Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Until he had his ships or knew whether Wolfe had triumphed or failed, Jeffery Amherst would be content to build. And wait.

  CHAPTER 36

  Dubious Battle WOLFE MEETS MONTCALM AT QUÉBEC

  JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1759

  AT QUÉBEC in August, James Wolfe was playing a waiting game of another, savage, sort. He, too, had been late to open his campaign, leaving Louisbourg only on June 4, a month later than Pitt had wished; he had not been able to begin landing his 8,500 troops on the Île d’Orléans, below Québec, until June 28. Throughout July he had been unable to dent the city’s defenses, either by the relentless shelling of the town that he began on July 12 or by the frontal assault on the French lines six miles below it, which he ordered on the last day of the month: a foolhardy attack that had cost his army 443 casualties, including 210 killed. By the beginning of August, Wolfe was out of ideas and at odds with his brigadiers, three talented, aristocratic officers who had come to distrust his judgment. With no more promising target offering itself, and lacking the strength to drive the French from their defenses, Wolfe therefore “reduced [his] Operations to . . . Skirmishing Cruelty & Devastation,” launching a “War of the worst Shape” in the hope of goading his enemy to give battle. By the end of August Wolfe’s terrorism had reduced the “agreeable prospect of a delightful country” that had delighted the eye in June—“windmills, water-mills, churches, chapels and compact farm-houses, all built with stone and covered, some with wood and others with straw”—to a smoldering wasteland. A conservative contemporary estimate held that fourteen hundred farms had been destroyed. No one ever reckoned the numbers of rapes, scalpings, thefts, and casual murders perpetrated during this month of bloody horror. 1

  But the defenders of Québec could no more be drawn out of their trenches by British terrorism than they could be driven out by bombardment and frontal attack. In the midst of his brutal enterprise, Wolfe’s health broke down. From August nineteenth until the twenty-second he was too sick to leave his bed: by turns wracked by fever and convulsed with pain from “the gravel,” or kidney stones, Wolfe despaired of ever forcing a decision, or even of living to see the end of the campaign. Gradually he improved, but by the beginning of September he was sick again and verging on mental collapse. More than a third of his army was unfit for duty, eaten alive by the same fevers that threatened his life; healthy men were deserting to the enemy in alarming numbers.2 The French had proven themselves more resourceful, and much more difficult to defeat, than he had imagined. But why? And what—supposing his health even permitted him to remain in command—could he do to lure them out of their fortifications, to fight the battle that haunted his feverish dreams?

  The French were able to put up so successful a resistance in part because their situation was so desperate—who in Québec could have doubted that New France was fighting for its life?—and in part because, at literally the last possible minute, a small relief convoy had arrived from France. In late April, before Wolfe’s transports and their powerful escort could begin to ascend the St. Lawrence, a couple of French frigates and fourteen supply ships had picked their way through the ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and slipped up the river, carrying food, reinforcements, and Montcalm’s returning aide, Bougainville. These, and ten or so unescorted merchantmen that crept in after them, reached Québec between May 9 and 23. In all, they numbered just two dozen vessels, but few as they were, they had come in time to make Wolfe’s task a nightmare. For these ships not only carried five hundred badly needed reinforcements but two commodities that the defenders of New France needed even more desperately than men: food and instructions.3

  The harvest of 1758 had been the worst of the whole war in Canada, and the winter of 1758–59 the coldest in memory. Without provisions from France, no defense at all would have been possible. Even with sufficient supplies, Canada had too few men left to mount a full defense along every possible invasion route; but Bougainville (who returned bearing the rank of colonel and a knighthood in the order of Saint-Louis) had brought intelligence concerning Wolfe’s expedition and its target, and he arrived early enough to alert Québec’s defenders of their peril. At the same time, and equally important, he carried detailed instructions from the French court, which were intended to settle the festering dispute between Vaudreuil and Montcalm—a feud that had nearly destroyed the ability of Canada to defend itself. The cultural divide between Canadian and Frenchman, as well as the personal animosity that set the provincial aristocrat against the professional soldier, had aggravated relations between the two men to the point that neither could see the sense in the other’s plans. In fact, both had strategic merit; but they were in effect mutually exclusive, and the letters that Bougainville carried determined that Montcalm’s conception would prevail.4

