Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War (84 page)

Now began the critical part of the expedition, the descent of the rapids. The Galops, the Rapide Plat, the Long Saut, the Côteau du Lac were passed in succession, with little loss, till they reached the Cedars, the Buisson, and the Cascades, where the reckless surges dashed and bounded in the sun, beautiful and terrible as young tigers at play. Boat after boat, borne on their foaming crests, rushed madly down the torrent. Forty-six were totally wrecked, eighteen were damaged, and eighty-four men were drowned.
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La Corne was watching the rapids with a considerable body of Canadians; and it is difficult to see why this bold and enterprising chief allowed the army to descend undisturbed through passes so dangerous. At length the last rapid was left behind; and the flotilla, gliding in peace over the smooth breast of Lake St. Louis, landed at Isle Perrot, a few leagues from Montreal. In the morning, September sixth, the troops embarked again, landed unopposed at La Chine, nine miles from the city, marched on without delay, and encamped before its walls.

The Montreal of that time was a long, narrow assemblage of wooden or stone houses, one or two stories high, above which rose the peaked towers of the Seminary, the spires of three churches, the walls of four convents, with the trees of their adjacent gardens, and, conspicuous at the lower end, a high mound of earth, crowned by a redoubt, where a few cannon were mounted. The whole was surrounded by a shallow moat and a bastioned stone wall, made for defence against Indians, and incapable of resisting cannon.
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On the morning after Amherst encamped above the place, Murray landed to encamp below it; and Vaudreuil, looking across the St. Lawrence, could see the tents of Haviland’s little army on the southern shore. Bourlamaque, Bougainville,
and Roquemaure, abandoned by all their militia, had crossed to Montreal with the few regulars that remained with them. The town was crowded with noncombatant refugees. Here, too, was nearly all the remaining force of Canada, consisting of twenty-two hundred troops of the line and some two hundred colony troops; for all the Canadians had by this time gone home. Many of the regulars, especially of the colony troops, had also deserted; and the rest were so broken in discipline that their officers were forced to use entreaties instead of commands. The three armies encamped around the city amounted to seventeen thousand men;
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Amherst was bringing up his cannon from La Chine, and the town wall would have crumbled before them in an hour.

On the night when Amherst arrived, the Governor called a council of war.
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It was resolved that since all the militia and many of the regulars had abandoned the army, and the Indian allies of France had gone over to the enemy, further resistance was impossible. Vaudreuil laid before the assembled officers a long paper that he had drawn up, containing fifty-five articles of capitulation to be proposed to the English; and these were unanimously approved.
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In the morning Bougainville carried them to the tent of Amherst. He granted the greater part, modified some, and flatly refused others. That which the French officers thought more important than all the rest was the provision that the troops should march out with arms, cannon, and the honors of war; to which it was replied: “The whole garrison of Montreal and all other French troops in Canada must lay down their arms, and shall not serve during the present war.” This demand was felt to be intolerable. The Governor sent Bougainville back to remonstrate; but Amherst was inflexible. Then Lévis tried to shake his resolution, and sent him an officer with the following note: “I send your Excellency M. de la Pause, Assistant Quartermaster-General of the Army, on the subject of the too rigorous article which you dictate to the troops by the capitulation, to which it would not be possible for us to subscribe.” Amherst answered the envoy: “I am fully resolved, for the infamous part the troops of France have acted in exciting the savages to perpetrate the most horrid and unheard of barbarities in the whole progress of the war, and for other open treacheries and flagrant breaches of faith, to manifest to all the world by this capitulation my detestation of such practices”; and he dismissed La Pause with a short note, refusing to change the conditions.

