[Footnote 860: Jugement rendu souverainement et en dernier Ressort dans l'Affaire du Canada. Papers at the Chatelet of Paris, cited by Dussieux.]

While on the American continent the last scenes of the war were drawing to their close, the contest raged in Europe with unabated violence. England was in the full career of success; but her great ally, Frederic of Prussia, seemed tottering to his ruin. In the summer of 1758 his glory was at its height. French, Austrians, and Russians had all fled before him. But the autumn brought reverses; and the Austrian general, Daun, at the head of an overwhelming force, gained over him a partial victory, which his masterly strategy robbed of its fruits. It was but a momentary respite. His kingdom was exhausted by its own triumphs. His best generals were dead, his best soldiers killed or disabled, his resources almost spent, the very chandeliers of his palace melted into coin; and all Europe was in arms against him. The disciplined valor of the Prussian troops and the supreme leadership of their undespairing King had thus far held the invading hosts at bay; but now the end seemed near. Frederic could not be everywhere at once; and while he stopped one leak the torrent poured in at another. The Russians advanced again, defeated General Wedell, whom he sent against them, and made a junction with the Austrians. In August, 1759, he attacked their united force at Kunersdorf, broke their left wing to pieces, took a hundred and eighty cannon, forced their centre to give ground, and after hours of furious fighting was overwhelmed at last. In vain he tried to stop the rout. The bullets killed two horses under him, tore his clothes, and crushed a gold snuff-box in his waistcoat pocket. "Is there no b—— of a shot that can hit me, then?" he cried in his bitterness, as his aides-de-camp forced him from the field. For a few days he despaired; then rallied to his forlorn task, and with smiles on his lip and anguish at his heart watched, manoeuvred, and fought with cool and stubborn desperation. To his friend D'Argens he wrote soon after his defeat: "Death is sweet in comparison to such a life as mine. Have pity on me and it; believe that I still keep to myself a great many evil things, not wishing to afflict or disgust anybody with them, and that I would not counsel you to fly these unlucky countries if I had any ray of hope; Adieu, mon cher!" It was well for him and for Prussia that he had strong allies in the dissensions and delays of his enemies. But his cup was not yet full. Dresden was taken from him, eight of his remaining generals and twelve thousand men were defeated and captured at Maxen, and "this infernal campaign," as he calls it, closed in thick darkness.

"I wrap myself in my stoicism as best I can," he writes to Voltaire. "If you saw me you would hardly know me: I am old, broken, gray-headed, wrinkled. If this goes on there will be nothing left of me but the mania of making verses and an inviolable attachment to my duties and to the few virtuous men I know. But you will not get a peace signed by my hand except on conditions honorable to my nation. Your people, blown up with conceit and folly, may depend on this."

The same stubborn conflict with overmastering odds, the same intrepid resolution, the same subtle strategy, the same skill in eluding the blow and lightning-like quickness in retorting it, marked Frederic's campaign of 1760. At Liegnitz three armies, each equal to his own, closed round him, and he put them all to flight. While he was fighting in Silesia, the Allies marched upon Berlin, took it, and held it three days, but withdrew on his approach. For him there was no peace. "Why weary you with the details of my labors and my sorrows?" he wrote again to his faithful D'Argens. "My spirits have forsaken me; all gayety is buried with the loved noble ones to whom my heart was bound." He had lost his mother and his devoted sister Wilhelmina. "You as a follower of Epicurus put a value upon life; as for me, I regard death from the Stoic point of view. I have told you, and I repeat it, never shall my hand sign a humiliating peace. Finish this campaign I will, resolved to dare all, to succeed, or find a glorious end." Then came the victory of Torgau, the last and one of the most desperate of his battles: a success dearly bought, and bringing neither rest nor safety. Once more he wrote to D'Argens: "Adieu, dear Marquis; write to me sometimes. Don't forget a poor devil who curses his fatal existence ten times a day." "I live like a military monk. Endless business, and a little consolation from my books. I don't know if I shall outlive this war, but if I do I am firmly resolved to pass the rest of my life in solitude in the bosom of philosophy and friendship. Your nation, you see, is blinder than you thought. These fools will lose their Canada and Pondicherry to please the Queen of Hungary and the Czarina."

The campaign of 1761 was mainly defensive on the part of Frederic. In the exhaustion of his resources he could see no means of continuing the struggle. "It is only Fortune," says the royal sceptic, "that can extricate me from the situation I am in. I escape out of it by looking at the universe on the great scale like an observer from some distant planet. All then seems to be so infinitely small that I could almost pity my enemies for giving themselves so much trouble about so very little. I read a great deal, I devour my books. But for them I think hypochondria would have had me in Bedlam before now. In fine, dear Marquis, we live in troublous times and desperate situations. I have all the properties of a stage hero; always in danger, always on the point of perishing."[861] And in another mood: "I begin to feel that, as the Italians say, revenge is a pleasure for the gods. My philosophy is worn out by suffering. I am no saint, and I will own that I should die content if only I could first inflict a part of the misery that I endure."

[Footnote 861: The above extracts are as translated by Carlyle in his History of Frederick II. of Prussia.]

While Frederic was fighting for life and crown, an event took place in England that was to have great influence on the war. Walpole recounts it thus, writing to George Montagu on the twenty-fifth of October, 1760: "My man Harry tells me all the amusing news. He first told me of the late Prince of Wales's death, and to-day of the King's; so I must tell you all I know of departed majesty. He went to bed well last night, rose at six this morning as usual, looked, I suppose, if all his money was in his purse, and called for his chocolate. A little after seven he went into the closet; the German valet-de-chambre heard a noise, listened, heard something like a groan, ran in, and found the hero of Oudenarde and Dettingen on the floor with a gash on his right temple by falling against the corner of a bureau. He tried to speak, could not, and expired. The great ventricle of the heart had burst. What an enviable death!"

The old King was succeeded by his grandson, George III., a mirror of domestic virtues, conscientious, obstinate, narrow. His accession produced political changes that had been preparing for some time. His grandfather was German at heart, loved his Continental kingdom of Hanover, and was eager for all measures that looked to its defence and preservation. Pitt, too, had of late vigorously supported the Continental war, saying that he would conquer America in Germany. Thus with different views the King and the Minister had concurred in the same measures. But George III. was English by birth, language, and inclination. His ruling passion was the establishment and increase of his own authority. He disliked Pitt, the representative of the people. He was at heart averse to a war, the continuance of which would make the Great Commoner necessary, and therefore powerful, and he wished for a peace that would give free scope to his schemes for strengthening the prerogative. He was not alone in his pacific inclinations. The enemies of the haughty Minister, who had ridden roughshod over men far above him in rank, were tired of his ascendency, and saw no hope of ending it but by ending the war. Thus a peace party grew up, and the young King became its real, though not at first its declared, supporter.

The Tory party, long buried, showed signs of resurrection. There were those among its members who, even in a king of the hated line of Hanover, could recognize and admire the same spirit of arbitrary domination that had marked their fallen idols, the Stuarts; and they now joined hands with the discontented Whigs in opposition to Pitt. The horrors of war, the blessings of peace, the weight of taxation, the growth of the national debt, were the rallying cries of the new party; but the mainspring of their zeal was hostility to the great Minister. Even his own colleagues chafed under his spirit of mastery; the chiefs of the Opposition longed to inherit his power; and the King had begun to hate him as a lion in his path. Pitt held to his purpose regardless of the gathering storm. That purpose, as proclaimed by his adherents, was to secure a solid and lasting peace, which meant the reduction of France to so low an estate that she could no more be a danger to her rival. In this he had the sympathy of the great body of the nation.

Early in 1761 the King, a fanatic for prerogative, set his enginery in motion. The elections for the new Parliament were manipulated in his interest. If he disliked Pitt as the representative of the popular will, he also disliked his colleague, the shuffling and uncertain Newcastle, as the representative of a too powerful nobility. Elements hostile to both were introduced into the Cabinet and the great offices. The King'sfavorite, the Earl of Bute, supplanted Holdernesse as Secretary of State for the Northern Department; Charles Townshend, an opponent of Pitt, was made Secretary of War; Legge, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was replaced by Viscount Barrington, who was sure for the King; while a place in the Cabinet was also given to the Duke of Bedford, one of the few men who dared face the formidable Minister. It was the policy of the King and his following to abandon Prussia, hitherto supported by British subsidies, make friends with Austria and Russia at her expense, and conclude a separate peace with France.

France was in sore need of peace. The infatuation that had turned her from her own true interest to serve the passions of Maria Theresa and the Czarina Elizabeth had brought military humiliation and financial ruin. Abbe de Bernis, Minister of Foreign Affairs, had lost the favor of Madame de Pompadour, and had been supplanted by the Duc de Choiseul. The new Minister had gained his place by pleasing the favorite; but he kept it through his own ability and the necessities of the time. The Englishman Stanley, whom Pitt sent to negotiate with him, drew this sketch of his character: "Though he may have his superiors, not only in experience of business, but in depth and refinement as a statesman, he is a person of as bold and daring a spirit as any man whatever in our country or in his own. Madame Pompadour has ever been looked upon by all preceding courtiers and ministers as their tutelary deity, under whose auspices only they could exist, and who was as much out of their reach as if she were of a superior class of beings; but this Minister is so far from being in subordination to her influence that he seized the first opportunity of depriving her not of an equality, but of any share of power, reducing her to the necessity of applying to him even for those favors that she wants for herself and her dependents. He has effected this great change, which every other man would have thought impossible, in the interior of the Court, not by plausibility, flattery, and address, but with a high hand, with frequent railleries and sarcasms which would have ruined any other, and, in short, by a clear superiority of spirit and resolution."[862]

[Footnote 862: Stanley to Pitt, 6 Aug. 1761, in Grenville Correspondence, I. 367, note.]

Choiseul was vivacious, brilliant, keen, penetrating; believing nothing, fearing nothing; an easy moralist, an uncertain ally, a hater of priests; light-minded, inconstant; yet a kind of patriot, eager to serve France and retrieve her fortunes.

