The Conquest of New France Part 5

Though Quebec was in their hands, the position of the British during the winter of 1759-60 was dangerous. In October General Murray, who was left in command, saw with misgiving the great fleet sail away which had brought to Canada the conquering force of Wolfe and Saunders. Murray was left with some seven thousand men in the heart of a hostile country, and with a resourceful enemy, still unconquered, preparing to attack him. He was separated from other British forces by vast wastes of forest and river, and until spring should come no fleet could aid him. Three enemies of the English, the French said exultingly, would aid to retake Quebec: the ruthless savages who haunted the outskirts of the fortress and ma.s.sacred many an incautious straggler; the French army which could be recruited from the Canadian population; and, above all, the bitter cold of the Canadian winter. To Murray, as to Napoleon long afterward in his rash invasion of Russia, General February was indeed the enemy. About the two or three British ships left at Quebec the ice froze in places a dozen feet thick, and snowdrifts were piled so high against the walls of Quebec that it looked sometimes as if the enemy might walk over them into the fortress. So solidly frozen was the surface of the river that Murray sent cannon to the south sh.o.r.e across the ice to repel a menace from that quarter. There was scarcity of firewood and of provisions. Scurvy broke out in the garrison. Many hundreds died so that by the spring Murray had barely three thousand men fit for active duty.

Throughout the winter Levis, now in command of the French forces, made increasing preparations to destroy Murray in the spring. The headquarters of Uvis were at Montreal. Here Vaudreuil, the Governor, kept his little court. He and Levis worked harmoniously, for Uvis was conciliatory and tactful. For a time Vaudreuil treasured the thought of taking command in person to attack Quebec. In the end, however, he showed that he had learned something from the disasters of the previous year and did not interfere with the plans made by Levis. So throughout the winter Montreal had its gayeties and vanities as of old. There were feasts and dances-but over all brooded the reality of famine in the present and-the foreboding of disaster to come.

By April 20, 1760, the St. Lawrence was open and, though the sh.o.r.es were c.u.mbered with ma.s.ses of broken ice, the central channel was free for the boats which Levis filled with his soldiers. It was a bleak experience to descend the turbulent river between banks clogged with ice. When Levis was not far from Quebec, he learned that it was impossible to surprise Murray who was well on guard between Cap Rouge on the west and Beauport on the east. The one thing to do was to reach the Plains of Abraham in order to attack the feeble walls of Quebec from the landward side. Since Murray's alertness made impossible attack by way of the high cliffs which Wolfe had climbed in the night, Levis had to reach Quebec by a circuitous route. He landed his army a little above Cap Rouge, marched inland over terrible roads in heavy rain, and climbed to the plateau of Quebec from the rear at Sainte Foy. On April 27, 1760, he drew up his army on the heights almost exactly as Wolfe had done in the previous September. Murray followed the example of Montcalm. He had no trust in the feeble defenses of Quebec and on the 28th marched out to fight on the open plain. The battle of Sainte Foy followed exactly the precedents of the previous year. The defenders of Quebec were driven off the field in overwhelming defeat. The difference was that Murray took his army back to Quebec and from behind its walls still defied his French a.s.sailant. Levis had poor artillery, but he did what he could. He entrenched and poured his fire into Quebec. In the end it was sea power which balked him. On the 15th of May, when a British fleet appeared round the head of the Island of Orleans, Levis withdrew in something like panic and Quebec was safe.

Levis returned to Montreal; and to this point all the forces of France slowly retreated as they were pressed in by the overwhelming numbers of the British. At Oswego, the scene of Montcalm's first brilliant success four years earlier, Amherst had gathered during the summer of 1760 an army of about ten thousand men. From here he descended the St. Lawrence in boats to attack Montreal from the west. From the south, down Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River to the St. Lawrence, came another British force under Haviland also to attack Montreal. At Quebec Murray put his army on transports, left the city almost dest.i.tute of defense, and thus brought a third considerable force against Montreal. There was little fighting. The French withdrew to the common objective as their enemy advanced. Early in September Levis had gathered at Montreal all his available force, amounting now to scarcely more than two thousand men, for Canadians and Indians alike had deserted him. The British pressed in with the slow and inevitable rigor of a force of nature. On the 7th of September their united army was before the town and Amherst demanded instant surrender. The only thing for Vaudreuil to do was to make the best terms possible. On the next day he signed a capitulation which protected the liberties in property and religion of the Canadians but which yielded the whole of Canada to Great Britain. The struggle for North America had ended.

