6. Gov. Thomas Fitch to Pitt, 14 July 1759, Pitt Corr., 2:140; see also same to same, 16 Apr. 1759, ibid., 84–7; see also Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 149 (table 5.1), 150.
7. Gipson, Victorious Years, 308–10 (N.J.), 309–10 (N.Y.), 325–8 (N.H.), 313–15 (R.I.). Also see John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, vol. 6 (Providence, 1861), 181, 194, 207, 213–14. Rhode Island’s attempt to retain men over the winter reflected the unusual conditions within a colony where as much as a fifth of the male population in the military age range was engaged in privateering and where many merchants were trading heavily with the enemy’s West Indies islands. The attractiveness of privateering necessitated paying men over the winter merely to have a claim on their services the following spring; meanwhile anxiety that the British government would punish the colony for its illicit trade made the assembly’s merchants eager to avoid giving offense to the commander in chief in point of raising troops. On Rhode Island’s trade with the enemy, see esp. Loudoun to Cumberland, 22 June 1757, in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 376.
8. Gipson, Victorious Years, 317.
9. Amherst’s financial problems: Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 133–5. Colonies’ willingness to lend money: Gipson, Victorious Years, 310. Amherst quotation: id. to De Lancey, 8 July 1759, quoted ibid.
10. Ibid., 290–2, 296–8; Gov. Henry Ellis to Pitt, 12 Feb. and 1 Mar. 1759, Pitt Corr., 2:38–40, 45; Gov. William Henry Lyttleton to Pitt, 26 Mar. and 15 Apr. 1759, ibid., 77, 84.
11. Gipson, Victorious Years, 293–6. The Burgesses renewed their offer of a ten-pound bounty and once more filled the ranks with volunteers, including the first substantial numbers of veterans; see James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 197 n. 23.
12. Gipson, Victorious Years, 301–7. In 1760 the Board of Trade and the Privy Council condemned the legislature’s action and ordered it to make restitution to the Penn family.
13. That there was real concern about this is clear from the panicky reaction of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the rumor that Byrd was about to be named commandant at Pittsburgh. The assembly hurriedly sent a delegation to Denny to discover whether there was any truth to the reports and to warn him that if there was, the assembly would deny all support for the coming campaign (ibid., 300–1).
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Emblem of Empire: Fort Pitt and the Indians
1. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 300; Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 160–1.
2. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 411–12; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 255. The raids continued and indeed intensified until May, when a French and Indian party from Venango killed thirty people near Fort Ligonier: one of the deadliest raids of the war in Pennsylvania (Wainwright, Croghan, 159).
3. Plan of trade: Eric Hinderaker, “The Creation of the American Frontier: Europeans and Indians in the Ohio River Valley, 1673–1800” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1991), 312–13, quotations from “An Act for Preventing Abuses in the Indian Trade” (1758). Pemberton and the Pittsburgh trade: John W. Jordan, ed., “James Kenny’s ‘Journal to ye Westward,’ 1758–59,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1937): 440 (entry of 2 Sept. 1759); Theodore Thayer, Israel Pemberton, King of the Quakers (Philadelphia, 1943), 171–4.
4. Hinderaker, “Creation of the Frontier,” 316–19; see also Wainwright, Croghan, 161–3.
5. Wainwright, Croghan, 159–63.
6. Construction of Fort Pitt: Gipson, Victorious Years, 340–1 (measurements based on “A Plan of the New Fort at Pitts-Burgh or Du Quesne,” facing 340). Cannon and barracks: anonymous letter, 21 Mar. 1760, quoted in Charles Morse Stotz, Outposts of the War for Empire: The French and English in Western Pennsylvania: Their Armies, Their Forts, Their People,1749–1764 (Pittsburgh, 1985), 131.
