Two weeks later, in a gathering of the ministers at Newcastle House, Cumberland and Fox proposed their own program, adopting Halifax’s suggestions concerning the replacement of Shirley and a new commission for Johnson, but otherwise reaffirming the plan under which Braddock had been dispatched the previous year. Cumberland disliked Halifax’s idea for using provincial troops—he thought them too expensive, inefficient, and undisciplined—and therefore called for sending two new regiments of redcoats from Britain and raising four new, thousand-man battalions of regulars in the colonies. In addition to Johnson, Cumberland and Fox proposed the appointment of an Indian superintendent for the southern colonies as well, the South Carolina trader Edmund Atkin. Finally, as Shirley’s replacement they proposed sending John Campbell, the fourth earl of Loudoun, an experienced military administrator. The other ministers present, including Newcastle, accepted it all.
Although Newcastle had for many years been Shirley’s patron, the decision to abandon him probably did not come hard. Over the years the two men had become estranged, and Fox and Cumberland, on whom Newcastle now depended for his political life, were united against him. Moreover, Thomas Pownall, after orchestrating a great letter-writing campaign against Shirley, had returned to London to manage the final phases of the offensive in person. He was fortunate in that four deeply troubling letters written in America and addressed to the duc de Mirepoix were intercepted at about the time of his arrival: letters that seemed to promise treason in return for French money. The letters, the work of an anonymous author calling himself Filius Gallicae, contained enough accurate information on North American military affairs to make Halifax, Cumberland, Fox, and others fear that a high army officer was about to turn his coat. Pownall suggested that, since Shirley had spent several years in Paris and had a French wife, Filius Gallicae might well be the commander in chief himself. In fact, the letters were probably a hoax intended to discredit George Croghan or even John Henry Lydius, but that hardly mattered. In Pownall’s opportunistic hands their effect was to discredit Shirley and insure his immediate recall. Whereas once it had been contemplated to relieve him of his military command but to compensate him for his long and faithful service by giving him the governorship of Jamaica, now Cumberland clamored to have him sent home in chains. Cooler heads prevailed, but Shirley’s career was effectively finished. On March 31, Fox wrote him a brusque letter confirming that he had been superseded in command of His Majesty’s forces, and that upon receipt of the letter he was to “repair to England with all possible Expedition.” 10
With Shirley taken care of, Pownall swept all before him. First he saw to it that Shirley’s leading political ally, Robert Hunter Morris, was removed from the governorship of Pennsylvania. The supply contracts for the army in New York, which Shirley had awarded to the partnership of Livingston and Morris, were diverted to the powerful, politically wired London firm of Baker and Kilby—the New York correspondent of which happened to be Oliver De Lancey, the younger brother of Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey. The records of Livingston and Morris in their dealings with Shirley were seized and submitted to a Treasury audit, a process that would take years to complete.
William Johnson, now known as Sir William because the king had conferred a baronetcy on him in November, hardly needed Pownall’s help; he was secure politically and his positions as northern Indian superintendent and colonel of the Six Nations brought him an annual stipend of six hundred pounds sterling. Nevertheless, Pownall continued energetically to publicize him as a man who (in contrast to Shirley) had sacrificed his own estate in the defense of the colonies and had proven himself a hero at the Battle of Lake George. In February, Parliament showed its gratitude by voting Sir William a reward of five thousand pounds for his services to the nation.
Only one piece of business remained. With Shirley dismissed from his governorship, the Crown needed a man of judgment and political acumen to head the crucial province of Massachusetts Bay. Modestly, and only after a decent interval, Thomas Pownall consented to accept that burden himself. 11
WILLIAM SHIRLEY’S career lay in ruins long before he knew it. In itself that would hardly have surprised him, for the tactics Pownall used to destroy him were the classic ones that men who wished to become royal governors employed. They were, for that matter, not dissimilar to those Shirley himself had employed to bring down his predecessor in the Massachusetts governorship, fourteen years before.12 Rather than his almost predictable destruction, what was most important about Shirley’s brief, thwarted tenure as commander in chief was the fact that six months passed between the time the ministers decided to replace him and the date his successor arrived. During that period, as government officials dawdled and the cumbersome machinery of army bureaucracy ground slowly forward in preparation for the change of command, Shirley had already set the campaign of 1756 in motion.
