Victory Removes an Antagonist
The year 1759 had been one of unrelieved disaster for New France. Winter suspended military operations, with two British forces poised for descent on Montreal, the new capital. There could be no escape from impending doom, General Lévis knew, without early and substantial aid from France. He asked for troops, for cannon, and for provisions.
But Louis XV and his ministers had an army at home to maintain, and a blockade by Britain’s navy that left France unable to succor her colonies. Canada had never been able to support herself, even in time of peace, and now was more dependent than ever. Was it worth saving, harried ministers asked? Where were more regiments to be found? Would a convoy escape British capture? And something must be wrong with the distribution of supplies already sent and the enormous amounts purchased for the military in Canada. The pungent smell of corruption had been wafted to France, but the culprits were not yet identified. Feebly the court gathered only four hundred recruits and a little more food and sent them off—only to be captured by the British navy.
Plucky Lévis had not waited. In April, 1760, he activated his mixed army of seven thousand men and boldly pushed down the river toward Quebec. He had recalled Bourlamaque from Île-aux-Noix and sent the less reliable Bougainville there.
Murray had a garrison of less than thirty-nine hundred, but he went out on April 28 to meet the enemy on the high ground Montcalm had occupied. He also had a field artillery of twenty-seven guns. The position he took was sound, but he did not keep it. When he saw Lévis’ advance start to dig in, Murray ordered a quick attack in the snow before the main body should come up. He was briefly successful, but the French columns did come up and hammered on his flanks until the tide turned. The red line broke and the British fell back into the city, losing all but two of their cannon. It was a bloodier engagement than Wolfe’s, for the British lost two hundred and fifty-nine killed and eight hundred and forty-five wounded. Lévis lost one hundred and ninety-three killed and six hundred and forty wounded, including the active Bourlamaque, in what is usually called the Battle of Ste. Foy. He now laid siege to Quebec, and if French ships had arrived, Murray might have had to capitulate. But on May 15 British ships appeared and immediately shot up the frigates that were supporting Lévis. The Frenchman saw that the jig was up and pulled back to Montreal again.
Now it was a matter of time. Amherst shifted his weight for the 1760 campaign. He sent two regiments from Louisbourg to strengthen Murray at Quebec so that he might move up the St. Lawrence. He reduced his force at Lake Champlain to thirty-four hundred—two regiments of regulars, the four New York Independent Companies, and the New England provincials—and gave over the command to Colonel William Haviland of the Twenty-seventh. They were to push down the lake toward Montreal starting August 10. Amherst himself added his remaining troops to those of Gage at Fort Oswego and took command of the descent of the St. Lawrence with the main army of ten thousand, also starting on August 10. With him were six hundred Iroquois under Sir William Johnson, a distinct achievement because Governor Vaudreuil had earlier sent French-allied Indians to persuade the Iroquois to remain neutral.
To meet this triple threat Lévis did what he could. He had ordered Captain Pouchot, recent commandant of Fort Niagara, to Fort La Galette to hold the upper St. Lawrence. Pouchot selected a nearby island and hurried construction of a fort in midstream—Fort Lévis. He tried to enlist the neighboring Indians but they hung off. The Iroquois succeeded in talking them into remaining neutral. Pouchot was left with only three hundred men and one ship to stem the invasion.
At Île-aux-Noix Bougainville had eleven hundred men. Lévis asked him to hold out as long as possible, but Vaudreuil, interfering as usual, advised him that in the face of a superior enemy he would have to retreat or surrender. Roughly halfway between Montreal and Quebec, Lévis stationed Major Jean Dumas, who had routed Braddock, at Trois Rivières in the hope that the garrison there might slow Murray’s advance.
The co-ordinated British offensive moved relentlessly. Haviland swept down Lake Champlain and landed near Île-aux-Noix. Batteries were erected and began pounding the French fort while a detachment swung around it to the Richelieu River below. With only a day’s provisions left, Bougainville stole away at night, leaving forty men to surrender on August 28. He hastened northward, burning St. Jean as he passed, to add his troops to the defense of Montreal.
