TALES FROM THE TRENCHES
America Was 20 Minutes Away From
Being French
How French hubris determined the fate of North
America.
ROBERT BATEMAN
07.23.16 12:01 AM ET
Go there at dawn.
The Plains of Abraham are located in what is now downtown Quebec City,
Canada, immediately adjacent to the Citadel of Quebec and the walls of the
Old City.
While the open spaces of this aesthetically pleasing park are easy on the
eyes at any hour, to open your mind to the long lines of Redcoats on the
western end of the plain, and the serried ranks of the White-frocked
Frenchmen opposing them with their backs to the city wall, you really need
to be alone. You need to see the space, the battlements beyond, without the
Frisbee tossing college students and the glazed-eyed lovers crisscrossing
the bloody battlefield before your eyes.
Go there at dawn. At dawn, one morning 257 years ago, the fate of a
continent and perhaps the world changed when a force of British Regulars
and American Rangers made it to the top of a cliff and with just two fatal
blasts from a line of muskets made history.
This battle, in 1759, was the culminating moment of what we think of as the
French and Indian War (the rest of the world knows it as the Seven Years
War). Yes, the war would continue on this continent for another year, but it
was that day, those 20 minutes, that made the difference.
For five years up to this point, the conflict see-sawed. The initial French
victories on this continent occurred along Lake Champlain and Lake
George (think “Last of the Mohicans”) under the leadership of the French
military commander, the Marquis de Montcalm. That string of successes,
however, did not last.
With the bold and newly promoted General James Wolfe at their head the
British (and it should be noted “Colonial”) troops reversed the tide. The
British had already captured the massive French fortress at Louisburg the
year before, when Wolfe was a Colonel, thereby opening up the Saint
Lawrence to the Royal Navy. As they controlled the entrance to the seaway,
moving upriver towards the jewel in France’s colonial crown, the fortified
city of Quebec was the logical next step.• Wolfe, returned to England, was
appointed a Brigadier and put in charge of that prong of the overall British
assault. He was 32 years old. He would not make 33.
Quebec City, in 1759, looked impressive. It was built where the mighty
Saint Lawrence went from dozens of miles wide to 1,000 yards, and at least
when seen from the river the formidable heights upon which the place
stood was a nightmare to attack. The British had been trying, ever since the
1690s, to no avail. But like all fortified places, it had its weak points. In this
case there were two, the geography, and French hubris.
Earlier attempts by the British over the preceding decades came to grief, in
no small part because of the very real difficulty of moving up the Saint
Lawrence without the benefit of an internal combustion engine. Reefs,
shoals, rocks, and hard shores all combined to make the river itself a major
combatant. And that was where the French hubris took over. Though
French ground commanders continually begged for more resources from
Versailles to construct defenses, the sea services pointed to the wrecked
efforts of the British, literally, to make the passage up the seaway and river
without expert local guides. To the French it was local knowledge, and
treacherous tides and rocks, that formed Quebec’s greatest bastion. A cashstrapped Versailles was more than willing to listen to this thesis of defense.
But Quebec City was vulnerable. Not from the water, that would have been
suicidal, but from the landward side. From “upriver,” as it were, the
defenses of the western landward approaches pretty much sucked. For
decades these were underfunded, incompetently built, and episodically
stopped in their construction by a Royal French Administration seeking
economy where they thought they might get it. The French would
ultimately lose that bet because they did not understand the intellectual
and administrative developments occurring in the United Kingdom.
See, although we now despise bureaucracy, this is because we are so used
to it and see it as an institutional inhibition. A plague. Something to be
avoided. But think about the past, before the invention of “Bureaus.”
In the 1700s these were new, an innovation, and something that was a
damned sight better than the quasi-medieval crud that had occurred
before, and the British were leading the way there. They had created
organizational institutions, and most importantly applied them to the very
real difficulties of controlling complex issues such as naval ship design, the
application of science to maritime efforts in issues like hydrographic
charting, and a whole host of other seemingly esoteric topics that seem,
“well DUH,” to us now. But these were groundbreaking at the time. For
example, the Royal Navy began, some years before this, to chart the oceans
of the entire planet. Not just generic coastlines, but depths and types of
ground underwater, all of it in detail, down to the fathom, as best they
could.
