Expulsion of the Acadians--A Cruel Deportation--The Marquis De Montcalm
--The Fort William Henry Massacre--Defeat of Abercrombie--William
Pitt Prosecutes the War Vigorously--Fort Duquesne Reduced--Louisburg
Again Captured--Wolfe Attacks Quebec--Battle of the Plains of Abraham
--Wolfe and Montcalm Mortally Wounded--Quebec Surrenders--New France a
Dream of the Past--Pontiac's War.
American history contains no sadder story than the expulsion of the
Acadians, or French settlers of Nova Scotia. The act may have been
justifiable on the ground of military necessity; the Acadians were not
loyal subjects, and they would have eagerly welcomed the expulsion of the
British from North America. Indeed their conduct might have been
construed as treasonable, and the English had ground for regarding them
as enemies of the British crown. Their dispersion weakened the French
cause at a time when that cause seemed in the ascendant, and when
Braddock's unavenged defeat had reanimated the French with the hope of
driving the English from America. Yet even if the deportation of the
Acadians was required by the supreme law of self-preservation, and
justifiable on the ground of their more than merely passive disloyalty,
the manner of that deportation could not be justified. The separation of
families, many of them never reunited, was a crime against humanity; the
conversion of an honest, industrious and thrifty peasantry into a host of
penniless vagrants, scattered like Ishmaelites through hostile colonies,
was a wrong as cruel as it was unnecessary. Colonized in South Carolina
or Georgia, the Acadians could hardly have been a menace to the power of
Great Britain, while the Huguenot element in those regions, understanding
the Acadian tongue, would have kept watch and ward against possible
disloyalty. It is a pathetic feature of this most painful episode that
the Huguenots, themselves driven out of France by the merciless tyranny
of a Roman Catholic king, gave kindly relief to such Roman Catholic
exiles from Acadia as were cast among them. They proved their true
Christian spirit by returning good for evil. About six thousand of the
Acadians were deported from their native land, and scattered the length
and breadth of the English colonies. Many made their way to Louisiana,
then a French possession, and their descendants still form a distinct
class in that State. Some even sought refuge among the Indians, and found
the barbarian kinder than their civilized persecutors. Longfellow's poem,
"Evangeline," is based on the touching story of Acadia. The French cause
was greatly strengthened by the arrival in 1756 of the Marquis de
Montcalm, a distinguished soldier, to take command of the French forces
in Canada. Montcalm displayed not only courage and skill, but humanity
likewise, in the management of his campaigns, and history relieves him of
responsibility for the horrid massacre by Indians of the captured English
garrison of Fort William Henry, after a safe escort to Fort Edward had
been promised to the captives. The facts are that both British and French
used the Indians as allies regardless of their savage practices, but that
the French, as at Fort Duquesne, showed less ability to restrain the
savages after a victory. In the following summer--1758--Montcalm
inflicted a most disastrous defeat at Ticonderoga on fifteen thousand
British and colonial troops, led by General Abercrombie. The French force
numbered only four thousand French and Indians. The English attempted to
carry the works by assault, without the aid of artillery, and were mowed
down by the fire of the French posted behind insuperable barriers. The
English loss was about two thousand, while that of the French was
inconsiderable. This was the last important success of the French in
America. A master hand had seized the helm in Great Britain.
William Pitt, the "Great Commoner," determined upon a vigorous
prosecution of the war in America. General John Forbes was sent, in 1758,
with about nine thousand men to reduce Fort Duquesne. The illness which
caused his death in the following year may be fairly accepted in excuse
and explanation of the incompetent management of the expedition, and its
almost fatal delays. Fortunately the French appeared to have lost the
vigor and daring which they had displayed in the defeat of Braddock, and
the sullen roar of an explosion, when the British troops were within a
few miles of Duquesne, gave notice that it had been abandoned without a
blow. General Forbes changed the name of the place to Fort Pitt, in honor
of that illustrious minister to whose energetic direction of affairs was
largely due the expulsion of the French arms from North America. When
Westminster Abbey shall have crumbled over the tombs of Britain's heroes,
and the House of Hanover shall have joined the misty dynasties of the
past, Pittsburg will remain a monument, growing in grandeur with the
progress of ages, to England's great statesman of the eighteenth century.
