Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  So developed what Loudoun came to recognize as a common pattern of requisition, refusal, threat, and (finally) submission: informal ways of dealing with the colonists, perhaps, and not altogether legal ones, but methods that nonetheless produced the effect he desired. “I have taken these measures,” he had explained to Fox, “because they appear to me right, and . . . I hope they will appear to You in the same light[.] If they do not, I shall alter them whenever I receive directions to do so; but I do expect to get through, for the People in this Country, tho’ they are very obstinate, will generally submit when they see You [are] determined.” 6 If Loudoun realized that his tactics of force and the casualness of his concern for the law were alienating the colonists, he did not show it. Winning the war, not coddling Americans, was his concern. Besides that, he harbored no particular animus toward colonists per se: he coerced anyone who differed with him, with complete impartiality. Governors who, hoping to preserve amiable relations with their assemblies, hesitated to comply with his requisitions were the first to feel the lash.

  Loudoun’s conviction that the colonists were incapable of selfsacrifice and his determination to bring the colonies into line by whatever means necessary manifested itself in another initiative that, like quartering, produced short-run results at the cost of eroding colonial affections. This was the instruction that Loudoun issued to the governors in early March 1757, to lay an embargo on all trade from their provinces, in effect prohibiting all ships, other than those engaged in official military business, from leaving port. As early as the previous October, Loudoun had received reliable evidence that at least one prominent Boston merchant was “carrying on a Correspondence with, and supplying the People in Canada.” Even before that, he had suspected that “there are many more in this Situation, Particularly among the dutch in Albany,” and he could hardly have missed hearing the perennial reports of illicit trading between the northern provision merchants and the sugar planters of the French West Indies.7

  At first Loudoun had not known what to do. Governors, under the influence of their assemblies, were unlikely to arrest those guilty of trading with the enemy when the offenders included some of the most prominent merchants—and assemblymen—in the colonies. He himself could not prevent flagrant smuggling at New York, literally in his headquarters’ backyard, and he was too distant from the other port cities to do anything more on his own; the home government was too distant and preoccupied to do more than raise a meaningless hue and cry against the practice. The embargo was Loudoun’s answer. By prohibiting all ship clearances except those that he or his subordinates ordered for military purposes, he would effectually cut off illegal commerce along with the rest. At the same time, he would also keep word from leaking out about the intended expedition against Louisbourg, insure that he would have enough shipping on hand to undertake it when the time came, and guarantee that adequate supplies of food would be available in the ports to provision it at reasonable rates.8

  To order such a measure lay well within Loudoun’s authority as commander in chief, and the governors of all the colonies from Virginia to the north complied without hesitation. Temporary embargoes in time of war were nothing new—several provinces acting on instruction from the Board of Trade had imposed them in 1755 and 1756—and the merchants in the various ports did not protest. Indeed, the very universality of the measure may have prevented them from doing so, for it guaranteed that no one port would gain at the expense of any other. The merchants did not immediately understand that Loudoun intended his embargo to remain in effect indefinitely. But as the weeks passed, the price of flour and corn in Philadelphia plummeted in markets glutted by unshippable stocks of provisions; the Virginia and Maryland tobacco crops remained locked in warehouses or stowed in the holds of ships riding at anchor; the price of bread skyrocketed in Boston while the departure of cod fishermen on the spring fare was indefinitely delayed.

  Everywhere except New York—insulated from the misfortunes of the other colonies by the presence of the army with its large supply demands—Loudoun’s embargo caused painful economic dislocation. He either did not grasp or did not care that it convinced colonial merchants and tobacco planters of his indifference to their welfare. Despite their increasingly urgent pleas, Loudoun refused to lift the ban. Why should he, since the protests of the various assemblies were motivated (he thought) by mean self-interest and the pressures of smugglers to resume their trade? Ultimately it was the Burgesses of Virginia who forced the issue in early May by refusing to grant a supply of money to the army unless the embargo was lifted. Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie acquiesced—thereby convincing Loudoun that he was trying to enrich himself at the expense of the war effort—and soon thereafter Maryland’s governor agreed to lift the embargo on his colony’s trade, so as not to forfeit Maryland’s share in the London tobacco market to the earlier arrival of Virginia’s leaf. Loudoun, furious but powerless to arrest the governors and legislators of two colonies, had no choice but to allow the reopening of trade, which began on June 27, seven days after the departure of his fleet for Louisbourg. He made no effort to hide his disgust at what he saw as the pusillanimous conduct of the governors and the virtual treason of the colonial assemblies.9