He flattered himself with no illusions. "Since we do not know how to make war," he said, "we must make peace;"[863] and he proposed a congress of all the belligerent Powers at Augsburg. At the same time, since the war in Germany was distinct from the maritime and colonial war of France and England, he proposed a separate negotiation with the British Court in order to settle the questions between them as a preliminary to the general pacification. Pitt consented, and Stanley went as envoy to Versailles; while M. de Bussy came as envoy to London and, in behalf of Choiseul, offered terms of peace, the first of which was the entire abandonment of Canada to England.[864] But the offers were accompanied by the demand that Spain, which had complaints of its own against England, should be admitted as a party to the negotiation, and even hold in some measure the attitude of a mediator. Pitt spurned the idea with fierce contempt. "Time enough to treat of all that, sir, when the Tower of London is taken sword in hand."[865] He bore his part with the ability that never failed him, and with a supreme arrogance that rose to a climax in his demand that the fortress of Dunkirk should be demolished, not because it was any longer dangerous to England, but because the nation would regard its destruction "as an eternal monument of the yoke imposed on France."[866]

[Footnote 863: Flassan, Diplomatie Francaise, V. 376 (Paris, 1809).]

[Footnote 864: See the proposals in Entick, V. 161.]

[Footnote 865: Beatson, Military Memoirs, II. 434. The Count de Fuentes to the Earl of Egremont, 25 Dec. 1761, in Entick, V. 264.]

[Footnote 866: On this negotiation, see Memoire historique sur la Negociation de la France et de l'Angleterre (Paris, 1761), a French Government publication containing papers on both sides. The British Ministry also published such documents as they saw fit, under the title of Papers relating to the Rupture with Spain. Compare Adolphus, George III., I. 31-39.]

Choiseul replied with counter-propositions less humiliating to his nation. When the question of accepting or rejecting them came before the Ministry, the views of Pitt prevailed by a majority of one, and, to the disappointment of Bute and the King, the conferences were broken off. Choiseul, launched again on the billows of a disastrous war, had seen and provided against the event. Ferdinand VI. of Spain had died, and Carlos III. had succeeded to his throne. Here, as in England, change of kings brought change of policy. While negotiating vainly with Pitt, the French Minister had negotiated secretly and successfully with Carlos; and the result was the treaty known as the Family Compact, having for its object the union of the various members of the House of Bourbon in common resistance to the growing power of England. It provided that in any future war the Kings of France and Spain should act as one towards foreign Powers, insomuch that the enemy of either should be the enemy of both; and the Bourbon princes of Italy were invited to join in the covenant.[867] What was more to the present purpose, a special agreement was concluded on the same day, by which Spain bound herself to declare war against England unless that Power should make peace with France before the first of May, 1762. For the safety of her colonies and her trade Spain felt it her interest to join her sister nation in putting a check on the vast expansion of British maritime power. She could bring a hundred ships of war to aid the dilapidated navy of France, and the wealth of the Indies to aid her ruined treasury.

[Footnote 867: Flassan, Diplomatie Francaise, V. 317 (Paris, 1809).]

Pitt divined the secret treaty, and soon found evidence of it. He resolved to demand at once full explanation from Spain; and, failing to receive a satisfactory reply, attack her at home and abroad before she was prepared. On the second of October he laid his plan before a Cabinet Council held at a house in St. James Street. There were present the Earl of Bute, the Duke of Newcastle, Earl Granville, Earl Temple, and others of the Ministry. Pitt urged his views with great warmth. "This," he exclaimed, "is the time for humbling the whole House of Bourbon!"[868] His brother-in-law, Temple, supported him. Newcastle kept silent. Bute denounced the proposal, and the rest were of his mind. "If these views are to be followed," said Pitt, "this is the last time I can sit at this board. I was called to the administration of affairs by the voice of the people; to them I have always considered myself as accountable for my conduct; and therefore cannot remain in a situation which makes me responsible for measures I am no longer allowed to guide." Nothing could be more offensive to George III. and his adherents.

[Footnote 868: Beatson, II. 438.]

The veteran Carteret, Earl Granville, replied angrily: "I find the gentleman is determined to leave us; nor can I say I am sorry for it, since otherwise he would certainly have compelled us to leave him. But if he is resolved to assume the office of exclusively advising His Majesty and directing the operations of the war, to what purpose are we called to this council? When he talks of being responsible to the people, he talks the language of the House of Commons, and forgets that at this board he is responsible only to the King. However, though he may possibly have convinced himself of his infallibility, still it remains that we should be equally convinced before we can resign our understandings to his direction, or join with him in the measure he proposes."[869]

[Footnote 869: Annual Register, 1761, p. 44. Adolphus, George III., I. 40. Thackeray, Life of Chatham, I. 592.]

Pitt resigned, and his colleagues rejoiced.[870] Power fell to Bute and the Tories; and great was the fall. The mass of the nation was with the defeated Minister. On Lord Mayor's Day Bute and Barrington were passing St. Paul's in a coach, which the crowd mistook for that of Pitt, and cheered lustily; till one man, looking in at the window, shouted to the rest: "This isn't Pitt; it's Bute, and be damned to him!" The cheers turned forthwith to hisses, mixed with cries of "No Bute!" "No Newcastle salmon!" "Pitt forever!" Handfuls of mud were showered against the coach, and Barrington's ruffles were besmirched with it.[871]

[Footnote 870: Walpole, George III., I. 80, and note by Sir Denis Le Marchant, 80-82.]

[Footnote 871: Nuthall to Lady Chatham, 12 Nov. 1761, in Chatham Correspondence, II. 166.]

The fall of Pitt was like the knell of doom to Frederic of Prussia. It meant abandonment by his only ally, and the loss of the subsidy which was his chief resource. The darkness around him grew darker yet, and not a hope seemed left; when as by miracle the clouds broke, and light streamed out of the blackness. The bitterest of his foes, the Czarina Elizabeth, she whom he had called infame catin du Nord, died, and was succeeded by her nephew, Peter III. Here again, as in England and Spain, a new sovereign brought new measures. The young Czar, simple and enthusiastic, admired the King of Prussia, thought him the paragon of heroes, and proclaimed himself his friend. No sooner was he on the throne than Russia changed front. From the foe of Frederic she became his ally; and in the opening campaign of 1762 the army that was to have aided in crushing him was ranged on his side. It was a turn of fortune too sharp and sudden to endure. Ill-balanced and extreme in all things, Peter plunged into headlong reforms, exasperated the clergy and the army, and alienated his wife, Catherine, who had hoped to rule in his name, and who now saw herself supplanted by his mistress. Within six months he was deposed and strangled. Catherine, one of whose lovers had borne part in the murder, reigned in his stead, conspicuous by the unbridled disorders of her life, and by powers of mind that mark her as the ablest of female sovereigns. If she did not share her husband's enthusiasm for Frederic, neither did she share Elizabeth's hatred of him. He, on his part, taught by hard experience, conciliated instead of insulting her, and she let him alone.

Peace with Russia brought peace with Sweden, and Austria with the Germanic Empire stood alone against him. France needed all her strength to hold her own against the mixed English and German force under Ferdinand of Brunswick in the Rhine countries. She made spasmodic efforts to seize upon Hanover, but the result was humiliating defeat.

In England George III. pursued his policy of strengthening the prerogative, and, jealous of the Whig aristocracy, attacked it in the person of Newcastle. In vain the old politician had played false with Pitt, and trimmed to please his young master. He was worried into resigning his place in the Cabinet, and Bute, the obsequious agent of the royal will, succeeded him as First Lord of the Treasury. Into his weak and unwilling hands now fell the task of carrying on the war; for the nation, elated with triumphs and full of fight, still called on its rulers for fresh efforts and fresh victories. Pitt had proved a true prophet, and his enemies were put to shame; for the attitude of Spain forced Bute and his colleagues to the open rupture with her which the great Minister had vainly urged upon them; and a new and formidable war was now added to the old.[872] Their counsels were weak and half-hearted; but the armies and navies of England still felt the impulsion that the imperial hand of Pitt had given and the unconquerable spirit that he had roused.

[Footnote 872: Declaration of War against the King of Spain, 4 Jan. 1762.]

This spirit had borne them from victory to victory. In Asia they had driven the French from Pondicherry and all their Indian possessions; in Africa they had wrested from them Goree and the Senegal country; in the West Indies they had taken Guadeloupe and Dominica; in the European seas they had captured ship after ship, routed and crippled the great fleet of Admiral Conflans, seized Belleisle, and defeated a bold attempt to invade Ireland. The navy of France was reduced to helplessness. Pitt, before his resignation, had planned a series of new operations, including an attack on Martinique, with other West Indian islands still left to France, and then in turn on the Spanish possessions of Havana, Panama, Manila, and the Philippines. Now, more than ever before, the war appeared in its true character. It was a contest for maritime and colonial ascendency; and England saw herself confronted by both her great rivals at once.

Admiral Rodney sailed for Martinique, and Brigadier Monckton joined him with troops from America. Before the middle of February the whole island was in their hands; and Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent soon shared its fate. The Earl of Albemarle and Admiral Sir George Pococke sailed in early spring on a more important errand, landed in June near Havana with eleven thousand soldiers, and attacked Moro Castle, the key of the city. The pitiless sun of the tropic midsummer poured its fierce light and heat on the parched rocks where the men toiled at the trenches. Earth was so scarce that hardly enough could be had to keep the fascines in place. The siege works were little else than a mass of dry faggots; and when, after exhausting toil, the grand battery opened on the Spanish defences, it presently took fire, was consumed, and had to be made anew. Fresh water failed, and the troops died by scores from thirst; fevers set in, killed many, and disabled nearly half the army. The sea was strewn with floating corpses, and carrion-birds in clouds hovered over the populous graveyards and infected camps. Yet the siege went on: a formidable sally was repulsed; Moro Castle was carried by storm; till at length, two months and eight days after the troops landed, Havana fell into their hands.[873] At the same time Spain was attacked at the antipodes, and the loss of Manila and the Philippines gave her fresh cause to repent her rash compact with France. She was hardly more fortunate near home; for having sent an army to invade Portugal, whichwas in the interest of England, a small British force, under Brigadier Burgoyne, foiled it, and forced it to retire.

[Footnote 873: Journal of the Siege, by the Chief Engineer, in Beatson, II. 544. Mante, 398-465. Entick, V. 363-383.]

The tide of British success was checked for an instant in Newfoundland, where a French squadron attacked St. John's and took it, with its garrison of sixty men. The news reached Amherst at New York; his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Amherst, was sent to the scene of the mishap. St. John's was retaken, and its late conquerers were made prisoners of war.

The financial condition of France was desperate. Her people were crushed with taxation; her debt grew apace; and her yearly expenditure was nearly double her revenue. Choiseul felt the need of immediate peace; and George III. and Bute were hardly less eager for it, to avert the danger of Pitt's return to power and give free scope to their schemes for strengthening the prerogative. Therefore, in September, 1762, negotiations were resumed. The Duke of Bedford was sent to Paris to settle the preliminaries, and the Duc de Nivernois came to London on the same errand. The populace were still for war. Bedford was hissed as he passed through the streets of London, and a mob hooted at the puny figure of Nivernois as he landed at Dover.

