Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War (65 page)

2
Bouquet to Forbes,
3
June,
1758.

3
Journal of a Reconnoitring Party,
Aug
. 1758. The writer seems to have been Ensign Chew, of Washington’s regiment.

Notes - 4

1
Vaudreuil au Ministre,
Juillet,
Août,
Octobre
1758.

2
Forbes to Bouquet,
18
Aug.
1758.

Notes - 5

1
Of the Hurons of the mission of Lorette, Bougainville says: “Ils sont toujours sauvages autant que ceux qui sont les moins apprivoisés.” And yet they had been converts under Jesuit control for more than four generations. The case was no better at the other missions; and at St. Francis it seems to have been worse.

Notes - 6

1
Journal of Christian Frederic Post,
July,
August,
September,
1758.

2
Minutes of Conferences at Easton,
October,
1758.

Notes - 7

1
Journal of Christian Frederic Post,
October,
November, 1758.

Notes - 8

1
Grant to Forbes,
no date
. “Les rapports sur le nombre des Français varient de 3,000 à 1,200.”
Bouquet à Forbes,
17
Sept.
1758. Bigot says that 3,500 daily rations were delivered at Fort Duquesne throughout the summer.
Bigot au Ministre,
22
Nov
. 1758. In October the number had fallen to 1,180, which included Indians.
Ligneris à Vaudreuil,
18 Oct. 1758.

Notes - 9

1
On Grant’s defeat,
Grant to Forbes,
no date,
a long and minute report, written while a prisoner.
Bouquet à Forbes,
17
Sept
. 1758.
Forbes to Pitt,
20
Oct
. 1758.
Vaudreuil au Ministre,
1
Nov
. 1758. Letters from camp in
Boston Evening Post,
Boston Weekly Advertiser,
Boston News Letter,
and other provincial newspapers of the time.
List of Killed,
Wounded,
and Missing in the Action of Sept
. 14.
Gentleman’s Magazine,
XXIX. 173.
Hazard’s Pennsylvania Register,
VIII. 141.
Olden Time,
I. 179. Vaudreuil, with characteristic exaggeration, represents all Grant’s party as killed or taken, except a few who died of starvation. The returns show that 540 came back safe, out of 813.

2
Forbes to Bouquet,
23
Sept
. 1758.

3
Burd to Bouquet,
12
Oct
. 1758.
Bouquet à Forbes,
13
Oct
. 1758.
Forbes to Pitt,
20
Oct
. 1758.
Letter from Loyalhannon,
14
Oct
., in
Olden Time,
I. 180.
Letters from camp,
in
Boston News Letter
.
Ligneris à Vaudreuil,
18
Oct
. 1758.
Vaudreuil au Ministre,
20
Nov
. 1758.

Notes - 10

1
Forbes to Bouquet,
15
Oct
. 1758.
Ibid
., 25
Oct
. 1758.
Forbes to Pitt,
20
Oct
. 1758.

Notes - 11

1
Letter from a British Officer in the Expedition,
25
Feb
. 1759,
Gentleman’s Magazine,
XXIX. 171.

2
Stanwix to Pitt,
20
Nov
. 1759.

Notes - 12

1
Galt,
Life of Benjamin West,
I. 64 (ed. 1820).

2
Bouquet to Chief Justice Allen,
25
Nov
. 1758.

3
Forbes to Amherst,
26
Nov
. 1758.

4
Halket to Bouquet,
28
Dec
. 1758.

XXIII

T
HE
B
RINK OF
R
UIN

Jealousy of Vaudreuil · He asks for Montcalm’s Recall · His Discomfiture · Scene at the Governor’s House · Disgust of Montcalm · The Canadians Despondent · Devices to encourage them · Gasconade of the Governor · Deplorable State of the Colony · Mission of Bougainville · Duplicity of Vaudreuil · Bougainville at Versailles · Substantial Aid refused to Canada · A Matrimonial Treaty · Return of Bougainville · Montcalm abandoned by the Court · His Plans of Defence · Sad News from Candiac · Boasts of Vaudreuil

“Never was general in a more critical position than I was: God has delivered me; his be the praise! He gives me health, though I am worn out with labor, fatigue, and miserable dissensions that have determined me to ask for my recall. Heaven grant that I may get it!”

