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

(#litres_trial_promo) And that was in the summer. Between November and March or April all sizeable military operations of whatever kind had to be suspended. Troops fought hard merely to stay alive. During Bougainville’s first winter he wrote, ‘it is impossible to conceive of a viler sort of weather…one could not understand how frightful this country is if he has not been here’.

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Montcalm enjoyed all the advantages of geography but he was also stronger than he had assumed, even though not every one of his men was available for the protection of Quebec. Montcalm was forced to send three of his eight French army battalions to protect the southern invasion route into the colony, which was threatened by General Amherst from Lake George. Joining them were eight companies of colonial regulars and 1,200 militiamen; about three thousand men in all. He also had to send troops to garrison Fort Niagara to protect the gateway to Canada’s vast western lands. For the defence of Quebec, one officer estimated that there were the five battalions of the French army, ‘about 1600 men’, ‘about 600 colonial’ regulars and ‘10,400 Canadians, and sailors distributed throughout the batteries’. New France could also call upon allied groups of Native Americans, from the Christianized Abenaki of St François to the more mercenary distant tribes from the west who joined for money, adventure, and booty. Estimates differ on the number of Native Americans present during the summer of 1759, and no doubt the number fluctuated as they came and went much as they pleased, but the same officer counted ‘918 Indians of different nations’. Last, there was ‘a troop of cavalry composed of 200 volunteers taken from different corps and to be posted promptly wherever the enemy should show themselves, to be attached to the general’s suite and to convey orders’. In all he gave the rather precise figure of 13,718 men. The journal comments that

so strong an army was not anticipated, because it was not expected that there would be so large a number of Canadians…but such an emulation prevailed among the people, that old men of 80 and children of 12 and 13 were seen coming to the camp, who would never consent to take advantage of the exemption granted to their age.

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A witness comments that the habitants ‘assembled themselves with so much activity and zeal that, on the field, we make up a body of eleven to twelve thousand men’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The people of New France were flocking in unprecedented numbers to help with the defence of their capital.

It was an empire dependent on its capital. Montcalm had told Versailles during the winter, that Canada would fall ‘without a doubt’ if Quebec did. ‘There is not’ he wrote, ‘a second line any place of strength, any spot having in depot any warlike stores or provisions’. Nor could Canada ‘sustain herself by herself and without succours from France’, and Quebec was Canada’s only port. Montcalm was as clear as Wolfe that it was in front of the walls of Quebec that the decisive clash for domination of the North American continent would take place.

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Quebec was derived from Kebec, which in the local Native American dialect meant ‘narrows’. At Quebec the St Lawrence River rapidly shrinks from being more than ten miles wide to just two-thirds of a mile. Here also the St Charles River joins the St Lawrence and in between the two there is a promontory of land surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs and water and on the fourth by an open patch of scrub known as Les Plaines d’Abraham or the Plains of Abraham. On this natural bastion sat the Upper Town of Quebec. Below it a thin strip of land at the bottom of the cliff was, in some places, around a hundred yards wide and was the site of the Lower Town, a few crowded blocks of buildings. Downriver from the narrows the St Lawrence widens out into a basin, the edges of which are very shallow. Large ships were unable to get close in; Quebec was not a natural harbour.

In 1535 the French explorer Jacques Cartier arrived and immediately realized that this was the place to dominate this vast new continent and, he hoped, the route to China. Large ocean-going ships could penetrate this far but little further, and the river was narrow enough to control who came and went. Added to this the site was almost impregnable. Cartier named the cliff which soared more than two hundred feet out of the river, Cap Diamant or Cape Diamond. It is still easy to see why he chose to spend his first winter in Canada on top of this peak. The small French party held out through a vicious Canadian winter in a little stockade protected by a moat built on top of Cap Diamant, the first European fort in Canadian history. Decimated by scurvy and threatened by Native attacks, Cartier abandoned the site in the spring. Several more attempts were made to settle the area, each of which was abandoned as the failure to find valuable raw materials or the hoped for sea-routes to China meant that the will evaporated to overcome the challenges of distance, climate, and the local inhabitants. A permanent settlement was finally established on 3 July 1608 by the father of Canada, Samuel de Champlain, who landed and built a trading post where the Lower Town of Quebec now stands. He promised his king that Quebec was the gateway to the continent and possession of it would make France the most powerful nation on earth.

