The War That Made America

As Amherst would learn when he read the reports and spoke to officers who had accompanied Wolfe’s expedition, the conquest of Quebec was anything but easy, its outcome anything but certain. Wolfe’s troubles had started even before he arrived on June 28 with eleven infantry battalions aboard some 150 transports, escorted by “the finest squadron of His Majesty’s Ships that had ever yet appeared in North-America”—forty-nine men-of-war, including twenty-two line-of-battle ships, the largest of which carried ninety guns. Those troubles had come in the form of just two French frigates and approximately two dozen supply ships that made it to Quebec in May, while Wolfe was still preparing to leave Louisbourg. This handful of vessels had brought between four and five hundred replacement soldiers, who were welcome enough, but also three commodities that Montcalm needed even more: provisions, intelligence, and instructions from the crown.

Because the Canadian harvest had failed once again in 1758 and the winter had been uncommonly severe, the civil and military population of Quebec was surviving on short rations when the relief vessels arrived. The food shortage was so extreme that the intelligence the ships carried—that Wolfe had orders to invade via the Saint Lawrence with Quebec as his target—would have been a signal for Montcalm to prepare to surrender, had not the holds of the vessels also been crammed with provisions. These were sufficient for Montcalm to contemplate a defensive campaign; thus he set his men to work to repair and expand Quebec’s fortifications and sent the ships fifty miles upriver to Batiscan, creating a supply depot from which he could feed the city’s civilians and defenders, and to which (if worse came to worst, and Quebec had to be evacuated) they could retreat. But it was the instructions that arrived in the portfolio of his returning aide, Bougainville, that he relished most. These had been endorsed by the king himself, and they unequivocally transferred supreme authority in all matters relating to Canada’s defense to the marquis de Montcalm.

This decision settled his old quarrel with Governor-General Vaudreuil over which strategy—a guerrilla war based on Indian alliances and attacks on the Anglo-American frontiers or a conventional defense relying on professional soldiers and militiamen—would best preserve New France. Because Vaudreuil’s military rank had been higher than Montcalm’s, his vision of reestablishing the French presence on the Ohio and resuming Indian raids on the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers had governed the initial disposition of troops and resources for the campaigns of 1759. This configuration of authority explained the allocation of large numbers of men and Indians to Lignery at Fort Machault (the force he used in trying to relieve Pouchot at Niagara), a strategy that Montcalm thought was folly. Vaudreuil’s emphasis on the west and Indian alliances also meant that he had paid little attention to repairing or expanding the fortification system that protected Quebec from a river-borne attack; hence with Wolfe literally at its door, the city’s defenses remained remarkably weak.

The new instructions changed everything. They gave Montcalm permission to fight in the conventional, professional mode he knew best, which to him meant implementing a larger version of the hedgehog strategy he had used so effectively at Fort Carillon the previous year. The Indian allies to whom Vaudreuil’s agents had appealed with considerable success over the winter and who appeared in surprisingly large numbers in the spring would not, therefore, be put to their traditional use, but instead retained in the vicinity of Quebec to function as irregular auxiliaries, alongside Catholic warriors from the Saint Lawrence réserves. Montcalm intended to make Wolfe wear himself out in attacks on entrenched defenses, holding out until winter and the freezing of the river forced his fleet, and his troops, to withdraw. If a peace could be negotiated in Europe (and the severe losses that Frederick the Great had suffered in 1758 gave Versailles reason to hope that this would happen), Canada might still be saved at the bargaining table.

In the meantime Vaudreuil was helpless to do more than watch and rage as Montcalm ordered General Bourlamaque, commander of the Lake Champlain sector, to withdraw from Forts Carillon and Saint Frédéric, and to take a stand only at Île-aux-Noix. Vaudreuil could only despair when the news of Niagara’s surrender arrived in early August, for he had no power to stop Montcalm from writing off the western forts, and with them the alliance system they had underpinned for more than a half-century. But, then again, by early August there was little that anyone in New France could do, beyond praying that Montcalm had made the right strategic choice and trusting that the Blessed Virgin, who had protected Quebec for so many years, would not forget the city in the hour of its peril.