  As all these measures illustrated, Loudoun was moving steadily toward the creation of a de facto military union of the colonies, of a sort not greatly different in its effect from the plan that the Albany Congress had proposed and the colonial assemblies had uniformly rejected. That the colonists would resist and resent his measures seems not to have bothered a man whose conceptions of responsibility derived from his experiences as a courtier and military officer, and who cared as little for the niceties of law or the expedients of politics as for the technicalities of trade. When he sailed from New York harbor with the Louisbourg fleet, Lord Loudoun was disappointed by the lateness of his departure—he blamed the backwardness of the colonies in making preparations, the tardiness of the Royal Navy in providing an escort, and the unfavorability of the winds—but had no reason to doubt that he had increased the likelihood of the expedition’s success. He had systematized the war effort in America, corrected the abuses that Shirley had fostered, and struck a blow against trade with the enemy. For the first time, an American campaign would go forward with efficiency, economy, and real prospects for success.

  Loudoun’s great invasion fleet, numbering more than a hundred sail and carrying six thousand troops, cleared Sandy Hook on June 20—nervously, for the promised escort of Royal Navy warships had not arrived and the transports were for all practical purposes defenseless; but the commander in chief was convinced that he could wait no longer. He had done everything in his power to prepare for the campaign. In February he had met with the commissioners representing the New England provinces at Boston to organize the northern war effort for the year. In March he had convened a meeting of the governors from Pennsylvania to North Carolina at Philadelphia and delivered his instructions for the defense of their frontiers. From Philadelphia he had gone on to meet with both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey assemblies, to compose differences between themselves and their governors and to assure (insofar as possible) that intragovernmental conflicts would not hobble the war effort. He had provided for the defense of the lake frontier in New York with two regular regiments and 5,500 provincials and had performed the unprecedented feat of getting the provincials into the field on schedule. Not least of all, he had mounted the largest seaborne expeditionary force ever to sail from an American port, under conditions of tighter security than anyone had ever managed before. All these accomplishments paid tribute to Loudoun’s vigor, administrative skill, and attention to detail. All of them augured well for the success of this, the best-planned, -manned, -equipped, and -coordinated campaign in the history of British North America. But other developments were already looming when Loudoun’s fleet weighed anchor, against which no amount of planning could have prevailed.10

  CHAPTER 19

  Fort William Henry

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  THE MOST OMINOUS problems were taking shape in New York, where Loudoun had left the defense of the lake frontier in the palsied hands of General Daniel Webb, the man who in 1756 had responded to rumors of a French advance down the Mohawk Valley by destroying Fort Bull, blocking Wood Creek with trees, and ordering a retreat to German Flats. Webb’s continued position as Loudoun’s third-ranking officer owed principally to the undiminished confidence of Webb’s patron, the duke of Cumberland, which left Loudoun little choice but to entrust the command to him. Although in one of the last letters he wrote from New York before departing for Louisbourg, Loudoun had urged Webb to establish an advanced post at the north end of Lake George and if possible to besiege Fort Carillon, Loudoun probably realized that he could be expected to do no more than defend New York against invasion. This was only in part because the commander in chief lacked confidence in the “timid, melancholic, and ‘diffident’ ” Webb, with his regrettable tendencies to panic and overreact. Loudoun’s desire to make the Louisbourg expedition an all-redcoat show had made him willing to allot Webb only two regular regiments to augment the questionable fighting capacities of 5,500 untrained provincials. Most of all, however, offensive action was realistically out of the question because Fort William Henry, the British post guarding the main approach to the upper Hudson Valley at the south end (or head) of Lake George, had already been damaged by a surprise attack.1

