Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War
Read Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War Online
Authors: Francis Parkman
Tags: #History, #Americas, #Canada, #First Nations, #Native American, #United States, #Colonial Period, #Europe, #France, #Military
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THE MODERN LIBRARY
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About The Modern Library
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.
Francis Parkman
Francis Parkman, whose epic seven-volume study,
France and England in North America,
established him as one of this country’s greatest historians, was born in Boston on September 16, 1823. His father was a prominent minister and the son of a wealthy merchant; his mother was descended from Reverend John Cotton, the famous New England Congregationalist. Frail health compelled Parkman to spend his early childhood on a farm in neighboring Medford, where he came to love outdoor life. After attending the Chauncy Hall School in Boston he entered Harvard in 1840. Under the influence of Jared Sparks, the college’s first professor of modern history, the eighteen-year-old sophomore initially envisioned his monumental account of the conquest of North America. “My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night,” recalled Parkman, who visited many of the battlefields of the French and Indian Wars during summer holidays. Though illness forced him to temporarily abandon his studies, he earned an undergraduate degree in 1844, with highest honors in history as well as election to Phi Beta Kappa, and completed Harvard Law School two years later.
In the spring of 1846 Parkman set out with his cousin Quincy Adams Shaw on a strenuous five-month expedition to the Far West. Shortly after returning to Boston he suffered a complete nervous and physical collapse and remained a partial invalid for the remainder of his life. While recuperating he dictated
The California and Oregon Trail
(1849), a gripping account of his wilderness adventures. Subsequently reissued as
The Oregon Trail,
the perennially popular travelogue was praised by Herman Melville and later hailed by Bernard DeVoto as “one of the exuberant masterpieces of American literature.” Still battling severe headaches and partial blindness, Parkman finished
History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac
(1851), a prelude to his epic lifework. Over the next decade recurring neurological problems impeded progress on
France and England in North America,
but he managed to write
Vassall Morton
(1856), a semiautobiographical novel, and
The Book of Roses
(1866), a study of horticulture.
Pioneers of France in the New World,
the first volume of Parkman’s monumental account of the struggle between England and France for dominance of North America, was published in 1865. “Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts,” wrote Parkman in his Preface to
Pioneers
. “The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.” He expanded his dramatic “history of the American forest” with
The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century
(1867),
The Discovery of the Great West
(1869),
The Old Régime in Canada
(1874), and
Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV
(1877). “Like fellow historians of the Romantic school, Parkman believed that the re-creation of the past demanded imaginative and literary art,” observed historian C. Vann Woodward. “He looked to such writers as Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and Lord Byron more than to historians for inspiration in his narrative style.”
Fearing he might not live to complete his vast work, Parkman next wrote
Montcalm and Wolfe
(1884), the climactic final volume of
France and England in North America
. “I suppose that every American who cares at all for the history of his own country feels a certain personal pride in your work,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote Parkman. Henry Adams said
Montcalm and Wolfe
put Parkman “in the front rank of living English historians,” and Henry James called it “truly a noble book [that] has fascinated me from the first page to the last.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., stated: “
Montcalm and Wolfe
—the tale of how half the continent changed hands on the Plains of Abraham before Quebec—is romantic history at its most vivid and compelling.”
A Half-Century of Conflict,
the sixth volume in the series, appeared in 1892, a year before Francis Parkman’s death in Boston on November 8, 1893. Two works culled from his papers were published posthumously:
The Journals of Francis Parkman
(1947) and
Letters of Francis Parkman
(1960).
“In the tradition of Gibbon and Prescott, Parkman’s achievement was seeing the human and the personal in the great movements of history,” wrote Daniel J. Boorstin. “Just as Gibbon had been engaged by the spectacle of Roman grandeur in decline, and Prescott by a new Spanish empire in creation, Parkman was entranced by the wilderness struggles of France and England in North America in the making of a new freer world.” And Edmund Wilson observed: “The genius of Parkman is shown not only in his disciplined, dynamic prose but in his avoidance of generalizations, his economizing of abstract analysis, his sticking to concrete events. Each incident, each episode is different, each is particularized, each is presented, when possible, in sharply realistic detail, no matter how absurd or how homely, in terms of its human participants, its local background, and its seasonal conditions. . . . He had a special sensitivity to landscape and terrain, a kind of genius unequalled, so far as I know, on the part of any other important historian, without which such a story could hardly have been told. . . . The clarity, the momentum, and the color of the first volumes of Parkman’s narrative are among the most brilliant achievements of the writing of history as an art.”
INTRODUCTION TO THE MODERN LIBRARY WAR SERIES
Caleb Carr
The term “military history” has always been a bit of a problem for me, as it has, I suspect, for many other students of the discipline. The uninitiated seem to have a prejudicial belief that those who study war are an exceedingly odd lot: men (few women enter the field) who at best have never outgrown boyhood and at worst are somewhat alienated, perhaps even dangerous, characters. Of course, much of this general attitude was formed during the sixties and early seventies (my own high school and college years), when an interest in the details of human conflict was one of the most socially ostracizing qualities a person could have. That tarnish has never quite disappeared:In our own day the popular belief that military historians are somehow, well,
off,
endures in many circles.
