Battle of Carillon, 1758: Montcalm's victory at Ticonderoga

The largest army yet seen in North America came up Lake George in the summer of 1758 to break open the road to Canada. At the far end of the lake waited a French force a quarter of its size, a half-built fort and a wall of logs thrown up in a day and a night. By the evening of 8 July the wall still stood, the ground in front of it was covered with British and colonial dead, and the great army was running for its boats.²

Background: the gate to Canada

By 1758 Britain and France had been fighting for North America for four years. William Pitt, who now directed Britain's war, planned three blows for that summer: Jeffery Amherst against the fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, John Forbes against Fort Duquesne on the Ohio, and James Abercromby up the chain of lakes from New York toward Montreal.³

The key to that last route was Fort Carillon. The French had begun it in 1755 at Ticonderoga, where the La Chute River drains Lake George into Lake Champlain; the name comes from an Iroquoian word that Makos renders as "the place between the waters" and Britannica as "between two waters". In 1758 the fort was still unfinished. A year earlier Montcalm had marched from it to take Fort William Henry at the other end of Lake George, and the loss of that fort, and the massacre that followed its surrender, made Carillon the next British target.⁴

New France entered the summer weak. Bad harvests in 1757 and 1758 left the colony short of food and dependent on supplies from France, and over the winter the rations of bread and meat were cut. The British, for their part, meant this to be the year they finished Canada.⁵

Armies and commanders

Command of the British northern army went to Major General James Abercromby, a long-serving officer who was now commander in chief in North America. Historians have not been kind to him: Makos calls him not an especially dynamic commander, and Richard Middleton, in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, describes him under Loudoun as loyal and tireless but entirely uninspired. The real spirit of the army was his second in command, Brigadier George Augustus, Viscount Howe, whom Middleton calls the moving spirit of the expedition.⁶

The numbers differ by source. Eccles and Middleton give some 6,000 British regulars and 9,000 provincials raised by the colonies; EBSCO counts 15,391 men, Britannica 15,000 to 16,000, and Makos more than 12,000. Among the regulars were Scottish Highlanders of the 42nd Regiment, the Black Watch. The army brought siege guns with it, for Fort Carillon was expected to need a siege.⁷

Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, commanded the French regulars in Canada. Most of his men were French regular infantry, and his aide Louis-Antoine de Bougainville complained that too many of them were poor recruits; with a few colonial regulars, militiamen and a handful of Indigenous allies, Montcalm had about 3,500 men at first. His second in command, the Chevalier de Lévis, was on his way with reinforcements.⁸

The battle in phases

Lake George and the death of Lord Howe

On 5 July the army embarked at the southern end of Lake George in a fleet that Makos puts at more than 800 boats and the Trust and the Canadian Encyclopedia at about a thousand. It crossed the lake, landed at its northern end and pushed into the dense woods toward the fort.⁹

On 6 July a French scouting force of some 350 to 400 men under Captain Trépezec, cut off as it fell back, ran into the head of the British column in the forest. In the skirmish Lord Howe was shot dead. The British won the fight but lost the man who held the army together; the advance stalled for about a day, and Eccles judged that this delay alone let Montcalm finish his defenses.¹⁰

Montcalm's wall

Montcalm had been unsure where, or even whether, to make a stand; he thought the unfinished fort could not withstand an assault, let alone a siege. On the advice of his officers he chose to fight on the high ground about three-quarters of a mile west of it. On 7 July his whole force went to work there. Soldiers felled hundreds of trees and piled the trunks into a breastwork six to eight feet high that followed the curve of the ridge, and in front of it they laid an abatis: felled trees with their sharpened branches turned toward the enemy, filled out with brush and debris.¹¹

That evening Lévis arrived with about 400 men, which brought the defenders to a little over 3,600. A smaller log wall covered the open ground below the ridge toward Lake Champlain, held by Canadians and colonial troops.¹²

Abercromby relied on the reconnaissance of a young engineer officer, who reported that it could be carried by infantry, and he had been told that the French expected thousands of reinforcements. He decided to attack at once, without waiting for his artillery or opening a siege. W. J. Eccles later pointed to what he missed: the open ground beside the French line, held by only about 400 Canadians, by which part of the army could have gone round Montcalm and cut him off from his fort.¹³

