39. Total War

By the end of 1755, then, the first phase of the French and Indian War had ended. British and Virginian attacks on Fort Duquesne had been smashed, as indeed had all the aggressive expeditions against the French except the campaign against Fort Beauséjour in New Brunswick, a victory followed by the expulsion of the entire peaceful French population of Nova Scotia. Despite determined and continued efforts by the French to preserve the peace, war between England and France officially broke out in the spring of 1756.

A new phase of the war had begun. England and France were now formally embarked on the Seven Years’ War, waged in Europe and in the overseas colonies in the East and the West. In America, Governor Shirley, in command of the English forces, concentrated on the northern frontier with New France in New York. The two main areas of conflict were on Lake Ontario in the west, and the Lake George-Lake Champlain area north of Albany. But Shirley had his troubles at the two English western forts of Oswego and Ontario, which were wracked by disease, lack of provisions, lack of money for soldiers’ pay, and near mutiny and mass desertions. Under Shirley, supplies to the forts had bogged down. Graft abounded in connection with the army’s contracts, especially in the circle of Shirley’s friends.

On the other side, the best new asset was the brilliant new commander in New France, the Marquis de Montcalm. In a sparkling maneuver, Montcalm captured and destroyed Fort Ontario and Fort Oswego in mid-August 1756. The British had now been driven from the entire Lake Ontario region, and this success now induced many Iroquois as well as other western Indian tribes to join the French side. At about the same time, Shirley was replaced as commander of American forces by the Earl of Loudoun, who soon sent Shirley packing out of the country in disgrace. The Earl, however, did little better than Shirley. During the 1757 summer campaign, while the Earl was mobilizing a huge force of fifteen thousand men for an assault on Louisbourg (an assault that he had to abandon), Montcalm swept down, and captured and destroyed Fort William Henry, the English stronghold at the southern tip of Lake George.

Loudoun had his troubles on the American homefront as well. New Yorkers, particularly in New York City and Albany, strenuously objected to Loudoun’s compulsory quartering of English troops in their private homes. The Pennsylvania militia bill was finally driven through, but the New Jersey Assembly sturdily refused Loudoun’s demand that it draft one thousand men for the war effort. New Jersey was a colony with heavy Quaker influence, and it was not and would not be part of the theater of war. Thus self-interest, pacifist philosophy, and a natural instinct for liberty all combined to resist a draft. Instead, New Jersey offered a handsome bounty for voluntary enlistments. Quaker justices of the peace, indeed, used their position to persuade recruits not to join up and even imprisoned them on fictitious charges until their military outfits had gone. Desertions from the army were frequent and generally went unpunished.

In 1756 and 1757, the French, having repulsed the attacks of the English under the great generalship of Montcalm, were able to take the initiative and to win signal victories on Lake Ontario and on the upper New York frontier. In the meanwhile, a grave and fateful turn of affairs was under way in Britain itself. With the war, especially in America, going badly, England again faced the choice of retreating or redoubling its efforts. It chose charisma and William Pitt, the half-crazed arch warmonger of them all.

In malevolent contrast to his confreres, Pitt was the harbinger of a modern war leader. Other European statesmen were content to fight for limited objectives and to indulge in an unedifying but at least a not fatally destructive jockeying over the balance of power. But Pitt, in his appetite for power, plunder, and imperial glory, was satisfied with nothing less than total victory, pursued by total mobilization and an all-out drive to crush the enemy without quarter. His particular interest for many years had been the eradication of New France. Backed by the London merchants and financiers eager for conquest and plunder, and by the English masses swayed by his imperialistic demagogy, Pitt rode to power in late 1756. After some faltering in early 1757, Pitt finally agreed to add Cumberland’s desire to pursue the war in Europe to his own plans for colonial conquest. Pitt was then firmly ensconced as virtually absolute war dictator by July 1757. A chastened Newcastle stayed to lend his important support as prime minister.

From the time that Pitt and his unlimited war took hold, the doom of New France was strategically inevitable. Already critically short of provisions, the French in America were soon faced with an overwhelming— and ever-increasing—disadvantage in men and resources. All Montcalm could do—which he did superbly—was to hold on as long as he could and hope for peace to be made in Europe.

At the end of 1757, Loudoun was succeeded as commander-in-chief by General James Abercromby, and Pitt proceeded to mobilize overwhelming numbers against the French. The British were to pay for arms and ammunition, and partially pay the expenses of the colonial troops. Even so, during the summer campaign of 1758, the French won their last great victory. Led by Abercromby, a huge force of over six thousand regulars and nine thousand American troops marched on Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga), the French bastion at the southern tip of Lake Champlain. On July 8, the French met this giant force with only slightly more than three thousand men, but again cut the English force to ribbons. The event was greatly aided by the stupid generalship of Abercromby, who repeatedly hurled his unfortunate troops into volleys of frontal fire.