Marquis de Montcalm, artist unknown. Louis Joseph de Montcalm, marquis de Montcalm de Saint-Véran (1712-1759), was appointed major general and dispatched to Canada in 1756. Intensely professional in his attitudes, he disdained the irregular warfare practiced by Canadians and American Indians, but nonetheless led mixed forces of French regulars, Canadian militia, and Native American fighters in a series of significant victories, including Oswego (1756), Fort William Henry (1757), and Carillon (1758). (Library and Archives Canada/C-027665)

For a time it seemed possible that together those protections might suffice. Wolfe had made little headway since he had landed his troops on the Île d’Orléans in the basin below the city, on June 28. Although the total manpower of the British amounted to about twenty-two thousand men as opposed to Montcalm’s fifteen thousand regulars and militiamen, only eighty-five hundred of them were redcoats and rangers who could actively participate in siege operations. The normal calculus of success in eighteenth-century siege warfare, which called for the besieging force to outnumber the defenders by no less than two to one, was therefore effectively reversed. Montcalm’s engineers had laid out their defensive lines with skill as well as speed, compensating by position and depth for the questionable quality of the Canadian militiamen, untrained in siege defense, who filled the trenches. As Wolfe put it in a letter to his mother, “My antagonist has wisely shut himself up in inaccessible entrenchments, so that I can’t get at him without spilling a torrent of blood, and that perhaps to little purpose. The Marquis de Montcalm is at the head of a great number of bad soldiers, and I am at the head of a small number of good ones, that wish for nothing so much as to fight him—but the wary old fellow avoids an action doubtful of the behaviour of his army.”

Wolfe had every confidence in his little army, which was in fact superb, but nothing he could do seemed capable of bringing on “an action” in which their superior training and discipline would enable them to prevail. He began on July 12 by shelling Quebec—not the defensive lines before it or the guns on its walls, but the city itself—an act intended to terrorize its civilian population and goad Montcalm into making a sortie against his batteries. The bombardment continued for sixty-eight days, until most of Quebec’s buildings were shattered or burned, but no attackers sallied out to avenge the city’s suffering. His one attempt to force his way through Montcalm’s defenses, a frontal assault on the lines at Beauport near the Falls of Montmorency on July 31, ended in failure with 210 men dead and 233 wounded. In August, stymied by Montcalm’s patience and mastery of defensive operations, Wolfe again tried to make him give battle by attacking the undefended farming settlements below the city, burning churches, houses, barns, and mills, making refugees of the civilian population by allowing his frustrated troops to give rein to their worst impulses.

At the end of a month-long orgy of destruction—what one of Wolfe’s brigadiers called a “War of the worst Shape”—an estimated fourteen hundred farmhouses lay in ashes. Alongside a great deal of violence against civilians generally, at least one massacre had occurred, an episode in which a captain of the Forty-third Regiment ordered his men to kill a group of thirty Canadian prisoners and their parish priest. The redcoats scalped the corpses, a practice that Wolfe’s prohibition—“The Gen[era]l stricktly forbids the inhuman practice of scalping, except when the enemy are Indians, or Canad[ian]s dressed like Indians”—did nothing to prevent because Indians so often dressed like Canadians and spoke such fluent French. Wolfe’s own views of the “Canadian vermin,” candidly expressed in a 1758 letter that spoke of the “pleasure” he would take in seeing them “sacked and pillaged and justly repaid for their unheard-of cruelty,” suggest that he was not unduly disturbed when his troops failed to make fine-grained distinctions. And yet for all its ferocious brutality, August’s campaign of “Skirmishing Cruelty & Devastation” did no more than the shelling of Quebec to lure Montcalm out of his lines.

Enraged at Montcalm’s patience and alienated from his own brigadiers, all three of whom loathed him for his willingness to attack defenseless civilians, Wolfe now suffered yet another reverse. In the last half of August, his fragile health collapsed in a prolonged bout of fever. He recovered briefly, only to collapse again on September 4. Rumors flew among the troops that his death was at hand. They had reason to suspect it, and so did Wolfe himself. He had long suffered from “the gravel [kidney stones] & Rheumatism,” and through much of the campaign had been compelled to rely on opiates merely to urinate. Yet on September 5 he was up once more—a rapid recovery that suggests it may have been stress and nervous exhaustion that afflicted him, as it had on more than one occasion before—and well enough to order half the units in his army to move upriver.

Five battalions marched up the south shore on September 5 to embark on ships that had previously passed the French guns and anchored near the confluence of the Etchemin River and the Saint Lawrence. Three more battalions made the move aboard more than a score of transports and warships, which rode the flood tide past Quebec’s batteries on the seventh. Wolfe’s brigadiers—Robert Monckton, Lord George Townshend, and James Murray—had previously urged him to move a force as high as Cap Rouge, nine miles or so above the city, or even Pointe aux Trembles, twenty miles upriver. Their intent was to cut Quebec off from its base of supply, and then to march down against the city. When the squadron anchored off Cap Rouge, they believed he had adopted their plan. But Wolfe had plans of his own.

