What Montcalm really needed to do was wait for Bougainville, whose force of picked men included some of the best regulars in Canada; but he did not. He had long been pessimistic about his chances of preserving the colony and had even joked about the prospects of defeat. Yet self-deprecating and even defeatist as he had been, until this moment he had either acted on the offensive or had been able to exploit defensive advantages in such a way as to deprive his adversaries of the initiative. Now, for the first time in the war, Montcalm found himself out-generaled, and it rattled him out of his wits. Despite the fact that he knew Wolfe’s soldiers were, man for man, far superior to his own, at ten o’clock Montcalm ordered his troops to advance, head-on, against the British line. Now that he had decided to attack, the topography of the plains gave him no alternative to a frontal assault: with the British line extending virtually from the St. Charles escarpment on Montcalm’s right to the St. Lawrence cliffs on his left, he had no room to maneuver, no opportunity to outflank his adversary. The battle would be a firefight, pure and simple.25
In the French center were the regular battalions of Béarn and Guyenne, in wide shallow columns; on the left stood the men of Royal-Roussillon and the Montréal and Trois-Rivières militia, in line; on the right, also in line, were the battalions of Languedoc, La Sarre, and the militia of Québec. All told they numbered about 4,500 men, and they were keen for a fight. When the order came to advance, they responded with a tremendous cheer. It was almost the last thing they would do in unison that day.
In the eighteenth-century infantryman’s world, everything depended upon deliberation, precision, order: the better the army, the more machinelike its maneuvers on the battlefield would be. Cohesion was all, and in order to maintain it the best soldiers of the day had been trained to march at a parade-ground pace to within hailing distance of an enemy line, halt, and fire a final volley on order before they could charge headlong, bayonets fixed, at their opponents. The fate of every infantry battle ultimately rested on the ability of soldiers to withstand the physical and psychological shock of that climactic volley. But while the white-coated regulars of Montcalm’s army had the discipline to perform as their general needed them to do, the un-uniformed militiamen mixed throughout their ranks had no appreciation of the necessity of making a deliberate, dress-right-dress approach to their enemy. Accordingly, almost as soon as they heard the order to advance, the militiamen broke into a run, despite the fact that the British line was at least five hundred yards away. The loss of coherence was instantaneous. “We had not gone twenty paces,” wrote one witness, before “the left was too far in [the] rear and the centre too far in front.” As his efforts to restore order failed, all Montcalm could do was ride along with the adrenalized tide that surged toward the still, scarlet line of British troops.26
Seven redcoat battalions stood facing the French in a double rank that stretched a half mile from end to end. Wolfe had ordered the men to load their muskets with an extra ball and had instructed their officers to fire the first volley only when the French were within forty yards. The redcoats stood quietly, more intent on the orders that were to come than on the enemy soldiers they could see haring wildly toward them. Every battalion, and most of the men in them, had seen combat before. The 58th and 78th Regiments, on the left, like the 43rd, the 28th, and the Louisbourg Grenadiers on the right, had all been at Louisbourg in 1758. Wolfe had put the units with the longest service in America in the center and the second line: the 47th had fought at Fort Beauséjour, and the 48th had accompanied Braddock to the Monongahela.27 There was remarkably little movement within the British formation. Apart from Wolfe’s aides, sprinting with orders to various commanders, the British ranks stood stock-still as they awaited the onslaught.
Montcalm’s men, shouting as they ran, finally halted at about “half-musket-shot” range, between 125 and 150 yards, from the British front; dropped “down on one knee,” and fired, probably in platoon volleys among the regulars, followed by “wild scattering” shots from the rest. Wolfe, standing on a rise near the Louisbourg Grenadiers, was one of the first to be hit. His wound, a shattered wrist, would have been agonizing, but he responded almost casually, wrapping it in a handkerchief without leaving his post. Other men, wounded more seriously, dropped from the ranks, which closed up as they fell. The range, however, was extreme; the effects of the French fire were virtually random and not (except to the individual victims) severe. No one in the British line shot back.28
At this point, when they were still at a considerable distance from the British line, Montcalm’s men had their last chance to regroup, but did not. Instead their cohesion dissolved altogether as the regulars paused to load in conventional style, standing upright in ranks, while the militiamen reloaded as they had been trained to do in forest fighting, by taking cover or throwing themselves onto the ground. “This false movement,” wrote a participant, “broke all the battalions”; and with that, the attack disintegrated. Men continued to advance and to fire, by companies and platoons and as individuals, but their piecemeal movement toward the British line exposed them to grave danger and guaranteed that their shots would be without collective effect. The redcoats stood impassive until the first attackers were within sixty yards; then they opened fire by platoons, especially on the left and the right wings. In the center, however, the 43rd and 47th Regiments stood fast until the enemy was within forty yards. Then, according to a captain of the 43rd, they delivered as close and heavy [a] discharge, as I ever saw performed at a private field of exercise, insomuch that better troops than we encountered could not possibly withstand it: and, indeed, well might the French Officers say, that they never opposed such a shock as they received from the center of our line, for that they believed every ball took place, and such regularity and discipline they had not experienced before; our troops in general, and particularly the central corps, having levelled and fired—comme une coup de canon. [H]ereupon they gave way, and fled with precipitation, so that, by the time the cloud of smoke was vanished, our men were again loaded, and, profiting by the advantage we had over them, pursued them almost to the gates of the town[,] . . . redoubling our fire with great eagerness, making many Officers and men prisoners.29
As the pursuit began, the British stood in danger of losing their discipline for the first time in the day. With hair-raising cries, the Highlanders of the 78th Foot slung their muskets, unsheathed their clay-mores—theirs was one of the few regiments left in which privates as well as officers carried swords—and set off at a run after the enemy. Along the rest of the line, huzzahing and shouting, the men of the English regiments charged forward with bayonets fixed. At the extreme right, Wolfe himself led the 28th Foot and the Louisbourg Grenadiers in the advance.
