Battle of Quebec 13th September 1759 in the French and Indian War or the Seven Years War
France and England (after 1707, Great Britain) fought four
major wars in North America either alone or in conjunction with allies. The
first was the war of the League of Augsburg (also known as King William’s War),
which broke out in 1689 and ended with the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. The next
was the War of the Spanish Succession, waged between 1702 and 1713, followed by
the War of the Austrian Succession (1744–48). The final conflict was the Seven
Years’ War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), which
started in North America in 1754 and ended with the withdrawal of France from
virtually all of the continent in 1763. For almost the entire time between the
mid-1600s and 1763, a vicious war of raids, ambushes, no quarter and no
prisoners, was fought along the border between New France and the English
colonies. Throughout that time, a few companies of French regular soldiers, the
New France militia, and the Compagnies franches de la Marine (as well as New
France’s aboriginal allies) constituted the French fighting force in America.
What Britain would call the Seven Years’ War began deep in
the North American interior in the late spring of 1754, when a small expedition
of Virginia militia, led by George Washington, ventured west across the
Allegheny Mountains. They were determined to expunge the French presence in the
Ohio River Valley as a prelude to both settlement and land speculation.
Beginning in the 1680s, French explorers had mapped out a great Y-shaped empire
in the interior. In the northeast, Quebec stood as the major entrepôt and
military guardian of French interests in America. In the far south, at the
mouth of the Mississippi, Louisiana and the post of New Orleans, on Lake
Pontchartrain, gave France internal access to the Gulf of Mexico. To the far
northwest, Fort Rouge (later Winnipeg) put French traders on the doorstep to
the fur-rich lands of Saskatchewan, bypassing the English posts on Hudson Bay.
On the southeast coast of Cape Breton, the fortified seaport of Louisbourg,
with its massive stone fort built after the Treaty of Utrecht ended the War of
the Spanish Succession, stood guard over the sea approaches to Quebec. New
Englanders saw Louisbourg as a mortal threat to their trade and their lives and
chafed for opportunities to crush it. And at virtually all the junctions of the
great river roads that linked this vast empire in the continental interior
stood French forts. They were mostly crudely built and manned by but a handful
of regulars or marines. Their major source of strength was not their walls or
their soldiers, but the strong ties they had established over decades with the
powerful Indian nations who ruled the land from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of
Mexico to the Great Plains.
George Washington intended to begin unravelling this network
of furs, trade, and Indian alliances at a point he thought vulnerable,
virtually at its centre. However, his expedition was a disaster, and the French
quickly sent him and his irregulars packing, back across the mountains.
Washington and other American colonists had had enough of French border raids,
French rule over the interior water-ways, French sway over the Indians, and the
French threat posed by Louisbourg. They were determined to launch a new foray,
this time with considerable support from Britain. Colonial entreaties to London
were answered when the British sent General Edward Braddock and a contingent of
regular troops to try again to attack the French in the Ohio Valley in the
summer of 1755. Braddock led an expedition to take Fort Duquesne, at the forks
of the Ohio, but he was killed and his contingent routed. The French then
responded to the reinforcement of British troops in North America with
reinforcements of their own regular troops from overseas.
In May 1755, four battalions of French regulars arrived at
Quebec and two at Louisbourg. These troops were the first formal regiments of
the French army to arrive in Canada since the departure of the
Carignan-Salières. Over the next three years (war between Britain and France on
the European continent officially broke out in 1756) six more regiments arrived,
along with Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, Marquis de Montcalm, a professional
soldier with long experience in European positional warfare, with its
well-drilled infantry, formal approaches to the battlefield, and lines of
soldiers engaging in mass volleys of fire. Montcalm and the regulars were sent
not so much to bolster the marines and militia of New France, but to take over
the war effort. As thousands of redcoats debarked along the Atlantic seaboard
and hundreds of Royal Navy warships arrived in Atlantic waters, France was
getting the unmistakable message that this fourth war for the continent could
well be the last.
The twelve battalions of troupes de terre from the Régiments
La Reine, Guyenne, Béarn, Languedoc, Bourgogne, Artois, Royal Roussillon, La
Sarre, Berry, Cambis, and Volontaires-Étrangers were the equal of any similar
contingent of European regular soldiers of that era. The rank and file were a
collection of young adventurers, former serfs, and the dregs of French ports
and cities, as well as a handful of the newly emerging middle class, who saw
the army as a potential ladder of upward mobility. The officer corps were a
mixed bag. Some were young men from noble families whose commissions were
largely purchased and whose military skills were minimal. Others had received
formal military training and their rank was based on ability and
accomplishment. The troops included no cavalry contingent, some artillery, but
mostly heavy infantry, armed with swords and muskets fitted with bayonets, who
carried heavy packs of hardtack, beer, ammunition, and powder while in the line
of march. They were subject to harsh discipline. They drilled, trained,
marched, and manoeuvred with but a single objective—to stand shoulder to
shoulder at distances as close as 50 metres to the enemy’s line and fire mass
volleys of lead balls at the men opposite. The nature of the principal weaponry
of the day—the long-barrelled musket, made even longer by the bayonet—dictated
this tactic. This single-shot flintlock firearm could not be easily reloaded
from a prone position, or fired accurately. Besides, accuracy was a moot point
so close to the enemy. It wasn’t a case of hit or miss but rather of standing
in place in the face of withering volleys, firing, reloading, and firing again,
without breaking. In such a fashion a line of infantry could shoot thousands of
rounds right at the enemy several times in a minute.