Thus wrote Montcalm to his mother after his triumph at Ticonderoga. That great exploit had entailed a train of vexations, for it stirred the envy of Vaudreuil, more especially as it was due to the troops of the line, with no help from Indians, and very little from Canadians. The Governor assured the Colonial Minister that the victory would have bad results, though he gives no hint what these might be; that Montcalm had mismanaged the whole affair; that he would have been beaten but for the manifest interposition of Heaven;
¹
and, finally, that he had failed to follow his (Vaudreuil’s) directions, and had therefore enabled the English to escape. The real directions of the Governor, dictated, perhaps, by dread lest his rival should reap laurels, were to avoid a general engagement; and it was only by setting them at nought that Abercromby had been routed. After the battle a sharp correspondence passed between the two chiefs. The Governor, who had left Montcalm to his own resources before the crisis, sent him Canadians and Indians in abundance after it was over; and while he cautiously refrained from committing himself by positive orders, repeated again and again that if these reinforcements were used to harass Abercromby’s communications, the whole English army would fall back to the Hudson, and leave baggage and artillery a prey to the French. These preposterous assertions and tardy succors were thought by Montcalm to be a device for giving color to the charge that he had not only failed to deserve victory, but had failed also to make use of it.
¹
He did what was possible, and sent strong detachments to act in the English rear; which, though they did not, and could not, compel the enemy to fall back, caused no slight annoyance, till Rogers checked them by the defeat of Marin. Nevertheless Vaudreuil pretended on one hand that Montcalm had done nothing with the Canadians and Indians sent him, and on the other that these same Canadians and Indians had triumphed over the enemy by their mere presence at Ticonderoga. “It was my activity in sending these succors to Carillon [
Ticonderoga
] that forced the English to retreat. The Marquis de Montcalm might have made their retreat difficult; but it was in vain that I wrote to him, in vain that the colony troops, Canadians and Indians, begged him to pursue the enemy.”
²
The succors he speaks of were sent in July and August, while the English did not fall back till the first of November. Neither army left its position till the season was over, and Abercromby did so only when he learned that the French were setting the example. Vaudreuil grew more and more bitter. “As the King has intrusted this colony to me, I cannot help warning you of the unhappy consequences that would follow if the Marquis de Montcalm should remain here. I shall keep him by me till I receive your orders. It is essential that they reach me early.” “I pass over in silence all the infamous conduct and indecent talk he has held or countenanced; but I should be wanting in my duty to the King if I did not beg you to ask for his recall.”
³

He does not say what is meant by infamous conduct and indecent talk; but the allusion is probably to irreverent utterances touching the Governor in which the officers from France were apt to indulge, not always without the knowledge of their chief. Vaudreuil complained of this to Montcalm, adding, “I am greatly above it, and I despise it.”
⁴
To which the General replied: “You are right to despise gossip, supposing that there has been any. For my part, though I hear that I have been torn to pieces without mercy in your presence, I do not believe it.”
⁵
In these infelicities Bigot figures as peacemaker, though with no perceptible success. Vaudreuil’s cup of bitterness was full when letters came from Versailles ordering him to defer to Montcalm on all questions of war, or of civil administration bearing upon war.
⁶
He had begged hard for his rival’s recall, and in reply his rival was set over his head.