The great question was, Should Canada be restored? Should France still be permitted to keep a foothold on the North American continent? Ever since the capitulation of Montreal a swarm of pamphlets had discussed the momentous subject. Some maintained that the acquisition of Canada was not an original object of the war; that the colony was of little value and ought to be given back to its old masters; that Guadeloupe should be kept instead, the sugar trade of that island being worth far more than the Canadian fur trade; and, lastly, that the British colonists, if no longer held in check by France, would spread themselves over the continent, learn to supply all their own wants, grow independent, and become dangerous. Nor were these views confined to Englishmen. There were foreign observers who clearly saw that the adhesion of her colonies to Great Britain would be jeopardized by the extinction of French power in America. Choiseul warned Stanley that they "would not fail to shake off their dependence the moment Canada should be ceded;" while thirteen years before, the Swedish traveller Kalm declared that the presence of the French in America gave the best assurance to Great Britain that its own colonies would remain in due subjection.[874]

[Footnote 874: Kalm, Travels in North America, I. 207.]

The most noteworthy argument on the other side was that of Franklin, whose words find a strange commentary in the events of the next few years. He affirmed that the colonies were so jealous of each other that they would never unite against England. "If they could not agree to unite against the French and Indians, can it reasonably be supposed that there is any danger of their uniting against their own nation, which it is well known they all love much more than they love one another? I will venture to say union amongst them for such a purpose is not merely improbable, it is impossible;" that is, he prudently adds, without "the most grievous tyranny and oppression," like the bloody rule of "Alva in the Netherlands."[875]

[Footnote 875: Interest of Great Britain in regard to her Colonies (London, 1760)

Lord Bath argues for retaining Canada in A Letter addressed to Two Great Men on the Prospect of Peace (1759). He is answered by another pamphlet called Remarks on the Letter to Two Great Men (1760). The Gentleman's Magazine for 1759 has an ironical article styled Reasons for restoring Canada to the French; and in 1761 a pamphlet against the restitution appeared under the title, Importance of Canada considered in Two Letters to a Noble Lord. These are but a part of the writings on the question.]

If Pitt had been in office he would have demanded terms that must ruin past redemption the maritime and colonial power of France; but Bute was less exacting. In November the plenipotentiaries of England, France, and Spain agreed on preliminaries of peace, in which the following were the essential points. France ceded to Great Britain Canada and all her possessions on the North American continent east of the River Mississippi, except the city of New Orleans and a small adjacent district. She renounced her claims to Acadia, and gave up to the conqueror the Island of Cape Breton, with all other islands in the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence. Spain received back Havana, and paid for it by the cession of Florida, with all her other possessions east of the Mississippi. France, subject to certain restrictions, was left free to fish in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off a part of the coast of Newfoundland; and the two little islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were given her as fishing stations on condition that she should not fortify or garrison them. In the West Indies, England restored the captured islands of Guadeloupe, Marigalante, Desirade, and Martinique, and France ceded Grenada and the Grenadines; while it was agreed that of the so-called neutral islands, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago should belong to England, and St. Lucia to France. In Europe, each side promised to give no more help to its allies in the German war. France restored Minorca, and England restored Belleisle; France gave up such parts of Hanoverian territory as she had occupied, and evacuated certain fortresses belonging to Prussia, pledging herself at the same time to demolish, under the inspection of English engineers, her own maritime fortress of Dunkirk. In Africa France ceded Senegal, and received back the small Island of Goree. In India she lost everything she had gained since the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; recovered certain trading stations, but renounced the right of building forts or maintaining troops in Bengal.

On the day when the preliminaries were signed, France made a secret agreement with Spain, by which she divested herself of the last shred of her possessions on the North American continent. As compensation for Florida, which her luckless ally had lost in her quarrel, she made over to the Spanish Crown the city of New Orleans, and under the name of Louisiana gave her the vast region spreading westward from the Mississippi towards the Pacific.

On the ninth of December the question of approving the preliminaries came up before both Houses of Parliament. There was a long debate in the Commons. Pitt was not present, confined, it was said, by gout; till late in the day the House was startled by repeated cheers from the outside. The doors opened, and the fallen Minister entered, carried in the arms of his servants, and followed by an applauding crowd. His bearers set him down within the bar, and by the help of a crutch he made his way with difficulty to his seat. "There was a mixture of the very solemn and the theatric in this apparition," says Walpole, who was present. "The moment was so well timed, the importance of the man and his services, the languor of his emaciated countenance, and the study bestowed on his dress were circumstances that struck solemnity into a patriot mind, and did a little furnish ridicule to the hardened and insensible. He was dressed in black velvet, his legs and thighs wrapped in flannel, his feet covered with buskins of black cloth, and his hands with thick gloves." Not for the first time, he was utilizing his maladies for purposes of stage effect. He spoke for about three hours, sometimes standing, and sometimes seated; sometimes with a brief burst of power, more often with the accents of pain and exhaustion. He highly commended the retention of Canada, but denounced the leaving to France a share in the fisheries, as well as other advantages tending to a possible revival of her maritime power. But the Commons listened coldly, and by a great majority approved the preliminaries of peace.

These preliminaries were embodied in the definitive treaty concluded at Paris on the tenth of February, 1763. Peace between France and England brought peace between the warring nations of the Continent. Austria, bereft of her allies, and exhausted by vain efforts to crush Frederic, gave up the attempt in despair, and signed the treaty of Hubertsburg. The Seven Years War was ended.



Chapter 32

1763-1884

Conclusion

"This," said Earl Granville on his deathbed, "has been the most glorious war and the most triumphant peace that England ever knew." Not all were so well pleased, and many held with Pitt that the House of Bourbon should have been forced to drain the cup of humiliation to the dregs. Yet the fact remains that the Peace of Paris marks an epoch than which none in modern history is more fruitful of grand results. With it began a new chapter in the annals of the world. To borrow the words of a late eminent writer, "It is no exaggeration to say that three of the many victories of the Seven Years War determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With that of Rossbach began the re-creation of Germany, with that of Plassey the influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alexander on the nations of the East; with the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States."[876]

[Footnote 876: Green, History of the English People, IV. 193 (London, 1880).]

So far, however, as concerns the war in the Germanic countries, it was to outward seeming but a mad debauch of blood and rapine, ending in nothing but the exhaustion of the combatants. The havoc had been frightful. According to the King of Prussia's reckoning, 853,000 soldiers of the various nations had lost their lives, besides hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who had perished from famine, exposure, disease, or violence. And with all this waste of life not a boundary line had been changed. The rage of the two empresses and the vanity and spite of the concubine had been completely foiled. Frederic had defied them all, and had come out of the strife intact in his own hereditary dominions and master of all that he had snatched from the Empress-Queen; while Prussia, portioned out by her enemies as their spoil, lay depleted indeed, and faint with deadly striving, but crowned with glory, and with the career before her which, through tribulation and adversity, was to lead her at last to the headship of a united Germany.

Through centuries of strife and vicissitude the French monarchy had triumphed over nobles, parliaments, and people, gathered to itself all the forces of the State, beamed with illusive splendors under Louis the Great, and shone with the phosphorescence of decay under his contemptible successor; till now, robbed of prestige, burdened with debt, and mined with corruption, it was moving swiftly and more swiftly towards the abyss of ruin.

While the war hastened the inevitable downfall of the French monarchy, it produced still more notable effects. France under Colbert had embarked on a grand course of maritime and colonial enterprise, and followed it with an activity and vigor that promised to make her a great and formidable ocean power. It was she who led the way in the East, first trained the natives to fight her battles, and began that system of mixed diplomacy and war which, imitated by her rival, enabled a handful of Europeans to master all India. In North America her vast possessions dwarfed those of every other nation. She had built up a powerful navy and created an extensive foreign trade. All this was now changed. In India she was reduced to helpless inferiority, with total ruin in the future; and of all her boundless territories in North America nothing was left but the two island rocks on the coast of Newfoundland that the victors had given her for drying her codfish. Of her navy scarcely forty ships remained; all the rest were captured or destroyed. She was still great on the continent of Europe, but as a world power her grand opportunities were gone.

In England as in France the several members of the State had battled together since the national life began, and the result had been, not the unchecked domination of the Crown, but a system of balanced and adjusted forces, in which King, Nobility, and Commons all had their recognized places and their share of power. Thus in the war just ended two great conditions of success had been supplied: a people instinct with the energies of ordered freedom, and a masterly leadership to inspire and direct them.

All, and more than all, that France had lost England had won. Now, for the first time, she was beyond dispute the greatest of maritime and colonial Powers. Portugal and Holland, her precursors in ocean enterprise, had long ago fallen hopelessly behind. Two great rivals remained, and she had humbled the one and swept the other from her path. Spain, with vast American possessions, was sinking into the decay which is one of the phenomena of modern history; while France, of late a most formidable competitor, had abandoned the contest in despair. England was mistress of the seas, and the world was thrown open to her merchants, explorers, and colonists. A few years after the Peace the navigator Cook began his memorable series of voyages, and surveyed the strange and barbarous lands which after times were to transform into other Englands, vigorous children of this great mother of nations. It is true that a heavy blow was soon to fall upon her; her own folly was to alienate the eldest and greatest of her offspring. But nothing could rob her of the glory of giving birth to the United States; and, though politically severed, this gigantic progeny were to be not the less a source of growth and prosperity to the parent that bore them, joined with her in a triple kinship of laws, language, and blood. The war or series of wars that ended with the Peace of Paris secured the opportunities and set in action the forces that have planted English homes in every clime, and dotted the earth with English garrisons and posts of trade.

With the Peace of Paris ended the checkered story of New France; a story which would have been a history if faults of constitution and the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode. Yet it is a noteworthy one in both its lights and its shadows: in the disinterested zeal of the founder of Quebec, the self-devotion of the early missionary martyrs, and the daring enterprise of explorers; in the spiritual and temporal vassalage from which the only escape was to the savagery of the wilderness; and in the swarming corruptions which were the natural result of an attempt to rule, by the absolute hand of a master beyond the Atlantic, a people bereft of every vestige of civil liberty. Civil liberty was given them by the British sword; but the conqueror left their religious system untouched, and through it they have imposed upon themselves a weight of ecclesiastical tutelage that finds few equals in the most Catholic countries of Europe. Such guardianship is not without certain advantages. When faithfully exercised it aids to uphold some of the tamer virtues, if that can be called a virtue which needs the constant presence of a sentinel to keep it from escaping: but it is fatal to mental robustness and moral courage; and if French Canada would fulfil its aspirations it must cease to be one of the most priest-ridden communities of the modern world.

