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Montcalm and Wolfe by Francis Parkman

F >> Francis Parkman >> Montcalm and Wolfe




[Footnote 115: _Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_.]

[Footnote 116: _Ordonnance du 12 Avril, 1751_.]

[Footnote 117: _Ecrit donne aux Habitants refugies a Beausejour, 10
Aout, 1754_.]

[Footnote 118: _Copie de la Lettre de M. l'Abbe Le Loutre, Pretre
Missionnaire des Sauvages de l'Accadie, a M. Lawrence a Halifax, 26
Aout, 1754_. There is a translation in _Public Documents of Nova
Scotia_.]

The number of Acadians who had crossed the line and were collected about
Beausejour was now large. Their countrymen of Chipody began to find them
a burden, and they lived chiefly on Government rations. Le Loutre had
obtained fifty thousand livres from the Court in order to dike in, for
their use, the fertile marshes of Memeramcook; but the relief was
distant, and the misery pressing. They complained that they had been
lured over the line by false assurances, and they applied secretly to
the English authorities to learn if they would be allowed to return to
their homes. The answer was that they might do so with full enjoyment of
religion and property, if they would take a simple oath of fidelity and
loyalty to the King of Great Britain, qualified by an oral intimation
that they would not be required for the present to bear arms.[119] When
Le Loutre heard this, he mounted the pulpit, broke into fierce
invectives, threatened the terrified people with excommunication, and
preached himself into a state of exhaustion.[120] The military
commandant at Beausejour used gentler means of prevention; and the
Acadians, unused for generations to think or act for themselves,
remained restless, but indecisive, waiting till fate should settle for
them the question, under which king?

[Footnote 119: _Public Documents of Nova Scotia_, 205, 209.]

[Footnote 120: Compare _Memoires, 1749-1760_, and _Public Documents of
Nova Scotia_, 229, 230.]

Meanwhile, for the past three years, the commissioners appointed under
the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to settle the question of boundaries
between France and England in America had been in session at Paris,
waging interminable war on paper; La Galissoniere and Silhouette for
France, Shirley and Mildmay for England. By the treaty of Utrecht,
Acadia belonged to England; but what was Acadia? According to the
English commissioners, it comprised not only the peninsula now called
Nova Scotia, but all the immense tract of land between the River St.
Lawrence on the north, the Gulf of the same name on the east, the
Atlantic on the south, and New England on the west.[121] The French
commissioners, on their part, maintained that the name Acadia belonged
of right only to about a twentieth part of this territory, and that it
did not even cover the whole of the Acadian peninsula, but only its
southern coast, with an adjoining belt of barren wilderness. When the
French owned Acadia, they gave it boundaries as comprehensive as those
claimed for it by the English commissioners; now that it belonged to a
rival, they cut it down to a paring of its former self. The denial that
Acadia included the whole peninsula was dictated by the need of a winter
communication between Quebec and Cape Breton, which was possible only
with the eastern portions in French hands. So new was this denial that
even La Galissoniere himself, the foremost in making it, had declared
without reservation two years before that Acadia was the entire
peninsula.[122] "If," says a writer on the question, "we had to do with
a nation more tractable, less grasping, and more conciliatory, it would
be well to insist also that Halifax should be given up to us." He thinks
that, on the whole, it would be well to make the demand in any case, in
order to gain some other point by yielding this one.[123] It is curious
that while denying that the country was Acadia, the French invariably
called the inhabitants Acadians. Innumerable public documents,
commissions, grants, treaties, edicts, signed by French kings and
ministers, had recognized Acadia as extending over New Brunswick and a
part of Maine. Four censuses of Acadia while it belonged to the French
had recognized the mainland as included in it; and so do also the early
French maps. Its prodigious shrinkage was simply the consequence of its
possession by an alien.

[Footnote 121: The commission of De Monts, in 1603, defines Acadia as
extending from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degrees of
latitude,--that is, from central New Brunswick to southern Pennsylvania.
Neither party cared to produce the document.]

[Footnote 122: "L'Acadie suivant ses anciennes limites est la presquisle
bornee par son isthme." _La Galissoniere au Ministre, 25 Juillet, 1749_.
The English commissioners were, of course, ignorant of this admission.]

[Footnote 123: _Memoire de l'Abbee de l'Isle-Dieu, 1753_ (1754?).]

