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A Half Century of Conflict, Volume II

F >> Francis Parkman >> A Half Century of Conflict, Volume II




This writer thinks that the seizure of Canseau and the attack of Annapolis
were sources of dire calamity to the French. "Perhaps," he says, "the
English would have let us alone if we had not first insulted them. It was
the interest of the people of New England to live at peace with us, and
they would no doubt have done so, if we had not taken it into our heads to
waken them from their security. They expected that both parties would
merely stand on the defensive, without taking part in this cruel war that
has set Europe in a blaze."

Whatever might otherwise have been the disposition of the "Bastonnais," or
New England people, the attacks on Canseau and Annapolis alarmed and
exasperated them, and engendered in some heated brains a project of wild
audacity. This was no less than the capture of Louisbourg, reputed the
strongest fortress, French or British, in North America, with the possible
exception of Quebec, which owed its chief strength to nature, and not to
art.

Louisbourg was a standing menace to all the Northern British colonies. It
was the only French naval station on the continent, and was such a haunt of
privateers that it was called the American Dunkirk. It commanded the chief
entrance of Canada, and threatened to ruin the fisheries, which were nearly
as vital to New England as was the fur-trade to New France. The French
government had spent twenty-five years in fortifying it, and the cost of
its powerful defences--constructed after the system of Vauban--was reckoned
at thirty million livres.

This was the fortress which William Vaughan of Damariscotta advised
Governor Shirley to attack with fifteen hundred raw New England militia.
[Footnote: Smollett says that the proposal came from Robert Auchmuty, judge
of admiralty in Massachusetts. Hutchinson, Douglas, Belknap, and other
well-informed writers ascribe the scheme to Vaughan, while Pepperrell says
that it originated with Colonel John Bradstreet. In the Public Record
Office there is a letter from Bradstreet, written in 1753, but without
address, in which he declares that he not only planned the siege, but "was
the Principal Person in conducting it,"--assertions which may pass for what
they are worth, Bradstreet being much given to self-assertion.] Vaughan was
born at Portsmouth in 1703, and graduated at Harvard College nineteen years
later. His father, also a graduate of Harvard, was for a time
lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire. Soon after leaving college, the
younger Vaughan--a youth of restless and impetuous activity--established a
fishing-station on the island of Matinicus, off the coast of Maine, and
afterwards became the owner of most of the land on both sides of the little
river Damariscotta, where he built a garrison-house, or wooden fort,
established a considerable settlement, and carried on an extensive trade in
fish and timber. He passed for a man of ability and force, but was accused
of a headstrong rashness, a self-confidence that hesitated at nothing, and
a harebrained contempt of every obstacle in his way. Once, having fitted
out a number of small vessels at Portsmouth for his fishing at Matinicus,
he named a time for sailing. It was a gusty and boisterous March day, the
sea was rough, and old sailors told him that such craft could not carry
sail. Vaughan would not listen, but went on board and ordered his men to
follow. One vessel was wrecked at the mouth of the river; the rest, after
severe buffeting, came safe, with their owner, to Matinicus.

Being interested in the fisheries, Vaughan was doubly hostile to
Louisbourg,--their worst enemy. He found a willing listener in the
Governor, William Shirley. Shirley was an English barrister who had come to
Massachusetts in 1731 to practise his profession and seek his fortune.
After filling various offices with credit, he was made governor of the
province in 1741, and had discharged his duties with both tact and talent.
He was able, sanguine, and a sincere well-wisher to the province, though
gnawed by an insatiable hunger for distinction. He thought himself a born
strategist, and was possessed by a propensity for contriving military
operations, which finally cost him dear. Vaughan, who knew something of
Louisbourg, told him that in winter the snow-drifts were often banked so
high against the rampart that it could be mounted readily, if the
assailants could but time their arrival at the right moment. This was not
easy, as that rocky and tempestuous coast was often made inaccessible by
fogs and surf; Shirley therefore preferred a plan of his own contriving.
But nothing could be done without first persuading his Assembly to consent.

