Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  And so, in the end, it was Lagos and Quiberon Bay that proved decisive at Québec, and control of the Atlantic that settled the ownership of Canada. Although the French ministry had ordered up a convoy of five big store ships carrying four hundred regulars and a large quantity of supplies, it had been able to send only a single frigate, the thirty-gun Machault, as an escort. Boscawen’s blockaders picked off three of the transports when they sailed from Bordeaux early in April; when the rest reached the mouth of the St. Lawrence on May 14, they found that warships from Louisbourg had sailed up the river six days earlier. Rather than risk certain disaster they had then put in at Chaleur Bay, a deep inlet on the south shore of the gulf, and anchored in the Restigouche River, where Acadian refugees still kept up an armed resistance. Making the best they could of their situation, the surviving two hundred regulars and the sailors of the Machault used the ship’s cannon to erect shore defenses and strung a chain boom across the river’s mouth; meanwhile, their commander sent a messenger overland to communicate with Lévis and Vaudreuil. Long before any word came back from Québec, however, the Restigouche had become the expedition’s grave. On July 8 two squadrons of British warships converged on Chaleur Bay. Hopelessly outmatched, the defenders sank the forlorn Machault, burned all but one of the other vessels to the waterline, and fled into the woods. When the first warships appeared at Québec on the evening of May 12, therefore, the blunt fact that they wore not the Lilies of France but the Union Jack compelled Lévis to raise his siege and retreat to Jacques-Cartier. 10

  “Ah!” Jean-Nicholas Desandrouins, Lévis’s engineer, exclaimed: “A single ship of the line and the place would have been ours!” That was very likely true; but the only ship of the line in the river was H.M.S. Vanguard, which sailed past Québec to the cheers of Murray’s men and opened fire on the French lines. On the morning of the thirteenth, carrying what they could on their backs and leaving everything else behind, Lévis’s men scrambled on board their boats and rowed for their lives. The frigate Pomone ran aground while trying to maneuver into position to cover the retreat, leaving the sturdy Atalante alone to stand off two British warships until the bateaux had made good their escape. Captain Jean Vauquelin, who had been master of the only frigate to escape Louisbourg in 1758, sailed his little man-of-war upriver to Pointe aux Trembles and ordered his men to drop anchor. There he nailed his colors to the mast and shot it out with his pursuers, refusing to give up until his gunners ran out of powder. In the end, wounded but still defiant, he ordered his crew to abandon ship, threw his sword into the river, and waited on his quarter-deck for the British to take him prisoner. 11

  Jean Vauquelin’s defiance was, in the classic sense, heroic: as audacious, and as futile, as the eleventh-hour attack on Québec. And in miniature Vauquelin’s fate, and that of his ship, foretold what lay in store for the chevalier de Lévis and French Canada. Henceforth Lévis’s operations would be limited to retreat and defense; henceforth his hopes would be limited to finding some last gesture by which he could temper defeat with honor. As with Vauquelin and the crew of the Atalante, neither Lévis’s audacity nor his soldiers’ courage, nor any possible act of collective valor, could stop the impending juggernaut.

  CHAPTER 42

  Murray Ascends the St. Lawrence

  JULY-AUGUST 1760

  SUPPLY SHIPS and their escorts began arriving at Québec soon after the French retreated upriver. Within a few days six ships of the line and seven frigates lay anchored in the basin; by July 13, when Murray was ready to order the advance toward Montréal, he had at his disposal thirty-two armed vessels, nine floating batteries, and scores of barges and bateaux. Although the dispatches that arrived with the ships explained that Amherst intended to meet him and Haviland at Montréal, he expected that he would be the only one to reach the city before the end of the summer; therefore he was relieved to learn that two regiments from Louisbourg were ascending the river to join him. Murray had scraped 2,200 serviceable men out of the wreckage of the Québec garrison—not a reassuringly large force, even though it was in fact far superior to the 1,500 that Lévis had given the chevalier de Bourlamaque to guard the river below the rapids of Richelieu. This tricky stretch of water, with its narrow navigable channel defended by shore batteries, offered the best opportunity of stopping the British before Montréal, but by July 26 Murray’s force had passed the rapids without significant loss.1

  Thereafter, French cannon on shore occasionally lobbed rounds at the passing flotilla, but only the current, contrary winds, and the weakening force of the tides slowed its progress. Frustrated, the defenders followed the ships, hoping to prevent them from landing forces on shore. In the event, they could not even do that; Murray stopped at most of the settlements he passed to proclaim their conquest and to receive the submission of their populations. The habitants proved tractable, for they were relieved to be spared further punishment and eager to trade poultry, garden crops, and other perishables for the salt that they desperately needed to preserve eels and fish against the coming winter.2

