Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  PART VI

  CONQUEST COMPLETED

  1760

  Amherst plans a climactic, three-pronged invasion of Canada in the midst of a colonial world transformed by Pitt’s military policies and expenditures. Outside the walls of Québec, the chevalier de Lévis wins one last battle but finds that he cannot change the course of the war. Murray, Haviland, and Amherst converge on Montréal. An accounting for Britain’s victory, and an assessment of its costs. Pitt, at the zenith of his power, confronts a crucial challenge: the sudden death of George II.

  CHAPTER 40

  War in Full Career

  1760

  AMHERST RECEIVED Pitt’s directions on February 20, when he was already deep in preparations for the coming campaigns. Upon his arrival at New York in December he had settled arrangements with the contractors for supplying the expeditions. In January he had written to the governors, asking for the same numbers of troops their provinces had furnished in 1759, and he had applied to the New York Assembly for another loan to cover his operating expenses until money arrived from Britain. In February he had arranged with Sir William Johnson to procure as many warriors from the Six Nations as possible for the coming year. Throughout the winter, artisans working under contract with the army busily repaired arms and tents and boats, readying them for the next summer’s use; ranger and regular officers recruited men to replace those lost in the previous campaign; sergeants drilled their troops in both the conventional tactics of the line and the newer techniques of aimed fire and bush fighting. By the beginning of March, Amherst was looking forward with considerable confidence to completing the conquest of Canada.1

  Since the capture of Niagara and the withdrawal of the French from their Allegheny forts had reduced activity in the west from an operational to an administrative level, Amherst gave over command of the provinces south of New York to Robert Monckton. With 400 Royal Americans and about 4,000 provincials (300 from North Carolina, 761 from Virginia, and 2,800 from Pennsylvania), he was to consolidate control at Fort Pitt, Niagara, and the old French posts on the Allegheny. Otherwise— apart from the 1,300 regulars he had had to send to South Carolina to help put down a Cherokee uprising—Amherst intended to use practically every redcoat in America, together with thousands of provincials from New England, New Jersey, and New York, in a great three-pronged attack on Canada. He would personally lead the main army of 12,000 men from Albany to Oswego, and then down the St. Lawrence to Montréal; if the Canadians and French were to try to escape westward, they would find their route blocked by overwhelming force. A second army, numbering about 3,500 redcoats and provincials, would advance under the command of Acting Brigadier General William Haviland along the Champlain corridor from Crown Point, taking Île-aux-Noix and the Richelieu River forts on its way to Montréal. The third force, under Brigadier General James Murray, would be made up of as many men as could be spared from the garrison of Québec, plus regular reinforcements sent up from Louisbourg; these would ascend the St. Lawrence by ship. All three forces were to converge, if possible simultaneously, on Montréal, where they would trap the last defenders of New France.2

  AMHERST’S BOLD PLAN not only called for a degree of strategic coordination never before seen in America, but also for provincial troops essentially equal in number to those that had been raised in the two previous years. That in turn would require greater outlays, man for man, than ever before. Despite problems in enlistment that stemmed both from the extreme exertions of the previous years and from the effects of rumors that peace was at hand in Europe, the governments of the northern provinces did their best to meet the demand for recruits.

  As usual, Massachusetts led the way. In January the General Court agreed to raise 5,000 volunteers for the campaign, notwithstanding the heroic expenditures that would be needed to accomplish it. The legislators had already voted to retain, over the winter of 1759–60, the 2,500 men who had been sent to garrison Louisbourg—the decision that had so distressed Gibson Clough.3 This unprecedented step had occasioned unanticipated expenses, for the province not only had to continue paying the troops’ wages so long as they remained in service, but also had to promise support for every “necessitous” soldier’s family and pledge an additional four-pound bonus upon completion of duty. In response to Amherst’s request for troops, the legislators agreed to pay a nine-pound bounty to any soldier at Louisbourg who would reenlist for the coming campaign and the same amount to as many more volunteers as would be needed to bring the province’s forces up to its 5,000-man quota. In the end, it proved necessary to add yet another three pounds to the bounty to raise the last 500 men. All in all, to reimburse a private soldier at Louisbourg— for example, Gibson Clough—for serving past the expiration of his previous enlistment and then reenlisting for 1760, the province had to lay out twenty-two pounds; and that did not include his wages for the coming campaign, which would cost nearly thirteen pounds more. This was an extraordinary sum to procure the services of a single common soldier, but nothing less would suffice. 4