On the next morning, September eighth, Vaudreuil yielded, and signed the capitulation. By it Canada and all its dependencies passed to the British Crown. French officers, civil and military, with French troops and sailors, were to be sent to France in British ships. Free exercise of religion was assured to the people of the colony, and the religious communities were to retain their
possessions, rights, and privileges. All persons who might wish to retire to France were allowed to do so, and the Canadians were to remain in full enjoyment of feudal and other property, including negro and Indian slaves.
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The greatest alarm had prevailed among the inhabitants lest they should suffer violence from the English Indians, and Vaudreuil had endeavored to provide that these dangerous enemies should be sent back at once to their villages. This was refused, with the remark: “There never have been any cruelties committed by the Indians of our army.” Strict precautions were taken at the same time, not only against the few savages whom the firm conduct of Johnson at Fort Lévis had not driven away, but also against the late allies of the French, now become a peril to them. In consequence, not a man, woman, or child was hurt. Amherst, in general orders, expressed his confidence “that the troops will not disgrace themselves by the least appearance of inhumanity, or by any unsoldierlike behavior in seeking for plunder; and that as the Canadians are now become British subjects, they will feel the good effects of His Majesty’s protection.” They were in fact treated with a kindness that seemed to surprise them.

Lévis was so incensed at the demand that the troops should lay down their arms and serve no longer during the war that, before the capitulation was signed, he made a formal protest
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in his own name and that of the officers from France, and insisted that the negotiation should be broken off. “If,” he added, “the Marquis de Vaudreuil, through political motives, thinks himself obliged to surrender the colony at once, we ask his permission to withdraw with the troops of the line to the Island of St. Helen, in order to uphold there, on our own behalf, the honor of the King’s arms.” The proposal was of course rejected, as Lévis knew that it would be, and he and his officers were ordered to conform to the capitulation. When Vaudreuil reached France, three months after, he had the mortification to receive from the Colonial Minister a letter containing these words: “Though His Majesty was perfectly aware of the state of Canada, nevertheless, after the assurances you had given to make the utmost efforts to sustain the honor of his arms, he did not expect to hear so soon of the surrender of Montreal and the whole colony. But, granting that capitulation was a necessity, his Majesty was not the less surprised and ill pleased at the conditions, so little honorable, to which you submitted, especially after the representations made you by the Chevalier de Lévis.”
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The brother of Vaudreuil complained to the Minister of the terms of this letter, and the Minister replied: “I see with regret, Monsieur, that you are pained by the letter I wrote your brother; but I could not help telling him what the King did me the honor to say to me; and it would have been unpleasant for him to hear it from anybody else.”
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It is true that Vaudreuil had in some measure drawn this reproach upon himself by his boastings about the battles he would fight; yet the royal displeasure was undeserved. The Governor had no choice but to give up the colony; for Amherst had him in his power, and knew that he could exact what terms he pleased. Further resistance could only have ended in surrender at the discretion of the victor, and the protest of Lévis was nothing but a device to save his own reputation and that of his brother officers from France. Vaudreuil had served the King and the colony in some respects with ability, always with an unflagging zeal; and he loved the land of his birth with a jealous devotion that goes far towards redeeming his miserable defects. The King himself, and not the servants whom he abandoned to their fate, was answerable for the loss of New France.

Half the continent had changed hands at the scratch of a pen. Governor Bernard, of Massachusetts, proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for the great event, and the Boston newspapers recount how the occasion was celebrated with a parade of the cadets and other volunteer corps, a grand dinner in Faneuil Hall, music, bonfires, illuminations, firing of cannon, and, above all, by sermons in every church of the province; for the heart of early New England always found voice through her pulpits. Before me lies a bundle of these sermons, rescued from sixscore years of dust, scrawled on their title-pages with names of owners dead long ago, worm-eaten, dingy, stained with the damps of time, and uttering in quaint old letterpress the emotions of a buried and forgotten past. Triumph, gratulation, hope, breathe in every line, but no ill-will against a fallen enemy. Thomas Foxcroft, pastor of the “Old Church in Boston,” preaches from the text, “The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad.” “Long,” he says, “had it been the common opinion,
Delenda est Carthago,
Canada must be conquered, or we could hope for no lasting quiet in these parts; and now, through the good hand of our God upon us, we see the happy day of its accomplishment. We behold His Majesty’s victorious troops treading upon the high places of the enemy, their last fortress delivered up, and their whole country surrendered to the King of Britain in the person of his general, the intrepid, the serene, the successful Amherst.”