So large was the British force, however, that this proved but a temporary setback to their plans. In complete command of the sea, a British fleet of forty ships carrying a land force of over ten thousand men (the vast bulk of them British regulars) and a sea force of at least as many, meanwhile laid siege to Louisbourg. The French defenders, scarcely six thousand strong, were soon forced to capitulate. The British celebrated their victory by expelling the entire French population from Cape Breton Island. Shortly afterward, at the end of August, Colonel John Bradstreet, commanding a force of over three thousand, found little trouble in swamping a Fort Frontenac guarded by a hundred men. The loss of this key French fort on the northern side of Lake Ontario cut communications between Canada and the Ohio Valley.

General Abercromby was promptly removed from overall command, and succeeded by General Jeffery Amherst, the victor at Louisbourg. The obvious next step was the recapture of Fort Duquesne and thus of the Ohio Valley. Paving the way for this was an agreement with the Delaware and Shawnee Indians, who had been conducting raids on the Pennsylvania frontier. Cheated of their lands by the walking purchase, these Indians had been further scandalized by the Albany Convention Treaty of 1754. In this treaty, the Iroquis, vaguely and tenuously overlords of the Ohio Valley tribes, were easily persuaded to sign away to the British all the Ohio Valley lands, which were utterly remote from their control or genuine concern. Finally, under the influence of Israel Pemberton and the Quakers, Pennsylvania concluded a peace agreement with the Indians in October 1758, relinquishing Pennsylvania’s entire claim to the Ohio lands west of the Alleghenies. The road was now paved for General John Forbes’ expedition against Fort Duquesne with a force of about six thousand men, the majority colonial militia. Again the French defenders were hopelessly outnumbered, having no more than one thousand men. Even though the Virginia route to Duquesne had already been built by Braddock, Forbes decided to hew a new road from Pennsylvania. The issue could not be in doubt, however, and at the end of November the retreating French destroyed Fort Duquesne. The fort was soon rebuilt by the British and fittingly renamed Fort Pitt.

With all the main French positions west and east captured—except for Fort Niagara—and enjoying absolute command of the sea, the British at the start of 1759 were in a firm position to strike into the Canadian heartland. Montcalm, commanding about ten thousand men and low on provisions, confronted the prospect of opposing five times that number, and knew that he could only concentrate his forces in the heartland and hope for a general peace. He was, however, beset by troubles both from a governor who had no conception of the danger and dreamed absurdly of retaking Lake Ontario and even Fort Pitt, and from a corrupt and venal statist bureaucracy in Canada.

The first tasks of the British in 1759 were to capture Fort Niagara and the Lake Champlain forts of Carillon and St. Frederic, after which the assault on Canada itself could be mounted. General John Prideaux, with several thousand men, laid siege to less than five hundred at Fort Niagara. Despite a series of blunders that included the accidental killing of Prideaux by British shells, sheer British numbers overwhelmed the fort at the end of July. Furthermore, a poorly organized French relief party of nearly fifteen hundred was captured and destroyed. The west was firmly in British hands.

In the meanwhile, Amherst advanced with about twelve thousand men, approximately half British and half provincials, against only twenty-five hundred French at Fort Carillon. The French could only blow up Fort Carillon and then Fort St. Frederic and retreat northward. By the end of July, the British had thus cleared all the outposts south of Canada and were ready for the climactic blow. In fact, the British probably could have finished the war swiftly if Amherst had had the tenacity to march north from Lake Champlain and capture Montreal. Instead, Amherst wasted a great deal of precious time building elaborate forts at Crown Point and Ticonderoga, which were irrelevant both to the current war and to the future frontier. After this, Amherst dawdled until the onset of winter suspended operations.

While Montreal was to remain as the major British effort of the following year, the climactic battle of the war was achieved in the capture of Quebec —the goal of so many British expeditions since the seventeenth century. In June 1759, a force of about nine thousand under young General James Wolfe launched an amphibious campaign up the St. Lawrence. The huge fleet, under Vice Admiral Charles Saunders, included one hundred seventy ships carrying some eighteen thousand seamen. A hard-line militarist and imperialist, Wolfe had nothing but the utmost contempt for Americans, French or Indians, and he wantonly destroyed and devastated the French settlements as he went. After three months of aimless and futile siege, Wolfe finally assented to the plan of his brigadiers. With a force of thirty-five hundred men, he executed a surprise maneuver to ascend to the Plains of Abraham near Quebec, where he routed the slightly smaller force of Montcalm’s. Quebec’s surrender was a matter of a few days. By the middle of September, the seat of French power in the New World had fallen.

Despite the loss of Quebec and of the great Montcalm, who had also fallen at the Plains of Abraham, the amazing French fought on. The new French commander, the Chevalier de Lévis-Leran, even administered a drubbing to the British forces the following spring. The British, too, had a new commander, General James Murray, for Wolfe had also been killed at the Plains of Abraham. The French, indeed, might well have recaptured Quebec, but once again numbers prevailed and a British relief party turned the tide. Finally, three forces converged on Montreal: Murray from Quebec, Amherst up the St. Lawrence from Lake Ontario, and Colonel William Haviland up the Richelieu River from Lake Champlain. Montreal finally fell on September 8, 1760. The British had succeeded in conquering all of Canada. The war with the French, so far as America was concerned, was over.