As the troopships made their way upriver on the seventh, Wolfe was on board the fifty-gun H.M.S. Sutherland with Monckton, Townshend, Murray, and Rear Admiral Charles Holmes, intently surveying the north bank through a telescope. He kept his own counsel—at least he said nothing to the brigadiers—but it seems clear that this day of reconnaissance was when he identified a cove on the shore, with a narrow track angling up the face of the 175-foot-tall bluff behind it. At the top of the path stood a small guard encampment, no more than a dozen tents behind a breastwork and an abatis. Behind the camp lay the Plains of Abraham, a plateau less than a mile wide that swept gently upward toward the six-bastioned wall of Quebec, two miles away. The waters of L’Anse au Foulon (the Fuller’s Cove) washed up on a hundred-yard-deep shingle, wide enough to handle the deployment of two thousand or more men after debarkation from landing boats. Here Wolfe intended to make his landing, or to die in the attempt.

The troops, in painfully cramped quarters on board the warships and transports anchored off Cap Rouge, waited four days for their orders. All the while they lay under the watchful eye of Bougainville (now a colonel) and more than a thousand infantry and cavalry on shore. Eventually Bougainville’s numbers doubled as more soldiers and militiamen arrived to oppose the expected landing.

Wolfe gave no hint of his intentions until eight-thirty on the evening of the twelfth, when he sent his brigadiers a curt message informing them that the boats would not be landing near the anchorage, but rather far downriver at L’Anse au Foulon. Royal Navy crews made ready the boats that Wolfe’s men began to board at nine. He would lead the boats downriver on the ebbing tide, with about eighteen hundred troops. Several small vessels carrying ammunition and other supplies would follow in a half-hour’s time; a half-hour after that, the brigadiers and the balance of the troops would follow aboard the larger warships.

The moon, in its last quarter, rose a few minutes before ten. By midnight it was high enough to shed a ghostly light over Wolfe’s men as they stood or sat silently in the boats, waiting to ride the ebb tide downriver. Finally, at two o’clock a pair of lanterns appeared at the main topmast of the Sutherland, the signal to cast off. The moon, now forty degrees above the eastern horizon, cast a glittering light on the water. From his perch in one of the leading boats, Wolfe looked down what would have seemed a pale highway toward the cove, eight and a half miles below, where he would learn the fate of his expedition.

Among the officers of the Royal Navy on the ships at Cap Rouge were several expert hydrographers, including the master of the Pembroke, James Cook, who would later explore the South Pacific as captain of the Endeavour and the Resolution. They understood a great deal about the strength of tidal currents in the river, the times of the moon’s rising and setting, and other factors of immense importance to Wolfe, who clearly consulted them in planning this operation. Yet it is almost inconceivable that even these sophisticated officers could have predicted how tide and moonlight would coincide in the early hours of September 13 to make it possible for Wolfe’s scheme to succeed. For indeed there was no other night in all of 1759 that could have produced conditions that rendered the boats essentially invisible to observers looking upriver from the French lines along the shore, yet illuminated the river sufficiently for the crews of the boats to steer downstream in safety; no other night when the ebb current would have moved at precisely the speed the British needed to deliver the boats to L’Anse au Foulon at four o’clock, when moonlight streamed across the river from the southeast, allowing the steersmen to pick out the cove and bring the boats to shore without mishap.

The degree to which planning or luck or destiny or sheer coincidence can be credited for allowing Wolfe to arrive at precisely the moment that favored him most, of course, can never be precisely fixed. What is clear, however, is that the British landing party took the small guard at the top of the bluff completely by surprise. By a few minutes after four o’clock a light infantry detachment under Lieutenant Colonel William Howe (the younger brother of Viscount Howe, who had died the year before at Fort Carillon) had killed or captured all but a single member of the French detachment, who ran for the city to give the alarm. Wolfe, who had expected the landing to be opposed, was so surprised by the lack of resistance that he did not at first know what to do, but the numbers of officers and men scrambling up the path soon banished indecision. As they secured an assembly area near the French camp, he moved off with a bodyguard to search for a position nearer the city. Below, in the predawn twilight, the ships from Cap Rouge could be seen dropping downriver. By sunrise they lay anchored off the cove, their masts standing like a small forest above the boats that busily ferried the remainder of Wolfe’s force ashore.