More ominously for Britain, at that same time the French ministry was more efficiently setting afoot its own military operations for 1756. Even before Lord Loudoun’s commission as lieutenant general and commander in chief for America had been issued, a new French commander, Dieskau’s replacement, had already sailed for Canada with reinforcements.13 Within six weeks after Loudoun took command of his army, two great French victories—one in America, the other in the Mediterranean—would call into question the whole British war effort and throw the British government into chaos.
And that would be only the beginning.
PART III
NADIR
1756-1757
Shirley undertakes operations in 1756, then turns over command to Lord Loudoun and suffers public disgrace. A thwarted campaign and a French victory suggest the importance of intercultural relations in deciding the war’s outcome. Colonial politics and the war effort; resistance to the commander in chief. War erupts in Europe. Britain fails to achieve political stability and sustains two notable military defeats. As 1757 begins, Lord Loudoun proves more adept at fighting the colonists than the French. The Anglo-Americans lose an important fort in New York and see hope glimmer, faintly, in Pennsylvania. As colonial opposition to Lord Loudoun edges toward deadlock and Britain faces a European shambles, William Pitt takes over direction of the war.
CHAPTER 12
Lord Loudoun Takes Command
1756
THE SIX FRENCH warships that sailed up the St. Lawrence in May 1756 carried several hundred troops and the man who would lead Canada’s defending forces for the next three years, Louis-Joseph, marquis de Montcalm-Gozon de Saint-Véran. At the age of forty-four, Montcalm was not one of France’s leading generals, but an experienced professional officer—a small, bright-eyed, quick-witted man whose courage and presence of mind in battle had earned him the rank of maréchal de camp, or brigadier general, during the previous war. The reflective cast of his mind has made Montcalm an attractive figure to many American historians, who have tended to portray him as the brilliant opposite number of the prickly, pompous British commander in chief, Lord Loudoun. His disdain for Canadians, his reluctance to use Indian allies to advantage, and his pessimism about achieving victory over the vast numbers of his enemy have made him a far more problematic figure for Canadian scholars. 1
In fact Montcalm did fritter away advantages, particularly in the use of Indians, that had long preserved New France from conquest; and he did it quite consciously—indeed, almost conscientiously, for he saw his actions as matters of principle, undertaken in defense of civilization itself. Yet Montcalm’s alienation of his allies, and eventually of the Canadians themselves, was a gradual process that did not immediately result in Anglo-American victories; indeed, for more than two years the redcoats and their provincial auxiliaries suffered a virtually uninterrupted series of defeats at his hands. The downward spiral of Anglo-American military fortunes in 1756 and 1757 cannot be understood apart from the increasingly bitter disputes between the colonial assemblies and Lord Loudoun, which finally led to the bottoming-out of Britain’s war effort in America. To understand
how and why the Anglo-Americans failed to take advantage of their vastly superior numbers and resources, and to see the reasons behind Montcalm’s abandonment of strategies of proven merit, is to begin to grasp the decisive influence of cultural factors in shaping the last and greatest of America’s colonial wars.
The marquis de Montcalm (1712–59). A soldier’s soldier in the European mode, Montcalm was horrified by the style of warfare he encountered in America and did everything in his power to make his operations conform to civilized standards as he understood them. He may have lived long enough to regret it. Courtesy of the McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal / Musée McCord d’histoire canadienne, Montréal.