In the moment of triumph Amherst inflicted on the French army a deep humiliation to punish the outrages committed by their Indian allies. In the early days of the war Loudoun, the Commander-in-Chief in America, had vowed that the British would make the French "sick of such inhuman villainy" and teach them to respect "the laws of nature and humanity." Washington speaks of his "deadly sorrow" at the dreadful outrages which he saw, the ravishing of women, the scalping alive even of children. Philadelphians had seen the grim spectacle of a wagon-load of corpses brought by mourning friends and relatives of the dead and laid down at the door of the a.s.sembly to show to pacifist legislators what was really happening. The French regular officers, as we have seen, had hated this kind of warfare Bougainville says that his soul shuddered at the sights in Montreal, where the whole town turned out to see an English prisoner killed, boiled, and eaten by the savages. Worse still, captive mothers were obliged to eat the flesh of their own children. The French believed that they could not get on without the savage allies who committed these outrages, and they were not strong enough to coerce them. Amherst, on the other hand, held his Indians in check and rebuked outrage. Now he was stern to punish what the French had permitted. He could write proudly to a friend that the French were amazed at the order in which he kept his own Indians. Not a man, woman, or child, he said, had been hurt or a single atrocity committed. It was a vivid contrast with what had taken place after the British surrender to Montcalm at Fort William Henry. The day of retribution had come. Because of such outrages, the French army was denied the honors of war usually conceded to a brave and defeated foe. The French officers and men must not, Amherst insisted, serve again during the war. Levis protested and begged Vaudreuil to be allowed to go on fighting rather than accept the terms, but in vain. The humiliation was rigorously imposed, and it was a sullen host which the British took captive.

France had lost an Empire. It was nearly three years still before peace was signed at Paris in 1763. To Britain France yielded everything east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, and to Spain she ceded New Orleans and everything else to which she had any claim. The fleurs-de-lis floated still over only two tiny fishing islands off the Newfoundland sh.o.r.e. All the glowing plans of France's leaders-of Richelieu, of Louis XIV, of Colbert, of Frontenac, of the heroic missionaries of the Jesuit Order-seemed to have come to nothing.

The fall of France did much to drag down her rival. Already was America restless under control from Europe. There was now no danger to the English in America from the French peril which had made insecure the borders of Ma.s.sachusetts, of New York, of Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and had brought widespread desolation and sorrow. With the removal of the menace went the need of help and defenses for the colonies from the motherland. The French belief that there was a natural antipathy between the English of the Old World and the English of the New was, in reality, based on the fact of a likeness so great that neither would accept control or patronage from the other. Towards the Englishman who a.s.sumed airs of superiority the antagonism of the colonists was always certain to be acute. Open strife came when the a.s.sumption of superiority took the form of levying taxes on the colonies without asking their leave. In no remote way the fall of French Canada, by removing a near menace to the English colonies, led to this new conflict and to the collapse of that older British Empire which had sprung from the England of the Stuarts.

When Montreal fell there were in the St. Lawrence many British ships which had been used for troops and supplies. Before the end of September the French soldiers and also the officials from France who desired to go home were on board these ships bound for Europe. By the end of November most of the exiles had reached home. Varying receptions awaited them. Levis, who took back the army, was soon again, by consent of the British government, in active service. Fortune smiled on him to the end. He died a great n.o.ble and Marshal of France just before the Revolution of 1789; but in that awful upheaval his widow and his two daughters perished on the scaffold. Vaudreuil's shallow and vain incompetence did not go unpunished. He was put on trial, accused of a share in the black frauds which had helped to ruin Canada. The trial was his punishment. He was acquitted of taking any share of the plunder and so drops out of history. Bigot and his gang, on the other hand, were found guilty of vast depredations. The former Intendant was for a time in the Bastille and in the end was banished from France, after being forced to repay great sums. We find echoes of the luxury of Quebec in the sale in France of the rich plate which the rascal had acquired. There were, however, other and even worse plunderers. They were tried and condemned chiefly to return what they had stolen. We rather wonder that no expiatory sacrifice on the scaffold was required of any of these knaves. Lally Tollendal, who, as the French leader in India, had only failed and not plundered, was sent to a cruel execution.

