The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (58 page)

Though reaching Quebec was half the battle, the other half was harder. The site of the city afforded its greatest protection, with the St. Lawrence on the east and south, the St. Charles on the north, and the third side of the triangle commanded by the Plains of Abraham, which
in turn were protected from the St. Lawrence by an intimidating escarpment. The French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, was so confident that the bluff could not be scaled that he did not bother to defend it.

Wolfe initially agreed with Montcalm’s assessment. He landed his troops below the city and tried every trick he could conceive to lure Montcalm away from the city into an open fight. Montcalm refused to be drawn. Wolfe sent a detachment to capture Point Lévis across the St. Lawrence from the city, at a place where the stream abruptly narrowed from a mile and a half to three-quarters of a mile (this narrowing was what gave Quebec its name—an Algonquin word meaning “strait” or “narrow”). From Point Lévis, British cannon bombarded the city. Montcalm remained unmoved.

Yet if position favored Montcalm, time did not. Provisioning the city posed a growing problem. Obviously no supplies would be coming up the river, which was now covered with British warships. Should Saunders and Cook proceed upstream, they might well cut the French supply lines from the interior. For this reason Montcalm could not simply wait for winter’s ice to freeze out his attackers.

So he tried fire instead. Torching seven of his own vessels, he cast them upon the current in the direction of the British squadron. All eyes on both sides of the river followed the floating infernos as they bore down on the attackers, but between the waywardness of the flow and the watchfulness of British boatmen who hooked the most threatening craft and pulled them aside, the incendiary ships drifted harmlessly away.

Weeks passed, then months. The British could not lure Montcalm from his redoubt. In frustration Wolfe sent rangers up and down the river to destroy whatever might give aid or comfort to the enemy. More than a thousand homes and farms were ravaged in the process, but Quebec remained untouched. One impetuous action by some British grenadiers against the French emplacements below the city produced—amid rain, thunder, mud and misfiring muskets—a sharp rebuke by the French. “Everything proves that the grand design of the English has failed,” wrote Governor Vaudreuil.

Wolfe fell sick under the strain. Feverish, his high hopes from the spring fading as the frosts of autumn approached, the British general turned to his lieutenants for ideas. They urged a landing miles upriver from Quebec, beyond the cliffs; from there the city could be approached overland. Wolfe assented, and preparations for moving some 3,500 men fifteen miles upstream commenced.

But rain delayed the operation, in the process intensifying Wolfe’s
anxiety. He had a boat crew row him up and down the river, seeking something he had overlooked, some weakness in the enemy’s defenses. Several days into September he found it: a narrow strip of land on a tiny cove directly below the heights of Abraham’s plain. Reconnaissance suggested that an ascent might conceivably be accomplished via a steep, treacherous path. Artillery in any numbers was out of the question, but lightly burdened infantry might manage the climb.

Wolfe determined to try. With 1,800 men, in the dead of night on September 12, he floated silently down the river to the cove. Through deserters the British commander had learned that a French supply convoy was scheduled to arrive that night; in fact it had been canceled, but, as British luck would have it, the officer in charge failed to notify Quebec of the cancellation. When a French sentry, hearing the British boats in the darkness, called out, a French-speaking British captain convincingly responded,
“Vive le roi
!”

At four in the morning the lead boats landed. Wolfe and Lieutenant Colonel William Howe led an ascent by a select squadron up the steep side of the cliff; hand over hand, clinging to roots and rocks, they scaled the bluff to surprise the guards at the top of the winding path. Before being overpowered, the guards managed to send a message into the city, but by the time Montcalm could react, the rest of Wolfe’s landing party of 4,500 had climbed the path.

This ascent was either a brilliant stroke or a stupid one, depending on what happened next. The French outnumbered the British and had the better position. If the redcoats got into trouble, the same steep slope that had been so difficult to surmount on the attack would be even more difficult in retreat—in confusion and under fire. For Wolfe and the British, on the Plains of Abraham it was triumph or die.

Wolfe did both. Montcalm, alarmed at the sudden appearance of his enemy where they were least expected, ordered an immediate attack. The French forces advanced bravely but in poor order; irregulars among the ranks fired from too far away to inflict much damage on the British. Wolfe meanwhile commanded his men to hold their fire. The French came closer, closer, closer—until at forty paces Wolfe gave the order. The British volley decimated the French line, which staggered and broke. Montcalm’s troops fell back, fighting as they went. Wolfe, leading the pursuit from the front, took a ball in the wrist, then one in the groin, then one in the lung. Dying, he gave a final order to cut off the French retreat, before declaring, “Now, God be praised, I will die in peace.”

Montcalm died no less heroically but considerably less happy.
Wounded in the retreat, the French general survived long enough to appreciate the extent of his failure. Those French troops that could leave the city fled to the west; those that could not were captured and transported to France. The French fleur-de-lis was struck from the ramparts of the citadel above the St. Lawrence; the British Union Jack went up in its place. Canada was not yet British, but Quebec, the key to Canada, was.

It was
a glorious victory, and recognized as such, but, to the astonishment of Franklin and his fellow Americans, the victory looked likely to be undone even before the glow of its doing diminished. The capture of Louisbourg, Duquesne, and Quebec, combined with other victories in America, as well as thrashings of the French in India and Europe and on the high seas, augured an auspicious peace for Britain. But any peace with France would be negotiated rather than dictated, partly because Britain’s triumphs at arms, stunning though they were, did not warrant dictation, and partly because Britain’s foreign policy was premised on a maintenance, rather than destruction, of the European balance of power. Britain would have to live with France; it therefore behooved the British to leave a France they could live with. The question for Britain’s negotiators was how much of what the nation’s armies had won in the field its diplomats ought to retain at the bargaining table.