Amherst approached Fort Lévis with numerous row galleys, whale boats, and bateaux. Near the island he put detachments ashore on either side of the St. Lawrence. Pouchot’s warship gave a good account of itself before it was captured, and Fort Lévis was reduced to “a litter of carpenter’s wood” when Pouchot surrendered on August 25. The British rechristened the stronghold Fort William Augustus and left a garrison to rebuild it. On August 31 the army began descending the dangerous seven great rapids. Although no enemy appeared to harass them, Amherst lost fifty-four boats and eighty-four men in the rocky, turbulent passage.
Meanwhile, Murray had embarked from Quebec with twenty-two hundred men on July 15, expecting to reach Montreal first and seize it alone. His ambition rather exceeded his competence. The journey was constantly against the current, and the wind was unreliable. Passage was slow, and at each parish he sent men ashore to receive the submission of the Canadians, collect their arms, and administer the oath of neutrality on penalty of burning their houses. Near Trois Rivières he paused, then passed it on the far side. Helpless Dumas could only retire upstream just ahead of him. Lévis did not deceive himself: “We possess no means of stopping them; we are making a mere defensive demonstration to retard their march.” Murray reached Varenne, just below Montreal, on August 31 and stopped a week waiting for Haviland to join him from the south. Amherst landed on the western end of the island of Montreal on September 6. The timing was perfect.
The Canadians, who had been falling away from Lévis, now left him completely. Only the battalions of regulars were left to defend the city. Governor Vaudreuil summoned the principal officers and Intendant Bigot on the night of September 6 to discuss capitulation in the face of such overwhelming strength. Bougainville called on Amherst next morning regarding a truce. The general was adamant: he had come to take Canada and would settle for nothing short of it. Proposals were made and argued. Agreement was reached on September 8 in a long treaty providing for surrender of the troops as prisoners, for protection of trading interests and the Catholic Church, and for security of private property. Lévis, failing in his demand for the honors of war, urged Vaudreuil not to sign, but the governor saw that Amherst’s terms were generous and gave up the whole of Canada. In a final defiance, Lévis burned his battalion flags and declared they had been destroyed earlier.
Amherst had won for his king a domain twelve times the size of England. Canada was actually of unknown extent. The Hudson Bay posts were now contiguous to New England. Westward the province stretched through the Great Lakes to boundaries undetermined; it angled southward to include the Ohio Valley and the vague Illinois country. The very next day after the capitulation General Amherst detached the redoubtable young Ranger commander, Major Robert Rogers, with two of his companies to row up the St. Lawrence and the lakes to take over the western posts and raise the British flag.
On his way Rogers reported to Brigadier General Monckton at Fort Pitt and picked up Johnson’s deputy Indian agent, George Croghan, and a company of the Sixtieth Regiment to garrison Detroit. The Indians of the Detroit River looked forward to the new “tenants” of the fort, as they considered them, anticipating gifts and supplies from the victorious power. On November 29,1760, in appropriate ceremonies, Rogers marched into Fort Detroit and raised his flag, while the small French garrison under Captain Bellestre marched off to Fort Pitt under guard as prisoners of war. Rogers then sent two squads of Rangers to the southwest to occupy Fort Miamis (Fort Wayne, Indiana) and Fort Ouiatenon (near Lafayette, Indiana). He himself attempted to lead a party up the lakes to Fort Michilimackinac (Mackinaw City, Michigan) but was turned back by ice. That fort as well as one on Green Bay and another at modern Niles, Michigan, would have to wait until the next summer. Croghan held a series of Indian conferences and promised a trade at fair prices. He also obtained the release of fifty-seven white captives. They went back east with the Rangers late in December.