Montcalm had not worried about a British landing near the Plains of Abraham, where he expected the cliffs and bluffs of the shore to stand in for the entrenchments that lined the banks below the city. At one point he had dismissed the need for fortifications upriver by observing that “we don’t need to believe that the enemy has wings”; at another he maintained that even a hundred “men, well posted, could stop the whole army and give us time to . . . march to . . . that sector.” But a wingless enemy had indeed landed, and no army had marched to oppose it because Montcalm had been distracted all night long by an elaborate ruse far downriver, where Admiral Charles Saunders had set boat crews rowing noisily back and forth in front of the Beauport shore, seemingly in preparation for a landing. When word finally reached Montcalm at Beauport around six o’clock, he initially believed the landings upriver were only another diversionary tactic. He issued orders for four battalions to assemble west of the city walls as a precaution, then rode upriver to take a firsthand look at the situation.

What he saw when he reached the Buttes à Neveu, the broken ridge about five hundred yards west of the city walls, left him thunderstruck. Half a mile away, six battalions of men in scarlet coats stood athwart the main road leading to town in a long double line that stretched almost across the Plains of Abraham. Behind them more troops were securing the flanks against the Indian and militia snipers who had begun to fire at them from the cover of trees and cornfields. It was a sight that nothing could have prepared him for, and it left him deeply uncertain about how to proceed.

Slowly absorbing it all, the shocked marquis must have pondered the suddenly tenuous position of the city, where too few provisions were stored to withstand a siege, and where the old western wall was too weak to withstand prolonged bombardment. He could estimate the strength of the British as approximately equal to his own, with about forty-five hundred men on a side. He knew that word had been sent upriver to Bougainville, whose two thousand men included some of the best-trained troops in Canada; but those reinforcements could not arrive in less than three hours. Could he afford to wait that long? By nine-thirty he had concluded he could not, for that was when he ordered his officers to prepare their men to advance against the enemy.

This was the decision that Wolfe had tried for months to provoke, for it played directly to what he knew was his greatest advantage, the superb discipline of the men under his command. Montcalm’s force consisted of a mixture of regulars, who knew exactly how to behave in an open-field battle, and militiamen, who did not. Montcalm had used the latter principally as laborers, and had been able to provide little training in marching and maneuver, at which the regulars excelled. Thus while the militiamen understood how to load and fire their muskets and had at least some idea of how to fight from cover, they had no notion at all of how to advance deliberately through a hail of small-arms and cannon fire to a point no more than fifty yards from the enemy line, then halt, deliver close-spaced volleys on command, and finally charge home with the bayonet. Such was the steadiness, precision, and discipline that eighteenth-century armies needed to succeed on the field of battle; without it they could not withstand the extraordinary stresses of combat.

By ten o’clock Montcalm’s officers had aligned their men before the Buttes à Neveu. No doubt he cantered the length of the line one last time to check their disposition and hearten them for the fight. Then he gave the order to advance and the ensigns let the regimental colors loose to the breeze. An immense shout went up as the great mass surged—de bonne grâce, witnesses said—toward the long double line of British soldiers who had risen to their feet, five hundred yards away, and were steadying themselves to receive the charge.

Wolfe had ordered his men to lie down nearly two hours before. This was not to allow them to rest, though it may have done so to some small degree. Instead Wolfe intended to make them less inviting targets for the enemy snipers who harassed them from the edges of the field, and for the four or five gun crews who had begun firing light cannon from the Buttes à Neveu at about eight o’clock. Now, as they dressed themselves into a double line, the redcoats’ steadiness was unmistakable. The men waited stock-still, listening for the order to present arms, make ready, and fire.

The Death of General Wolfe, by Edward Penny, c. 1763-1764. The year 1759 became known throughout the British Atlantic world as the annus mirabilis (year of miracles) in recognition of British and allied victories in North America, the West Indies, Germany, and India. Wolfe’s triumph at Quebec was the most spectacular and emotionally powerful of them all. Writers, artists, sculptors, and tradesmen memorialized his death as the Hero of Quebec in verse, art, and mementos. This painting is one of many versions of the British hero’s death. (Fort Ligonier, Ligonier, Pennsylvania)

There was no such calm in the French troops advancing toward them, whose order began to break down almost immediately after they heard the command to advance. The left lagged, the center pressed ahead of the right wing; the regulars tried to march, as they had been trained to do, but the cheering militiamen lunged toward their foe almost at a run. Their officers managed to halt them at about a “half-musket-shot” (perhaps 125 yards) from the British line, and to deliver their first fire. Then all discernible order broke down. The regulars reloaded standing and advanced on order, as they had been trained to do. The militia threw themselves on the ground and reloaded as if they were in a woodland firefight. Some ran forward again, while others continued firing from their initial positions; still others moved laterally across the field seeking better positions or the safety of cover.

