CANADA.
[Sidenote: 1756--The struggle for Canada]
We have seen that, when the young Duke of Cumberland, after the battle
of Culloden, was earning his right to the title of "Butcher," one
English officer at least had the courage to protest by his actions
against the atrocities of the English general. That soldier was James
Wolfe, then a young lieutenant-colonel, who had served his
apprenticeship to arms in the Low Countries in the war of the Austrian
Succession, and earned by his courage and his abilities an honorable
name. He was destined to make that name famous by the part he was to
play in the events that were taking place in Canada. The red-haired,
unattractive soldier, whose cold and almost repellent manner concealed
some of the highest qualities, was fated to do as much for the glory of
the English Empire in one part of the world as Clive in another. But
there could hardly be two men more different than Clive and Wolfe. The
one was always an adventurer--a gentleman adventurer, indeed, and a
brilliant specimen of the class, but an adventurer still, and with some
of the worst vices of his kind. Wolfe, on the contrary, resembled more
the better men among those Puritan soldiers who rallied around the name
of Cromwell and battled beneath the standards of Monk. He cherished an
austere ideal of public and private virtue. The sweet, simple gravity
of the man's nature lives for us very vividly in the portrait Thackeray
draws of him in the pages of "The Virginians," where so many of the
famous figures of the crowded last century world seem to take bodily
shape again and live and move around us.
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From the end of the fifteenth century, when John and Sebastian Cabot
discovered Canada, France considered that portion of the New World as
her own. Early in the sixteenth century a French expedition under
Verazzani formed a settlement named New France, and eleven years later
the Breton Jacques Cartier ascended the St. Lawrence as far as the site
of Montreal. The first permanent settlement was made in 1608, when
Quebec was founded. From that time Quebec seems like the prize for
which English and French arms are to strive. Canada was taken by the
English in 1629, only to be restored in 1632; but when more than a
century later France and England were newly at war, the serious and
final struggle for the possession of Canada took place.
The French settlements in America were called Canada and Louisiana.
The one comprehended the basin of the St. Lawrence River and the Great
Lakes, with a vast extent of territory west and north to the Pacific
and Arctic oceans. It was, as has been happily said, a convenient
maxim in those days of our colonization, that whoever possessed the
coast had a right to all the inland territory as far as from sea to
sea. While this gave England its boundaries from north to south, it
left from east to west open to French fancy and French ambition.
Louisiana was a term which covered in English eyes only the Mississippi
mouths and a few stations along the Mississippi and Ohio valleys; in
French minds the term extended to all the territory bounded to the
north by Canada and to the south by Mexico, and stretching from the
Alleghanies to the Pacific.
The French settlements in Canada were administered very much upon the
same happy-go-lucky system as that which prevailed in France at home
under the beneficent influence of the Old Order, and which at home was
slowly and surely preparing the way for the French Revolution. The
ministers in Paris governed the colonies through governors who were
supreme in their own districts, but who possessed no power whatever of
initiating any laws for the people they swayed.
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The English colonies were very different from those of the French.
Founded in the early days of religious persecution by men too
strong-minded to accept tyranny or to make composition with their
consciences, the new colonies of Englishmen in America had thriven in
accordance with the antique spirit of independence which had called
them into existence. The colonists were a hardy, a stubborn, and a
high-minded people, well fitted to battle with the elements and the
Indians, and to preserve, under new conditions, the austere standard of
morality which led them to look for liberty across the sea. The creed
which they professed endowed them with a capacity for self-government,
and taught them the arts of administration and the polity of free
States. The English colonies, as they throve and extended, were not
without their faults. The faith which their founders professed was a
gloomy faith, and left its mark in gloom upon the characters of the
people and the tenor of their laws. The Ironside quality of their
creed showed itself in the cruelties with which they visited the
Indians; the severity of their tenets was felt by all who could not
readily adapt themselves to the adamantine ethics of men of the type of
Endicott and Mather. There was not wanting, too, a spirit of
lawlessness in the English America, curiously in contrast with the
law-abiding character of the Non-conformist colonizations. Along the
seaboard wild pirates nestled, skimmers of the seas of the most daring
type, worthy brethren of the Kidds, the Blackbeards, and the Teaches,
terrors of the merchantman and the well-disposed emigrant. But in
spite of the sternness of the law-abiding, and the savageness of the
lawless portions of the English settlements, they contrasted favorably
in every way with the settlements which were nominally French and the
centres of colonization which hoisted the French flag.
