within 7 miles of Duquesne) without meeting any extraordinary event,
having only a straggler or two picked up by the French Indians. When we
came to this place, we were attacked (very unexpectedly) by about three
hundred French and Indians. Our numbers consisted of about thirteen
hundred well-armed men, chiefly Regulars, who were immediately struck
with such an inconceivable panick that nothing but confusion and
disobedience of orders prevailed among them. The officers, in general,
behaved with incomparable bravery, for which they greatly suffered,
there being near sixty killed and wounded--a large proportion, out of
the number we had!
"The Virginia companies behaved like men and died like soldiers; for I
believe out of three companies that were on the ground that day scarce
thirty were left alive. Capt. Peyroney and all his officers, down to a
corporal, were killed; Captn. Polson had almost as hard a fate, for
only one of his escaped. In short, the dastardly behavior of the
Regular troops (so called)[37] exposed those who were inclined to do
their duty to almost certain death, and, at length, in despite of every
effort to the contrary, broke and ran as sheep before hounds, leaving
the artillery, ammunition, provisions, baggage, and, in short,
everything a prey to the enemy. And when we endeavored to rally them,
in hopes of regaining the ground and what we had left upon it, it was
with as little success as if we had attempted to have stopped the wild
bears of the mountains or rivulets with our feet; for they would break
by, in despite of every effort that could be made to prevent it.
"The General was wounded in the shoulder and breast, of which he died
three days after; his two aids-de-camp were both wounded, but are in a
fair way of recovery; Colo. Burton and Sr. John St. Clair are also
wounded and I hope will get over it; Sir Peter Halket, with many other
brave officers, were killed in the field. It is supposed that we had
three hundred or more killed; about that number we brought off wounded,
and it is conjectured (I believe with much truth) that two-thirds of
both received their shot from our own cowardly Regulars, who gathered
themselves into a body, contrary to orders, ten or twelve deep, would
then level, fire and shoot down the men before them.
"I tremble at the consequences that this defeat may have upon our back
settlers, who, I suppose, will all leave their habitations unless there
are proper measures taken for their security.
"Colo. Dunbar, who commands at present, intends, as soon as his men are
recruited at this place, to continue his march to Philadelphia for
winter quarters,[38] consequently there will be no men left here,
unless it is the shattered remains of the Virginia troops, who are
totally inadequate to the protection of the frontiers."
CAPTAIN DE CONTRECOEUR
Monsieur de Contrecoeur, captain of infantry commanding at Fort
Duquesne, having been informed that the English would march out from
Virginia to come to attack him, was warned a little time afterward that
they were on the road. He put spies through the country who would inform
him faithfully of their route. The 7th of this month (July) he was
warned that the army, composed of 3,000 men of the regular English
forces were only six leagues from his fort. The commander employed the
next day in making his arrangements, and on the 9th of the month he sent
Monsieur de Beaujeu against the enemy and gave him for second in command
Monsieurs Dumas and de Lignery, all three of them being captains, with
four lieutenants, six ensigns, 20 cadets, 100 soldiers, 100 Canadians,
and 600 savages, with orders to hide themselves in a favorable place
that had previously been reconnoitred. The detachment found itself in
the presence of the enemy at three leagues from the fort before being
able to gain its appointed post. Monsieur de Beaujeu seeing that his
ambuscade had failed, began a direct attack. He did this with so much
energy that the enemy, who awaited us in the best order in the world,
seemed astounded at the assault. Their artillery, however, promptly
commenced to fire and our forces were confused in their turn. The
savages also, frightened by the noise of the cannon rather than their
execution, commenced to lose ground. Monsieur de Beaujeu was killed, and
Monsieur Dumas rallied our forces. He ordered his officers to lead the
savages and spread out on both wings, so as to take the enemy in flank.
At the same time he, Monsieur de Lignery, and the other officers who
were at the head of the French attacked in front. This order was
executed so promptly that the enemy, who were already raising cries of
victory, were no longer able even to defend themselves. The combat
wavered from one side to the other and success was long doubtful, but at
length the enemy fled.
