Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire

Death or Victory

THE BATTLE OF QUEBEC AND THE BIRTH OF EMPIRE

DAN SNOW

To Mum and Dad

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Maps

Author’s Note

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Epilogue

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

‘One of the great battles of the world.’

FIELD MARSHAL MONTGOMERY

BATTLES CAN CHANGE the course of history. The fighting in North America that culminated with the battle James Wolfe fought outside the walls of Quebec on 13 September 1759 altered the world in a dramatic and lasting way. The dominance of the Anglo-Saxon model with its ideas of government, manners, trade, and finance was built on the British victory in what was truly a world war. Appropriately, I wrote this book during the course of a busy year spent all over the world. In Auckland, New Zealand, I wrote for a few hours every day and then took a fast stroll down to the glistening waters of the Hauraki Gulf to restore my energy. Every time I passed Wolfe Street I smiled; the shabby city street seemed to have little to do with the lanky, chinless, volatile commander of the British army at Quebec. It was, however, a powerful reminder of the enduring significance of the Seven Years War. Those events in the mosquito-ridden woods of New England and Canada, on the foaming seas off Western Europe, and in the shadow of the grand architecture of Quebec still matter. There are Wolfe Streets in cities in every corner of the world: Cape Town, Canberra, Baltimore, Houston, London, Liverpool, and Little Rock, Arkansas. On reflection it is not surprising that Auckland, a city that sprang into life during this time of Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy, should have a reference, however small, to a man who helped to bring that supremacy about.

The raising of the Union Flag over Quebec and the destruction of French power in North America were far more significant for world history than the subsequent American Revolution. The revolution was merely a squabble for control over the fruits of the British victory over France and her Native allies. At the end of the Seven Years War a continent rich in farmland, minerals, and raw materials fell into the lap of the Anglo-Americans. In time, this continent would become the engine of an international system based on the rule of law, commercialism, representative institutions, and the English language. In the twentieth century North America would play the key part in defending that system as it was challenged by militarism, fascism, and communism. It was the armourer, paymaster, granary, and provider of millions of troops to defend the world order that had been born as a result of the Seven Years War.

Britain defeated France in the Seven Years War because she was able to assemble a crushing advantage in men and ships, paid for by an unprecedented level of government borrowing. By the mid-eighteenth century the French crown was unable to mobilize the country’s superior wealth or manpower nearly as effectively as its smaller neighbour, Britain. The underfunded French navy was swept from the seas by a supremely professional British Royal Navy, while its army remained bogged down in a European war against enemies kept in the field by British loans. British victory owed much to favourable credit ratings. Yet the muskets still needed firing, the ships of the line still needed expert handling, the armies and raids still needed leadership, and the men who trudged along the frontiers of empire still needed to bear the heavy burden of campaigning, fighting, and surviving. The campaign and battle at Quebec in 1759 is a reminder that it was also a victory of flesh, blood, and grit. Indeed, the battle fought on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec, brief though it was, demonstrates that individuals and the choices they make matter hugely even in vast conflicts. British financial might may have projected Wolfe and his army deep into enemy territory and kept them fed and supplied but the capture of Quebec was not bound to follow.

A battle is celebrated, remembered, and studied not just because it is a decisive event, but because it looks and sounds like one. We cannot help but to be fascinated by its violent crescendos, its sounds, smells, and extremes of emotion, and the flight of one side or another. The mass of British subjects, at the time and since, could not understand or even picture a bond market and were unlikely to name streets after one, but battles can fill imaginations. To English-speaking peoples the victory at Quebec came to be seen as a milepost that marked their rise to global hegemony. Quebec symbolized, and still does, the seismic geo-political shift that occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century. A shift that changed the world for ever.

In attempting to tell the story of that summer in 1759 I have been assisted by friends, colleagues, and family in at least four countries. The book would not have existed were it not for my agent, Caroline Dawnay, and my auntie, Margaret MacMillan, a historian who I can only dream of emulating. Another historian I have always respected and to whom I now owe a debt of gratitude is Professor Robert Bothwell, an expert editor who helped me to avoid terrible mistakes and improve the book in no small measure. Arabella Pike at HarperCollins provided the unflagging support that one would expect from the latest in a line of martial types. It was a privilege to be allowed to renew my partnership with Martin Redfern when Arabella left on maternity leave. Carol Anderson was stunningly efficient. Sarah Hopper was her usual brilliant self on the pictures and Sophie Goulden had the patience of a rock as she steered the project home.