7. “James Kenny’s Journal,” 433 (entry of 24 July 1759, recounting conversation of 9 July). Comparative sizes of Forts Pitt and Duquesne: Stotz, Outposts, 56, 81, 133, 137. All of Fort Duquesne could have been situated comfortably on the parade square in the middle of Fort Pitt, which encompassed 1.3 acres.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: The Six Nations Join the Fight: The Siege of Niagara
1. Amherst to Pitt, 19 June 1759, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:124–5; “Prideaux and Johnson Orderly Book,” James Sullivan, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 3 (Albany, 1921), 55 (entry of 27 June 1759). Prideaux arrived at Oswego with about four thousand men, having detached about a thousand soldiers (mainly provincials) to garrison the forts at the Carrying Place. He left another thousand at Oswego to hold the river’s mouth and to begin constructing a new post, Fort Ontario. Thus when he left for Niagara his force consisted of about two thousand regulars, a thousand provincials, and a thousand Iroquois warriors. For units and dispositions see Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 344; and Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 143 and app. 2. For the best overall account of the Anglo-American campaign and French defense, see Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Siege—1759: The Campaign against Niagara (Youngstown, N.Y., 1996).
2. Mercer to Forbes, 8 Jan. 1759, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., The Papers of Col. Henry Bouquet, ser. 21655 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1943), 25–6.
3. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 414–15. Quotation: Johnson to Amherst, 16 Feb. 1759, Johnson Papers, 3:19. That a delegation of Iroquois approached Johnson is a surmise on my part, based on the episode that Mercer reported from Pittsburgh.
4. See esp. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, 1992), 23–46; also Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 186–268. That the Iroquois regarded the threat as being of the utmost importance can be read in the number of Indians that accompanied Prideaux to Niagara: to field a thousand warriors was to make something like a total mobilization of the Confederacy’s military manpower. In c. 1736 (the only year for which there is anything like a reliable estimate) the Iroquois could muster about eleven hundred warriors; given the slow growth of populations in Iroquoia it would seem unlikely that there were many more than that among the Six Nations in 1759. To send so many men with Prideaux was both an immense commitment and a great risk, since few warriors would have been left to defend the villages of Iroquoia. The Confederacy council could never have countenanced such extreme measures unless a powerful consensus justified it. (On Iroquois populations, see Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 31–2.)
5. Prideaux was only forty-one, and a colonel only since Oct. 1758, when he replaced Howe as commandant of the 55th Regiment of Foot; see Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Prideaux, John.” On Niagara, see Charles Morse Stotz, Outposts of the War for Empire: The French and English in Western Pennsylvania: Their Armies, Their Forts, Their People, 1749–1764 (Pittsburgh, 1985), 71, and esp. Dunnigan, Siege, 11–22, 34–44.
6. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Poucho
t, Pierre.” Unless otherwise noted, the account of the siege follows this excellent sketch and the account in Gipson, Victorious Years, 347–56.
7. “Bad business”: Pouchot, Memoir upon the Late War in North America, . . . 1755–60, 11–14 July 1759, quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 417. Besides Gipson’s account of the conferences of 11–14 July in Victorious Years, 349–51, see Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 216–17, and Dunnigan, Siege, 57–60.
8. Ibid., 61–75; Victorious Years, 348–9.
9. Ibid., 351–2; Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 455–6; Dunnigan, Siege, 77–82.
10. Ibid., 88–93; “floating island”: anonymous witness quoted in Gipson, Victorious Years, 352.
11. For the most comprehensive account of the engagement at La Belle Famille and the pursuit after the battle, see Dunnigan, Siege, 93–8. The Pennsylvania Gazette, 23 Aug. 1759, reported that the Iroquois hunted the retreating French through the woods to a “vast Slaughter.” Captain Charles Lee of the 44th Foot reported to his sister that Lignery’s men “were totally defeated . . . with the entire loss of officers and men, their Indians excepted,” and remarked to his uncle that “almost their entire party [was] cut off” (id. to Miss Sidney Lee, 30 July [1759], The Lee Papers, vol. 1, New-York Historical Society, Collections 4 [1871]: 19; Lee to Sir William Bunbury, 9 Aug. 1759, ibid., 21). Captain James De Lancey, commander of a regular light infantry detachment at the abatis, reported that “Our Indians as soon as they saw the Enemy give way pursued them very briskly and took and killed great numbers of them . . .” (Capt. James De Lancey to Lt. Gov. James De Lancey, 25 July 1759, in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, 15 vols. [Albany, 1856–1887], 7:402). Lignery: see Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Le Marchand de Lignery, François-Marie”; the author, C. J. Russ, suggests that Lignery died on 28 July. Johnson, however, did not leave Niagara until 4 Aug., at which time Lignery was still alive; see Johnson to Amherst, 9 Aug. 1759, Johnson Papers, 3:121.
