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The Seven Years’ War had a strange dynamic. The British had suffered an almost endless stream of defeats at Monongahela, Oswego, and Fort William Henry, but the British government’s response to each defeat was to up the ante and send more troops. However, instead of sending enough reinforcements to exploit the above-mentioned victories, Paris would throw tens of thousands of men into European battlefields but only dispatch token reinforcements to Canada. It was if the French government felt that since the tiny armies in North America were able to win victories, more men were not really needed. Aside from a lack of reinforcements, the Canadian militia had been neglecting their farms and the Royal Navy was successfully preventing France from supplying the colony. Realizing that he had limited resources, Montcalm, the French commander, decided to concentrate his troops at Fort Carillon on Lake George and send no reinforcements to the other French strong points. Governor Vaudreuil strongly opposed this static strategy, pointing out that the French colonists had routinely kept the British off-balance with sudden raids and there was no reason to abandon such a successful strategy.

Loudon, the British commander, had failed to capture the key French fortress Louisbourg and had lost both Oswego and Fort William Henry, while his lack of people skills had created conflict with every governor in the colonies, so he was replaced by Major General James Abercromby, on the express order of George II and against Pitt’s will. It was his first independent command but given Pitt’s astonishingly precise orders it was not really an independent command. Abercromby was told to take Fort Carillon, Major General Jeffrey Amherst was to assault Louisbourg and Duquesne was given to Brigadier General John Forbes. The strained relationship with the governors was easily solved by Pitt’s announcement that the king would pay for the war. The governors happily raised militia units and by early summer, twenty thousand regulars and militia had gathered, although given their lack of training, the value of the militia was limited.

Fifteen thousand of those men were to march on Fort Carillon but the British Indian allies were not as confident as the British and refused to risk another disaster, so they stayed at home, thus depriving Abercromby of information. Since it had taken so long to gather the militia, there was no time to train them, but his second in command, Brigadier General George Howe, and Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage, a veteran of Major General Edward Braddock’s 1755 campaign, taught the light infantry to fight using cover.

Located on the southern part of Cape Breton Island, Louisbourg was vital because it was a key trading hub between France, New France and the French colonies in the West Indies. In addition, French control of the fortress would make any attempt to sail a fleet up the St. Lawrence to attack Quebec City a very hazardous venture, so the threat had to be eliminated. Commanded by the chevalier de Ducour with a garrison of 3,500 soldiers and another 3,500 sailors and marines, it was a powerful fortress but all of its defenses were directed seawards. Learning from the previous year’s mistakes, the British blockade had been mounted early enough to ensure that only a handful of French ships were able to bring supplies to Louisbourg. A huge fleet of 140 transports and 40 warships left Halifax on May 29 with the 14,000 troops, almost all regulars, of Amherst’s army. Relying on two diversionary attacks to distract the French, Amherst landed a large part of his force on June 7 and began the siege. Actually, he felt the best approach would be to have the warships force their way in to the harbor, but Admiral Boscawen feared that his ships would be trapped in the harbor, so the army had to do it the hard way, digging trenches closer and closer to the fort and then build secure positions for the artillery. This naturally took time and was dangerous but on June 19 the British guns started the bombardment. The cannon steadily demolished the walls while mortars destroyed buildings and even ships in the harbor.

Defeat was inevitable but Ducour held out as long as he could in order to prevent the British from using the summer weather to continue to Quebec, so the garrison of Louisbourg had to bear this punishing fire for weeks. By July 26, the French had had enough and surrendered, although they briefly reconsidered when they learned that Amherst refused to grant them the “honors of war” in revenge for the massacre at Fort William Henry the year before. Immediately following the surrender, British engineers began demolishing the fortress to ensure that it could not be used again by the French.

The army of roughly 6,000 regulars and 9,000 colonial troops left Fort Edward on July 5 and managed to move across Lake George undetected past Montcalm’s scouts by rowing at night, so the troops were able to land unopposed near Fort Carillon. The army was moving towards the fort when Howe was killed while leading the light troops during a skirmish with French troops. However, he had trained his men well and the French force was quickly surrounded and destroyed. Unfortunately, the main body of regulars had not been as well trained and became so disorganized during the march that no progress was made that day. Worse, many troops were unnerved by sounds from outside the camp and fired at shadows, frequently hitting their own patrols. Despite the confusion, victory seemed guaranteed since Montcalm had only 3,600 regulars, militia and Indians.

