1759
The Battle of Quebec
The Daring Gamble That Dashed French Hopes of a New Empire and Brought Britain Control of North America
ON THE NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER 12, 1759, a flotilla carrying the cream of the British army in Canada floated up the St. Lawrence River, under the noses of the watchful French guarding the citadel city of Quebec. A quarter-moon had arisen around ten o’clock, which provided enough light for the fleet to steer by, but not so much that it might be clearly seen. Moving under the towering cliffs of Quebec, the British continued west to a cove called the Anse au Foulon, landing in the dark perhaps two hours before dawn. They looked up from the beach to see a sheer rock face some 175 feet high, with a narrow path winding across its face. The path had been pointed out to the British a few weeks earlier, probably by a French deserter.
With haste, yet trying to be as quiet as possible, the detachment of perhaps two hundred Light Infantry crept up the path; when a French sentry challenged them, a French-speaking Highlander told him with some indignation that they were reinforcements sent from up the river. This fooled the French soldier long enough for the British to reach the top of the cliff and overwhelm the French garrison on guard duty.
One of the officers who accompanied the first companies to the top of the cliff was their brilliant, cold commander in chief, General James Wolfe. He had donned a new uniform for what he was certain would be the defining moment of his military career. Plagued by illness and possessed of a dark soul and temperament, he had convinced himself that he would die in the coming battle, and had hinted as much when he gave his personal effects and a picture of his fiancée to a Royal Navy officer for safekeeping. Yet now, as thousands more British troops climbed the cliff, following those who had so easily taken the guard-post, he may have thought for a moment that he might yet escape the fate he had foreseen for himself.
A PIVOTAL MOMENT
The battle for Quebec — which controlled the St. Lawrence River, the water highway by which the interior of the North American continent and its rich fur trade could be accessed — came three years into the Seven Years’ War, as France and Great Britain, age-old rivals, engaged in a global struggle for supremacy. Beginning in 1753, the war was fought on two fronts. In Western Europe, Great Britain and Prussia were pitted against France, Austria, Russia, and Sweden. Britain and France continued the battle on the second front, in North America. Known as the French and Indian War due to the French use of Indian allies, it was fought mainly in what would become New York, New England, and Canada.
The French had had the best of it up until Wolfe’s arrival at the Anse au Foulon. They and their Huron and Abenaki allies had destroyed a force under General Braddock at Fort Duquesne, on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1755. The next year they had made inroads into what would become northern New York State, capturing Forts Ontario, George, and Otswego. And in August of 1757 they had captured Fort William Henry on Lake George.
The commander of the victorious French forces at Fort William Henry was a man named Louis-Joseph, the Marquis de Montcalm. He guaranteed the safety of the British troops and civilians inside the fort after they surrendered. But as soon as the British were allowed to begin their journey to British lines, the Abenakis set upon them, killing 180 in cold blood and taking perhaps 500 as slaves. When he heard about this, Montcalm raced out on horseback to restore order. Montcalm’s brave and judicious actions were the only bright spot in an ugly episode that became a rallying cry for British and Americans.
ON THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM
After the advance company of the British had scaled the cliffs and neutralized the small French outpost, the rest of the British force — about five thousand men — made its way up and marched to the Plains of Abraham, southwest of the city. The Plains of Abraham were named, not after the biblical figure, but after a farmer named Abraham Martin, who had been given this long piece of land west of Quebec in the 1650s. On September 13, as the sun rose over these plains, the French beheld an astonishing sight: thousands of red-coated troops who had formed up in a line two deep that extended all the way across the thousand-yard-wide plains. These men were five hundred yards from Quebec’s western wall. On their right were cornfields and then the cliff-edge over the St. Lawrence. On their left was a forest.
The French leader, the Marquis de Montcalm — the same Montcalm who had tried to stop the massacre at Fort William Henry — was stunned when he rode his horse out in front of the French lines. He kept staring at the seven battalions of British troops as though, one observer noted, “his fate was upon him.” Despite the fact that Canadian irregulars and French Indians sped to the cornfield and the forests to begin picking off British troops, Montcalm seemed frozen.
Montcalm kept staring at the seven battalions of British troops as though “his fate was upon him.”
Far across the plain, his counterpart, General Wolfe, with little regard for his own safety and perhaps deliberately tempting fate, strode up and down behind his men, whom he had ordered to lie down. Montcalm and Wolfe could almost certainly not see each other, but their lives and deaths would be forever intertwined on that day.
In some ways, they presented a study in opposites. Montcalm was a decent man; not a brilliant commander, but a strong and intelligent one. Born in 1712 (which made him fifteen years older than Wolfe), he was the product of wealthy royal French parents and a classical education. His father died when he was a young man, leaving him a fortune, which, unfortunately, was riddled with debts. Friends arranged a marriage for the young marquis to a rich heiress named Angelique Louise Talon du Boulay; surprisingly, the union of convenience turned into a happy marriage, producing ten children to whom both parents were devoted. Montcalm, however, was away much of the time, fighting wars. He was wounded on several occasions and showed such conspicuous gallantry that he was promoted to major general. In 1756, he arrived in North America and led French troops to a series of stunning successes before being placed in charge of the all-important fortress of Quebec.
