Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
Earl of Loudoun, a pompous military administrator who not only detested colonials and natives but had no idea of how to conduct a war or even a battle. He abruptly fired Massachusetts governor William Shirley in June 1756, and sent him off in disgrace, carrying the responsibility for some of Braddock’s blunders. (It was the season of the scapegoat, as the official murder of the only slightly cautious Admiral Byng after the fall of Minorca had demonstrated.) Loudoun’s lack of rapport with the colonial authorities surpassed even Braddock’s.
Montcalm invested Fort Oswego, at the southeastern edge of Lake Ontario, with 3,000 men, in August 1756, and it quickly fell, with about 1,600 British taken prisoner. Montcalm was not sufficiently impressed with the duration or vigor of their resistance to allow the British to retreat under their own colors. This was the inauspicious start of the Loudoun incumbency, and even after this setback, the colonial governments were little disposed to assist the British military, despite all Loudoun’s huffing and puffing. Once again, the worldly Franklin came to the rescue in Pennsylvania, and in exchange for a modest gift by the owners of most of the colony, the Penn family, the Assembly voted 55,000 pounds for “the King’s use,” a Franklinian euphemism that allowed the pacifist Quaker majority to pretend that it was not for military uses, a balm of conscience presumably made more emollient by the fact that the payment was destined to help prevent their occupation and capture by Montcalm’s swashbuckling Catholic, French legionnaires. The Quaker caucus of legislators soon splintered on the issue of whether to offer bounties for Indian prisoners and scalps, and the Quaker domination of the Pennsylvania Assembly ended abruptly, at the hands of fellow colonials less troubled by the exigencies of war. Loudoun had had explicitly to threaten the use of force to gain quarters for his troops in Philadelphia, where an epidemic of dysentery and related ailments was feared. This was not a gesture best designed to build Anglo-American solidarity at the approach of the enemy. Again, Franklin produced the desired compromise, by assigning the soldiers a principal hospital, addressing under the same roof both the wrath of the commander and the threat to public health.
Loudoun had been promised the formidable total, for the American theater, of 17,000 troops, to seize Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, and ultimately Quebec; he left New York in a 100-ship force carrying 6,000 troops, the largest amphibious force ever launched in North America up to that time, bound for Louisbourg, on June 20, 1757. His force arrived at Halifax on June 30 and had to wait 10 days for the accompanying Royal Navy squadron that was to blast its way into Louisbourg harbor. There was a further wait for the abatement of fog. By that time, the French had concentrated a fleet of 18 warships at Louisbourg, and the Royal Navy commander, Admiral Francis Holborne, declared the mission impossible beginning so late in the season, and the whole force returned dismally to New York. While this was happening in late July 1757, Montcalm, at the head of 3,000 French, 3,000 Canadians, and a blood-curdling 2,000 Indians, who volunteered in large numbers, encouraged by French successes, had invested Fort William Henry at the south end of Lake George, the entrance to the Hudson Valley from Quebec. Montcalm’s force included representatives from 33 different Indian tribes, or nations. Nearly half were Catholics who could be influenced, if not commanded, by the missionary priests that Montcalm brought for that purpose. The rest could be motivated to some degree by French officers and traders they had served with, but 2,000 Indians coming from up to 1,500 miles to enlist for an attack on the British were going to be a terribly unruly group once the issue was joined.
Colonel George Monro was defending the fort with 1,500 men. In late July Monro sent a reconnaissance in force up the lake. Most of it was seized by Indians and frightful barbarities ensued, including three Englishmen boiled in a pot for dinner, washed down with large quantities of rum the British had brought with them. Returning survivors warned Monro of the imminent dangers, though they did not know the extent of Montcalm’s force. The French arrived in strength on August 3, including artillery, spearheaded by 1,500 naked Indians gliding swiftly up the lake in their canoes. Monro was advised to consider capitulation in a letter expressing the view of the governor of New York, which was taken by an Indian from the body of the courier, whom he had intercepted, and sent into Fort William Henry under a white flag, with an accompanying note from Montcalm that it was good advice. When Monro declined, Montcalm maintained continuous artillery fire for five days, and by August 9 the British garrison was very haggard and the walls of the fort had been smashed in several places.