To establish a makeshift government for Canada, Amherst divided the province into three districts. Murray was continued as military governor of the Quebec or eastern district. Burton was named military governor of the Trois Rivières region, and Gage was appointed military governor of the Montreal district. Militia captains were given powers as justices of the peace to settle local disputes. Provisions were distributed, and trade goods called for from American merchants. Life for the Canadian habitant moved along much as it had before, pending a general treaty of peace by which he assumed Canada would be restored to France once more.
THE CHEROKEE REVOLT
Yet the fighting was not ended, and a formal treaty was more than two years away. One trouble spot was the back country of the Carolinas, where the Cherokees had taken up the hatchet. Numbering ten thousand distributed in forty towns, they resented four western settlements, on Long Canes Creek and at Ninety-Six in western South Carolina, and two recent forts: Fort Prince George on the Keowee River (Pickens County on the extreme western border of South Carolina) and Fort Loudoun on the Little Tennessee River (near Vonore, Tennessee, thirty-five miles southwest of Knoxville). The latter post, established in 1756, stood near the Cherokee capital of Chota and was the first English fort on the west side of the Appalachians. The neighboring Cherokee women, enjoying great personal freedom, soon were living with many men of the garrison.
The Cherokees were divided into pro-French and pro-English factions. Border killings occurred all spring and summer of 1759. When numerous headmen went to Charleston to try to negotiate peace, they were illegally held as hostages. Governor William Henry Lyttelton ordered the Cherokees deprived of ammunition and led South Carolina militia to Fort Prince George to threaten them in November. Chief Attakullakulla, who had visited England in 1730 and remained steadfastly pro-British, could not deliver up the twenty-five murderers wanted by the governor. The Carolina troops, restless over an advancing wave of smallpox, forced Lyttelton to agree that, as soon as the guilty raiders were brought in, the hostages at Fort Prince George would be released and the presents at the fort (three tons of powder, balls, muskets, and woolens) would be distributed. Lyttelton marched out on December 31 leaving a tinderbox—a smallpox epidemic, sullen Cherokees who would never surrender the guilty ones, resentful relatives of the innocent hostages, and the needed ammunition that could be obtained only by force. Governor Louis de Kerlérec of Louisiana tried to aggravate the Cherokees’ hostility but lacked the powder and trade goods to encourage them.
The rebellious members of the tribe tried to take Fort Prince George by trickery in February, 1760, and failed, although they killed the commandant. In revenge the soldiers butchered the hostages. Cherokee war parties killed fifteen traders and forty-six settlers, captured many more, and attacked Ninety-Six. They pushed back the frontier almost a hundred miles. When South Carolina appealed for regulars, Amherst sent two regiments from Pennsylvania under Colonel Archibald Montgomery, with recently exchanged Major James Grant as second in command. The regulars marched to Ninety-Six in May and destroyed five Indian towns, killing sixty to eighty warriors, on their way to Fort Prince George. Since no Indians sued for peace, Montgomery moved along toward Fort Loudoun, a hundred miles northwest. He was attacked and lost seventeen killed and sixty-six wounded while killing about fifty Cherokees. Cautioned by Grant and thinking he had done enough, he did not go on. He left provisions and reinforcements at Prince George and returned to Charleston, where he finally posted four companies. The Cherokees believed the British had retreated in fear of them.
Isolated Fort Loudoun, containing two hundred militia under Captain Paul Demeré, was besieged all spring and summer by Oconostota. South Carolina had asked Virginia to send relief, since the northern route was shorter, and the Virginia Assembly agreed to dispatch the regiment under Colonel William Byrd. He started slowly on the 300-mile journey in July. But by early August the Loudoun garrison was starving and mutinous. Captain Demeré asked the Cherokee chiefs for terms and surrendered on August 8. His troops and their families were to be escorted to Fort Prince George. Early on the second morning out, however, they were attacked by their Cherokee escorts. Demeré was horribly mangled, some thirty-five others were slain, and the survivors divided up as captives. Attakullakulla, who was still for peace, rescued his friend Captain John Stuart, an agent to the Cherokees, and delivered him to Colonel Byrd. The latter sent a blustering message to the Cherokee war leaders but halted his march. Oconostota sought French aid in New Orleans.
