Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Ligonier selected accordingly for the four missions that had been the ambitions of succeeding British commanders since before the war officially began. Jeffery Amherst, a 40-year-old colonel and regimental commander, was promoted to “Major General in America” to command the expedition against Louisbourg, assisted by the 31-year-old Lieutenant Colonel James Wolfe. The attack on Fort Duquesne was to be conducted by a 50-year-old Scottish doctor, Brigadier John Forbes; Ticonderoga (Fort Carillon) and Fort Frontenac were to be taken by the 33-year-old acting brigadier, Viscount Howe (though Abercromby himself was the nominal commander). Pitt had strengthened the forces in accord with his plan: 14,000 men under Amherst in the attack on Louisbourg; 25,000 men for the attacks on Ticonderoga and Frontenac and the “Irruption into Canada”; and Forbes had 7,000 men for the attack on Fort Duquesne.

  Counting the militia of every able-bodied male between the ages of 16 and 60 (except for the numerous priesthood), Montcalm had 25,000 men in total, though the real total at any time was less than that, or all secular civilian occupations would have been denuded. The Indians, traditionally a powerful French ally, had vanished, either from smallpox, detection of the shifting balance of power, or anger at the debacle following the fall of Fort William Henry. Montcalm thus reaped the worst of two harvests: the spirit of vengeance of both the outraged English and the, as they considered themselves, betrayed Indians. He was also suffering from acute shortages of food, due to a poor harvest, and a shortage of some munitions. Montcalm’s problems were further aggravated by the divisions of the civil administration, led by the governor, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, and the financial director, or Intendant, François Bigot, and particularly the corrupt practices of Bigot, who held that office from 1744 on and had embezzled an immense fortune.

  Gravely compounding French disadvantages, Louis XV had lost interest in colonial matters and was particularly tired of the military costs of Canada, which did not return him much. The fur trade was no possible justification for such a vast effort, and the French had much less natural disposition for overseas adventure than Britain, a relatively poor island nation with seafaring conducted along its entire perimeter. Pitt was able to blockade the French Mediterranean fleet at Gibraltar, and many of the Atlantic ports, and Boscawen had raised appreciably his interdiction of arriving French ships in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There were only two avenues for breaking into Canada and strangling the French presence up the St. Lawrence to Quebec, which required disposing of Louisbourg first, or from New York past Ticonderoga-Carillon and Lake Champlain toward Montreal. Pitt and Ligonier had prepared a heavy blow at each door.

  The first test was Abercromby and Howe’s move on Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga). They set up their headquarters on the recently smoldering ruins of Fort William Henry and amassed 16,000 men for the assault. They arrived by water, in a thousand small craft, and landed four miles from the French fort on July 5. Unfortunately, Howe was killed by a retreating French reconnaissance sniper, and Abercromby lacked the energy for what followed. Montcalm had arrived at Carillon and found it desperately under-prepared, in men and supplies and the state of the fortifications, to cope with an attack. He built concealed trenches and elevated gun emplacements, and moved some of his 3,600 men forward. Abercromby did not trouble to train his artillery on the fort, and ordered a charge uphill at the French on July 8, a thousand light troops followed by 7,000 Redcoats in parade precision, to the roll of drums and the skirl of bagpipes. The French held their fire until the British became disorganized in the forward trenches and impediments Montcalm had just had crafted from felled trees, and then cut the British down in droves. About 2,000 were killed or seriously wounded, as Abercromby, from behind the lines, ordered renewed attacks over the corpses and wounded of the previous failed charges all day. Then, as night fell, he ordered a retreat that became a panic and a rout, and many wounded and much supplies were abandoned. Montcalm thought at first it was a stratagem to lure him out, as Abercromby still had a great superiority of manpower and artillery and supplies. Abercromby stabilized his forces at the old Fort William Henry; Montcalm remained at Carillon until late August, and then had to release most of his men to return and bring in the harvest. He had, by his skill and decisive leadership, and Abercromby’s incompetence, saved New France for another winter. But the British, under so determined a leader as Pitt, were not to be put off so easily.