Scarcely were they free from the incubus of France when the British provinces showed symptoms of revolt. The measures on the part of the mother-country which roused their resentment, far from being oppressive, were less burdensome than the navigation laws to which they had long submitted; and they resisted taxation by Parliament simply because it was in principle opposed to their rights as freemen. They did not, like the American provinces of Spain at a later day, sunder themselves from a parent fallen into decrepitude; but with astonishing audacity they affronted the wrath of England in the hour of her triumph, forgot their jealousies and quarrels, joined hands in the common cause, fought, endured, and won. The disunited colonies became the United States. The string of discordant communities along the Atlantic coast has grown to a mighty people, joined in a union which the earthquake of civil war served only to compact and consolidate. Those who in the weakness of their dissensions needed help from England against the savage on their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity to make firm the foundations on which that prosperity rests, and turn some fair proportion of her vast mental forces to other objects than material progress and the game of party politics. She has tamed the savage continent, peopled the solitude, gathered wealth untold, waxed potent, imposing, redoubtable; and now it remains for her to prove, if she can, that the rule of the masses is consistent with the highest growth of the individual; that democracy can give the world a civilization as mature and pregnant, ideas as energetic and vitalizing, and types of manhood as lofty and strong, as any of the systems which it boasts to supplant.



Appendix A

Chapter 3. Conflict for the West

Piquet and his War-Party.—"Ce parti [de guerre] pour lequel M. le General a donne son consentement, sera de plus de 3,800 hommes.... 500 hommes de nos domicilies, 700 des Cinq nations a l'exclusion des Agniers [Mohawks] qui ne sont plus regardes que comme des anglais, 600 tant Iroquois que d'autres nations le long de la Belle Riviere d'ou ils esperent chasser les anglais qui y formentu des Etablissemens contraires au bien des guerriers, 2,000 hommes qu'ils doivent prendre aux tetes plates [Choctaws] ou ils s'arresteront, c'est la ou les deux chefs de guerre doivent proposer a l'armee l'expedition des Miamis au retour de celle contre la Nation du Chien [Cherokees]. Un vieux levain, quelques anciennes querelles leur feront tout entreprendre contre les anglais de la Virginie s'ils donnent encore quelques secours a cette derniere nation, ce qui ne manquera pas d'arriver...."

"C'est un grand miracle que malgre l'envie, les contradictions, l'opposition presque generale de tous les Villages sauvages, j'aye forme en moins de 3 ans une des plus florissantes missions du Canada.... Je me trouve donc, Messieurs, dans l'occasion de pouvoir etendre l'empire de Jesus Christ et du Roy mes bons maitres jusqu'aux extremites de ce nouveau monde, et de plus faire avec quelques secours que vous me procurerez que la France et l'angleterre ne pourraient faire avec plusieurs millions et toutes leur troupes." Copie de la Lettre ecrite par M. l'Abbe Picquet, dattee a la Presentation du 8 Fev. 1752 (Archives de la Marine).

I saw in the possession of the late Jacques Viger, of Montreal, an illuminated drawing of one of Piquet's banners, said to be still in existence, in which the cross, the emblems of the Virgin and the Saviour, the fleur-de-lis, and the Iroquois totems are all embroidered and linked together by strings of wampum beads wrought into the silk.

Directions of the French Colonial Minister for the Destruction of Oswego.—"La seule voye dont on puisse faire usage en temps de paix pour une pareille operation est celle des Iroquois des cinq nations. Les terres sur lesquelles le poste a ete etabli leur appartiennent et ce n'est qu'avec leur consentement que les anglois s'y sont places. Si en faisant regarder a ces sauvages un pareil etablissement comme contraire a leur liberte et comme une usurpation dont les anglois pretendent faire usage pour acquerir la propriete de leur terre on pourrait les determiner a entreprendre de les detruire, une pareille operation ne seroit pas a negliger; mais M. le Marquis de la Jonquiere doit sentir avec quelle circonspection une affaire de cette espece doit etre conduite et il faut en effet qu'il y travaille de facon a ne se point compromettre." Le Ministre a MM. de la Jonquiere et Bigot, 15 Avril, 1750 (Archives de la Marine).



Appendix B

Chapter 4. Acadia

English Treatment of Acadians.—"Les Anglois dans la vue de la Conquete du Canada ont voulu donner aux peuples francois de ces Colonies un exemple frappant de la douceur de leur gouvernement dans leur conduite a l'egard des Accadiens."

"Ils leur ont fourni pendant plus de 35 ans le simple necessaire, sans elever la fortune d'aucun, ils leur ont fourni ce necessaire souvent a credit, avec un exces de confiance, sans fatiguer les debiteurs, sans les presser, sans vouloir les forcer au payement."

"Ils leur ont laisse une apparence de liberte si excessive qu'ils n'ont voulu prendre aucune difference [sic] de leur differents, pas meme pour les crimes.... Ils ont souffert que les accadiens leur refusassent insolemment certains rentes de grains, modiques & tres-legitimement dues."

"Ils ont dissimule le refus meprisant que les accadiens ont fait de prendre d'eux des concessions pour les nouveaux terreins qu'ils voulaient occuper."

"Les fruits que cette conduite a produit dans la derniere guerre nous le savons [sic] et les anglois n'en ignorent rien. Qu'on juge la-dessus de leur ressentiment et des vues de vengeance de cette nation cruelle.... Je prevois notamment la dispersion des jeunes accadiens sur les vaisseaux de guerre anglois, ou la seule regle pour la ration du pain suffit pour les detruire jusqu'au dernier." Roma, Officier a l'Isle Royale a——, 1750.

Indians, directed by Missionaries, to attack the English in Time of Peace.—"La lettre de M. l'Abbe Le Loutre me paroit si interessante que j'ay l'honneur de vous en envoyer Copie.... Les trois sauvages qui m'ont porte ces depeches m'ont parle relativement a ce que M. l'Abbe Le Loutre marque dans sa lettre; je n'ay eu garde de leur donner aucun Conseil la-dessus et je me suis borne a leur promettre que je ne les abandonnerai point, aussy ai-je pourvu a tout, soit pour les armes, munitions de guerre et de bouche, soit pour les autres choses necessaires."

"Il seroit a souhaiter que ces Sauvages rassembles pussent parvenir a traverser les anglois dans leurs entreprises, meme dans celle de Chibouctou [Halifax], ils sont dans cette resolution et s'ils peuvent mettre a execution ce qu'ils ont projette il est assure qu'ils seront fort incommodes aux Anglois et que les vexations qu'ils exerceront sur eux leur seront un tres grand obstacle. Ces sauvages doivent agir seuls, il n'y aura ny soldat ny habitant, tout se fera de leur pur mouvement, et sans qu'il paraisse que j'en eusse connoissance."

"Cela est tres essentiel, aussy ai-je ecrit au Sr. de Boishebert d'observer beaucoup de prudence dans ses demarches et de les faire tres secretement pour que les Anglois ne puissent pas s'apercevoir que nous pourvoyons aux besoins des dits sauvages."

"Ce seront les missionnaires qui feront toutes les negociations et qui dirigeront les pas des dits sauvages, ils sont en tres bonnes mains, le R.P. Germain et M. l'Abbe Le Loutre etant fort au fait d'en tirer tout le party possible et le plus avantageux pour nos interets, ils menageront leur intrigue de facon a n'y pas paroitre...."

"Je sens, Monseigneur, toute la delicatesse de cette negociation, soyez persuade que je la conduirai avec tant de precautions que les anglois ne pourront pas dire que mes ordres y ont eu part." La Jonquiere au Ministre, 9 Oct. 1749.

Missionaries to be encouraged in their Efforts to make the Indians attack the English.—"Les sauvages.... se distinguent, depuis la paix, dans les mouvements qu'il y a du cote de l'Acadie, et sur lesquels Sa Majeste juge a propos d'entrer dans quelques details avec le Sieur de Raymond...."

"Sa Majeste luy a deja observe que les sauvages ont ete jusqu'a present dans les dispositions les plus favorables. Il est de la plus grande importance, et pour le present et pour l'avenir, de ne rien negliger pour les y maintenir. Les missionnaires qui sont aupres d'eux sont plus a portes d'y contribuer que personne, et Sa Majeste a lieu d'etre satisfaite des soins qu'ils y donnent. Le Sr. de Raymond doit exciter ces missionnaires a ne point se relacher sur cela; mais en meme temps il doit les avertir de contenir leur zele de maniere qu'ils ne se compromettent pas mal a propos avec les anglois et qu'ils ne donnent point de justes sujets de plaintes." Memoire du Roy pour servir d'Instruction au Comte de Raymond, 24 Avril, 1751.

Acadians to join the Indians in attacking the English.—"Pour que ces Sauvages agissent avec beaucoup de Courage, quelques accadiens habilles et mataches comme les Sauvages pourront se joindre a eux pour faire coup sur les Anglois. Je ne puis eviter de consentir a ce que ces Sauvages feront puisque nous avons les bras lies et que nous ne pouvons rien faire par nous-memes, au surplus je ne crois pas qu'il y ait de l'inconvenient de laisser meler les accadiens parmi les Sauvages, parceque s'ils sont pris, nous dirons qu'ils ont agi de leur propre mouvement." La Jonquiere au Ministre, 1 Mai, 1751.

Cost of Le Loutre's Intrigues.—"J'ay deja fait payer a M. Le Loutre depuis l'annee derniere la somme de 11183l. 18s. pour acquitter les depenses qu'il fait journellement et je ne cesse de luy recommander de s'en tenir aux indispensables en evitant toujours de rien compromettre avec le gouvernement anglois." Prevost au Ministre, 22 Juillet, 1750.

Payment for English Scalps in Time of Peace.—"Les Sauvages ont pris, il y a un mois, 18 chevelures angloises [English scalps,] et M. Le Loutre a ete oblige de les payer 1800 l., argent de l'Acadie, dont je luy ay fait le remboursement." Ibid., 16 Aout, 1753.

Many pages might be filled with extracts like the above. These, with most of the other French documents used in Chapter 4, are taken from the Archives de la Marine et des Colonies.



Appendix C

Chapter 5. Washington

Washington and the Capitulation at Fort Necessity.—Villiers, in his Journal, boasts that he made Washington sign a virtual admission that he had assassinated Jumonville. In regard to this point, a letter, of which the following is an extract, is printed in the provincial papers of the time. It is from Captain Adam Stephen, an officer in the action, writing to a friend five weeks after.