Joseph Marin de La Malgue (called Marin fils, baptized 1719), son of the man to whom Duquesne had assigned the task of building the Ohio forts in 1752; his story is one of those small odysseys that illuminates the nature of eighteenth-century European colonialism. Marin fils had spent most of his life as a merchant, government administrator, and officer in the troupes de la marine, serving in posts over a huge geographical range, from Minnesota to Acadia. Imprisoned in New York after the battle, he was “repatriated” to France—a country he had never seen—in 1762. After failing to establish himself there he eventually participated in the attempt to establish a colony in Madagascar, where he died in 1774 (Dictionary of CanadianBiography, vol. 4, s.v. “Marin de la Malgue, Joseph”).
12. Johnson to Amherst, 31 July 1759, Johnson Papers, 3:115.
13. “Settling an Alliance”: ibid. Amherst sends Gage to take command: Amherst to Johnson, 6 Aug. 1759, ibid., 3:118–20.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: General Amherst Hesitates: Ticonderoga and Crown Point
1. News of Niagara’s fall: see Amherst to Johnson, 6 Aug. 1759, in James Sullivan, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 3 (New York, 1921), 118. The campaign to date: Daniel John Beattie, “Sir Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 137–63; on Bradstreet’s role, see William G. Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit and Preferment in Colonial North America: John Bradstreet’s Quest (Waterloo, Ont., 1982), 142–52.
2. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967) 361–4; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Bourlamaque, François-Charles de”; Beattie, “Amherst,” 153–9, 164.
3. “Great Post”: Amherst’s journal, quoted in Beattie, “Amherst,” 164. Estimate of strategic situation: Amherst to Pitt, 22 Oct. 1759, a journal letter recounting developments from 6 Aug. onward; see esp. entries of 6–18 Aug. (Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America [1906; reprint, New York, 1969], 2:186–90). On 1 Sept. Amherst ordered a third vessel built, the Boscawen, to counter a new sixteen-gun French sloop. This necessitated a new sawmill and further delays. Rufus Putnam supervised the mill’s construction (Beattie, “Amherst,” 161; E. C. Dawes, ed., Journal of Gen. Rufus Putnam, Kept in Northern New York during Four Campaigns of the Old French and Indian War, 1757–1760 [Albany, 1886], 91 [entries of 26 July–4 Aug. 1759]; Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam [Boston, 1903], 26–8).
4. Anticipations of Wolfe’s failure: John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 95. Preparations and roads: Amherst to Pitt, 22 Oct. 1759, entries of 6–31 Aug., Pitt Corr., 2:186–92.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Dubious Battle: Wolfe Meets Montcalm at Québec
1. Course of the campaign: C. P. Stacey, Quebec, 1759: The Siege and the Battle (Toronto, 1959), 51, 75–80. “Reduced [his] Operations”: Brig. George Townshend to Charlotte, Lady Ferrers [his wife], 6 Sept. 1759, ibid., 93. “Windmills, water-mills”: Capt. John Knox, An Historical Journal of the Campaigns in North America, for the Years 1757, 1758, 1759, and 1760, ed. Arthur G. Doughty, 3 vols. (Toronto, 1914–16), 1:375. Atrocities: Stacey, Quebec, 91. Scalpings were common in the New England–raised ranger companies, but regulars also engaged in the practice, as when a detachment of the 43rd Regiment captured, killed, and scalped a priest and thirty of his parishioners at Ste. Anne on August 23. Wolfe himself sanctioned scalping, if not necessarily mass murder, by an order of 27 July, which sought to systematize what had already become a general practice: “The Genl. strickly forbids the inhuman practice of scalping, except when the enemy are Indians, or Canads. dressed like Indians” (General Orders in Wolfe’s Army [Quebec, 1875], 29).