  The other access to Canada, via the St. Lawrence, was not approached with such hesitancy. Amherst had arrived in strength near Louisbourg on June 8 and began investing the town and fort. Louisbourg was a formidable installation, but the techniques for reducing a fortress in a siege were well-known and could not be countered if the attacking forces were adequately numerous and supplied and the besieged object could not be resupplied. Trenches were dug to bring siege guns forward and holes were blasted in the walls and other trenches were dug to enable columns of attackers to come forward and surge through the ruptured walls. Other artillery would fire over the walls and create as much havoc as possible for as long as was necessary. The British boxed in and gradually outgunned the French men o’ war in the harbor, and invested the fort on all landward sides and were eventually able to pour fire from the naval squadron straight into the town. The French defended valiantly but had no chance of being relieved, and by July 26, the French commander, Drucour, asked for terms, as the British had at Fort William Henry.

  The legacy of that frightful episode intruded. Instead of recognizing that the French had fought honorably and tenaciously, as they had (and had taken 400 dead and 1,300 wounded in a garrison of 5,000), and allowing them to retire under their colors and with their possessions, Amherst required that the entire garrison be taken as prisoners of war and the entire civilian population of 8,000 from the surrounding area be deported to France. This was the larger, second half of the removal of the Acadians from 1755, and was another outrage. But the British felt that the earlier, prewar precedent and the antics of the French and Indians at Fort William Henry would have justified even sterner measures. The fall of Louisbourg left the St. Lawrence wide open to the Royal Navy, though there was not time to organize an attack up-river in 1758.

  The third British target, Fort Frontenac, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario where it empties into the St. Lawrence, fell easily on August 26, to a deft and stealthy approach by Colonel John Bradstreet at the head of 3,100 men against a garrison of only 110 soldiers, the rest having been taken forward by the troops-starved Montcalm. Bradstreet captured stores and bread for more than 4,000, plus all the lake-craft the French had on Lake Ontario. The supply route between Montreal and the Ohio and western Pennsylvania forts was now heavily interdicted.

  Abercromby, who despite his lethargy and lack of imagination as a commander had moments of strategic boldness, ordered Forbes to take Fort Duquesne, which involved some sort of rapprochement with some of the Indian tribes (or nations, as they preferred to be called). Abercromby was then sacked by Pitt, in favor of Amherst. The Indians remembered Fort William Henry, and despite Montcalm’s repulse of Abercromby at Carillon, they knew of the fall of Fort Frontenac and the approach of Forbes at the head of a large force. They spurned the request for alliance of the French commander at Duquesne, François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, and the Frenchman evacuated Fort Duquesne, blew it up on November 23, and withdrew his diminished garrison up the Allegheny for the winter. Pittsburgh would arise on the ashes of Fort Duquesne, Ligonier would be its most prosperous suburb, Duquesne a distinguished university, and for many years Forbes Field would be Duquesne’s baseball stadium. The route was clear from Philadelphia into the Ohio country, and the French presence in North America had been eradicated except for Montreal, Quebec, a few lesser towns along the St. Lawrence and St. Maurice Rivers, and partially, New Orleans.

  7. THE WAR IN THE WEST INDIES AND AFRICA, 1759

  On the heels of his successful seizure of the Senegalese slave trade, Pitt followed the advice of a Jamaican sugar plantation owner, William
Beckford (who was also a London alderman), and seized the French island of Guadeloupe, which had a sugar production equivalent to Jamaica’s (20,000 tons a year), and was a staging port for attacks by French privateers against British sea commerce in the Caribbean. Possession of it would give Britain control of the sugar market and pricing procedure opposite most of Europe, and a bargaining chip to trade for Minorca, a valued base for the British fleet in the Mediterranean. (The British would take Martinique, too, in 1761.) A financial bonanza followed, as Martinique and Guadeloupe provided Britain with great quantities not only of sugar but of coffee, rum, molasses, and tropical fruit, and the wealth generated by these activities transformed the City doubters about Britain’s rising debt to purring tabbies, financing these exotic industries. The cautious and envious Newcastle periodically advised Pitt that the London City financial community, which bought British bonds, had to believe in the war for it to be paid for; in fact, Pitt, as long as his military operations were successful, could have forced the country’s bonds on the City, though it would have been a huge inconvenience. Pitt had sold his ability to deliver much of the world to British rule and profit, and to push France back into her own country, and he was delivering on his promise. There were 71,000 men in the Royal Navy and 91,000 in the army and it was proposed to add 10,000 to the army. Britain’s capacity to build ships was at its outer limits. With the activities of Britain in America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India, as well as Hanover, there were only about 10,000 troops, strengthened by the flabby and almost untrained home guard of 32,000, to protect the home islands in case of need.

