France and England in North America, Part VI : Montcalm and Wolfe

by Francis Parkman

Introduction

Welcome to Project Gutenberg's edition of Montcalm and Wolfe. While this book was the sixth part released by Francis Parkman in his seven-part series called France and England in North America, Parkman refers to this book as Part Seven. In the Preface to this book, Parkman noted that these two volumes were a departure from the chronological sequence of the series. The events of the epoch that was passed over formed the topics of A Half Century of Conflict, Part Six of this series. Parkman published both volumes of Part Six in 1892.

The author was in poor health when he began work on these volumes, and wondered if he would only be able to write one more book. He chose to tell first the story that he most ardently wished to tell.

Our version of Montcalm and Wolfe is based on the 1885 edition of this book, published by Little, Brown, and Company. This book is essentially the same book as the original work, published one year before by the same publisher. The 1884 book is of slightly better quality, but practical considerations factored into our decision to use the book available from Yale University. Future claims of errata may be consulted against the scanned pages of the 1885 book, available through Hathitrust.

The footnotes have been produced using the Project Gutenberg™ standard. Footnotes follow the paragraph in which they were mentioned. Footnotes have been set in smaller print and have larger margins than regular text. Footnotes are numbered sequentially. There are a total of 877 numbered footnotes in this book. There are also eleven end of chapter footnotes, which are in addition to the sequentially numbered footnotes.

This text generally preserved the italicization of words, phrases, and the titles of references which are presented in italics in the printed book. The standard of the book is to not use italics on numbers. For example, it is easier to write: Webb to Loudon, 1 Aug. 1757, but the book displayed the content as follows: Webb to Loudon, 1 Aug. 1757. We have tried to match that policy in this e-book. Small capitalization has also been retained.

The topics list in the Contents are supposed to match the topics list at the beginning of each chapter. The variances were most often present in the capitalization of words. There was one case of variance in punctuation, and another case where a word was changed. Our emendations in these matters made the topics list in the contents match the topics list at the beginning of each chapter. See the Detailed Notes for individual changes.

Detailed notes describe problems or issues in transcribing a specific portion of the text. Emendations are listed, and described, in the Detailed Notes, as well as other issues in transcribing the text.

You will see changed text underlined by dotted silver lines. In some versions (like the HTML version) of this document, you can hover your cursor over the changed text and see details in a small box. Those details are repeated, and sometimes elaborated upon, in the Detailed Notes Section of these Notes.