Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Dawn brought all the mischief the Anglo-Americans had feared. As the regulars prepared to lead the column down the road to Fort Edward, hundreds of warriors armed with knives, tomahawks, and other weapons swarmed around them, demanding that they surrender arms, equipment, and clothing. Other Indians entered the entrenched camp, where the provincial troops and camp followers anxiously awaited the order to march, and began carrying off not only property but all the blacks, women, and children they could find among the camp followers. When at last the column began to move out, at around 5:00 a.m., the regulars in the lead marched alongside the column’s French escort and thus were spared the worst of the violence that followed. The provincials at the rear of the column, however, lacked all protection and found themselves beset on every side. Within minutes, Indians had seized, killed, and scalped the wounded from the provincial companies and stripped others of clothes, money, and possessions. As noise and confusion mounted, discipline disintegrated. Terrified men and women huddled together, trying as best they could to defend themselves. Then, with a whoop that witnesses took to be a signal, dozens of warriors began to tomahawk the most exposed groups, at the rear of the column.

  The killing lasted only a few minutes, but more lives would be lost in the panic that followed. Frye’s regiment dissolved in chaos as men bolted screaming in every direction: some into the woods, others toward the French camp, others back to the fort, with Indians in hot pursuit. Since prisoners were more valuable than trophies, most of those whom the Indians caught were in less immediate danger than they thought. When Montcalm and other senior French officers ran up to stem the disorder, however, they first tried to intervene and free the captives, only to find that the result was often fatal: many warriors preferred to kill their captives and take trophies rather than be deprived of them altogether.

  By the time order could be restored, as many as 185 soldiers and camp followers had been killed and a much larger number—between 300 and 500—had been taken captive. Another 300 to 500 provincials and regulars had found refuge with the French. The rest either fled down the road or escaped into the woods and eventually made their way toward Fort Edward. As for the Indians, virtually all of them left without delay once they had secured the prisoners, scalps, and plunder they had earned in battle. By sunset on August 10, only about 300 domesticated Abenakis and Nipissings remained with Montcalm’s army. The other 1,300 warriors and their captives were already paddling north on the first leg of the long journey home. 20

  Also by sunset on August 10, substantial numbers of men had begun to reach Fort Edward, where they brought the first, exaggerated reports of the massacre to General Webb and a garrison that was now beginning to swell with the arrival of thousands of New England and New York militiamen. Refugees continued to straggle in from the woods—scared, starving, and sometimes stark naked—for more than a week. On August 15 the largest single group arrived, a contingent of perhaps five hundred survivors including Colonel Monro, dragging with them the brass sixpounder that was supposed to symbolize their honor in defeat. They had been brought under French escort to Half-way Brook and handed over to a British guard along with Montcalm’s assurances that the rest of the garrison would be returned as soon as its members could be recovered from the Indians.

  Indeed, Montcalm, his officers, and the missionary fathers who had accompanied the expedition’s Indians had gone to great lengths to retrieve prisoners ever since the tenth, and Governor-General Vaudreuil was doing his best to intercept warriors returning to the pays d’en haut at Montréal in order to ransom their captives. Thanks to all these strenuous efforts at least two hundred prisoners were recovered by the end of August, at an average cost to the crown of 130 livres and thirty bottles of brandy each. Further redemptions followed, piecemeal, along with a few escapes. Including those who died before they could be recovered and as many as forty who were adopted into Indian families and refused to return, only about two hundred captives would fail to return to the British colonies by 1763. 21