  In mid-March a force of fifteen hundred Canadians, French, and Indians under the command of the governor-general’s wiry, sawed-off younger brother, François-Pierre Rigaud, had approached the fort over the frozen lake and harassed its small winter garrison for four days. The raiders had come equipped only with scaling ladders, not cannon, and therefore stood little chance of actually seizing the fort unless they could surprise or stampede its commander. As it happened, Fort William Henry that winter was under the highly competent command of the man who had designed it, Major William Eyre; and Eyre made no mistakes in directing its defense. Before the raiders withdrew to Ticonderoga, however, they burned all of the fort’s outbuildings (including a palisaded barracks, several storehouses, a sawmill, and a hospital), its exposed bateaux, and the half-built sloop that stood on stocks near the lake.2

  Although its defenders had suffered only a handful of minor casualties and its wood-and-earth walls had been untouched by anything heavier than musket balls, the damage to Fort William Henry as a strategic outpost had been grave. The valuable supplies that would have to be replaced from Albany and the external buildings that would take weeks to rebuild were the least consequential losses. More serious by far was the loss of the fort’s bateaux, without which troops could not be moved down the lake against Fort Carillon; but most damaging of all was the loss of the sloop, which left the fort with only one serviceable gunboat to launch in the spring. As the winter’s experience showed, Fort William Henry was safe from attackers who lacked artillery. Unless the British could dominate Lake George with armed vessels, however, they could not prevent an invading French army from bringing siege cannon from Fort Carillon. It would take weeks of labor, once shipwrights had been brought in from New England, to construct a replacement for the lost sloop. In the meantime, Fort William Henry would be vulnerable to any siege the marquis de Montcalm cared to mount.

  There was one other critical way in which Rigaud’s raid had put the British in New York at a disadvantage: the loss of intelligence. At the beginning of the winter Eyre’s garrison at Fort William Henry had included about a hundred rangers under Captain Robert Rogers. But Rogers had led them on a disastrous scout against Fort Carillon in January that had cost nearly a quarter of that number, and he had sustained a wound of his own that required treatment at Albany. He would not recover and return to the fort until the middle of April. Given these circumstances the rangers could not have ventured far from the fort even if conditions had favored them. But following Rigaud’s raid, the woods around Lake George grew thick with French-allied Indians. Word of Rogers’s defeat and of Rigaud’s adventure brought hundreds of Ottawa, Potawatomi, Abenaki, and Caughnawaga warriors to Fort St. Frédéric and Fort Carillon in the spring of 1757. From April through June, under the leadership of their own chiefs and of Canadian officers like Charles Langlade (who had directed the destruction of Pickawillany in 1752 and helped defeat Braddock in 1755), they raided English outposts and ambushed supply trains in the woods between Fort Edward and Fort William Henry. So effectively did the Indians and Canadian irregulars confine the rangers to the vicinity of the British forts that General Webb and his senior officers were deprived of virtually all intelligence concerning French preparations for the coming campaigns. If they had known what was coming Webb and his subordinates might conceivably have prepared more vigorously for the summer, but as late as the beginning of June the garrison at Fort William Henry had not undertaken repairs.3

  What Webb and his officers did not know was that since late in the summer of 1756 the most successful recruiting drive in the history of New France had been under way among the Indians of the pays d’en haut, the upper Great Lakes basin. The combination of Governor-General Vaudreuil’s enthusiasm for using Indian allies and the widespread reports of French victories at the Monongahela and Oswego attracted warriors from a vast area to serve in the principal campaign planned for 1757: a thrust against Fort William Henry. Montcalm, still unhappy with the uncontrollable behavior of his Abenaki, Caughnawaga, Nipissing, Menominee, and Ojibwa warriors after the surrender of Oswego, entertained more reservations than ever about relying on Indians, but these were overborne by the sheer numbers who presented themselves at Montréal and the Lake Champlain forts between the fall of 1756 and the early summer of 1757. Stories that the Ojibwas and Menominees carried back home to the Great Lakes after the fall of Oswego had “made a great impression,” Montcalm’s aide-de-camp noted; “especially what they have heard tell of everyone there swimming in brandy.” Of equal importance, perhaps, was the news that Montcalm had been willing to ransom English prisoners from their Indian captors after the battle. At any rate, the Indians came in numbers that exceeded even Vaudreuil’s fondest hopes and included warriors who had traveled as far as fifteen hundred miles to join the expedition.4