Other questions of limits, more important and equally perilous, called
loudly for solution. What line should separate Canada and her western
dependencies from the British colonies? Various principles of
demarcation were suggested, of which the most prominent on the French
side was a geographical one. All countries watered by streams falling
into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi were to
belong to her. This would have planted her in the heart of New York and
along the crests of the Alleghanies, giving her all the interior of the
continent, and leaving nothing to England but a strip of sea-coast. Yet
in view of what France had achieved; of the patient gallantry of her
explorers, the zeal of her missionaries, the adventurous hardihood of
her bushrangers, revealing to civilized mankind the existence of this
wilderness world, while her rivals plodded at their workshops, their
farms, or their fisheries,--in view of all this, her pretensions were
moderate and reasonable compared with those of England. The treaty of
Utrecht had declared the Iroquois, or Five Nations, to be British
subjects; therefore it was insisted that all countries conquered by them
belonged to the British Crown. But what was an Iroquois conquest? The
Iroquois rarely occupied the countries they overran. Their military
expeditions were mere raids, great or small. Sometimes, as in the case
of the Hurons, they made a solitude and called it peace; again, as in
the case of the Illinois, they drove off the occupants of the soil, who
returned after the invaders were gone. But the range of their
war-parties was prodigious; and the English laid claim to every
mountain, forest, or prairie where an Iroquois had taken a scalp. This
would give them not only the country between the Alleghanies and the
Mississippi, but also that between Lake Huron and the Ottawa, thus
reducing Canada to the patch on the American map now represented by the
province of Quebec,--or rather, by a part of it, since the extension of
Acadia to the St. Lawrence would cut off the present counties of Gaspe,
Rimouski, and Bonaventure. Indeed among the advocates of British claims
there were those who denied that France had any rights whatever on the
south side of the St. Lawrence.[124] Such being the attitude of the two
contestants, it was plain that there was no resort but the last argument
of kings. Peace must be won with the sword.

[Footnote 124: The extent of British claims is best shown on two maps of
the time, Mitchell's _Map of the British and French Dominions in North
America_ and Huske's _New and Accurate Map of North America_; both are
in the British Museum. Dr. John Mitchell, in his _Contest in America_
(London, 1757) pushes the English claim to its utmost extreme, and
denies that the French were rightful owners of anything in North
America except the town of Quebec and the trading-post of Tadoussac.
Besides the claim founded on the subjection of the Iroquois to the
British Crown, the English somewhat inconsistently advanced others
founded on titles obtained by treaty from these same tribes, and others
still, founded on the original grants of some of the colonies, which ran
indefinitely westward across the continent.]

The commissioners at Paris broke up their sessions, leaving as the
monument of their toils four quarto volumes of allegations, arguments,
and documentary proofs.[125] Out of the discussion rose also a swarm of
fugitive publications in French, English, and Spanish; for the question
of American boundaries had become European. There was one among them
worth notice from its amusing absurdity. It is an elaborate
disquisition, under the title of _Roman politique_, by an author
faithful to the traditions of European diplomacy, and inspired at the
same time by the new philosophy of the school of Rousseau. He insists
that the balance of power must be preserved in America as well as in
Europe, because "Nature," "the aggrandizement of the human soul," and
the "felicity of man" are unanimous in demanding it. The English
colonies are more populous and wealthy than the French; therefore the
French should have more land, to keep the balance. Nature, the human
soul, and the felicity of man require that France should own all the
country beyond the Alleghanies and all Acadia but a strip of the south
coast, according to the "sublime negotiations" of the French
commissioners, of which the writer declares himself a "religious
admirer."[126]

[Footnote 125: _Memoires des Commissaires de Sa Majeste Tres Chretienne
et de ceux de Sa Majeste Brittanique_. Paris, 1755. Several editions
appeared.]

[Footnote 126: _Roman politique sur l'Etat present des Affaires de
l'Amerique_ (Amsterdam, 1756). For extracts from French Documents, see
Appendix B.]

We know already that France had used means sharper than negotiation to
vindicate her claim to the interior of the continent; had marched to the
sources of the Ohio to entrench herself there, and hold the passes of
the West against all comers. It remains to see how she fared in her bold
enterprise.





Chapter 5

1753, 1754

Washington


Towards the end of spring the vanguard of the expedition sent by
Duquesne to occupy the Ohio landed at Presquisle, where Erie now stands.
This route to the Ohio, far better than that which Celeron had followed,
was a new discovery to the French; and Duquesne calls the harbor "the
finest in nature." Here they built a fort of squared chestnut logs, and
when it was finished they cut a road of several leagues through the
woods to Riviere aux Boeufs, now French Creek. At the farther end of
this road they began another wooden fort and called it Fort Le Boeuf.
Thence, when the water was high, they could descend French Creek to the
Allegheny, and follow that stream to the main current of the Ohio.