  Both humanitarian and practical concerns made Montcalm and Vaudreuil eager to retrieve the prisoners. Montcalm desperately wanted to preserve the integrity of the capitulation proceedings, for as the officer who had guaranteed the safety of the surrendered garrison he would be personally dishonored by any violation of the surrender terms. Moreover, as he clearly understood, the British would be disinclined to behave generously toward any French garrison in the future, should they ever gain the upper hand; and he could ill afford to antagonize an enemy so potentially powerful by seeming to sanction uncivilized warfare. As for the governor-general, Vaudreuil hoped to minimize the damage to Franco-Indian relations by an episode that the Indians regarded as a betrayal of trust, and that Montcalm saw (with equal conviction) as evidence of an ineradicable savagery. Vaudreuil, convinced that Indian alliances were the key to the successful defense of Canada, understood that the appalling aftermath of victory at Fort William Henry threatened two possibilities, equally dire: that the Indians would not volunteer their services again, or if they did that Montcalm would decline to use them. Thus he did his best to appease both the commander in chief, by ransoming as many prisoners as possible, and the Indians, by offering the most generous terms he could afford. He also did his best to overlook such distasteful incidents as the ritual eating of a prisoner outside Montréal on August 15. 22

  In the end the violent sequel to Montcalm’s victory would both defeat Vaudreuil’s best efforts to salvage Indian relations and realize Montcalm’s worst fears of British vengeance. Never again would Indian allies flock to the French colors as they had in 1757. The western Indians would discover too late that the English and provincials at William Henry had been suffering from smallpox, and thus that the captives, scalps, and clothing they brought back carried the seeds of a great epidemic, which would devastate their homelands. No warriors from the pays d’en haut would help Montcalm again, and even the converts from the St. Lawrence missions would become reluctant to take up the hatchet. In coming campaigns Montcalm would rely on regulars and Canadians to oppose the regulars and provincials of the British, fighting increasingly in the European mode that he preferred. But although the conflict would in this sense be Europeanized after 1757, British officers would never be inclined to offer the honors of war to any French force. At the same time, provincial outrage over “the massacre of Fort William Henry” would feed an already ferocious anti-Catholic tradition in New England and intensify an undiscriminating Anglo-American hatred of Indians.23

  But while the fall of Fort William Henry thus marked a critical juncture in the war, its long-term significance remained latent in 1757. American colonists and British ministers alike saw it as one more humiliation, one more instance of military incapacity, in the long, dismal litany of defeat that the war had become. Yet two events that followed the capitulation, the full implications of which no one in British North America understood, foretold important dimensions of what was to come. The first was Montcalm’s decision not to attack Fort Edward.

  After Montcalm’s victory, nothing seemingly prevented him from following the road that pointed toward the next logical objective; yet he opted instead to destroy Fort William Henry and return to Fort Carillon. Webb was greatly relieved without understanding why. Montcalm had in fact had no choice but to withdraw, for he was hobbled both by the loss of his Indian supporters—which was to say, his main source of intelligence—and by an acute shortage of provisions. New France had suffered a disastrous crop failure in 1756; Montcalm indeed had had to delay his departure from Fort Carillon until the necessary foodstuffs arrived from France. Unable to open his campaign before the very end of July, now he could not delay in releasing the Canadian militiamen who made up more than half of the non-Indian troops at the siege, for they urgently needed to return home to the harvest. Yet even dismissing them at the earliest possible moment did not prevent further disaster, for the harvest of 1757 would be one of the worst in Canadian history. Conditions were especially bad in the
vicinity of Montréal, ordinarily “the granary of Canada” and also the home of many of the militiamen who served on the expedition. By late September the inhabitants of Montréal were each subsisting on a half-pound of bread a day, and those of Québec on half that. No one contemplating New France’s military prospects could escape the conclusion that, without provisions from Europe, the colony would soon become indefensible. 24