The assault

The sources differ on the hour. Eccles and the Trust put the first assault shortly after noon, the Canadian Encyclopedia at about 12:30 p.m., and EBSCO the main attacks between 1 and 7 p.m. The regulars went forward in four columns with colonial skirmishers between them. Abercromby meant a single blow along the whole line, but the regiments went in at different points and different times, and the abatis broke up every formation.¹⁴

Struggling through the branches, the redcoats were shot down before they reached the wall. One observer wrote that they were "cut down like grass", and a survivor sheltering behind a stump remembered that a man could no more stand up without being hit than stand in a shower without getting wet. They re-formed and came on again, six times by EBSCO's count. An attempt to send boats down the La Chute River past the French flank was driven off by the guns of the fort.¹⁵

The Highlanders and the retreat

Late in the day Highland troops made the most determined attack of all. Some of them got over the breastwork and fought hand to hand before French reinforcements threw them back. The 42nd lost more than half its men, by the regiment's own museum's account.¹⁶

By about seven in the evening the attackers could do no more and Abercromby ordered a withdrawal. Rumors of a French counterattack turned it into a stampede. Men left arms and equipment behind, and by the evening of 9 July the army was back at the south end of Lake George, where its campaign had begun, having fled from an enemy that was in no state to follow.¹⁷

Turning point: the guns that stayed on the beach

Carillon was lost before the first volley. The French position was a field work of logs that cannon could have smashed, and Abercromby had a siege train. Eccles wrote that his guns would have reduced Montcalm's wall to kindling; Middleton calls the hurried assault and the retreat that followed two serious errors, since even after the battle the British still outnumbered the French and could have brought up their artillery. Abercromby did neither. An army that had lost Howe and then the day was led home by a commander shaken by his losses.¹⁸

The losses were lopsided. EBSCO gives the British 550 killed, 1,355 wounded and 27 missing; Eccles and Middleton count 1,944 casualties, 1,610 of them regulars. French losses were about 370 to 380 killed and wounded by EBSCO's and Eccles's counts. Isaac Makos of the Trust calls it the bloodiest battle of the French and Indian War.¹⁹

Aftermath

London blamed Abercromby. He was recalled in September and replaced by Amherst, and he never commanded in the field again. Montcalm was promoted to lieutenant general. The victory held up the British advance toward Montreal for a year, but it did not save New France. Louisbourg fell that summer, Forbes took Fort Duquesne in November, and in August John Bradstreet, Abercromby's quartermaster, crossed Lake Ontario with a largely colonial force and destroyed Fort Frontenac and the French flotilla on the lake.²⁰ › Battle of Plassey, 1757

In 1759 Amherst came up the lakes again. The French blew up Carillon and fell back into Canada, and the British rebuilt the fort as Ticonderoga. The war in North America was decided that September, before Quebec.²¹

Legacy and memory

In the Revolution the fort changed hands twice more. Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys and Benedict Arnold surprised its small British garrison in May 1775, and General John Burgoyne retook it in July 1777, only to give it up after his surrender at Saratoga. Makos notes that Montcalm's defense left many officers believing the place impregnable, a reputation it never again lived up to.²² › The Battle of Saratoga, 1777

In French Canada, Carillon became a symbol of resistance. Its memory faded after the conquest and came back in the nineteenth century: in 1858, for the hundredth anniversary, Octave Crémazie published his poem Le Drapeau de Carillon, which made him Quebec's "national poet". A banner said to have flown in the battle, the flag of Carillon, is named by the Canadian Encyclopedia and Britannica among the inspirations of the blue and white Quebec flag adopted in 1948.²³

Visiting the battlefield today

The fort and the ground of the French lines are preserved at Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York. After long years of ruin, the Pell family began restoring the fort in the early twentieth century and opened it as a museum, which is still open; Britannica dates the start of the work to 1908 and the Trust to 1909.²⁴ › Jumonville Glen, 1754