"When Mr. Vanbraam returned with the French proposals, we were obliged to take the sense of them from his mouth; it rained so heavy that he could not give us a written translation of them; we could scarcely keep the candle lighted to read them by; they were written in a bad hand, on wet and blotted paper, so that no person could read them but Vanbraam, who had heard them from the mouth of the French officer. Every officer there is ready to declare that there was no such word as assassination mentioned. The terms expressed were, the death of Jumonville. If it had been mentioned we would by all means have had it altered, as the French, during the course of the interview, seemed very condescending, and desirous to bring things to an issue." He then gives several other points in which Vanbraam had misled them.

Dinwiddie, recounting the affair to Lord Albemarle, says that Washington, being ignorant of French, was deceived by the interpreter, who, through poltroonery, suppressed the word assassination.

Captain Mackay, writing to Washington in September, after a visit to Philadelphia, says: "I had several disputes about our capitulation; but I satisfied every person that mentioned the subject as to the articles in question, that they were owing to a bad interpreter, and contrary to the translation made to us when we signed them."

At the next meeting of the burgesses they passed a vote of thanks for gallant conduct to Washington and all his officers by name, except Vanbraam and the major of the regiment, the latter being charged with cowardice, and the former with treacherous misinterpretation of the articles.

Sometime after, Washington wrote to a correspondent who had questioned him on the subject: "That we were wilfully or ignorantly deceived by our interpreter in regard to the word assassination I do aver, and will to my dying moment; so will every officer that was present. The interpreter was a Dutchman little acquainted with the English tongue, therefore might not advert to the tone and meaning of the word in English; but, whatever his motives for so doing, certain it is that he called it the death or the loss of the Sieur Jumonville. So we received and so we understood it, until, to our great surprise and mortification, we found it otherwise in a literal translation." Sparks, Writings of Washington, II. 464, 465.



Appendix D

Chapter 7. Braddock

It has been said that Beaujeu, and not Contrecoeur, commanded at Fort Duquesne at the time of Braddock's expedition. Some contemporaries, and notably the chaplain of the fort, do, in fact, speak of him as in this position; but their evidence is overborne by more numerous and conclusive authorities, among them Vaudreuil, governor of Canada, and Contrecoeur himself, in an official report. Vaudreuil says of him: "Ce commandant s'occupa le 8 [Juillet] a former un parti pour aller au devant des Anglois;" and adds that this party was commanded by Beaujeu and consisted of 250 French and 650 Indians (Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Aout, 1755). In the autumn of 1756 Vaudreuil asked the Colonial Minister to procure a pension for Contrecoeur and Ligneris. He says: "Le premier de ces Messieurs a commande longtemps au fort Duquesne; c'est luy qui a ordonne et dirige tous les mouvements qui se sont faits dans cette partie, soit pour faire abandonner le premier etablissement des Anglois, soit pour les forcer a se retirer du fort Necessite, et soit enfin pour aller au devant de l'armee du General Braddock qui a ete entierement defaite" (Vaudreuil au Ministre, 8 Nov. 1756.) Beaujeu, who had lately arrived with a reinforcement, had been named to relieve Contrecoeur (Dumas au Ministre, 24 Juillet, 1756), but had not yet done so.

As the report of Contrecoeur has never been printed, I give an extract from it (Contrecceur a Vaudreuil, 14 Juillet, 1755, in Archives de la Marine):—

"Le meme jour [8 Juillet] je formai un party de tout ce que je pouvois mettre hors du fort pour aller a leur rencontre. Il etoit compose de 250 Francois et de 650 sauvages, ce qui faisoit 900 hommes. M. de Beaujeu, capitaine, le commandoit. Il y avoit deux capitaines qui estoient Mrs. Dumas et Ligneris et plusieurs autres officiers subalternes. Ce parti se mit en marche le 9 a 8 heures du matin, et se trouva a midi et demie en presence des Anglois a environ 3 lieues du fort. On commenca a faire feu de part et d'autre. Le feu de l'artillerie ennemie fit reculer un peu par deux fois notre parti. M. de Beaujeu fut tue a la troisieme decharge. M. Dumas prit le commandement et s'en acquitta au mieux. Nos Francois, pleins de courage, soutenus par les sauvages, quoiqu'ils n'eussent point d'artillerie, firent a leur tour plier les Anglois qui se battirent en ordre de bataille et en bonne contenance. Et ces derniers voyant l'ardeur de nos gens qui foncoient avec une vigeur infinie furent enfin obliges de plier tout a fait apres 4 heures d'un grand feu. Mrs. Dumas et Ligneris qui n'avoient plus avec eux q'une vingtaine de Francois ne s'engagerent point dans la poursuite. Ils rentrerent dans le fort, parceq'une grande partie des Canadiens qui n'estoient malheureusement que des enfants s'estoient retires a la premiere decharge."

The letter of Dumas cited in the text has been equally unknown. It was written a year after the battle in order to draw the attention of the minister to services which the writer thought had not been duly recognized. The following is an extract (Dumas au Ministre, 24 Juillet, 1756, in Archives de la Marine):—

"M. de Beaujeu marcha donc, et sous ses ordres M. de Ligneris et moi. Il attaqua avec beaucoup d'audace mais sans nulle disposition; notre premiere decharge fut faite hors de portee; l'ennemi fit la sienne de plus pres, et dans le premier instant du combat, cent miliciens, qui faisaient la moitie de nos Francais lacherent honteusement le pied en criant 'Sauve qui peut.' Deux cadets qui depuis ont ete faits officiers autorisaient cette fuite par leur exemple. Ce mouvement en arriere ayant encourage l'ennemi, il fit retentir ses cris de Vive le Roi et avanca sur nous a grand pas. Son artillerie s'etant preparee pendant ce temps la commenca a faire feu ce qui epouvanta tellement les Sauvages que tout prit la fuite; l'ennemi faisait sa troisieme decharge de mousqueterie quand M. de Beaujeu fut tue."

"Notre deroute se presenta a mes yeux sous le plus desagreable point de vue, et pour n'etre point charge de la mauvaise manoeuvre d'autrui, je ne songeai plus qu'a me faire tuer. Ce fut alors, Monseigneur, qu'excitant de la voix et du geste le peu de soldats qui restait, je m'avancai avec la contenance qui donne le desespoir. Mon peloton fit un feu si vif que l'ennemi en parut etonne; il grossit insensiblement et les Sauvages voyant que mon attaque faisait cesser les cris de l'ennemi revinrent a moi. Dans ce moment j'envoyai M. le Chev'r. Le Borgne et M. de Rocheblave dire aux officiers qui etaient a la tete des Sauvages de prendre l'ennemi en flanc. Le canon qui battit en tete donna faveur a mes ordres. L'ennemi, pris de tous cotes, combattit avec la fermete la plus opiniatre. Des rangs entiers tombaient a la fois; presque tous les officiers perirent; et le desordre s'etant mis par la dans cette colonne, tout prit la fuite."

Whatever may have been the conduct of the Canadian militia, the French officers behaved with the utmost courage, and shared with the Indians the honors of the victory. The partisan chief Charles Langlade seems also to have been especially prominent. His grandson, the aged Pierre Grignon, declared that it was he who led the attack (Draper, Recollections of Grignon, in the Collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society, III.). Such evidence, taken alone, is of the least possible weight; but both the traveller Anbury and General John Burgoyne, writing many years after the event, speak of Langlade, who was then alive, as the author of Braddock's defeat. Hence there can be little doubt that he took an important part in it, though the contemporary writers do not mention his name. Compare Tasse, Notice sur Charles Langlade. The honors fell to Contrecoeur, Dumas, and Ligneris, all of whom received the cross of the Order of St Louis (Ordres du Roy et Depeches des Ministres, 1755).



Appendix E

Chapter 14. Montcalm

To show the style of Montcalm's familiar letters, I give a few examples. Literal translation is often impossible.

A MADAME DE MONTCALM, A MONTREAL, 16 AVRIL, 1757.

(Extrait.)

"Ma sante assez bonne, malgre beaucoup de travail, surtout d'ecriture. Esteve, mon secretaire, se marie. Beau caractere. Bon autographe, ecrivant vite. Je lui procure un emploi et le moyen de faire fortune s'il veut. Il fait un meilleur mariage que ne lui appartient; malgre cela je crains qu'il ne la fasse pas comme un autre; fat, frivole, joueur, glorieux, petit-maitre, depensier. J'ai toujours Marcel, des soldats copistes dans le besoin....Tous les soldats de Montpellier se portants bien, hors le fils de Pierre mort chez moi. Tout est hors de prix. Il faut vivre honorablement et je le fais, tous les jours seize personnes. Une fois tous les quinze jours chez M. le Gouverneur general et Mr. le Chev. de Levis qui vit aussi tres bien. Il a donne trois beaux grands bals. Pour moi jusqu'au careme, outre les diners, de grands soupers de dames trois fois la semaine. Le jour des devotes prudes, des concerts. Les jours des jeunes des violons d'hazard, parcequ'on me les demandait, cela ne menait que jusqu'a deux heures du matin et il se joignait l'apres-souper compagnie dansante sans etre priee, mais sure d'etre bien recue a celle qui avait soupe. Fort cher, peu amusant, et souvent ennuyeux.... Vous connaissiez ma maison, je l'ai augmentee d'un cocher, d'un frotteur, un garcon de cuisine, et j'ai marie mon aide de cuisine; car je travaille a peupler la colonie: 80 mariages de soldats cet hiver et deux d'officiers. Germain a perdu sa fille. Il a epouse mieux que lui; bonne femme mais sans bien, comme toutes...."

A MADAME DE MONTCALM, A MONTREAL, 6 JUIN, 1757.

(Extrait.)

"J'addresse la premiere de cette lettre a ma mere. Il n'y a pas une heure dans la journee que je ne songe a vous, a elle, et a mes enfants. J'embrasse ma fille; je vous adore, ma tres chere, ainsi que ma mere. Mille choses a mes soeurs. Je n'ai pas le temps de leur ecrire, ni a Naujac, ni aux abbesses.... Des compliments au chateau d'Arbois, aux Du Cayla, et aux Givard. P.S. N'oubliez pas d'envoyer une douzaine de bouteilles d'Angleterre de pinte d'eau de lavande; vous en mettrez quatre pour chaque envoi."

A BOURLAMAQUE, A MONTREAL, 20 FEVRIER, 1757.

(Extrait.)