The experiment in global supremacy did not get off to a great start. The early town was blockaded and captured without a fight in 1629 by the Kirke brothers, two English corsairs who ransacked the town so that when it was returned to the French in the treaty of 1632 it had to be rebuilt again from scratch. In 1690 when the Acadian town of Port Royal, near modern-day Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia, fell to an English fleet, it was decided that Quebec needed a wall on its western landward side to protect the town from its only vulnerable approach, on the Plains of Abraham, the raised plateau of rolling ground to the west. A wooden palisade was built, protecting the city from an enemy simply capturing it coup de main with the simplest of attacks.

The building work could not have been timelier. On 16 October 1690, thirty-four New English ships arrived off Quebec with around two and a half thousand men on board. They were led by Sir William Phips, an adventurer who had become fabulously wealthy after he salvaged the wreck of a Spanish galleon. These New Englanders were flushed from successes against the French settlements on the Atlantic seaboard and were now intent on conquering New France. Massachusetts had optimistically paid for the expedition on credit to be redeemed with the booty from Quebec. Few, if any, New Englanders had ever seen the stronghold before the expedition; its dominant position must have come as an unpleasant surprise. A messenger was sent to issue an ultimatum to the French governor. The Comte de Frontenac, a proud, aristocratic soldier of France, had to be restrained from hanging him for his impertinence. He gained control of his temper and told the messenger, ‘Tell your master I will answer him with the mouth of my cannons!’ This message of defiance against the piratical New English seamen became a Canadian motto for the next hundred years.

Phips’ assault carried vital lessons for future operations against Quebec. The obvious place for a force to land was along the north shore of the St Lawrence, east of the town on its downriver side. From the St Charles River, which marked the town’s eastern edge, the shoreline ran for five miles to the Montmorency River with its spectacular waterfall. In the centre lay the village of Beauport; the Beauport shore offered numerous low lying coves and beaches on which to land men. This is where Phips sent his troops. They were carried from their transports in ships’ boats, the sailors pulling hard at the oars. As they waded ashore the New Englanders were harassed by Canadians and allied Native Americans. Both of these two groups were highly skilled in the arts of bush fighting and used the woodland as cover from which to launch lightning attacks. Meanwhile, the larger ships attempted to batter the defences of Quebec with their cannon but came off distinctly second best in their duel with the batteries on shore.

Having landed, the New Englanders attempted to march westward along the Beauport shore towards the St Charles River, force a crossing and storm the town. They never made it to the riverbank. The Canadian and Native irregulars kept up a withering fire from the cover of the woods and so demoralized the New Englanders that they retreated in near panic back to the beaches and onto their ships. Around one hundred and fifty of them were killed or wounded, while the Canadians suffered nine dead and perhaps fifty wounded. Sickness swept through the fleet and the shortening nights terrified the sailors of the expedition, who imagined being trapped by ice in the St Lawrence. On 23 October Phips and his fleet weighed anchor and made for Boston. They suffered heavy losses at sea on the way back. It would take more than a fortnight and more than a handful of ships and men to take Quebec.

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Frontenac knew that his defences would not prove as impregnable against a force armed with modern siege artillery; cannon that could hurl a thirty-two-pound ball at 485 yards per second would brush aside a wooden stockade half a mile away as if it were paper. Work started on modern fortifications but soon got bogged down into a bewildering quagmire caused by shortage of funds and a rapid succession of engineers who all without fail utterly condemned their predecessor’s work. Nothing dramatic was achieved until war broke out again with the British in 1744. Louisbourg fell in the summer in 1745 and the government of New France was once again faced with an urgent need to protect their capital. Every able-bodied man from 14 to 60 within forty miles of the city was forced to help with the construction. They built a modern stone wall, with an earth filling, designed to withstand cannon fire. Four half octagonal bastions jutted out from the wall, allowing the cannon on them to produce an ‘enfilading’ fire—sideways down the length of the wall. At either end the wall was anchored on the top of the cliffs that surrounded the city with another demibastion. On the southern end a redoubt was built on the very highest point of Cap Diamant.