  In the absence of effective opposition Murray’s advance became less an expedition into the heart of enemy territory than a kind of triumphal progress. When Captain John Knox of the 43rd Foot chronicled the army’s passage by the “garrison town” of Trois-Rivières on August 8, he might almost have been describing an unusually elaborate tableau vivant rather than the largest concentration of French soldiers below Montréal. “The [enemy] troops,” he wrote, apparently about two thousand, lined their different works, and were in general cloathed as regulars, except a very few Canadians and about fifty naked . . . savages, their bodies being painted of a reddish colour, their faces of different colours, which I plainly discerned with my glass; and otherwise whimsically disfigured, to strike terror into their enemies: their light cavalry, who paraded along the shore, seemed to be well appointed, cloathed in blue, faced with scarlet; but their officers had white uniforms; in fine, their troops, batteries, fair-looking houses, their situation on the banks of a delightful river, our fleet sailing triumphantly before them, with our float[ing batterie]s drawn up in line of battle, the country on both sides interspersed with neat settlements, together with the verdure of the fields and trees, afforded, with the addition of clear pleasant weather, as agreeable a prospect as the most lively imagination can conceive. 3

  Simply by bypassing enemy opposition in this way, Murray was able to sustain a steady progress toward Montréal and to avoid almost all loss of life in doing so. August 23 found the British fleet in the basin called Lac St.-Pierre, where the Richelieu River emptied into the St. Lawrence; at this point they were less than forty miles below Montréal. There, at last, the two Louisbourg regiments that had all the while been trailing them up the river finally joined Murray’s battalions, bringing the expedition’s fighting strength up to about four thousand men.

  On August 27, with French and Canadian troops watching impotently from either shore of the river, the fleet dropped anchor just below the island of Montréal. Against slight resistance, Murray landed troops on the south shore and on September 1 took possession of the parish of Varenne, just downriver from the town. Still he met no significant opposition; indeed, the most difficult task he faced was administering the oath of loyalty to the habitants and the deserting French and Canadian troops who flocked to his camp. Even so—perhaps because he remembered his last encounter with the chevalier de Lévis—he made no move to engage the enemy. Instead he contented himself with digging in and anticipating the arrival of Haviland and Amherst. James Murray was not a particularly patient man, but he would not have long to wait.4

  CHAPTER 43

  Conquest Completed VAUDREUIL SURRENDERS AT MONTRÉAL

  AUGUST 1760

  WILLIAM HAVILAND, the imperious forty-two-year-old brigadier who commanded the regulars and provincials who were to approach Montréal via Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River, had launched his expedition only on August 11, when Murray was already past the halfway point. For on
ce it was not the provincials who were at fault, for most of them had arrived at Crown Point by mid-June. Instead, the huge task of carrying provisions and stores forward from Albany had held up the campaign, as had the necessity of giving Amherst time to reach Oswego, from which his western expedition would descend the St. Lawrence. Amherst, guessing that Haviland’s small army would take about as long to besiege and take Île-aux-Noix as his larger force would require to make the passage from Oswego down the river, had ordered the two armies to jump off, as nearly as possible, simultaneously. Surprisingly, that almost happened: although it had been delayed by low water in the Mohawk, Amherst’s force managed to leave Oswego on August 10. Thus on the sixteenth, when Amherst’s bateaux and their escorts, the armed sloops Onondaga and Mohawk, were approaching the first obstacle in their path—Fort Lévis, Captain Pouchot’s island post at La Galette— Haviland’s men were disembarking opposite Fort Île-aux-Noix and preparing to open their siege.1

  Although Amherst and Haviland (the former with almost 11,000 men at his disposal after leaving behind garrisons for the Mohawk River posts and Fort Oswego, and the latter with 3,500 effectives) commanded forces much larger than either of their adversaries, their tasks were formidable ones. At Île-aux-Noix, the chevalier de Bougainville blocked Haviland’s advance with 1,450 men in an island fort that dominated the Richelieu River. The French had prepared to receive the invaders by building temporary dams and flooding the land on either shore to a depth of two or three feet, while a schooner and a radeau lay moored just below the island to prevent the British from attempting to run their floating battery, the Ligonier, past the fort. Similarly, on the St. Lawrence, the ingenious Captain Pouchot had had enough time to fortify an island at the head of an imposing stretch of rapids. Although he had only about three hundred men under his command, the situation of this stout little fort and Pouchot’s thoroughness in preparing its defenses meant that Amherst could not simply pass it by. Like Haviland, he would have to carry out one last complicated siege before he could pass on toward Montréal.2

  In the end, although the two sieges were conducted under dissimilar circumstances, they lasted about equally long. Haviland opened his batteries against Île-aux-Noix on the nineteenth, and shelled the fort relentlessly until Bougainville evacuated it on the night of August 27–28. Punishing as it had been, it was not Haviland’s bombardment that had made him abandon the post, but a raid on the twenty-fifth in which the British seized the schooner and radeau moored below the island. Without these, and lacking any other way to deny the British passage down the Richelieu, Bougainville could only withdraw overland toward Montréal and join forces with Bourlamaque on the south shore of the St. Lawrence.

  Haviland, like Amherst a systematic commander, took his time in following Bougainville, securing his conquests as he went; but it was only caution that slowed his advance. Rather than defend the two remaining forts on the Richelieu, St.-Jean and Chambly, Bougainville ordered them burned. Thus, impeded less by force of arms than by the necessity of taking oaths of allegiance from the habitants and deserters who poured into his camps to surrender, Haviland marched overland for the St. Lawrence. On September 3 his messengers reached Murray at Varenne, advising him to expect the southern army in two or at most three days.