Museums and libraries all over the world have been unstintingly generous with their time and advice. Dorian Hayes at the British Library was a great source of suggestions. Valerie Adams at the Public Record Office in Belfast could not have been more helpful. Pieter Van der Merwe at the National Maritime Museum was very good to give up a morning to fire volley after volley of brilliant, if totally unrelated facts and ideas at me. Richard Kemp at the Somerset Military Museum went so far beyond the call of duty that I was embarrassed. Lizzy Shipton at the Rifles Museum, Salisbury, was a great help and Alan Readman, the assistant country archivist, West Sussex, Nora Hague at the McCord Museum, Montreal, Odile Girard at the Library and Archives Canada, and the team at Harvard all made research that little bit easier.

I was blessed with researchers, translators, and givers of advice. The book would not have been written without Gwyneth MacMillan in Quebec. She was efficient, intelligent, generous, and cheerful. Eddie Kolla in Paris was enormously helpful. Michael Manulak was very helpful in the opening stages. My sister, Rebecca Snow, is an expert in her own right and Roger Nixon and David Mendel were stalwarts; the latter walked me around Quebec bringing the eighteenth century alive on every street. Glen Steppler, Laurence Westgaph and Erica Charters were very good to me while Isabelle Pila and Brigitte Sawyer were vital translators.

Shuna and Katie Snow encouraged me and made me laugh through the process. My parents, Peter Snow and Ann MacMillan, were as unfailingly supportive as they have been of all my projects through the years. They read every word and, more importantly, they have always told me I could do it.

PROLOGUE

AN HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE the hated drummers marched along the rows of tents. Their sticks beat the ‘General’, driving a clear message into the sleeping brains of the men. Even those befuddled by ‘screech’, cheap rum brewed by boiling the sediment from molasses barrels, were dragged from their slumbers. Men clambered over their drowsy comrades and emerged into the open air. Their feet squelched in the urine-soaked ground, for soldiers invariably eased themselves at the entrance to their tents or even inside where they slept. For an hour a mass of figures in the semi-darkness jostled and cursed. But as the light grew so did their regularity. By the time the drummers beat the ‘Assembly’ at 0500 hours the tents had been struck, kit packed, weapons retrieved and the men bundled onto the assembly area to line up by company and regiment, ready for inspection, colours unfurled, sharp new flints securely fastened in the jaws of their muskets. Companies of between 50 and 100 men were commanded by a captain who knew every one of them by name. When he was happy that his men were properly attired, their weapons clean and thirty-six rounds in their cartridge cases he reported to the major or lieutenant colonel and soon the whole force was ready to march.

Groups of light infantrymen and rangers set off first. The British force had been in the heart of Canada for less than a week and they had been given a shocking immersion into the world of insurgency, sniping, ambush and Native American warfare. Bodies of soldiers that strayed from the riverbank were found horribly killed and mutilated, their scalps taken as trophies by Native Americans and the Canadians who had learnt their way of war from them. Civilians in this populous part of Canada were trapped in between. Their farmhouses ransacked, their provisions confiscated by hungry warriors. That very morning a patrol of British light troops had searched one house and finding no one set it on fire. A British officer reported that ‘they were alarmed with bitter shrieks and cries of women and children’. They had, apparently, ‘foolishly concealed themselves among some lumber in a cellar’. British troops ‘very humanely exerted themselves for the relief of those miserable wretches, but their best endeavours were ineffectual…these unhappy people perished in the flames’. The officer wrote in his diary that ‘Such alas! are the direful effects of war.’1 By the end of the summer an incident like this would barely raise a comment as atrocity fed atrocity and the campaign became a nightmare of terror, retribution, and disease.

This was the first serious push away from the beaches where the British had landed just days before. Major General James Wolfe, their commander, had ordered this force to move west, away from the comforting presence of the fleet anchored in the river, to tighten the noose around Quebec, a fortress said to be impregnable, capital of the vast French North American empire. They were to seize a prominent piece of ground called Point Lévis from where British guns could fire across the river into Quebec. The soldiers knew the French would not let this probing force march with impunity. The terrain favoured the defence with thick woodland and a steep rise overlooking the track. One British officer described the route as ‘no regular road’ but ‘only a serpentine path with trees and under-wood on every side of us’.2

Rangers led the column. They looked more like Native Americans than Christian subjects of King George with tomahawks at their waists, moccasins and powder horns, while a few even carried scalps of fallen enemies hanging from their belts. They were nearly all Americans recruited from the frontiers and despite their appearance and their unruly reputation (the French dubbed them ‘the English savages’) their skill in this kind of conflict meant that they could command twice the pay of red-coated regular infantrymen. Some carried the long, accurate rifle but most thought that the Brown Bess musket, possibly with a few inches sawed off the end to make it lighter, was a better weapon for close quarters bush fighting. It was quicker to reload and capable of firing buckshot. Alongside them was a new brand of British regular, the light infantryman. They had been introduced by innovative officers to try to improve the British army’s woeful performance in the wilderness fighting of North America. They were picked men who had been selected for having a sharp mind, an ability to improvise and a true aim. Major General Wolfe had written careful instructions. The light troops were to ‘post detachments in all the suspected places on the road to prevent the columns from being fired at, from behind trees, by rascals who dare not show themselves’. As the column marched past the light troops would then fall in as the rear guard.3 They had not advanced far before the woods echoed to the bangs of muskets and rifles, the howls of wounded and the shriek of the Native Americans, allies of the French.

