1757, 1758
A Winter of Discontent
Loudon, on his way back from Halifax, was at sea off the coast of Nova
Scotia when a despatch-boat from Governor Pownall of Massachusetts
startled him with news that Fort William Henry was attacked; and a few
days after he learned by another boat that the fort was taken and the
capitulation "inhumanly and villanously broken." On this he sent Webb
orders to hold the enemy in check without risking a battle till he
should himself arrive. "I am on the way," these were his words, "with a
force sufficient to turn the scale, with God's assistance; and then I
hope we shall teach the French to comply with the laws of nature and
humanity. For although I abhor barbarity, the knowledge I have of Mr.
Vaudreuil's behavior when in Louisiana, from his own letters in my
possession, and the murders committed at Oswego and now at Fort William
Henry, will oblige me to make those gentlemen sick of such inhuman
villany whenever it is in my power." He reached New York on the last day
of August, and heard that the French had withdrawn. He nevertheless sent
his troops up the Hudson, thinking, he says, that he might still attack
Ticonderoga; a wild scheme, which he soon abandoned, if he ever
seriously entertained it.[527]
[Footnote 527: _Loudon to Webb, 20 Aug. 1757. London to Holdernesse,
Oct. 1757. Loudon to Pownall, 16_ [_18?_] _Aug. 1757_. A passage in this
last letter, in which Loudon says that he shall, if prevented by
head-winds from getting into New York, disembark the troops on Long
Island, is perverted by that ardent partisan, William Smith, the
historian of New York, into the absurd declaration "that he should
encamp on Long Island for the defence of the continent."]
Webb had remained at Fort Edward in mortal dread of attack. Johnson had
joined him with a band of Mohawks; and on the day when Fort William
Henry surrendered there had been some talk of attempting to throw
succors into it by night. Then came the news of its capture; and now,
when it was too late, tumultuous mobs of militia came pouring in from
the neighboring provinces. In a few days thousands of them were
bivouacked on the fields about Fort Edward, doing nothing, disgusted
and mutinous, declaring that they were ready to fight, but not to lie
still without tents, blankets, or kettles. Webb writes on the fourteenth
that most of those from New York had deserted, threatening to kill their
officers if they tried to stop them. Delancey ordered them to be fired
upon. A sergeant was shot, others were put in arrest, and all was
disorder till the seventeenth; when Webb, learning that the French were
gone, sent them back to their homes.[528]
[Footnote 528: _Delancey to_ [_Holdernesse?_], _24 Aug. 1757._]
Close on the fall of Fort William Henry came crazy rumors of disaster,
running like wildfire through the colonies. The number and ferocity of
the enemy were grossly exaggerated; there was a cry that they would
seize Albany and New York itself;[529] while it was reported that Webb,
as much frightened as the rest, was for retreating to the Highlands of
the Hudson.[530] This was the day after the capitulation, when a part
only of the militia had yet appeared. If Montcalm had seized the moment,
and marched that afternoon to Fort Edward, it is not impossible that in
the confusion he might have carried it by a _coup-de-main._
[Footnote 529: _Captain Christie to Governor Wentworth, 11 Aug. 1757.
Ibid., to Governor Pownall, same date._]
[Footnote 530: Smith, _Hist. N.Y._, Part II. 254.]
Here was an opportunity for Vaudreuil, and he did not fail to use it.
Jealous of his rival's exploit, he spared no pains to tarnish it;
complaining that Montcalm had stopped half way on the road to success,
and, instead of following his instructions, had contented himself with
one victory when he should have gained two. But the Governor had
enjoined upon him as a matter of the last necessity that the Canadians
should be at their homes before September to gather the crops, and he
would have been the first to complain had the injunction been
disregarded. To besiege Fort Edward was impossible, as Montcalm had no
means of transporting cannon thither; and to attack Webb without them
was a risk which he had not the rashness to incur.
It was Bougainville who first brought Vaudreuil the news of the success
on Lake George. A day or two after his arrival, the Indians, who had
left the army after the massacre, appeared at Montreal, bringing about
two hundred English prisoners. The Governor rebuked them for breaking
the capitulation, on which the heathen savages of the West declared that
it was not their fault, but that of the converted Indians, who, in
fact, had first raised the war-whoop. Some of the prisoners were
presently bought from them at the price of two kegs of brandy each; and
the inevitable consequences followed.
