CHAPTER TEN
The Making of a “Massacre”
Lord Loudoun’s experiences with Britain’s North American colonists in the fall of 1756 had hardly encouraged him to think of Americans as an asset in the war effort. In several important cities and towns, including Albany, the site of his campaign headquarters, civilian authorities had refused to provide quarters for his men. Faced with similar reluctance, the adaptable Shirley had purchased the goodwill of local governments and landlords by paying well for the shelter and provisions his men needed, and in so doing had drained his discretionary funds dry. Loudoun, cut from a different cloth, would have none of such irregular, extravagant practices. Finding that his requisition orders produced not accommodations but protests and lectures from mayors and town councils explaining how the English Bill of Rights forbade the billeting of troops on civil populations, Loudoun simply seized the quarters he needed, by force.
Once local officials saw that the choleric Scot was willing to chuck them out of their own houses at bayonet point, they appealed for help to their provincial legislatures, which eventually knuckled under and built barracks for the troops whom Loudoun wished to quarter. It was a deeply unpopular solution among colonial politicians, who saw the forcible taking of housing for troops as an act of tyranny, and who understood being compelled to appropriate public funds for barracks as tantamount to forced taxation. Loudoun, however, concluded that the colonists would respond to coercion, and he grew only more contemptuous of colonial assertions of rights. “I do expect to get through” the colonists’ resistance, he assured the secretary at war, “for the People in this Country, tho’ they are very obstinate, will generally submit when they see You [are] determined.”
Loudoun was also determined to use provincial troops on terms that he, not the colonial assemblies, would set. Thus for the 1757 campaigns he demanded that colonial legislatures raise soldiers to fill standardized hundred-man companies, which could be placed under the command of regular regimental officers. This measure, he believed, would avoid the problems that went with raising provincial regiments of the sort he had encountered in the summer of 1756, manned by troops who insisted that their enlistment contracts be honored and commanded by field officers who refused to serve under regulars of lower rank than themselves. He intended to use most of the provincials as garrison troops at Fort Edward and Fort William Henry, where they would back up two redcoat regiments in preventing a French attack on Albany. Most of the remaining regulars in North America would participate in Loudoun’s main expedition of 1757, an attack on Louisbourg.
Seizing control of the Saint Lawrence was critical to Britain’s plans for success in the American war. So long as the French could supply reinforcements and arms and provisions by sea, there was no realistic hope of weaning the western Indians from their historic alliance, no way to stop the raids that continued to scorch the Anglo-American frontiers from New York to North Carolina. Louisbourg, while formidable, was by no means unassailable. Three thousand provincials and a small Royal Navy squadron had taken it in 1745; six thousand of His Majesty’s best troops, trained in siege warfare and operating in conjunction with a far larger naval task force, could scarcely fail to duplicate their success in 1757.
As Loudoun knew only too well, the element of surprise was critical to the success of any such assault, while the elaborate preparations necessary for a combined army-navy operation were impossible to conceal. It was also clear to him that information about the expedition would fairly hemorrhage from North America’s ports once preparations began; the French would know about it before Loudoun’s transports could sail because merchants in all of the northern cities were keeping up a brisk, barely concealed trade with enemy correspondents in Canada and the French West Indies alike. That treasonous trade, which Loudoun saw as typical of the self-interested behavior of Americans, disgusted him, and he longed to punish those who profited by it as much as he needed to prevent the flow of intelligence to the French. He soon hit on a way to accomplish both: in early March he used his vast powers as commander in chief to decree an embargo on all shipping from North American ports, excepting only those vessels that he or his representatives cleared for military missions. The closure of the ports would last until seven days after the invasion fleet had sailed from New York.
