X. 1759. BOOK letter from Montcalm in relation to an exchange of prisoners, obtained information that Wolfe was besieging Quebec. With the army which undertook the siege of Niagara, however, his communication was uninterrupted; and intelligence of its success had reached him before he advanced from Ticonderoga against Crown Point. While Amherst's army was thus employed, General Prideaux, with his European, American, and Indian troops, embarking on Lake Ontario, advanced without loss or opposition to the fortress at Niagara, which he reached about the middle of July, and promptly invested on all sides. He was conducting his approaches with great vigour, when on the twentieth of the month, during a visit he made to the trenches, he lost his life by the unfortunate bursting of a cohorn. Amherst was no sooner informed of this accident, than he detached General Gage from Ticonderoga to assume the command of Prideaux's army: but it devolved, in the mean time, upon Sir William Johnson, who exercised it with a success that added a new laurel to the honours which already adorned his name. The enemy, alarmed with the apprehension of losing a post of such importance, resolved to make an effort for its relief. From their forts of Detroit, Venango, and Presque Isle, they drew together a force of twelve hundred men, which, with a troop of Indian auxiliaries, were detached under the command of an officer named D'Aubry, with the purpose of raising the siege, or reinforcing the garrison of Niagara. Johnson, who had been pushing the siege even more vigorously than his predecessor, having learned the design of the French to relieve the garrison, made instant preparation to intercept it. As they approached, he ordered his light infantry, supported by a body of grenadiers and other regulars, to occupy the road from Niagara falls to the fortress, by which the enemy were advancing, and covered his flanks with numerous troops of his Indian allies. At the same time, he posted a strong detachment of men in his trenches, to prevent any sally from the garrison during the approaching enJuly 24. gagement. About eight in the evening, the two armies being Battle of in sight of each other, the Indians attached to the English, Niagara- advancing, proposed a conference with their countrymen who served under the French banners; but the proposition was V. 1759. declined. The French Indians having raised the wild and CHAP. horrible scream called the war-whoop, which by this time had lost its appalling effect on the British soldiers, the action. began by an impetuous attack from the enemy; and while the neighbouring cataract of Niagara pealed forth to inattentive ears its everlasting voice of many waters, the roar of artillery, the yells of the Indians, and the shrieks and shouts incident to a field of battle, mingled in strange chorus with the majestic music of nature. The French conducted their attack with the utmost courage and spirit, but were encountered with such steady valour in front by the British regulars and provincials, and so severely galled on their flanks by the Indians, that in less than an hour their army was completely routed, their general with all his officers taken prisoners, and the fugitives from the field pursued with great slaughter for many miles through the woods. This was the second victory gained in the course of the present war by Sir William Johnson, a man who had received no military education, and whose fitness for command was derived solely from natural courage and sagacity.1 Both his victories were signalised by the capture of the enemy's commanders. On the morning after July 25. the battle, Johnson sent an officer to communicate the result of it to the commandant of the garrison at Fort Niagara, and recommended an immediate surrender before more blood was shed, and while it was yet in his power to restrain the barbarity of the Indians and the commandant, having ascertained the truth of the tidings, capitulated without farther delay. The and capgarrison, consisting of between six and seven hundred effec- ture of tive men, marched out with the honours of war, and were gara. conveyed prisoners to New York. They were allowed to retain their baggage, and by proper escort, were protected from the ferocity and rapacity of the Indians. Though eleven hundred of these savages (chiefly of the confederacy of the Six Nations) followed Johnson to Niagara, so effectually did he restrain them, that not an incident occurred to rival or retaliate the scenes at Oswego and Fort William-Henry. The : "The war in general was distinguished by the singular success of Sir William Johnson and the celebrated Lord Clive, two self-taught generals, who, by a series of shining actions, have demonstrated that uninstructed genius can, by its own internal light and efficacy, rival, if not eclipse, the acquired advantages of discipline and experience."-Smollett. Fort Nia X. 1759. BOOK women, of whom a considerable number was found at Fort Niagara, were sent, at their own request, with their children to Montreal; and the sick and wounded, who could not sustain the fatigue of removal, were treated with humane attention. Although the army by which this success was achieved, whether from ignorance of the result of Wolfe's enterprise, or from some other cause more easily conjectured than ascertained, made no attempt to pursue the ulterior objects which had been assigned to its sphere of operation, and so far failed to fulfil its expected share of the campaign; yet the actual result of its exertions was gratifying and important in no ordinary degree. The reduction of Niagara effectually interrupted the communication, so much dreaded by the English between Canada and Louisiana: and by this blow, one of the grand designs of the French, which had long threatened to produce war, and which finally contributed to provoke the present contest, was completely defeated.1 General Wolfe, meanwhile, was engaged in that capital enterprise