The loyal John Mellen, pastor of the Second Church in Lancaster, exclaims, boding nothing of the tempest to come: “Let us fear God and honor the King, and be peaceable subjects of an easy and happy government. And may the blessing of Heaven be ever upon those enemies of our country that have now submitted to the English Crown, and according to the oath they have taken lead quiet lives in all godliness and honesty.” Then he ventures to predict that America, now thrown open to British colonists, will be peopled in a century and a half with sixty million souls: a prophecy likely to be more than fulfilled.

“God has given us to sing this day the downfall of New France, the North American Babylon, New England’s rival,” cries Eli Forbes to his congregation of sober farmers and staid matrons at the rustic village of Brookfield. Like many of his flock, he had been to the war, having served two years as chaplain of
Ruggles’s Massachusetts regiment; and something of a martial spirit breathes through his discourse. He passes in review the events of each campaign down to their triumphant close. “Thus God was our salvation and our strength; yet he who directs the great events of war suffered not our joy to be uninterrupted, for we had to lament the fall of the valiant and good General Wolfe, whose death demands a tear from every British eye, a sigh from every Protestant heart. Is he dead? I recall myself. Such heroes are immortal; he lives on every loyal tongue; he lives in every grateful breast; and charity bids me give him a place among the princes of heaven.” Nor does he forget the praises of Amherst, “the renowned general, worthy of that most honorable of all titles, the Christian hero; for he loves his enemies, and while he subdues them he makes them happy. He transplants British liberty to where till now it was unknown. He acts the General, the Briton, the Conqueror, and the Christian. What fair hopes arise from the peaceful and undisturbed enjoyment of this good land, and the blessing of our gracious God with it! Methinks I see towns enlarged, settlements increased, and this howling wilderness become a fruitful field which the Lord hath blessed; and, to complete the scene, I see churches rise and flourish in every Christian grace where has been the seat of Satan and Indian idolatry.”

Nathaniel Appleton, of Cambridge, hails the dawning of a new era. “Who can tell what great and glorious things God is about to bring forward in the world, and in this world of America in particular? Oh, may the time come when these deserts, which for ages unknown have been regions of darkness and habitations of cruelty, shall be illuminated with the light of the glorious Gospel, and when this part of the world, which till the later ages was utterly unknown, shall be the glory and joy of the whole earth!”

On the American continent the war was ended, and the British colonists breathed for a space, as they drifted unwittingly towards a deadlier strife. They had learned hard and useful lessons. Their mutual jealousies and disputes, the quarrels of their governors and assemblies, the want of any general military organization, and the absence, in most of them, of military habits, joined to narrow views of their own interest, had unfitted them to the last degree for carrying on offensive war. Nor were the British troops sent for their support remarkable in the beginning for good discipline or efficient command. When hostilities broke out, the army of Great Britain was so small as to be hardly worth the name. A new one had to be created; and thus the inexperienced Shirley and the incompetent Loudon, with the futile Newcastle behind them, had, besides their own incapacity, the disadvantage of raw troops and half-formed officers; while against them stood an enemy who, though weak in numbers, was strong in a centralized military organization, skilful leaders armed with untrammelled and absolute authority, practised soldiers, and a population not only brave, but in good part inured to war.

The nature of the country was another cause that helped to protract the contest. “Geography,” says Von Moltke, “is three fourths of military science”; and never was the truth of his words more fully exemplified. Canada was
fortified with vast outworks of defence in the savage forests, marshes, and mountains that encompassed her, where the thoroughfares were streams choked with fallen trees and obstructed by cataracts. Never was the problem of moving troops, encumbered with baggage and artillery, a more difficult one. The question was less how to fight the enemy than how to get at him. If a few practicable roads had crossed this broad tract of wilderness, the war would have been shortened and its character changed.