The fleet did not weigh anchor until June 20. For nearly four months virtually all economic activity in the colonial ports ceased. The price of bread skyrocketed in Boston, while the price of flour plummeted in the glutted market of Philadelphia. In the Chesapeake hogsheads of tobacco grew musty in warehouses and shipholds while London and Glasgow merchants looked sharp for other suppliers; New England’s cod fishermen could not make their spring voyage to the Grand Banks. Everywhere sailors lounged about the docks with hands in pockets, unemployed and restless; everywhere merchants anxiously eyed their dwindling cash reserves, fretted over their inventories, and worried about their mounting debts. Only New York, insulated by heavy military demand for supplies and shipping, remained immune to the economic chaos Loudoun’s order had unleashed. Dismissive of the complaints that made it to his ears, the commander in chief did not look up from his endlessly involving tasks of organization and planning to contemplate an American scene in which he was rapidly becoming more hated than Louis XV and more reviled than the marquis de Montcalm.
By the time Loudoun’s fleet sailed, the principal French expedition of the summer was well under way at Montreal and Fort Saint Frédéric. News of the ransom Montcalm had paid for prisoners after the fall of Oswego traveled back into the upper Great Lakes along with the Ojibwa and Menominee warriors who had participated in the siege; from there it spread deep into the interior. With spring, warriors began to appear in unprecedented numbers at Montreal. In all nearly two thousand warriors, from thirty-three native nations, offered their services to their French father. Fewer than half of them were from Caughnawaga, Saint François, and the other Christian réserves that the Jesuits sponsored in New France. The rest represented peoples from across the pays d’en haut and even beyond. One group came from what is now Iowa, speaking a language for which no interpreter could be found.
H.M.S. Sutherland Leaving New York for Halifax, 1757, by Robert Wilkins. The fifty-gun Sutherland carried Lord Loudoun from New York to Halifax, the staging area for his intended attack on the fortress of Louisbourg, in June 1757. The ship had earlier served as a temporary prison for detained Acadian leaders, and would later serve in combined land and sea operations at Louisbourg (1758) and Quebec (1759). (© Queen’s Printer and Controller of HMSO, 2004. UK Government Art Collection)
Vaudreuil welcomed them all, for he intended to use them in the time-tested way, as a loosely directed allied force that would harass and terrify the defenders of the expedition’s objective, Fort William Henry, making the woods around the post a no-man’s-land and preventing any hope of relief. Montcalm dreaded what they might do, and knew that their very diversity and lack of a common language would make them hard, if not impossible, to control. When Ottawa warriors returned to Fort Saint Frédéric from preliminary scouting expeditions with prisoners whom they ate in ritual feasts, he sensed that he might well have to confront behavior even worse than what he had witnessed after the fall of Oswego.
Despite the growing tensions between Montcalm and Vaudreuil, preparations for the largest military adventure yet undertaken from New France proceeded apace. In all about eight thousand men—troupes de la marine, troupes de terre, Canadian militiamen, and Indians—assembled at Fort Carillon in early July. Some sixty-five hundred of them would proceed by foot and boat down the length of Lake George in the last days of the month, bringing with them a train of thirty cannon. They did not expect an easy victory. The English garrison at Fort William Henry had originally consisted of about eleven hundred men fit for duty, together with perhaps sixty carpenters, eighty women and children, and several sutlers. When it became clear in late July that the fort was about to come under siege, the regional commander at Albany, General Daniel Webb, sent reinforcements to bring the defensive force up to nearly twenty-four hundred. Moreover, the fort was a stout one, built under the supervision of a regular-army engineer, and well provisioned. It was also formidably armed; its walls mounted eighteen heavy cannon and a variety of lighter ones. For all these reasons, as well as the still-sharp memory of Oswego, the marquis de Montcalm was determined to make his operations against Fort William Henry match, as much as possible, those of a European siège en forme. He knew that such a siege, properly conducted, would reduce even the strongest fortress in six or (at most) eight weeks’ time, provided that no outside force arrived to relieve it.