"I thought," writes Bougainville, "that the Governor would have told
them they should have neither provisions nor presents till all the
English were given up; that he himself would have gone to their huts and
taken the prisoners from them; and that the inhabitants would be
forbidden, under the severest penalties, from selling or giving them
brandy. I saw the contrary; and my soul shuddered at the sights my eyes
beheld. On the fifteenth, at two o'clock, in the presence of the whole
town, they killed one of the prisoners, put him into the kettle, and
forced his wretched countrymen to eat of him." The Intendant Bigot, the
friend of the Governor, confirms this story; and another French writer
says that they "compelled mothers to eat the flesh of their
children."[531] Bigot declares that guns, canoes, and other presents
were given to the Western tribes before they left Montreal; and he adds,
"they must be sent home satisfied at any cost." Such were the pains
taken to preserve allies who were useful chiefly through the terror
inspired by their diabolical cruelties. This time their ferocity cost
them dear. They had dug up and scalped the corpses in the graveyard of
Fort William Henry, many of which were remains of victims of the
small-pox; and the savages caught the disease, which is said to have
made great havoc among them.[532]
[Footnote 531: "En chemin faisant et même en entrant à Montréal ils les
ont mangés et fait manger aux autres prisonniers." _Bigot au Ministre,
24 Août, 1757._
"Des sauvages out fait manger aux mères la chair de leurs enfants."
_Jugement impartial sur les Opérations militaires en Canada_. A French
diary kept in Canada at this time, and captured at sea, is cited by
Hutchinson as containing similar statements.]
[Footnote 532: One of these corpses was that of Richard Rogers, brother
of the noted partisan Robert Rogers. He had died of small-pox some time
before. Rogers, _Journals_, 55, _note_.]
Vaudreuil, in reporting what he calls "my capture of Fort William
Henry," takes great credit to himself for his "generous procedures"
towards the English prisoners; alluding, it seems, to his having bought
some of them from the Indians with the brandy which was sure to cause
the murder of others.[533] His obsequiousness to his red allies did not
cease with permitting them to kill and devour before his eyes those whom
he was bound in honor and duty to protect. "He let them do what they
pleased," says a French contemporary; "they were seen roaming about
Montreal, knife in hand, threatening everybody, and often insulting
those they met. When complaint was made, he said nothing. Far from it;
instead of reproaching them, he loaded them with gifts, in the belief
that their cruelty would then relent."[534]
[Footnote 533: _Vaudreuil au Ministre, 15 Sept. 1757._]
[Footnote 534: _Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760._]
Nevertheless, in about a fortnight all, or nearly all, the surviving
prisoners were bought out of their clutches; and then, after a final
distribution of presents and a grand debauch at La Chine, the whole
savage rout paddled for their villages.
The campaign closed in November with a partisan exploit on the Mohawk.
Here, at a place called German Flats, on the farthest frontier, there
was a thriving settlement of German peasants from the Palatinate, who
were so ill-disposed towards the English that Vaudreuil had had good
hope of stirring them to revolt, while at the same time persuading their
neighbors, the Oneida Indians, to take part with France.[535] As his
measures to this end failed, he resolved to attack them. Therefore, at
three o'clock in the morning of the twelfth of November, three hundred
colony troops, Canadians and Indians, under an officer named Belêtre,
wakened the unhappy peasants by a burst of yells, and attacked the small
picket forts which they had built as places of refuge. These were taken
one by one and set on fire. The sixty dwellings of the settlement, with
their barns and outhouses, were all burned, forty or fifty of the
inhabitants were killed, and about three times that number, chiefly
women and children, were made prisoners, including Johan Jost Petrie,
the magistrate of the place. Fort Herkimer was not far off, with a
garrison of two hundred men under Captain Townshend, who at the first
alarm sent out a detachment too weak to arrest the havoc; while Belêtre,
unable to carry off his booty, set on his followers to the work of
destruction, killed a great number of hogs, sheep, cattle, and horses,
and then made a hasty retreat. Lord Howe, pushing up the river from
Schenectady with troops and militia, found nothing but an abandoned
slaughter-field. Vaudreuil reported the affair to the Court, and summed
up the results with pompous egotism: "I have ruined the plans of the
English; I have disposed the Five Nations to attack them; I have carried
consternation and terror into all those parts."[536]
[Footnote 535: _Dépêches de Vaudreuil, 1757._]
[Footnote 536: _Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 12
Fév. 1758. Ibid., 28 Nov. 1758._ Bougainville, _Journal. Summary of M.
de Belêtre's Campaign_, in _N.Y. Col. Docs._, X. 672. Extravagant
reports of the havoc made were sent to France. It was pretended that
three thousand cattle, three thousand sheep (Vaudreuil says four
thousand), and from five hundred to fifteen hundred horses were
destroyed, with other personal property to the amount of 1,500,000
livres. These official falsehoods are contradicted in a letter from
Quebec, _Daine au Maréchal de Belleisle, 19 Mai, 1758_. Levis says that
the whole population of the settlement, men, women, and children, was
not above three hundred.]