  As in the previous years, a high bounty offered in one province drove up the bounties in the neighboring ones, so overall costs were greater than in 1758 and 1759; yet the northern colonies responded without complaint, as if they had become accustomed to mobilizing men and resources for the war. Although recruiting went as slowly as usual, by the end of June they had placed nearly 14,500 provincials at Amherst’s disposal: 5,000 from Connecticut, 4,000 from Massachusetts, 2,680 from New York, 1,000 each from New Jersey and Rhode Island, and 800 from New Hampshire.5

  The enthusiasm that lay behind these efforts was real enough, for if anything the prospect of ending the war had enhanced the patriotic spirit of the assemblies. But there was also great practicality in their cooperation. By now the provinces most heavily engaged in the fighting had contracted such massive public debts in proportion to their tax resources that they had become dependent upon Parliament’s reimbursements, even to meet current expenses. They were, therefore, no longer in a position to balk at the demands of Amherst and Pitt and risk bringing an end to transfer payments that totaled about £200,000 sterling per year.

  Furthermore, throughout the northern colonies military service and such related civilian jobs as those for artificers, wagoners, and crewmen on privateering vessels were generating steady employment for tens of thousands of young men and pumping specie into circulation at a rate unparalleled in colonial history. Agriculture was becoming a steadily more commercialized activity, even in New England, where the purchases of military provision contractors drove commodity prices to extraordinary heights. Beef and pork, bellwethers for the effects of military demand because of their importance in soldiers’ rations, commanded prices that were on average half again higher at the beginning of 1760 than they had been at the outset of the war.6 What Thomas Hutchinson observed of Massachusetts at the beginning of 1760 might be said with equal force about any northern colony: “The generous compensations which had been every year made by parliament, not only alleviated the burden of taxes, which otherwise would have been heavy, but, by the importation of such large sums of specie, increased commerce; and it was the opinion of some, that the war added to the wealth of the province, though the compensation did not amount to one half the charges of government.” 7

  Thus in British America the seventh and climactic year of the war began in an atmosphere of confidence, prosperity, and cooperation between colonies and metropole that no one could have predicted on the evidence of the conflict’s first years. The scale of the war itself had become almost inconceivably large: a conflict that had begun in an Allegheny glen with the massacre of thirteen Frenchmen had spread over two oceans and three continents—half a world—and had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. There had been nothing direct about the path, and certainly nothing inevitable about the events, that connected Washington’s wretched fort in the Great Meadows to the huge encampments of Anglo-American troops preparing for the war’s climactic campaign. And yet, even in th
e spring of 1760—as officers were beating up for recruits across the northern countryside and ships laden with munitions butted their way across the Atlantic, as John Stanwix was supervising the completion of Fort Pitt and Jeffrey Amherst put the finishing touches on his plans for the summer’s expeditions—even then, nothing was foreordained. At Montréal, the chevalier de Lévis had been making plans of his own. He needed only a few ships carrying men and munitions and Indian trade goods from France to make those plans succeed, and if he did, Canada might yet hold out until peace could be made in Europe. In that case, all Amherst’s meticulous preparations, all the manpower of the colonies, and all the military strength and logistical weight of Great Britain, would add up to nothing more than one more chapter of frustration to the long, fruitless history of Anglo-American attempts to conquer New France.