Louisburg also fell in 1758, and in the following year the English
prepared to end the struggle by an attack on Quebec. Pitt placed at the
head of the expedition a young general, James Wolfe, who had
distinguished himself at the capture of Louisburg. Wolfe had about eight
thousand troops under a convoy of twenty-two line-of-battleships, and as
many frigates and smaller armed vessels. Montcalm defended the city with
about seven thousand Frenchmen and Indians. The heights on which the
upper town of Quebec was situated, rising almost perpendicularly at one
point of three hundred feet above the river, and extending back in a
lofty plateau called the Plains of Abraham, seemed to defy successful
attack. Wolfe spent the summer in fruitless efforts to reduce Quebec. At
length he learned that the precipice fronting on the river and supposed
to be impassable, could be scaled at a point a short distance above the
town, where a narrow ravine gave access to the plateau. On the evening of
September 12, the British vessels, loaded with troops, floated with the
inflowing tide some distance up the river. Then past midnight, while the
sky was black with clouds, the ships silently and undetected by the
French floated down to the designated landing-place. The troops were
taken on shore in flat-bottomed boats, with muffled oars. At dawn
Lieutenant-Colonel William Howe led the advance up the ravine, drove back
the guard at the summit, and protected the ascent of the army. The
garrison and people of Quebec awoke to see the redcoats in battle array
on the Plains of Abraham. Montcalm soon confronted the British. Both of
the heroic commanders knew and felt all that was at stake on the fate of
the day, and they both fought with a courage that gave a splendid example
to their men. Wolfe, twice wounded, continued to give orders until
mortally wounded he fell. Montcalm fell nearly at the same time, mortally
wounded, and his troops, already wavering before the irresistible onset
of the British, broke and fled. When told that death was near, "So much
the better," said Montcalm, "I will not live to see the surrender of
Quebec." "Now, God be praised, I will die in peace," said the English
commander, on hearing that victory was assured. Quebec was surrendered a
few days later. Forts Niagara and Ticonderoga had already fallen.
Spain, having taken side with France, lost Cuba and the Philippine
Islands to the English, but in the treaty of Paris of 1763, England gave
those islands to Spain and received Florida in exchange. France ceded to
Spain, in order to compensate that power for the loss of Florida, the
city of New Orleans, and all the vast and indefinite territory known as
Louisiana, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the unexplored regions
of the northwest. New France was a dream of the past.
The French policy in America had one essential and fatal feature. The
French came more as a garrison than as colonists. They came to govern,
rather than possess the land, to rule, but not to supplant the natives of
the soil. This policy insured some immediate strength, because the
Indians were naturally less jealous of Europeans who did not threaten
their hunting-grounds. On the other hand the ultimate failure of such a
course was inevitable, in dealing as rivals and antagonists with a people
who had come to possess the land, to drive out the Indian, to make the
New World their home and a heritage for their descendants. The English
settlers might be driven back for a time; their cabins might be turned
into ashes, and the tomahawk and scalping-knife leave dire evidence of
savage vengeance and Gallic inhumanity. But the rally was as certain as
the raid was sudden. A garrison might be massacred; a colony could not be
exterminated, and the defeats of Braddock and Abercrombie only burned
into English breasts the resolution to tear down forever on the American
continent the flag which floated over the evidence of England's dishonor.
The Algonquin Indians, who had regarded the French as allies and
protectors, were now left to defend themselves against the English.
Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas, conceived the idea of inducing all the
tribes to unite in a general attack upon the English settlements as a
last desperate resort to stay the advance of the whites. Pontiac is
supposed to have led the Ottawas who assisted the French in defeating
Braddock, and he perhaps underrated the power and prowess of his British
antagonists. He was an able chieftain, of the same type as King Philip,
Tecumseh and Sitting Bull. He saw that the white man and the red man
could not possess the land together, and he determined to make a stand in
behalf of his race. The struggle lasted for about two years, attended by
the usual barbarities of savage warfare, and ended in the death of
Pontiac, who, after suing for peace, was murdered by a drunken Indian,
bribed by an English trader with a barrel of rum to commit the deed.
Instead of preventing, Pontiac's War only hastened the flight of the
Indian and the march of the colonists toward the setting sun.
THIRD PERIOD.
The Revolution.