Mort du Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon. This engraving, after a painting by Louis-Joseph Watteau, attempts to cast Montcalm’s demise in the same heroic mold as Benjamin West’s more famous Death of General Wolfe. Montcalm was in fact buried within the city on the evening of the day after the battle; his grave was a shell hole inside the chapel of the Ursuline convent. Here the shell hole alone remains true to the facts. Watteau’s decision to show the two Indian warriors lifting a spent mortar shell from the crater at left reflects sheer fancy, or perhaps an homage to the Mohawk warrior whom West gave a central position in The Death of General Wolfe. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
The Death of General Wolfe. Benjamin West’s 1771 history painting caused an immense stir when first exhibited in London; William Woollett made this engraving in 1776 and grew rich on the sales of thousands of copies. At least in part, West’s success depended on his ability to depict so much in a single scene. Here, simultaneously, is a classically ordered tableau with historical figures (Robert Monckton stands at the apex of the left-hand grouping, clutching his wounded chest, while Colonel Isaac Barré cradles his dying commander at the center); a mythically climactic moment (the figure running in from the left brings news of victory while Wolfe gasps thanksgiving to God and gives up the ghost); and an allegory of empire that unites all ranks and nationalities in symbolic witness to a martyr’s death. The central figures are a general, a colonel, a major, and two captains, but on the right a grenadier private clasps his hands in prayer, and in the background a detachment of sailors drags a cannon up from the river, where the Royal Navy’s ships ride at anchor. Most significant of all, however, was West’s decision to place in the left foreground a Mohawk warrior, who views the drama from a pose of classic contemplation while an American ranger and a Scottish soldier point back to the running messenger and relay the news of victory to the dying Wolfe. That none of this happened in the way West shows it did not matter. His enterprise was not to create a historically accurate painting, but to apotheosize both Wolfe and the empire, and at that he succeeded brilliantly. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
The rugged chevalier did not doubt that he could make it through the coming winter, and indeed that the winter might actually serve his interests better than those of the British. For once his army had adequate, if not copious, provisions on hand: Montréal had at last enjoyed a bountiful harvest, and even an early one. Most of the Québec district, of course, had had no harvest at all, but that was a British problem. As the redcoat officers prepared their men to enter winter quarters in the city they were acutely aware of what Wolfe’s August campaign of terror had actually accomplished. Together with the large numbers of Canadian civilians who were coming to Québec to swear fealty to King George, the British garrison would face great hardships during the winter, for all they had to live on was what they had brought from England. No British provision fleet could possibly reach Québec before the St. Lawrence froze.
In the meantime the British prepared for the ordeal that lay ahead. Virtually every soldier—including those sick and wounded men deemed likely to recover—would have to remain at Québec to make the garrison strong enough to stand off an attack. This amounted to more than seven thousand troops, a number that would stretch the food supply to its uttermost limit. Moreover, they all had to be sheltered, along with the returned civilians, in a city that ordinarily housed about seven thousand souls. Few structures in Québec and its suburbs had come through the ordeal of the summer undamaged; thus the month between the capitulation and the departure of the fleet was consumed with feverish efforts not only to strengthen the city’s walls, bastions, and batteries, but to repair enough shell-shattered houses to preserve the garrison against a Canadian winter.