  For once, Montcalm would not be looking forward to the end of the Quebec winter. In Paris, it had been a dismal military year, and all Louis XV had to show for his exertions was to have thrown the paltry Hanoverians back across the Rhine. The Duke de Choiseul was named chief minister to go head-to-head with Pitt. His strategy would be the familiar one to mass the French navy to facilitate an invasion of England by the main French army, and leave it to Austria and Russia and the Swedes to give Frederick of Prussia a well-deserved thrashing, and give up the overseas campaigns as an improvident beau geste where France had little interest and less chance of success against the maritime-focused British. Of course, the problems with this were that Choiseul had no short-term ability to devote the forces necessary to build a fleet that could seriously threaten the British Isles; Pitt could always bribe Europeans into tearing scraps out of the frontiers of France; and the long-term strategic future was in vast continents and subcontinents, such as North America and India, and not in the cordons sanglants, slivers of territory between the Great Powers of Europe such as Flanders, Alsace-Lorraine, Silesia, and the trackless political wasteland of the Balkans, which changed hands back and forth at intervals for centuries.

  Choiseul’s impatience with the overseas operations was understandable, and coincided with the king’s irritation at their cost and difficulty. But in building up an army of 100,000 in the Channel ports and waiting for an opportunity to attack across the Channel with naval superiority, he was seeking an instant gratification of a long-held wish that the British had never permitted to be filled. The only way to defeat Britain was successfully to occupy the home islands. This would require a substantially stronger navy than Britain’s, as well as an army large enough to defeat and occupy England, while maintaining sufficient strength to repel an invasion by a land neighbor, while busy trying to subdue the British Isles. Thus the secret of crushing Britain, as was never realized by its greatest continental adversaries, was to be at peace with all continental powers, which would require a greater army than all continental rivals, and then to have a greater navy than Britain’s. This would effectively require the combined naval and military force of the three other greatest powers in Europe. The geography and history of Europe never yielded any country such an advantage, and the British talent for dividing Europe with well-purchased and supported coalitions prevented that, even against leaders who dominated most of Europe for a time. This is why Britain has not been seriously invaded since the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066. Choiseul’s plan appealed to Gallic logic and King Louis XV’s acute military frustration, but it had no basis in reality. Though there is no evidence that anyone was thinking in these terms in the eighteenth century, this is precisely the advantage, much magnified from Britain’s modest means, that would eventually accrue to the Great Power of the Americas: no one could threaten it at home, and it would be able to intervene and promote coalitions in Europe and East Asia and the Middle East.

  Pitt had successfully placated the king, and was loved by the masses, and the cautious Newcastle was little disposed to oppose him. As the normally waspy and envious Horace Walpole (the long-serving prime minister’s belletrist son) remarked, “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.”6 Pitt presented a budget for 1759 that, at 13 million pounds, was the greatest by far in British history and was more than half debt, with more than half the anticipated revenues committed to paying interest. To anyone who cared to notice, it was obvious that the quantum of this debt, especially if the war dragged on at all (and Pitt might take France’s castaway colonies but neither Britain nor any other country had any power to threaten France herself), would grow and would have to be shared by all the British, including the more than 20 percent of Britons in the flourishing colonies of America. This was a time bomb.

  Seven Years in America. Wisconsin Cartographers’ Guild. WISCONSIN’S PAST AND PRESENT. © 1998 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press.