  The second event that accompanied the fall of Fort William Henry was the equally significant, but equally unremarked, mobilization of thousands of militiamen from the New England provinces. In response to Webb’s frantic summons for help, between August 7 and 10 Connecticut drafted five thousand men from its militia regiments—about one-quarter of all the militiamen in the colony—formed them into temporary companies, and marched them off to defend Fort Edward. Massachusetts’s response was equally impressive. Upon receiving the first appeals for help, Governor Pownall ordered the four westernmost regiments of militia to march for New York and warned all twenty-six of the province’s battalions “to hold themselves in readiness to march at a minutes warning.” On August 8 he “ordered up all the Troops of Horse and a fourth part of the Militia of the province,” and began assembling a train of artillery, as well as provision magazines, to support them. Between August 9 and 12 more than seven thousand Massachusetts militiamen left their homes and began to march for Fort Edward. Because of the distances to be covered, none actually arrived before Fort William Henry surrendered, but soon thereafter they came streaming in in numbers that overwhelmed Webb’s ability to feed and control them. As soon as it had become clear that the French were not advancing on his post, Webb dismissed the militiamen at the fort and dispatched couriers to turn back those still on the road. Even so, by August 12 no fewer than 4,239 New England men were encamped outside the walls of Fort Edward.25

  This response cost the northern provinces a vast sum of money, for militia privates on active service earned more than twice as much per day as provincial soldiers of the same rank. The total charges for maintaining the Connecticut militia in the field for the eighteen days of the alarm equaled one-third of the expense of all its operations in 1757. Yet notwithstanding the expense and the logistical difficulty of mobilizing large proportions of their male populations on short notice, the northern provinces had demonstrated a capacity to respond to a military emergency without parallel in the English-speaking world.26

  Even though in the aftermath of this great mobilization colonial governments remained chiefly aware of its futility and expense, and even though regular officers tended to ignore or to dismiss it as having made no difference to the outcome of the campaign, the response of the New England provinces provided unmistakable evidence of the willingness of the colonists to fight. The alarm proved that no lack of popular motivation or military resources could account for the growing uncooperative-ness of the New England assemblies. If only the means could be found to tap them, and some way discovered effectively to direct them, the energies and the manpower of the northern colonies alone could tip the strategic balance in North America. But how they could be tapped, and how they might be directed, remained problems that were still very far from being solved.

  CHAPTER 20

  Other Disasters, and a Ray of Hope

  1757

  IN THE REGION that Lord Loudoun had designated as the Southern Department of operations—the colonies from Pennsylvania to Georgia—the picture at the time of Fort William Henry’s fall was hardly an encouraging one. Only in the lower south, a region still spared much military activity, did things seem to be progressing satisfactorily. The completion of Fort Loudoun in what would later become southeastern Tennessee established a strategic foothold for the Crown and the colony of South Carolina in the Overhill Cherokee country. French agents ranging northward from Fort Toulouse (a post at the forks of the Alabama River on the approximate site of modern Montgomery) and Shawnees operating to the south from the Ohio Valley had been in the area since 1754, seeking to forge an alliance with the Cherokees. Fort Loudoun and its supporting post of Fort Prince George, located about a hundred miles to the southeast amid the Cherokee Lower Towns, seemed ready to foster stable relations with the Cherokees by furnishing foci for trade and fortified bases for the operations of provincial and redcoat troops. North of the Carolinas, however, in the backwoods of the middle and southern colonies, relations with the Indians were anything but stable. There the war in 1757 proceeded very much as it had in the previous year, as raiders from Fort Duquesne lengthened to seeming endlessness the melancholy list of kidnappings, scalpings, and settlement-burnings. 1

  In the Chesapeake colonies, Maryland continued to spend as little as possible on defense. The backwoods settlements to the east of Fort Cumberland in the Conococheague Valley had all but emptied themselves of people in 1756 after the assembly announced that it would defend nothing to the west of Fort Frederick. Although Loudoun in his March conference with the governors had ordered Governor Horatio Sharpe to garrison Fort Cumberland with 150 men, the Maryland Assembly had flatly refused to support them so long as they remained there. They stayed in place but ultimately had to be provisioned by the regular army. Although Maryland did raise 500 men in 1757, relations were so strained between the upper house of the assembly, controlled by a faction friendly to the interests of the proprietary family, the Calverts, and the lower house, dominated by the antiproprietary (or popular) party, that these two halves of the legislature never agreed on a supply bill, and the soldiers were never paid.2