They struggled unavailingly to keep some order in their retreat. The
cries of the savages with which the woods echoed, carried fear into the
hearts of the foe. The rout was complete. The field of battle remained
in our possession, with six large cannons and a dozen smaller ones, four
bombs, eleven mortars, all their munitions of war and almost all their
baggage. Some deserters who have since come to us tell us that we fought
against two thousand men, the rest of the army being four leagues
farther back. These same deserters tell us that our enemies have retired
to Virginia. The spies that we have sent out report that the thousand
men who had no part in the battle, also took fright and abandoned their
arms and provisions along the road. On this news we sent out a
detachment which destroyed or burned all that remained by the roadside.
The enemies have lost more than a thousand men on the field of battle;
they have lost a great part of their artillery and provisions, also
their general, named Monsieur Braddock, and almost all their officers.
We had three officers killed and two wounded, two cadets wounded. This
remarkable success, which scarcely seemed possible in view of the
inequality of the forces, is the fruit of the experience of Monsieur
Dumas and of the activity and valor of the officers that he had under
his orders.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] The regulars laid the responsibility of defeat on the provincials,
alleging "that they were harassed by duties unequal to their numbers,
and dispirited through want of provisions; that time was not allowed
them to dress their food; that their water (the only liquor, too, they
had) was both scarce and of a bad quality; in fine, that the provincials
had disheartened them by repeated suggestions of their fears of a defeat
should they be attacked by Indians, in which case the European method of
fighting would be entirely unavailing."--_Review of the Military
Operations in North America from 1753 to 1756._ The _Gentleman's
Magazine_ asserted these same forces--Irish, Scotch, and English--ran
away "shamefully" at Prestonpans. The news of Braddock's defeat "struck
a general damp on the spirits of the soldiers" in Shirley's and
Pepperell's regiments, and many deserted.
"I must leave a proper number in each county to protect it from the
combinations of the Negro slaves, who have been very audacious on the
defeat on the Ohio. These poor creatures imagine the French will give
them their freedom."--DINWIDDIE to Earl of Halifax, 23 July, 1755.
[38] "Fearful of an unpursuing foe, all the ammunition, and so much of
the provisions were destroyed for accelerating their flight, that Dunbar
was actually obliged to send for thirty horse-loads of the latter before
he reached Fort Cumberland, where he arrived a very few days after, with
the shattered remains of the English troops."--_Review of the Military
Operations in North America._ Dinwiddie wished Dunbar to remain and make
a new attempt on Duquesne; but a council of officers unanimously decided
the scheme was impracticable, and on the next day (August 2d) began his
march toward Philadelphia.
EXILE OF THE ACADIAN NEUTRALS
A.D. 1755
WILLIAM H. WITHROW[39]
The deportation and dispersion of the French Neutrals from their
Acadian homes at Grandpré, on the peninsula that projects into Minas
Basin, Nova Scotia, was one of the most pitiful incidents in the
French and Indian war, known as the American phase of the Seven
Years' War. The region is familiar to Americans, through the epic of
the poet Longfellow, as the Land of Evangeline. The district around
Minas Basin was settled in the early years of the seventeenth
century by immigrants from La Rochelle, Saintonge, and Poitou.
During the wars between France and England the Acadians, as a Nova
Scotian historian relates, "were strongly patriotic, and took up
arms in the cause of their native land. Intensely devoted to the
Roman Catholic Church, and considering these wars as in the nature
of crusades, they fought valiantly and well. But when Nova Scotia
was finally ceded to Great Britain (in 1713) their position became
very awkward and painful. Many of them refused to take the oath of
allegiance, and for others a modified formula was framed. Emissaries
of the French power at Louisburg and Quebec circulated among them
and maintained their loyalty to France at a fever heat, while their
priests pursued the same policy and kept up the hostility to the
conquerors.