The French? Not so much. Local “experts” were far cheaper than any sort
of detailed hydrographic survey process. So they never went that route, and
because they did not, they came to believe in things like the “fact” that the
hazards of the Saint Lawrence Seaway and river were viable barriers to
anybody else being able to attack them as far up the route as Quebec. And
it was quite a way. From Louisburg, at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence,
(which the British captured, again, in 1758) it was still 650 nautical miles to
Quebec, and the last 300 or so were particularly dangerous.
So the French were not necessarily wrong in the 1600s, or the early 1700s.
The tides in the Seaway can run 5 knots in one direction and 3 knots in the
other, and both shores are granite. The tides also may rise and fall as much
as 10’-15’ in mere hours, changing everything. As a man who sails upon
oceans and bays in the modern age, I can tell you that is terrifying even
with modern GPS.
But by the middle of that century, the French were way off base. The
British came, with their Royal Navy, but they came with charts all the way,
because they were making them as they went along. In 150-some years the
French had never accurately charted the seaway and the river. But the
British were doing it, methodically, scientifically, as they moved upstream.
Then they marked the channels, setting buoys out along the narrow
sections, and making their “soundings” everywhere they went. These, like
other products of their new “bureaucratic” system, were to be spread about
the entire Royal Navy, forever more. It was something the French had
never done, out of cheapness and a belief that nobody else would or could
do such a thing. In short, hubris.
So, when in the late Spring of 1759 the British did work their way up the
seaway and then up the river, the French were caught off balance. It is
perhaps indicative of the Royal Navy’s competence that one of those
“Masters” of a British ship conducting the surveys as they went along was
then-Lieutenant James Cook. Yes, “that” James Cook, who later lapped the
planet a few times before dying in Hawaii. Charting each and every hazard,
the depths, the tidal flows and the prevailing winds, the Royal Navy
brought General James Wolfe’s command to striking distance. The Royal
Navy landed Wolfe on the Isle de Orleans in June, 1759.
Stymied by the scale of the defenses when he first arrived with his army
and accompanying fleet that summer, Wolfe initially had to settle for a
semi-conventional siege. “Semi” because the combination of water and
land was so complex.
We need a map, but a simple version would look like this: Draw one
slightly arced line across the bottom half of a page. Label that “St.
Lawrence.” Now vertically coming in from the top draw another line. This
is the very minor river known as the Charles. Finally, from about 80
degrees to the right (East) draw in one more line that intersects at the same
point. This is the “Northern Branch” of the same St. Lawrence, at the end
of the 13 mile-long island Isle de Orleans, as it rejoins the main line of the
river.
Draw a small circle where all points connect. That is the basin just outside
Quebec.
On the Upper Left of that intersection, on the ground, where the St Charles
and St. Lawrence Rivers combine, that is the low and high-ground of
Quebec City. On the top edge of the line that is the “Northern Branch”, that
stretch of coast, that is called “Beauport.” The wedge where the St
Lawrence (north and south) converge is the end of the previously
mentioned Isle de Orleans, where Wolfe originally landed. And with all this
water Wolfe, a landsman, had a significant quandary: How to assault from
the land side, since just beside Quebec the river was so narrow?
WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY
Death of General Wolfe (1727-1759), painting by Benjamin West.
His initial intention was to attack due north, assaulting the Beauport coast.
That did not work. Though he landed troops up there, the French general
confounded him. His “siege” was not complete, as the French could still get
supplies from the interior of Canada, down the river.
Such a siege could not last. Wolfe, outside the walls, needed to fight the
French before the freezing Canadian weather forced his fleet to leave and
left him and his men outside the walls in the dead of winter. Atop that, his
health was failing and some speculate that though recently engaged, the 32
year-old Wolfe had become fatalistic. The Royal Navy saved him.