"Dimanche j'avais rassemble les dames de France hors Mad. de Parfouru qui m'a fait l'honneur de me venir voir il y a trois jours et en la voyant je me suis appercu que l'amour avait des traits de puissance dont on ne pouvait pas rendre raison, non pas par l'impression qu'elle a faite sur mon coeur, mais bien par celle qu'elle a faite sur celui de son epoux. Mercredi une assemblee chez Mad. Varin. Jeudi un bal chez le Chev. de Levis qui avait prie 65 Dames ou demoiselles; Il n'y en avait que trente—autant d'hommes qu'a la guerre. Sa salle bien eclairee, aussi grand que celle de l'Intendance, beaucoup d'ordre, beaucoup d'attention, des rafraichissements en abondance toute la nuit de tout genre et de toute espece et on ne se retira qu'a sept heures du matin. Pour moi qui ay quitte le sejour de Quebec, Je me couchai de bonne heure. J'avais eu ce jour-la huit dames a souper et ce souper etait dedie a Mad. Varin. Demain j'en aurai une demi douzaine. Je ne sais encore a qui il est dedie, Je suis tente de croire que c'est a La Roche Beaucourt Le galant Chev'r. nous donne encore un bal."



Appendix F

Chapter 15. Fort William Henry

WEBB TO LOUDON, FORT EDWARD, 11 AUG. 1757.

Public Record Office. (Extract.)

"On leaving the Camp Yesterday Morning they [the English soldiers] were stript by the Indians of everything they had both Officers and Men the Women and Children drag'd from among them and most inhumanly butchered before their faces, the party of about three hundred Men which were given them as an escort were during this time quietly looking on, from this and other circumstances we are too well convinced these barbarities must have been connived at by the French. After having destroyed the women and children they fell upon the rear of our Men who running in upon the Front soon put the whole to a most precipitate flight in which confusion part of them came into this Camp about two o'Clock yesterday morning in a most distressing situation, and have continued dropping in ever since, a great many men and we are afraid several Officers were massacred."

The above is independent of the testimony of Frye, who did not reach Fort Edward till the day after Webb's letter was written.

FRYE TO THOMAS HUBBARD, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF MASSACHUSETTS, ALBANY, 16 AUG. 1757.

Public Record Office. (Extract.)

"We did not march till ye 10th at which time the Savages were let loose upon us, Strips, Kills, & Scalps our people drove them into Disorder Rendered it impossible to Rally, the French Gaurds we were promised shou'd Escort us to Fort Edward Could or would not protect us so that there Opened the most horrid Scene of Barbarity immaginable, I was strip'd myself of my Arms & Cloathing that I had nothing left but Briches Stockings Shoes & Shirt, the Indians round me with their Tomehawks Spears &c threatening Death I flew to the Officers of the French Gaurds for Protection but they would afford me none, therefore was Oblig'd to fly and was in the woods till the 12th in the Morning of which I arriv'd at Fort Edward almost Famished ... with what of Fatigue Starving &c I am obliged to break off but as soon as I can Recollect myself shall write to you more fully."

FRYE, JOURNAL OF THE ATTACK OF FORT WILLIAM HENRY.

Public Record Office. (Extract.)

"Wednesday, August 10th.—Early this morning we were ordered to prepare for our march, but found the Indians in a worse temper (if possible) than last night, every one having a tomahawk, hatchett or some other instrument of death, and Constantly plundering from the officers their arms &ca this Col'o. Monro Complained of, as a breach of the Articles of Capitulation but to no effect, the french officers however told us that if we would give up the baggage of the officers and men, to the Indians, they thought it would make them easy, which at last Col'o. Monro Consented to but this was no sooner done, then they began to take the Officers Hatts, Swords, guns & Cloaths, stripping them all to their Shirts, and on some officers, left no shirt at all, while this was doing they killed and scalp'd all the sick and wounded before our faces and then took out from our troops, all the Indians and negroes, and Carried them off, one of the former they burnt alive afterwards."

"At last with great difficulty the troops gott from the Retrenchment, but they were no sooner out, then the savages fell upon the rear, killing & scalping, which Occasioned an order for a halt, which at last was done in great Confusion but as soon as those in the front knew what was doing in the rear they again pressed forward, and thus the Confusion continued & encreased till we came to the Advanc'd guard of the French, the savages still carrying away Officers, privates, Women and Children, some of which latter they kill'd & scalpt in the road. This horrid scene of blood and slaughter obliged our officers to apply to the Officers of the French Guard for protection, which they refus'd & told them they must take to the woods and shift for themselves which many did, and in all probability many perish't in the woods, many got into Fort Edward that day and others daily Continued coming in, but vastly fatigued with their former hardships added to this last, which threw several of them into Deliriums."

AFFIDAVIT OF MILES WHITWORTH, SURGEON OF THE MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT, TAKEN BEFORE GOVERNOR POWNALL 17 OCT.1757.

Public Record Office. (Extract.)

"Being duly sworn on the Holy Evangelists doth declare ... that there were also seventeen Men of the Massachusetts Regiment wounded unable to March under his immediate Care in the Intrenched Camp, that according to the Capitulation he did deliver them over to the French Surgeon on the ninth of August at two in the Afternoon ... that the French Surgeon received them into his Custody and placed Centinals of the French Troops upon the said seventeen wounded. That the French Surgeon going away to the French Camp, the said Miles Whitworth continued with the said wounded Men till five o'clock on the Morn of the tenth of August, That the Centinals were taken off and that he the said Whitworth saw the French Indians about 5 O'clock in the Morn of the 10th of August dragg the said seventeen wounded men out of their Hutts, Murder them with their Tomohawks and scalp them, That the French Troops posted round the lines were not further than forty feet from the Hutts where the said wounded Men lay, that several Canadian Officers particularly one Lacorne were present and that none, either Officer or Soldier, protected the said wounded Men."

MILES WHITWORTH. "Sworn before me T. POWNALL."



Appendix G

Chapter 20. Ticonderoga

The French accounts of the battle at Ticonderoga are very numerous, and consist of letters and despatches of Montcalm, Levis, Bougainville, Doreil, and other officers, besides several anonymous narratives, one of which was printed in pamphlet form at the time. Translations of many of them may be found in N.Y. Colonial Documents, X. There are, however, various others preserved in the archives of the War and Marine Departments at Paris which have not seen the light. I have carefully examined and collated them all. The English accounts are by no means so numerous or so minute. Among those not already cited, may be mentioned a letter of Colonel Woolsey of the New York provincials, and two letters from British officers written just after the battle and enclosed in a letter from Alexander Colden to Major Halkett, 17 July. (Bouquet and Haldimand Papers.)

The French greatly exaggerated the force of the English and their losses in the battle. They place the former at from twenty thousand to thirty-one thousand, and the latter at from four thousand to six thousand. Prisoners taken at the end of the battle told them that the English had lost four thousand,—a statement which they readily accepted, though the prisoners could have known little more about the matter than they themselves. And these figures were easily magnified. The number of dead lying before the lines is variously given at from eight hundred to three thousand. Montcalm himself, who was somewhat elated by his victory, gives this last number in one of his letters, though he elsewhere says two thousand; while Levis, in his Journal de la Guerre, says "about eight hundred." The truth is that no pains were taken to ascertain the exact number, which, by the English returns, was a little above five hundred, the total of killed, wounded, and missing being nineteen hundred and forty-four. A friend of Knox, writing to him from Fort Edward three weeks after the battle, gives a tabular statement which shows nineteen hundred and fifty in all, or six more than the official report. As the name of every officer killed or wounded, with the corps to which he belonged, was published at the time (London Magazine, 1758), it is extremely unlikely that the official return was falsified. Abercromby's letter to Pitt, of July 12, says that he retreated "with the loss of four hundred and sixty-four regulars killed, twenty-nine missing eleven hundred and seventeen wounded; and eighty-seven provincials killed, eight missing, and two hundred and thirty-nine wounded, officers of both included." In a letter to Viscount Barrington, of the same date (Public Record Office), Abercromby encloses a full detail of losses, regiment by regiment and company by company, being a total of nineteen hundred and forty-five. Several of the French writers state correctly that about fourteen thousand men (including reserves) were engaged in the attacks; but they add erroneously that there were thirteen thousand more at the Falls. In fact there was only a small provincial regiment left there, and a battalion of the New York regiment, under Colonel Woolsey, at the landing.

A LEGEND OF TICONDEROGA.—Mention has been made of the death of Major Duncan Campbell of Inverawe. The following family tradition relating to it was told me in 1878 by the late Dean Stanley, to whom I am also indebted for various papers on the subject, including a letter from James Campbell, Esq., the present laird of Inverawe, and great-nephew of the hero of the tale. The same story is told, in an amplified form and with some variations, in the Legendary Tales of the Highlands of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder. As related by Dean Stanley and approved by Mr. Campbell, it is this:—

The ancient castle of Inverawe stands by the banks of the Awe, in the midst of the wild and picturesque scenery of the western Highlands. Late one evening, before the middle of the last century, as the laird, Duncan Campbell, sat alone in the old hall, there was a loud knocking at the gate; and, opening it, he saw a stranger, with torn clothing and kilt besmeared with blood, who in a breathless voice begged for asylum. He went on to say that he had killed a man in a fray, and that the pursuers were at his heels. Campbell promised to shelter him. "Swear on your dirk!" said the stranger; and Campbell swore. He then led him to a secret recess in the depths of the castle. Scarcely was he hidden when again there was a loud knocking at the gate, and two armed men appeared. "Your cousin Donald has been murdered, and we are looking for the murderer!" Campbell, remembering his oath, professed to have no knowledge of the fugitive; and the men went on their way. The laird, in great agitation, lay down to rest in a large dark room, where at length he feel asleep. Waking suddenly in bewilderment and terror, he saw the ghost of the murdered Donald standing by his bedside, and heard a hollow voice pronounce the words: "Inverawe! Inverawe! blood has been shed. Shield not the murderer!" In the morning Campbell went to the hiding-place of the guilty man and told him that he could harbor him no longer. "You have sworn on your dirk!" he replied; and the laird of Inverawe, greatly perplexed and troubled, made a compromise between conflicting duties, promised not to betray his guest, led him to the neighboring mountain, and hid him in a cave.

In the next night, as he lay tossing in feverish slumbers, the same stern voice awoke him, the ghost of his cousin Donald stood again at his bedside, and again he heard the same appalling words: "Inverawe! Inverawe! blood has been shed. Shield not the murderer!" At break of day he hastened, in strange agitation, to the cave; but it was empty, the stranger was gone. At night, as he strove in vain to sleep, the vision appeared once more, ghastly pale, but less stern of aspect than before. "Farewell, Inverawe!" it said; "Farewell, till we meet at TICONDEROGA!"

