The disaster on the Monagahela shook the colonists and bruised British prestige, but it did not alter the balance of power in North America. The French army there was scattered across the mid-west in penny packets and was nowhere strong enough to deliver a sustained offensive. It did, however, give its opponents some nasty surprises; in August 1756 Fort Oswego was captured and, during the following year, there were raids against settlements in the Mohawk valley.
In the meantime, the colonial authorities and the British army took stock of the situation. The Quakers were ousted in Pennsylvania and the colony placed on a proper war footing. Most significantly Braddock’s successor, John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun began a programme of training soldiers to fight a bush war. Loudoun was well-qualified for the task since he had had experience of guerrilla fighting during and after the 1745-6 Jacobite rebellion. Undistinguished as a field-commander, he had the good sense to realise that a new form of warfare required a new type of soldier. They were the Ranger, an American huntsman or trapper, and the light infantryman, a British regular chosen for his stamina, agility and quick-wittedness. They were given practical uniforms, often dark green or dun-coloured, which allowed them to pass unnoticed through woodland and bush.
The Ranger and light infantryman learned the arts of woodcraft, marksmanship and rapid movement across rough terrain, accomplishments which enabled the British army to fight a partisan war on equal terms with the French and Indians. Such troops, deployed as scouts and skirmishers ahead of a column, were also an insurance against the sort of disaster that had overtaken Braddock.
Flexible and imaginative commanders were needed if soldiers adept in frontier warfare were to be used to the best effect. These were provided by Pitt, who sent to North America two outstanding and energetic young officers, Major-General Jeffrey Amherst and Brigadier James Wolfe. Amherst was thirty and Wolfe two years older and each took his profession seriously, an uncommon virtue among George II’s officers.
The new high command in North America in 1758 was the instrument of Pitt’s grand strategy for the invasion and conquest of Canada. The cabinet was convinced that nothing short of the complete extinction of French power in North America would guarantee the future security of Britain’s colonies there. Such an ambitious undertaking required a massive concentration of sea and land forces and, it went without saying, a tight sea blockade that would deny succour and reinforcements to the French commander, Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm.
Three armies invaded New France in 1758. General Lord Abercromby, the commander-in-chief, with 11,000 regulars, advanced on Forts William, Henry and Ticonderoga. Brigadier John Forbes, with nearly 7,000, mostly colonial militia, followed in Braddock’s tracks to take Fort Duquesne. The third and largest army of 30,000 was led by Amherst, who was directed to make a seaborne attack on Louisbourg and then, if time permitted, proceed down the St Lawrence to assault Quebec. His transports were escorted by a squadron of twenty-three battleships and nineteen frigates commanded by Boscawen.
What was the largest imperial campaign yet undertaken met with mixed fortunes. Abercromby was thrown back from Ticonderoga by Montcalm and Forbes occupied Fort Duquesne unopposed.
The Louisbourg operation was the most complicated of all. Amphibious attacks always needed methodical preparation and precise execution. Troops, landing-craft, ammunition and stores had to be systematically stowed aboard transports for a swift and smooth disembarkation. Getting the soldiers ashore was always a dangerous and complex business; first the beaches had to be surveyed and then an operational plan concocted to secure them and any inland defences as quickly as possible. At Louisbourg, Amherst and his subordinate, Wolfe, took responsibility for the crucial reconnaissance and, after they had closely examined the Cape Breton Island beaches, Wolfe drafted a plan of attack.
It was several days before the sea was calm enough for the landing-craft to be rowed ashore. These were shallow-draught, flat-bottomed boats, which carried between 40 and 60 soldiers each and were propelled by 20 oarsmen.8 The first wave, as usual, were the most reliable troops, in this instance light infantrymen led by Wolfe.
