Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  4. Expenses of retaining and enlisting soldiers: JHRM, 36:113–14 (7 Nov. 1759), 191 (24 Jan. 1760); 37, part 1 (1760–61); 11 (30 May 1760). The men who remained at Louisbourg stood to make sizable sums, especially if they acted as artificers, which was the case with both Clough and Jonathan Procter (another private in the same regiment). Procter earned sixty-three pounds, five shillings lawful money in his twenty months at Louisbourg, including bounties, wages, and additional compensation for his work as a carpenter. During that time he spent about thirteen pounds, so Procter ended his service with fifty pounds in his pocket—a remarkable sum for a man who, even at the high wartime wages civilian artisans commanded in the Bay Colony, could have earned no more than forty-five pounds for the same period at home, and who would as well have had to purchase his own lodging, food, and clothing, items supplied as part of his ordinary compensation while on active duty. See “Diary Kept at Louisbourg, 1759–1760, by Jonathan Procter of Danvers,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 70 (1934): 31–57.

  5. Gipson, Victorious Years, 445–6. The figure of four thousand for Massachusetts is from Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, vol. 3 (1936; reprint, New York, 1970), 58. The evident shortfall in Massachusetts’s contribution probably stems from the way Hutchinson counted them, as 3,300 having enlisted for general service and 700 having remained in service at Louisbourg. Unlike the other northern provinces, the Bay Colony also garrisoned forts on its own, including Castle William in Boston, a chain of forts along the western and northern frontiers of the province, and Forts Shirley, Western, and Pownall in Maine. Since these were manned and commanded entirely by provincials, they were not counted as part of the general service (i.e., as soldiers placed at the disposal of the commander in chief). This was, however, a distinction lost on the members of the General Court, who saw all the province’s troops as equal in expense and importance, regardless of where and under whose command they had been placed. Thus by the reckoning of the General Court, if not that of Hutchinson or Amherst, the province met (indeed exceeded) the 5,000-man quota to which it initially agreed.

  Finally, a word on the slowness of the provincials to arrive at their points of rendezvous for the campaigns, which was a matter of constant complaint for the commanders in chief from Braddock onward. At least in the later years of the war this was probably less a function of the reluctance of men to serve than of two other factors: the need to complete the spring planting, which afforded good wages to plowmen and rural laborers, and therefore delayed their enlistments; and the ability of men who intended to serve to wait until the government announced the impressment quotas of each militia regiment, and then to sell their services to the impressed men as substitutes. Because each of the provinces had statutes authorizing men to be drafted from the militia if enlistment quotas were not met voluntarily, impressment was routinely undertaken to fill out the last vacancies in the ranks. Because the decision on who would be drafted was left to local militia officers, however, the impressed men were not always, or even generally, the vagrants and unmarried men singled out by the statutes as the proper targets. Rather militia officers tended to impress men who had the money to hire substitutes to take their places. This in turn meant that men—and especially veterans like Rufus Putnam, who hired himself out as a substitute in 1759—would wait to strike a bargain with an impressed man (or men, since two or more draftees would sometimes pool their resources to hire a substitute), and then enlist on his behalf. Because the hired man was technically a volunteer, he was entitled to all the normal bounties as well as his wages.

  Although it is difficult to know precisely what the going rate for substitutes was in the later years of the war, there would seem to be no doubt that a vigorous secondary market had arisen in military labor by 1758. As the war continued to demand more and more men and as bounties rose, so must the price needed to hire substitutes have risen; but as these were private transactions, we have no systematic evidence on the costs involved. The only documented case of which I have direct knowledge is that of Rufus Putnam, who in 1759 agreed to serve on behalf of Moses Leland of Sutton, in return for fourteen pounds thirteen shillings lawful money—a sum one shilling higher than the maximum bounty offered in that year (see Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam [Boston, 1903], 25 n. 1). As a result of this bargain, Putnam in 1759 would have earned in excess of forty-four pounds lawful money for his service not counting the additional wages he received as an artificer and the increment he received when he was promoted to orderly sergeant. Thus unless Putnam’s case represents an aberration—and there is no reason to suspect that it does—there were substantial economic incentives to delay enlisting, even in the years of high bounties: inducements that would have virtually guaranteed that the provincials would be slow to be raised and slow to appear in the field.

  6. This highly conservative approximation is based upon figures in Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 118–19. Main shows that between 1756 and the end of 1759 the price of oxen on the hoof rose by 71 percent; of cows, by 33 percent; of pork, by 50 percent. The price of sheep during the same years doubled—a probable result not of demand for meat, but for wool, in high demand for the blankets that were issued as a part of the bounty in every province through every year of the war.