Since no sane person who was free to leave would have stayed at Québec under such circumstances, Monckton—who had made enough of a recovery from his wounds to assume command but was still far from fit—elected to return to New York to convalesce. Townshend, who had his political health to nurse, opted to return to England. On October 18, therefore, when Admiral Saunders’s fleet weighed anchor and slipped downriver on the ebbing tide, it was the junior brigadier, James Murray, who remained as commandant of His Majesty’s garrison and governor of Québec. He could hardly have been delighted with his prospects. Unpleasant as his future looked, however, Murray’s men must surely have known that theirs was bound to be worse. 37
CHAPTER 37
Fall’s Frustrations
OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1759
OCTOBER 18 WAS also the day that a fretful Jeffery Amherst finally learned that Québec had fallen. Word reached him on Lake Champlain, where he was shepherding his troops cautiously north to attack Bourlamaque at Île-aux-Noix. Captain Stobo, whom Wolfe had sent with letters back on September 7, had arrived at Crown Point on October 9. Unfortunately for Amherst, he arrived without the dispatches; a French privateer had overtaken his ship near Halifax and he had thrown Wolfe’s letters overboard lest they be discovered among his possessions. He had therefore been able to give Amherst general information only, leaving the commander in chief intensely frustrated. “I am not a whit the wiser,” he complained, “except that [Stobo] says Gen Wolfe had got with allmost his whole Army above the Town & [Wolfe] thinks he will not take it.”1
Inconclusive as it was, the captain’s report nonetheless convinced Amherst that he dared not delay launching his attack on Île-aux-Noix, for if Wolfe had indeed failed, Montcalm’s whole force at Québec would soon be available to reinforce Bourlamaque. The arrival over the next couple of days of the three long-awaited vessels from the shipyard at Ticonderoga—the brigantine Duke of Cumberland, the radeau Ligonier, and the sloop Boscawen—gave Amherst the naval protection he craved, and on the afternoon of October 11 he had at last ordered his men into their bateaux and set them rowing north. But from the thirteenth through the seventeenth storms, cold, and “northerly & contrary” winds had held up the boats and forced the army to take shelter on the lakeshore. Thus the letter from New York that arrived on October 18, carrying news of Québec’s fall, came to Amherst as a great relief. On the following day, with the “appearance of winter” everywhere in evidence, he called off the expedition. Two days later he was back at Crown Point; within two weeks he dismissed his provincials and ordered his regulars into winter quarters. 2
The Anglo-American forces officially welcomed the news of Québec’s fall with feux-de-joie and thanksgiving sermons, but for the provincials the northern campaigns generally ended with all the usual irritations, for all the usual reasons. As in every previous year, their camps had grown sicklier as the summer waned; their provisions had proven scantier and less wholesome than promised; and they had worried that they would be kept in service after their enlistment contracts had expired. On the road from Crown Point to Fort Number 4 in New Hampshire, for example, where a ranger captain named John Stark was supervising about 250 New England provincials in the last phases of construction, the men complained of short rations, hard work, and bad weather more and more bitterly until they finally mutinied on November 13. Even though Stark was a popular commander, nothing he said could dissuade them from throwing down their tools and refusing to work. Only the timely arrival of provisions, the nearness of the builders to the end of the road, and Stark’s promise that he would release them at Number 4 prevented a mass desertion.3
While Stark scrambled to keep his men from vanishing into the woods, back at the Fort Ticonderoga sawmill Sergeant Rufus Putnam of the Massachusetts provincials also chafed at what he understood to be a violation of his enlistment contract. As the workman who had supervised the building of the mill (which in turn had sawn the planks of the Boscawen, the Ligonier, and the Duke of Cumberland), Putnam was too valuable to be released with his fellow provincials and had been kept on as foreman of the sawyers at the site. Only the promise that he would be paid an extra dollar a day for his services had kept him from
leaving when his enlistment expired. At the end of November, however, the regular officer in charge at Ticonderoga refused to pay Putnam off at the agreed rate and instead allowed him only his sergeant’s wages. Making his way home in bitter weather, Putnam brooded on how often he had “ben disappointed of the rewards promised for extra Service.” Once back in Brookfield, he “came to a ditermnation never to engage again as a Solder.”4