On the beach and in the charge to storm the French shore positions, Wolfe behaved with that aloof indifference to danger and cool-headedness which were regarded as the distinguishing marks of a gentleman officer. These qualities of leadership were, he believed, only found among gentlemen. ‘I never can recommend’, he once wrote, ‘any but a gentleman to serve with gentlemen. There is little prospect of a low dog doing any shining act.’9 Before Louisbourg, Wolfe conducted himself in the manner expected of a gentleman of fine breeding, even pausing during the action to give a guinea each to the two Highland soldiers who had been the first ashore. Such gestures, like his courage under fire, won his soldiers’ hearts.
Wolfe’s advance guard cleared the way for the disembarkation of the rest of the army and its siege-train. The siege dragged on through June and well into July before the French, worn down by continual bombardment and without hope of relief, surrendered. Many, Wolfe among them, were keen to press on to Quebec, but Boscawen was uneasy about taking his ships into the hazardous waters of the St Lawrence. Furthermore, if operations extended into November, the armada would be stranded when the river froze.
* * *
Pitt’s masterplan had whittled down, not destroyed, French power in North America. The following year it was the chance of new generals. The dud Abercromby was replaced by Amherst, who conducted a renewed offensive against Ticonderoga. Wolfe was chosen by Pitt to command the St Lawrence expedition, partly on the recommendation of those officers who had served with him at Louisbourg, and partly because the war minister had been deeply impressed by his commitment to the campaign’s objective. He nearly had second thoughts after a private dinner during which Wolfe delivered a histrionic exhibition of his martial ardour. Whether this sword-waving outburst of patriotism was a consequence of his vanity, which was considerable, or of over-drinking, is not known. Newcastle, on hearing of the incident, is alleged to have warned George II that Wolfe was mad. ‘Mad is he?’ remarked the King. ‘Then I hope he will bite some of my other generals.’
The Quebec campaign, which began in June 1759, proceeded smoothly at first. Wolfe’s transports were protected by a squadron of twenty-two battleships under an able and brave officer, Admiral Sir Charles Saunders, whose valuable contribution to the operation has often been overlooked. Much depended on him; his light craft sailed ahead of the main force with officers skilled in navigation aboard, including the future explorer James Cook, who charted a course through what was still a little-known waterway.
Progress was therefore methodical and slow in a campaign where time mattered. Outnumbered, and unlikely to get assistance from France, Montcalm’s only chance of avoiding defeat lay in delaying his adversary until the beginning of winter. For a time it appeared that he might succeed. After occupying the Ile d’Orléans at the beginning of July, Wolfe found himself bogged down, his way impeded by the French batteries on the bluffs downstream from Quebec. A landing by the Montmorency Falls, intended to dislodge these cannon, went awry when the assault force of grenadiers and light infantrymen from the recently raised Royal American Regiment were driven back to their boats by the volleys of French-Canadian militiamen.
Wolfe was disheartened by this reverse, which was made more galling by the fact that his finest troops had been routed by amateurs. He considered colonial militiamen as no more than an armed rabble. At Louisbourg, he had described the American militia as: ‘the dirtiest, most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive. There is no depending upon ’em in action. They fall down in their dirt and desert by battalions.’10 As the war progressed, it revealed a deep social gulf between aristocratic British officers and colonials, whom they believed to be without moral fibre. This disdain was shared by French officers, one of whom sourly observed that French-Canadian militiamen were ‘very brave behind a tree and very timid when not covered’.11
Other tensions
emerged during Britain’s first large-scale imperial war of conquest. British officers were appalled to discover that European laws of war, devised to restrain its worst excesses, went unrecognised on the frontier. Wolfe, like many of his fellow officers, was shocked by the promiscuous brutality of colonial warfare, in particular the murder of prisoners and civilians by Indians. Wolfe blamed Montcalm personally for the Indian outrages and pledged himself to repay in kind.12 A year before he set off for Quebec, he had given notice of the sort of punishment he had in mind in a letter to his friend, Lord George Germain. ‘I am neither inhuman or rapacious yet I own it would give me pleasure to see the Canadian vermin sack’d and pillaged.’13 He kept his word; during the summer of 1759, parties of Rangers and other light troops harried the villages along the shores of the St Lawrence, burning houses and crops and carrying off what they could. Those French-Canadians who refused to swear allegiance to George II were evicted from their homesteads.14
A pattern was set for future colonial wars. Ideals of humanity held by often highly urbane and well-read officers were very soon shed when they were confronted by the primitive struggle for survival which lay at the heart of frontier conflicts. Wolfe, who recited Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard to his officers and, according to legend, accounted its composition an accomplishment equal to the taking of Quebec, could at the same time order the firing and pillage of French-Canadian settlements.