Familiar now, by both presence and bold surveys, they believed they could
shoot through the narrows beside Quebec City and get “above” (that is to
say “upstream”, to the west) on the river. This they did. Now Wolfe had
options. He withdrew his forces from Beauport and moved them along the
south side of the St. Lawrence. There they met the ships.
Day after day elements of the fleet ran up and down the river, looking for
unguarded areas where Wolfe might land forces on the northern shore.
Nothing seemed to promise success without massive risk. But their
movements probably also contributed to the fatigue of the French seeking
to shadow them along the northern shore. Finally, Wolfe took that risk.
At 3am on 13 September 1759 Wolfe’s subordinate, Brigadier James
Murray, landed at the foot of the cliffs just upriver from Quebec. Wolfe
himself was not far behind. The landing was a master-stroke of Army-Navy
cooperation, and though it pains me to credit any navy, to the Royal Navy
should go most of the credit.
The evidence seems to support the legend to some degree that a French
speaking officer under Murray convinced the French forces above the
landing site that they (the British) were French themselves. The Brits
managed, at least, to land their initial forces unmolested on the low
ground. But the heights were before them, and unless they got atop they
would be sitting ducks.
To capture the small outpost at the top of the trail leading from the beach a
small force scaled some cliffs just to the east and then outflanked the single
narrow footpath leading up from the landing site. At the top was a
conventional force of the French Army blocking the way up the trail. The
British were led by a young-ish Lieutenant Colonel named Howe. A decade
and a half later he would command British forces, slowly and without
enthusiasm, as a general against the American rebels. But in 1759 he was a
vigorous young Lieutenant Colonel, climbing the shale heights with his 200
men of the elite “Light” battalion. Within an hour Wolfe had his
bridgehead, courtesy of Howe and his Light Infantrymen.
By 6:45 AM that morning Montcalm had the alarming news, a British force
was on the south side of the river, just outside the vulnerable western (land
side) walls of the upper part of the city. By placing themselves there the
British now also sat astride Montcalm’s only supply route, since the Royal
Navy owned the river. Pressed by time and circumstances the French
general made a fatal decision. He would take many of his French regulars,
as well as a significant number of the Canadian militia (and some Indian
allies), and confront the British on the open field of battle, outside of the
defensive walls of Quebec.
Montcalm sallied forth from the city not too long after 8:00 AM, though
most times in all of this are imprecise. To punish the British and keep his
own lines protected he pushed forward his Canadian backwoodsmen
militia and Native American allies arranged in skirmishing and harassing
formations on the flanks. It was their steady work that actually caused
most of the British casualties taken during the entire engagement. Their
sniping took place over the course of roughly an hour as the French main
line moved into position and actually caused the British to divert troops
from their own main line to protect the flanks. Finally Montcalm had his
main body assembled and in-line. They then moved to confront the now
steady line of around 4,500 British regulars. But Montcalm had a problem
with his own “regulars.” It was a problem of his own creation.
Although he nominally had five battalions of professional French regular
soldiers, those units were depleted. This was due to both his strategic need
to spread the professionals as best he could to threatened locations all
across Canada, as well as by the normal wastage of men and material under
frontier conditions. To mitigate these nominal and real losses Montcalm
made a fateful decision to augment the Regulars with colonial militia,
supplementing the Regulars with a significant percentage of Canadians.
But though this boosted raw numbers, those militia were never truly
integrated. They could not, in the short time allotted, learn the discipline
and drill to change from men accustomed to “open” and largely individual
behavior in combat along the frontier to solid infantry in the age of Linear
Warfare. Even if they wanted to, and it appears that many did not. This
mattered.
Because the irregulars were not, well, regular, the overall quality of the
“Regulars” went down. Ironically, those same sort of men provided great
support on the sides of Montcalm’s formation, and actually caused the
majority of the casualties that the British sustained. But their effect in the
center was fatal. As the French main line, the linear formations of the nowdegraded professionals approached the British line, it began to delaminate.
WINSTON FRASER/ALAMY
The Plains of Abraham are located in what is now downtown Quebec City,
Canada.
