Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (8 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Precise advice on how to take Quebec came from Captain Robert Stobo, one of the prisoners handed over by Washington as an earnest when he evacuated Fort Necessity in 1755. Stobo had lived as a prisoner since, in Fort Duquesne and then Quebec, though he circulated easily in Quebec society, until apprehended as a spy for having smuggled out of Fort Duquesne, via an Indian, plans he had drawn of Duquesne that were found in the belongings of the deceased Braddock after the disaster on the Monongahela. Stobo escaped Quebec, spoke only to Wolfe, and advised him of a footpath up the cliffs at what has become known as Wolfe’s Cove. Thus arose the plan for one of history’s decisive military battles.
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Wolfe moved about 4,500 men on the tides up-river from Quebec, then down on the current in the early hours of September 12, mounted Stobo’s path to a site above known as the Plains of Abraham, and overwhelmed a small French tent encampment. Wolfe was apparently beset by morose thoughts, as well as indecision, finding himself alone on the Plains. He ordered that disembarkations stop, but the landing officer assumed the order was mistaken and ignored it. Montcalm had been distracted by a carefully played ruse to the east of Quebec, and only arrived on the Plains after Wolfe’s men had been drawn up across the Plains. By 9:30 in the morning Montcalm was concerned that the British were bringing up artillery from the ships and entrenching themselves in a manner that would become irreversible if didn’t act, and ordered his men forward. In fact, Wolfe had had one of his attacks of inertia and the British were bringing up artillery but not entrenching; Montcalm had summoned a detachment of 2,000 of his best troops from the west, who he hoped would land in Wolfe’s rear once battle was engaged.
There were about 4,500 men on each side, though the British had the advantage of better trained and disciplined forces. There is a good deal of anecdotal evidence that neither commander expected to survive the engagement about to begin. In this at least, their provisions were exact. The French attacked in rather ragged order, supported by Indians and irregular skirmishers who sniped from the sides. The British coolly held their fire, and the professionalism of the Redcoats paid handsome rewards—they drenched the French with artillery and pushed them into what became a rather uncoordinated but not panicky retreat to Quebec. Wolfe had been wounded early on the wrist, but was mortally hit by snipers in the chest and stomach as he joined the advance. Just before he died, he received the information that the French were vacating the field and that it was certainly a victory. Only a few minutes later, the column Montcalm had been hoping for arrived in the British rear, but the British, now commanded by Brigadier George Townshend, were able to deflect them. Montcalm had been severely wounded on his retreat from the Plains, in his stomach and leg. He fell into a delirium and died at 4 a.m. the following morning.
The governor general of New France, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, took over. He ordered the forces Montcalm had been whipping into shape to the east of Quebec when Wolfe attacked from the west to retreat inland and westward; the remains of the army at the Plains to join them; both groups to join with the column that had arrived from the west just after they could have been decisive; Quebec to hang on as best it could; and the forces that managed to execute the maneuver to retreat toward Montreal, the final significant outpost of French rule in North America. (New Orleans was an unfortified, international crossroads of adventurers.) The French irregulars had no enthusiasm for prolonging the suspense at Quebec and accepted Townshend’s generous surrender terms on September 18. Montcalm’s deputy commander, François de Lévis, had taken over the fragmented units from Vaudreuil, had shaped them up, and was leading them crisply back to Quebec and was only a day’s march away when Quebec surrendered.
The historic importance of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, as determining the fate of Canada, and the expulsion of the French from North America, amplified by the drama of the two brave and capable commanders dying on the field, mythologically immortalized by the paintings of the death scenes by Benjamin West of Wolfe and by Louis Watteau of Montcalm, have obscured what a close and often farcical encounter it was. If Wolfe had approached Quebec more closely and quickly and put in hand the measures to start a siege, preventing westward sorties from the city, Montcalm would have been bottled up. If Montcalm had waited an hour before attacking, his relief force would have arrived in the British rear almost simultaneously. If Quebec had held out another two days, Lévis would have mauled Townshend very badly.