[Sidenote: 1754--Young Mr. Washington]
After a long stretch of threatened hostilities, the pinch came at last
in 1753, when the two nations met on the banks of the Ohio. The
meeting meant one of the greatest and most momentous series of wars in
the century. {285} French soldiers invaded all the settlements of the
Ohio company and drove the settlers out. The Governor of Virginia sent
an ambassador to the French officer commanding on the Ohio, and chose
as his ambassador a young Virginian gentleman then absolutely unknown
except to the small circle of his personal friends, but destined to
become one of the most famous, and most deservedly famous, men in
history. Young Mr. George Washington bore Governor Dinwiddie's message
over 500 miles through the wilderness at the peril of his life. That
expedition, says Irving, "may be considered the foundation of his
fortunes. From that moment he was the rising hope of Virginia." The
French commander informed the young envoy that he proposed to hold Ohio
and drive the English out. Back went George Washington through the
wilderness again with this discouraging reply. After that hostilities
were inevitable. The next year Washington, then lieutenant-colonel,
led a small force to the frontier, and fired the first shot against the
enemy. It is curious to think of all the results that followed from
that first shot. The fall of the French colonies in America, the
establishment of the American Republic, the French Revolution--all may,
by the simplest process of causation, be traced back to the first shot
fired by Washington's command against a petty officer on the frontier.
That shot echoes on the Plains of Abraham, at Lexington and Bunker's
Hill, at the taking of the Bastille, and with the "whiff of
grape-shot"; we may hear it at Waterloo and in the autumn horrors of
the Coup d'État.
France had long been ambitious of extending the domain of her colonial
empire in America. Her aim was to secure for herself the Mississippi
and Ohio valleys. Securing these meant many things to France. It
meant the connection of her Mexican colonies with Canada, but it meant
much more than this; it meant serious annoyance to England, serious
limitation to English commerce. It would make the Alleghany mountains
the western limits of the English colonies, hamper the English trade
with {286} the Indians, and expose to French attack the English on the
north, south, and west. In this year 1754, therefore, she deliberately
drove the English out of West Pennsylvania, and set up her staff there
by building Fort Duquesne to command the Ohio Valley. At that time the
chief British commander in America was General Braddock, a joyous,
rollicking soldier of the old-fashioned type, rather popular in London
as a good companion and good fellow, who loved his glass with a more
than merely convivial enthusiasm. But he was not the sort of man who
was fitted to fight the French just then and there. In the open field
and under ordinary conditions he might have done well enough, but the
war with France in the American colonies was not pursued under ordinary
conditions. It was fought on the lines of Indian warfare, with
murderous Indian allies, against whom the jolly general of the London
tables and the St. James's clubs was wholly unfitted to cope. Though
he had been warned by Sir P. K. Halkett, who knew the danger, Braddock
actually insisted upon advancing with astonishing recklessness against
Fort Duquesne as if he were marching at the head of an invincible force
to the easiest possible success. The result of his heedlessness is one
of the grimmest spots in English colonial history.
[Sidenote: 1759--James Wolfe]
Braddock's forces were cut to pieces: very few of his stout thousand
escaped to spread horror through the English colonies by the news of
their misfortunes. The banner of the Leopard had gone down indeed
before the white coats and the Silver Lilies of France and the painted
fantasies of Indian braves and sachems. The fair hair of English
soldiers graced the wigwams of the wild and remorseless Red Man, and it
seemed for the moment as if the fighting power of England had gone.
But, indeed, English fighting power was made of sterner stuff. The
fact is, perhaps, never more happily exemplified than in this very
story of the dying Braddock himself. As he was carried away, bleeding,
to his death, from that fatal ambuscade, something of the hero animated
and exalted {287} the spirit of that drink-hardy and foolhardy soldier.