  7. Hutchinson, History, 3:57. One good indicator of the prosperity that had overtaken the province was that one of the taxes laid to pay for the war was an excise on three prime consumer products, “Tea, Coffee and China-Ware.” See JHRM, 36:111–12 (6 Nov. 1759).

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: The Insufficiency of Valor: Lévis and Vauquelin at Québec

  1. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 434–5.

  2. On Lévis’s plans and the difficult but far from hopeless state of Canada’s defenses, see esp. George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 242–4.

  3. Ibid., 244–5 (quotation at 244).

  4. Stanley, New France, 245–6; Gipson, Victorious Years, 438 n. 40. When the French landed at Pointe aux Trembles, a bateau had overturned, dumping a man into the frigid water; he scrambled onto an ice floe, floated downriver, and was fished out by the British, to whom he revealed the approach of Lévis’s army.

  5. Murray to Pitt, 25 May 1760, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:292.

  6. Gipson, Victorious Years, 432–4, 428.

  7. Quotations: Murray to Pitt, 25 May 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:292. Murray takes the field: Stanley, New France, 246–7; Gipson, Victorious Years, 438–9.

  8. This account of the battle follows Stanley, New France, 246–8; Gipson, Victorious Years, 438–9; and Murray to Pitt, 25 May 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:291–7.

  9. Quotation: Lt. Malcolm Fraser, Journal of the Operations before Quebec, quoted in Stanley, New France, 297 n. 15. (Fraser concluded that Murray was “possessed of several virtues, and particularly the military ones, except prudence.”) Artillery duel: ibid., 248–9.

  10. On the destruction of the Bordeaux convoy, see Gipson, Victorious Years, 436–7; Stanley, New France, 259–61; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 113; Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 220–1; and Alexander, Lord Colville, to Pitt, 12 Sept. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:333–4.

  11. Desandrouins quotation: Stanley, New France, 259. Vauquelin: ibid., 172, 250; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, s.v. “Vauquelin, Jean.” Before the Atalante ran out of ammunition her crew sank one of the two frigates that it had engaged, H.M.S. Lowestoft. Captain Vauquelin recovered from his wounds, was later released from British custody, and returned to French service. H
e participated in attempts to establish colonies in Guiana and on Madagascar until his death in 1772. A commoner, he never advanced beyond the rank of lieutenant commander. A better measure of his skills as a naval officer than his promotion record can be found in the comment of Admiral Boscawen, who declared at Louisbourg—after Vauquelin had given his own captains the slip—that if the Frenchman had been one of his officers, he would have put him in command of a ship of the line.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: Murray Ascends the St. Lawrence

  1. Capt. John Knox, The Siege of Quebec and the Campaigns in North America, 1757–1760, ed. Brian Connell (Mississauga, Ont., 1980), 262–5; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 458.

  2. Knox, Siege of Quebec, 267–8.

  3. Ibid., 268.

  4. Gipson, Victorious Years, 457–61; George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 251–3.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: Conquest Completed: Vaudreuil Surrenders at Montréal

  1. “Samuel Jenks, His Journall of the Campaign in 1760,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 25 (1890): 353–68 (entries of 22 May–16 Aug. 1760); Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 449–50.

  2. George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 256.

  3. Gipson, Victorious Years, 461–2.

  4. Fortifications: Capt. John Knox, The Siege of Quebec and the Campaigns in North America, 1757–1760, ed. Brian Connell (Mississauga, Ont., 1980), 301; “Plan of the Town and Fortifications of Montreal or Ville Marie in Canada,” in Gipson, Victorious Years, facing 463. Defenders’ strength: Amherst to Pitt, 4 Oct. 1760, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:336.

  5. Indians abandon French alliance: Journal de Lévis, quoted in Gipson, Victorious Years, 462.

  6. Stanley, New France, 257.

  7. Amherst never grasped this fact; in his official reports he mentioned the Indians only to compliment Johnson for having restrained them from the savagery he expected. See Amherst to Pitt, 8 Sept. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:332. It is also worth noting that while Amherst believed procuring Iroquois warriors was inordinately expensive—he had laid out gifts that came to a penny or two over twenty-four pounds New York currency for each warrior—they cost almost exactly as much, per man, as provincials from Connecticut (twenty-four pounds nineteen shillings) and Massachusetts (twenty-six pounds four shillings) who participated in the campaign (Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut [New Haven, Conn., 1990], 151, 152; Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984], 226). Like his predecessors, Amherst never understood that the scarcity of labor in America meant that soldiers would necessarily be expensive. Since the Iroquois warriors represented a majority of the male population of the Six Nations, they were actually an infinitely bigger bargain than Amherst knew.

