[1431] Printed in the N. Y. Col. Docs., x.: Montcalm’s letter (p. 596); Journal, July 12 to Aug. 16 (p. 598); Bougainville’s letter to the ministry (p. 605); articles of capitulation (p. 617); other accounts (p. 640); number of the French forces (pp. 620, 625), of the English garrison (p. 621); account of the booty (p. 626), etc. The same volume contains (p. 645) a reprint of a current French pamphlet, dated Oct. 18, 1757. These and other documents are in the Coll. de Manuscrits (Quebec), vol. iv.: Montcalm’s letters from Montreal; his instructions, July 9 (p. 100); his letters from Carillon (p. 110); his letter to Webb, Aug. 14 (p. 114); an account of the capture, dated at Albany, Aug., 1757 (p. 117); Munro’s capitulation (p. 122).
[1432] Vol. iv. Cf. Felix Martin’s De Montcalm en Canada, p. 65. The letter is translated in Kip’s Jesuit Missions, and is reprinted by J. M. Lemoine in his La Mémoire de Montcalm vengée, ou le massacre au Fort George, Quebec, 1864, 91 pp. (Field, Ind. Bibliog., no. 906; Sabin, x. p. 205.) Cf., on Roubaud, “The deplorable case of Mr. Roubaud,” in Hist. Mag., 2d ser., viii. 282; and Verreau, Report on Canadian Archives (1874). A late writer, Maurault, in his Histoire des Abénakis (1866), has a chapter on these Indians in the wars. They are charged with beginning the massacre. The modern French view is in Garneau’s Canada, 4th ed., vol. ii. 251.
[1433] There is a letter on the capture, by N. Whiting, among the Israel Williams MSS. (ii. 42) in the Mass. Hist. Soc. library. Cf. a paper by M. A. Stickney in the Essex Inst. Historical Collections, iii. 79.
[1434] Cf. Scull’s Evelyns in America, p. 260.
[1435] The Journals give a sketch of the intrenchment near Fort William Henry, laid out by James Montresor (p. 23), and describe how the firing was heard at Fort Edward (p. 26), and how the survivors of the massacre came in (p. 28). Webb’s reports to the governor during this period are noted in Goldsbrow Banyar’s diary (Aug. 5-20), in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., January, 1877. The Journal of General Rufus Putnam, kept in Northern New York during four campaigns, 1757-1760, with notes and biog. sketch by E. C. Dawes (Albany, 1886), shows (pp. 38-41) how the news came in from the lake,—the diarist, whose father was a cousin of Israel Putnam, being stationed at Fort Edward.
[1436] Niles’ French and Indian Wars; Minot’s Massachusetts (ii. 21); Belknap’s New Hampshire (ii. 298); Hoyt’s Antiq. Researches, Indian Wars, (p. 288); Williams’ Vermont, (i. 376). Chas. Carroll (Journal to Canada, 1876, p. 62) tells what he found to be the condition of Forts George and William Henry twenty years later.
[1437] Orig. ed., iv. 258; final revision, ii. 463.
[1438] Vol. iii. 376.
[1439] Stone’s Johnson, ii. 47. The admirer of Cooper will remember the interest with which he read the story of Fort William Henry as engrafted upon The Last of the Mohicans, but the novelist’s rendering of the massacre is sharply criticised by Martin in his De Montcalm en Canada, chaps. 4 and 5. Cf. also Rameau, La France aux Colonies, ii. p. 306. Cooper, in fact, embodied the views which at once became current, that the French did nothing to prevent the massacre. The news of the fall of the fort reached the eastern colonies by way of Albany, where the fright was excessive, and it was coupled with the assurance that the massacre had been connived at by the French. (N. H. Prov. Papers, vi. 604, 605.) Montcalm had apprehensions that he would be reproached, and that the massacre might afford ground to the English for breaking the terms of the surrender. He wrote at once to Webb and to Loudon, and charged the furor of the Indians upon the English rum (N. Y. Col. Docs., x. 618, 619), and Vaudreuil wrote a letter (p. 631) of palliation. Some later writers, like Grahame (United States, iv. 7), do not acquit Montcalm; but the more considerate hardly go further than to question his prudence in not providing a larger escort. (Warburton, Conquest of Canada, ii. 67.) Potter (Adj.-Gen. Rep. of N. H., 1866, ii. 190) says that of 200 men of that province, bringing up the rear of the line of retreating English, 80 were killed; and he reminds the apologists of Montcalm that, when the English were advised to defend themselves, the French general knew that they had not surrendered till their ammunition was expended. Stone (Johnson, ii. 49) says that thirty were killed. Parkman (i. p. 512) says it is impossible to tell with exactness how many were killed—about fifty, according to French accounts, not including those murdered in the hospitals. Of the six or seven hundred carried off by the Indians, a large part were redeemed by the French. The evidence, which is rather confusing, is examined also in Watson’s County of Essex, N. Y., p. 74. Cf. Les Ursulines de Québec, 1863, vol. ii. p. 295.
[1440] Of the later writers, see Parkman, ii. 6; Stone’s Johnson, ii. 54; Simms’s Frontiersmen of N. Y., 231; and Nath. S. Benton’s Herkimer County, which rehearses the history of the Palatine community, 1709-1783. Parkman, referring to Loudon’s despatches as he found them in the Public Record Office, says they were often tediously long. They were, it seems, in keeping with the provoking dilatoriness in coming to a point which characterized all his lordship’s movements. Franklin gives some amusing instances. (Cf. Parton’s Franklin, i. p. 383; Sparks’ Franklin, i. 217-21.) “The miscarriages in all our enterprises,” wrote Peter Fontaine in 1757, “have rendered us a reproach, and to the last degree contemptible in the eyes of our savage Indian and much more inhuman French enemies.” (Maury’s Huguenot Family, 366.)