The British gained the initial strategic successes on the
Atlantic seaboard. British troops captured Fort Beauséjour, in Acadia, in June
1755 and Louisbourg in July 1758. In the latter campaign they mustered 27,000
men, both regulars and colonial militia, and 157 ships to fight 7,500 French
soldiers, sailors, and marines. With the fort surrounded and British artillery
able to bombard the position virtually at will from surrounding heights, the
outcome was inevitable: the French were chased from the Maritimes. But French
forces more than held their own in the first years of fighting in the forests
and among the lakes and rivers of the interior. In August 1757 they captured
Fort Ontario at Oswego, New York, and secured control of Lake Ontario. A year
later they besieged and captured Fort William Henry on Lake George, New York,
giving them virtual domination over the route from the Hudson River Valley to
the St. Lawrence. Although the militia and France’s Indian allies greatly aided
in the campaign, the brunt of the fighting was done by the French regulars. As
late as 1758 Montcalm was pleased with their successes and reported that their
discipline was excellent.
But 1758 was also the nadir of French success in the war.
Despite their short internal lines of communication, along the great rivers
from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi to the Missouri, and the staunchness
and fighting quality of their aboriginal allies, the French were in a
precarious position. The Royal Navy ruled the Atlantic and the approaches to
Louisiana, Louisbourg, and Quebec. The entire population of New France numbered
barely sixty thousand, while the British colonies were already over a million.
Even under the best of circumstances the French could never conquer the British
in North America, whereas it was entirely feasible that the opposite might
happen. Finally, Britain—strongly supported by its colonists—had had enough of
the French sitting astride their potential routes of expansion into the west,
terrorizing their frontiers, and threatening their trade on the east coast. The
British poured tens of thousands of regular troops across the Atlantic, while
the colonies raised tens of thousands more. By 1759 an estimated fifty thousand
troops carried the British colours in the field, an extraordinary number for
North America. No matter how well the French fought, no matter how good they
were, superior numbers created a strategic advantage all its own.
In 1758 British forces captured and destroyed Fort
Frontenac, near present-day Kingston. France’s aboriginal allies in the Ohio
country decided to make a separate peace with the obviously superior British
army, forcing the French to abandon Fort Duquesne. With the interior cleared
and Louisbourg gone, the British launched three major attacks on the heartland
of New France—the area between Montreal and Quebec—in 1759. One army captured
Fort Niagara, another drove up the Lake Champlain–Richelieu River route toward
the St. Lawrence, and the third besieged Quebec City. Although both the morale
and the fighting ability of the French-Canadian militia and the marines
remained high, the state of the French regiments had deteriorated markedly.
There were constant arguments between Montcalm and the colony’s Canadian-born
governor Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Marquis de Vaudreuil, who
was nominally in charge of all military forces in the colony. Vaudreuil had
little patience for or knowledge of the apparently stiff European style of
warfare, and he and Montcalm rarely agreed on either strategic objectives or
tactical preferences. Because of British control of the seas, few
reinforcements reached the French regiments, and the constant fighting and
movement through the hilly and often cold and rainy forests of eastern Canada
and northern New York and New England wore them down. Discipline began to
deteriorate; desertion increased; performance under fire declined.
By the spring of 1759, Montcalm’s hold was precarious. He
could muster only some five battalions of regulars in defence of Quebec
itself—2,900 troops—together with about 8,000 militia from Montreal,
Trois-Rivières, and Quebec, 600 garrison troops, and a number of his aboriginal
allies. But because of serious disagreements between Montcalm and Vaudreuil,
the French neglected to build blocking positions downriver of Quebec to
forestall the Royal Navy besieging the town or landing troops.