It was heavy work to carry the cumbrous load of baggage across the
portages. Much of it is said to have been superfluous, consisting of
velvets, silks, and other useless and costly articles, sold to the King
at enormous prices as necessaries of the expedition.[127] The weight of
the task fell on the Canadians, who worked with cheerful hardihood, and
did their part to admiration. Marin, commander of the expedition, a
gruff, choleric old man of sixty-three, but full of force and capacity,
spared himself so little that he was struck down with dysentery, and,
refusing to be sent home to Montreal, was before long in a dying state.
His place was taken by Pean, of whose private character there is little
good to be said, but whose conduct as an officer was such that Duquesne
calls him a prodigy of talents, resources, and zeal.[128] The subalterns
deserve no such praise. They disliked the service, and made no secret of
their discontent. Rumors of it filled Montreal; and Duquesne wrote to
Marin: "I am surprised that you have not told me of this change. Take
note of the sullen and discouraged faces about you. This sort are worse
than useless. Rid yourself of them at once; send them to Montreal, that
I may make an example of them."[129] Pean wrote at the end of September
that Marin was in extremity; and the Governor, disturbed and alarmed,
for he knew the value of the sturdy old officer, looked anxiously for a
successor. He chose another veteran, Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, who had
just returned from a journey of exploration towards the Rocky
Mountains,[130] and whom Duquesne now ordered to the Ohio.

[Footnote 127: Pouchot, _Memoires sur la derniere Guerre de l'Amerique
Septentrionale_, I. 8.]

[Footnote 128: _Duquesne au Ministre, 2 Nov. 1753_; compare _Memoire
pour Michel-Jean Hugues Pean_.]

[Footnote 129: _Duquesne a Marin, 27 Aout, 1753_.]

[Footnote 130: _Memoire ou Journal sommaire du Voyage de Jacques
Legardeur de Saint-Pierre._]

Meanwhile the effects of the expedition had already justified it. At
first the Indians of the Ohio had shown a bold front. One of them, a
chief whom the English called the Half-King, came to Fort Le Boeuf and
ordered the French to leave the country; but was received by Marin with
such contemptuous haughtiness that he went home shedding tears of rage
and mortification. The Western tribes were daunted. The Miamis, but
yesterday fast friends of the English, made humble submission to the
French, and offered them two English scalps to signalize their
repentance; while the Sacs, Pottawattamies, and Ojibwas were loud in
professions of devotion.[131] Even the Iroquois, Delawares, and
Shawanoes on the Alleghany had come to the French camp and offered their
help in carrying the baggage. It needed but perseverance and success in
the enterprise to win over every tribe from the mountains to the
Mississippi. To accomplish this and to curb the English, Duquesne had
planned a third fort, at the junction of French Creek with the
Alleghany, or at some point lower down; then, leaving the three posts
well garrisoned, Pean was to descend the Ohio with the whole remaining
force, impose terror on the wavering tribes, and complete their
conversion. Both plans were thwarted; the fort was not built, nor did
Pean descend the Ohio. Fevers, lung diseases, and scurvy made such
deadly havoc among troops and Canadians, that the dying Marin saw with
bitterness that his work must be left half done. Three hundred of the
best men were kept to garrison Forts Presquisle and Le Boeuf; and then,
as winter approached, the rest were sent back to Montreal. When they
arrived, the Governor was shocked at their altered looks. "I reviewed
them, and could not help being touched by the pitiable state to which
fatigues and exposures had reduced them. Past all doubt, if these
emaciated figures had gone down the Ohio as intended, the river would
have been strewn with corpses, and the evil-disposed savages would not
have failed to attack the survivors, seeing that they were but
spectres."[132]

[Footnote 131: _Rapports de Conseils avec les Sauvages a Montreal,
Juillet, 1753. Duquesne au Ministre, 31 Oct. 1753_. Letter of Dr.
Shuckburgh in _N.Y. Col. Docs._, VI. 806.]

[Footnote 132: _Duquesne au Ministre, 29 Nov. 1753_. On this expedition,
compare the letter of Duquesne in _N.Y. Col. Docs._, X. 255, and the
deposition of Stephen Coffen, _Ibid._, VI. 835.]

