The War That Made America

For Governor-General Vaudreuil there was no mystery about how to fight effectively against the British colonies, no matter how vastly their populations outnumbered that of New France. Vaudreuil had literally grown up with war. His father, another governor-general, had enrolled him as an ensign in the troupes de la marine when he was still a boy, and he had risen to the rank of major before he became governor of Louisiana. Everything in his experience convinced him that the most effective way to defend New France was to encourage its Indian allies to raid the frontiers of the British colonies at will.

Attacks by Indians on backcountry settlements terrified the settlers, and reliably created panic. Facing massive refugee crises, British colonial governments had no choice but to fortify their frontiers, spending massive amounts of money, tying down militiamen and provincial soldiers as garrison troops, and diminishing their capacity to take the initiative. Expensive as they were to build and man, however, the Anglo-American forts were always too far-flung to create a genuine shield for the colonies that built them, and so generally accomplished little more than reassuring those settlers who chose not to flee that they would have a place to take shelter in case of attack.

In practice the forts were as much targets as shields. Because they attracted so many people and held large stocks of supplies and arms, the loss of a major fort could have a disproportionally devastating effect. When Delaware warriors attacked Fort Granville on the Juniata River in south-central Pennsylvania on July 30, 1756, for example, they killed or captured its entire garrison, together with all the settlers who had sought refuge there. Granville had been a major supply depot; without it, posts that lay farther west had to be abandoned, and the colony’s defensive line fell back to Carlisle, just a hundred miles from Philadelphia. French forts, by contrast, supported offensive actions at the same time that they defended strategic passes. Fort Duquesne and Fort Saint Frédéric, notably, served as advanced bases for Indian warriors, offering them the weapons and ammunition they needed to carry on raids and acting as collecting points where prisoners and loot could be brought to be exchanged for trade goods. French posts thus functioned less as defensive bulwarks than as magnets for the warriors—some from hundreds of miles away—on whom the security of New France depended.

Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnal, Marquis de Vaudreuil (1698-1778), unknown French artist, c. 1753-1755. The Canadian-born marquis de Vaudreuil was already an experienced military officer, colonial administrator, and intercultural diplomat when he was appointed governor-general of New France in 1755. His strategy of frontier raiding against the British colonies produced a string of early victories. (Library and Archives Canada/C-147538)

Pursuing what amounted to a strategy of guerrilla war had two drawbacks: it placed the initiative in Indian hands, and it encouraged native warriors to fight according to their own cultural norms. Both would have made it difficult for the marquis Duquesne, with his metropolitan and militarily conservative perspective, to embrace fully la guerre sauvage. Neither feature, however, bothered Vaudreuil. From the time of Braddock’s defeat through 1757, he happily took advantage of the willingness of Indians to fight for their French father on whatever terms they pleased. At Fort Duquesne, Fort Niagara, Fort Saint Frédéric, and Fort Detroit he offered arms, supplies, and modest numbers of troupes de la marine and Canadian militiamen to provide whatever guidance and aid native raiders were willing to accept. Essentially, however, the western Indians were free to conduct a war of their own devising, and they did so with enormous success. With the governments of Virginia and Pennsylvania entirely preoccupied with defending their own frontiers and unable to contribute much in the way of men or money to efforts to attack Canada, Vaudreuil could concentrate on defending the likeliest invasion route, the Lake Champlain-Richelieu River corridor, while deploying enough men to besiege posts of high strategic value on the New York frontier.

Stove plate, 1756. Central European immigrants to Pennsylvania continued the tradition of heating their homes with iron stoves that often displayed biblical references and other decoration. The inscription on this cast iron side plate—“DIS IST DAS IAHR DARIN WITET” (“This is the year in which rages”)—continues on an end plate: “DER INCHIN SCHAR” (“the Indian War Party”). (From the collection of the Moravian Historical Society, Nazareth, Pennsylvania)

The first fort to offer itself as a potential target was Oswego, the old New York trading post on Lake Ontario that William Shirley’s forces had occupied, at great cost, through the bitter winter of 1756. Vaudreuil had intended to wipe it out in 1755, before the Anglo-Americans could complete their fortifications there, but he found New France under attack from so many different directions that he was forced to hold off until the following year. By that point the need to strike Oswego had become critical. The fort allowed the British to threaten critical sites in two directions: Fort Frontenac on the north shore of Lake Ontario, which guarded the head of the Saint Lawrence (and hence controlled access to Montreal by the river); and Fort Niagara at the western end of the lake, which protected the portage to Lake Erie and hence controlled communication to all interior posts. Oswego could not be ignored.