By way of counterargument let me claim that enthusiasts of military history are often among the most committed and well-read people one might hope to encounter. Rarely does an important work of military history go out of print; and those who know war well can usually hold their own in discussions of political and social history, as well. The reason for this is simple:The history of war represents fully half the tale of mankind’s social interactions, and one cannot understand war without understanding its political and social underpinnings. (Conversely, one cannot understand political history or cultural development without understanding war.) Add to this the fact that military history very often involves tales of high adventure—peopled by extreme and fascinating characters and told by some of the best writers ever to take up a pen—and you have the actual secret of why the subject has remained so popular over the ages.
The new Modern Library War Series has been designed to both introduce the uninitiated to this, the real nature of military history, and to reacquaint the initiated with important works that they may have either forgotten or overlooked. For the sake of coherence, we have chosen to focus our four initial offerings on American military history specifically, in order to show how the study of war illuminates so many other aspects of a particular people’s experience and character. Francis Parkman’s
Montcalm and Wolfe,
for example, not only shows how very much about the psychology of pre-Revolutionary leaders one must understand in order to grasp the conflict known in North America as the French and Indian War, but is also the work of one of the great American prose stylists of the nineteenth century. Ulysses S. Grant’s
Personal Memoirs
(which owe more than a little to the editorial efforts of one of Grant’s champions, Mark Twain) contrast the remarkable humility of their author with the overwhelmingly dramatic circumstances into which Fate flung him, and that he struggled so hard—in the end, successfully—to master. Theodore Roosevelt’s
The Naval War of 1812,
too long neglected, was the first work to reveal the prodigious intellect, irrepressible character, and remarkably entertaining style of this future president, who (his father having spent most of the family fortune on charities) consistently made a good part of his income through writing. And finally we have
A Soldier’s Story,
the memoirs of Omar Bradley, “the G.I. General,” who, surrounded by a sea of prima donnas during World War II, never stopped quietly learning his trade, until he became, during the conquest of Germany in 1945, arguably the most progressive and important senior American commander in the European theater.
To read any or all of these books is to see that military history is neither an obscure nor a peculiar subject, but one critical to any understanding of the development of human civilization. That warfare itself is violent is true and unfortunate; that it has been a central method through which every nation in the world has established and maintained its independence, however, makes it a critical field of study. The fact that the personalities and stories involved in war are often so compelling is simply a bonus—but it is the kind of bonus that few academic disciplines can boast.
by John Keegan
The story of the struggle between Britain and France to control the continent of North America is one of the great dramas of history. Francis Parkman devoted much of his life as a historian to writing an account of the conflict and in the last two of his seven volumes, first published in 1884 and now republished here, recounts its climax as a personal contest between the opposed commanders: General James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm.
The climax of the drama was truly a stroke of theater, as if devised as tragedy by Shakespeare or Racine, for the lives of Wolfe and Montcalm were to be ended at the same time and the same place, after every turn and twist of plot had been worked out, on the Plains of Abraham outside the city of Quebec, where the final battle of a century of war was fought to a decision on September 13, 1759.
Any great historical drama requires telling by a great historian if it is to be brought to life. Francis Parkman (1823-1899) was unquestionably a great historian, perhaps the first great historian the United States produced, certainly still one of his country’s most notable. Parkman was not only a historical dramatist, with the vision to comprehend the story of his country’s origins in a single embracing sweep. He was also a master of historical method, dedicated not only to studying key documents in state archives—for his history he copied six thousand manuscript pages in Paris, and more in London—but also to reconstructing events on the ground. In a series of journeys to the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence, the Mohawk, and the Upper Hudson and its associated rivers and lakes, he visited every scene of the conflict he made it his life’s ambition to describe. The vividness of his narrative breathes the excitement he felt, as a young traveler through past time, in penetrating the Great American Wilderness, still dense when he began his quest, to rediscover the places where the subjects of his history had met, fought, and often died.
Parkman was an unlikely historical dramatist. A Bostonian, the son of a Unitarian minister, he had had the most proper of New England educations, first at a Latin School, then at Harvard. There, however, he had been taught by a man, Jared Sparks, who was “drawn to adventure and exploration,” much as a successor, Samuel Eliot Morison, would be in the twentieth century. Sparks encouraged Parkman, if he needed encouragement, to pursue his historical studies on the ground, with the result that he set off in 1846 to journey to the Far West, to meet frontiersmen, pioneer settlers, and their Great Plains Indian enemies in the flesh. He traveled as far as Fort Laramie and the outcome of his adventure, published in 1849 as
The California and Oregon Trail,
made his reputation. Its commercial success largely freed him to devote the rest of his life to exploring how his Anglo-Saxon ancestors, rather than their French foes, had taken possession of the American heartland.