On June 26, 1759, a British fleet of 168 ships under Admiral
Charles Saunders anchored off the south shore of the island of Orléans and
began debarking 8,500 troops under the command of General James Wolfe. The
French did not directly contest the landings; in fact, Vaudreuil, who as governor
was in overall command of the garrison, withdrew his troops from the entire
south shore of the river. The British set up artillery on the south shore of
the narrows, directly opposite Quebec, and began to bombard the town and the
citadel. They also established major encampments at Point Lévis and on the
eastern bank of the Montmorency River. The French manned the citadel and
entrenchments along the north shore of the river from the tidal flats off the
mouth of the St. Charles River, east of Quebec, to the western bank of the
Montmorency River. On July 31, Wolfe tried to cross the Montmorency in an
effort to roll back the French left flank to the flats below the citadel, but
the attack was beaten back with heavy losses.
As the summer waned, Montcalm and Wolfe weighed their
prospects. Montcalm’s position was even more precarious than it had been when
Wolfe and Saunders arrived, a result of the surrenders of Forts Niagara,
Carillon, and Saint-Frédéric (at the northern end of Lake Champlain) at the end
of July. Even so, he knew that if he could hold out until October, the British
would have to withdraw their fleet before the onset of winter and the freezing
over of the St. Lawrence. Wolfe was well aware that he did not have unlimited
time to bring the siege to a successful conclusion, but he was unsure how to
get at the French positions. Finally, he and his officers decided on an
indirect approach—to put men and ships upriver of Quebec, cross the river at a
point to be determined, and threaten to cut Montcalm’s supply lines to Montreal
from the French rear. That could force the French to come out and fight.
On the night of September 12/13, 1759, British troops from
ships anchored in the river rowed stealthily, with muffled oarlocks, from
midstream to the small cove of Anse-au-Foulon, at the foot of a cliff about 3
kilometres above Quebec. A small guard at the top of the cliff was quickly
overcome, and for the next several hours the British troops quickly scaled the
cliffs, dragging cannon, stores, and munitions with them. They then assembled
on the Plains of Abraham and moved north, toward the road that connected Quebec
with the small settlement of Sainte-Foy and, beyond it, to Trois-Rivières and
Montreal. Not long after daybreak, the French spotted Wolfe’s advancing lines,
4,800 strong. They were taken completely by surprise. Montcalm did not learn of
the British deployment until mid-morning. When he did, he raced from his
headquarters at Beauport, about halfway between Quebec and the Montmorency
River, and ordered his troops to muster opposite the British. Some 4,500
regulars and militia answered the call and, to the roll of drums, began to
deploy in front of the walls of Quebec, facing the British.
Montcalm was not greatly outnumbered by Wolfe, but his
troops were a mixed bag. History has recorded that he had about five battalions
of regulars but gives little detail about their composition at this stage of
the war. The well-trained regiments that had arrived with Montcalm four years
earlier still existed in name and still flew their regimental banners, but by
now many of the soldiers in their ranks were former militiamen or marines. They
had not been trained in the severe firing discipline of the regimental troops;
instead they instinctively sought cover in the rolling terrain, the tall grass,
or the bushes on the battlefield as soon as the shooting started. As the lines
approached each other, shots rang out from the flanks as French snipers and
skirmishers fired at the redcoats, who came steadily on. The French line fired
several volleys at the British but the British did not return fire. Instead,
they continued to advance, seemingly oblivious to the gaps in their ranks that
opened every time one of them fell dead or wounded.
Some of the French riflemen—those not trained in
European-style warfare—threw themselves to the ground to reload. This increased
the confusion in the French ranks. Were these men dead or wounded? Was it time
to dive to the earth or even to run back to the citadel? Gaps opened in the
French line, rendering their firing discipline much less effective than it
might have been. When the two lines were at the astonishingly close distance of
12 metres or so, the British stopped, then opened a withering fire at the
French, cutting the troops down like mown wheat. After a few volleys, the
kilted Highland regiments drew their large claymore swords and charged the
French. The French line broke and, with few exceptions, ran in panic back to
Quebec and even past it, to Vaudreuil’s encampment. Both Wolfe and Montcalm
were mortally wounded in the encounter. Vaudreuil then led the surviving French
troops around the British and on to winter in Montreal. British forces entered
Quebec six days later.
The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, as it is called, did
not end the war in Canada. Over the winter the French regrouped and reorganized
in Montreal, then marched on Quebec in late April 1760. The French commander,
François-Gaston de Lévis, Duc de Lévis, led a combined force of 5,000 men
against British commander James Murray’s 3,900 men at the Plains of Abraham.
This time the French won the encounter and the British retreated to Quebec,
where they were put under siege. Within weeks, however, the ice broke on the
St. Lawrence and the British fleet reached Quebec first. Lévis broke camp and
retreated to Montreal. The British, now reinforced, followed him, and other
British columns advanced on Montreal from Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain. On
September 8, 1760, Vaudreuil surrendered New France to the British commander,
General Jeffery Amherst. The surrender was confirmed by the Treaty of Paris,
which formally ended the Seven Years’ War on February 10, 1763. This ended the
era of Canada’s French regiments, and the British regimental tradition in
Canada was about to be born.