Montcalm, his summer work over, went to Montreal; and thence in
September to Quebec, a place more to his liking. "Come as soon as you
can," he wrote to Bourlamaque, "and I will tell a certain fair lady how
eager you are." Even Quebec was no paradise for him; and he writes again
to the same friend: "My heart and my stomach are both ill at ease, the
latter being the worse." To his wife he says: "The price of everything
is rising. I am ruining myself; I owe the treasurer twelve thousand
francs. I long for peace and for you. In spite of the public distress,
we have balls and furious gambling." In February he returned to Montreal
in a sleigh on the ice of the St. Lawrence,--a mode of travelling which
he describes as cold but delicious. Montreal pleased him less than ever,
especially as he was not in favor at what he calls the Court, meaning
the circle of the Governor-General. "I find this place so amusing," he
writes ironically to Bourlamaque, "that I wish Holy Week could be
lengthened, to give me a pretext for neither making nor receiving
visits, staying at home, and dining there almost alone. Burn all my
letters, as I do yours." And in the next week: "Lent and devotion have
upset my stomach and given me a cold; which does not prevent me from
having the Governor-General at dinner to-day to end his lenten fast,
according to custom here." Two days after he announces: "To-day a grand
dinner at Martel's; twenty-three persons, all big-wigs (_les grosses
perruques_); no ladies. We still have got to undergo those of Péan,
Deschambault, and the Chevalier de Lévis. I spend almost every evening
in my chamber, the place I like best, and where I am least bored."
With the opening spring there were changes in the modes of amusement.
Picnics began, Vaudreuil and his wife being often of the party, as too
was Lévis. The Governor also made visits of compliment at the houses of
the seigniorial proprietors along the river; "very much," says Montcalm,
as "Henri IV. did to the bourgeois notables of Paris. I live as usual,
fencing in the morning, dining, and passing the evening at home or at
the Governor's. Péan has gone up to La Chine to spend six days with the
reigning sultana [_Péan's wife, mistress of Bigot_]. As for me, my
_ennui_ increases. I don't know what to do, or say, or read, or where to
go; and I think that at the end of the next campaign I shall ask
bluntly, blindly, for my recall, only because I am bored."[537]
[Footnote 537: _Montcalm à Bourlamaque_, 22 _Mai_, 1758.]
His relations with Vaudreuil were a constant annoyance to him,
notwithstanding the mask of mutual civility. "I never," he tells his
mother, "ask for a place in the colony troops for anybody. You need not
be an Oedipus to guess this riddle. Here are four lines from
Corneille:--
"'Mon crime véritable est d'avoir aujourd'hui
Plus de nom que ... [_Vaudreuil_], plus de vertus que lui,
Et c'est de là que part cette secrète haine
Que le temps ne rendra que plus forte et plus pleine.'
Nevertheless I live here on good terms with everybody, and do my best to
serve the King. If they could but do without me; if they could but
spring some trap on me, or if I should happen to meet with some check!"
Vaudreuil meanwhile had written to the Court in high praise of Lévis,
hinting that he, and not Montcalm, ought to have the chief command.[538]
[Footnote 538: _Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 16 Sept. 1757.
Ibid., au Ministre de la Guerre, même date_.]
Under the hollow gayeties of the ruling class lay a great public
distress, which broke at last into riot. Towards midwinter no flour was
to be had in Montreal; and both soldiers and people were required to
accept a reduced ration, partly of horse-flesh. A mob gathered before
the Governor's house, and a deputation of women beset him, crying out
that the horse was the friend of man, and that religion forbade him to
be eaten. In reply he threatened them with imprisonment and hanging; but
with little effect, and the crowd dispersed, only to stir up the
soldiers quartered in the houses of the town. The colony regulars,
ill-disciplined at the best, broke into mutiny, and excited the
battalion of Béarn to join them. Vaudreuil was helpless; Montcalm was in
Quebec; and the task of dealing with the mutineers fell upon Lévis, who
proved equal to the crisis, took a high tone, threatened death to the
first soldier who should refuse horse-flesh, assured them at the same
time that he ate it every day himself, and by a characteristic mingling
of authority and tact, quelled the storm.[539]
[Footnote 539: Bougainville, _Journal. Montcalm à Mirepoix, 20 Avril,
1758_. Lévis, _Journal de la Guerre du Canada_.]
