Volume 2, Chapter 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 Beaux-Azur 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.
Women in 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
in the Lake Champlain area north of Albany. But Shirley had his troubles at the two English
western forts of Oswego and Ontario, which were wrecked 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 Montcombe.
In a sparkling maneuver, Montcombe 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
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 15,000 men for an assault on Lewisburg, an assault
that he had to abandon. Montcalm swept down and captured and destroyed Fort William Henry,
the English stronghold of the southern tip of Lake George. Loudon had his troubles on
the American home front as well. New Yorkers, particularly in New York City and Albany,
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 general ship 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 underway 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 arc-warmonger
of Them All. In malevolent contrast to his confrères, 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
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, Loudon was succeeded as commander-in-chief by General
James Abercrombie 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 Abercrombie, a huge force of over 6,000 regulars
and 9,000 American troops marched on Fort Carillon, Ticonderoga.
The French passed in at the southern tip of Lake Champlain.
On July 8, the French met this giant force with only slightly more than 3,000 men, but
again caught the English force to ribbons.
The event was greatly aided by the stupid general ship of Abercrombie, who repeatedly
Herald 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
The French defenders, scarcely 6,000 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 3,000, found little trouble in swamping a fort in front of him.
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 Abercrombie
was promptly removed from overall command and succeeded by General Jeffrey Amherst,
the victor at Lewisburg. The obvious next step was the recapture of Fort Duquesne and
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 Iroquois, 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
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 6,000 men, the majority colonial militia. Again, the French defenders were
hopelessly outnumbered, having no more than 1,000 men. Even though the Virginia route
The route to Duquesne had already been built by Braddock. Forbes decided to hue a new road from Pennsylvania.
The issue could not be endowed, 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 10,000 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 status bureaucracy in Canada.
The first tasks of the British in 1759 were to capture Fort Niagara and the Lake Champlain
General John Pridot, with several thousand men, laid siege to less than 500 at Fort Niagara.
Despite a series of blunders that included the accidental killing of Pridot by British
shells, sheer British numbers overwhelmed the fort at the end of July. Furthermore, a poorly
The organized French Relief Party of nearly 1500 was captured and destroyed, though West
was firmly in British hands.
In the meanwhile, Amherst advanced with about 12,000 men, approximately half British and
half provincials, against only 2,500 French at Fort Carillon.
The French could only blow up Fort Carillon and then Fort St. Frederick 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 Hamhurst had had the tenacity
to march north from Lake Champlain and capture Montreal.
Instead, Hamhurst 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 dwindled until the onset of winter suspended operations. While Montreal
was to remain as the major British effort of the following year, the climatic battle
of the war was achieved in the capture of Quebec, the goal of so many British expeditions
In June 1759, a force of about 9,000 under young General James Wolfe launched an amphibious campaign up the St. Lawrence.
The huge fleet under Vice Admiral Charles Saunders included 170 ships carrying some 18,000 seamen.
A hard-line militarist and imperialist, Wolf 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, Wolf finally ascended to the plan of
of His Brigadiers. With a force of 3,500 men, he executed a surprise maneuver to ascend
to the plains of Abraham, near Quebec, where he routed the slightly smaller force of Mont
Calme'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
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 la Ville-Lorraine, even administered a
drubbing to the British forces the following spring. The British, too, had a new commander,
General James Murray, for Wolf 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 to 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.