The two yokefellows were excellently fitted to exasperate each other: Montcalm, with his southern vivacity of emotion and an impetuous, impatient volubility that sometimes forgot prudence; and Vaudreuil, always affable towards adherents, but full of suspicious egotism and restless jealousy that bristled within him at the very thought of his colleague. Some of the byplay of the quarrel may be seen in Montcalm’s familiar correspondence with Bourlamaque. One day the Governor, in his own house, brought up the old complaint that Montcalm, after taking Fort William Henry, did not take Fort Edward also. The General, for the twentieth time, gave good reasons for not making the attempt. “I ended,” he tells Bourlamaque, “by saying quietly that when I went to war I did the best I could; and that when one is not pleased with one’s lieutenants, one had better take the field in person. He was very much moved, and muttered between his teeth that perhaps he would; at which I said that I should be delighted to serve under him. Madame de Vaudreuil wanted to put in her word. I said: ‘Madame, saving due respect, permit me to have the honor to say that ladies ought not to talk war.’ She kept on. I said: ‘Madame, saving due respect, permit me to have the honor to say that if Madame de Montcalm were here, and heard me talking war with Monsieur le Marquis de Vaudreuil, she would remain silent.’ This scene was in presence of eight officers, three of them belonging to the colony troops; and a pretty story they will make of it.”

These letters to Bourlamaque, in their detestable handwriting, small, cramped, confused, without stops, and sometimes almost indecipherable, betray the writer’s state of mind. “I should like as well as anybody to be Marshal of France; but to buy the honor with the life I am leading here would be too much.” He recounts the last news from Fort Duquesne, just before its fall. “Mutiny among the Canadians, who want to come home; the officers busy with making money, and stealing like mandarins. Their commander sets the example, and will come back with three or four hundred thousand francs; the pettiest ensign, who does not gamble, will have ten, twelve, or fifteen thousand. The Indians don’t like Ligneris, who is drunk every day. Forgive the confusion of this letter; I have not slept all night with thinking of the robberies and mismanagement and folly.
Pauvre Roi,
pauvre France,
cara patria!
” “Oh, when shall we get out of this country! I think I would give half that I have to go home. Pardon this digression to a melancholy man. It is not that I have not still some remnants of gayety; but what would seem such in anybody else is melancholy for a Languedocian. Burn my letter, and never doubt my attachment.” “I shall always say, Happy he who is free from the proud yoke to which I am bound. When shall I see my château of Candiac, my plantations, my chestnut grove, my oil-mill, my mulberry-trees?
O bon Dieu! Bon soir; brûlez ma lettre
.”
¹

Never was dispute more untimely than that between these ill-matched colleagues. The position of the colony was desperate. Thus far the Canadians had never lost heart, but had obeyed with admirable alacrity the Governor’s call to arms, borne with patience the burdens and privations of the war, and submitted without revolt to the exactions and oppressions of Cadet and his crew; loyal to their native soil, loyal to their Church, loyal to the wretched government that crushed and belittled them. When the able-bodied were ordered to the war, where four fifths of them were employed in the hard and tedious work of transportation, the women, boys, and old men tilled the fields and raised a scanty harvest, which always might be, and sometimes was, taken from them in the name of the King. Yet the least destitute among them were forced every winter to lodge soldiers in their houses, for each of whom they were paid fifteen francs a month, in return for substance devoured and wives and daughters debauched.
¹

No pains had been spared to keep up the courage of the people and feed them with flattering illusions. When the partisan officer Boishébert was tried for peculation, his counsel met the charge by extolling the manner in which he had fulfilled the arduous duty of encouraging the Acadians, “putting on an air of triumph even in defeat; using threats, caresses, stratagems; painting our victories in vivid colors; hiding the strength and successes of the enemy; promising succors that did not and could not come; inventing plausible reasons why they did not come, and making new promises to set off the failure of the old; persuading a starved people to forget their misery; taking from some to give to others; and doing all this continually in the face of a superior enemy, that this country might be snatched from England and saved to France.”
²
What Boishébert was doing in Acadia, Vaudreuil was doing on a larger scale in Canada. By indefatigable lying, by exaggerating every success and covering over every reverse, he deceived the people and in some measure himself. He had in abundance the Canadian gift of gasconade, and boasted to the Colonial Minister that one of his countrymen was a match for from three to ten Englishmen. It is possible that he almost believed it; for the midnight surprise of defenceless families and the spreading of panics among scattered border settlements were inseparable from his idea of war. Hence the high value he set on Indians, who in such work outdid the Canadians themselves. Sustained by the intoxication of flattering falsehoods, and not doubting that the blunders and weakness of the first years of the war gave the measure of English efficiency, the colonists had never suspected that they could be subdued.