AS THE SHIPS bearing Montcalm and his men fought their way westward against the Atlantic’s March gales, the men William Shirley had left behind at Oswego battled the deadlier enemies of scurvy and starvation. The 50th and 51st Regiments had been on short rations ever since their long river-and-lake supply line from Albany had frozen shut. With his men so weak that they could barely mount guard, Lieutenant Colonel James Mercer in the late winter found himself with no choice but to evacuate the fort. He had already set March 25 as the day he would order his men to march for Schenectady when, on March 24, fourteen bateau-loads of supplies arrived and staved off disaster.
Still there was no immediate relief. For the next month and more, provisions trickled in at a rate just sufficient to sustain the garrison, for with the coming of spring, travel between the advance supply base at Schenectady and Oswego became mortally dangerous. On March 27 French and Indian raiders appeared, as if from nowhere, outside the palisade of Fort Bull at the west end of the Great Carrying Place—the portage road across the divide between the east-flowing Mohawk River and west-running Wood Creek. The raiders annihilated Fort Bull’s small garrison, razed its buildings and palisade, destroyed supplies and boats, and vanished back into the woods. Thereafter from the headwaters of the Mohawk to the walls of Oswego there was no security for the bateaumen who carried the post its lifeblood. Weak and sick, dying at an appalling rate, the men of Mercer’s garrison held on, but only barely. Their sufferings and the loss of Fort Bull seemed grim omens for the year that had barely begun.2
Smoke may still have drifted from the wreck of the fort when, thousands of miles away, Henry Fox began to draft the letter ordering Major General Shirley to turn over command to his successor and “repair to England with all possible Expedition.” Weeks would pass before Shirley would realize how bad circumstances were, either at Oswego or at Whitehall; at the moment he was back in Boston, catching up on his duties as governor and drumming up political support for the campaigns he had planned for the coming summer. He hoped to convince the Bay Colony’s legislators to join the other New England provinces and New York in raising thousands of provincials for an assault on Crown Point, and he had reason to anticipate success. Massachusetts had always been zealous to prosecute wars against the French and Indians; although its population was still less than a quarter million, for example, nearly eight thousand of its men (one in five of those in the prime military ages) had enlisted in provincial and regular units during the previous year. 3
As Shirley well knew, the problem was less enthusiasm than money, for the General Court had levied heavy taxes to support the previous campaigns, and the legislators wanted assurances that sufficient subsidies or reimbursements would be forthcoming from England to allow them to meet the empire’s demands without bankrupting their province. Shirley did his best to reassure them, promising to press their claims with the authorities at home and in the meantime lending the province thirty thousand pounds from his war chest to help meet current expenses. Conscious that many of them were discontented with the way William Johnson had managed the previous year’s expedition, he also promised to appoint a popular, thoroughly experienced Massachusetts officer, John Winslow, as major general in command of the combined provincial forces on the Crown Point expedition. Pleased with his attention to their concerns, the legislators agreed to raise 3,000 men for the coming year, as Massachusetts’s contribution to the total of 7,500 provincials to be recruited from the northern colonies.4
Plan of Fort Bull . . . on the frontiers of New England and New France, taken by assault by the French at mid-day, 27 March 1756. Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry, lieutenant of the troupes de la marine and commander of the Franco-Indian raiding party, recorded the outlines of Fort Bull before he ordered it blown up and put to the torch. As this engraving, made from his sketch, suggests, the post was not so much a fort as a way station: a collection of storehouses and barracks, enclosed in a single palisade. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
The enthusiasm of Massachusetts together with that of Connecticut ensured that a large provincial expedition would proceed against Crown Point in 1756. The remainder of Shirley’s plans for the year called for the regulars under his command in New York—now including four infantry battalions and a substantial train of artillery—to attack the French forts of the upper St. Lawrence basin. Since New France’s western posts were all supplied from Montréal, the seizure of the Fort La Galette (Oswegatchie) on the upper St. Lawrence and Fort Frontenac (Cataraqui) at the foot of Lake Ontario would render the rest of the western forts untenable—and that included everything from Niagara and Detroit on the Great Lakes to Duquesne in the Ohio Country. Shirley had also been encouraging the colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to send a provincial army over Braddock’s road to attack Fort Duquesne, but this was not a prerequisite for victory. Even if these provinces did not, or could not, cooperate—and given the chaos on their frontiers, he could not realistically hope for much from them—the elimination of Fort Frontenac alone would destroy France’s ability to control the west.5
These expeditions by no means added up to a war of conquest, but if successful they would cripple New France militarily, and they would do so in a way that was both more economical and more strategically elegant than Braddock’s plan. Most of all, however, Shirley’s proposals for 1756 utilized the complementary strengths of the provinces and the regular army without asking for unrealistic exertions from any of them.
