Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War (2 page)

Population is part of the explanation. In 1756, when the war of decision called by Europeans the Seven Years’ War and by Americans the French-Indian War, broke out, the French-speaking population of North America numbered only sixty thousand but the English-speaking over a million. While the French of France were reluctant to emigrate, and the French kings forbade emigration by the only group of their subjects who might have been ready to leave home for the New World—the Protestants—the English, Scots, and Irish crossed the Atlantic willingly and without legal restriction. The physical outcome of their emigration was the string of English-speaking settlements which, by 1756, formed the colonies of New England, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

The colonies were, however, only a strip, confined by the Atlantic on the continental seaboard and the line of the Appalachian mountains on the continental side. Over a thousand miles long, north to south, it was little more than two hundred miles deep at its greatest extent. Beyond the mountains, the Anglo-Saxons were aware, beckoned rich lands; but the way thither was blocked by the crests through which no passes were known, while Indians, most often the allies of the French, deterred efforts to explore. Some of the boldest colonists pressed forward, particularly from Virginia and Pennsylvania. The majority were content to farm the Atlantic seaboard’s thin soils and to trade with Britain and the West Indian islands from its maritime cities.

The French, by contrast, commanded the great highways of the continent, all water highways, leading from the northern Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. The greatest of the highways was the estuary of the St. Lawrence, explored by Cartier in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth it had been more deeply penetrated by Samuel Champlain, the founding father of French America, who, during the course of his extraordinary career, crossed the Atlantic twenty-seven times. From the St. Lawrence the French, departing from their bases at Quebec and Montreal, had crisscrossed the Great Lakes, discovering the connections between them by river and portage—the overland routes usually revealed to them by the Indians—until at the end of the seventeenth century they had found the short territorial passage from the Great Lakes region to the headwater of the Mississippi. The Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette and his trader companion, Louis Jolliet, made the crucial transit from Lake Michigan to the Wisconsin River and thence to the Mississippi in 1673. In a voyage downstream they discovered a “second Mississippi,” now known as the Missouri, and sailed as far as Arkansas before being turned back by hostile natives. It was not until 1682 that another French trader, Robert de la Salle, finding another route via the Illinois River, traversed the length of the Mississippi to its delta in the Gulf of Mexico.

The French now understood the essential facts of North American geography east of the Rocky Mountains, which were that two great river systems, those of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, connected by the lake and portage routes between them through the Great Lakes, formed a single chain of communication from the cold North Atlantic to the warm Gulf of Mexico. The French of Canada also recognized its enormous strategic significance, seeing that if it could be defended the Anglo-Saxons of the seaboard colonies could be confined for good to the east of the Appalachians, leaving the vast interior of the continent to France.

The French at home, occupied with the struggle for power within Europe against the Habsburgs and the English, failed at first to comprehend the opportunity the discoveries of Jolliet, Marquette, and de la Salle offered. A “policy of posts,” meaning forts to protect the key points on the river chain, first advocated by Denonville, Governor of New France, in 1686, failed to attract royal support. It was only after the defeat of France in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)—Queen Anne’s War to Americans—that the “policy of posts” became official. Its first manifestation was the great fortress of Louisbourg, begun on Cape Breton Island in 1721, to protect the mouth of the St. Lawrence. It was to be followed by the building of forts at all points of contact, or threatened contact, between British and French America from upper New York Colony to the Gulf.

On paper, particularly on map paper, the “policy of posts” seemed certain to consolidate the integrity of New France. The forts appeared to deny to the British colonists passage beyond the crucial river junctions and portages, while providing bases from which the French garrisons and their Indian allies could conduct an active defense, often an attack, against the colonial militias and royal troops. What maps did not reveal was that, in the vast triangle of wilderness between the Appalachians, the Great Lakes, and the Upper Mississippi, there was a no-man’s-land controlled by neither side. The French regarded it as their own and policed it with local troops and their associated Indian tribes. From the middle of the eighteenth century onward, however, it began to be penetrated by British explorers and traders from Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Virginian Thomas Walker was the first to find a way through the Appalachians, at the Cumberland Gap, which he discovered in 1750. His discovery was to be exploited by the famous backwoodsman Daniel Boone, the first Anglo-Saxon to appreciate the potentiality of the Ohio country. In the years that followed, he and others ranged ever wider along the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the other tributaries of the Mississippi which watered the “Old North West.”

By mid-century the French were keenly aware that British penetration of the Ohio country threatened their control of the interior. Their response was to multiply the number of their forts in the region, culminating in the construction of a new strongpoint, Fort Duquesne, at the Forks of the Ohio, where the rivers Allegheny and Monongahela joined on their way to the Mississippi. The site of the fort is today the center of Pittsburgh. In 1754 a young militia officer George Washington, sent through the Appalachians by the governor of Virginia to contest the French advance, fought a battle on the spot and then beat a retreat to escape a French counterattack. The following year he was back, as a junior officer in a major British expedition led by General Edmond Braddock, commissioned to take possession of the Forks of the Ohio and secure it definitively for the British American empire.

The battle that ensued, on the Monongahela, on June 21, 1755, was to be the last triumph of New France. After a wilderness journey of nineteen days from Pennsylvania to the Forks of the Ohio, Braddock’s well-equipped army of British regulars was ambushed by an inferior force of French militia and Indian allies and cut to pieces. Braddock was killed in the massacre, as were five hundred of his soldiers. The French dead, including Indians, numbered only twenty-three. The British survivors straggled back to Pennsylvania, among them Daniel Boone, George Washington himself as well as Thomas Gage and Horatio Gates who, twenty years later, would find themselves opposed as enemies during the War of the Revolution.