  By the end of July nearly 2,000 Indians were assembled at Fort Carillon in aid of the army of 6,000 French regulars, troupes de la marine, and Canadian militiamen that Montcalm was preparing to lead against Fort William Henry. More than 300 Ottawas had come from the upper Lake Michigan country; nearly as many Ojibwas (Chippewas and Mississaugas) from the shores of Lake Superior; more than 100 Menominees and almost as many Potawatamis from lower Michigan; about 50 Winnebagos from Wisconsin; Sauk and Fox warriors from even farther west; a few Miamis and Delawares from the Ohio Country; and even 10 Iowa warriors, representing a nation that had never been seen in Canada before. In all, 979 Indians from the pays d’en haut and the middle west joined the 820 Catholic Indians recruited from missions that extended from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes—Nipissings, Ottawas, Abenakis, Caughnawagas, Huron-Petuns, Malecites, and Micmacs. With no fewer than thirty-three nations, as many languages, and widely varying levels of familiarity with European culture represented, problems of control were magnified even beyond their usual scope. Since Montcalm realized that “in the midst of the woods of America one can no more do without them than without cavalry in open country,” he did what he could to accommodate, appease, and flatter his allies. But as he knew better than anyone else, he could not command them. Montcalm could only rely on the persuasive abilities of the missionary fathers, interpreter-traders, and warrior-officers like Langlade whom he “attached” to each group in the hope of gaining its cooperation. 5

  Robert Rogers, of the rangers (1731–95). Shown here in a Revolutionary-era engraving as the Loyalist “Commander in Chief of the Indians in the Back Settlements of America,” Rogers spent most of the Seven Years’ War leading ranger units that were supposed to replace the Indian allies that the British lacked. He tried ind
efatigably to perfect the rangers’ skills in woodlands warfare, yet never entirely succeeded in doing so; twice he and his men suffered terribly (and he himself nearly died) at the hands of French marines and Indians whose expertise was of a markedly higher order. What Rogers lacked as an irregular, however, he made up as a self-publicist. His Journals, published in London in 1765, secured his reputation as the very model of the frontier guerrilla leader. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  In the spring Lieutenant Colonel George Monro had brought five companies of his regiment, the 35th Foot, to Fort William Henry to relieve Major Eyre’s winter garrison. Together with two New York independent companies and nearly eight hundred provincials from New Jersey and New Hampshire, Monro’s command numbered more than fifteen hundred men in late June when two escaped English prisoners brought the first reliable intelligence of the eight-thousand-man force that Montcalm was gathering at Fort Carillon. Monro—“an old Officer but [one] who never ha[d] served” in the field—dispatched several ranger patrols over the next several weeks to observe the French and Indian buildup at the foot of the lake. None succeeded, and the lack of serviceable boats prevented Monro from mounting a reconnaissance-in-force until late July. It was only on the twenty-third that he finally hazarded five companies of New Jersey provincials under Colonel John Parker in a raid intended to burn the French sawmills at the foot of the lake and to take as many prisoners as possible. Traveling in two bay boats under sail and twenty whaleboats—virtually all of the vessels available at Fort William Henry—Parker’s command made its way north down the lake toward Sabbath-Day Point. They did not know until the next morning that more than five hundred Ottawas, Ojibwas, Potawatomis, Menominees, and Canadians were waiting for them. According to Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Moncalm’s aide-de-camp,