After a morning of intermittent rain, the sun broke through the clouds and now shone warmly over a field where blood lust had banished caution. As the British began to chase the scattering mob helter-skelter toward the city and the St. Charles River, Canadian and Indian skirmishers opened fire from their positions on the margins of the battlefield. They took the heaviest toll of the day. On the left it was the Scots of the 78th, charging along the woods that lined the northern edge of the field, who suffered the most heavily. On the right the 28th and the Louisbourg Grenadiers fell victim to marksmen concealed in a cornfield. It was there, as he urged the Grenadiers on, that one bullet tore through Wolfe’s intestines and another punctured his chest. In shock and hemorrhaging uncontrollably, he clung to consciousness long enough to learn that the French had fallen into a general rout. He gurgled a few words in reply. Then James Wolfe achieved the consummation he had so long sought, and so devoutly wished.30
AS WOLFE BLED to death, his second-in-command, Monckton, also lay severely wounded with a musket ball through the lungs. Meanwhile, Murray, a Scot, had led his countrymen of the 78th in their wild charge, only to be tied down along with them in a vicious firefight near the St. Charles River. Barré, who as adjutant general had been acting as Wolfe’s chief of s
taff, had been hit in the face with a musket ball and was unable to give any direction at all. Everywhere on the Plains of Abraham battalions were disintegrating; men who had stood fast all morning responded to their sudden release by trying to skewer every Frenchman in sight. At last someone found Townshend, the only available brigadier; he assumed command with an intense awareness that the British force was falling to bits around him. Immediately he sent runners to the battalion commanders with orders to halt the pursuit and re-form their units on the battlefield. Discipline slowly reemerged, and none too soon. Within minutes Bougainville and his flying column appeared on the road from Cap Rouge, hoping to reinforce Montcalm, and not yet aware of his defeat. Townshend scraped together every available man and gun—two battalions and two fieldpieces—to oppose them. Even though his men outnumbered the redcoats blocking his path by more than two to one, Bougainville was taken aback. He drew off to assess his situation from the safety of the nearby Sillery Woods.
In calling off the pursuit Townshend saved the day for the British. Even though later critics would denounce him for betraying Wolfe’s boldness and success, Townshend’s prudence and presence of mind enabled him to face down a comparatively well-rested force with the capacity to wreak havoc on his still scattered, disorganized command. By about noon, with security reestablished, his soldiers could tend to the wounded, eat their first meal of the day, and count the dead. The British army had lost fifty-eight killed and six hundred wounded, almost exactly the same number as the French. At last Townshend sent to the ships for the picks and shovels that his men now needed more than the muskets and bayonets that had been the tools of a bloody morning’s work. Although somewhat fewer than four thousand weary redcoats remained on the field and fit for service on the afternoon of September 13, Townshend set them to digging the first trenches for a siège en forme.31
So small a number of effective troops should not have been able to invest the city successfully, for they had no hope of isolating it from reinforcement and resupply. Within the walls of Québec and in the Beauport camp, however, the comparative weakness of the British went unremarked as the shock of defeat bred disorganization and despair. Montcalm had had his belly and one leg ripped open by grapeshot during the retreat but tried to retain command, sending advice to Vaudreuil and even dictating a letter to the British commander, despite shock and pain that steadily loosened his grip on reality. He died at four o’clock the next morning. Other than Montcalm, there was no senior commander within the walls of Québec. The two lieutenant colonels who had acted as his brigadiers in the battle, Fontbonne and Sénezergues, had both received mortal wounds; Bougainville was somewhere west of the city, out of contact. Nobody had reliable information on the state of the French forces, let alone that of their enemy. No one was sure of how many soldiers had been killed and wounded on the field, how many had deserted, how many had made it back to Beauport.