  8. “Samuel Jenks, His Journall,” 376–7 (entries of 6 and 7 Sept. 1760).

  9. Amherst’s journal, quoted in Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 216.

  10. Proposed conditions: Gipson, Victorious Years, 464; Gustave Lanctot, A History of Canada, vol. 3, From the Treaty of Utrecht to the Treaty of Paris, 1713–1763 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 181–2. Terms as finally agreed: ibid., 225–36.

  11. “Must lay down their arms”: “Articles of Capitulation of Montreal,” article 1, ibid., 225. “The infamous part”: Knox, Siege of Quebec, 289, quoting Amherst’s reply to M. de la Pause, a French officer, who protested “the too rigorous article” that denied the honors of war. Money was also an important element in the officers’ anger, for their inability to serve during the war would place them on half-pay for the duration—a huge personal loss, since an infantry captain received only ninety-five livres per month and typically parlayed that pittance into a respectable salary by collecting the wages of nonexistent men carried on his company roll. Article 1 thus doomed to poverty every officer who lacked independent means of support (Lee Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Military Organization and Administration [Durham, N.C., 1967], 70, 96 n. 39).

  12. Amherst to Pitt, 4 Oct. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:335.

  13. Amherst’s journal, quoted in J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst (New York, 1933), 135.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: The Causes of Victory and the Experience of Empire

  1. Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 125–6 (quotation, from an anonymous officer’s letter, 12 June 1758, at 125); and id., “The Adaptation of the British Army to Wilderness Warfare, 1755–1763,” in Maarten Ultee, ed., Adapting to Conditions: War and Society in the Eighteenth Century (University, Ala., 1986), 71–4.

  2. Ibid.

  3. The significance of so many forts and the roads that connected them has been more often remarked upon than analyzed for its significance in American history. For a stimulating attempt to come to terms with the topic, see John Keegan, Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (New York, 1996).

  4. Amherst to Pitt, 4 Oct. 1760, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:335–8.

  5. “Samuel Jenks, His Journall of the Campaign in 1760,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 24 (1889): 373 (entry of 28 Aug. 1760), 378 (9 Sept.), 382 ff. (e.g., 28 Sept.: two-thirds of the provincials sick, and smallpox spreading rapidly), 386 (27 Oct.), 387 (31 Oct.), 389 (16 Nov.: Haviland’s broken leg).

  6. “Extracts from Gibson Clough’s Journal,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 3 (1861): 201 (entry of 1 Jan. 1761).

  7. “Deprived of the honour”: Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam (Boston, 1903), 34 (entry spanning 22 June–19 Nov. 1760). “And now”: E. C. Dawes, ed., Journal of Gen. Rufus Putnam, Kept in Northern New York during Four Campaigns of the Old French and Indian War, 1757–1760 (Albany, 1886), 103 (1 Dec. 1760).

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: Pitt Confronts an Unexpected Challenge

  1. Pitt to Amherst, 24 Oct. 1760, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissionersin America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:344; Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 274–5.

  2. Pitt to Amherst, 24 Oct. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:344–7. Amherst, whose wife had begun an irreversible descent into madness, longed to return to England and had begged to be relieved of command since Louisbourg. Pitt, to whom Amherst’s personal troubles were meaningless, had always demurred.

  3. Reginald Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1966), 201–82 and app. 13, 477–8.

  4. Ludwig Reiners, Frederick the Great: A Biography, trans. Lawrence P. R. Wilson (New York, 1960), 208–11.

  5. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 144–56.

  6. Gipson, Culmination, 159–62.

  7. Ibid., 166–71.

  8. On Pitt’s views of the war in Europe, and his insistence on the Belleisle venture, see Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 165–9.

  9. Walpole to George Montague, 26 Oct. 1760, in Paget Toynbee, ed., The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1903), 43
9.

  10. J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (Boston, 1975), 95.

  PART VII: VEXED VICTORY, 1761-1763 CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN:

  The Cherokee War and Amherst’s Reforms in Indian Policy

  1. Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New York, 1993), 5–16; also David Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival, 1740–62 (Norman, Okla., 1962), 3–12. “As many as seven hundred warriors” reflects Forbes’s estimate, based on provision requirements; Corkran estimates that about 450 served (ibid., 146), while Hatley places the number at “three hundred or more” (Dividing Paths, 100).

  2. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 157–9. Thirty deaths must be regarded as a lower-bound estimate. John Richard Alden, in John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier (1944; reprint, New York, 1966), suggests that thirty men were killed from the Lower Towns only (79 n. 15); Gov. William Henry Lyttelton reported in Oct. 1758 that thirty had been killed in the vicinity of Winchester, Virginia, alone (Hatley, Dividing Paths, 100, 268 n. 51).