But now there was a change. The reverses of the last campaign, hunger, weariness, and possibly some incipient sense of atrocious misgovernment, began to produce their effect; and some, especially in the towns, were heard to murmur that further resistance was useless. The Canadians, though brave and patient, needed, like Frenchmen, the stimulus of success. “The people are alarmed,” said the modest Governor, “and would lose courage if my firmness did not rekindle their zeal to serve the King.”
³

“Rapacity, folly, intrigue, falsehood, will soon ruin this colony which has cost the King so dear,” wrote Doreil to the Minister of War. “We must not flatter ourselves with vain hope; Canada is lost if we do not have peace this winter.” “It has been saved by miracle in these past three years; nothing but peace can save it now, in spite of all the efforts and the talents of M. de Montcalm.”
¹
Vaudreuil himself became thoroughly alarmed, and told the Court in the autumn of 1758 that food, arms, munitions, and everything else were fast failing, and that without immediate peace or heavy reinforcements all was lost.

The condition of Canada was indeed deplorable. The St. Lawrence was watched by British ships; the harvest was meagre; a barrel of flour cost two hundred francs; most of the cattle and many of the horses had been killed for food. The people lived chiefly on a pittance of salt cod or on rations furnished by the King; all prices were inordinate; the officers from France were starving on their pay; while a legion of indigenous and imported scoundrels fattened on the general distress. “What a country!” exclaims Montcalm. “Here all the knaves grow rich, and the honest men are ruined.” Yet he was resolved to stand by it to the last, and wrote to the Minister of War that he would bury himself under its ruins. “I asked for my recall after the glorious affair of the eighth of July; but since the state of the colony is so bad, I must do what I can to help it and retard its fall.” The only hope was in a strong appeal to the Court; and he thought himself fortunate in persuading Vaudreuil to consent that Bougainville should be commissioned to make it, seconded by Doreil. They were to sail in different ships, in order that at least one of them might arrive safe.

Vaudreuil gave Bougainville a letter introducing him to the Colonial Minister in high terms of praise: “He is in all respects better fitted than anybody else to inform you of the state of the colony. I have given him my instructions, and you can trust entirely in what he tells you.”
²
Concerning Doreil he wrote to the Minister of War: “I have full confidence in him, and he may be entirely trusted. Everybody here likes him.”
³
While thus extolling the friends of his rival, the Governor took care to provide against the effects of his politic commendations, and wrote thus to his patron, the Colonial Minister: “In order to condescend to the wishes of M. de Montcalm, and leave no means untried to keep in harmony with him, I have given letters to MM. Doreil and Bougainville; but I have the honor to inform you, Monseigneur, that they do not understand the colony, and to warn you that they are creatures of M. de Montcalm.”
⁴

The two envoys had sailed for France. Winter was close at hand, and the harbor of Quebec was nearly empty. One ship still lingered, the last of the season, and by her Montcalm sent a letter to his mother: “You will be glad to have me write to you up to the last moment to tell you for the hundredth time that, occupied as I am with the fate of New France, the preservation of the troops, the interest of the state, and my own glory, I think continually of you all. We did our best in 1756, 1757, and 1758; and so, God helping, we will do in 1759, unless you make peace in Europe.” Then, shut from the outer world for half a year by barriers of ice, he waited what returning spring might bring forth.