Because the British would now have to spend the winter in Quebec, 7,000 troops with 7,000 civilians, in a heavily damaged town with accommodation and food for the winter for just 7,000 and winter closing off the possibility of resupply, Brigadier Murray, to whom Townshend bequeathed command when he took the last ship out on October 18, formalized what would be a genuinely historic policy that would ramify constructively through centuries to come, of close and equal cooperation between the British and the French in Canada.
There would not be such rejoicing at the military capture of a town in North America until the fall of Atlanta to General Sherman 105 years later (Chapter 6), and in Britain, a thousand bonfires of celebration blazed. It was a particular relief to Pitt, as Wolfe’s last dispatches had been quite gloomy. Pitt’s eulogy of the fallen commander remains one of the classics of British parliamentary oratory: “The horror of the night, the precipice scaled by Wolfe, the empire he with a handful of men added to England, and the glorious catastrophe of contentedly terminating life where his fame began—ancient story may be ransacked and ostentatious philosophy thrown into the account before an episode can be found to rank with Wolfe’s.” A monument was raised to Wolfe in the slightly out-of-the-way place of Greenwich, only a few hundred yards from where the Meridian would be set (Chapter 7). The French were not so preoccupied with Quebec, though they found the succession of British victories very tiresome, but Choiseul’s policy of an invasion of England had gained no traction. The French fleet at Toulon, which had taken Minorca, tried to skip the Mediterranean and gather in the Channel. The ever-vigilant Boscawen saw it sneak past Gibraltar, gave chase, destroyed five of the French ships at the Battle of Lagos (Portugal, not Nigeria), and blockaded the rest into Cádiz.
9. THE WAR IN EUROPE, 1759
 
But the main French naval forces, at Brest in Britanny, joined with returning forces from the Caribbean and sought to take advantage of traditionally stormy weather in the autumn to slip the blockade of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, who had developed the technique of rotating several of his ships at a time home for refit, provisioning and home leave, and maintaining the watch constantly. Hawke and the French naval commander, the Count de Conflans, came to grips on November 20 in tempestuous weather in Quiberon Bay. A wild action ensued, in which there was no effort to coordinate between different ships in each command, and in the melee and the succeeding grounding of French ships in the Vilaine River, the British lost two ships and 300 men and the French ultimately 17 ships and 2,500 men. The French navy was in no position to conduct invasion barges across the Channel, even had the weather allowed, and Quiberon Bay was a victory on the scale of Drake’s, and of Howe’s and Nelson’s to come. Pitt’s strategy was triumphant, and Choiseul’s, as designs based on the invasion of Britain inevitably are, was a complete failure.
The continental campaign had not gone well for the Anglo-Prussian alliance, however. Hanover was safe enough, but Frederick’s bellicosity had caught up with him. The Russians won some victories on the Eastern Front, the Austrians forced the surrender of a Prussian corps at Maxen (13,000 men), and at Kunersdorf on August 12, in the greatest defeat of his career, Frederick lost half his army (21,000 men) to the Russians, who, not for the last time in the history of these countries, had been completely underestimated. The Austrians occupied Dresden, and Saxony, Frederick’s initial prize in the war, was largely lost. Frederick contemplated abdication and even suicide and began frenzied importuning of Pitt to convene a peace conference. Prince Louis of Brunswick, the Dutch regent and a presentable neutral, but the brother of the British ally Prince Ferdinand, duly invited the combatants to parlay, but the Austrians and Russians were not interested. Nor, really, were the French. No one, including the British banker of Frederick’s military impetuosities (and his brother-in-law George II), much cared what happened to the Prussians.
The odd Anglo-Prussian alliance, with Pitt everywhere victorious and Frederick on the ropes, surged and staggered into 1760. Pitt was running out of French colonies to attack, but France had the largest army in Europe, and in the same measure that the British were determined to keep continental and especially French armies out of England, they had no land war capacity to do more in France than amphibious pin-pricks along the coast, which were almost always costly failures anyway. It was a stand-off, a shark and a lion. But a general peace could not be had until the Austrians and Russians wearied of the war with Prussia, which had Frederick, in a frenetic war of maneuver, endlessly showing the prowess of his well-trained troops, marching all about his frontiers repelling intruders at every hand. His opponents finally had a coordinated plan: The Austrians would again try to take Silesia and advance from Saxony, the Russians would attack from East Prussia, and whichever column encountered Frederick was to try to tie him up while the others made for Berlin.