It was advanced for North America but war on the continent was changing fast. New forts were being built to the latest European designs. For any fortress to survive the hammering of an artillery bombardment it had to be surrounded by low lying stone and earth walls yards thick arranged in geometric patterns to allow cannon to sweep every angle. Soon North American fortifications would look more like state of the art complexes in Flanders than the old stockades of just a generation before. Quebec never reached this level of sophistication. There were a couple of serious drawbacks. High ground on the rolling Plains of Abraham allowed cannon to be placed that would look down on the wall. Also the cost and effort of completing the landward defences was simply too much. When Britain and France made peace in 1748 Louisbourg was returned to Louis in exchange for Madras in India, which had been captured by a French expedition. The work petered out at Quebec. The all-important ditch with a ‘glacis’ or gently sloping, raised earthwork to stop artillerymen getting a clear line of sight to the walls was never completed. One observer later wrote that because the walls were ‘constructed before any ditch was sunk and the soil is of a slaty rock, the blowing of it for that purpose must undoubtedly shake the whole mass of the works’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Blasting a ditch would have brought the walls down. Instead, a shallow ditch and a glacis seem to have stretched down from the north end for only a quarter of the wall. In addition the fifty-two cannon on the wall were mounted on the flanks of the bastions to produce a lethal enfilading fire at attacking infantry but this meant they could not fire out over the Plains of Abraham directly away from the city.

By the Seven Years War it was widely accepted, especially by the disdainful French regulars, that if a large modern force could get troops to the west of the city and bring their large siege cannon to bear on the wall it would be only a matter of days before they had pounded a breach and poured infantry into the city itself. The 42-year-old Chief Engineer of New France, Nicolas Sarrebource de Pontleroy, described by Montcalm as ‘an excellent man’ declared that the city ‘is not capable of useful defence in case of siege, having neither ditches, nor counterscarps nor covered way, and being dominated by heights behind which there is cover facilitating the approaches’. Bougainville wrote that Quebec ‘was without fortifications…if the approaches to the city were not defended, the place would have to surrender’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Montcalm agreed, a journal relates that ‘he was persuaded that an army, which can get near to the walls of a town, is sure, sooner or later to compel its surrender, whatever may be the numbers engaged in its defence; and must in an especial manner be the case with Quebec, which not being fortified, was merely secured against being taken by surprise’.

(#litres_trial_promo) With his usual vitriol for Canadians, he described de Pontleroy’s predecessor as Chief Engineer as ‘a great ignoramus in his profession (you need only look at his works) who robbed the king like the others’. The defences at Quebec, he wrote, were ‘so ridiculous and so bad that it would be taken as soon as besieged’.

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Montcalm’s simple solution was to do everything he could to stop the enemy seizing the Plains of Abraham to the west of the city. The best way to do that was to stop them landing on the north shore at all. As he had written to Versailles that winter, ‘all our hopes depend on preventing the landing’.

(#litres_trial_promo) To this end he erected temporary fortifications right along the Beauport shore, ensuring that Wolfe’s men would be unable to simply march ashore as Phips’ men had. One French officer recorded, ‘Quebec, the only barrier of this colony on the river side, being, from the nature of its fortifications, incapable of sustaining a siege, attention was directed…to putting it at least beyond the danger of a coup de main.’ Some work had been progressing over the winter but the news that the British were in the river ‘roused the men from their languor’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Montcalm did not let his pessimism erode his determination to prepare Quebec for a siege. He threw himself into improving the defences with huge energy and in the words of one officer, ‘made the necessary dispositions for a vigorous defence’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He made his headquarters at the village of Beauport and spent his time inspecting every inch of riverbank with Pontleroy and together they sited cannon batteries, redoubts, and lines of trenches. They both knew that in the open field their part-time soldiers could not face Wolfe’s trained killers on equal terms, but positioned behind fixed defences they could be relied upon to stand firm. Also they would be supported by a massive amount of firepower. In all ‘234 pieces of cannon, 17 mortars, and 4 howitzers’ were available to Montcalm and if even some of these could be brought to bear at the critical moment Wolfe’s army could be pulverized.

(#litres_trial_promo) Bougainville was more optimistic than his general. Two years before he had written that ‘defensive lines…which three or four thousand men could hold, would…make the city entirely safe’. Any British attempt on the city would be ‘foolish’.