"I must do better another time," he is reported to have said; and it
would not be easy to say with what gallanter words a stout soldier
could go to his account. Against such a spirit as that which animated
the dying Braddock the soldiers of France were not destined to triumph.
"The last of the Gracchi," said Mirabeau, "when dying, flung dust to
heaven, and from that dust sprang Marias." Braddock, promising himself
to do better next time, spoke not indeed for himself, but for his
nation. The next time came in its due season, but the man who "did
better," who carried that "banner of the Leopard" high over the Lilies,
was not Braddock, but James Wolfe.
England thirsted for revenge. The years came and the years went, and
at last they brought the hour and the men. An elaborate campaign in
1759 had been prepared, by which Amherst, coming by Lake George,
Ticonderoga, and Lake Champlain; Prideaux and Johnson coming by Fort
Niagara, Lake Ontario, and Montreal; and Wolfe coming by the St.
Lawrence River, were to unite in attacking Quebec. But the first two
divisions of the whole force were unable to make the connection in the
due time, and to Wolfe's command alone was given the honor of assailing
Quebec. He advanced up the St. Lawrence with some 7000 men and the
fleet under Admiral Saunders, and encamped on the Island of St. Orleans
in the St. Lawrence River, some eight miles from Quebec. The whole
world, perhaps, hardly holds a scene more picturesque, whether looked
at from above or from below, from the rock or from the river, than that
which is given by the city of Quebec. At some places the bold mass of
rock and clay descends almost sheer to the lower level and the
river-shore. One can see that splendid heap of rock and clay from the
distant Falls of Montmorency, standing out as the Acropolis of Athens
or as Acrocorinth may be seen from some far-off point of view. The
newer part of the city and the fortifications are perched high upon the
great mound or mass of clay and rock, which looks over the {288}
confluence of a mighty river and a great stream. The lower and older
town creeps and straggles along the base of the rock and by the edges
of the river. Here are the old market-places, the quaint old streets,
the ancient wharfs, the crumbling houses, the narrow lanes, the curious
inlets, of past generations, and the crude shanties of yesterday and
the day before yesterday. From this lower level broad roads now wind
up to what would be called the better part of the city--the region of
the hotels, and the clubs, and the official buildings, and the
fashionable residences. But until lately these roads passed under the
ancient gate-ways of the city--gate-ways that reminded one of the Gate
of Calais, and brought back suggestions of Hogarth's famous picture.
In more recent years, however, the restless spirit of modern
improvement has invaded even Quebec, and all, or nearly all, the
ancient gate-ways, the gate-ways of the days of Wolfe, have bowed to
the fate of Temple Bar. Yet even to-day the traveller in Canada who
stands upon that height may vividly recall the scene that lay before
the eyes of Wolfe during that memorable campaign.
Wolfe made an attempt to carry a battery above the Montmorency mouth,
but failed, and was repulsed with considerable loss. He then cast
about him if it were possible to attack the town from the Heights of
Abraham on the southern side. It seemed on the face of it an
impossibility. How was it possible for the attacking force to make its
way unseen by the French up the precipitous cliffs to the Heights of
Abraham? Luckily, there was a young man in Wolfe's army, a Lieutenant
McCulloch, who had been held prisoner in Quebec in 1756. With a view
to future possibilities, he employed his time in surveying the cliffs,
and he thought that he had discovered a particular spot where the steep
hills might be successfully scaled by an attacking force. He now
communicated this to Wolfe. Indeed, the idea of attack in this way
seems to have been suggested by him, and on the memorable September
night the attempt was made.
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[Sidenote: 1759--Wolfe's tribute to literature]
Who has not heard--who has not been touched and thrilled by the story
of Wolfe, while being rowed across the spreading waters of the St.
Lawrence to the cove where the attempt was to be made, repeating in low
tones to his officers near him Gray's "Elegy in a Country Church-yard"?