William Shirley was nothing if not a consummate judge of what could and could not be expected of colonial societies at war. He knew that he could rely only on the militant New England provinces (in practice, Massachusetts and Connecticut) for heavy commitments of men and money. He also understood the limits within which he had to operate in dealing with them. Thus, his allocation of provincial and regular forces to separate expeditions, which to any professional military officer or British government minister would have seemed bizarre, in fact reflected an astute appraisal of those limits.
Shirley wanted to keep provincials apart from regulars because fourteen years of experience as Massachusetts’s governor told him that two British military policies would wreck any campaign in which the two kinds of forces had to operate together. First was the Royal Proclamation of November 12, 1754, which stipulated that all provincial officers (that is, all officers commissioned by the governors of colonies) would be deemed junior to all regular officers (those holding commissions issued by the king or his commander in chief). This order reduced the most experienced colonial military leaders, colonels and generals not excepted, to a level below that of the newest pimpled ensign in the regular army. No self-respecting colonial officer would willingly serve under such conditions; Shirley knew that only too well. He also understood that the second British policy might prove even more devastating to colonial participation in the war effort.6
In December 1754, the solicitor general had ruled that “all Officers and Soldiers . . . raised in any of the British Provinces in America, by Authority of the respective Governors or Governments thereof, shall, . . . when they happen to join, or act in Conjunction with, his Majesty’s British forces, be liable to [the same] martial Law and Discipline, . . . as the British Forces are; and shall be subject to the same Trial, Penalties,
and Punishments.” The extension of regular discipline to provincial armies would discourage if not put a stop to enlistment, for no matter how patriotic or eager for the pay potential recruits might be, they knew very well that regular courts-martial routinely sentenced soldiers to severe whippings, and not infrequently to death, for infractions of discipline. 7
Realizing all this, Shirley planned operations for 1756 that would require no contact between the all-provincial campaign against Crown Point and the all-regular expedition against Fort Frontenac. Although he understood that provincial troops were amateurish, hard to discipline, and deficient in the technical expertise needed to conduct siege warfare, Shirley clearly believed that the risks of employing them against the nearest target, Crown Point, were worth running. In order to lay to rest all doubts in the colonial assemblies, he gave explicit assurances that any provincials raised for the expedition would serve only under their own officers, that they would be subject to provincial and not regular discipline, and that they would be employed only in an area east of Schenectady and north of Albany.8
The New England assemblies responded warmly to Shirley’s plans and promises, and thousands of New England men would eventually volunteer for the Crown Point expedition. In the meantime, Shirley was trying to solve the problem of supplying Oswego in an equally inventive, equally irregular way. An American-born officer in the 51st Regiment, Captain John Bradstreet, had shown exceptional talent during the previous war, when Shirley had taken the unusual step of making him lieutenant colonel of a Massachusetts provincial regiment, and he had gone on to serve with distinction at the Louisbourg siege. In 1755 Shirley had once again sought to exploit his genius by placing him in charge of the bateaumen who supplied Fort Oswego. In January, Shirley promoted Bradstreet to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the regular army—an unauthorized, utterly illegal promotion for which Shirley would later pay—and ordered him to organize a corps of two thousand bateaumen and boatbuilders to handle all transportation between Schenectady and Lake Ontario.
Crucible of War Page 17