South Carolina, its governor called home, appealed again to Amherst for troops, and he sent back a detachment under James Grant, now a lieutenant colonel, that arrived in Charleston in January, 1761. This time the province also raised a regiment and six hundred mounted rangers under such officers as Francis Marion, Dr. William Moultrie, and Henry Laurens. With more than twenty-eight hundred men, Grant reached Fort Prince George in May. It was now commanded by Lieutenant Lachlan McIntosh, whom the Indians respected and who had ransomed one hundred and thirteen white prisoners, including seventy from Fort Loudoun. Oconostota was ready to talk peace, but Charleston wanted vengeance, and Amherst had ordered chastisement for the massacre of the Fort Loudoun garrison. When Grant pressed on, he was attacked on June 10. His losses were small and he carried out a systematic destruction of fifteen Indian towns and their crops. The Cherokees living beyond the demolished Fort Loudoun could see what was in store for them and were ready to have Attakullakulla plead for them. He brought in a few chiefs to Prince George, and terms were dictated by Colonel Grant. Attakullakulla objected to one stipulation and insisted on going to Charleston to see the lieutenant governor. The clause was modified, but the other terms included a boundary line in the west between Indian and white settlements, all white captives to be delivered up, future Indian murderers to be executed by their own chiefs, white murderers to be tried in Charleston, and no Frenchman to be allowed in Cherokee country. The treaty was signed on December 17, 1761, yet its chief effect was to solidify Cherokee hatred of the English.
RECEDING DRUMS
With the fall of Canada, Governor Vaudreuil, Intendant Bigot, the two generals, Colonel Bougainville, Major Péan, other officers and civil officials departed for France. If some of them were bitter over lack of support from Versailles, others may have been uneasy over their coming reception. Loss of Canada had not been viewed kindly by the ministry, and the inevitable attempt to find a scapegoat had inspired re-examination of the support previously given to the province. In the course of this investigation, evidence of flagrant corruption was uncovered. Therefore, upon arrival Vaudreuil, Bigot, and forty others were clapped in the Bastille, accused of fraud and peculation.
Trials for twenty-one of them commenced in December, 1761; like thieves they began to accuse one another, and the whole sordid story came out. Provisions sent for troops had been sold to traders; then supplies purchased in Canada were bought at artificially high prices, as were ships hired for military purposes. Yet farmers were forced to sell their grain first to Bigot at low fixed prices. Gifts to Indians were overpriced. Entertainments had been charged off to the king. With excessive profits accruing to a few, gambling and wenching ran high. Vaudreuil and seven others were acquitted; the governor had not profited, but he certainly could not have been ignorant of the dishonest traffic. Bigot was fined a million and a half livres as restitution, his property was confiscated, and he was banished from France for life. Joseph Cadet, commissary general, was fined six million livres and banished from Paris for nine years. Others were fined and imprisoned. Thirty-four of the accused failed to appear for trial, but seven were sentenced in absentia.
The three military commanders were not involved. Lévis became a marshal of France and was eventually created a duke. Bourlamaque and Bougainville continued their military careers, although the latter transferred to the navy, became a noted explorer of the East Indies, and is better remembered for an island in the Solomon group and a tropical flower that were both named for him.
Meanwhile, France had lost her last stronghold in India in April, 1761, and had surrendered the island of Dominica in June. Peace negotiations with England were proposed, but Pitt was suspicious. The French, indeed, were hoping to trade their conquests in Hesse and Göttingen for Canada. Pitt insisted on keeping all the conquered parts of the French empire. Frederick the Great was not satisfied either, but British public opinion was divided over continuing the war for his benefit.