On the 9th of January the General Court of Massachusetts--a convention of
grave city merchants and solemn rustics from the country villages--was
astonished by a message from the Governor to the effect that he had a
communication to make, so critical that he wished the whole body to swear
secrecy. The request was novel, but being then on good terms with Shirley,
the Representatives consented, and took the oath. Then, to their amazement,
the Governor invited them to undertake forthwith the reduction of
Louisbourg. The idea of an attack on that redoubtable fortress was not
new. Since the autumn, proposals had been heard to petition the British
ministry to make the attempt, under a promise that the colonies would give
their best aid. But that Massachusetts should venture it alone, or with
such doubtful help as her neighbors might give, at her own charge and risk,
though already insolvent, without the approval or consent of the ministry,
and without experienced officers or trained soldiers, was a startling
suggestion to the sober-minded legislators of the General Court. They
listened, however, with respect to the Governor's reasons, and appointed a
committee of the two houses to consider them. The committee deliberated for
several days, and then made a report adverse to the plan, as was also the
vote of the Court.

Meanwhile, in spite of the oath, the secret had escaped. It is said that a
country member, more pious than discreet, prayed so loud and fervently, at
his lodgings, for light to guide him on the momentous question, that his
words were overheard, and the mystery of the closed doors was revealed. The
news flew through the town, and soon spread through all the province.

After his defeat in the Assembly, Shirley returned, vexed and disappointed,
to his house in Roxbury. A few days later, James Gibson, a Boston merchant,
says that he saw him "walking slowly down King Street, with his head bowed
down, as if in a deep study." "He entered my counting-room," pursues the
merchant, "and abruptly said, 'Gibson, do you feel like giving up the
expedition to Louisbourg?'" Gibson replied that he wished the House would
reconsider their vote. "You are the very man I want!" exclaimed the
Governor. [Footnote: Gibson, _Journal of the Siege of Louisbourg_.]
They then drew up a petition for reconsideration, which Gibson signed,
promising to get also the signatures of merchants, not only of Boston, but
of Salem, Marblehead, and other towns along the coast. In this he was
completely successful, as all New England merchants looked on Louisbourg as
an arch-enemy.

The petition was presented, and the question came again before the
Assembly. There had been much intercourse between Boston and Louisbourg,
which had largely depended on New England for provisions. [Footnote:
_Lettre d'un Habitant de Louisbourg_.] The captured militia-men of
Canseau, who, after some delay, had been sent to Boston, according to the
terms of surrender, had used their opportunities to the utmost, and could
give Shirley much information concerning the fortress. It was reported that
the garrison was mutinous, and that provisions were fallen short, so that
the place could not hold out without supplies from France. These, however,
could be cut off only by blockading the harbor with a stronger naval force
than all the colonies together could supply. The Assembly had before
reached the reasonable conclusion that the capture of Louisbourg was beyond
the strength of Massachusetts, and that the only course was to ask the help
of the mother-country. [Footnote: _Report of Council, 12 Jan. 1745_.]

The reports of mutiny, it was urged, could not be depended on; raw militia
in the open field were no match for disciplined troops behind ramparts; the
expense would be enormous, and the credit of the province, already sunk
low, would collapse under it; we should fail, and instead of sympathy, get
nothing but ridicule. Such were the arguments of the opposition, to which
there was little to answer, except that if Massachusetts waited for help
from England, Louisbourg would be reinforced and the golden opportunity
lost. The impetuous and irrepressible Vaughan put forth all his energy; the
plan was carried by a single vote. And even this result was said to be due
to the accident of a member in opposition falling and breaking a leg as he
was hastening to the House.

The die was cast, and now doubt and hesitation vanished. All alike set
themselves to push on the work. Shirley wrote to all the colonies, as far
south as Pennsylvania, to ask for co-operation. All excused themselves
except Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, and the whole burden
fell on the four New England colonies. These, and Massachusetts above all,
blazed with pious zeal; for as the enterprise was directed against Roman
Catholics, it was supposed in a peculiar manner to commend itself to
Heaven. There were prayers without ceasing in churches and families, and
all was ardor, energy, and confidence; while the other colonies looked on
with distrust, dashed with derision. When Benjamin Franklin, in
Philadelphia, heard what was afoot, he wrote to his brother in Boston,
"Fortified towns are hard nuts to crack, and your teeth are not accustomed
to it; but some seem to think that forts are as easy taken as snuff."
[Footnote: Sparks, _Works of Franklin_, VII. 16.] It has been said of
Franklin that while he represented some of the New England qualities, he
had no part in that enthusiasm of which our own time saw a crowning example
when the cannon opened at Fort Sumter, and which pushes to its end without
reckoning chances, counting costs, or heeding the scoffs of ill-wishers.