The British provincial government was located at Annapolis, and
though its laws were mild and clement, it could not command respect
on account of its physical weakness. Under these circumstances
hundreds of Acadians joined the French armies during every war
between the two powers, and proved dangerous foemen on account of
their knowledge of the region. British settlers were unwilling to
locate among these people on account of their racial hostility, and
the fairest lands of the province were thus held by an alien and
hostile population.
The expulsion and exile of the French Neutrals from their homes in
Acadia--the region now included in the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick--are one of the saddest episodes in history. The
occasion for their removal and dispersion was the alleged charge that
they secretly took sides with their French compatriots against the
English in every struggle on this continent between the two nations,
each seeking supreme dominion in the New World, and were thus a constant
menace to the English colonists on the seaboard. The trouble at this
period was complicated by disputed boundary lines, the whole interior of
the continent being claimed by France, while the English were shut in
between the mountain ranges of the Alleghanies and the sea. But the
English colonies would not be hemmed in either by nature or by France.
Their hardy sons sought adventure and gain in the Far West, while not a
few for this purpose pushed their way to the St. Lawrence and the Lakes
by the water-ways and woodland valleys of the continent. The French,
resenting this intrusion, began to erect a series of forts to mark the
boundaries of their possessions and conserve the inland fur trade.
Already, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the first scene in the opening
drama had been enacted at Louisburg. This stronghold in Cape Breton,
which guarded the marine highway to New France, had surrendered in 1745
to the forces of England and her colonial levies on the Atlantic. French
pride was hurt at this disaster and the loss of the important naval
station in the gulf. To recover the lost prestige, Count de la
Galissonière was sent as governor to Canada. This nobleman's extravagant
assumptions of the extent of the territorial possessions of New France,
however, offended the English colonists and roused the jealousy of many
of the Indian tribes. Nor was this feeling allayed when France, by the
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, recovered Louisburg, and when her boundary
commissioners claimed all the country north of the Bay of Fundy as not
having been ceded to England by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the
inevitable result followed; hostilities between the two nations were
precipitated in the valley of the Ohio by the persistent encroachment of
the English.
English successes in other parts of the continent in some measure atoned
for Braddock's defeat. Beauséjour fell before an expeditionary force
sent out from Massachusetts, while Dieskau was routed and made a
prisoner near Lake George by Colonel (afterward Sir William) Johnson, in
command of the colonial militia and a band of Mohawk warriors.
The command of the expedition against Beauséjour, in the Acadian
isthmus, to which the French still laid claim, had been given to Colonel
Monckton, who, in the spring of 1755, sailed from Boston with forty-one
vessels and two thousand men. Ill-manned by a few hundred refugees and a
small body of soldiers it soon capitulated and was renamed Fort
Cumberland. The Acadian peasants, on the beautiful shores of the Bay of
Fundy, Canadian historians tell us, "were a simple, virtuous, and
prosperous community," though other writers give them less favorable
character, speaking of them as turbulent, aggressive, and meddlesome.
With remarkable industry they had reclaimed from the sea by dikes many
thousand of fertile acres, which produced abundant crops of grain and
orchard fruits; and on the sea meadows at one time grazed as many as
sixty thousand head of cattle. The simple wants of the peasants were
supplied by domestic manufacture or by importations from Louisburg. So
great was their attachment to the government and institutions of their
fatherland that during the aggressions of the English after the conquest
of the region a great part of the population--some ten thousand in
number, it is said, though the figures are disputed--abandoned their
homes and migrated to that portion of Acadia still claimed by the
French, while others removed to Cape Breton or to Canada. About seven
thousand still remained in the peninsula of Nova Scotia, but they
claimed a political neutrality, resolutely refusing to take the oath of
allegiance to the alien conquerors. They were accused of intriguing with
their countrymen at Louisburg, with resisting the English authority, and
with inciting, and even leading, the Indians to ravage the English
settlements.
