[1493] Amherst’s letters chronicling progress are in N. Y. Col. Docs., vii. 400, etc. Early in Nov., 1758, it had been rumored in Albany that Amherst was to supersede Abercrombie. (C. V. R. Bonney’s Legacy of Hist. Gleanings, Albany, 1875, p. 26.) A large number of letters addressed to Amherst are in the Bernard Papers (Sparks MSS.), 1759. On Amherst’s family connections, cf. James E. Doyle’s Official Baronage of England (London, 1886), i. p. 38.
[1494] An Orderly Book of Commissary Wilson, in the possession of Gen. J. Watts De Peyster, was printed as no. 1 of Munsell’s Historical Series, at Albany, in 1857, with notes by Dr. O’Callaghan, which in the main concern persons mentioned in the record.
A journal of Samuel Warner, a Massachusetts soldier, is printed in the Wilbraham Centennial, and is quoted in De Costa’s Lake George. Parkman was favored by Mr. Wm. L. Stone with the use of a diary of Sergeant Merriman, of Ruggles’ regiment, and with a MS. book of general and regimental orders of the campaign. The Journal of Rufus Putnam covers this forward movement. A MS. “Project for the attack on Ticonderoga, May 29, 1759, W. B. delt.,” is among the Faden maps, no. 24, Library of Congress.
[1495] A centennial address of the capture of Ticonderoga, delivered in 1859, is in Cortlandt Van Rensselaer’s Sermons, Essays, and Addresses, Phil., 1861.
[1496] Parkman refers to an account by Thompson Maxwell as of doubtful authenticity, as it is not sure that the writer was one of Rogers’s party. A hearsay story of equal uncertainty, respecting an ambush laid by Rogers for the Indians, as told by one Jesse Pennoyer, is given by Mrs. C. M. Day, in her Hist. of the Eastern Townships. Stone (Life of Johnson, ii. 107) says he could not find any tradition of the raid among the present descendants of the St. Francis tribe. Maurault, in his Histoire des Abénakis, gives an account. Vaudreuil refers to it in his letters in the Parkman MSS. Cf. Watson’s County of Essex, p. 106.
[1497] The first attempt to recount the exploits of Wolfe in the shape of a regular biography was made by a weak and florid writer, who, in 1760, “according to the rules of eloquence,” as he professed, got out a brief Life of General James Wolfe, which was in the same year reprinted in Boston. (Carter-Brown, iii. 1,280; Haven in Thomas, p. 557.) Nothing adequate was done, however, for a long time after, and the reader had to gather what he could from the Annual Register, Smollett’s England, Walpole’s George II., or from the contemporary histories of Entick and Mante. (Cf. various expressions in Walpole’s Letters.)
The letters of Wolfe to his parents were not used till Thomas Streatfeild made an abstract of a part of them for a proposed history of Kent; but his project falling through, the papers passed by Mahon’s influence (Hist. of England, 3d ed., iv. 151) to the Rev. G. R. Gleig, who used them in his Lives of the Most Eminent British Military Commanders (1832). About 1827, such of the Wolfe papers as had descended from General Warde, the executor of Wolfe’s mother, to his nephew, Admiral George Warde, were placed in Robert Southey’s hands, but a life of Wolfe which he had designed was not prepared, and the papers were lost sight of until they appeared as lots 531, 532 of the Catalogue of the Dawson Turner Sale in 1858, which also contained an independent collection of “Wolfiana.” Upon due presentation of the facts, the lots above named were restored to the Warde family, together with the “Wolfiana,” as it was not deemed desirable to separate the two collections. This enlarged accumulation was submitted to Mr. Robert Wright, who produced the Life of Major-General James Wolfe, which was published in London in 1864. To the domestic correspondence of Wolfe above referred to, which ceases to be full when the period of his greatest fame is reached, Mr. Wright added other more purely military papers, which opportunely came in his way. Some of these had belonged to Col. Rickson, a friend of Wolfe, and being filed in an old chest, in whose rusty lock the key had been broken, they had remained undisturbed till about forty years ago, when the chest was broken open, and the papers were used by Mr. John Buchanan in a sketch of Wolfe, which he printed in Tait’s Magazine in 1849, and reprinted in his Glasgow Past and Present in 1856. Wright found the originals in the Museum of the Antiquarian Society of Scotland, at Edinburgh, and he says they, better than the letters addressed to his mother, exhibit the tone and bent of Wolfe’s mind. The letters which passed between Wolfe and Amherst during the siege of Louisbourg (1758) were submitted to Wright by Earl Amherst, and from these, from the “Wolfiana” of Dawson Turner, from the Chatham and Bedford Correspondence, he gathered much unused material to illustrate the campaigns which closed the struggle for Canada. See particularly a letter of Wolfe, from Halifax, May 1, 1759, detailing the progress of preparations, which is in the Chatham Correspondence, i. 403, as is one of Sept. 9, dated on board the “Sutherland,” off Cape Rouge (p. 425). Walpole speaks of the last letter received from Wolfe before news came of his success, and of that letter’s desponding character. “In the most artful terms that could be framed, he left the nation uncertain whether he meant to prepare an excuse for desisting, or to claim the melancholy merit of having sacrificed himself without a prospect of success.” (Mem. of the Reign of George II., 2d ed., iii. p. 218.) Mr. Wright, from a residence in Canada, became familiar with the scenes of Wolfe’s later life, and was incited thereby to the task which he has very creditably performed.
[1498] Cf. also, on Wolfe, James’ Memoirs of Great Commanders, new ed., 1858; Bentley’s Mag., xxxi. 353; Eclectic Mag., lxii. 376; Canadian Monthly, vii. 105, by D. Wilson. Mahon (England, iv. ch. 35) tells some striking stories of the way in which Wolfe’s shyness sometimes took refuge in an almost crazy dash.
[1499] The Abbé Verreau is said to have one. I note another in a sale catalogue (Bangs, N. Y., 1854, no. 1,319), and a third is cited in the Third Report of the Hist. MSS. Commission, p. 124, as being among the Northumberland Papers at Alnwick Castle.
[1500] This address was delivered before the N. E. Hist. Geneal. Soc. in Boston. It was not so much a narrative of events as a critical examination of various phases of the history of the siege.