  CHAPTER 41

  The Insufficiency of Valor LÉVIS AND VAUQUELIN AT QUÉBEC

  APRIL-MAY 1760

  LÉVIS’S ONE OBJECTIVE was to retake Québec, and with only a little help from home he had it within his power to accomplish this. Wolfe’s devastation of the countryside around the city had forced most of the Québecois to seek refuge in the Trois-Rivières and Montréal districts during the winter. The flood of refugees had strained the available food supply, but it had also placed at his disposal several thousand men eager to help expel the enemy from their city. The grain harvest in the Montréal district had been sufficient to provision a siege; once the streams thawed and wheat could be milled into flour, full-scale operations could begin. 1

  The trick would be in timing the start of the campaign, for although he had the troops and the bread, Lévis lacked siege guns and ammunition sufficient to hammer the city into submission if Murray chose to shut himself up within its walls. Lévis had sent a messenger to France after the British fleet had departed in October, urgently requesting reinforcements, heavy cannon, and supplies: all of which had to arrive as soon as the St. Lawrence became navigable and ahead of the British supply fleet. He therefore intended to open his siege in April. If the supply ships came promptly with the men and matériel he needed to finish the job, he would have recaptured the city before the British could relieve it; at which point his enemy would have to perform, once more, the feat that Wolfe had taken all summer to accomplish in 1759.

  Since Lévis did not propose to repeat Montcalm’s mistakes, he did not assume that the British would succeed—or indeed, that they would even try to besiege the city again. If, as seemed likely, they chose to withdraw from Québec and to concentrate their efforts on seizing Montréal by way of the upper St. Lawrence or the Richelieu River, he was reasonably confident that he could fight them to a standstill. Captain Pouchot, the talented former commandant of Niagara, had lately returned in a prisoner exchange, and Lévis had placed him in charge of Montréal’s upriver defenses. Île-aux-Noix still stood unchallenged at the head of the Richelieu, supported by newly built gunboats. The British would have to take the Montréal district inch by inch, by sieges and in woodland combat against Canadian militiamen and Indians: no easy prospect. If by winter the Anglo-Americans had not captured their prize, they would have no choice but to withdraw once more to their base of supply, in New York.2

  Thus on April 20, having made what preparations he could, the chevalier de Lévis led a surprisingly large army (over seven thousand men) with a tiny train of artillery (“twelve miserable old cannon”) out of Montréal, for Québec. The spring thaw was well along, and in the middle of the river enough water lay open for two of the four frigates in Canada, the Atalante and the Pomone, to escort the barges and bateaux that carried the troops. Lévis was staking everything he had on the venture. On board the boats rode all eight of his regular battalions, their ranks brought to full strength by militiamen; two battalions of troupes de la marine; a battalion of Montréal militia; a variety of Indians from the St. Lawrence missions; and even a kind of scratch cavalry squadron, its horses still bony from the winter’s privations. Other than a few hundred men left behind at Montréal, the garrison of Île-aux-Noix, and the detachments that had accompanied Pouchot upriver, practically every able-bodied soldier and militiaman in Canada was rowing down the great river, hoping against hope that a supply fleet was also making its way toward them. On April 24, at Pointe aux Trembles, they stopped, unloaded supplies, and readied themselves to march overland toward the city. By dawn on the twenty-seventh, the advance guard had almost reached the little village of Ste. Foy, less than six miles from Québec. That was where they saw the British, entrenched across the road in front of them.3

  A lucky accident had given Murray advance warning that a French force was advancing on Québec, for it was not until early that same day he had had any inkling of the size of the threat he faced.4 For many reasons, the appearance of so formidable a force made him almost desperate with worry. Murray’s men had suffered dreadfully during the winter. The troops had lacked clothing adequate for the climate—the Highlanders in the 78th, in fact, had had only their kilts, along with whatever Scotsmen wear underneath, to fend off the cold—but disease and inadequate nutrition had taken the gravest toll. By late April, the Québec garrison, which had originally included seven thousand men, could count fewer than four thousand “effectives.” The diseases and mishaps of a cruel winter— typhus, typhoid, dysentery, scurvy, frostbite, hypothermia—had killed a thousand men and rendered “above two thousand of what remained, totally unfit for any Service.”5