The British stood fast as the French lost coherence, then began firing on order by platoons, reserving their last climactic volleys until their adversaries were within forty yards. A British engineer described the action as clearly as any witness on the field that day:

The French Line began . . . advancing briskly and for some little time in good order, [but] a part of their Line began to fire too soon, which immediately catch’d throughout the whole, then they began to waver but kept advancing with a scattering Fire.—When they had got within about a hundred yards of us our Line mov[e]d up regularly with a steady Fire, and when within twenty or thirty yards of closing gave a general one; upon which a total route [rout] of the Enemy immediately ensued.

As the last fragments of discipline among the French disintegrated, the British line charged with bayonets fixed, chasing the fleeing men back toward the walls of the city. The whole action had taken fifteen minutes, or even less, to fight. Each side had suffered approximately equal casualties: 58 dead and about 600 wounded for the British, approximately 644 dead and wounded among the French. At the head of the butcher’s bill were the two officers who had led the armies.

Wolfe, wounded in the wrist and the chest at the beginning of the battle, bled to death on the edge of the field while his men ran wildly after the defeated enemy. It was an end he had wished for, since he believed his health was irreparably broken, and to fall in battle would secure his reputation for valor in ways nothing else could. And so it did; the British public would embrace Wolfe as the war’s greatest hero, enshrining him in a place of honor unrivaled until the next century produced yet another military martyr in Lord Nelson. Coming as it did at the climax of the battle, however, Wolfe’s death put his army at great risk, for no one was truly in control of the adrenalized redcoats whose determination to skewer every Frenchman in sight caused an almost complete breakdown in order, even as Bougainville’s men approached from the west. Ultimately it was the brigadier who had liked Wolfe least, Lord George Townshend, who rallied two battalions to form and face the French. Had he not done so, Bougainville’s two thousand comparatively well-rested professionals would surely have had the capacity to break up the disorganized British force and destroy it piecemeal. As it was, the sight of Townshend’s battalions blocking the road made Bougainville hesitate, then break off contact and withdraw to the safety of Sillery Woods while he tried to understand what had taken place. With that, the last French hope of regaining the advantage perished, and with it the prospect of saving Quebec.

Montcalm, too, received a mortal wound in the fighting when a charge of grapeshot from one of the two British six-pound guns on the field tore open his belly and leg. Three men supported him on horseback long enough to reach the city, where he lingered in agony until four the next morning, refusing to give up his command despite the shock and pain that destroyed his capacity for connected thought. On the afternoon of the thirteenth Vaudreuil assumed control and ordered the bulk of the army to evacuate the Beauport lines and the city, skirting north of the British lines and marching upriver to join forces with Montcalm’s second-in-command, Brigadier General François-Gaston de Lévis, who was in charge of the Montreal district. Vaudreuil left a skeleton force of militia, sailors, and invalids behind with orders to hold the city as long as possible. Given the extreme shortage of provisions on hand, however, that could at most amount to a matter of days.

The chevalier de Lévis, a bold and active officer, met the refugee army at Jacques-Cartier, about thirty miles upriver from Quebec, on September 17, and immediately set about rallying and reorganizing it in the hope of attacking the British siege lines from the rear, before they could reduce the city to submission. He had already set elements of the force in motion toward Quebec on the eighteenth when word arrived that the city had surrendered the day before. With no artillery at hand to re-besiege the place, Lévis ordered the army back to Jacques-Cartier. There he established a fort to defend the frontier of a New France that had now shrunk to approximately the size of the Montreal district.

Even so, all was not lost, and both Lévis and Vaudreuil busied themselves with preparations for recapturing Quebec. For the first time in years, the harvest in the Montreal district had been bountiful, so provisioning the remainder of the defense force through the winter and spring would be no problem. Between the refugees and the formations that had been stationed in the district, Lévis would have more than seven thousand men (among whom nearly four thousand were regulars) to move against Quebec in the spring. If reinforcements, artillery, and matériel could be sent from France to arrive at the earliest moment after the river thawed, Lévis stood a superb chance of being able to drive the British out. The conquerors of Quebec would have to survive a brutal Canadian winter on the limited stock of salt provisions that the fleet could put ashore before it weighed anchor for Britain in October, and they would have no alternative to living in a town largely ruined by their own merciless bombardment. Such conditions were sure to produce a weakened and vulnerable force by April or May. It was by no means in despair that Lévis and Vaudreuil composed letters describing the events of 1759 and imploring the king to send them aid and men in 1760, while they waited for the British fleet to flee the river, allowing them to run their own ships past the British guns at Quebec, home to France.