  Vaudreuil saw the problem of defense in light of the proven Canadian strategies of Indian alliance and wilderness warfare. His was essentially a guerrilla’s conception of defense, for it rested upon his confidence that although the British might conquer territory, they could never hold it so long as Canada’s French and Indian peoples remained united and capable of resisting in the interior. The true security of New France therefore lay in keeping open communication with the tribes of the pays d’en haut, for if properly led these warriors could visit such havoc on the enemy’s frontiers that the British would eventually be forced to sue for peace. Québec itself might be abandoned to the enemy without disabling the colony’s defenses; if the west held the key to Canada’s survival, then Montréal was the critical post to defend, and that meant giving priority to manning both the forts that flanked its southern approaches and those like Niagara that protected its links with the pays d’en haut. Thus while Vaudreuil’s plan envisioned the defense of Québec, its overriding concern was not with improving the city’s fortifications, but with evacuating the region’s civilian population upriver to Trois-Rivières, halfway to Montréal. The governor-general’s strategy thus called for a staged withdrawal rather than a supreme effort to stop the invaders outside the walls of the capital.5

  Montcalm had seen matters in almost exactly the opposite way. As a conventionally minded European professional officer, he thought it suicidal to dissipate the forces available for defense by holding western posts. In his view the only key to Canada was the city of Québec; the only way to hold it was to concentrate as much force as possible there and oppose to the last extremity the coming invasion. Montcalm did not entirely discount the value of Indian allies, but he distrusted them as uncontrollable, unreliable, and barbarous. The specters of Oswego and Fort William Henry had convinced him that Vaudreuil’s preferred approach was no better than a surrender to savagery. Nor did he wish to rely upon Canadians. The rapacity of Bigot and the imperfect discipline of the militiamen, like Vaudreuil’s parochial “prejudices” and preference for irregular warfare, had led Montcalm to disdain the military capacities of the people he had been sent to defend. He therefore intended to contract the perimeter of defense to a core region centering on the St. Lawrence Valley from Québec to Montréal. Unlike Vaudreuil’s plan, which required dispersion of force, his would maximize the number of disciplined men—regulars and troupes de la marine— available to stave off the British attack. If the invaders could be repulsed, Canada might be preserved until a general peace could be concluded in Europe, and the prewar frontiers might be restored diplomatically. But if, on the other hand, the colony should fall to an overwhelmingly strong enemy, at least Montcalm would have conducted an honorable defense. For the diminutive marquis held as an article of faith what so few Canadians seemed able to grasp: that there were more important things in war than winning.

  Until Bougainville arrived with the clarifying directives from Versailles, Vaudreuil had directed Canada’s defenses. He had decided to reinforce Niagara and to support Lignery’s efforts to regain the Forks of the Ohio; by the same token, he had placed little emphasis on repairing Québec’s fortifications. After May 10, however, once it was known that the kin
g had given Montcalm the principal military authority in New France, Montcalm’s strategic vision prevailed. Hence the order for Bourlamaque to withdraw by stages from the advanced posts on Lake Champlain; thus the sudden emphasis given, in the days before Wolfe’s arrival, to constructing entrenchments and emplacing artillery around Québec. By pulling every available soldier into the vicinity of the capital, by mobilizing the region’s militia, and by accepting as volunteers both graybeards and boys whose ages ordinarily would have excluded them from serving, Montcalm managed to meet Wolfe’s invaders with between twelve and fifteen thousand men. All the regulars in Canada except Bourlamaque’s three battalions were there: the Régiments Béarn, Guyenne, Languedoc, La Sarre, Royal-Roussillon. So were the militia companies of Québec as well as those from settlements as far up the valley as Trois-Rivières; so too were companies made up of the sailors from the ships that had arrived in May, of refugee Acadians, of three hundred or so Indians (about half of whom were Indian converts from the local missions and the remainder Crees from the remote north, who had heretofore taken no role in the fighting), and even of thirty-five scholars from Québec’s Jesuit seminary—a unit so improbable that some wit labeled it the Royal-Syntaxe. After years of fighting and few replacements, the regulars were too thin on the ground to do all the fighting, so Montcalm integrated the fittest of the militiamen into their ranks. The rest of the militia he set to work on the prodigious task of fortifying the countryside around the city, turning what was already difficult terrain into a network of obstacles to defy the most ingenious attacker.6