Rather than a single disciplined mass, the regiments came up somewhat
piecemeal. Adding to the problems for the French was the fact that some of
their regiments had a fairly high proportion of ill-disciplined new arrivals
from France itself in addition to the colonial supplement. Rather than
coming forward in one straight line the French had a bulging center, and
significant internal distractions.
For example, as one French regiment initiated fire…from much too far
away, the colonial elements of the regiment lay down (as was their normal,
frontier, practice) to reload. It takes a lot longer to reload a muzzle-loading
musket from the prone. This started the break-up, and they were more
than 100 yards away, meaning that their fire was ineffective anyway. So
when the regiment then moved forward the supplemental troops were still
prone, reloading. (This may be a generous description, it should be noted.)
Firing and reloading, the French main line continued to move forward,
albeit disjointedly. The British, for their part, stood stock still.
The main British line had been prone due to the earlier skirmishing fire,
but stood up when the French advance commenced. The Redcoats took the
French fire without moving, unsurprising since at 100+ yards a
smoothbore musket is not even remotely accurate. Closer and closer the
French came forward, however unevenly. At one hundred yards the
muskets of both sides were within killing range and just beyond that at
least some French units fired a second volley. Still the British held their
fire.
At fifty yards even the “Brown Bess” of the British infantry was moderately
accurate, and even then the British held their fire. General Wolfe had
ordered that they all load their muskets with double-shot, meaning two
balls of ammunition per barrel, and he wanted them to hold their fire until
the last moment, when such a volley would count the most. Finally, when
the French lines stood no more than forty yards away, the British opened
fire in one massive rippling volley. Battalion by battalion, platoon by
platoon, their fire ripped forward.
Somewhere in here Wolfe, the commanding General, took not one, or two,
but three rounds. His wrist, his belly (or groin, depending upon the
source), and a fatal one to the chest. But he would live long enough to learn
the outcome. Of course, that was not very long at all.
Because their muskets were all double-shotted, which reduces the range
but obviously doubles the potential killing power of that first volley, the
damage they displayed was impressive. In less than twenty seconds, as the
British barrage discharged in a disciplined mass, unit by unit down their
entire line, the French line was shredded. Then the British line took a few
steps forward (perhaps to get clear of their own smoke), reloaded, and did
it again. From the start of the French attack it had been, perhaps, 20
minutes. From the first British volley to the second, perhaps 240 seconds.
And now this was the end. In that vanishingly small space of time, the vast
majority of the French casualties went down, as did New France.
Because they were the losers, and because their record keeping was less
precise, the exact numbers for the French are hard to establish. Estimates
range from 600-1,500 men took a round in his body that morning. But
fairly clearly the utter shattering force that the French felt was because it
all came at one instant. Even the lower-end estimates put a figure that
makes it clear that almost one man in four was killed or wounded in a just
a few seconds. It was the epitome of “Shock.” The French recoiled, then
retreated. Among those taking rounds during the retrograde was Montcalm
himself. Though he lived long enough to get back inside the walls of
Quebec, he would be buried in a shell-hole there not long after.
Within twelve months “New France” was no longer, Canada was British,
and a border threat that might have kept American colonists from rebelling
and creating a new nation, no longer existed. Yes, just 20 minutes to
change the world.
Go to the Plain of Abraham at dawn. At dawn you may see them again, in
your mind’s eye — nervous new French recruits facing fire for the first time
under the colors of their King, and scarred old veterans of thirty years
service. In the silence you can find only at dawn you might hear the echoes
of commands rolling down the lines of the Redcoats, “Steady boys, steady.
Wait for it. Stand fast there. OK, parade-ground like
now…READY…LEVEL…FIRE!”
* The British and French saw seapower in distinctly different ways. The
British, around this time, were starting to develop based around control of
the seas. Sink the enemy, control the seas. Therefore the Army was just the
ammunition which the Navy “launched” when power was needed ashore.
The French saw seapower primarily as a way to move land armies and
supplies from A to B, and so much of their nascent doctrine was based
upon avoiding contact, and costly battles, to get to land where their armies
would then dominate the land.