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Jean Baptiste Nicholas Roch de Ramezay was the King’s Lieutenant (Lieutenant de Roi) in Quebec. He was 50 years old, born in Canada and an embodiment of New France’s interconnected web of military and trading oligarchs. Since the age of 11 he had campaigned for his king against the Fox in Illinois and the British in Acadia. He was now paid 18,000 livres a year to protect Quebec, or more correctly, the Upper Town. Only a year into the job, he was now about to earn his salary as no other King’s Lieutenant had ever done. His account of the siege describes how men hammered stakes into the ground to enclose open areas and placed ‘some cannon on the top of the road that leads from the Lower to the Upper Town’.

(#litres_trial_promo) For two weeks thousands of men, the sailors from the merchant and naval ships, regular soldiers and members of the militia, carried, dug, and hacked at the earth. Houses along the Beauport shore were evacuated, barricaded, and had loopholes punched through the walls. Montcalm made it clear that the entire colony would be involved in a supreme effort to ensure its survival; ‘the monks, priests, civil officers and women will perform the field labor’.Women were allowed to stay for the time being but Montcalm did not want to feed the extra mouths when the siege began and gave orders that all the ‘women, children, magistrates and all those persons that embarrass the defense [were to] be immediately sent to Trois Rivières’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Angélique Renaud d’Avène des Méloizes de Péan was the wife of one of New France’s richest, and most corrupt, merchants. She wrote that ‘most of the nobles and gentry of Quebec have taken refuge at Trois Rivières or Montreal, but I refused to follow their lead. I will not leave my dear husband.’ The beautiful Madame Péan had less to fear than most. François Bigot was entirely smitten with the young woman and, as she admitted, ‘my house has been transformed into a veritable fortress because he fears for my safety’. ‘Those of an envious disposition,’ she continued gaily, ‘say that all available resources should rather be used to improve the city’s fortifications.’

(#litres_trial_promo) There were other young women rather less fortunate than Madame Péan. Quebec had no less than three nunneries, the Ursuline Convent, the Hôtel Dieu, and the General Hospital. The majority of nuns were of noble birth and the rest were from well to do merchant families. Families paid a huge 3,000 livres for the privilege of installing a daughter in the nunnery so only the wealthy could even dream about joining. This was more than fathers paid in all but the most fashionable convents in France.

(#litres_trial_promo) The nuns would stay through the siege and provide vital healthcare to the wounded. One kept a journal of the summer and describes the flight of ‘all the families of distinction, merchants, etc’ who were ‘capable of sustaining themselves’. They were ‘removed to Three Rivers and Montreal, thereby relieving the garrison during the siege’.

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Some people stayed, many left. One French officer recorded that ‘all persons who could be of no service in the siege, such as ladies and others, were desired to withdraw from the city; this request being considered by most people as an order, was submitted to, but not without reluctance’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, many ignored it; there were certainly women left in Quebec right through the summer. Those who remained helped the soldiers and militiamen as they carried out Montcalm’s orders. Two fully armed ships were scuttled in the mouth of the St Charles River to act as forts and block the entrance. A wooden boom was also run across the mouth, attached with chains to either side, to prevent raids by small boats. The two sides of the river were connected by a bridge of boats with either end protected by an earthwork. Beyond them on the Beauport shore work continued ‘to line the crested bank from the River St Charles to the Falls of Montmorency with entrenchments’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Every few hundred metres, a redoubt was built containing three or four cannon each, with infantry positions dug in alongside and behind. In all just under forty cannon swept the coastline. In the city itself new batteries were constructed along the waterfront of the Lower Town. These guns, numbering over a hundred in all, would have the absolutely vital task of stopping the British ships getting through the narrows of the St Lawrence and upriver or ‘beyond’ the town. Once there they could cause havoc with Quebec’s communications with the rest of the colony and potentially land troops on the all-important north shore. It was imperative that the British fleet was kept below the town. Just as the Beauport entrenchments covered the French position to the east, the cannon of the town would stop the British opening a front to the west. A French officer noted in his journal that ‘batteries were erected on the Quay du Palais, and those on the ramparts, and in the lower town, were repaired, completed, and considerably enlarged’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Four shore batteries called ‘Royal’, ‘King’s’, ‘Queen’s’, and ‘Dauphin’s’ (the heir to the French throne) were all either built or augmented. As a result, although some defences were built further upriver, in places like L’Anse des Mères and Sillery, ‘that quarter was deemed inaccessible’. Houses that backed onto the water had their walls strengthened. Passageways from the Lower to the Upper Town were barricaded. The Scottish Jacobite, Chevalier Johnstone, was given this job; ‘I was employed for three weeks upon it with miners and other workmen, to render all the footpaths impracticable.’