  Meanwhile Amherst had forced the surrender of Fort Lévis, but only after Pouchot’s tiny garrison had held up his huge army for a week. Then, with typical care, Amherst repaired the battered fort (which he renamed William Augustus in Cumberland’s honor) and refitted his gunboats before pressing on to face the deadliest obstacles to his progress: the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence. Twenty-one redcoats and provincials had been killed in the siege of Fort Lévis; four times that number drowned before Amherst’s boats had shot the last of the white water that lay between the fort and Montréal. Although irregulars would have found the army extremely vulnerable as it tried to negotiate the rapids, neither Canadian militiamen nor Indian warriors appeared to harass the British force. Thus even with time taken to repair damaged boats and to raise cannon that had fallen into the river, the western army encamped on Île Perrot near the mouth of the Ottawa River, virtually within sight of Montréal, on September 5. Like Murray and Haviland, Amherst found that the main impediments to his advance were the Canadians who flooded into his camps, begging his men to trade and his officers to administer the oath of allegiance.3

  Île-aux-Noix. This island, its fortifications, and its obstacles—chains stretched across the channels and flooded woods on either shore—posed the only serious tactical problem that Haviland had to face between Lake Champlain and Montréal. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  Amherst attacks Fort Lévis, August 16–26, 1760. This engraving, from Captain Pouchot’s Mémoires sur la dernière guerre de l’Amérique septentrionale entre la France et l’Angleterre (1781), shows the English shelling the fort from three vessels on the river, and batteries located on nearby islands and Pointe de Ganataragoin, upstream. The French battered two of the ships to hulks and held out until they had exhausted their ammunition. When Pouchot surrendered on August 26 his fort had been reduced to a heap of earth and splintered logs. He and his officers were sent to France as prisoners on parole in 1761. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  Within the jaws of the vise now closing on him, Lévis had pulled all his regulars back to defend Montréal—a site with none of Québec’s geographical advantages. As an island with enemy troops on three of its four sides, lacking any independent base of supply, Montréal would in any case have had little hope of withstanding a siege. The town’s “mean and inconsiderable” fortifications, however, made the task of defense a hopeless one even before the first enemy battery could be erected. Lying low to the river, the town was surrounded by a dry ditch, about eight feet deep, and a “slight wall of masonry, solely calculated to awe the . . . Indians.” At the northeast end, near the arsenal and boatyard, stood its pathetic excuse for a citadel—“only a Cavalier [an artificial hill, ten or twelve feet high] without a Parapet.” Most of the Canadian militiamen had already vanished; the regulars and troupes de la marine who were left, including the wounded and men too sick to stand, numbered perhaps four thousand.4

  And yet, as recently as the day before Amherst landed at Île Perrot, Lévis had continued to maintain substantial bodies of troops on the river’s southern bank, where they and the forces of Murray and Haviland eyed each other with the mutual respect of old adversaries. Lévis had thought he could still strike out against the invaders, if only he could secure the support of a few hundred Indian warriors. To that end he had summoned the chiefs of the local villages to a conference on September 4, at the settlement of La Prairie. Warriors from the pays d’en haut, of course, had not been much in evidence since 1757, but thus far the Catholic Indians of the St. Lawrence missions had remained steadfast allies. As Lévis was in the very midst of his appeal for help, however, an envoy from one of the upriver villages arrived, stepped into the council circle, and announced that his people had concluded peace with Amherst’s army, which would be arriving as soon as the next day. Nothing more needed to be said. “In a moment [the chiefs] dispersed leaving M. le Chevalier de Lévis with the [other] officers quite alone.” Thereafter the grim Gascon could only prepare to make his last stand. By the morning of the fifth, he had withdrawn all his remaining forces to the island of Montréal, where they made ready to defend what little was left of New France against an enemy they knew they could not stop.5

  The outcome of Lévis’s last Indian conference demonstrated that, man for man, the most valuable component of Amherst’s army was the one that Amherst most despised and distrusted: the seven hundred Iroquois warriors who had accompanied him from Oswego. Amherst had been outraged at the size of the present Sir William Johnson had thought necessary to secure their cooperation—£17,000 worth of goods and cash—and had never believed they were anything but an expensive, savage nuisance
. Thus he, like every British general who served in America except John Forbes, failed to grasp the Indians’ real significance. Wherever his army appeared at a mission village—as, for example, at the mission of La Présentation near Fort Lévis—the mere presence of the Iroquois, and their testimony to the benefits of alliance with the British, gave enough weight to Sir William’s offers of amnesty and trade to procure not only peace but active support for the invaders. Through the whole of Amherst’s expedition, therefore, the very Indian villages that had always furnished New France with its most loyal auxiliaries actually expedited the British advance. Caughnawaga Mohawks guided Amherst’s army through the rapids from La Présentation onward. Amherst barely acknowledged their help, but this service undoubtedly saved scores, if not hundreds, of his soldiers’ lives.6