Fortunately for the French, Oswego was also vulnerable. The withdrawal of the Mohawks from active alliance with the British after the Battle of Lake George and the resumption of a more or less uniform Iroquois policy of neutrality between the combatant empires had made it so, because the long supply route on which Oswego depended could be attacked at will, provided that the Iroquois gave permission for the attackers to pass through their lands. Vaudreuil took advantage of this in late March 1756 by sending a raiding party on snowshoes to destroy Fort Bull, the main way station between Albany and Oswego. This stockaded storehouse complex guarded the portage between the upper Mohawk and Wood Creek, which in turn gave access to Lake Oneida, the Onondaga River, and Lake Ontario. The raiding party was modest in size—slightly more than 350 Canadians, Indians, and troupes de terre—but exploited the advantage of surprise so completely as to annihilate the hundred-man garrison. Fort Bull’s destruction left Oswego in a perilous state, for all that spring French and Indian war parties beset supply convoys on the river with ease. It was May before the first boatloads of supplies arrived from Albany, and June before the depleted, disease-ridden garrison had recuperated sufficiently to begin strengthening the fort’s defensive works. Only then did the garrison resume building the whaleboats, sloops, and other vessels that were to carry troops in the expedition against Fort Frontenac that General Shirley had ordered for the summer of 1756.

“Attaques des Forts de Chouaguen.” This finely detailed topographical map of Oswego (called Chouaguen by the French) shows the arrangement of defenses and siege lines at the time of Montcalm’s attack, August 10, 1756. The original fort, a fur-trading post, lies west of the river’s mouth within a triangular entrenchment. Fort Ontario, an eight-pointed star, stands on a low hill to the east; the small, isolated Fort George (“Fort Rascal”) looks down from the top of a bluff to the west. Warehouses and traders’ houses line the riverbank just south of Fort Oswego’s entrenchments, near the small harbor. (Library and Archives Canada/C-041106)

The expedition never happened. French and Indian pressure on Oswego’s supply lines did not diminish as summer advanced, and the garrison’s strength increased only moderately. By the beginning of August the three forts in the Oswego complex (Old Oswego, Fort Ontario, and New Oswego, an outlier stockade so small and contemptible that the troops called it “Fort Rascal”) sheltered only about 1,800 souls, a number that included not only the 1,135 regular troops of the Fiftieth and Fifty-first Regiments, but hundreds of boat-builders and other civilian artificers, traders, and sailors, and a considerable number of women and children camp followers. The reinforcements from Albany that Oswego’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Mercer, needed in order to move against Fort Frontenac never materialized. Instead, on August 10, three thousand French and Indian enemies did. Four days later Mercer was dead and Oswego was theirs.

The siege of Oswego was, as Vaudreuil had planned it, a joint operation involving troupes de terre, troupes de la marine, Canadian militiamen, and Indian warriors. The commander on the scene, and the man who accepted the British surrender, was not Vaudreuil but Dieskau’s successor, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, marquis de Montcalm-Gozon de Saint-Véran. Like the governor-general, the forty-four-year-old Montcalm had been an army officer since boyhood; commissioned an ensign at age nine, he had entered on active duty at twenty as a captain and gone on to serve in eleven campaigns, in the course of which he had suffered five wounds. A small, charming man with an acid wit, Montcalm differed in every way— except perhaps in egotism—from the bearish, affable Vaudreuil. The potential for friction between the two was in no way diminished by the fact that Montcalm had come to New France as a major general, with orders that designated him as commander of troops in the field and therefore subordinate to Vaudreuil. Montcalm had arrived at Quebec in May accompanied by his staff and two fresh regiments of troupes de terre, but assumed command of the Oswego expedition only at the end of July; thus he had little part in the planning or organization of the campaign, which had been Vaudreuil’s alone.

It was therefore with some justice that Vaudreuil called the taking of Oswego “my victory” and took pride in having secured control of the Great Lakes and the west. Montcalm, however, disapproved. He had intended to conduct a formal siege with a prolonged artillery bombardment, in the hope of luring a relief column west from Albany. Once those reinforcements were well along the way, troops whom he had previously positioned at Fort Carillon had orders to strike Fort William Henry and if possible Fort Edward. That design had been frustrated by the quickness with which Oswego’s surrender followed the death of its commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Mercer; when a cannonball beheaded him not long after the bombardment began, his unnerved second-in-command asked for a truce and then capitulated. Montcalm, outraged that a professional officer would surrender before losing at least three or four hundred men, denied the surrendered garrison the honors of war.

