Chapter I: Common Undertakings (3)

The French commander at Duquesne had no such force as Braddock was bringing against him. He expected to be obliged to retire. But on the 9th of July the English general, with his advance force of twelve hundred men, forded the shallow Monongahela but eight miles from Duquesne, and striking into the trail which led to the fort, walked into an ambush. A thousand men,—Indians, chiefly, and Canadian provincials,—poured a deadly fire upon him from the thick cover of the woods on either hand. He would not open his order and meet the attack in forest fashion, as Washington begged him to do, but kept his men formed and crowded in the open spaces of the road, to be almost annihilated, and driven back, a mere remnant, in utter rout. It was shameful, pitiful. Washington and his Virginian rangers could with difficulty keep the rear when the rout came, and bring the stricken commander off, to die in the retreat. Dinwiddie could not persuade the officers left in command even to stay upon the Virginian frontier to keep the border settlements safe against the savages. It was Washington’s impossible task for the rest of the war to guard three hundred and fifty miles of frontier with a handful of half-fed provincial militia, where the little huts and tiny settlements of the Scots-Irish immigrants lay scattered far and wide among the foothills and valleys of the spreading mountain country, open everywhere to the swift and secret onset of the pitiless redskins.

Braddock’s papers, abandoned in the panic of the rout, fell into the hands of the French, and made known to them all the English plans. They were warned what to do, and did it as promptly as possible. Shirley gave up the attempt to take Niagara before reaching the lake. Johnson, assisted by Lyman, of Connecticut, met the French under Dieskau at Lake George, and drove them back (September 8, 1755),—the commander and part of the force the French had so hastily despatched to America in the spring,—and Dieskau himself fell into their hands; but they did not follow up their success or shake the hold of the French upon the line of lakes and streams which ran from the heart of New York, like a highway, to the valley of the St. Lawrence. The attack upon Beauséjour alone accomplished what was planned. A force of two thousand New England provincials, under Colonel Monckton and Colonel John Winslow, found the half-finished fortifications of the French on Beauséjour hill in their hands almost before their siege was fairly placed; and Acadia was more than ever secure.

There followed nearly three years of unbroken failure and defeat. In 1756 the Marquis Montcalm succeeded Dieskau as commander in Canada, and the very year of his coming took and destroyed the English forts at Oswego. That same year the Earl of Loudon came over to take charge of the war for the English; but he did nothing effective. The government at home sent reinforcements, but nothing was done with them that counted for success. “I dread to hear from America,” exclaimed Pitt. In 1757 Loudon withdrew the best of his forces to the north, to make an attack on Louisbourg. Montcalm took advantage of the movement to capture Fort William Henry, the advanced post of the English on Lake George; and Loudon failed in his designs against Louisbourg. Even the stout and wily English frontiersmen of the northern border found themselves for a little while overmatched. In March, 1758, Robert Rogers, the doughty New Hampshire ranger whose successful exploits of daring all the northern border knew, was beaten by a scouting party from Ticonderoga, and barely came off with his life. The pouring in of troops, even of regulars from over sea, seemed to count for nothing. General James Abercrombie led an army of fifteen thousand men, six thousand of them regulars, against Ticonderoga, where Montcalm had less than four thousand; blundered at every critical point of the attack; lost two thousand men; and retired almost as if in flight (July, 1758).