The prevailing hope and faith were, it is true, born largely of ignorance,
aided by the contagious zeal of those who first broached the project; for
as usual in such cases, a few individuals supplied the initiate force of
the enterprise. Vaughan the indefatigable rode express to Portsmouth with a
letter from Shirley to Benning Wentworth, governor of New Hampshire. That
pompous and self-important personage admired the Massachusetts Governor,
who far surpassed him in talents and acquirements, and who at the same time
knew how to soothe his vanity. Wentworth was ready to do his part, but his
province had no money, and the King had ordered him to permit the issue of
no more paper currency. The same prohibition had been laid upon Shirley;
but he, with sagacious forecast, had persuaded his masters to relent so far
as to permit the issue of £50,000 in what were called bills of credit to
meet any pressing exigency of war. He told this to Wentworth, and succeeded
in convincing him that his province might stretch her credit like
Massachusetts, in case of similar military need. New Hampshire was thus
enabled to raise a regiment of five hundred men out of her scanty
population, with the condition that a hundred and fifty of them should be
paid and fed by Massachusetts. [Footnote: Correspondence of Shirley and
Wentworth, in _Belknap Papers, Provincial Papers of New Hampshire_,
V.]

Shirley was less fortunate in Rhode Island. The Governor of that little
colony called Massachusetts "our avowed enemy, always trying to defame us."
[Footnote: _Governor Wanton to the Agent of Rhode Island, 20 Dec.
1745,_ in _Colony Records of Rhode Island_, V.] There was a grudge
between the neighbors, due partly to notorious ill-treatment by the
Massachusetts Puritans of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, and
partly to one of those boundary disputes which often produced ill-blood
among the colonies. The Representatives of Rhode Island, forgetting past
differences, voted to raise a hundred and fifty men for the expedition,
till, learning that the project was neither ordered nor approved by the
Home Government, they prudently reconsidered their action. They voted,
however, that the colony sloop "Tartar," carrying fourteen cannon and
twelve swivels, should be equipped and manned for the service, and that the
Governor should be instructed to find and commission a captain and a
lieutenant to command her. [Footnote: _Colony Records of Rhode
Island_, V. (_Feb._ 1745).]

Connecticut promised five hundred and sixteen men and officers, on
condition that Roger Wolcott, their commander, should have the second rank
in the expedition. Shirley accordingly commissioned him as major-general.
As Massachusetts was to supply above three thousand men, or more than three
quarters of the whole force, she had a natural right to name a
Commander-in-chief.

It was not easy to choose one. The colony had been at peace for twenty
years, and except some grizzled Indian fighters of the last war, and some
survivors of the Carthagena expedition, nobody had seen service. Few knew
well what a fortress was, and nobody knew how to attack one. Courage,
energy, good sense, and popularity were the best qualities to be hoped for
in the leader. Popularity was indispensable, for the soldiers were all to
be volunteers, and they would not enlist under a commander whom they did
not like. Shirley's choice was William Pepperrell, a merchant of Kittery.
Knowing that Benning Wentworth thought himself the man for the place, he
made an effort to placate him, and wrote that he would gladly have given
him the chief command, but for his gouty legs. Wentworth took fire at the
suggestion, forgot his gout, and declared himself ready to serve his
country and assume the burden of command. The position was awkward, and
Shirley was forced to reply, "On communicating your offer to two or three
gentlemen in whose judgment I most confide, I found them clearly of opinion
that any alteration of the present command would be attended with great
risk, both with respect to our Assembly and the soldiers being entirely
disgusted." [Footnote: _Shirley to Wentworth, 16 Feb._ 1745.]