An impulsive reaction, Montcalm’s decision spoke volumes about the depth of his concern for conducting the war according to the norms of European military culture.² What appalled him most in this connection, however, was the behavior of the 260 or so Indian warriors who had taken part in the expedition. During the siege they had swarmed within musket shot of Fort Ontario, utterly disregarding the disciplined, professional rituals of approach and attack. After the surrender they had broken into Oswego’s hospital, where they killed at least thirty of the wounded and sick; and they had taken captives with the usual purposes of adoption and torture in mind. Vaudreuil, who was not on the scene, would have understood this behavior, and tolerated it as the price of la guerre sauvage. Montcalm, horrified, did his best to put a stop to it. In the end he redeemed the captives at great expense in trade goods and brandy, thereby convincing the Indians that captive-taking had the potential to enhance both their martial reputations and their material well-being.

Although Vaudreuil retroactively supported Montcalm’s decision to ransom prisoners, the taking of Oswego marked the opening of a rift between the two men. It would widen as Montcalm’s disgust with la guerre sauvage grew, and with it his scorn for the provincial aristocrat who clung to it with undiminished conviction. To Montcalm nothing could have been clearer than the folly of taking “a few scalps, or . . . burning a few houses,” the “petty means” that served only to “waste material and time,” when he had thousands of trained professionals, men who knew what war was supposed to be, at his disposal. With these troupes de terre he could defend Canada in the classic way, strengthening the forts that defended its heartland and capital, compelling the Anglo-Americans to fling themselves at his defenses and wear themselves out in a long, civilized war of attrition. The West, strategically meaningless in such a war, could safely be left to the savages. But Vaudreuil understood a strategy of conventional defense as doomed by Britain’s overwhelming numbers and naval strength, and so refused to consider it. His continued promotion of Indian alliances and adherence to guerrilla strategies would produce military successes—to Montcalm’s chagrin—for another year.

The British, meanwhile, had yet to find the formula for capitalizing on their manifest advantages. During the previous winter the accidental commander in chief, William Shirley, had proposed campaigns for 1756 that would concentrate on defending the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia while pressing two offensive expeditions through New York. Regulars from the Fiftieth and Fifty-first Regiments were to make the attempt—foiled with the loss of Oswego—to take Fort Frontenac, and thus to cut Fort Duquesne and the other interior posts off from Canada. At the same time an expedition made up entirely of provincial troops from New England would attack Ticonderoga (Fort Carillon) and Crown Point (Fort Saint Frédéric). Shirley’s was a plan that no professional general could have approved, for it assigned responsibility for a major campaign to several thousand half-disciplined provincials, under the command of officers who were scarcely more proficient than their men.

That William Shirley was no professional general was not lost on the duke of Cumberland and Secretary at War Henry Fox, who began moving during the early months of 1756 to replace him with one of Cumberland’s protégés, John Campbell, the fourth earl of Loudoun. Like the mills of the gods, however, the wheels of Whitehall ground exceeding slow. Even though Shirley knew in April that he would be superseded, he remained in command until June 25, when Loudoun’s second-in-command, Major General James Abercromby, arrived to relieve him of his duties. Meanwhile the campaigns had proceeded along the deeply irregular paths that Shirley had marked out for them.

While Shirley’s military amateurism was unmistakably evident in his unorthodox campaign plans, he had excellent political reasons to make the choices he did. The assemblies of the New England provinces were eager to seize the French forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and even to invade Canada, to bring an end to Indian raids against the northern frontier. They feared two British policies, however, as much as they feared the French and Indians, and refused to appropriate money and raise troops until they had been reassured that neither would be implemented. First was a ruling by the British solicitor general from 1754, which stipulated that whenever provincial soldiers served jointly with regulars in North America they would be under the direct command of regular officers and therefore subject to the same rigorous discipline as the regulars. Second was a royal proclamation of 1754 that made all provincial officers junior in rank to all regular officers, effectively subjecting even provincial colonels and generals to the commands of fuzz-faced redcoat ensigns. The solicitor general’s ruling would inhibit voluntary enlistment, for the ferocious discipline of the redcoats, whose courts-martial regularly sentenced men to floggings of a thousand lashes, was only too well known in the colonies; the royal proclamation would ensure that no gentleman with any self-respect would offer his services as a provincial officer. Shirley’s simple, direct solution had been to separate the provincials and regulars into two entirely distinct expeditions, linked only insofar as he had ultimate supervision of both. Thus he guaranteed that neither unduly strict discipline nor loss of honor would diminish Yankee engagement in the war effort. The New England assemblies, understanding Shirley’s solution as a concession to their interests, responded with great enthusiasm, authorizing the enlistment of seventy-five hundred men for the Crown Point expedition. By the end of June the provincials’ regiments were nearly full.