(#litres_trial_promo) His work made a direct assault on the Lower Town with a view to storming the Upper a very difficult prospect. Cannon were mounted in small boats designed to harass any ships who ventured into the basin of Quebec. Innovative new ideas jostled for funding. Panet describes ‘two boats, armed with four 24 pound cannon’, which he says were called tracassiers, literally ‘harassers’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Monsieur Duclos, captain of the frigate Chézine which had brought Bougainville back from France, ‘proposed the construction of a floating battery’. It was agreed to and he was given command. Known as La Diable, ‘The She-Devil’, she was described as a ‘pontoon of a hexagonal figure; capable of bearing 12 guns of large calibre’. Six ‘gunboats each carrying a 24 pounder’ were built and each placed under the command of one of the captains of the merchant ships recently arrived in Quebec. Finally, eight small boats were each given an eight-pound gun. All these boats were able to operate in the shallow water off Beauport and would serve ‘the purpose of preventing the landing of the English’. An officer records that these boats would ‘send bark canoes ahead, which patrolling throughout the night, would be able to give notice of the slightest movement on the part of the enemy’.

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Councils of war were held and radical ideas debated. One was to destroy the Lower Town to allow clear fields of fire if the British tried to assault it directly. A diarist says that this plan was dismissed because Quebec was ‘in fact nothing if the Lower Town was destroyed’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Montcalm did knock down the odd warehouse to improve fields of fire for his cannon and deny any assaulting force cover as they tried to land but he was against wholesale destruction. ‘If the success of the colony could be assured by the destruction of the houses, we should not hesitate,’ he wrote to his artillery commander, Le Chevalier le Mercier, ‘however there is no point destroying houses and ruining poor people without good cause.’

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The Plan of Operations for the army stated that the ‘general disposition’ of the troops was to ‘oppose a landing between St Charles River and Montmorency falls, as well as for retirement behind this river in case the landings were effected’. Troops were spread out along the north shore of the St Lawrence. They were supported by the Native Americans although one diarist points out that ‘the savages were dispersed according to their own inclinations, it being found impossible to reduce them to any state of subordination or discipline’. Montcalm ordered his force to ‘entrench itself along its whole front for protection against cannon fire, and work will be set about to fortify the places which appear to offer the readiest facilities for landing’. In the city itself he left 800 militiamen, just over a hundred colonial regulars, and all the seamen who had come over with the fleet, perhaps seven hundred men. They manned the all-important artillery batteries which would shut off the upper river.

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If the British did try to bludgeon their way ashore, ‘no precise directions can be given for such a time. Everything will depend on the circumstances and the manner in which the enemy attacks. The army leaders must apply themselves to use every means to repel the enemy, and not to expose themselves to a total defeat by failing to secure a path for retreat.’ If withdrawal became necessary, cannon which were too heavy to drag away in a hurry should be ‘spiked’, rendered useless by driving a nail through the touch-hole on top of the barrel, so that the British could not use French cannon against them. If the French retreated across the St Charles then that line must be held at all costs; once it was crossed then the weaknesses of Quebec’s western fortifications would be exposed. In fact, if the British crossed the St Charles, Montcalm signalled his intention to abandon Quebec, rather than endure a siege. If Quebec was abandoned, the orders warned, ‘the colony is in extremis’. However, the tone of the orders was upbeat, and the commanders assured the troops that ‘in the situation in which we are, it is the only position we can take. It is both audacious and military.’

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As for the town, the command of the garrison in the Upper Town was given to de Ramezay, the King’s Lieutenant, and the Lower Town had a subordinate commander because Ramezay ‘could not be everywhere at once’. One French officer said there were ‘in all about 2000’ men in the garrison of the town, ‘composed of the Burghers and seamen’. But he claimed that they were ‘relieved every four days from the camp’. It is possible that Montcalm tried to keep his troops alert by rotating them through various positions.