Rebuffed, France listened to a Spanish proposal to form an alliance and dragged Spanish complaints into the discussion. Pitt refused even to consider Spanish issues, and the tentative negotiations broke down. On August 15 the Bourbon Family Compact was secretly signed. King Ferdinand of Spain had wisely remained neutral throughout the war, earning England’s gratitude, but after his death in 1759, Charles III, strongly sympathetic to France, succeeded him. He demanded certain concessions from England over ship seizures, logwood in Honduras, and cod in Newfoundland. He thought he could gain his points by an alliance with an already defeated France, but Spain was entering the war too late to reap anything but disaster.
Pitt suspected an alliance and in September asked the cabinet to declare war on Spain. The new king, young George III, wanted peace, not further war, and so did some of his ministers. They had all smarted under Pitt’s insolence, bred of success. When Pitt threatened to resign if they did not meet his demand for war, the cabinet dug in its heels and refused to give way. As he had never had a party following, Pitt could bring no pressure on the opposition. So he resigned on October 4, 1761, and was succeeded by the Earl of Egremont.
A month later the cabinet asked Spain to disavow its suspected alliance with France, and when the Spanish court refused, England declared war, on January 4, 1762. Spain now showed that her first aim was to reconquer Portugal, a neutral friendly to Britain. Her army invaded the poor kingdom in May. In July England sent Lord Loudoun and Brigadier General John Burgoyne with six thousand troops who were able to protect Lisbon until the Spanish forces ignominiously departed. That was only the beginning for Spain. In June an expedition under the Earl of Albemarle, augmented by several regiments from America under Monckton, laid siege to Cuba’s El Morro Castle and captured Havana. In October English forces under Brigadier General William Draper and Rear Admiral Samuel Cornish set out from India and took Manila and the Philippines. Such was the fruit of Charles Ill’s foreign policy.
Secret peace talks with France reopened in late spring of 1762. Now that Pitt had left the government, the predatory aims of Frederick had grown more distasteful to England. France had gained nothing from her Spanish alliance. Indeed, France’s position had only deteriorated. Bereft of India, all of Canada and half of Louisiana, three of her four West Indies islands, her hopes of holding four so-called neutral islands, and her army driven from Hesse, she had paid heavily for her offensive move into the Ohio Valley. All she had gained was Minorca and two trading posts in Sumatra; she still held two islands in the Indian Ocean. Her fundamental weakness was not that her military and financial commitments in Germany prevented her from strengthening her far-flung colonies, but rather that she lacked trained seamen and essential naval stores for shipbuilding and that she suffered from Britain’s blockade and naval superiority.
Spain with much justice had gained nothing and lost Cuba, the Philippines, and part of her navy. She had failed to conquer Portugal or scare the British from Gibraltar. All this in ten months of war was something of a downhill record.
There was not much France could ask as a price for peace. She did put great stress on the return of St. Lucia Island and on fishing rights off Newfoundland. When England indicated acquiescence, ministers were exchanged, and the Duke of Bedford went to Paris in August with detailed instructions. A draft of a treaty was submitted to the cabinet council in October and approved. It was then signed on November 3, 1762, and laid before Parliament.
Canada and all Louisiana east of the Mississippi (except New Orleans) went to England. Free navigation of that river was granted to British subjects. Grenada and three of the neutral islands (St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago) remained in British hands. Minorca and the two posts in Sumatra were restored to England. French acquisitions in India made since 1749 were renounced. The fortifications of Dunkerque on the English Channel were to be demolished. French and British armies were to be withdrawn from the German principalities. No compensation was allowed for French ships taken between the outbreak of hostilities in 1754 and the formal declaration of war in 1756.
England conceded fishing rights on the Newfoundland banks to France and returned two small islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence as fishing stations. Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St. Lucia were restored to France, and she got back the posts in India held before 1749, as well as the slave port of Goree off the west coast of Africa. Canadians were to have the choice of leaving Canada or becoming British citizens.
