1759. This manuscript map, from the papers of Thomas Gage, shows what had become by 1759 a thoroughly familiar geography of lake, stream, and marsh. The preferred route to Ticonderoga and Lake Champlain remained via Fort William Henry, despite its destruction. As the shading on this map makes clear, the alternative route, along Wood Creek, South Bay, and South River, ran through swampy, difficult ground. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  But Fort Carillon, the site of such slaughter in 1758, had fallen just four days after Amherst’s arrival on the twenty-second, at a total cost to the attackers of five dead and thirty-one wounded. Amherst’s men had barely emplaced their siege cannon when the token force of defenders had spiked their guns, lit a fuse to the powder in the magazine, and retired to Crown Point. There they joined the three-thousand-man army of Brigadier General François-Charles de Bourlamaque, the capable, asthmatic officer to whom Montcalm had entrusted the defense of Montréal’s southern approaches. Methodical to a fault, Amherst paused to survey the ruins of Fort Carillon before sending a detachment of rangers ahead to observe Bourlamaque’s activity at Fort St. Frédéric. When they returned on August 1 with news that the French had already blown up the post and withdrawn, Amherst ordered his army ahead to take control—and stopped once more to take stock of his position.2

  By the time the commander in chief learned of Niagara’s fall, then, he had gained command of Lake Champlain as far north as Crown Point, a “great Post” which “secures entirely the country behind it.” He had also begun to acquire intelligence on the enemy from rangers and deserters and thus knew that the French had withdrawn all the way to Île-aux-Noix, a fortified island at the foot of the lake. But the lack of determined resistance only served to make Amherst more circumspect, and less willing to make a headlong thrust toward Montréal, for two reasons. In the first place, the French had a small fleet of warships on the lake, and he had none. The enemy’s schooner and three xebecs mounted thirty-two cannon between them and could easily make hash of his bateaux. Amherst accordingly resolved to wait for his own shipwrights, back at Ticonderoga, to build a brigantine and a large armed raft, or radeau, to protect the army’s advance down the lake.3 The second factor that weighed on his mind was perhaps even more disabling than the lack of naval protection, for he could do nothing about it: he had heard nothing of Wolfe since the beginning of July.

  Without some knowledge of the progress of the campaign against Québec, Amherst had no reliable way to interpret the lack of resistance to his army’s advance. If operations on the St. Lawrence were tying down large
numbers of men, he could proceed against Bourlamaque in relative safety. But Amherst was anything but an optimist by nature and almost certainly expected Wolfe to fail. If this had happened—if Wolfe had fallen back to Louisbourg—Montcalm would be free to shift his forces to Île-aux-Noix and achieve local superiority over Amherst and the five thousand or so men he would be able to bring northward after garrisoning Fort George, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point. For all Amherst knew, the withdrawals of the French had been no more than bait to a cunning trap. Île-aux-Noix was eighty miles (three days) down the lake from Crown Point, and he knew next to nothing about its situation. To venture so far from his base of supply, so far from reinforcements, would be to place his whole army and all his gains at risk. Thus in August, Amherst set his men to repairing Ticonderoga and to constructing a new pentagonal fort at Crown Point; to planting gardens; to scouting northward through the woods; and to building roads—one to connect Ticonderoga to Crown Point, another to run seventy-seven miles overland from Crown Point to Fort Number 4 in the Connecticut Valley—the better to secure the supplies he needed to retain his conquests.4

  Crown Point Fort, 1759. At least a third larger than its predecessor, Fort St. Frédéric, Amherst’s new post was fully as large and expensive as Fort Pitt. And as ill-fated: a chimney fire in 1773 ignited a general conflagration that blew up the magazines and leveled the fort, which was never rebuilt. From Rocque, A Set of Plans and Forts. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.