The prospects of the next campaign began to open. Captain Pouchot had
written from Niagara that three thousand savages were waiting to be let
loose against the English borders. "What a scourge!" exclaims
Bougainville. "Humanity groans at being forced to use such monsters.
What can be done against an invisible enemy, who strikes and vanishes,
swift as the lightning? It is the destroying angel." Captain Hebecourt
kept watch and ward at Ticonderoga, begirt with snow and ice, and much
plagued by English rangers, who sometimes got into the ditch
itself.[540] This was to reconnoitre the place in preparation for a
winter attack which Loudon had planned, but which, like the rest of his
schemes, fell to the ground.[541] Towards midwinter a band of these
intruders captured two soldiers and butchered some fifteen cattle close
to the fort, leaving tied to the horns of one of them a note addressed
to the commandant in these terms: "I am obliged to you, sir, for the
rest you have allowed me to take and the fresh meat you have sent me. I
shall take good care of my prisoners. My compliments to the Marquis of
Montcalm." Signed, Rogers.[542]
[Footnote 540: _Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 28 Mars, 1758_.]
[Footnote 541: _Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758_.]
[Footnote 542: _Journal de ce qui s'est passé en Canada, 1757, 1758_.
Compare Rogers, _Journals_, 72-75.]
A few weeks later Hebecourt had his revenge. About the middle of March a
report came to Montreal that a large party of rangers had been cut to
pieces a few miles from Ticonderoga, and that Rogers himself was among
the slain. This last announcement proved false; but the rangers had
suffered a crushing defeat. Colonel Haviland, commanding at Fort Edward,
sent a hundred and eighty of them, men and officers, on a scouting party
towards Ticonderoga; and Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche, of the
twenty-seventh regiment, joined them as volunteers, no doubt through a
love of hardy adventure, which was destined to be fully satisfied.
Rogers commanded the whole. They passed down Lake George on the ice
under cover of night, and then, as they neared the French outposts,
pursued their way by land behind Rogers Rock and the other mountains of
the western shore. On the preceding day, the twelfth of March, Hebecourt
had received a reinforcement of two hundred Mission Indians and a body
of Canadians. The Indians had no sooner arrived than, though nominally
Christians, they consulted the spirits, by whom they were told that the
English were coming. On this they sent out scouts, who came back
breathless, declaring that they had found a great number of snow-shoe
tracks. The superhuman warning being thus confirmed, the whole body of
Indians, joined by a band of Canadians and a number of volunteers from
the regulars, set out to meet the approaching enemy, and took their way
up the valley of Trout Brook, a mountain gorge that opens from the west
upon the valley of Ticonderoga.
Towards three o'clock on the afternoon of that day Rogers had reached a
point nearly west of the mountain that bears his name. The rough and
rocky ground was buried four feet in snow, and all around stood the gray
trunks of the forest, bearing aloft their skeleton arms and tangled
intricacy of leafless twigs. Close on the right was a steep hill, and at
a little distance on the left was the brook, lost under ice and snow. A
scout from the front told Rogers that a party of Indians was approaching
along the bed of the frozen stream, on which he ordered his men to halt,
face to that side, and advance cautiously. The Indians soon appeared,
and received a fire that killed some of them and drove back the rest in
confusion.
Not suspecting that they were but an advance-guard, about half the
rangers dashed in pursuit, and were soon met by the whole body of the
enemy. The woods rang with yells and musketry. In a few minutes some
fifty of the pursuers were shot down, and the rest driven back in
disorder upon their comrades. Rogers formed them all on the slope of the
hill; and here they fought till sunset with stubborn desperation, twice
repulsing the overwhelming numbers of the assailants, and thwarting all
their efforts to gain the heights in the rear. The combatants were often
not twenty yards apart, and sometimes they were mixed together. At
length a large body of Indians succeeded in turning the right flank of
the rangers. Lieutenant Phillips and a few men were sent by Rogers to
oppose the movement; but they quickly found themselves surrounded, and
after a brave defence surrendered on a pledge of good treatment. Rogers
now advised the volunteers, Pringle and Roche, to escape while there was
time, and offered them a sergeant as guide; but they gallantly resolved
to stand by him. Eight officers and more than a hundred rangers lay dead
and wounded in the snow. Evening was near and the forest was darkening
fast, when the few survivors broke and fled. Rogers with about twenty
followers escaped up the mountain; and gathering others about him, made
a running fight against the Indian pursuers, reached Lake George, not
without fresh losses, and after two days of misery regained Fort Edward
with the remnant of his band. The enemy on their part suffered heavily,
the chief loss falling on the Indians; who, to revenge themselves,
murdered all the wounded and nearly all the prisoners, and tying
Lieutenant Phillips and his men to trees, hacked them to pieces.
Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche had become separated from the other
fugitives; and, ignorant of woodcraft, they wandered by moonlight amid
the desolation of rocks and snow, till early in the night they met a man
whom they knew as a servant of Rogers, and who said that he could guide
them to Fort Edward. One of them had lost his snow-shoes in the fight;
and, crouching over a miserable fire of broken sticks, they worked till
morning to make a kind of substitute with forked branches, twigs, and a
few leather strings. They had no hatchet to cut firewood, no blankets,
no overcoats, and no food except part of a Bologna sausage and a little
ginger which Pringle had brought with him. There was no game; not even a
squirrel was astir; and their chief sustenance was juniper-berries and
the inner bark of trees. But their worst calamity was the helplessness
of their guide. His brain wandered; and while always insisting that he
knew the country well, he led them during four days hither and thither
among a labyrinth of nameless mountains, clambering over rocks, wading
through snowdrifts, struggling among fallen trees, till on the fifth day
they saw with despair that they had circled back to their own
starting-point. On the next morning, when they were on the ice of Lake
George, not far from Rogers Rock, a blinding storm of sleet and snow
drove in their faces. Spent as they were, it was death to stop; and
bending their heads against the blast, they fought their way forward,
now on the ice, and now in the adjacent forest, till in the afternoon
the storm ceased, and they found themselves on the bank of an unknown
stream. It was the outlet of the lake; for they had wandered into the
valley of Ticonderoga, and were not three miles from the French fort.
In crossing the torrent Pringle lost his gun, and was near losing his
life. All three of the party were drenched to the skin; and, becoming
now for the first time aware of where they were, they resolved on
yielding themselves prisoners to save their lives. Night, however, again
found them in the forest. Their guide became delirious, saw visions of
Indians all around, and, murmuring incoherently, straggled off a little
way, seated himself in the snow, and was soon dead. The two officers,
themselves but half alive, walked all night round a tree to keep the
blood in motion. In the morning, again toiling on, they presently saw
the fort across the intervening snowfields, and approached it, waving a
white handkerchief. Several French officers dashed towards them at full
speed, and reached them in time to save them from the clutches of the
Indians, whose camps were near at hand. They were kindly treated,
recovered from the effects of their frightful ordeal, and were
afterwards exchanged. Pringle lived to old age, and died in 1800, senior
major-general of the British army.[543]
[Footnote 543: Rogers, two days after reaching Fort Edward, made a
detailed report of the fight, which was printed in the _New Hampshire
Gazette_ and other provincial papers. It is substantially incorporated
in his published _Journals_, which also contain a long letter from
Pringle to Colonel Haviland, dated at Carillon (Ticonderoga), 28 March,
and giving an excellent account of his and Roche's adventures. It was
sent by a flag of truce, which soon after arrived from Fort Edward with
a letter for Vaudreuil. The French accounts of the fight are _Hebecourt
à [Vaudreuil?], 15 Mars, 1758. Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, 10
Avril, 1758_. Bougainville, _Journal. Relation de l'Affaire de Roger, 19
Mars_, 1758. _Autre Relation, même date_. Lévis, _Journal_. According to
Lévis, the French force consisted of 250 Indians and Canadians, and a
number of officers, cadets, and soldiers. Roger puts it at 700. Most of
the French writers put the force of the rangers, correctly, at about
180. Rogers reports his loss at 125. None of the wounded seem to have
escaped, being either murdered after the fight, or killed by exposure in
the woods. The Indians brought in 144 scalps, having no doubt divided
some of them, after their ingenious custom. Rogers threw off his
overcoat during the fight, and it was found on the field, with his
commission in the pocket; whence the report of his death. There is an
unsupported tradition that he escaped by sliding on his snow-shoes down
a precipice of Rogers Rock.]