As after the previous round of fighting, the Americans discovered that their interests counted for little in the thinking of Britain’s leaders. The news of the capture of Quebec had hardly reached London before interested parties began talking of handing Canada back to the French. British forces had captured Guadeloupe, the French sugar island in the West Indies, during that same glorious season; on the assumption that one or the other would have to be restored to France, influential voices in England advocated keeping Guadeloupe and returning Canada.

Franklin accounted such a course the height of folly. Had the British government learned nothing from this latest round of conflict with France? Had a peace treaty that left France in control of Canada ever led to anything but another war?

Franklin initially employed satire against the arguments for the return of Canada, thinking folly should be met with derision. He wrote a letter to the
London Chronicle
adducing a list of absurdities arguing for return, among them that British commerce was already too great and could not stand the increase certain to follow access to all of Canada; that a
surfeit of beaver pelts would drive down prices for the broad-brimmed hats favored by “that unmannerly sect, the Quakers”; that England ought soon to have another costly war in order to avoid the dangers of becoming too rich; that the French Indians might continue their scalping campaigns against the colonists and thus prevent the colonies from growing too strong; that the English tradition of fighting bravely but negotiating meekly should continue unbroken (“Otherwise we shall be inconsistent with ourselves”).

Franklin’s barbs glanced off, and the campaign for restoration of Canada gained strength. In light of the seriousness of the threat, Franklin himself grew more serious. In April 1760 he published a pamphlet with the sober title
The Interest of Great Britain Considered, with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe.
He left off his name, after the custom (his and the era’s) of anonymity and in recognition that as the agent of Pennsylvania he might be accused of special pleading. Yet though he spoke as a loyal subject of King George, close reading suggested that anyone this conversant with circumstances on the North American frontier must be a colonial. And even a cursory reading indicated that the author possessed a powerful mind, one that might benefit Britain—or endanger Britain, if it came to that.

Advocates of returning Canada to France contended that imperial security in North America might be guaranteed by the judicious placement of well-provisioned forts and the control of key mountain passes. Such statements, Franklin asserted, betrayed an utter ignorance of frontier warfare. “Security will not be obtained by such forts, unless they were connected by a wall like that of China, from one end of our settlements to the other.” As for the passes, “If the Indians, when at war, marched like the Europeans, with great armies, heavy cannon, baggage and carriages, the passes through which alone such armies could penetrate our country or receive their supplies, being secured, all might be sufficiently secure.” But the reality was wildly different. “They go to war, as they call it, in small parties, from fifty men down to five. Their hunting life has made them acquainted with the whole country, and scarce any part of it is impracticable to such a party. They can travel through the woods even by night, and know how to conceal their tracks. They pass easily between your forts undiscovered.” They required no convoys of provisions, instead living off the land. Nor was there any punishing them after the fact. “When they have surprised separately and murdered and scalped a dozen families, they are gone with inconceivable expedition through unknown ways, and ’tis very rare that pursuers have any chance of coming up with
them.” In short, as long as France held Canada, it would hold the English settlers in America hostage. And unless the British government was willing to abandon those settlers to a ghastly fate, it must be prepared to fight more wars like the last two.

Another argument for Guadeloupe over Canada marshaled the theories of the mercantilists, who as always decried the drain of cash from the home economy. In the two centuries since the first planting of sugarcane in the West Indies, the English had developed quite a sweet tooth; supporting their sucrose habit tipped the balance of payments in an adverse direction. Bringing Guadeloupe into the empire would alleviate the imbalance without forcing the British to forgo their sweets.

Against this argument Franklin employed what might have been called a neo-mercantilist argument. In the early days of the European empires, colonies had been seen as territories to exploit, and perhaps proselytize, but hardly to settle. For the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French, the original model of nonsettlement remained the rule, as it did for the British colonies in the tropics. But in North America the original population of religious dissenters and fortune-seekers had flourished, until the number of North Americans in the British empire equaled a substantial fraction of the population of Britain itself. And, for reasons Franklin had explained in his pamphlet on population growth—reasons he reiterated in summary here—the number of North Americans would continue to grow, perhaps one day surpassing the population of the home country.

This growing population, Franklin noted, provided an obvious clientele for the manufactures of England. In mercantilist terms of effect on the balance of trade, the export of manufactures to the colonies might be fully as beneficial as the import of sugar or tea. Moreover, while the trade in sugar had reached maturity—the islands were limited in size, and supported all the plantations they would ever be able to support—the North American trade would continue to grow, almost without limit. Citing the case of Pennsylvania, Franklin pointed out that exports to that province had multiplied by seventeen times in scarcely more than a generation. Such an extreme rate of increase might not continue, but the general trend certainly would. The trade with North America already eclipsed that with the West Indies; with each year the Indies would fall further into the shade.

Some in the contra-Canada camp used the growth of the North American colonies against them, contending that as they grew they would compete with the home country in manufactures. All the more
reason for keeping Canada, replied Franklin, denying the conclusion even as he accepted the concern it reflected. What prevented the development of manufactures in the colonies was not legal prohibition but the cheapness of land. Again echoing his earlier pamphlet, he asserted, “All the penal and prohibitory laws that were ever thought on will not be sufficient to prevent manufactures in a country whose inhabitants surpass the number that can subsist by the husbandry of it.” To return Canada to the French would bottle up the British population between the seaboard and the mountains, thereby producing, if not in this generation, then in the next or the next after that, precisely the situation British manufacturers wanted to prevent. To open up Canada to British settlement would have the opposite effect. “While there is land enough in America for our people, there can never be manufactures to any amount or value.”