In the Beauport camp Vaudreuil was nominally in charge. He had witnessed only the end of the battle, lacked a clear sense of the overall situation, and could form no idea of what could be done until late afternoon, when he finally managed to convene a council of war. At about six in the evening, on the council’s advice, he ordered the army to evacuate the Beauport lines. Giving the British a wide berth, the troops were to march to the north and then west as far as the settlement of Jacques-Cartier, about twenty-five miles up the St. Lawrence. Neither Vaudreuil nor the officers he consulted believed there was any alternative. The retreat would preserve whatever remained of the army and protect whatever was left of the supplies at Batiscan; Bougainville’s force could cover their rear and then consolidate with them at Jacques-Cartier; and the chevalier de Lévis, who had been summoned from Montréal, could assume command of the whole. Québec, of course, would have to be left to the British. Vaudreuil hoped against hope that the city would be able to hold out until the army could be reorganized but nonetheless left behind draft terms of surrender along with his other instructions for the city’s garrison when he rode off with the army at nine o’clock.32
It is a measure of the confusion in the French command that they abandoned artillery, ammunition, and large stores of provisions in the Beauport camp without making any effort to move them into Québec proper. The force left behind to defend the city numbered about 2,200 men, mainly militia and sailors. None of them could have been happy to be charged with protecting the four thousand or so civilian, sick, and wounded noncombatants who had taken refuge within the walls—especially when it became known that the city had less than three days’ supply of food on hand, and when anyone with eyes could stand on the ramparts and see the British constructing batteries and redoubts within a thousand yards of the fragile western wall. Thus when the formal siege opened on September 14, the demoralization of Québec’s defenders posed at least as great a threat to the city’s survival as the guns of the besiegers. The British, in fact, did not fire a shot that day—or the next, or the next, or the next—but instead concentrated on digging siege works and hauling cannon and howitzers up from the Foulon cove. Meanwhile Québec’s garrison noisily shelled its enemy and quietly collapsed from within. On the afternoon of the seventeenth, with a heavy British battery making ready to fire on the St. Ursule Bastion and with Admiral Saunders preparing to open a bombardment of his own from a line of ships in the basin, the French commandant ordered his gunners to cease fire. At four o’clock an envoy preceded by a flag of truce approached the British lines bearing the terms of capitulation that Vaudreuil had left behind.33
The town major of Québec, Jean-Baptiste-Nicholas-Roch de Ramezay, hoped to spin out the negotiations long enough to allow the army to return from Jacques-Cartier and attack the British. Delay was the only defense he had left, for his troops were out of food and the city’s civilian population lacked protection from the coming bombardment. But no relief was imminent, the terms to which Townshend and Saunders were willing to agree turned out to be surprisingly generous ones, and to judge by the rate at which they jumped the walls and deserted to the enemy, Québec’s militiamen seemed prepared to make peace regardless of what the town major intended. At eleven o’clock that night Ramezay accepted the British terms, and at eight o’clock the next morning, Tuesday, September 18, 1759, signed the formal capitulation of Québec. That afternoon a detachment of the Royal Artillery marched into the city to raise the Union Jack over the citadel while the Louisbourg Grenadiers mounted guard on the walls. After nearly three months of trying, a British army had conquered Québec. But now they had to keep it.34
For in fact the action of September 13, despite the haze of romance that has come to envelop it, was no more a decisive battle than a brilliant one. Few battles, perhaps none, are ever as decisive as generals hope that they will be; and nowhere was it truer than in eighteenth-century North America that victories on the battlefield win wars only when the victors can retain their conquests. Therefore Townshend, Murray, Saunders, and Holmes immediately set about consolidating control over Québec and the surrounding countryside, preparing to defend it against the return of the French army. Here their most effective weapon was clemency, for they were far too weak to impose order on the city and its people and therefore offered terms infinitely more generous than those Amherst had allowed at Louisbourg. For the only time after Fort William Henry, the British permitted a defeated Franco-Canadian garrison to surrender with the honors of war. The regulars were not to be made prisoners of war but rather transported under flag of truce to France, where they would be free to rejoin the French army. Militiamen who had borne arms in the siege would not be required to accompany the army, but could remain with their families, providing that they surrendered their weapons and swore an oath of fidelity to the British Crown. No one from the civil population would be subject to exile. Citizens would be guaranteed the security of their property and assured of their right to continue practicing their religion under the care of the bishop of Québec. Anyone willing to take the oath of fidelity would enjoy all the protections
normally afforded to British subjects.35
Thus from the occupation’s beginning, the British sought to secure the voluntary cooperation of a civil population they knew they could not control by force. And from the beginning it could hardly have been clearer that at the very least the neutrality of this population would be necessary, for a reorganized French army was marching back toward the city even as the terms of capitulation were being negotiated. François-Gaston, chevalier de Lévis, the tough Gascon brigadier who had served Montcalm as second-in-command, was in every sense equal to the responsibilities he had inherited. He had taken over at Jacques-Cartier on the seventeenth, and at once had stiffened the spines of the refugees he found there. Showing nothing but scorn for their flight, he had ordered the troops back downriver—so rapidly that by the time the Union Jack first fluttered over Québec, his advance guard had reached St. Augustin, less than a day’s march from the city. Had Ramezay held out for two more days, Lévis could have invested the lightly entrenched British camp. Since he lacked cannon and the supplies sufficient to besiege the city, however, he had had no choice but to order his men back to Jacques-Cartier, once he learned of the surrender. There he ordered a fort to be built and watched for an opportunity to run a ship past the British fleet at Québec. With reinforcements and supplies from France, Lévis knew, he could regain the city for his king. 36
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