Spain came out better than she deserved. Although she had to cede Florida to England in order to get back Cuba, it was no great loss; Florida had become an expensive failure. As compensation for the possible loss of Florida, France had promised New Orleans and western Louisiana to Spain; now the pledge had to be redeemed, thereby sweeping France entirely from the mainland of North America and leaving Spain ensconced in a new region. She regained the Philippines because the conquest by England was not known until after the treaty was signed. Spain was denied a share in fishing off Newfoundland, and she was forced to allow British subjects to harvest logwood in Honduras. As for the Spanish ships taken before war was declared, their cases were referred to admiralty courts in England.
An ailing Pitt led the opposition to ratifying this treaty on the grounds that Frederick the Great was not a party to it and that certain conquests were given up. A few voices out-Pitted Pitt in their objection to any concession to France. Thundered the North Britain, under editorship of the rakish John Wilkes, demogogic member of Parliament: “A wicked faction only would purchase an ignoble and inglorious peace, by giving up to the perfidious French and to the feeble and insolent Spaniards our most valuable and important conquests.”
Most such minority criticism was founded on the fame of the West Indies for sugar and on ignorance of the resources of Canada and Florida, both of which were considered by some as largely uninhabitable or not self-sustaining. Frederick, meanwhile, was getting along with peace negotiations on his own with an exhausted Austria.
The Treaty of Paris passed Parliament easily and was formally signed on February 10, 1763. Five days later a separate treaty ended what had come to be a separate war in Germany by a reversion to the status quo ante bellum. Frederick’s overweaning ambition had been checked, and it was quietly demonstrated that George III had no further interest in ancestral Hanover and its foreign relations.
REFLECTIONS ON THE PEACE
The Treaty of Paris was a good treaty because, given the circumstances, it was fair. There was a comforting note of finality to it for the British. In truth it ended one chapter of empire history and opened another. Previous treaties by their restoration of too many conquests had simply left old sores to fester. France had lost her American empire as much by ambitions she could not support as by strangling regulations. The tenuousness of legal claims to unoccupied lands based only on exploration stood revealed. France had had her Cartier, Spain her De Soto, and England her Cabots, but charters and assertions written according to who saw what first were no more than vain boasts and challenges. Inevitably it was up to the colonists themselves to make their own boundaries by the drift of their settlements. None of the three powers would recognize a line that the others could not hold by force. The beckoning land had to be won—that is, reclaimed from the wilderness, wrested from the savage, and secured from the rival.
Early in the contest France and England, although professing a desire for peace and knowing that strength was to be gathered only from peace, insisted on a peace that would permit expansion of trade and territory. Each country had developed a sense of mission, whether it was toward the fur trade, saving the souls of the Indians, gaining a new Canaan, wider boundaries, or national prestige. It could not be fulfilled without possession of the interior continent. This was a contradictory or mutually exclusive ambition. One side had to conquer. The irony is that under English rule the French colonials actually achieved more freedom and prosperity than they ever enjoyed under their own government.
The Treaty of Paris elevated Great Britain to the strongest power in Europe with the largest world empire. She had come a long way from her trembling posture before the Spanish armada, her panting rivalry with the Dutch, and her anxiety toward Louis XIV. By the same treaty France passed her zenith and began a gradual decline. Napoleon recovered Louisiana from Spain but did not know enough to keep it. His other conquests were momentary, being chiefly tributes to the egotism that accelerated his country’s retrogression. Of more significance, perhaps, France’s exit from this continent put the area out of range of the Napoleonic wars to come. North America escaped two decades of exhausting conflict.
Competition between France and England by no means ceased. It persisted for another fifty years. Without hope of regaining her empire, France nevertheless allied herself with the Americans during their revolution to make sure that Britain would likewise lose her extensive possessions on this continent. Successful in this adventure, she then fell victim to the contagion of revolution. The rise of Napoleon again pitted England against her old enemy to stop France from swallowing Europe and the Mediterranean. By 1815 France was thoroughly subdued, and Europe was exhausted. The colonial wars were the first conflicts in this long rivalry and foreshadowed the outcome. They occurred in two pairs of wars that gave ample warning of reforms needed to preserve the French empire—clear to everyone but an absolute monarch.