A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

Misconduct of the Indians.

When he returned to Oswego, St. Leger, on the 27th of August, wrote a dispatch to Burgoyne, giving details of his expedition, but not punctuating his failure. The failure was due to insufficiency of numbers and artillery in the first place, and in the second, beyond question, to the misconduct of his Indian allies. The employment of Bad effects of employing them in the war. Indians in this war with British colonists may have been inevitable, but it was certainly politically inexpedient, notwithstanding the fact that the colonists themselves were ready to avail themselves of similar aid. Indians had been engaged on the English side in the wars with the French, but sparingly and under strict supervision. Carleton, as long as he directed operations in the War of Independence, had been equally careful in using these savage tools.[131] In St. Leger’s expedition the disadvantages of enlisting Indian fighting men came fully to light. They became, St. Leger wrote to Burgoyne, ‘more formidable than the enemy we had to expect.’ Disappointed of looting the enemy, they plundered their friends and endangered, if they did not in some cases take, their lives. Unstable as friends, ferocious as foes, they were not fit helpmates for Englishmen in fighting Englishmen, even their value as scouts was diminished by their incurable habit of believing and exaggerating any report. As in the war with the French in Canada, the English gained ground by the scrupulous care which they took to prevent outrages on the part of the savages who accompanied their armies, so in the later war with their own countrymen, they distinctly lost ground through calling out the coloured men of America against colonists of British birth.

Burgoyne’s address to the Indians.

Burgoyne’s instructions from Lord George Germain included the employment of Indians under due precautions; and he formally addressed his Indian followers in his camp at the river Bouquet, on the western side of Lake Champlain, on the 21st of June, 1777. ‘The collective voices and hands of the Indian tribes over this vast continent,’ were, he told them, with a few exceptions, ‘on the side of justice, of law, and the King.’ He bade them ‘go forth in might of your valour and your cause: strike at the common enemies of Great Britain and America’. On the other hand, he sternly forbade bloodshed except in battle, and enjoined that ‘aged men, women, children, and prisoners must be held sacred from the knife or hatchet, even in the time of actual conflict’. Compensation would be given for the prisoners taken, but the Indians would be called to account for scalps. His listeners replied, through an old chief of the Iroquois—‘We have been tried and tempted by the Bostonians, but we have loved our father, and our hatchets have been sharpened upon our affections.’ They promised with one voice obedience to the general’s commands.

Burgoyne.

At this date, in the year 1777, Burgoyne was fifty-five years of age, having been born in 1722, two years before Carleton was born. He was clearly a man of ability, and unusually versatile. He was also, as times went, an honourable man. In his relations to Carleton, at any rate, he seems to have been open to no reproach. But he tried too many things to be first-rate in anything; he was not adequate to a great crisis and to heavy responsibility: and because he was not of the first class, and also because he had much dramatic instinct, he seems to have had more eye for present effect than for the root of matters. He was educated at Westminster School, and, when he died in 1792, he was buried in the northern cloister of Westminster Abbey. He was a soldier, a politician, a dramatist, and a man of society. He entered the army in 1740, again two years before Carleton’s military service began. He became so involved in debt that he had to sell his commission. He rejoined the army in 1756, and in 1762 he distinguished himself in Portugal, where the English supported the Portuguese against Spain and France. A few years later, however, in 1769, Junius referred to him as ‘not very conspicuous in his profession’.[132] He went into the House of Commons in 1761 as member for Midhurst. In 1768, through the influence of his father-in-law, Lord Derby, he became member for Preston, and, in connexion with his election, was attacked by Junius for corruption and also for his gambling propensities. As a politician he was, before he went to America, more or less of a free-lance. He spoke on foreign and Indian questions, and in 1773 made a speech in the House of Commons, attacking Clive. After the catastrophe at Saratoga, and his return to England, he threw in his lot with the Whigs, having been befriended by Fox and his followers; he became Commander-in-Chief in Ireland under Rockingham; and in 1787 he managed the impeachment of Warren Hastings. Before the American war broke out, he produced in 1774 a play called The Maid of the Oaks, of which Horace Walpole wrote: ‘There is a new puppet show at Drury Lane as fine as scenes can make it, called The Maid of the Oaks, and as dull as the author could not help making it.’[133] At a later date, however, Walpole had to confess that ‘General Burgoyne has written the best modern comedy’.[134] This was The Heiress, which was brought out in the beginning of 1786, and achieved a great success. Walpole had no love for Burgoyne, at any rate at the time when the latter served in America. ‘You ask the history of Burgoyne the pompous,’ he wrote in October, 1777,[135] the month in which the surrender at Saratoga took place; and after describing him as ‘a fortunate gamester’, he continued, ‘I have heard him speak in Parliament, just as he writes: for all his speeches were written and laboured, and yet neither in them nor in his conversation did he ever impress me with an idea of his having parts.’ Burgoyne’s affectation and mannerism may have been due to the fact that he was essentially a man of society, as society was then. He had eloped in early life with Lord Derby’s daughter, and, like Charles Fox, was a confirmed gambler. The world of London was his world, and the standard by which he measured things was not the standard of all time. When he went out in 1777 to command the expedition from Canada, he was on the flowing tide of fortune, and the tone of his proclamations gave Walpole cause for sarcastic comment. ‘Have you read General Burgoyne’s rhodomontade, in which he almost promises to cross America in a hop, step, and a jump?’[136] ‘Burgoyne has sent over a manifesto that if he was to over-run ten provinces would appear too pompous.’[136] ‘I heard to-day at Richmond that Julius Caesar Burgonius’s Commentaries are to be published in an Extraordinary Gazette of three-and-twenty pages in folio to-morrow—a counterpart to the Iliad in a nutshell.’[136] All these three passages were written in August, 1777, while Burgoyne’s expedition was proceeding. The writer of them did not like Burgoyne, and did not like the war in which Burgoyne was engaged; but, though Burgoyne lent himself to criticism and lacked the qualities which the time and place demanded, his story is by no means the story either of a bad soldier or of a bad man; it is rather the story of a second-rate man set with inadequate means to solve a problem of first-rate importance.

Burgoyne’s advance against Ticonderoga.

Having completed his preparations, Burgoyne reached Crown Point on the 26th of June, preparatory to attacking Ticonderoga. The full control of the operations had passed into his own hands, for, by Germain’s instructions, Carleton’s authority was limited by the boundary line of Canada, and that line was drawn far north of Crown Point and Ticonderoga, cutting the outlet of Lake Champlain near the point of land named Point au Fer. The total force amounted to rather over 7,000 men, nearly half of whom were Germans under the command of Baron Riedesel. The advance was made on both sides of the lake, the Germans being on the eastern shore, the British on the western—the side on which were Crown Point and Ticonderoga. The Americans, too, held positions on The American position at Ticonderoga. both sides of the lake, for, over against the peninsula on which Ticonderoga stood, there jutted out another point of land, described in Burgoyne’s dispatch as ‘high and circular’, but in reality rather oblong in form, rising well above the level of the lake and skirted in part on the land side by a rivulet. It was called Mount Independence, and was strongly held and fortified. The lake, here narrowed to a river, is about a quarter of a mile across, and between Ticonderoga and Mount Independence a bridge had been constructed, consisting of sunken timber piers connected by floating timber, the whole being guarded in front by a heavy boom of wood strengthened by iron rivets and chains.

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