  Virginia, with an increasingly disciplined regiment attempting to defend its frontier, seemed to offer a better example of coordination between colony and empire. On closer inspection, however, the situation could be seen to have improved only slightly, if at all, over the previous year. By early 1757 the Virginia provincial officers had grown so discouraged by the unwillingness of the House of Burgesses to supply and pay their regiment that Washington himself had approached Lord Loudoun at his Philadelphia conference and pleaded for the Virginia Regiment to be taken into the regular establishment. The Virginia officers, he maintained, “want nothing but Commissions from His Majesty to make us as regular a Corps as any upon the Continent.” His men had “been regularly Regimented and trained, and have done as regular Duty for upwards of 3 Years as any regiment in His Majesty’s Service,” and, he concluded hopefully, “we are very certain, that no Body of regular Troops ever before Servd 3 Bloody Campaigns without attracting Royal Notice.” Loudoun had not been impressed enough by the towering young colonel’s arguments to agree to absorb his regiment into the regular army, but he evidently thought enough of its proficiency to leave the defense of the Virginia backcountry entirely in its hands. Instead of issuing Washington the regular commission he coveted, Loudoun decided to station a battalion of the Royal American (60th) Regiment in Pennsylvania for 1757 and to give its commander, Colonel John Stanwix, authority over Washington and the Virginia provincials. Since Stanwix’s first communication to Washington was an order to deliver a hundred barrels of gunpowder, twelve thousand flints, and three tons of lead from his regimental stores to wagoners that Stanwix was sending down from Pennsylvania, Washington had reason to think that his new, closer connection to the regular army would only make a hard job worse.3

  And indeed it did. Although Washington would eventually find his way to a cordial relationship with the competent, long-experienced Stanwix, nothing about the defense of Virginia’s backcountry came easily in 1757. Plagued by desertions and distressed by the behindhand way in which the province sent him replacements, Washington found himself no more able than before to defend 350 miles of frontier against raiders from the Ohio Country. As if this were not difficult enough, Loudoun had detached two hundred of Washington’s men and sent them to South Carolina under the regiment’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Adam Stephen. There they helped to garrison Charleston—in effect, to deter slave insurrection—while regulars from the province’s independent companies, the Royal Am
ericans, and the Highland (63rd) Regiment defended the frontier against an invasion that never materialized. Left with as few as four hundred (and never more than seven hundred) men to hold Virginia’s chain of eighteen forts, Washington abandoned all but seven, a move that enabled French and Indian raiding parties to enter the province virtually at will. Although Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie made efforts to supplement Washington’s forces with Catawba and Cherokee warriors imported from the Carolinas, Washington never found them to be more than burdensome: they consumed inordinate amounts of supplies, came and went as they pleased, and generally “behaved very insolently” when he tried to employ them as scouts.4

  In October, beset not only by enemies he could not stave off but by his own quartermaster’s embezzlement of supplies and desertion, Washington was near despair. “Another campaign, such as was the last,” he wrote to Dinwiddie, “will depopulate the country.” Purely defensive strategies had failed, and unless an expedition could be sent to destroy Fort Duquesne, “there will not . . . be one soul living on this side the Blue-Ridge [by] the ensuing autumn.” He was not exaggerating. When Governor-General Vaudreuil reported to his superior, the minister of marine, on the raids conducted from Fort Duquesne in 1757, he could describe “nothing very important”—just twenty-seven scalps and twenty-seven prisoners taken since his previous account. It had not been for want of activity, but rather because there were so few English settlers left on the frontier; one group had been in the field for two months and taken only two scalps. Indeed, Vaudreuil wrote, “all our parties have carried terror among our enemies to a point that the settlements of the English in Pinsilvanie, Mariland, and Virginia are abandoned. All the settlers have retreated to the city or into the forest.”5