The campaign closed in November with an attack on the post at German Flats, a settlement of Palatine Germans, by a scouting body of French and Indians under one of Vaudreuil’s Canadians, Belêtre. Everything disappeared in the havoc, which a detachment sent by Colonel Townshend from Fort Herkimer, not far off, was powerless to check. Before Lord Howe, with a larger force from Schenectady,[1154] could reach the scene, the French had departed.
The winter of 1757-58 at Montreal and Quebec passed with the usual official gayety and bureaucratic peculation. The passions of war were only aroused as occasional stories of rapine and scalps came in from the borders. Good hearty rejoicing took place, however, in March, over the report that a scouting party from Ticonderoga had encountered Rogers, and that the dreaded partisan had been killed and his followers annihilated. The last part of the story was too true, but Rogers had escaped, leaving behind his coat, which he had thrown off in the fray, and in its pocket was his commission, the capture of which had given rise to the belief in his death. Meanwhile, on the English side a new spirit of control was preparing to give unaccustomed vigor to the coming campaign. In England’s darkest hour William Pitt had come to power, thrown up by circumstances. He was trusted in the country’s desperation, and proved himself capable of imparting a momentum that all British movements had lacked since the war began. He developed his plans for America, and made his soldiers and sailors spring to their work. Loudon was recalled. The provincial officer was made the equal of the regular, by conferring upon him the same right of seniority by commission. The whole colonial service felt that they were thereby made equal sharers of the honors as well as of the burdens of the times. Pitt put his finger upon the three vulnerable gaps in the French panoply. He would reach Quebec by taking Louisbourg; and singling out a stubborn colonel who had shown his mettle in Germany, he made him Major-General Amherst, and sent him with a fleet to take Louisbourg, as we may see in another chapter.[1155] Circumstances, or a mischance in judgment, made him retain Abercrombie for the Crown Point campaign, but a better decision named Brigadier John Forbes to attack Fort Duquesne. It belongs to this place to tell the story of these last two campaigns.
In June, Abercrombie had assembled at the head of Lake George a force of 15,000 men, of whom 6,000 were regulars. Montcalm was at Ticonderoga with scarce a quarter as many; but Vaudreuil was tardily sending forward some scant reinforcements under De Lévis. The French general got tidings early in July of the embarkation in England, but had done nothing up to that time to protect his army, which was lying on the peninsula of Ticonderoga, mainly outside the fort. In fact, he was at a loss what to do; no help had reached him, and the approaching army was too numerous to hope for success. He thought of retreating to Crown Point, but some of his principal officers opposed it. He now began a breastwork of logs on the high ground before the fort, and, felling the trees within musket range, he covered the ground with a dense barrier.
All the while, the English were in a heydey of assurance. Pitt was waiting anxiously in London for the first tidings. Abercrombie, now a man of fifty-two years, did not altogether inspire confidence. His heavy build and lethargic temperament made lookers-on call him “aged.” There was, however, a proud expectation of success from the vigorous, companionable Earl Howe, the brigadier next in command, whom Pitt hoped to prove the real commander, because of the trust which Abercrombie put in him. On the 5th of July the immense flotilla, which bore the English army and its train, started down Lake George. To a spectator it completely deadened the glare of the water for miles away. The next morning at daybreak the army was passing Rogers’ Slide, whence a French party under Langy watched them. By noon it had disembarked at the extreme north end of Lake George, and near the river conducting to Ticonderoga they built an entrenchment, to protect their bateaux. Rogers, with his rangers, was sent into the woods to lead the way, while the army followed; but the denseness of the forest soon brought the column into confusion. Meanwhile, the French party under Langy, finding the English had got between them and their main body, endeavored to pass around the head of the English column, and, in doing so, got equally confused in the thickness of the wood, and suddenly encountered that part of the English force where Lord Howe and Major Putnam were. A skirmish ensued, Howe fell,[1156] and the army was practically without a head. Rogers, who was in advance, turned back upon Langy, and few of the Frenchmen escaped.
LORD HOWE.
From an engraving in Entick’s Hist. of the Late War, 3d ed., 1765, vol. iii. p. 209. For the impression made by Howe’s character on the colonists, see Mrs. Grant’s American Lady, Wilson’s ed., p. 222.
In the morning Abercrombie withdrew the army to the landing. Bradstreet, with his watermen, having rebuilt the bridges destroyed by the French, the original intention of skirting the river on the west was abandoned, and the army now started to follow the ordinary portage across the loop of the river, which held the rapids. The French had already deserted their positions at either end of this portage. At the northerly end, near a saw-mill, the English general halted his army. He was at one base-corner of the triangular peninsula of which Ticonderoga was the apex. He had now to encounter, not far from the fort, the entrenchment which Montcalm was busily constructing out of the forest-trees which had been laid along its front as by a hurricane. Scorning all measures which might have spared his army great losses, and thoughtless of movements which could have intercepted Montcalm’s reinforcements,[1157] the English general undertook, from the distant mill, to direct repeated assaults in front. His soldiers made a deadly push through the entanglements of the levelled trees and against the barricade, behind which the defenders were almost wholly protected. He could have done nothing to help Montcalm so much. The stores of the French were sufficient for eight days only, and the chief dread of the French general was that Abercrombie would cut his communications with Crown Point.
