Brief biographies from American history, for the fifth and sixth grades

by Edna Henry Lee Turpin

During this time there were growing into manhood two youths who were to be leaders when the conflict came.

One of these was a Frenchman, Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm. At the age of fourteen, he entered the army and at the age of eighteen he was a general. He did valiant service in Italy and in Germany.

Several years younger than Montcalm was the English soldier, James Wolfe. He also became a soldier at an early age and at sixteen was serving in the Netherlands, doing a man’s work in the battles which he described with boyish zest in his loving and dutiful letters to his mother in England.

About the middle of the eighteenth century, the French determined to shorten and strengthen their line of defence towards the south. They established a fort on French Creek and an outpost upon the Alleghany River. This was land which the English claimed, and George Washington, then a lad of twenty-one, was sent to the French to demand that they leave the Ohio. A forced march was made through the pathless winter woods. The French commander received the messenger courteously, but informed him that they regarded the land as their own and had no intention of yielding it to the English. This was in the winter of 1753. The next year Washington was sent in command of a little force of three hundred and fifty men to uphold the English claim, and was defeated at Great Meadows by a French force of double the size. The English began to build a fort at the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela Rivers on a site selected by Washington, but the French drove them away and finished the fort, which they called Fort Du Quesne.

In this emergency the colonies at first did not act together. Troops were sent from Virginia, South and North Carolina, and Maryland; but the Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Dutch of New York said that the English claim to the valley of the Ohio was a matter of no importance, and did not move. Fortunately, the home government recognized the necessity of protecting the frontier, and of extending outposts; troops were sent from England for this purpose. Thus in 1755 began the Seven Years’ War which involved England and France in Europe; in America this contest was called the French and Indian War, from the enemies the English colonists had to encounter.

The English general Braddock led forces to the northwest just as he would have marched them in a European campaign. He paid with his life the penalty of his ignorance of Indian warfare, being defeated and fatally wounded by an Indian attack in the forest. This defeat was the first of many.

“I dread to hear from America,” said the English statesman, Pitt, as month after month, year after year, brought tidings of defeat.

In the spring of 1756, Montcalm was sent to Canada to command the French forces. He began a career of victory by capturing Fort Ontario at Oswego. The next year he captured Fort William Henry at the head of Lake George, with its garrison of twenty-five hundred men. In 1758, with thirty-six hundred men he defended Fort Ticonderoga against an English force of fifteen thousand. As he had neither men nor supplies to hold the place, he was compelled to abandon it the next year and retire to Quebec. Here he was to contend in a death struggle with the English general Wolfe, who was sent to America in 1758.

The English realized the value of their New World possessions. The best of their troops were sent over to prosecute the war with vigor. Montcalm, on the other hand, lacked men, means, ammunition, and supplies, for which he appealed in vain to the home government. With a sad heart he foresaw the downfall of French power in America. Resolved “to find his grave under the ruins of the colony,” he bent all his energies to the struggle.

One place after another was captured by the English. News of their victories came now as regularly as tidings of their defeat had come a few months before. Louisburg, a naval station and fortified town commanding the mouth of the St. Lawrence, was attacked and taken. The French were driven from Fort Frontenac at Oswego which guarded the outlet of the Great Lakes. Fort Du Quesne was taken by Washington, and Crown Point was captured and strengthened.