  Québec stood on the northern shore of the St. Lawrence at the point where the river flowed into a broad basin, its channel widening from three-quarters of a mile to nearly two miles across. Atop a headland, 200 to 350 feet above the water, the Upper Town nestled snugly within walls, looking out across the basin and down upon the houses and docks of the Lower Town as well as the suburbs of St.-Roch and Palais. Immediately below, the St. Charles River flowed into the St. Lawrence, defining the northern boundary of the city’s promontory with a steep escarpment. From the confluence downriver for the next three miles or so the northern shore lay low along the basin; then, near the village of Beauport, the land began to rise. From that point onward, bluffs and increasingly steep slopes lined the shore for another three miles, until they climaxed at the spot where the Montmorency River hurled itself off a three-hundred-foot cliff in a fall so spectacular that a contemporary observer could only describe it as “a stupendous natural curiosity.” Thus below the town the St. Charles and the Montmorency presented substantial obstacles to the movement of attackers overland, while the shoreline offered few promising footholds for assaults from the St. Lawrence itself. Above Québec, steep wooded slopes, naked cliffs, and bluffs lined the river’s northern shore for miles. Behind them lay farmland that, west of the city, flattened into a narrow plateau between the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles, where Abraham Martin, one of Champlain’s pilots, had settled to farm in the early seventeenth century. There, on what has ever since been called the Plains of Abraham, the level ground swept gently upward through farms and woodlots to a broken ridge, and then on to the walls of Québec.7

  Viewed from the river, the least forbidding approach to the city lay on the eastern (downstream) side, and it was there that Wolfe had first probed the French defenses. But Montcalm had strongly fortified the riverbank and the hillsides from the St. Charles all the way to the Montmorency Falls, and Wolfe’s inability to crack this defensive barrier had frustrated him into launching his campaign of “Skirmishing Cruelty & Devastation” in August. Montcalm had stationed most of his regular troops along these so-called Beauport lines, where he expected Wolfe to concentrate his attacks. The French commander had, however, also fortified the heights west (upriver) of the city as insurance against the possibility that the British fleet would be able to ride the tides past Québec’s batteries. Because the threat seemed less severe upriver, Montcalm had posted militia units to defend those lines, reinforcing them with a thousand picked men under Bougainville—a mobile force poised to repel any effort to land above the city. Montcalm’s final measure had been to send his supply ships about fifty miles upriver, to the settlement of Batiscan near Trois-Rivières. This made defenders dependent on a long supply line, which could be cut if the British managed to land above the city. But by refusing to concentrate his provisions and munitions in the city, Montcalm intended to leave himself an out: should Québec have to be abandoned, his army could retreat upriver without losing its supplies.8

  Montcalm’s efficient, conventional disposition of his forces baffled the equally conventional Wolfe. Military operations in America so far had consisted either of sieges or raids, and thus far no full siège en forme had failed to bring an attacker victory. But the defenses of Québec were so nearly seamless that Wolfe could not gain a foothold on the north shore of the St. Lawrence from which he could open a formal siege. So long as the French remained able to resupply themselves, and so long as Montcalm could shift his forces freely from one part of the lines to another, Wolfe had little hope of even beginning a successful siege. To decide the issue he needed something that had never yet taken place in America, an open-field battle. Until Montcalm consented to give him one, he could do no more than shell the town, ravage the countryside, and issue bombastic proclamations calling upon the French to surrender. As he explained in a letter to his mother, “My antagonist has wisely shut himself up in inaccessible entrenchments, so that I can’t get at him without spilling a torrent of blood, and that perhaps to little purpose. The Marquis de Montcalm is at the head of a great number of bad soldiers, and I am at the head of a small number of good ones, that wish for nothing so much as to fight him—but the wary old fellow avoids an action doubtful of the behaviour of his army.” In recognition of this predicament, hoping that perhaps they would approve of an all-out assault on the Beauport lines, Wolfe at the end of August convened his three brigadiers—Robert Monckton, George Townshend, and James Murray—as a council of war, and asked their advice. He did so not because he particularly valued their opinions (indeed, he had come to such bad terms with them that he would have preferred not to deal with them at all), but because the etiquette of eighteenth-century command demanded that he consult his chief officers before ordering a major attack. Their response was categorically to deny the wisdom of making another assault on Montcalm’s stoutest defenses. Instead they advised Wolfe to look for an opening upriver from Québec and sever the defenders’ line of supply.9