Montcalm understood well the elaborate etiquette of the siege. Before the formal opening of operations he would advance a flag of truce and offer the English commandant the chance to surrender; his opponent, if he was an honorable man, would naturally refuse. The digging of approach trenches and transverse trenches would then begin outside cannon range, inching forward until batteries of heavy guns could be brought to bear on the walls of the fort. From that point on, if no relief column appeared from Fort Edward, the siege would proceed inexorably to its conclusion. Cannon would batter the wall and bastions nearest them with direct fire, while mortars would lob high-trajectory explosive shells, called bombs, into the interior of the fort. As the bombardment progressed, the defenders would see their own cannon blasted, one by one, from the embrasures on the walls; would see comrades dismembered by cannon shot, blown to pieces by bombs, mutilated by shell fragments; would grow increasingly demoralized from fear and lack of sleep. Meanwhile the cannonade would hammer the walls of the fort relentlessly, weakening them to the point of collapse. When sections of the wall gave way, Montcalm would raise a flag of truce and offer another proposal for surrender, this one—provided that the defenders had held out manfully under fire—promising an honorable capitulation and hence a means of escape for the battered garrison. Should the fort’s commandant be so foolish as to refuse, he and his men would face the certainty of annihilation when the besieging army stormed through the breaches in the wall. It was virtually certain that he would accept terms that offered the honors of war: few commanders had ever declined them. Montcalm and his men would salute as the foe marched off with colors flying, personal property intact, and a symbolic cannon to testify to their valor; then Montcalm would order the fort razed and proceed with the campaign. Fort Carillon and Fort Saint Frédéric, and the invasion route they guarded, would be more secure than ever before.
And so it went—almost. Montcalm’s second-in-command, a tough Gascon brigadier, François-Gaston de Lévis, arrived on August 3 with three thousand Canadian militiamen and Indian warriors, having marched overland from Fort Carillon. Quickly they succeeded in infiltrating the woods around the fort and cutting it off from communication with Fort Edward. Montcalm landed his artillery and established a siege camp that same day and politely invited Lieutenant Colonel George Monro to surrender. When Monro, a veteran officer from the Thirty-fifth Regiment of Foot, refused, the French set to work; meanwhile, the Indians harassed the garrison with sniper fire. From the time the bombardment began on August 6 it took only three days for Montcalm’s gunners to disable or dismount most of the fort’s great guns, and to position a nine-cannon “breaching battery” at point-blank range before a weakened western wall. Having satisfied the demands of honor, and knowing—thanks to a captured message that Webb had tried to send to Monro, which Montcalm obligingly delivered—that no relief force was on its way, Monro accepted Montcalm’s offer of an honorable surrender.
By midday on August 9 all the particulars were agreed to, and all the preparations for turning over the fort to the French were in place. In return for the promise that neither he nor his men would fight again for eighteen months, Monro and the defenders of Fort William Henry would be allowed to march off for Fort Edward as “parolees,” carrying their personal effects, arms, colors, and a symbolic brass fieldpiece. The sick and wounded of the fort were to be cared for by the French and returned under flag of truce when they recovered. Monro agreed to see to it that all French prisoners in English custody would be repatriated, and that the fort and all its supplies would be surrendered to Montcalm. Then, as befit the conclusion of business between professionals, Colonel Monro treated the marquis de Montcalm to a handsome dinner, complete with the best of the wine that remained in the cellar of the officers’ mess. War might be nasty, brutal work, but it was no occasion for incivility between gentlemen.
It was a model capitulation, thoroughly in keeping with European regular-army practices, but in offering it Montcalm took no account of the wishes of his Indian allies. After the articles had been signed, he summoned the war chiefs to explain to them that they and their warriors would have none of the prisoners or plunder they believed they had fought to obtain. The chiefs listened impassively to what they regarded as an utterly dishonorable set of prohibitions, then returned to their followers with the news that the little man they had called Father was no father at all, for he intended to deprive them of what was rightfully theirs. If they were to have the prisoners, trophies, and plunder they had come for, they would have to take them by force, and Montcalm could be damned.
The next morning at five o’clock, as the long column of surrendered regular and provincial troops and their camp followers prepared to march for Fort Edward with a small French escort, the Indians took what they believed they had earned. The assault was brief, vicious, and chaotic, focused on the rear of the long column, where the Massachusetts provincials and camp followers marched. Within minutes the corpses of between 70 and 185 soldiers and camp followers lay scalped and stripped on the road and in the woods beyond. As many as five hundred more were taken captive. Then the warriors left. By nightfall on August 10, only three hundred or so Christian Abenakis and Nipissings remained with Montcalm’s army. The rest of his erstwhile allies were paddling northward down Lake George, heading home with the rewards they had fought to gain.
