| The Iroquois discouraged. |
The effect of what had happened on the minds of the Five Nation Indians was disastrous. Oswego had covered their cantons, it had been the entrepôt of trade between them and the west. They saw it swept away with little or no resistance. They saw Webb hurry back towards Albany, only anxious, as it seemed, to quit the country unmolested. Hesitating constantly between the French and English alliance, they had now every reason to prefer the former; and, had it not been for Johnson's influence with the Mohawks, the Iroquois would, for the time at any rate, have abandoned the English cause in disgust and contempt.9
9 Sir William Johnson, writing to the Lords of Trade on Sept. 10, 1756, says: 'Oswego in our hands, fortified and secured by us, and our having a navigation on Lake Ontario, was not only a curb to the power of the French that way, but esteemed by the Six Nations, whenever they joined our arms, as a secure cover to them and their habitations against the resentment of the French.' Later in the same letter he speaks of the fort as 'the barrier of the Six Nations,' and says that, in consequence of its capture, 'the spirit they had recently shown in our favour was sunk and overawed by the success of the French' (O'Callaghan's Documentary History of New York, vol. ii, pp. 733, 734).
Moreover, the achievement differed in kind from the ordinary Canadian raid. Troops had been moved, artillery brought up, transport organized in rapid, skilful fashion, which betokened leadership of no ordinary kind; the new General from France had at once made himself felt, and friend and foe alike recognized that Canada was being defended and the English colonies attacked by a soldier of high order in the Marquis de Montcalm.
| Montcalm. |
Few characters in colonial history are so interesting and attractive as that of Montcalm. Interest attaches to him not only on account of his own personality, but also because he illustrates the better side of the soldier-aristocrats of France. Born in 1712, near Nîmes in the south of France, he came out in middle life to North America, having seen hard fighting in various parts of the continent, and owing the Canadian command to his own merits, not to Court influence. He was the head of his family, owner of the ancestral estate, straitened in means, and with ten children to provide for; loving his home, loving his mother, his wife and children, following arms as his profession for honour and for a livelihood. He was well educated, and in every sense a gentleman of France, with a quick, impetuous Southern spirit, but the heart of an affectionate and chivalrous man. His coming lifted the war on the Canadian side to a higher plane; he used the savage tools which he found to hand, but he did not love them,10 nor did he love the corruption and chicanery which made the Government of New France a squalid reproduction of the Government at home. A great man—Champlain—brought New France to birth; her end was ennobled by the death of Montcalm. Of his military talent it would be difficult even for an expert to judge, for it must always be a matter of doubt how far Montcalm, like Wolfe, may have been 'felix opportunitate mortis.' Neither the one nor the other was tried in the command of big battalions on European battlefields; but in quick aggressive movement, such as resulted in the capture of Oswego, as well as in the patient defensive tactics which he displayed at Quebec, Montcalm proved himself to be a skilful commander.
10 This is contrary to what Wolfe wrote, when before Louisbourg, to Amherst. 'Montcalm has changed the very nature of war, and has forced us, in some measure, to a deterring and dreadful vengeance' (Wright's Life of Wolfe, pp. 440, 441). But none the less it was the case that, with Montcalm's arrival, war on the French side became what it never had been before, something more than a series of semi-savage raids.
| Levis, Bourlamaque, and Bougainville. |
He was ably supported by his second in command, De Levis, who lived to be a duke and a marshal of France, and a third good officer, Bourlamaque, came out at the same time. Montcalm's own aide de camp was De Bougainville, more famed in after years on sea than land. His name stands first in the list of French navigators; he was the rival and contemporary of Captain Cook. Good leaders France sent out to America in the spring of 1756, but she sent few troops with them. The campaign on the continent absorbed her strength, and New France was lost in consequence.