Under the terms of the surrender and of the final Treaty of Peace in 1763, civilians in Canada were given leave to return to France. Nearly the whole of the official cla.s.s and many of the large landowners, the seigneurs, left the country. In Canada there remained a priesthood, largely native, but soon to be recruited from France by the upheaval of the Revolution, a few seigneurial families, natural leaders of their race, a peasantry, exhausted by the long war but clinging tenaciously to the soil, and a good many hardy pioneers of the forest, men skilled in hunting and in the use of the axe. Out of these elements, amounting in 1763 to little more than sixty thousand people, has come that French-Canadian race in America now numbering perhaps three millions. The race has scattered far. It is found in the mills of Ma.s.sachusetts, in the canebrakes of Louisiana, on the wide stretches of the prairie of the Canadian West, but it has always kept intact its strong citadel on the banks of the St. Lawrence. New France was, in reality, widely separated in spirit from old France, before the new master in Canada made the division permanent. The imagination of the Canadian peasant did not wander across the ocean to France. He knew only the scenes about his own hearth and in them alone were his thought and affections centered.

The one wider interest which the habitant treasured was love for the Catholic Church of his fathers and of his own spiritual hopes. It thus happened that when France in revolution a.s.sailed and for a time overthrew the Church within her borders, the heart of French Canada was not with France but with the persecuted Church; she hated the spirit of revolutionary France. Te Deums were sung at Quebec in thanksgiving for the defeats of Napoleon. In language and what literary culture they possessed, in traditions and tastes, the conquered people remained French, but they had no allegiance divided between Canada and France. To this day they are proud to be simply Canadians, rooted in the soil of Canada, with no debt of patriotic grat.i.tude to the France from which they sprang or to the Britain which obtained political dominance over their ancestors after a long agony of war. To the British Crown many of them feel a certain attachment because of the liberty guaranteed to them to pursue their own ideals of happiness. In preserving their type of social life, their faith and language, they have shown a resolute tenacity. To this day they are as different in these things from their fellow-citizens of British origin in the rest of Canada as were their ancestors from the English colonies which lay on their borders.

The French in Canada are still a separate people. From time to time a nervous fear seizes them lest too many of their race may be lost to their old ideals in the Anglo-Saxon world surging about them. Then they listen readily to appeals to their racial unity and draw more sharply than ever the lines of division between themselves and the rest of North America. They remain a fragment of an older France, remote and isolated, still dreaming dreams like those of Frontenac of old of the dominance of their race in North America and a.s.serting pa.s.sionately their rights in the soil of Canada to which, first of Europeans, they came. At the mouth of the Mississippi in the Louisiana founded by Louis XIV, along the St. Lawrence in the Canada of Champlain and Frontenac, with a resolution more than half pathetic, and in a world that gives little heed, men of French race are still on guard to preserve in America the lineaments of that older France, long since decayed in Europe, which was above all the eldest daughter of the Church.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

While the present narrative is based for the most part on more recondite and widely scattered sources, the most accessible volumes relating to the period are the following works of Francis Parkman (Boston: many editions): "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV, A Half Century of Conflict" (2 vols.), and "Montcalm and Wolfe" (2 vols.). To these should be added, as completing the story, George M. Wrong, "The Fall of Canada" (Oxford, 1914) which dwells in detail on the last year of the struggle. All these volumes contain adequate references to authorities. The last of Parkman's works was published more than twenty-five years ago and later research has revised some of his conclusions, but he still commands great authority. In "The Chronicles of Canada" (Toronto, 191316) half a dozen volumes relate to the period; each of these volumes, which embody later research and are written in an attractive style, contains a bibliography relating to its special subject: C.W. Colby, "The Fighting Governor" [Frontenac]; Agnes C. Laut, "The Adventurers of England on Hudson Bay"; Lawrence J. Burpee, "The Pathfinders of the Great Plains"; Arthur G. Doughty, "The Acadian Exiles"; William Wood, "The Great Fortress" [Louisbourg], "The Pa.s.sing of New France", and "The Winning of Canada." Lawrence J. Burpee's "Search for the Western Sea" (Toronto, 1908) deals with the work of La Verendrye and other explorers. Anthony Hendry's "Journal" is published in the "Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada," series iii, volume i. The latest phase of the discussions on La Verendrye are reviewed in an article by Doane Robinson in "The Mississippi Valley Historical Review" for December, 1916. The material relating to the discoverer was long scattered, but it has now been collected in a volume, edited by Lawrence J. Burpee for the Champlain Society, Toronto, but owing to the war it is at the present date (1918) still in ma.n.u.script. Much of what is contained in Mr. Burpee's volume will be found in "South Dakota Historical Collections," volume vii, 1914 (Pierre, S.D.).

Additional references are given in the bibliographies appended to the articles on "Chatham, Seven Years' War," and "Nova Scotia" in "The Encyclopaedia Britannica," 11th Edition.