2. Christopher Hibbert, Wolfe at Quebec (New York, 1959), 107–19.
3. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 389.
4. Failed harvest: Jean Elizabeth Lunn, “Agriculture and War in Canada, 1740–1760,” CanadianHistorical Review 16 (1935): 2, 128–9. Severity of the winter: George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 221–2. Bougainville’s arrival: Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 205–6; Gipson, Victorious Years, 389–90. Vaudreuil vs. Montcalm: Roger Michalon, “Vaudreuil et Montcalm—les hommes— leurs relations—influence de ces relations sur la conduite de la guerre 1756–1759,” in Conflits de sociétés au Canada français pendant la Guerre de Sept Ans et leur influence sur les operations, ed. Jean Delmas (Ottawa: Colloque International d’Histoire Militaire, Ottawa, 19–27 Aug. 1978), 43–175, esp. 153–4.
5. Gipson, Victorious Years, 388–9.
6. Stacey, Quebec, 43–4; Stanley, Last Phase, 223–4; Steele, Warpaths, 219.
7. Knox, Historical Journal, 1:375.
8. Stacey, Quebec, 41–2.
9. “My antagonist”: Wolfe to his mother, 31 Aug. 1759, in Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (New York, 1909), 469. Deadlock and council of war: Gipson, Victorious Years, 405–7, Willson, Letters of Wolfe, 466–8; Stacey, Quebec, 99–102 and app. (“Wolfe’s Correspondence with the Brigadiers, August 1759”), 179–81.
10. Stacey, Quebec, 104–5.
11. Robert C. Alberts, The Most Extraordinary Adventures of Major Robert Stobo (Boston, 1965).
12. Stacey, Quebec, 106–8.
13. Wolfe to Brigadier [Robert] Monckton, 81⁄2 o’clock, 12 Sept. 1759, in Willson, Letters of Wolfe, 485.
14. Ibid., 482–3, 493. Jervis, of course, would become a notable fighting admiral in the Napoleonic Wars, winning the
Battle of Cape St. Vincent, 14 Feb. 1797, and earning the peerage, as Lord St. Vincent, that he would bear until he became admiral of the fleet and finally first lord of the Admiralty (a task at which, unlike battle, he did not distinguish himself).
15. Stacey, Quebec, 127–30; Hibbert, Wolfe at Quebec, 134–8.
16. There is obviously a substantial degree of speculation in this, for we cannot know Wolfe’s state of mind or his plans for the assault. However, certain evidence does point in this direction. Brig. Gen. James Murray, the fourth-in-command on the expedition, never forgave Wolfe’s “absurd, visionary” conduct and especially resented his abandonment of the brigadiers’ advice to carry out the upriver landing at Pointe aux Trembles, where he could have cut off Québec’s supplies as well as at L’Anse au Foulon, but with infinitely less risk to the army. In 1774 Murray was still angry enough to write: “It does not appear to me that it ever was Mr Wolfes intention to bring the Enemy to a general Action” on the Plains; the landing was “almost impossible,” and “successful . . . thanks to Providence” (to George Townshend, 5 Nov. 1774, quoted in Stacey, Quebec, 176).
In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the Canadian intendant, Bigot, investigated Wolfe’s plans. On 25 Oct. 1759 he wrote to Marshal Belle-Isle, “I know all the particulars of that landing from English officers of my acquaintance who have communicated them to me; adding, that Mr. Wolf did not expect to succeed; that he had not attempted to land above Quebec [at Pointe aux Trembles or Cap Rouge, the two strategically sound objectives], and that he was to sacrifice only his van-guard which consisted of 200 men; that were these fired on, they were all to reëmbark” (quoted in Gipson, Victorious Years, 416 n. 58).
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