The men of the North American tribes were bred as warriors. Martial prowess was highly prized and even in times of peace young men picked fights with neighbouring groups in order to win acclaim. Prisoners, in Native cultures, could replace relatives who had fallen in battle or could be tortured expertly so that their pain assuaged that of the family of a fallen brave. In the two centuries since Europeans had introduced gunpowder into North America the Native Americans had mastered the musket and rifle and men had honed their marksmanship for hunting as well as war. At close quarters they were just as skilled with tomahawk or knife. Their terrible reputation for savagery, together with expert bushcraft, exotic tattoos, and haunting war cries, had all conspired to send many British units into total panic at even the prospect of an encounter. The Canadians of European descent were no less fearsome. Canada had only just survived in the face of an unforgiving climate and constant hostility from some tribes. Her young men had adapted to the North American way of war and to many outsiders they were indistinguishable from the Native warriors. As the British force pushed along the track the biggest challenge was overcoming the massive psychological inferiority that years of ambush, slaughter, and defeat had bred in the men. The redcoats were edgy. One officer reported an unfortunate ‘friendly fire’ incident in which a light infantryman shot one of his corporals, and the wounded man had to be carried on ‘a blanket with skewers to two poles’. It took six men to carry the casualty and they were ‘relieved every quarter of an hour’.4

Wolfe would report to his political masters in London that the force had ‘two or three skirmishes’ but the evidence from those who actually sweated up to Point Lévis, clutching their muskets and scanning the unfamiliar woodland for any movement, suggests that it was not as casual as Wolfe made it sound.5 A Highlander who acted as his regiment’s bard gives a graphic description in a Gaelic song: ‘the marshalling was under Beaumont/ those ranks were handsome/ sent up to Pointe Levis/ to test the warriors;/ Indians and Frenchmen/ were very close to us in the bushes/ wrecking the heads/ and the legs that belonged to us!’6 As the soldiers skirted the shore many caught their first horrifying glimpses of this new kind of war. One young Scotsman was horrified at the sight of several British corpses, ‘all scalped and mangled in a shocking manner’. He wrote that, ‘no human creature but an Indian could be guilty of such inhuman cruelty,’ but changed his journal to read, ‘no human creature but an Indian or Canadian could be guilty of such inhumanity as to insult a dead body’.7 His men were uncowed though, if the Gaelic war song is to be believed: ‘when we were fully drawn up/ in line of battle/ and watching them/ to see if they would wait and give us satisfaction/ they sprayed fire into our faces/ but they got it back in return;/ they took fright/ when they recognised us’.8 The hit and run tactics of the Canadians and Native Americans could slow the British advance but not stop it. In a series of mini engagements, the light infantry and the rangers edged forward towards Point Lévis. One sergeant called it a ‘sharp skirmish of near two hours’ and said ‘we sustained a considerable loss of killed and wounded’.9 An officer wrote that in the end the French forces could not ‘withstand our fire and numbers’ and put the casualty figure at ‘thirty killed and wounded’.10 The fighting had been intense enough to make their commander think about turning back.

As the exhausted men fought their way onto the cleared ground around Point Lévis they gazed across the St Lawrence River in awe. There, around half a mile away, was Quebec. It occupied one of the most powerful natural positions of any town or city in the world. Fine buildings with tall sloping roofs and churches with high spires sat above cliffs which soared out of the St Lawrence. The walls atop the cliffs bristled with cannon and beyond the city a great army was camped along the shoreline. Those with telescopes scanned its defences knowing that they could very well be asked to storm its walls. One was dismayed by what he saw: ‘their situation appears to be very strong by nature, and…they are very numerous’. Even from this far away he could pick out lines of trenches and redoubts and, also, ‘throughout their camp there are a continued chain of houses, the windows of which are logged up for the service of musketry’.11

It had been a bloody morning. The men who now gazed on Quebec and its defenders realized that it was simply a prologue. Before the waters of the mighty river froze in winter the British force would have to capture Quebec or face an ignominious retreat that could derail the entire British war effort not just in North America but in distant Europe too. Defeat was not an option, yet the soldiers staring out at Quebec knew that they could well pay a terrible price for victory.