All this was lost on General Abercromby, who saw only an astonishingly disordered state of affairs when he assumed command from William Shirley in late June—so disordered, indeed, that he hesitated to proceed with either expedition until his superior, Lord Loudoun, arrived. His lordship finally stepped on the quay at New York only on July 23, as Montcalm’s troops were making the final preparations to embark against Fort Oswego. Meanwhile the colonels of the New England regiments at Lake George were debating what would happen, and what actions they would take, if the new commander in chief decided to subject them and their troops to direct redcoat authority. The colonels concluded that the result would be “a dissolution of the army”: the common soldiers would desert en masse and most officers would resign their commissions.

Lord Loudoun, an officer so professional that he had planted hundreds of trees on his Ayrshire estate “in the form of a regiment drawn up in review, a tree to a man,” was dumbfounded by the attitudes and behavior of the provincials. He rejected Shirley’s bizarre campaign plans immediately and set about making the wholesale corrections he thought necessary. He encountered little but frustration. His powers were even more extensive than Braddock’s had been; he was a viceroy in all but name, and his commission gave him direct authority over all colonial civil officers, including governors. Yet he found that he could do nothing to counteract the provincial soldiers’ and officers’ determination to stand by what they thought were their rights, and to insist on the binding nature of the contracts under which they served. Nor did Loudoun arrive in time to deploy the eight fresh regiments of regular troops he had brought with him to save Oswego from destruction. Nor indeed could he prevent his panicky subordinate on the New York frontier, Major General Daniel Webb, from responding to the fall of Oswego by pulling his advanced forces back from the Great Carrying Place to German Flats, fully forty miles down the Mohawk River.

By mid-August the New York frontier had unraveled in confusion, and all Loudoun could do was blame Shirley for having made it happen. Incapable of regaining Oswego and unwilling to trust the provincials to move against the French at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, he embarked on a campaign to have his predecessor cashiered from the army and stripped of civil office. Loudoun’s initial impulse was to send him back to England in chains; in the end he settled for sending a list of charges to London. Shirley returned to Boston, where he attended to his duties as governor while (good lawyer that he was) he gathered documents with which to defend himself before the secretary at war and the grave, serried ranks of treasury auditors who awaited his arrival. He sailed for London in October 1756. He would be cleared of wrongdoing only in 1758. The audits would drag on until 1763, at which point he would finally be released from scrutiny.

John Campbell, Fourth Earl of Loudoun, by Allan Ramsay, c. 1760. The Scottish artist Allan Ramsay painted Lord Loudoun (1705-1782) several times between 1747 and about 1760, when Britain’s former commander in chief in North America sat for this portrait. Loudoun’s American command (1756-1758) was marked by acrimonious disputes with provincial forces, legislatures, and officials over royal prerogative and colonial rights. (Fort Ligonier, Ligonier, Pennsylvania)

With Shirley out of the way and headed (Loudoun hoped) for disgrace, and with nothing more to be done militarily but to wait out the year and send his regulars into winter quarters, the commander in chief turned to the organizational tasks at which he excelled. There, he knew, he could make real progress, and the reforms he instituted in procurement, provisioning, and transport services would indeed stand the British war effort in good stead for years to come. His lordship would prove less successful in dealing with the colonists and their governments, however, in large part because his formal powers exceeded both his political resources and his fund of common sense. Nevertheless, by the end of the campaign year in 1756, he was beginning to understand what he was up against. The colonists and their legislatures, insistent on what they called their rights, would cooperate at best grudgingly with the demands for money and men that he made on the king’s behalf. But Loudoun was not discouraged. Like young soldiers unaccustomed to discipline, colonial officials and legislators would simply have to be shown their duty. Then, and only then, could the war against New France be won.