The cruel Micmacs needed little instigation. They swooped down on the
little town of Dartmouth, opposite Halifax, and within gunshot of its
forts, and reaped a rich harvest of scalps and booty. The English
prisoners they sometimes sold at Louisburg for arms and ammunition. The
Governor asserted that pure compassion was the motive of this traffic,
in order to rescue the captives from massacre. He demanded, however, an
excessive ransom for their liberation. The Indians were sometimes,
indeed generally, it was asserted, led in these murderous raids by
French commanders. These violations of neutrality, however, were chiefly
the work of a few turbulent spirits. The mass of the Acadian peasants
seem to have been a peaceful and inoffensive people, although they
naturally sympathized with their countrymen, and rejoiced at the
victory of Du Quesne, and sorrowed at the defeat of Lake George. They
were, nevertheless, declared rebels and outlaws, and a council at
Halifax, confounding the innocent with the guilty, decreed the expulsion
of the entire French population.
[Illustration: British officer reads the decree of exile of the Acadian
neutrals in the village church.
Painting by Frank Dicksee, A.R.A.]
The decision was promptly given effect. Ships soon appeared before the
principal settlement in the Bay of Fundy. All the male inhabitants over
ten years of age were summoned to hear the King's command. At Grandpré
four hundred assembled in the village church, when the British officer
read from the altar the decree of their exile. Resistance was
impossible; armed soldiers guarded the door, and the men were
imprisoned. They were marched at the bayonet's point, amid the wailings
of their relatives, on board the transports. The women and children were
shipped in other vessels. Families were scattered; husbands and wives
separated--many never to meet again. Hundreds of comfortable homesteads
and well-filled barns were ruthlessly given to the flames. A number,
variously estimated at from three to seven thousand, were dispersed
along the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Georgia. Twelve hundred were
carried to South Carolina. A few planted a New Acadia among their
countrymen in Louisiana. Some sought to return to their blackened
hearths, coasting in open boats along the shore. These were relentlessly
intercepted when possible, and sent back into hopeless exile. An
imperishable interest has been imparted to this sad story by
Longfellow's beautiful poem _Evangeline_, which describes the sorrows
and sufferings of some of the inhabitants of the little village of
Grandpré.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] By permission of the author.
CLIVE ESTABLISHES BRITISH SUPREMACY IN INDIA
THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA: BATTLE OF PLASSEY
A.D. 1756
SIR ALEXANDER J. ARBUTHNOT
Robert Clive is recognized as the man to whom, above all others,
England owes the establishment of her empire in India. Born in 1725
in Shropshire, he was raised to the Irish peerage in 1760 as Baron
Clive of Plassey. The son of a poor country squire, at eighteen he
entered the service of the East India Company at Madras.
For over a century the company had competed with its Dutch rival in
India, and Clive went to his post at a time when French rivalry with
the English was becoming formidable. In 1744 war broke out between
the English and French, and Clive saw his first military service. In
the second war with the French (1751-1754), he bore the leading
part, capturing Arcot (1751), and successfully defending it against
a vastly superior force of natives, who were aided by the French. By
these successes he won a brilliant reputation. His later career
proved him to be as efficient in civil as in military affairs, and
he stands in English history distinguished among great
administrators, although he has been no less the object of censure
than of praise by his country's historians. A parliamentary inquiry
into his official conduct resulted (1773) in his practical
vindication. Whatever the truth in the case may be, Clive must ever
hold his place among the "builders of Greater Britain."
In 1753 Clive returned to England, and two years later went back to
India as governor of Fort St. David, in the Madras presidency. Of
his proceedings in this government and his further successful
military enterprises, which went so far to win India for England,
Arbuthnot, late member of the Council of India, gives an
authoritative account, based on the fullest information available at
the close of the nineteenth century.