The struggle for control of North America was, at the Monongahela and elsewhere, a curiously intimate affair. Nowhere was it more so than at the culminating battle at Quebec in 1759. Wolfe, the British commander, had fought the French at Dettingen during the War of the Austrian Succession (1742-1748); he had also been present at Culloden, where Bonnie Prince Charlie, the pretender to the throne of England and Scotland, sponsored by France, had suffered a final defeat to Stuart hopes. Montcalm, too, was a veteran of the Austrian Succession War. His close subordinate Bougainville was later to win fame as the great French explorer of the South Seas, while his British equivalent James Cook would go on from the Quebec campaign to explore the South Seas also and circumnavigate the globe.

At Quebec Cook’s great achievement was to plot the channels up the St. Lawrence River by which Wolfe found the way to land his amphibious force under the cliffs that protect the city from an invader. Bougainville’s men, patrolling the heights, failed to detect the British landing at the Anse de Foulon or their ascent via a precipitous path. When Montcalm woke on the morning of September 13 it was to the news that a British army was drawn up in line of battle under the walls of Quebec on the Plains of Abraham. Outnumbered though his troops were, Montcalm nevertheless decided to join action. In the few volleys of musketry and salvos of artillery that followed, the French line was broken. Wolfe, directing the pursuit, was hit and hit again; a third wound proved mortal. Montcalm, riding back into the city, was shot through the body and died soon afterward. Today their deaths are commemorated on a joint monument within the historic walls.

“Measured by the numbers engaged,” Parkman summarized his account, “the battle of Quebec was but a heavy skirmish: measured by results, it was one of the great battles of the world.” In its aftermath, French power in North America collapsed and New France became but a province of the expanding British Empire. Seventeen years later, however, the British colonists, freed by Wolfe’s victory from the menace of French interference but galled by the efforts of London to tax them for the costs of maintaining a royal army on American soil, rose in revolt. It was thus not only the fate of one European empire in America that was decided on the Plains of Abraham, but of its successor also.

If there is anything to regret in Parkman’s career, it is that he did not survive to continue his narrative of eighteenth-century warfare in America to its conclusion at Yorktown in 1781. How great a historian he would have been of the War of the Revolution. His achievement, nevertheless, was great enough.
France and England in North America,
of which these are the concluding volumes, is a work of genius, both in intellectual conception and professional execution. Above all, it is a literary triumph. The first chapter of
Montcalm and Wolfe,
in which he surveys the state of France, Britain, Canada, and the Thirteen Colonies at the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession, is Gibbonian in quality, recalling the first chapter of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
in which Gibbon surveyed the condition of the Caesars’ domains in the second century
A.D.
Parkman is Gibbonian, too, in his powers of characterization, of political and social analysis, of geographic description and narrative drive, and in brilliant prose composition. He is one of the great literary historians of the English language.

“Canada had a vigor of her own,” he writes. “It was not in spiritual deference only that she differed from the country of her birth. Whatever she had caught of its corruptions, she had caught nothing of its effeminacy. The mass of her people lived in rude poverty—not abject, like the peasant of old France, nor ground down by the tax-gatherer; while those of the higher ranks—all more or less engaged in the pursuits of war or adventure, and inured to rough journeyings and forest exposures—were rugged as their climate.” Thus read his characterization of French Canada’s people. Of its strategic geography he wrote, “Canada lay ensconced behind rocks and forests. All along her southern boundaries, between her and her English foes, lay a broad tract of wilderness, shaggy with primeval woods. Innumerable streams gurgled beneath their shadows; innumerable lakes gleamed in the fiery sunsets; innumerable mountains bared their rocky foreheads to the wind. These wastes were ranged by her savage allies, Micmacs, Etechémins, Abenakis, Caughnawagas: and no enemy could steal upon her unawares.”

By contrast, “the long waving line of the New England border, with its lonely hamlets and scattered farms, extended from the Kennebec to beyond the Connecticut, and was everywhere vulnerable to the guns and tomahawks of the neighbouring French.” New England’s strength was in its people. “Fighting had been a necessity with her, and she had met the emergency after a method extremely defective, but the best that circumstance would permit. Having no trained officers and no disciplined soldiers, and being too poor to maintain either, she borrowed her warriors from the workshop and the plough, and officered them with lawyers, merchants, mechanics, and farmers.” The southern colonies, which were to supply so many of the militia’s leaders, differed greatly. “The lower classes of Virginia were as untaught as the warmest friend of popular ignorance could wish.” The upper class, though often “poor in book-learning” was “rich in natural gifts.” Though they “raced, gambled, drank and swore and (though) they did everything that in Puritan eyes was most reprehensible...in the day of need they gave the United Colonies a body of statesmen and orators which had no equal on the continent.”

In his characterization of the Thirteen Colonies in 1742 and their differences—“divided in government; divided in origin, feelings, and principles; jealous of each other, jealous of the Crown”—Parkman anticipates an account of the origins of the War of the Revolution he did not write. Instead he supplies a magnificent account of the conflict that was to make the Revolution perhaps necessary, probably unavoidable. The colonies, he tells us, “drifted into a war (against the French) that was to decide the fate of the continent. This war was the strife of a united and concentrated few (the French) against a divided and discordant many (the Colonists). It was the strife, too, of the past against the future; of the old against the new; of moral and intellectual torpor against moral and intellectual life; of barren absolutism against a liberty, crude, incoherent, and chaotic, yet full of prolific vitality.”

The same might have been written of the war between the British imperial garrison and the American colonies it occupied that broke out in 1776. The struggle between France and England resolved into that between Britain and the Colonies, with the future of North America in each case as the issue. No one—American, British, or indeed French—who recognizes those conflicts as central to the history of the Atlantic world can fail to be instructed and inspired by Francis Parkman’s great book.