The strange name dwelt in Campbell's memory. He had joined the Black Watch, or Forty-second Regiment, then employed in keeping order in the turbulent Highlands. In time he became its major; and, a year or two after the war broke out, he went with it to America. Here, to his horror, he learned that it was ordered to the attack of Ticonderoga. His story was well known among his brother officers. They combined among themselves to disarm his fears; and when they reached the fatal spot they told him on the eve of the battle, "This is not Ticonderoga; we are not there yet; this is Fort George." But in the morning he came to them with haggard looks. "I have seen him! You have deceived me! He came to my tent last night! This is Ticonderoga! I shall die to-day!" and his prediction was fulfilled.

Such is the tradition. The indisputable facts are that Major Duncan Campbell of Inverawe, his arm shattered by a bullet, was carried to Fort Edward, where, after amputation, he died and was buried. (Abercromby to Pitt,19 August, 1758.) The stone that marks his grave may still be seen, with this inscription: "Here lyes the Body of Duncan Campbell of Inverawe, Esq, Major to the old Highland Regiment, aged 55 Years, who died on the 17th July, 1758, of the Wounds he received in the Attack of the Retrenchment of Ticonderoga or Carrillon, on the 8th July, 1758."

His son, Lieutenant Alexander Campbell, was severely wounded at the same time, but reached Scotland alive, and died in Glasgow. Mr. Campbell, the present Inverawe, in the letter mentioned above, says that forty-five years ago he knew an old man whose grandfather was foster-brother to the slain major of the forty-second, and who told him the following story while carrying a salmon for him to an inn near Inverawe. The old man's grandfather was sleeping with his son, then a lad, in the same room, but in another bed. This son, father of the narrator, "was awakened," to borrow the words of Mr. Campbell, "by some unaccustomed sound, and behold there was a bright light in the room, and he saw a figure, in full Highland regimentals, cross over the room and stoop down over his father's bed and give him a kiss. He was too frightened to speak, but put his head under his coverlet and went to sleep. Once more he was roused in like manner, and saw the same sight. In the morning he spoke to his father about it, who told him that it was Macdonnochie [the Gaelic patronymic of the laird of Inverawe] whom he had seen, and who came to tell him that he had been killed in a great battle in America. Sure enough, said my informant, it was on the very day that the battle of Ticonderoga was fought and the laird was killed."

It is also said that two ladies of the family of Inverawe saw a battle in the clouds, in which the shadowy forms of Highland warriors were plainly to be described; and that when the fatal news came from America, it was found that the time of the vision answered exactly to that of the battle in which the head of the family fell.

The legend of Inverawe has within a few years found its way into an English magazine, and it has also been excellently told in the Atlantic Monthly of September of this year, 1884, by Miss C.F. Gordon Cumming. Her version differs a little from that given above from the recital of Dean Stanley and the present laird of Inverawe, but the essential points are the same. Miss Gordon Cumming, however, is in error when she says that Duncan Campbell was wounded in the breast, and that he was first buried at Ticonderoga. His burial-place was near Fort Edward, where he died, and where his remains still lie, though not at the same spot, as they were long after removed by a family named Gilchrist, who claimed kinship with the Campbells of Inverawe.



Appendix H

Chapter 25. Wolfe at Quebec

FORCE OF THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH AT THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC.

"Les retranchemens que j'avois fait tracer depuis la riviere St. Charles jusqu'au saut Montmorency furent occupes par plus de 14,000 hommes, 200 cavaliers dont je formai un corps aux ordres de M. de la Rochebeaucour, environ 1,000 sauvages Abenakis et des differentes nations du nord des pays d'en haut. M. de Boishebert arriva ensuite avec les Acadiens et sauvages qu'il avoit rassembles. Je reglai la garnison de Quebec a 2,000 hommes." Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759.

The commissary Berniers says that the whole force was about fifteen thousand men, besides Indians, which is less than the number given by Vaudreuil.

Bigot says: "Nous avions 13,000 hommes et mille a 1,200 sauvages, sans compter 2,000 hommes de garnison dans la ville." Bigot au Ministre, 25 Oct. 1759.

The Hartwell Journal du Siege says: "II fut decide qu'on ne laisseroit dans la place que 1,200 hommes, et que tout le reste marcheroit au camp, ou l'on comptoit se trouver plus de 15,000 hommes, y compris les sauvages."

Rigaud, Vaudreuil's brother, writing from Montreal to Bourlamaque on the 23d of June, says: "Je compte que l'armee campee sous Quebec sera de 17,000 hommes bien effectifs, sans les sauvages." He then gives a list of Indians who have joined the army, or are on the way, amounting to thirteen hundred.

At the end of June Wolfe had about eight thousand six hundred effective soldiers. Of these the ten battalions, commonly mentioned as regiments, supplied six thousand four hundred; detached grenadiers from Louisbourg, three hundred; artillery, three hundred; rangers, four hundred; light infantry, two hundred; marines, one thousand. The complement of the battalions was in some cases seven hundred and in others one thousand (Knox, II. 25); but their actual strength varied from five hundred to eight hundred, except the Highlanders, who mustered eleven hundred, their ranks being more than full. Fraser, in his Journal of the Siege, gives a tabular view of the whole. At the end of the campaign Levis reckons the remaining English troops at about six thousand (Levis au Ministre, 10 Nov. 1759), which answers to the report of General Murray: "The troops will amount to six thousand" (Murray to Pitt, 12 Oct. 1759). The precise number is given in the Return of the State of His Majesty's Forces left in Garrison at Quebec, dated 12 Oct. 1759, and signed, Robert Monckton (Public Record Office, America and West Indies, XCIX.). This shows the total of rank and file to have been 6,214, which the addition of officers, sergeants, and drummers raises to about seven thousand, besides 171 artillerymen.



Appendix I

Chapter 27. The Heights of Abraham

One of the most important unpublished documents on Wolfe's operations against Quebec is the long and elaborate Journal memoratif de ce qui s'est passe de plus remarquable pendant qu'a dure le Siege de la Ville de Quebec (Archives de la Marine). The writer, M. de Foligny, was a naval officer who during the siege commanded one of the principal batteries of the town. The official correspondence of Vaudreuil for 1759 (Archives Nationales) gives the events of the time from his point of view; and various manuscript letters of Bigot, Levis, Montreuil, and others (Archives de la Marine, Archives de la Guerre) give additional particulars. The letters, generally private and confidential, written to Bourlamaque by Montcalm, Levis, Vaudreuil, Malartic, Berniers, and others during the siege contain much that is curious and interesting.

Siege de Quebec en 1759, d'apres un Manuscrit depose a la Bibliotheque de Hartwell en Angleterre. A very valuable diary, by a citizen of Quebec; it was brought from England in 1834 by the Hon. D.B. Viger, and a few copies were printed at Quebec in 1836. Journal tenu a l'Armee que commandoit feu M. le Marquis de Montcalm. A minute diary of an officer under Montcalm (printed by the Quebec Historical Society). Memoire sur la Campagne de 1759, par M. de Joannes, Major de Quebec (Archives de la Guerre). Lettres et Depeches de Montcalm (Ibid.). These touch briefly the antecedents of the Siege. Memoires sur le Canada depuis 1749 jusqu'a 1760 (Quebec Historical Society). Journal du Siege de Quebec en 1759, par M. Jean Claude Panet, notaire (Ibid.). The writer of this diary was in Quebec at the time. Several other journals and letters of persons present at the siege have been printed by the Quebec Historical Society, under the title Evenements de la Guerre en Canada durant les Annees 1759 et 1760. Relation de ce qui s'est passe au Siege de Quebec, par une Religieuse de l'Hopital General de Quebec (Quebec Historical Society). Jugement impartial sur les Operations militaires de la Campagne, par M'gr. de Pontbriand, Eveque de Quebec (Ibid.). Memoirs of the Siege of Quebec, from the Journal of a French Officer on board the Chezine Frigate, taken by His Majesty's Ship Rippon, by Richard Gardiner, Esq., Captain of Marines in the Rippon, London, 1761.

General Wolfe's Instructions to Young Officers, Philadelphia, 1778. This title is misleading, the book being a collection of military orders. General Orders in Wolfe's Army (Quebec Historical Society). This collection is much more full than the foregoing, so far as concerns the campaign of 1759. Letters of Wolfe (in Wright's Wolfe), Despatches of Wolfe, Saunders, Monckton, and Townshend (in contemporary magazines). A Short Authentic Account of the Expedition against Quebec, by a Volunteer upon that Expedition, Quebec, 1872. This valuable diary is ascribed to James Thompson, a volunteer under Wolfe, who died at Quebec in 1830 at the age of ninety-eight, after holding for many years the position of overseer of works in the Engineer Department. Another manuscript, for the most part identical with this, was found a few years ago among old papers in the office of the Royal Engineers at Quebec. Journal of the Expedition on the River St. Lawrence. Two entirely distinct diaries bear this name. One is printed in the New York Mercury for December, 1759; the other was found among the papers of George Alsopp, secretary to Sir Guy Carleton, who served under Wolfe (Quebec Historical Society). Johnstone, A Dialogue in Hades (Ibid.). The Scotch Jacobite, Chevalier Johnstone, as aide-de-camp to Levis, and afterwards to Montcalm, had great opportunities of acquiring information during the campaign; and the results, though produced in the fanciful form of a dialogue between the ghosts of Wolfe and Montcalm, are of substantial historical value. The Dialogue is followed by a plain personal narrative. Fraser, Journal of the Siege of Quebec (Ibid.). Fraser was an officer in the Seventy-eighth Highlanders. Journal of the Siege of Quebec, by a Gentleman in an Eminent Station on the Spot, Dublin, 1759. Journal of the Particular Transactions during the Siege of Quebec (Notes and Queries, XX.). The writer was a soldier or noncommissioned officer serving in the light infantry.

Memoirs of the Siege of Quebec and Total Reduction of Canada, by John Johnson, Clerk and Quarter-master Sergeant to the Fifty-eighth Regiment. A manuscript of 176 pages, written when Johnson was a pensioner at Chelsea (England). The handwriting is exceedingly neat and clear; and the style, though often grandiloquent, is creditable to a writer in his station. This curious production was found among the papers of Thomas McDonough, Esq., formerly British Consul at Boston, and is in possession of his grandson, my relative, George Francis Parkman, Esq., who, by inquiries at the Chelsea Hospital, learned that Johnson was still living in 1802.

I have read and collated with extreme care all the above authorities, with others which need not be mentioned.