  8. THE FALL OF QUEBEC

  Pitt sent out his military orders for 1759 on December 9, 1758. These were to include Amherst overwhelming French opposition along Lake Champlain and seizing Montreal, while James Wolfe, who had returned to London and settled in his club to recover his health and reported to Pitt that he was ready to go up the St. Lawrence, was so charged, and he left England for Canada on February 24. On July 25, 1759, Amherst’s forces captured Fort Niagara, about 60 miles from what is now Toronto, and at the opposite end of Lake Ontario from Fort Frontenac, which Bradstreet had taken 11 months before. By this time, Wolfe’s assault on Quebec was well underway. He landed 8,500 troops on He d’Orleans, a few miles down-river from Quebec, on June 28. Despite the immense importance of the battle for Quebec to the whole Western world, and the huge mythology that has been built about it, from both sides, it was an almost accidental and very close-run engagement. Heavily outnumbered and isolated, Montcalm defended Quebec with great skill and agility, inflicting heavy losses on Wolfe, whose problems were compounded by acute fevers, indigestion, and depressive attacks. He was reduced to asking the opinion of his brigade commanders (Robert Monckton, George Townshend, and James Murray), whom he despised, a sentiment that was fully requited. They recommended that he desist from further attacks on Quebec from down-river and that Wolfe move the British forces up, to the west of Quebec, and attack there, to separate Montcalm from landward reinforcements, and try to enfilade Quebec from what was presumed to be its more vulnerable aspect.

  Precise advice on how to take Quebec came from Captain Robert Stobo, one of the prisoners handed over by Washington as an earnest when he evacuated Fort Necessity in 1755. Stobo had lived as a prisoner since, in Fort Duquesne and then Quebec, though he circulated easily in Quebec society, until apprehended as a spy for having smuggled out of Fort Duquesne, via an Indian, plans he had drawn of Duquesne that were found in the belongings of the deceased Braddock after the disaster on the Monongahela. Stobo escaped Quebec, spoke only to Wolfe, and advised him of a footpath up the cliffs at what has become known as Wolfe’s Cove. Thus arose the plan for one of history’s decisive military battles.7

  Wolfe moved about 4,500 men on the tides up-river from Quebec, then down on the current in the early hours of September 12, mounted Stobo’s path to a site above known as the Plains of Abraham, and overwhelmed a small French tent encampment. Wo
lfe was apparently beset by morose thoughts, as well as indecision, finding himself alone on the Plains. He ordered that disembarkations stop, but the landing officer assumed the order was mistaken and ignored it. Montcalm had been distracted by a carefully played ruse to the east of Quebec, and only arrived on the Plains after Wolfe’s men had been drawn up across the Plains. By 9:30 in the morning Montcalm was concerned that the British were bringing up artillery from the ships and entrenching themselves in a manner that would become irreversible if didn’t act, and ordered his men forward. In fact, Wolfe had had one of his attacks of inertia and the British were bringing up artillery but not entrenching; Montcalm had summoned a detachment of 2,000 of his best troops from the west, who he hoped would land in Wolfe’s rear once battle was engaged.

  There were about 4,500 men on each side, though the British had the advantage of better trained and disciplined forces. There is a good deal of anecdotal evidence that neither commander expected to survive the engagement about to begin. In this at least, their provisions were exact. The French attacked in rather ragged order, supported by Indians and irregular skirmishers who sniped from the sides. The British coolly held their fire, and the professionalism of the Redcoats paid handsome rewards—they drenched the French with artillery and pushed them into what became a rather uncoordinated but not panicky retreat to Quebec. Wolfe had been wounded early on the wrist, but was mortally hit by snipers in the chest and stomach as he joined the advance. Just before he died, he received the information that the French were vacating the field and that it was certainly a victory. Only a few minutes later, the column Montcalm had been hoping for arrived in the British rear, but the British, now commanded by Brigadier George Townshend, were able to deflect them. Montcalm had been severely wounded on his retreat from the Plains, in his stomach and leg. He fell into a delirium and died at 4 a.m. the following morning.