Legardeur de Saint-Pierre arrived at the end of autumn, and made his
quarters at Fort Le Boeuf. The surrounding forests had dropped their
leaves, and in gray and patient desolation bided the coming winter.
Chill rains drizzled over the gloomy "clearing," and drenched the
palisades and log-built barracks, raw from the axe. Buried in the
wilderness, the military exiles resigned themselves as they might to
months of monotonous solitude; when, just after sunset on the eleventh
of December, a tall youth came out of the forest on horseback, attended
by a companion much older and rougher than himself, and followed by
several Indians and four or five white men with packhorses. Officers
from the fort went out to meet the strangers; and, wading through mud
and sodden snow, they entered at the gate. On the next day the young
leader of the party, with the help of an interpreter, for he spoke no
French, had an interview with the commandant, and gave him a letter from
Governor Dinwiddie. Saint-Pierre and the officer next in rank, who knew
a little English, took it to another room to study it at their ease; and
in it, all unconsciously, they read a name destined to stand one of the
noblest in the annals of mankind; for it introduced Major George
Washington, Adjutant-General of the Virginia militia.[133]

[Footnote 133: _Journal of Major Washington. Journal of Mr. Christopher
Gist._]

Dinwiddie, jealously watchful of French aggression, had learned through
traders and Indians that a strong detachment from Canada had entered the
territories of the King of England, and built forts on Lake Erie and on
a branch of the Ohio. He wrote to challenge the invasion and summon the
invaders to withdraw; and he could find none so fit to bear his message
as a young man of twenty-one. It was this rough Scotchman who launched
Washington on his illustrious career.

Washington set out for the trading station of the Ohio Company on Will's
Creek; and thence, at the middle of November, struck into the wilderness
with Christopher Gist as a guide, Vanbraam, a Dutchman, as French
interpreter, Davison, a trader, as Indian interpreter, and four woodsmen
as servants. They went to the forks of the Ohio, and then down the river
to Logstown, the Chiningue of Celoron de Bienville. There Washington had
various parleys with the Indians; and thence, after vexatious delays, he
continued his journey towards Fort Le Boeuf, accompanied by the friendly
chief called the Half-King and by three of his tribesmen. For several
days they followed the traders' path, pelted with unceasing rain and
snow, and came at last to the old Indian town of Venango, where French
Creek enters the Alleghany. Here there was an English trading-house; but
the French had seized it, raised their flag over it, and turned it into
a military outpost.[134] Joncaire was in command, with two subalterns;
and nothing could exceed their civility. They invited the strangers to
supper; and, says Washington, "the wine, as they dosed themselves pretty
plentifully with it, soon banished the restraint which at first appeared
in their conversation, and gave a license to their tongues to reveal
their sentiments more freely. They told me that it was their absolute
design to take possession of the Ohio, and, by G----, they would do it;
for that although they were sensible the English could raise two men for
their one, yet they knew their motions were too slow and dilatory to
prevent any undertaking of theirs."[135]

[Footnote 134: Marin had sent sixty men in August to seize the house,
which belonged to the trader Fraser. _Depeches de Duquesne_. They
carried off two men whom they found here. Letter of Fraser in _Colonial
Records of Pa._, V. 659.]

[Footnote 135: _Journal of Washington_, as printed at Williamsburg, just
after his return.]

With all their civility, the French officers did their best to entice
away Washington's Indians; and it was with extreme difficulty that he
could persuade them to go with him. Through marshes and swamps, forests
choked with snow, and drenched with incessant rain, they toiled on for
four days more, till the wooden walls of Fort Le Boeuf appeared at last,
surrounded by fields studded thick with stumps, and half-encircled by
the chill current of French Creek, along the banks of which lay more
than two hundred canoes, ready to carry troops in the spring. Washington
describes Legardeur de Saint-Pierre as "an elderly gentleman with much
the air of a soldier." The letter sent him by Dinwiddie expressed
astonishment that his troops should build forts upon lands "so
notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain." "I
must desire you," continued the letter, "to acquaint me by whose
authority and instructions you have lately marched from Canada with an
armed force, and invaded the King of Great Britain's territories. It
becomes my duty to require your peaceable departure; and that you would
forbear prosecuting a purpose so interruptive of the harmony and good
understanding which His Majesty is desirous to continue and cultivate
with the Most Christian King. I persuade myself you will receive and
entertain Major Washington with the candor and politeness natural to
your nation; and it will give me the greatest satisfaction if you return
him with an answer suitable to my wishes for a very long and lasting
peace between us."