The painter Smibert has left us a portrait of Pepperrell,--a good bourgeois
face, not without dignity, though with no suggestion of the soldier. His
spacious house at Kittery Point still stands, sound and firm, though
curtailed in some of its proportions. Not far distant is another noted
relic of colonial times, the not less spacious mansion built by the
disappointed Wentworth at Little Harbor. I write these lines at a window of
this curious old house, and before me spreads the scene familiar to
Pepperrell from childhood. Here the river Piscataqua widens to join the
sea, holding in its gaping mouth the large island of Newcastle, with
attendant groups of islets and island rocks, battered with the rack of
ages, studded with dwarf savins, or half clad with patches of whortleberry
bushes, sumac, and the shining wax-myrtle, green in summer, red with the
touch of October. The flood tide pours strong and full around them, only to
ebb away and lay bare a desolation of rocks and stones buried in a shock of
brown drenched seaweed, broad tracts of glistening mud, sandbanks black
with mussel-beds, and half-submerged meadows of eel-grass, with myriads of
minute shellfish clinging to its long lank tresses. Beyond all these lies
the main, or northern channel, more than deep enough, even when the tide is
out, to float a line-of-battle-ship. On its farther bank stands the old
house of the Pepperrells, wearing even now an air of dingy respectability.
Looking through its small, quaint window-panes, one could see across the
water the rude dwellings of fishermen along the shore of Newcastle, and the
neglected earthwork called Fort William and Mary, that feebly guarded the
river's mouth. In front, the Piscataqua, curving southward, widened to meet
the Atlantic between rocky headlands and foaming reefs, and in dim distance
the Isles of Shoals seemed floating on the pale gray sea.

Behind the Pepperrell house was a garden, probably more useful than
ornamental, and at the foot of it were the owner's wharves, with
storehouses for salt-fish, naval stores, and imported goods for the country
trade.

Pepperrell was the son of a Welshman [Footnote: "A native of Ravistock
Parish, in Wales" Parsons, _Life of Pepperrell_. Mrs. Adelaide Cilley
Waldron, a descendant of Pepperrell, assures me, however, that his father,
the emigrant, came, not from Wales, but from Devonshire.] who migrated in
early life to the Isles of Shoals, and thence to Kittery, where by trade,
ship-building, and the fisheries, he made a fortune, most of which he left
to his son William. The young Pepperrell learned what little was taught at
the village school, supplemented by a private tutor, whose instructions,
however, did not perfect him in English grammar. In the eyes of his
self-made father, education was valuable only so far as it could make a
successful trader; and on this point he had reason to be satisfied, as his
son passed for many years as the chief merchant in New England. He dealt
in ships, timber, naval stores, fish, and miscellaneous goods brought from
England; and he also greatly prospered by successful land purchases,
becoming owner of the greater part of the growing towns of Saco and
Scarborough. When scarcely twenty-one, he was made justice of the peace, on
which he ordered from London what his biographer calls a law library,
consisting of a law dictionary, Danvers' "Abridgment of the Common Law,"
the "Complete Solicitor," and several other books. In law as in war, his
best qualities were good sense and good will. About the time when he was
made a justice, he was commissioned captain of militia, then major, then
lieutenant-colonel, and at last colonel, commanding all the militia of
Maine. The town of Kittery chose him to represent her in the General Court,
Maine being then a part of Massachusetts. Finally, he was made a member of
the Governor's Council,--a post which he held for thirty-two years, during
eighteen of which he was president of the board.

These civil dignities served him as educators better than tutor or village
school; for they brought him into close contact with the chief men of the
province; and in the Massachusetts of that time, so different from our own,
the best education and breeding were found in the official class. At once a
provincial magnate and the great man of a small rustic village, his manners
are said to have answered to both positions,--certainly they were such as
to make him popular. But whatever he became as a man, he learned nothing
to fit him to command an army and lay siege to Louisbourg. Perhaps he felt
this, and thought, with the Governor of Rhode Island, that "the attempt to
reduce that prodigiously strong town was too much for New England, which
had not one officer of experience, nor even an engineer." [Footnote:
_Governor Wanton to the Agent of Rhode Island in London, 20 Dec.
1745._] Moreover, he was unwilling to leave his wife, children, and
business. He was of a religious turn of mind, and partial to the clergy,
who, on their part, held him in high favor. One of them, the famous
preacher, George Whitefield, was a guest at his house when he heard that
Shirley had appointed him to command the expedition against Louisbourg.
Whitefield had been the leading spirit in the recent religious fermentation
called the Great Awakening, which, though it produced bitter quarrels among
the ministers, besides other undesirable results, was imagined by many to
make for righteousness. So thought the Reverend Thomas Prince, who mourned
over the subsiding delirium of his flock as a sign of back-sliding. "The
heavenly shower was over," he sadly exclaims; "from fighting the devil they
must turn to fighting the French." Pepperrell, always inclined to the
clergy, and now in great perplexity and doubt, asked his guest Whitefield
whether or not he had better accept the command. Whitefield gave him cold
comfort, told him that the enterprise was not very promising, and that if
he undertook it, he must do so "with a single eye," prepared for obloquy if
he failed, and envy if he succeeded. [Footnote: Parsons, _Life of
Pepperrell,_ 51.]