However, the delay had given Montcalm enough time to dig in on the ground that overlooked the fort, in order to prevent the British from putting artillery there and shelling the fort. It was an impressive achievement for a day’s work but there had not been enough time to protect the sides. The British did not carefully examine the French positions and from far away they did look weak but they found a rude surprise when they attacked on July 8. Montcalm had put his best marksmen on the front line and assigned other troops to reload for them so the French line was literally pouring fire into the advancing British. Abercromby made no effort to send men around either of the weakly defended flanks and rashly decided against waiting for artillery. Several British units, most notably the fierce Black Watch (Scottish Highlanders), repeatedly made it to the French positions but were driven back each time.

By the end of the day, both sides had taken appalling losses but the French still held their ground. Abercromby’s decision to order a retreat after wasting so many lives earned him the ridicule of his men but Montcalm knew that he was still heavily outnumbered and refused to follow the British as they returned to Fort William Henry. The British had taken casualties of 1,944 against French casualties of 372.

Amherst had initially intended to continue on to Quebec but when he learned that Abercromby had failed to take Fort Carillon, he decided to return to Boston because the colonies were now vulnerable.

Abercromby’s senior officers pressed him to make a second attack in order to preserve their careers but only Lt. Col. John Bradstreet suggested a different target. He persuaded Abercromby to let him lead 3,600 men, almost all militia assembled at Albany, against Fort Frontenac, on the eastern end of Lake Ontario (modern-day Kingston, Ontario). He failed to recruit Indian allies because Frontenac was a valuable trading post. Bradstreet was the perfect choice for this command since he had previously been responsible for supplying Oswego, on the southern part of Lake Ontario. As a result, he had mastered the use of bateaux, which were invaluable given the reliance on waterways in North America, since one could transport twenty-five men and their supplies. Unfortunately, the route was extremely difficult, since Oswego had been captured and destroyed two years earlier. The exhausting labor of dragging their boats on portage after portage had driven six hundred men to desert by the time the army reached the ruins at Oswego. The hard work paid off because most of the garrison had been sent to reinforce Montcalm at Carillon. Not having faced an attack for eighty-five years, the French had become lax and Bradstreet was able to get his boats across Lake Ontario unnoticed. He started shelling the fort on August 26 and the tiny French garrison of a hundred men surrendered the next morning. Grateful for his men’s sacrifice, Bradstreet told the men to divide his share of the captured furs.

After destroying the fort, Bradstreet led his men home, content with the sole British victory, knowing that the French would no longer be able to supply Forts Duquesne and Niagara, and even western forts like Michilimackinac. Aside from the huge amount of provisions, Bradstreet had also captured nine small ships that inexplicably did not simply sail away when the commander had received a warning from Indian allies several days before. The ships would have quite likely destroyed the fleet of bateaux if they had attacked when the enemy was on the open water of Lake Ontario. The ease of the victory illustrated the key problem of the French, namely that they could not properly defend all of their strong points, so they had to anticipate British movements or better yet seize the initiative. The French government’s policy of claiming more land than it could colonize meant that the military was horribly overextended.

Forbes had been given fourteen hundred regulars and five thousand militia to destroy Duquesne. Pennsylvania and Virginia each contributed two thousand men, and George Washington commanded a regiment of Virginia militia. Forbes consulted with the local officers but refused to accept their suggestion that he follow Braddock’s original route. Instead, he chose an alternate route, which necessitated hacking out a new road through central Pennsylvania to Duquesne. The issue of the road’s location became a bone of contention between Pennsylvania and Virginia, since once the French were finally evicted from Ohio, colonists would flood there along whichever road already existed, thus benefiting the colony where the road originated. He also became so sick from dysentery that he had to be carried around on a litter but he persisted in leading the campaign.

Forbes wanted to ensure that the march went smoothly so he sent fifteen hundred men under Lt. Col. Henry Bouquet, his second in command, to prepare Loyal Hannon, a base forty miles from Duquesne. Lacking Indian allies, Bouquet’s work parties were frequently ambushed by French and Indian parties, so he allowed Major James Grant to lead 750 men, half of his force, to observe the fort. Unknown to Bouquet, Grant believed that the fort was weakly defended and hoped for the glory of capturing it. The fort was indeed weak since part of the garrison had been sent to help defend Carillon, but Captain Francois-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, the commander, was not a fool. However, the destruction of Fort Frontenac had cut his supply line, so he knew that he had to slow down the British until the fall rains would make the roads impassable. Once again, the French Indian allies quickly discovered that a relatively small British force was coming and prepared an ambush, which Grant obligingly walked into on September 14. Having encountered no resistance, he assumed that he was right about the weak defenses and divided his men into three columns in order to surround the fort. Instead, the forest was suddenly full of French and Indians, and his three columns were cut off from each other and quickly overwhelmed. Barely four hundred men managed to escape and the rest were either killed or captured, including Grant himself, at a cost of sixteen French casualties.