The deadlock at Quebec ended early in September. Wolfe, faced with the onset of winter in two months’ time, agreed to a plan proposed by some of his senior officers. It involved a risky nocturnal dash past Quebec and a dawn landing upstream from the city. With British troops between Montcalm and his supply base, Montreal, he would be forced to emerge and offer battle on the Plains of Abraham. Everything went as predicted; the British were able to disembark undetected and form up in time to meet Montcalm’s attack.
The battle for the control of North America was fought in an orthodox manner with columns and lines marching to the beat of the drum. The French manoeuvred clumsily, partly because the militiamen misunderstood what was expected of them in an unfamiliar kind of battle, and the entire French line crumpled under British volley fire. Montcalm was killed in the confusion as was Wolfe. Both had a reputation for gallantry and their deaths gave the entire campaign the quality of an epic contest between two worthy adversaries. Wolfe was quickly transformed into an imperial hero, the first of a breed that would proliferate over the next century and a half, whose patriotism, courage, attachment to duty and perseverance were set up as examples to be followed by their countrymen.
The fall of Quebec did not mark the end of the campaign. Disturbed by Amherst’s presence at Ticonderoga, Montcalm had detached a substantial force, under the Chevalier de Lévis, to protect Montreal. These troops tried to retake Quebec in the spring of 1760 and were beaten in a hard-fought battle at Sainte-Foy, in which both sides suffered casualties four times as great as on the Plains of Abraham.
The capture of Quebec and its less well-known sequel at Sainte-Foy marked the end of French power in Canada. There were suggestions during the peace negotiations in 1762-3 that part of New France might be restored to France in return for keeping Guadeloupe, but in the end the long-term security of British North America counted for more than quick profits from sugar.
The British government, having acquired complete control over North America, was immediately faced with a dilemma. Stability, which had been the war’s principle objective, proved elusive. Having removed the external threat to the colonies’ security, the government had to cope with new, unexpected threats to local tranquillity, all indirect consequences of the fall of Quebec. First, policies had to be devised to satisfy the aspirations of 70,000 French Canadians, and to reassure an unknown but larger number of Indians, who were scattered across Britain’s new territories in America’s mid-West. At the same time as attending to the needs of its new subjects, the government had to heed the demands of the old; thousands of colonists were impatient to exploit the fruits of victory and move westwards.
Land speculation boomed between 1763 and 1774. A new empire was in the offing, which would be carved from the territories now open beyond the Appalachians, and speculators swarmed into the region to stake their claims. On both sides of the Atlantic investors were quick to respond, and land companies found no difficulty in attracting capital. Greed, and a faith in the ability of the new lands to pay their way, bound together American men of substance, like the scientist and political philosopher Benjamin Franklin, and British aristocrats, like his future antagonist, Lord Dartmouth. The land fever also infected men of humbler means; in 1771–2, Clydesdale farmers and artisans combined to form their own company which, they hoped, would purchase land in America for settlement by Scots.
