Abercrombie was superseded after this disaster and went home, his
successor in command being Baron Jeffrey Amherst, who the next year
led another grand martial procession northward along the lake to
attack the French. His expedition had better success, for it resulted
in the conquest of Canada, and the treaty of peace which followed
closed the great "Seven Years' War" most triumphantly for England.
Fort Carillon, the name of which the English changed to Fort
Ticonderoga, stood upon a high rocky promontory, the termination of a
mountain range, the extremity, then called Sugar Loaf Hill, but since
named Mount Defiance, rising eight hundred and fifty feet above Lake
Champlain. It is a lofty peninsula, nearly a square mile in surface,
almost surrounded by water, with a swamp on the western side. When
Amherst advanced, the French garrison was meagre, for Wolfe was
threatening Quebec, and Montcalm had gone with reinforcements to repel
him; so that actually without a struggle they abandoned the fort,
after blowing up the magazine and burning the barracks. Amherst then
pushed on to conquer Canada, and the war ending, the British regarded
this and Crown Point, ten miles northward on Lake Champlain, as among
their most important posts, commanding the route to the new Dominion.
Both were greatly enlarged and strengthened, over $10,000,000 being
expended upon them, an enormous sum for that day, so that they became
the most elaborate British fortresses in the American colonies, the
citadel and field works of Ticonderoga including an area of several
square miles, having buildings and barracks and defensive
constructions anterior to the Revolution, covering almost the entire
surface. In 1763 France ceded Canada to England, and afterwards
Ticonderoga was neglected and partially decayed. When the Revolution
began in 1775 it was one of the earliest strongholds captured by the
Americans. Ethan Allen, with eighty men, crossed over Lake Champlain
from Vermont, surprised the small and unsuspecting garrison of fifty
men in the night, and Allen, penetrating to the bedside of the
astonished commandant, made his famous speech demanding surrender. "In
whose name?" asked the surprised officer. "In the name of the
great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." The Americans held it for
two years, when Burgoyne, on his southern march in 1777, besieged it,
and discovering that Mount Defiance, not then in the works, completely
commanded it, he dragged cannon up there and erected batteries, which
soon compelled the garrison to abandon it, and the British were in
possession until the war closed.
[Illustration: _Old Fort Ticonderoga_]
Ticonderoga has since fallen into utter decay, but parts of the ruins
are now preserved as a national memorial. A portion of wall and a
dilapidated gable enclosing a window still stand, and make a
picturesque ruin on top of a high slope rising from Lake Champlain,
with a background of timbered hills. These forests to the west and
south have grown during the nineteenth century, and are full of the
remains of the old redoubts and entrenchments. Well-defined dry
ditches are traced beyond the ramparts, with the barrack walls
surrounding the parade-ground, an old well, and also the sally-port on
the water side where Allen and his bold Green Mountain boys effected
their entrance. During many years after the fort fell into ruins, the
neighbors carried off its well-cut brick and stone work to build the
growing villages on Lake Champlain's shores. All the surroundings are
now eminently peaceful. The invaders, no longer warlike, are on
pleasure bent; the inhabitants make paper and textiles, saw lumber,
and also manufacture good lead-pencils from graphite found nearby.
Sheep contentedly browse amid the relics of the great fortress, and
vividly recall Browning's pastoral:
"Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles
Miles and miles
On the solitary pasture where our sheep,
Half-asleep,
Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop--
Was the site of a city, great and gay,
(So they say.)"