Major General James Wolfe was a more complex, more troubled man, and had had a far more mercurial rise than Montcalm. Thirty-two years old, he was the son of an undistinguished army general. His looks were the first thing most people commented on: he was tall and gangly, with a pinched face, pale skin, and a mop of red hair, which he refused to cover with a wig. He had made his reputation with the British army in Scotland in 1746, fighting the Jacobite rebellion, and a cruel reputation it was — Wolfe thought nothing of burning villages or executing civilians. Cold and egotistical, unable to connect with men or women, and prone to maladies that left him ill much of the time, Wolfe was bad-tempered, but a powerful fighter, which he had proved during the successful siege of the French fortress of Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, in 1758, a victory that opened up the approaches to the St. Lawrence for the British Royal Navy.
Despite protests from rivals, some of whom thought Wolfe mad, King George II put him in charge of the invasion force that was to attack Quebec. “Mad, is he?” the king famously said. “Then I hope he will bite some others of my generals.”
DILEMMAS ON BOTH SIDES
Wolfe had been besieging Quebec for three long months — “burning and laying waste the countryside,” as his orders to his scouts read, blockading the St. Lawrence and hoping to starve the French garrison out. But his forces had not been quite strong enough to do this, and so he had settled on a last gambit before winter set in: all-out attack on Quebec.
Mad or not, Wolfe had taken an extraordinary chance. As the French cannon lobbed shots at his lines, he knew that somewhere west of him was a French force of some three thousand troops commanded by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a man who would later become one of the most brilliant explorers in French history, and who now, Wolfe assumed, was on his way to reinforce the French garrison. If so, British forces would be caught between the cliffs, the French in Quebec, the snipers in the woods, and Bougainville approaching from the rear. To avoid this trap, he was going to have to order his 4,500 troops to attack soon, charging directly at Quebec’s defenses.
Montcalm, too, was having his anxieties. His forces equalled Wolfe’s, but he had far fewer regular army troops, being dependent on unreliable militia as well as scouts and Indians. It seemed that his best move would be to retire behind Quebec’s walls to await the coming of Bougainville and his relief forces, but there were two problems with this strategy. Quebec’s defenses at this point in the city walls were weak, since it had been assumed no one would be able to scale the cliffs. Secondly, where was Bougainville? No one knew. Montcalm paced up and down impatiently. “Is it possible Bougainville doesn’t hear all that noise?” he asked an aide.
A PERFECT VOLLEY
Bougainville later claimed he received too little notice to muster his forces for an attack on Wolfe. Whatever the case, by 10 a.m., he had still not shown up. Montcalm thus made a decision which, while understandable, was almost certainly the wrong one. Instead of retreating within the walls of the city, he chose to attack Wolfe’s forces.
When Montcalm gave the order to attack, the French forces, cheering and whooping, charged at the British lines. But here the lack of discipline among the militia showed, for they were either ahead of or behind the regular forces, and they did not fire in volleys at the British lines a few hundred yards away, instead kneeling and snapping off single shots whenever they could. The regular British troops simply waited for the French to get within thirty yards and then fired what one British officer later called: “the most perfect volley ever fired on a battlefield.”
The effect on the French was devastating. The British then moved forward and fired yet another volley and this became the pattern of the battle. Steadily, the French withered under such a terrible onslaught of lead at such close range, and those who survived turned tail and ran. The British gave fixed bayonets and charged, chasing the French back toward the city.
But Quebec was temporarily saved by the fifteen hundred or so French irregulars and Indians in the woods off the British left flank, who poured fierce fire into the British and forced them to stop and re-form several times. This allowed the French army in the field to escape, for the time being, to a fort upriver. Quebec remained strongly garrisoned, however, and for the moment, the British, still concerned about the threat from Bougainville, did not attack.
TWO LEADERS IMMORTALIZED
Probably just as the British charge was beginning, James Wolfe, who had continued to recklessly expose himself, was shot in the chest and bled to death. However, he lived long enough to hear an aide cry, “They run!” Wolfe asked who ran, and the aide said: “The enemy sir. Egad! They give way everywhere!” Wolfe, ever the commander, gave orders to cut off the enemy’s retreat, then said, “Now, God be praised, I can die in peace.” A few moments later, he was gone. His was and remains one of the most famous last moments in British military history, immortalized in art and literature, most notably in Benjamin West’s famous painting, The Death of General Wolfe.
Remarkably, at about the time Wolfe was hit, Montcalm also suffered a mortal wound, either from sniper bullets or grapeshot, and had to be helped back into the city. He died the next day and was buried in the yard of an Ursuline convent. He, too, passed into legend, staring fixedly at the sky in numerous French paintings, the most famous being Jean-Antoine Watteau’s The Death of Montcalm, which has the General dying on the battlefield, flanked by Indians, instead of at the convent. Ironically, although the battle was one of the most pivotal in North American history, its prominence in the public imagination derives mainly from these stirring but inaccurate portrayals.
The British did not enter the city that day, but the French finally surrendered. The British lost 650 men, the French a few less, but the British triumph was great. Although the French would try in vain to retake Quebec in 1760, after Wolfe’s posthumous triumph the French empire in North America was as good as lost. Wolfe’s great gamble at the Anse au Foulon had paid off. The British now had complete control of Canada and would soon gain control of New England and New York. The battle of Quebec had determined that North America would be a British, not a French, continent.