But that was the end of failure. The year 1757 had seen the great Pitt come into control of affairs in England, and no more incompetent men were chosen to command in America. Pitt had been mistaken in regard to Abercrombie, whom he had retained; but he made no more mistakes of that kind, and a war of failure was transformed into a war of victories, quick and decisive. Two more years, and the French no longer had possessions in America that any nation need covet. Pitt saw to it that the forces, as well as the talents, used were adequate. In July, 1758, a powerful fleet under Admiral Boscawen, and twelve thousand troops under General Jeffrey Amherst, whom Pitt had specially chosen for the command, invested and took Louisbourg. In August, Colonel John Bradstreet, with three thousand of Abercrombie’s men, drove the French from Fort Frontenac at Oswego. In November the French abandoned Fort Duquesne, upon the approach of a force under General Forbes and Colonel Washington. In June, 1759, Johnson captured the French fort at Niagara and cut the route to the Ohio,—where Fort Duquesne gave place to Fort Pitt. At midsummer General Amherst, after his thorough fashion, led eleven thousand men against Ticonderoga, and had the satisfaction of seeing the French retire before him. He cleared Lake George and captured and strengthened Crown Point upon Champlain. The French needed all their power in the north, for Pitt had sent Wolfe against Quebec. They had concentrated quite fourteen thousand men in and about the towering city ere Wolfe came with scarcely nine thousand (June 21, 1759), and their fortifications stood everywhere ready to defend the place. For close upon three months the English struck at their strength in vain, first here and then there, in their busy efforts to find a spot where to get a foothold against the massive stronghold,—Montcalm holding all the while within his defences to tire them out; until at last, upon a night in September which all the world remembers, Wolfe made his way by a path which lay within a deep ravine upward to the heights of Abraham, and there lost his life and won Canada for England (September 13, 1759).

After that the rest of the task was simple enough. The next year Montreal was yielded up, all Canada passed into the hands of the English, and the war was practically over. There were yet three more years to wait before formal peace should be concluded, because the nations of Europe did not decide their affairs by the issue of battles and sieges in America; but for the English colonies the great struggle was ended. By the formal peace, signed in 1763, at Paris, England gained Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, and all the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the river and harbor of Mobile, and all the disputed lands of the continent, north and south, between the eastern mountain ranges and mid-stream of the Mississippi, except New Orleans,—besides the free navigation of the great river. From Spain she got Florida. France had the year before (1762) ceded to Spain her province of “Louisiana,” the great region beyond the Mississippi, whose extent and boundaries no man could tell. She was utterly stripped of her American possessions, and the English might look forward to a new age in their colonies.

The general _authorities_ for the condition of the country and
the movement of affairs during this period are the well known
histories of Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; the third volume
of J. A. Doyle’s _English Colonies in America_; the third
volume of J. G. Palfrey’s _Compendious History of New England_;
W. B. Weeden’s _Economic and Social History of New England_;
Mr. Barrett Wendell’s _Cotton Mather_; Mr. Eben G. Scott’s
_Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies
of America_; C. W. Baird’s _Huguenot Emigration to America_;
James Russell Lowell’s _New England Two Centuries Ago_, in
his _Among My Books_; Mr. Brooks Adams’s _Emancipation
of Massachusetts_; Madame Knight’s _Journal_ (1704); John
Fontaine’s _Diary_, in the _Memoirs of a Huguenot Family_; and
Benjamin Franklin’s _Autobiography_.

A more particular account of many of the transactions that
fell within the period may be found in Justin Winsor’s _New
England, 1689-1763_, in the fifth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative
and Critical History of America_; Berthold Fernow’s _Middle
Colonies_, Justin Winsor’s _Maryland and Virginia_, and William
J. Rivers’s _The Carolinas_, in the same volume of Winsor;
Charles C. Smith’s _The Wars on the Seaboard: Acadia and Cape
Breton_, and Justin Winsor’s _Struggle for the Great Valleys of
North America_, in the same volume of Winsor.

The chief _authorities_ for the settlement and early history
of _Georgia_ are Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; Charles
C. Jones’s _History of Georgia_ and _English Colonization
of Georgia_ in the fifth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and
Critical History of America_; W. E. H. Lecky’s _History
of England in the Eighteenth Century_; Alexander Hewatt’s
_Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies
of South Carolina and Georgia_, in Carroll’s _Historical
Collections of South Carolina_; the first and second volumes of
Peter Force’s _Tracts and Other Papers relating to the Colonies
in North America_; and the _Colonial Acts_ of Georgia.