  Three brigadiers. All three of Wolfe’s chief subordinates came from social origins superior to their commander, and by late summer 1759 all of them had come to despise him. The feeling was entirely reciprocated. Clockwise from top left, in order of seniority: Robert Monckton (1726–82); Lord George Townshend (1724–1807); and James Murray (1722–94). Monckton and Townshend appear more or less as they looked in 1759; Murray as he looked at about age sixty. Monckton and Townshend portraits are courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan; Murray, courtesy of the McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal / Musée McCord d’histoire canadienne, Montréal.

  By the ordinary expectations of professional military leadership, the brigadiers’ opinion was binding upon Wolfe only if he wished it to be, but he was too sick, and in too precarious a mental state, to ignore their advice. He had only recently recovered from his fever enough to leave his bed; his consumptive cough was worsening; he was weak from the blood-letting to which he had been subjected; and except for the opiates his physician prescribed, he was unable even to urinate without excruciating pain. His weakness was so apparent that when he collapsed once more on September 4, the rumor spread throughout the army that he was dying. He himself believed that he had little time left and begged his doctor only to patch him up sufficiently to do duty for a few days more. Even if he lived, Wolfe realized, he would have to abandon the campaign unless he could bring Montcalm to battle before the end of September
. Thereafter the change of season meant that his naval support would have to withdraw, for although the army had supplies sufficient to survive the winter, the crews of the ships, numbering more than thirteen thousand sailors, did not.

  Wolfe also knew that if he did not succeed, he alone would bear the blame for failure. His brigadiers, who had come to loathe him—especially George Townshend, a member of Parliament, heir to a viscountcy, and political ally of Pitt—would see to that. Convinced that he had not long to live and fearing that inaction would bring disgrace upon his memory, with his judgment clouded by opiates and his body weakened by therapeutic bleedings no less than disease, Wolfe threw himself into planning a final desperate attack on the French lines above Québec. No one knew what he hoped to accomplish or how or where he intended to act. He consulted neither Monckton, Townshend, Murray, nor his senior naval commanders, Rear Admirals Charles Saunders and Charles Holmes, who had previously run ships past Québec and from whose vessels he surveyed the shoreline for a place to land troops. 10 Wolfe sought the advice of only one officer, a man who knew Québec better than anyone else on the expedition, Captain Robert Stobo.

  Stobo, one of the most vivid characters in a story that has no shortage of them, had lived in the city from 1755 through the spring of 1759 as a prisoner of war. He was, in fact, one of two British prisoners of longest standing, for he and Jacob Van Braam had been the officers whom Washington had given up as hostages at the surrender of Fort Necessity. Thereafter he and Van Braam had been moved from Fort Duquesne to Québec for safekeeping, but not before Stobo had drawn—and, in folly or bravado, signed—a sketch of the fort’s defenses and arranged for Shingas to smuggle it out to the Pennsylvania authorities. The letter in which he described the fort turned up in Braddock’s captured baggage after the Battle of the Monongahela. Before this damning document came to light, Stobo had had the run of Québec, mingling in its high society and even forming a business partnership with one of its biggest merchants. Once his role in revealing Duquesne’s defenses became known, however, both he and Van Braam were arrested and tried as spies. The court acquitted Van Braam but found Stobo guilty and sentenced him to death—a punishment he escaped only when the sentence was sent to Versailles for confirmation, and ordered suspended. Thereafter he enjoyed less freedom but eventually managed to move around the city and its immediate vicinity, carefully noting (as was his habit) the disposition of its defenses. Twice in 1757 he tried to escape; twice he was caught. Finally, on May 1, 1759, he led eight other prisoners, including a woman and three children, in the attempt that finally succeeded. Descending the St. Lawrence—first in a stolen canoe, later in a schooner that he and his companions hijacked, complete with captain and crew—he had reached Louisbourg shortly after the Québec expedition had sailed. With barely a pause, he turned around and ascended the river, joining Wolfe’s army in July.11