Monro belatedly took the governor’s advice and Montcalm chivalrously replicated the surrender terms of Minorca earlier in the summer: the British would promise to refrain from combat for 18 months and would leave an officer behind as hostage and return French prisoners, and would be allowed to leave with their belongings, under their colors, with a French escort to the next fort to the east. Montcalm would take all the stores and artillery left in the fort, and would care for the seriously wounded British and return them as their convalescent condition permitted. It was European war by officers and gentlemen to the highest standard.
Unfortunately, these terms did not conform in the slightest to Indian notions of the fruits of victory. The Indians were not consulted by Montcalm, and when they learned of these generous conditions, and of the resulting paucity of rewards for them, they first seized and scalped some of the wounded, and the following day, on the march to the nearest British fort, Fort Edward, they attacked the column from all sides and in the most terrifying manner, killing nearly 200 and capturing perhaps 500. Montcalm himself led his officers and men, accompanied by the placatory missionaries, to restore order and take back the prisoners seized by the Indians. Eventually Montcalm, the French governor, Vaudreuil, and others managed, sometimes by paying up to 30 bottles of brandy per ransomed prisoner, to liberate and return to Fort Edward all but about 200 prisoners, who, except for about 40 who joined Indian communities and remained there, were deemed to have been massacred. The incident was apparently concluded by a public, ritualistic, and instantly infamous boiling and eating of a British prisoner by his Indian captors outside Montreal on August 15, 1757.
It was a great victory for Montcalm and left all New York almost open to Montcalm’s forces, which with further reinforcements now stood at about 11,000 seasoned fighters under a skilled commander. But as Montcalm and Vaudreuil immediately foresaw, the strategic implications of the terrible aftermath of the fall of Fort William Henry were potentially very bad for France. The Indians would henceforth be very difficult to persuade to join the French, as they didn’t really care what side they were on and were only interested in the slave labor of prisoners and, along with scalps, the prestige they brought to returning individual warriors, and booty—especially liquor, firearms, ammunition, and gaudy trinkets. Montcalm could attempt to provide them with all of this except the prisoners and scalps, but the French had become heavy-handed in retrieving the captured British, from civilized and Christian disgust at the barbarities of their allies. It was difficult to imagine that of the three parties in the engagement, the British and French, with their colonial fellow-soldiers, were the enemies. The Indians would not assist if they had to fight the designated enemy and then the ostensible ally to get anything useful, and the French would not recruit allies who would sully the flag and faith of France with disgusting acts and have to be subdued, at great risk and cost of lives. Thus would vanish much of the French superior expertise at guerrilla war, and reconnaissance and path-finding in the trackless wilderness of much of the contested territory.
Even more worrisome, the French commanders knew, and were even in some sympathy with, what they correctly anticipated would be the British reaction. It would be represented to Britain and the colonies that what had occurred was completely normal behavior for the Catholic French and the Indians whom they had coached and encouraged, and that the aftermath of the capitulation agreement was indicative of the French regard for a pact between officers, and of French treachery generally.
The notorious failure of the colonial assemblies to assign the funds necessary to build and equip proper militias, and to coordinate with each other, was now over. Instead of the British having to send forces from across the Atlantic to enter into cat-and-mouse games with inhospitable locals, there was finally a sense that it was time for a showdown with the French and Indians in North America, and that it was a struggle of life and death and for the honor of British America, to avenge the massacred and punish the savages and their satanic French puppeteers. As always in mortal combat, these caricatures were travesties, and there was a general recognition that Montcalm personally had behaved with the exemplary courtesy and the