of the campaign which aimed at the reduction of Quebec. The army which he conducted, amounting to eight thousand men, having embarked at Louisburg, under convoy of an English squadron, commanded by Admiral Saunders and Holmes, after a successful voyage, disembarked, in the end of June, on the Isle of Orleans, a large fertile island surrounded by the waters of the St. Lawrence, situated a little below Quebec, well cultivated, producing plenty of grain, and abounding with inhabitants, villages, and plantations. Soon after his landing, Wolfe distributed a manifesto among the French colonists, acquainting them that the king, his master, justly exasperated against the French monarch, had equipped a powerful armament in order to humble his pride, and was determined to reduce the most considerable settlements of France in America. He declared that it was not against industrious peasants and their families, nor against the ministers of religion, that he wished or intended to make war: on the contrary, he lamented the misfortunes to which they were exposed by the quarrel; he offered them his protection, and promised to maintain them in their temporal possessions, as 1 See Note VII. at the end of the volume.. V. well as in the free exercise of their religion, provided they CHAP. would remain quiet, and abstain from participation in the controversy between the two crowns. The English, he observed, 1759. were masters of the river St. Lawrence, and could thus intercept all succours from France: and they had, besides, the prospect of a speedy reinforcement from the army which General Amherst was conducting to form a junction with them. The line of conduct which the Canadians ought to pursue, he affirmed, was neither difficult nor doubtful; since the utmost exertion of their valour must be useless, and could serve only to deprive themselves of the advantages which they might reap from their neutrality. He protested that the cruelties already exercised by the French upon the subjects of Great Britain in America, would sanction the most severe reprisals; but that Britons were too generous to follow such barbarous example. While he tendered to the Canadians the blessings of peace amidst the horrors of war, and left them by their own conduct to determine their own fate, he expressed his hope that the world would do him justice, and acquit him of blame, should the objects of his solicitude, by rejecting these favourable terms, oblige him to have recourse to measures of violence and severity. Having expatiated on the strength and power of Britain, whose indignation they might provoke, he urged them to recognise the generosity with which she now held forth the hand of humanity, and tendered to them forbearance and protection, at the very time when France, by her weakness, was compelled to abandon them. This proclamation produced no immediate effect: nor, indeed, did the Canadians place much dependence on the assurances of a people whom their priests had industriously represented to them as the fiercest and most faithless enemy upon earth. Possessed with these notions, they disregarded the offered protection of Wolfe, and, abandoning their habitations, joined the scalping parties of the Indians who skulked among the woods, and butchered all the English stragglers whom they could surprise, with the most inhuman barbarity. Wolfe, in a letter to Montcalm, remonstrated against these enormities as contrary to the rules of war between civilized nations, and dishonourable to the service of France. But either the authority of Montcalm was not sufficient, or it was not exerted X. BOOK with sufficient energy, to bridle the ferocity of the savages; who continued to scalp and murder with such increase of ap1759. petite for blood and revenge, that Wolfe, in the hope of intimidating the enemy into a cessation of this style of hostility, judged it expedient to connive at some retaliatory outrages, from which the nobleness of his disposition would otherwise have revolted with abhorrence. From his position in the Isle of Orleans, the English commander had a distinct view of the danger and difficulty by which his enterprise was confronted. Quebec is chiefly built on a steep rock on the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, and additionally defended by the river St. Charles, which, flowing past it on the east, unites with the St. Lawrence immediately below the town, and consequently incloses it in a peninsular situation. Besides its natural barriers, the city was tolerably fortified by art; secured with a numerous garrison, and plentifully supplied with provisions and ammunition. In the St. Charles, whose channel is rough, and whose borders are intersected with ravines, there were several armed vessels and floating batteries; and a strong boom was drawn across its mouth. On the eastern bank of this stream, a formidable body of French troops, strongly entrenched, extended their encampment along the shore of Beaufort to the falls of the river Montmorency, having their rear covered by an almost impenetrable forest. At the head of this army was the skilful, experienced, and intrepid Montcalm, the ablest commander whom France had employed in America, since the death of Count Frontignac, and who, though possessed of forces superior in number to the invaders, prudently determined to stand on the defensive, and mainly depend on the natural strength of the country, which, indeed, appeared almost insurmountable. He had lately reinforced his troops with five battalions embodied from the flower of the colonial population: he had trained to arms all the neighbouring inhabitants, and collected around him a numerous band of the most ancient and attached Indian allies of France. To undertake the siege of Quebec, against such means of opposition, was not only a deviation from the established maxims of war, but a rash and romantic enterprise. Wolfe, however, though fully aware of the hazard and difficulty of the achievement, |