Immigrants poured into North America at an unprecedented rate to people the vast tracts of wilderness being purchased by the speculators’ agents. Between 1760 and 1775, 30,000 English, 55,000 Irish and 40,000 Scots crossed the Atlantic; many, perhaps the biggest proportion, hoped to settle on the frontier. Two thousand pioneers passed annually down the Shenandoah Valley in western Virginia on the way towards the backlands of Carolina. The appeal of the West was always the strongest; during the early 1770s plans were in hand to create two new inland colonies, named, in a wonderful flight of fancy, Transylvania, roughly modern Kentucky, and Vandalia, which lay between the Ohio and Allegheny rivers.
Reports of abundant and cheap land in America were naturally most enticing to those who faced a bleak future in Britain. A recession during 1773–4 in the woollen, cotton and silk-weaving industries forced men and women to leave the West Country, Yorkshire, Spitalfields in London, and Paisley; Paisley silk weavers, on strike for higher wages in 1773, bluntly told their employers that they would ‘go off in a body to America’ if they were not satisfied.15 There were plenty of others discontented with their lot. In the Scottish Highlands and Western Isles there was a mass flight from grinding lairds who demanded high rents for poor land. It was the same in Ireland, where rack-renting had reached a peak in the early 1770s. Crofters and smallholders were joined by indentured servants, who were naturally in demand to undertake the donkey work of breaking new lands. By 1770, the old underworld of kidnappers and cozeners of indentured servants was back in action
The government, landlords and employers were dismayed by the scale of emigration and in Scotland, where it was believed that three per cent of the population had shifted to America in less than ten years, an attempt was made to stem the flow. This was legally impossible since no authority could remove a British subject’s traditional liberty to go where he or she wished. Some pondered where it would all end and foretold that Britain, like Greece and Rome, would eventually lose the sources of its wealth and power which would pass to America. In 1774, a futuristic story appeared in which visitors from ‘the empire of America’ tour London in 1974. They discover a ruined metropolis very like the Rome depicted in Piranesi’s engravings. The explanation for this desolation was the exodus of Britain’s merchants who ‘are now scattered over the whole world, and more especially have they settled in America, whither they were followed by most of our artisans and mechanics’.16
Britain was not the only loser from this wave of immigration. Many were destined for lands which had been appropriated from Indian tribes who, during the early 1760s. fought a number of unsuccessful campaigns to expel the intruders. The familiar pattern of frontier warfare repeated itself with neither side showing pity. In the 1760–61 Carolina war, one volunteer soldier reported to the governor: ‘We have now the pleasure to fatten our Dogs with their carcasses, and to Display their Scalps, neatly ornamented on the Tops of our Bastions.’17
And yet, in the eyes of the British government, such creatures were subjects of George III and, as long as they kept his laws, had the right to expect his protection. From 1763 onwards, the king’s ministers and their officials in North America endeavoured to fulfil this obligation, in par
ticular protecting the Indians from the legal chicanery practised by speculators. Everywhere the government faced obstruction. As Sir William Johnson, a Superintendent of Indian Affairs, observed, equitable treatment for the Indians ‘strikes at the Interest of some the most leading men in this Province’. The colonial merchants and proprietors with investments in land speculation hindered the government’s efforts to secure fair play for the Indians and made sure that the local sheriffs and justices of the peace did likewise.18
Johnson’s own position was ambivalent, for he was both a government official entrusted with the affairs of the Six Nations and the owner of an extensive estate in upper New York, where he lived in rollicking style with successive mistresses, one a runaway indentured servant, the other a Mohawk squaw. Johnson also speculated in land and encouraged emigrants, most from his native Scotland, to settle on it. And yet he retained his strong sense of natural justice and honestly tried to balance Indian and settler interests.
These were irreconcilable and a source of increasing frustration to British governments who wanted a stable frontier. Every solution to the problem proved unsatisfactory or created new difficulties. Bans on settlement, which pleased the Indians, were unenforceable, and contemporary reverence for the rights of property was so strong that ministers were reluctant to take too firm a line with speculators who, for all their underhand methods, often possessed legally defensible claims to Indian lands.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 12