Among several manuscript maps and plans showing the operations of the siege may be mentioned one entitled, Plan of the Town and Basin of Quebec and Part of the Adjacent Country, shewing the principal Encampments and Works of the British Army commanded by Major Gen'l. Wolfe, and those of the French Army by Lieut. Gen'l. the Marquis of Montcalm. It is the work of three engineers of Wolfe's army, and is on a scale of eight hundred feet to an inch. A facsimile from the original in possession of the Royal Engineers is before me.

Among the "King's Maps," British Museum (CXIX. 27), is a very large colored plan of operations at Quebec in 1759, 1760, superbly executed in minute detail.



Appendix J

Chapter 28. Fall of Quebec

Death and Burial of Montcalm.—Johnstone, who had every means of knowing the facts, says that Montcalm was carried after his wound to the house of the surgeon Arnoux. Yet it is not quite certain that he died there. According to Knox, his death took place at the General Hospital; according to the modern author of the Ursulines de Quebec, at the Chateau St.-Louis. But the General Hospital was a mile out of the town, and in momentary danger of capture by the English; while the Chateau had been made untenable by the batteries of Point Levi, being immediately exposed to their fire. Neither of these places was one to which the dying general was likely to be removed, and it is probable that he was suffered to die in peace at the house of the surgeon.

It has been said that the story of the burial of Montcalm in a grave partially formed by the explosion of a bomb, rests only on the assertion in his epitaph, composed in 1761 by the Academy of Inscriptions at the instance of Bougainville. There is, however, other evidence of the fact. The naval captain Foligny, writing on the spot at the time of the burial, says in his Diary, under the date of September 14: "A huit heures du soir, dans l'eglise des Ursulines, fut enterre dans une fosse faite sous la chaire par le travail de la Bombe, M. le Marquis de Montcalm, decede du matin a 4 heures apres avoir recu tous les Sacrements. Jamais General n'avoit ete plus aime de sa troupe et plus universellement regrette. Il etoit d'un esprit superieur, doux, gracieux, affable, familier a tout le monde, ce qui lui avoit fait gagner la confiance de toute la Colonie: requiescat in pace."

The author of Les Ursulines de Quebec says: "Un des projectiles ayant fait une large ouverture dans le plancher de bas, on en profita pour creuser la fosse du general."

The Boston Post Boy and Advertiser, in its issue of Dec. 3, 1759, contains a letter from "an officer of distinction" at Quebec to Messrs. Green and Russell, proprietors of the newspaper. This letter contains the following words: "He [Montcalm] died the next day; and, with a little Improvement, one of our 13-inch Shell-Holes served him for a Grave."

The particulars of his burial are from the Acte Mortuaire du Marquis de Montcalm in the registers of the Church of Notre Dame de Quebec, and from that valuable chronicle, Les Ursulines de Quebec, composed by the Superior of the convent. A nun of the sisterhood, Mere Aimable Dube de Saint-Ignace, was, when a child, a witness of the scene, and preserved a vivid memory of it to the age of eighty-one.



Appendix K

Chapter 29. Sainte-Foy>

STRENGTH OF THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH AT THE BATTLE OF STE-FOY

In the Public Record Office (America and West Indies, XCIX) are preserved the tabular returns of the garrison of Quebec for 1759, 1760, sent by Murray to the War Office. They show the exact condition of each regiment, in all ranks, for every month of the autumn, winter, and spring. The return made out on the 24th of April, four days before the battle, shows that the total number of rank and file, exclusive of non commissioned officers and drummers, was 6,808, of whom 2,612 were fit for duty in Quebec, and 654 at other places in Canada, that is, at Ste Foy, Old Lorette, and the other outposts. This gives a total of 3,266 rank and file fit for duty at or near Quebec, besides which there were between one hundred and two hundred artillerymen, and a company of rangers. This was Murray's whole available force at the time. Of the rest of the 6,808 who appear in the return, 2,299 were invalids at Quebec, and 669 in New York, 538 were on service in Halifax and New York, and 36 were absent on furlough. These figures nearly answer to the condensed statement of Fraser, and confirm the various English statements of the numbers that took part in the battle; namely, 3,140 (Knox), 3,000 (John Johnson), 3,111, and elsewhere, in round numbers, 3,000 (Murray) Levis, with natural exaggeration, says 4,000. Three or four hundred were left in Quebec to guard the walls when the rest marched out.

I have been thus particular because a Canadian writer, Garneau, says "Murray sortit de la ville le 28 au matin a la tete de toute la garnison, dont les seules troupes de la ligne comptaient encore 7,714 combattants, non compris les officiers." To prove this, he cites the pay-roll of the garrison, which, in fact, corresponds to the returns of the same date, if noncommissioned officers, drummers, and artillerymen are counted with the rank and file. But Garneau falls into a double error. He assumes, first, that there were no men on the sick list, and secondly, that there were none absent from Quebec, when in reality, as the returns show, considerably more than half were in one or the other of these categories. The pay-rolls were made out at the headquarters of each corps, and always included the entire number of men enlisted in it, whether sick or well, present or absent. On the same fallacious premises Garneau affirms that Wolfe, at the battle on the Plains of Abraham, had eight thousand soldiers, or a little less than double his actual force.

Having stated, as above, that Murray marched out of Quebec with at least 1,714 effective troops, Garneau, not very consistently, goes on to say that he advanced against Levis with six thousand or seven thousand men, and he adds that the two armies were about equal, because Levis had left some detachments behind to guard his boats and artillery. The number of the French, after they had all reached the field, was, in truth, about seven thousand; at the beginning of the fight it seems not to have exceeded five thousand. The Relation de la seconde Bataille de Quebec says: "Notre petite armee consistoit au moment de l'action en 3,000 hommes de troupes reglees et 2,000 Canadiens ou sauvages." A large number of Canadians came up from Sillery while the affair went on, and as the whole French army, except the detachments mentioned by Garneau, had passed the night at no greater distance from the field than Ste-Foy and Sillery, the last man must have reached it before the firing was half over.



Index

A Abenaki Indians, 50, 122, 157, 262, 335 destruction of their town, 520

Abercromby, James, British general, 270, 409, 410, 432, 434, 460 arrives in Albany, 280 praises Robert Rogers, 309, 310n. joy at fall of Louisbourg, 404 Wolfe's comments on, 411 his blunders, 418, 428 attacks Ticonderoga (1758), 422-424 his defeat, 425 his retreat, 426

Abraham, heights of, 523 (See also Quebec) Wolfe's plan to climb, 521-532, 537 guarded by Captain de Vergor, 533, 535 surprised and captured, 540

Abraham, Plains of, 542 (See also Quebec) Wolfe's army forms on, 542 battle for Quebec on, 544-550 rout of French forces,. 546-550 behavior of Canadians, 549-550 French and English losses, 547n.-548, 552, 637-638 report of battle on, 638-639

Acadia (Nova Scotia), Conflict for, 82-106 conquered by Nicholson, 82 ceded to England (1713), 82 guaranteed religious freedom, 82, 87 hostility of French-Canadian authorities, 82, 84, 174-175 English patience and moderation, 83, 85, 94-96, 175 Halifax founded, 84 treachery of French clergy, 86-102 British seize ship in, 97 British-French disputes over boundaries, 102-105 failure to settle boundary disputes, 105 life in, 189-190 emigration under French pressure (1748-1755), 17n. its value to France, 175-176 British remove settlers, 186-205 delay in finding British settlers, 205

Acadian, oath of allegiance to George II, 83, 87 urged to leave by French, 87, 89, 93ff. threats of Le Loutre, missionary priest, 93ff., 102, 174 forced from Beaubassin by Le Loutre, 98ff., 174 misery of refugees, 100-102 removal by British, 186-205 reasons for removal, 175, 177, 188-189, 191-193 their misery at Beausejour, 179-180 heartless treatment from French authorities, 180-181 life of, 189-190 powers of church over, 190 refuse pledge of allegiance to George II, 191-193 English treatment of, 625 ordered by priests to join Indian attacks, 626

Adams, Captain, 194, 198

Africa, French driven from, 615 English power in, 615 Senegal ceded to England, 618 Aix-la-Chapelle, treaty of, 31, 38, 102

Albemarle, Lord, British Minister to France (1752), 91n., 139 Lord Chesterfield's comment on, 139 dies in Paris, 142

Albany, New York, in the 1750's, 228-229

Albemarle, Earl of (1761), takes Havana, 615

Alembert, D', 35

Alequippa, Iroquois Chieftoness, 54 joins Washington's men, 120

Algonquin, or Algonkin Indians, 72, 122, 262, 335 divination practices of, 305n.

Allen, Ensign, 152

Amherst, Major-General Jeffry, 516, 526, 527, 531 commands Louisbourg expedition, 385 sails for Halifax, 387 reaches Louisbourg, 390 his siege of Louisbourg, 394-399 Louisbourg surrenders, 401-402 his courtesy to French, 403 takes French posts around Louisbourg, 405 his relations with Wolfe, 406 joins Abercromby, 406, 437 discusses attack on Ticonderoga, 438 prepare for advance on Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Montreal, 507 marches on Ticonderoga, 509 French retreat and fort falls, 510 rebuilds fort, 510, 516 postpones going to Wolfe's aid, 511 finally embarks, 517 turned back by storms, 518 winters at Crown Point, 518 his blunders, 518 his plan to capture Montreal, 590 sails from Oswego, 594 takes Fort Levis, 595 arrives at Montreal, 596 Montreal surrenders, 597-598

Annapolis, Fort (Acadia), 83ff.

Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty (England 1754), 139

Anthonay D', Lieutenant-Colonel, 400

"Apostle of the Iroquois" (see Piquet, Abbe)

Appleton, Nathaniel, 601

Apthorp, Boston merchant, 181

Argens, D', 607 Frederick the Great, letters to, 607-608

Argenson, D', French Minister of War (1743), 35, 252 appoints Montcalm to Canadian Command, 255

Armstrong, Colonel John, destroys Indian stronghold, 296-297

Arnoux, surgeon, Montcalm dies at his house, 556

Ashley, John, 272

Aubry, French officer, 513ff.

Augustus, Elector of Saxony, 32

Austria (See also Maria Theresa) her defeat at Rossbach, 380 signs treaty of Hubertsburg, 619

Avery, Ensign, 520

B

Bagley, Colonel Jonathon, Fort William Henry commander, 273-274

Barre, Major-General, 528

Barrington, Viscount, 610

Beaubassin (Acadia), occupied by British, 98 Le Loutre forces Acadians to leave, 98ff.

Beaujieu, Captain at Fort Duquesne, 157 plans to ambush Braddock, 158-160

Beausejour, Fort, 100, 177-186 Lawrence authorizes attack on, 177 corruption in, 178-181 siege of, 182-185 its surrender, 185-186 name changed to Fort Cumberland, 186