Clive returned to the Madras Presidency at a critical moment. War with
France was imminent, and broke out in the course of a few months. The
very day that Clive assumed the government of Fort St. David, Calcutta
was captured by the Nawab[40] of Bengal, and the tragedy of the Black
Hole took place. The acquisition of Calcutta by the East India Company
was somewhat later than that of Madras. It dates from 1686, when the
representatives of the company, driven by the Mogul authorities from
Hugli, where they had established a factory, moved under the leadership
of Job Charnock some twenty-six miles down the river to Satanati, now
one of the northern suburbs of Calcutta. Ten years afterward they built
the original Fort William, and in 1700 they purchased the villages of
Satanti, Kalikata, and Govindpur from the son of the Emperor.
In 1707 the East India Company declared Calcutta a separate presidency.
Here, surrounded by the richest districts in India, amid a teeming
population, on the banks of a river which was the chief highway of
Eastern commerce, the servants of the company drove a thriving trade,
threatened only, but never actually assailed, by the raids of the
Mahrattas, the memory of which is still kept alive by the famous
Mahratta ditch. They were in the same relation to the Nawab of Bengal as
the servants of the company at Madras were to the Nawab of the Carnatic.
In April, 1756, Aliverdi Khan, who was a just and strong ruler, died,
and was succeeded by his grandson, Suraj ud Daulah, a youth under twenty
years of age, whose training had been of the worst description. One of
the whims of this youth was hatred toward the English, and he had not
been two months on the throne when he found a pretext for indulging this
sentiment in the fact that the English, in anticipation of difficulties
with the French, were strengthening the fortifications of Fort William.
On June 4th he seized the English factory at Kasimbazar, and on the 15th
attacked Calcutta. The women and children in the fort were removed on
board ship on the 18th, and on the same day the Governor, Mr. Drake, and
the military commandant, Captain Minchin, deserted their posts, and to
their lasting disgrace betook themselves to the ships. Mr. Holwell, a
member of the council, assumed command in the fort, but on the 25th the
place was taken.
All the Englishmen in the fort, one hundred forty-six persons, were
thrust at the point of a sword into a small room, the prison of the
garrison, commonly known as the Black Hole, only twenty feet square. The
Nawab had promised to spare their lives, but had gone to sleep after a
debauch. No expostulations on the part of the prisoners, not even
bribes, would induce the guards to awake the Nawab and obtain his leave
to liberate the prisoners, until the morning, when, having slept off his
debauch, he allowed the door to be opened. By that time, out of one
hundred forty-six prisoners, one hundred twenty-three had miserably
perished. The survivors, among whom was the acting Governor, Holwell,
were brought before the tyrant, insulted and reproached by him, and
detained in custody in wretched sheds and fed upon grain and water. An
Englishwoman who was one of the survivors, was placed in the Nawab's
harem. The details of this terrible tragedy and of the sufferings which
the survivors subsequently underwent, are given in a letter from Mr.
Holwell, from which it appears that his eventual release was brought
about by the intercession of Aliverdi Khan's widow, who had in vain
endeavored to dissuade the Nawab from attacking Calcutta, and had
predicted that his doing so would be his ruin.
Intelligence of the outrage did not reach Madras until August 16th, when
it was at once decided to send a force under Clive to Calcutta to avenge
it. Clive was appointed commander-in-chief, with full military and
political control. He took with him 900 English soldiers and 1200 Sepoys
and some artillery. Owing, however, to the obstinacy of Admiral Watson,
and to jealousy of Clive on the part of Colonel Aldercron, who had
recently arrived at Madras in command of the Thirty-ninth foot, a delay
of two months took place before the expedition sailed. Watson declined
to undertake it at all unless the government of the Bengal settlement,
which the Madras council proposed to assume pending orders from home,
was intrusted to the survivors of the Bengal Council, the leaders of
which had so shamefully deserted their posts; while Aldercron, on being
informed that Clive was to exercise the military command, actually went
so far as to disembark the greater part of his regiment, together with
guns and stores which had already been put on board ship, allowing only
two hundred fifty men to remain, who were to serve as marines under
Watson.