On the French side, there are the official documents, the Mémoire sur la Canada, 1749-60 (published by the Lit. and Hist. Soc. of Quebec), and Pouchot, i. 162.
The loss of Frontenac gave rise to a disagreement between Vaudreuil and Montcalm as to the dispositions to be made upon Lake Ontario, and the papers which passed between them are in the N. Y. Col. Docs., x. 866, etc., as well as others on the conflict of their opinions respecting the defence of Ticonderoga (Ibid., p. 873, etc.).
The main sources for the Duquesne expedition of 1758 are in the Public Record Office, America and West Indies, including the correspondence of Forbes.[1466] There are also papers in the Col. Records of Penna. and Pennsylvania Archives. The letters of Washington in Sparks’ Washington (vol. ii.) may be supplemented by the fuller text of the same, and by others, in Bouquet and Haldimand Papers, in the British Museum. Washington’s letters to Bouquet are in Additional MSS., vol. 21, 641, of the British Museum, and there is a copy of them among the Parkman MSS.[1467] There is a letter of a British officer in the Gent. Mag., xxix. 171. For the new route made by Forbes, see Lowdermilk’s Cumberland, p. 238. The routes of Braddock and Forbes are marked on the map given in Sparks’ Washington, ii. 38, and Washington’s opinion of their respective advantages is in Ibid., ii. 302.
Of Grant’s defeat, the principal fight of the campaign, there are contemporary accounts in the Penna. Gazette,[1468] Boston Evening Post, Boston Weekly Advertiser, Boston News-Letter, etc.; in Hazard’s Penna. Reg., viii. 141; in Olden Time, i. p. 179. Grant’s imprudence met with little consideration in England. (Grenville Correspondence, i. 274.)
The account of Post’s embassy, July 15 to Sept., 1758, appeared in London in 1759, as the Second Journal of Christian Frederick Post.[1469]
Parkman,[1470] Bancroft,[1471] and Irving,[1472] of course, tell the story of Forbes’s campaign,—the first with the best help to sources.[1473]
The concomitants of the winter of 1758-59 in Canada must be studied in order to comprehend the inequality of the two sides in the signal campaign which was to follow. Parkman finds the material of this study in the documents of the Archives de la Marine et de la Guerre in Paris; in the correspondence of Montcalm, of which he procured copies from the present representative of his family, including the letters of Bougainville[1474] and Doreil[1475] on their Paris mission; and in the letters of Vaudreuil, in the Archives Nationales.[1476] Much throwing light on the strained relations between the general and the governor will be found in the N. Y. Col. Docs., vol. x.[1477] French representations of the situation in Canada are given in the Considérations sur l’État présent du Canada, published by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec in 1840, sometimes cited as Faribault’s Collection de Mémoires, no. 3. Further use may be made of Mémoire sur le Canada, 1749-1760, en trois parties, Quebec, 1838.[1478]
The comparative inequality of the two combatants was a fruitful subject of inquiry then, especially upon the French side. There is in the Penna. Archives, 2d series, vi. 554, a French Mémoire, setting forth their respective positions, needs, and resources, dated January, 1759, and similar documents are given in the N. Y. Col. Docs., x. 897, 925, 930.
Later writers, with the advantage of remoteness, have found much for comment in the several characteristics, experiences, aims, and abilities of the two warring forces. These are contrasted in Warburton’s Conquest of Canada.[1479] Judge Haliburton[1480] points out the great military advantages of the paternal and despotic government of Canada. Viscount Bury, in his Exodus of the Western Nations,[1481] compares the outcome of their opposing systems. Parkman gives the last chapter of his Old Régime in Canada to a vigorous exposition of the subject. The institutional character of the English colonists, developed from the circumstances of their life, is compared with the purpose of the French colonists to reproduce France, in E. G. Scott’s Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies of America.[1482]
Among the later French authors, Rameau, in his France aux Colonies (Paris, 1859), writes in full consciousness of the limitations and errors of policy which deprived France of her American colonies.[1483] The efforts which were made to propitiate the Indians before the campaign opened are explained in Stone’s Life of Johnson, ii. ch. v., and in the N. Y. Col. Docs., vii. 378.