The endless scrambling around the edges of a gradually imploding Prussia continued all year. Frederick, though outnumbered, ejected the Austrians from Silesia yet again. The Russians, with an Austrian contingent, briefly occupied Berlin in October, but withdrew as Frederick hastily returned. The Russian empress, Elizabeth, would be the only Russian leader to occupy Berlin until Joseph Stalin arrived at the Potsdam Conference in Frederick’s palace in 1945, at the head of the 360 divisions of the Red Army (Chapter 11). The year of relentless warfare in Germany ended with the Battle of Torgau on November 2, west of Dresden, which was effectively a draw between the Austrians and Frederick’s smaller army. Frederick’s resourcefulness was starting to wear down his enemies, but even now, no serious peace discussions took place. The war in India also continued well for the British, and France had no capacity at all to resupply its forces there.
10. THE END OF THE WAR IN AMERICA, 1760
 
In America, Montreal was effectively the last prize. Lévis made a spirited effort to retake Quebec in April but was repulsed, and Amherst encroached on Montreal over the summer and it was surrendered, at least honorably and with generous terms for the civil population, by Governor Vaudreuil, on September 8, 1760. With the fall of Quebec and Montreal to the English, the war for North America was effectively over. In London, America’s greatest intellectual, Benjamin Franklin, was back as the envoy of Pennsylvania, as of 1757, and he shared in the widespread concern in some American circles that Britain might bargain Canada back to France for Martinique and trade Guadeloupe for Minorca. All his conscient life up to this time, Franklin had cherished a view of the endless growth of America, and noted early regarding the growth of the American population, doubling every 20 years or so, that “it will in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the water.”
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He strongly objected to the British custom of prescribing the death penalty for far too many offenses, and of substituting for the gallows the transportation of such convicts to America. He approved the imposition of tariffs on the convicts’ admission (invalidated by the British Parliament), and even sponsored the return to Britain of a shipload of rattlesnakes as a gesture of thanks for the receipt in America of so many hardened criminals.
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Franklin chafed at unreasonable laws imposed from overseas, but continued to regard himself as an Englishman living in America. Franklin disapproved the emigration of Germans in such numbers that they might not assimilate to the English language,
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but reasoned that the prosperity, relative absence of war, more abundant agriculture, standard of living, and general levels of nutrition and energy in America were so superior to those in Britain that America would surpass the British population without one more person embarking in Britain for America. Franklin was correct, and would have been even without the huge waves of assimilated immigration from central and southern Europe, or the famine-driven half of the entire Irish population that made ship for America and Canada in the middle of the next century. Franklin included such thoughts in his
Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.
He wrote nothing of his long-term notions of political organization of relations with the home country, but when the North American victory became clear, he agitated and lobbied strenuously for the British retention of Canada. As agent for Pennsylvania, Franklin rarely met Pitt (until later, less intense times for Pitt, when they became quite friendly), but he had a close relationship with Pitt’s secretaries, Potter and Wood, and was continually pipelining in his urgings for the conquest and retention of Canada.
When this appeared to be in hand, in 1760, it was assumed in Britain that peace was near, as the British sea superiority and French land superiority made it hard to discern where the war would continue. The Earl of Bath wrote a pamphlet promoting retention of Canada, and it was widely thought, but never confirmed and now seems unlikely, that Franklin effectively ghost-wrote much of it. Edmund Burke wrote a trenchant championship of retention of Guadeloupe and the return of Canada, as Louisbourg had been returned by the Peace of Aix-la-Chappelle in 1748. Franklin openly entered this controversy, writing “I have long been of opinion that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though, like other foundations, they are low and little now, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure that human wisdom ever erected.... If we keep it, all the country from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people ... the Atlantic sea will be covered with your trading ships; and your naval power, thence continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole world, and awe the world. If the French remain in Canada, they will continually harass our colonies by the Indians, and impede, if not prevent their growth; your progress will at best be slow.”
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This was from a letter to Lord Kames but was reprinted in what became known as Franklin’s
The Canada Pamphlet.

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