Henry Sherburn, commissary of the New Hampshire regiment, begged Whitefield
to furnish a motto for the flag. The preacher, who, zealot as he was,
seemed unwilling to mix himself with so madcap a business, hesitated at
first, but at length consented, and suggested the words, _Nil desperandum
Christo duce_, which, being adopted, gave the enterprise the air of a
crusade. It had, in fact, something of the character of one. The cause was
imagined to be the cause of Heaven, crowned with celestial benediction. It
had the fervent support of the ministers, not only by prayers and sermons,
but, in one case, by counsels wholly temporal. A certain pastor, much
esteemed for benevolence, proposed to Pepperrell, who had at last accepted
the command, a plan, unknown to Vauban, for confounding the devices of the
enemy. He advised that two trustworthy persons should cautiously walk
together along the front of the French ramparts under cover of night, one
of them carrying a mallet, with which he was to hammer the ground at short
intervals. The French sentinels, it seems to have been supposed, on hearing
this mysterious thumping, would be so bewildered as to give no alarm. While
one of the two partners was thus employed, the other was to lay his ear to
the ground, which, as the adviser thought, would return a hollow sound if
the artful foe had dug a mine under it; and whenever such secret danger was
detected, a mark was to be set on the spot, to warn off the soldiers.
[Footnote: Belknap, _Hist. New Hampshire_, II. 208.]

Equally zealous, after another fashion, was the Reverend Samuel Moody,
popularly known as Father Moody, or Parson Moody, minister of York and
senior chaplain of the expedition. Though about seventy years old, he was
amazingly tough and sturdy. He still lives in the traditions of York as the
spiritual despot of the settlement and the uncompromising guardian of its
manners and doctrine, predominating over it like a rough little village
pope. The comparison would have kindled his burning wrath, for he abhorred
the Holy Father as an embodied Antichrist. Many are the stories told of
him by the descendants of those who lived under his rod, and sometimes felt
its weight; for he was known to have corrected offending parishioners with
his cane. [Footnote: Tradition told me at York by Mr. N. Marshall.] When
some one of his flock, nettled by his strictures from the pulpit, walked in
dudgeon towards the church door, Moody would shout after him, "Come back,
you graceless sinner, come back!" or if any ventured to the alehouse of a
Saturday night, the strenuous pastor would go in after them, collar them,
drag them out, and send them home with rousing admonition. [Footnote:
Lecture of Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Cabot, Memoir of Emerson, I. 10.
] Few dared gainsay him, by reason both of his irritable temper and of the
thick-skinned insensibility that encased him like armor of proof. And while
his pachydermatous nature made him invulnerable as a rhinoceros, he had at
the same time a rough and ready humor that supplied keen weapons for the
warfare of words and made him a formidable antagonist. This commended him
to the rude borderers, who also relished the sulphurous theology of their
spiritual dictator, just as they liked the raw and fiery liquors that would
have scorched more susceptible stomachs. What they did not like was the
pitiless length of his prayers, which sometimes kept them afoot above two
hours shivering in the polar cold of the unheated meeting-house, and which
were followed by sermons of equal endurance; for the old man's lungs were
of brass, and his nerves of hammered iron. Some of the sufferers ventured
to remonstrate; but this only exasperated him, till one parishioner, more
worldly wise than the rest, accompanied his modest petition for mercy with
the gift of a barrel of cider, after which the Parson's ministrations were
perceptibly less exhausting than before. He had an irrepressible conscience
and a highly aggressive sense of duty, which made him an intolerable
meddler in the affairs of other people, and which, joined to an underlying
kindness of heart, made him so indiscreet in his charities that his wife
and children were often driven to vain protest against the excesses of his
almsgiving. The old Puritan fanaticism was rampant in him; and when he
sailed for Louisbourg, he took with him an axe, intended, as he said, to
hew down the altars of Antichrist and demolish his idols. [Footnote: Moody
found sympathizers in his iconoclastic zeal. Deacon John Gray of Biddeford
wrote to Pepperrell: "Oh that I could be with you and dear Parson Moody in
that church [at Louisbourg] to destroy the images there set up, and hear
the true Gospel of our Lord and Saviour there preached!"]

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