  Even those men who remained capable of mounting guard and performing the tasks of garrison duty suffered from scurvy and overwork. In particular the necessity of fetching firewood—a task that required long daily treks through snow to the city’s woodlots—had grown steadily more fatiguing for the fit as the numbers of sick men mounted. Finally, Murray knew no better than Lévis whether the first ships to arrive with supplies and reinforcements would be English or French. By taking the field at Ste. Foy on the twenty-seventh, therefore, he was not trying to entice Lévis to battle, but only to cover the retreat of his light infantry, which had been manning outposts as far upriver as Cap Rouge. Unlike Lévis, Murray had no plan. Although he had expected the French to move against Québec, when faced with the reality, he could only play for time.6

  Lévis was too canny a commander to attack the British abatis at Ste. Foy, and so waited for nightfall and the chance to flank the redcoats through the woods that lay to their left. Murray, realizing this danger, ordered a retreat as evening drew on, pulling his men back to a position not far from where Montcalm had arrayed his troops seven months before. He worried that he had too few men to construct advanced lines with which to hold the French outside cannon range from the city’s weak western wall. He knew, moreover, that his effective strength was dwindling by the day, and that if the French (whose numbers he had estimated at “ten thousand men, and five hundred Barbarians”) laid siege, his garrison might not be able to sustain a defense. But he also knew that his men, weakened as they were, were all regulars, while Lévis’s army had to be composed principally of militia. Therefore, mindful “that our little Army was in the habit of beating that Enemy,” Murray “resolved to give them Battle” on the Plains of Abraham. Early on the morning of April 28 he mustered about 3,800 troops—every man healthy enough to carry a musket—along with twenty field guns, and ordered them into position on the broken ridge where Montcalm’s line had stood before the attack on September 13. Having effectively recapitulated Montcalm’s reasoning, Murray was about to reenact the Battle of Québec.7

  Lévis had expected to lay siege, not to fight an open-field engagement, but he was willing to take advantage of the opportunity that Murray seemed intent on offering. Even though he had so far brought up about half of his force, when between six and seven o’clock he saw that the British had assumed a position outside the city, he ordered his available men (also numbering about 3,800) forward, to take up an opposing position. Murray, who was at this same time reconnoitering ahead of his lines, realized that the French
were still on the march and impulsively decided to abandon the high ground. If he could deliver an attack on the enemy’s left flank while they were still in column, he reasoned, he might hope to drive them back against the cliffs of the St. Lawrence and annihilate them once and for all.

  But eager as they were to fight, Murray’s men could not deliver the quick blow he wanted. On the lower ground the melting snow still lay half a leg deep, and underneath it was a mire of mud; what he had intended as a decisive maneuver bogged down near the village of Sillery in ferocious combat. Eventually, after more than an hour of fighting, often at hand to hand, the French began to push back both flanks of the British line, forcing Murray to order a withdrawal. Since their field guns had become hopelessly trapped in the muck and slush, the redcoats spiked and abandoned them on the battlefield. By midday they were back where Montcalm had been seven months earlier, within the walls of Québec, and Lévis was exactly where Townshend had been, opening siege lines before the city. Back at Sillery, French artillerymen were busy drilling the touch-holes of the cannon that Murray had obligingly supplied.8

  The Second Battle of Québec had been a much bloodier affair than the first. Out of approximately equal numbers engaged on each side, the French lost 193 killed and 640 wounded (22 percent of the men on the field) while the British sustained losses of 259 killed and 829 wounded (28 percent). Since Murray not only had sustained heavier casualties, abandoned his artillery, and retreated, but had also lost a much higher proportion of his effective men than the French (28 percent as opposed to less than 12), it is no exaggeration to say that he had taken a spectacular gamble and sustained a spectacular loss. The sight of French engineers laying out siege lines opposite the walls of Québec could hardly have made it clearer that Murray’s “passion for glory” would in all likelihood cost him the city, unless help soon arrived from below. By May 11, with his lines complete and his guns securely in place, Lévis was ready to begin bombarding Québec. Although the British could respond with twenty rounds to every one the Gascon brigadier could afford to fire from his meager stock of ammunition, Murray knew that the outcome of the siege would depend not on guns and gunners but on whatever ships and sailors the northeast winds were carrying up the river.9