Who does not remember Wolfe's famous saying that he would rather have
written the Elegy than take Quebec? It is a fine saying, akin to that
of Caesar when he swore that he would rather be the first man in an
obscure Italian village than the second man in Rome. We may perhaps
take the liberty of questioning the absolute accuracy of either saying.
In Caesar's case he was, no doubt, sufficiently conscious that he was
going to be the first man in Rome. In Wolfe's case we may well believe
that his exquisite tribute to literature, and to the most charming work
of one of the most charming men of letters then alive, was not meant
very seriously. He was a soldier; Quebec was his duty; Quebec was to
be his fame. But it is one of those sayings that live forever, and the
mere thought of it at once calls up two widely different pictures,
pictures of places in two widely different parts of the world. One
shows the shining, swelling St. Lawrence River and the dead hour of
night, and those slowly moving boats of hushed heroes creeping across
the waters to where the mighty Quebec hills gloomed hugely out. The
other is of that quiet church-yard in England, at Stoke Pogis, near
Slough, where pilgrims from many parts of the world still wander
through the pleasant Buckinghamshire fields to stand where Gray
conceived his Elegy.
Wolfe carried out his plan to perfection. Day was dawning as the
majority of his forces formed upon the Heights of Abraham. It was six
in the morning before Montcalm's irregulars were upon the field, and
nine o'clock before the French army was in position for action. At ten
o'clock the battle began. It did not last very long. Whether the
French were utterly disheartened or not by the appearance so
unexpectedly of the {290} English on the ground, which they had deemed
unassailable, certain is it that they made a poor fight of it. Though
the French forces amounted to nearly double the English strength, the
whole battle, from the first French advance to their utter rout and
flight, did not last a quarter of an hour. It was one of the sharpest
and the strangest battles in history. Both sides lost their generals.
Montcalm was killed; Wolfe, charging gallantly at the head of his men,
fell mortally wounded. The wild cry, "They run!" echoed in his dying
ears. He seemed to recover a kind of alertness at the sound, and
shaking himself from his deadly stupor, asked, "Who run?" We can
imagine the momentary trepidation in that gallant heart: could it be
his outnumbered followers? In a moment he was reassured; it was the
enemy who fled; with his last breath he gave some strategical orders,
and then fell back. "God be praised, I die in peace," he said, and so
passed away. The time may, perhaps, come when the great game of war
will no longer stir the pulses, and men will no longer feel that they
die in peace after the bloody defeat of their enemies. But so long as
the pulses of men's hearts do answer to any martial music, so long men
will say of Wolfe that he died well as became a soldier, a hero, and a
gentleman. He sleeps in Greenwich Church.
[Sidenote: 1759--An old French province]
The pride of England's colonial empire might find new stimulus in the
way in which the memory of one of the most brilliant scenes in the
story of England's career is kept green in Quebec. The traveller,
standing on Dufferin Terrace to-day, may in his mind's eye see Wolfe
crossing the stream on his perilous expedition, may in his mind's ear
hear him reciting to his officers those lines from Gray's Elegy, and
telling them that he would rather have written such verses than be sure
of taking Quebec. His monument is near to the promenade on Dufferin
Terrace--his monument which, a rare event in war, is the monument also
of his rival, the French commander, Montcalm, killed in the hour of
defeat, as Wolfe was at the moment of victory. Quebec itself seems to
illustrate in {291} its own progress and its own history the moral of
that common monument. Quebec is as loyal to the British Crown as
Victoria or as the Channel Islands. But it is still in great part an
old-fashioned French city. The France that survives there and all
through the province is not the France of to-day, but the France of
before the great Revolution. The stranger seeking his way through the
streets had better, in most cases, question the first crossing-sweeper
he meets in French, and not in English. The English residents are all
expected to speak French. But the English residents and the French
live on terms of the most cordial fraternity. Little quarrels, local
quarrels of race and sect, do unquestionably spring up here and there
now and again, but they are only like the disputes of Churchmen and
Dissenters in an English city, and they threaten no organic
controversy. England has great reason to be proud of Quebec. The
English flag has a home on those heights which we have already said may
challenge the world for bold picturesqueness and beauty.
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