“An Indian War Chief Completely Equipped with a Scalp in His Hand,” by George Townshend, c. 1758. A military leader of modest gifts, Brigadier General George, Viscount Townshend (1724-1807), was a caricaturist of great, if merciless, talent. This image, taken from life, captures much about both the subject and the artist: it accurately depicts the light dress and arms favored by native warriors, reflects the European fascination with scalping, and bespeaks the casual racism of Townshend’s view of Indians. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
In the aftermath of what the Anglo-American colonists called “the massacre of Fort William Henry,” Vaudreuil and Montcalm both did their best to ransom prisoners. They ultimately recovered all but about two hundred of them, at an average price of 130 livres in trade goods and thirty bottles of brandy per captive. Montcalm was desperate to redeem as many as he could to salvage his reputation as an honorable commander; Vaudreuil was equally concerned to pay handsomely in order to prevent damage to the alliance with the Indians of the Great Lakes Basin and the interior. Neither succeeded. The reports of the survivors convinced British authorities that the killing had been Montcalm’s calculated blow against defenseless prisoners and resulted in the official voiding of the capitulation agreement. No British commander in North America would offer any defeated French force the option of surrender with the full honors of war for the rest of the conflict. In the view of the redcoat command, the “massacre” had left an ineradicable stain on the reputation of Montcalm and his fellow officers. Popular outcries, meanwhile, exploded in New England, stoking an already fierce anti-French, anti-Catholic rage. The colonists blamed the episode on Montcalm’s premeditation, and found in it every reason to indulge the indiscriminate Indian-hating that became only more prevalent as the war dragged on.
The western Indians carried home a full load of anger and disillusionment, and something far worse: smallpox. The disease had been endemic at the fort, and the captives, scalps, and clothing the Indians brought back touched off an epidemic that ravaged the upper Great Lakes during the latter 1750s. This disaster meant that few warriors would journey from the region to join the French in the critical year 1758, and even Catholic warriors from the Saint Lawrence réserves would show markedly less enthusiasm. Higher proportions of mission Indians turned out in 1759 to defend against an Anglo-American invasion, but that was in the context of a life-or-death struggle that the missionary priests explained as a war to defend the Catholic faith. In that same year the fervent appeals of missionaries and officiers at remote posts on the Great Lakes and beyond produced a resurgence in the numbers of western and northern Indians. In the end approximately eighteen hundred Indians joined in the defense of Canada in 1759; even Dakotas from the Plains and Crees from the subarctic offered their services in the defense of Quebec. They would find, however, that Montcalm had little use for them, for he was resolved to conduct the war in as civilized and conventional a manner as possible, and that gave precious little scope to the kind of freewheeling frontier guerrilla war that had served New France so well for so long.
The withdrawal of Indian support left Vaudreuil’s offensive in ruins. He had intended that Montcalm, having taken Fort William Henry, should proceed against Fort Edward; but Montcalm, having discovered the hard way that he could not command Indians as auxiliaries, found himself without the scouts he needed to carry on the campaign and so contented himself with destroying the works at Fort William Henry and returning to Canada. Each marquis condemned the other in angry letters to Versailles. Vaudreuil blamed Montcalm for having squandered the greatest military advantage New France had ever enjoyed; Montcalm blamed Vaudreuil’s policies for the grisly events of August 10, suggesting that the early termination of the campaign was Vaudreuil’s fault. Vaudreuil accurately foresaw that New France would now be forced onto the defensive, a position he dreaded because it so obviously favored the numerous British. Montcalm, on the other hand, welcomed the necessity of fighting a defensive campaign of phased withdrawal from the frontiers to the heartland, where he would concentrate his forces and pursue the kind of professional, honorable war he longed to fight. The two men went on campaigning against each other with increasing bitterness until the breach between them was open and public. Eventually the dispute, which threatened to cripple the French war effort in America, had to be resolved by the king himself.