Seven hundred miles away, Private Gibson Clough of Salem was coming to the same conclusion at about the same time. He had enlisted to serve on the Crown Point expedition only to find that his unit was sent to garrison Louisbourg and release regulars to accompany Wolfe to Québec. This had been disappointing enough, but life in the fortress had begun to look even gloomier as September turned to October. It seemed increasingly likely “we shall stay all winter here within stone walls,” he grumbled in his diary, without even the prospect of having “good Liquors for to keep up our Spirits on cold Winter’s days.” To be kept beyond the term of his contract was nearly unbearable for Clough, who complained that “although we be Englishmen Born yet we are debarred Englishmens Liberty” and noted grimly that “we now see what it is to be under Martial Law and to be with ye regulars who are but little better than slaves to their Officers.” The soldiers in Clough’s regiment agreed, and on November 1 they mutinied, refusing to do further service. Even the arrival of a letter from the governor of Massachusetts bearing news that the General Court had agreed to pay a bonus for service over the winter did nothing to pacify them. Only the threat of force, the impossibility of escape from Cape Breton, and their colonel’s promise that he would return to Boston and seek their release convinced the soldiers to resume their duties. 5
Such episodes of disappointment and outright mutiny among the provincials—and many more could be added—suggest the extent to which their experience of military service shaped their views of the regulars alongside whom, and under whose command, they served. Even in so successful a year as 1759, the dominant memory that a New England provincial might take home from the armies was unlikely to be a pleasant one. For thousands of ordinary men like Rufus Putnam (who “made up [his] mind not to engage any more in the Military Service”) and Gibson Clough (who resolved that “when I get out of their pen [i.e., Louisbourg, but more generally, the power of the regulars] I shall take care how I get in again”) the net effect of provincial military service was disillusionment. No matter how much colonists in general rejoiced in the British victories, for the provincials themselves, the war was nothing so much as a protracted, often painful lesson in the differences between themselves and the regulars: differences more profound than almost any of them, believing that they were neither more nor less than “Englishmen Born,” had had any reason to expect.6
At the same time, the provincials’ seemingly incorrigible casualness about discipline and their readiness to desert or mutiny when they suspected that their enlistment contracts were being violated had convinced Jeffery Amherst, like Braddock and Loudoun and Abercromby before him, that Americans had much less in the way of character and toughness than real Englishmen. When the New Englanders began to desert from Crown Point at the beginning of November, Amherst found that he had no alternative but to dismiss them, since there was no way to force them into line. “The provincials,” he wrote, “have got home in their heads & will now do very little good. I hear they are deserting from every Post where I have been obliged to leave some & several ran away who had a good deal of money due to them. ’Twill be so much saved to the Publick.” Already he had gone far toward forming what would become his summary opinion: “The Disregard of Orders, and Studying of their own Ease, rather than the good of the Service, has been too often Just Grounds for Complaint Against Some of the Provincial Officers, and all their Men.” They were no more than a necessary evil, settled upon him by the need for laborers and garrison troops in a frustrating wilderness war. Whatever else Amherst might say of the Americans, he would never think of them as soldiers, and he could hardly wait to put them, and their wretched country, behind him.7
CHAPTER 38
Celebrations of Empire, Expectations of the Millennium
OCTOBER 1759
PERHAPS PREDICTABLY, the reactions of civilians and government officials to the news of Québec’s fall were more ecstatic—because they were unmingled with the irritations and anxieties of military service—than those of the soldiers themselves. Everywhere local and province governments staged elaborate public ceremonies, while people in general demonstrated their joy in less structured ways. In Pennsylvania, where the war-driven market for agricultural produce was helping to counter the memory of a devastated frontier, Philadelphians—except for Quakers, who refused to observe holidays set aside to recognize military victories—celebrated by illuminating their windows and building so many bonfires that they were said to dim the moon. In New York, where merchants and artisans were feasting on military contracts, an evening celebration “was ushered in with a large Bonfire and Illuminations,” continued with “an elegant Entertainment” for “all the principal Persons of the Place,” and concluded with “every . . . Toast that Loyalty and Gratitude could dictate . . . ; each being accompanied with the Discharge of a Round of Cannon, amounting in the Whole to above a Hundred.”1