However, when Lignery tried to maintain the momentum by attacking Loyal Hannon on October 12 with over a thousand French and Indians, he was beaten back after a fierce two hour battle, which showed that this army would not be defeated as easily as Braddock’s had been. This does not lessen the damage caused by Grant’s defeat. In fact, his rash raid on Duquesne had nearly derailed the entire expedition, since the losses of over three hundred men was almost as bad as Braddock’s casualties at Monongahela, so it gave the appearance that the British truly were no more than a pack of old women. Furthermore, the fact that the British had been forced to retreat into the fort even though they outnumbered the attackers confirmed that the British could barely defend themselves.

Forbes arrived with the main force on November 2 and knew that he had to take Duquesne quickly or enter winter quarters. Even so, he only made the decision after his scouts captured several prisoners from a French raiding party on November 12 and learned that the fort was much more weakly defended than he had thought. It took six days to march to Duquesne and the evening before he reached the fort a huge explosion was heard. Believing that the British would not attack this late in the year, many troops and militia had been sent to Illinois where there were more supplies and the Indian allies had been allowed to leave to hunt in preparation for the winter. Lignery knew that he had too few men to hold off the British, not enough food to survive the winter, and that Montcalm could ill afford to lose valuable troops, so he evacuated the fort and then blew it up on November 24. The fort was rebuilt and renamed Fort Pitt, after Prime Minister William Pitt. Forbes then led most of his army back to Philadelphia, where he died on March 11, 1759.

Forbes had understood the need for Indian diplomacy but the men of Virginia and Pennsylvania had suffered three years of savage Indian raids and had been promised land as part of enlistment bounty, so they saw the victory as allowing them access to new lands.

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Further Reading:

Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754-1765-Matthew C. Ward, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.

The effect of the Seven Years’ War on Virginia and Pennsylvania has received little attention even though the two colonies bore the brunt of Indian raids and economic destruction, while gaining little of the wealth that accompanied the war since both states lacked ports. This was especially true since the area suffered Indian raids from 1755 to 1758 following Braddock’s defeat and then again during Pontiac’s Uprising in 1763. Ward provides a good examination of the spread of settlers into the two colonies during the fifty years before the war started, as well as a detailed examination of how the two colonies handled Indian raids during the seven years’ war and how they were affected by the actions of other colonies. It is a well-written and well-researched book that is probably of more interest to the specialist than general readers, but it is extremely valuable for devotees of this period, since the majority of books on the Seven Years’ War seem to be general studies, rather than deal with individual campaigns.

The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia-James Titus, Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.

As the title suggests, it focuses entirely on how Virginia reacted to the challenge it faced during the Seven Years War. To be specific, Titus explores how the different elements of society interacted, showing how the richer part of society provoked trouble and the middle and lower classes only rallied to the military when their homes were threatened by Indian raids. He also explains that while the middle class property owners did not have the time or resources to form parties and challenge the rich planters for control of the local government, their unwillingness to serve unless in self-defence makes it clear that they were not as deferential as previous historians have believed. It also contains a very in-depth look at Virginia’s military structure with several detailed tables presenting the makeup and origin of men serving in the regiment. To be honest, despite the impressive amount of research, it is probably of interest to academics only.

Empires At War: The Seven Years’ War and the Struggle for North America 1754-1763-William M. Fowler Jr., Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005.

The first chapter concisely explains the political situation in Europe and how conflict was brewing in North America despite the vast distances between the French and British colonies. The portraits of the main participants and contemporary paintings of the notable battles and forts are interesting but no replacement for actual maps. Admittedly, the footnotes give the modern locations of the places mentioned in the narrative but simply looking at modern maps does not give any sense of the scale of distance covered and just how empty the disputed areas were. Fowler also never details the specific number of casualties after each battle. As the title states, it focuses on the struggle for North America and spends little time explaining the situation in Europe. However, it is an excellent introduction to a conflict that set the stage for the American Revolution.

The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America-Walter R. Borneman, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006.

Borneman devotes more time to an aborted plan of union between the colonies than to the initial fight that started the war and Washington’s surrender at Fort Necessity. He excels at explaining the economic aspect of the war and makes Pitt’s global vision easily understood. Although specific numbers of casualties for each battle are provided, some of his explanations of battles are better than others, which I suspect reflects whether they are considered important or not. Pontiac’s rebellion is examined in good detail and shows how Pontiac’s leadership role has been overstated. The years immediately following the end of the war are covered to show how the frustration of not being able to settle the captured French lands combined with heavy taxes drove the colonists to revolt. Finally, he briefly plays the what-if game, while never forgetting that the game is both fascinating and pointless. Above all, he shows how the war transformed the kingdom of Great Britain into the British Empire. Oh, it has great maps.

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