ONE

Assault on New France

THERE WERE SHIPS in the St Lawrence. Not an armada, but a squadron powerful enough to dominate the river. Around ten in all, seven of them were obviously warships; their hulls were chequered with gun ports. The largest was a fine man of war with eighty guns, a match for any craft afloat. The air was heavy with fog. The vessels drifted in and out of banks of cloud and cohesion was maintained by the largest ship firing one of its cannon at regular intervals. Sharpeyed officers of the watch saw an eruption of white smoke with a momentary stab of fire at its centre, seconds later came the deep sound of the explosion, echoing back off the banks of the river as the shorelines slowly converged.1

The river had grown narrower. After days of sailing up the Gulf of St Lawrence where the land was barely visible on either side, the crews could now see clearly either shore. On the north side it was spectacular: high, near vertical slopes, covered with spruce trees, broken only by the occasional section of cliff, damp with water that gave them a bright sheen during rare bursts of sunshine. On the south side, only twenty-two miles away, the coastline was flatter but beyond it, another mountain range reminded the crews of the vast, wild nature of the country.

There was a large island, separated from the south shore by a gap of just over three miles. With a good natural harbour the Île du Bic had, for centuries, been an easily defensible haven for ships on the passage up or down the river and home to a small community of priests and pilots. Here the largest ship broke out a large plain white flag, or ensign, at its mizzen. It was the ‘Bourbon Banner’, symbol of the Bourbon kings of France. On the shore the inhabitants, who had been keenly examining the ships for clues as to their nationality, broke out into ‘the greatest rejoicing imaginable’.2

This was the gateway to Canada, the jewel in the crown of New France, a vast French empire that stretched from the North Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains and down to New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. But its great size was matched by its vulnerability and especially now that France was at war. Her ancient rivalry with England, inherited in 1707 by the newly created Britain, had been revived at the end of the seventeenth century and they had fought a series of wars, each greater than the last, separated by periods of unconvincing peace. No longer did Englishmen strive to carve out dynastic empires in France itself; instead, the fighting surged across the almost limitless horizons of newly discovered continents, dragging in the settlers of the adolescent colonial empires. For four years New France had been fighting the British whose colonies in North America clung to the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts down to Georgia. At the beginning of each campaigning season when the ice melted in the St Lawrence River, the artery of Canada, the settlers, or habitants, waited nervously to see what help France would send to her North American possessions. This year, it seemed, France had been generous in her aid. The people of Bic rushed into canoes and paddled out to greet the ships, which they assumed were carrying the food, gunpowder, soldiers, and gold which New France so desperately needed to hold back the British and their American colonial allies.

The enthusiastic Canadians scrambled up the towering sides of the hulls on slippery, shallow steps that formed a vertical ladder. But as soon as they reached the deck, their euphoria was instantly extinguished. Rather than receiving a warm welcome from fellow subjects of the Most Christian King, Louis XV of France, they found themselves with British oak beneath their feet, and the muskets and cold steel of red-coated marines pointed at their bellies. The ships were British. It was 23 May 1759: the war had arrived in the heart of the French empire. This Royal Naval squadron under the command of Rear Admiral of the Red, Philip Durell, had been given the task of blockading Canada; to cut it off from any help that France might send, and hasten its capitulation.

On shore the joy of the habitants turned to confusion as they waited for the canoes to return, then to ‘consternation, rage and grief’ as they saw ‘the White colours struck, and the British flags, hoisted in their place’. Apparently, a priest who had been avidly watching the proceedings with a telescope clamped to his eye, ‘dropped down and instantly expired’.3 With an age-old ruse de guerre Durell had lured experienced Canadian pilots on board, men he desperately needed to complete his mission.

The squabbles of European monarchs had poisoned relations between their colonies in the Americas since those continents had been discovered 250 years before. The ambitions of Louis XIV in Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain had pushed England into armed opposition. Fighting had spread from Western Europe to the wildernesses of the Carolinas or northern New Hampshire as it had to West Africa and Asia. But the current conflict was different. Long the victims of Europe’s wars, the colonies now became their instigators. As their size, populations, and economies had all swelled they developed their own ambitions, interests, and points of friction with the colonies of other powers. While Europe would never lose its primacy in policymakers’ minds, by the mid-eighteenth century French and British politicians found themselves increasingly impelled by colonial considerations. In the late 1740s ambitious British colonials had crossed the Allegheny Mountains and started trading with the Native American inhabitants of the Ohio valley. The British colonies had always claimed the entire continent as far as the Pacific but the barrier of the Alleghenies and the hostility of the Native Americans beyond them had prevented them from ever making these claims a reality. Now these adventurers hoped to sell vast swathes of this fertile land to migrants from the colonies, who would then provide a market for manufactured goods that they would supply. Little attention was paid to French assertions of sovereignty in the area, and none at all to those of the Native Americans.