Boston observed the occasion with an intensity suited to the colony most enthusiastically engaged in the war. “The Morning [of October 16] was ushered in by the ringing of the Bells of the Town, which continued the whole Day”; an “excellent sermon was preached” to the governor, both houses of the legislature, and “a vast Auditory”; militia units performed “Rejoicing Fires,” and all the artillery pieces of the town and the ships in the harbor joined in a massive salute. That evening there was a “Concert of Musick” at the Concert Hall and then a procession to Faneuil Hall, where Thomas Pownall threw a formal dinner for the legislators, “a great Number of Civil and Military Officers, and other Persons of Distinction.” Into the shank of the night the governor and guests toasted their monarch and his generals before reeling outdoors to observe the “beautifuly illuminated” windows of the town, the “large Bonfires formed in a pyramidical Manner . . . on several Eminences” around about, and the “Abundance of extraordinary Fire-Works [that] were play’d off in almost every Street; more especially the greatest Quantity of Sky-Rockets ever seen on any Occasion.” 2
Indeed, New Englanders everywhere joined in “great Rejoicings.” Yet as one would expect of this region where people remained eager to discern providential meanings in events, when the smoke finally cleared, sermons had probably outnumbered bonfires; and the preachers, both Old Light and New, had achieved virtual unanimity in their interpretation of the fall of Québec. Since the end of the seventeenth century, they agreed, God had chastised his people with defeat and discouragements in order to make them mindful of their sins and to bring them back to the paths of righteousness. Through the previous three wars and the first years of the present one, the enemy “gain’d ground, fortified and secur’d every pass into their own country, grew more and more animated,” the Reverend Samuel Langdon told his New Hampshire auditory. “But when God had thus prov’d and humbled and convinc’d us that the race is not to the swift . . . His Providence bro’t about a change” of truly miraculous nature. 3
This pattern recapitulated the ways in which the Lord had always dealt with his chosen ones. He had sent afflictions on the people of Israel in exactly the same way he had recently sent them on New England, and for exactly the same purpose: to call forth moral regeneration, humility, renewal of faith. The return of divine favor, unmistakable in such a great military event as the taking of Québec, spoke directly to the hearts of a people conscious of their special relationship with the Almighty. “I know not how to express the importance of that success and yet I feel it,” the Reverend Samuel Cooper told Governor Pownall and the members of the General Court in his thanksgiving sermon on October 16. “We have received a Salvation from Heaven, greater perhaps than
any since the Foundation of the Country.”4
As he had in Israel of old, God had found within New England a saving remnant of saints whose righteousness he imputed to the whole of the English nation—and for that matter to all the Protestants fighting to destroy the popish powers. The Catholic and heathen enemies of God’s people, once so mighty, had been brought low not merely by the exertions of the British and American soldiers but by God’s own doing. No case in all of salvation history had made clearer God’s willingness to fight his people’s battles than the encounter on the Plains of Abraham, where every circumstance manifested divine intervention. Many preachers found even more in the events of 1759 than a reconfirmation of God’s mercy to his people, for the cumulative impact of so many victories suggested that God was preparing to drive the minions of Antichrist out of America altogether, as the opening stroke of the millennium.5
As often happens in times of war and cultural stress, apocalyptic meanings were plain to those who, like the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, saw parallels between the prophecies in the Book of Revelation and current events. Mayhew encouraged his audience to look forward to the day when the defeat of the Whore of Babylon (France) would lead the peoples of Spain and Portugal to reject Catholicism and join in a great Protestant revival; to the day when the Indians, delivered from the delusions of popery and priest-craft, might accept the true religion and adopt peaceful ways; to the day indeed when North America would be home to “a mighty empire (I do not mean an independent one) in numbers little inferior to the greatest in Europe, and in felicity to none.” Fairly transported by a vision of peace and harmony, Mayhew invited his auditors to imagine with him the glories of that millennial America:
Methinks I see mighty cities rising on every hill, and by the side of every commodious port; mighty fleets alternately sailing out and returning, laden with the produce of this, and every other country under heaven; happy fields and villages wherever I turn my eyes, thro’ a vastly extended territory; there the pastures cloathed with flocks, and here the vallies cover’d with corn, while the little hills rejoice on every side! And do I not there behold the savage nations, no longer our enemies, bowing the knee to Jesus Christ, and with joy confessing him to be “Lord, to the glory of God the Father!” Methinks I see religion professed and practiced in this spacious kingdom, in far greater purity and perfection, than since the times of the apostles; the Lord being still as a wall of fire round about, and the glory in the midst of her! O happy country! happy kingdom!6
Crucible of War Page 45