Saint-Pierre took three days to frame the answer. In it he said that he
should send Dinwiddie's letter to the Marquis Duquesne and wait his
orders; and that meanwhile he should remain at his post, according to
the commands of his general. "I made it my particular care," so the
letter closed, "to receive Mr. Washington with a distinction suitable to
your dignity as well as his own quality and great merit."[136] No form
of courtesy had, in fact, been wanting. "He appeared to be extremely
complaisant," says Washington, "though he was exerting every artifice to
set our Indians at variance with us. I saw that every stratagem was
practised to win the Half-King to their interest." Neither gifts nor
brandy were spared; and it was only by the utmost pains that Washington
could prevent his red allies from staying at the fort, conquered by
French blandishments.

[Footnote 136: "La Distinction qui convient a votre Dignitte a sa
Qualite et a son grand Merite." Copy of original letter sent by
Dinwiddie to Governor Hamilton.]

After leaving Venango on his return, he found the horses so weak that,
to arrive the sooner, he left them and their drivers in charge of
Vanbraam and pushed forward on foot, accompanied by Gist alone. Each was
wrapped to the throat in an Indian "matchcoat," with a gun in his hand
and a pack at his back. Passing an old Indian hamlet called Murdering
Town, they had an adventure which threatened to make good the name. A
French Indian, whom they met in the forest, fired at them, pretending
that his gun had gone off by chance. They caught him, and Gist would
have killed him; but Washington interposed, and they let him go.[137]
Then, to escape pursuit from his tribesmen, they walked all night and
all the next day. This brought them to the banks of the Alleghany. They
hoped to have found it dead frozen; but it was all alive and turbulent,
filled with ice sweeping down the current. They made a raft, shoved out
into the stream, and were soon caught helplessly in the drifting ice.
Washington, pushing hard with his setting-pole, was jerked into the
freezing river; but caught a log of the raft, and dragged himself out.
By no efforts could they reach the farther bank, or regain that which
they had left; but they were driven against an island, where they
landed, and left the raft to its fate. The night was excessively cold,
and Gist's feet and hands were badly frost-bitten. In the morning, the
ice had set, and the river was a solid floor. They crossed it, and
succeeded in reaching the house of the trader Fraser, on the
Monongahela. It was the middle of January when Washington arrived at
Williamsburg and made his report to Dinwiddie.

[Footnote 137: _Journal of Mr. Christopher Gist_, in _Mass. Hist. Coll.,
3rd Series_, V.]

Robert Dinwiddie was lieutenant-governor of Virginia, in place of the
titular governor, Lord Albermarle, whose post was a sinecure. He had
been clerk in a government office in the West Indies; then surveyor of
customs in the "Old Dominion,"--a position in which he made himself
cordially disliked; and when he rose to the governorship he carried his
unpopularity with him. Yet Virginia and all the British colonies owed
him much; for, though past sixty, he was the most watchful sentinel
against French aggression and its most strenuous opponent. Scarcely had
Marin's vanguard appeared at Presquisle, when Dinwiddie warned the Home
Government of the danger, and urged, what he had before urged in vain on
the Virginian Assembly, the immediate building of forts on the Ohio.
There came in reply a letter, signed by the King, authorizing him to
build the forts at the cost of the Colony, and to repel force by force
in case he was molested or obstructed. Moreover, the King wrote, "If you
shall find that any number of persons shall presume to erect any fort or
forts within the limits of our province of Virginia, you are first to
require of them peaceably to depart; and if, notwithstanding your
admonitions, they do still endeavor to carry out any such unlawful and
unjustifiable designs, we do hereby strictly charge and command you to
drive them off by force of arms."[138]

[Footnote 138: _Instructions to Our Trusty and Well-beloved Robert
Dinwiddie, Esq., 28 Aug. 1753._]

The order was easily given; but to obey it needed men and money, and for
these Dinwiddie was dependent on his Assembly, or House of Burgesses. He
convoked them for the first of November, sending Washington at the same
time with the summons to Saint-Pierre. The burgesses met. Dinwiddie
exposed the danger, and asked for means to meet it.[139] They seemed
more than willing to comply; but debates presently arose concerning the
fee of a pistole, which the Governor had demanded on each patent of land
issued by him. The amount was trifling, but the principle was doubtful.
The aristocratic republic of Virginia was intensely jealous of the
slightest encroachment on its rights by the Crown or its representative.
The Governor defended the fee. The burgesses replied that "subjects
cannot be deprived of the least part of their property without their
consent," declared the fee unlawful, and called on Dinwiddie to confess
it to be so. He still defended it. They saw in his demand for supplies a
means of bringing him to terms, and refused to grant money unless he
would recede from his position. Dinwiddie rebuked them for "disregarding
the designs of the French, and disputing the rights of the Crown"; and
he "prorogued them in some anger."[140]

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