General Wolfe’s Men in Quebec

Two hundred and fifty years ago a British Army under General James Wolfe won a momentous battle at Quebec. The outcome has been seen as a fortuitous springboard to Empire, the result of luck more than leadership. But, as Stephen Brumwell argues, a crucial – and neglected – ingredient in Wolfe’s dramatic victory was the professionalism of the army he had helped to create. On the morning of Wednesday, September 12th, 1759, on the St Lawrence River some 11 miles from the fortified city of Quebec, Major-General James Wolfe issued final orders to his army. They included an appeal to the troops’ patriotism and esprit de corps: the 32-year-old Wolfe urged officers and men alike to remember ‘what their country expects from them, and what a determined body of soldiers, inured to war, is capable of doing against five weak French battalions mingled with disorderly peasantry’. Wolfe’s emphasis upon his redcoats’ professionalism is significant. In his final dispatch from Quebec on September 9th, written to the Northern Secretary-of-State, the Earl of Holderness, the general praised his army as ‘a chosen body of troops … able to fight the united force of Canada upon even terms’. Wolfe had spent a frustrating summer seeking to achieve just such a level playing field.

As his devoted Adjutant-General, Major Isaac Barré, later observed: It was notorious to every Body, who had any the least knowledge of Mr Wolfe’s wishes and Intentions that Campaign that they were most ardently bent on bringing the Enemy to an action on any thing like equal terms …’ Under the circumstances, Wolfe’s determination to grapple his antagonist is all the more striking: against all military convention, his army was heavily outnumbered by the force it was seeking to besiege. Promised 12,000 men by the expedition’s planners back in London, Wolfe was allocated just 9,000 to pitch against Quebec’s 14,000 defenders. While dangerously small for its task, Wolfe’s army was, as he assured Britain’s war leader William Pitt (the elder), not only ‘good’, but also ‘very well disposed’. Since first arriving near Quebec in late June Wolfe had hoped that his opponent, General Louis-Joseph Marquis de Montcalm, would attack him. If Montcalm accepted the challenge, as Wolfe told his second-in-command, Brigadier-General Robert Monckton, a month later, his battalions would be knocked about ‘most furiously’. But the wily Montcalm refused to budge from his extensive entrenchments and it was not until September 9th that Wolfe devised a plan he believed capable of provoking a decisive battlefield confrontation. ‘Corporal Jones of the 13th Foot’, drawn from life by Lieutenant William Baillie, shows the appearance of an ordinary foot soldier in the 1750s. As Wolfe himself observed in 1757, war is an uncertain business, in which ‘something must be allowed to chance and fortune, seeing it is in its nature hazardous’. His own plan, involving a nine-mile descent of the St Lawrence under cover of darkness, followed by an amphibious assault on the cliff-backed Foulon Cove, less than two miles from Quebec, was certainly no exception to this rule. Wolfe’s stratagem overrode the more cautious advice of his three brigadiers, Monckton, George Townshend and James Murray, who recommended landing far higher up the St Lawrence River to cut Montcalm’s supply line with Montreal; it has remained controversial ever since.

Many historians have argued that Wolfe’s plan was needlessly risky, even that it was nothing more than a face-saving ‘suicide mission’ that, owing solely to extraordinary luck, unexpectedly yielded a momentous victory. This emphasis has overshadowed another remarkable factor behind the outcome of events: whatever the imponderables inherent in Wolfe’s plan, there was one element of which he had no doubt: his soldiers’ ability to execute it. Wolfe’s total confidence in his troops rested upon their hard-earned status as veterans, capable of fighting in both the ‘conventional’ European fashion and under the ‘irregular’ conditions encountered in North America; and not least, of co-operating effectively with the Royal Navy in mounting combined operations. An officer since his early teens, Wolfe (1727-59) had been at the forefront of initiatives to encourage such versatility within the British Army. Earlier in the 1750s, as Lieutenant-Colonel of the 20th Foot, he evangelised for simplified and aggressive tactics at odds with official regulations. In January 1755, as Wolfe readied his battalion for the impending renewal of hostilities with the old enemy France, his orders concentrated upon maximising firepower, replacing the complex ‘platoon’ firing used since Marlborough’s day half a century before with another unofficial, but far more practical, system of musketry. Rather than splitting the battalion into 18 small units which fired in various convoluted sequences, the so-called ‘alternate’ fire used larger blocks of manpower, based on the regimental companies themselves, and so was less likely to break down in action. As this system was ‘the most simple, plain, and easy, and used by the best disciplined troops in Europe’ – the Prussians of Frederick the Great – ‘we are at all times to imitate them in that respect’, Wolfe ordered.

In December 1755, at Canterbury, Wolfe warmed to his theme. In regimental orders that became both celebrated and influential he reminded his men that ‘a cool well-levelled fire, with the pieces carefully loaded’, was far deadlier than ‘the quickest fire in confusion’. Modern research supports Wolfe’s reasoning: amid the pandemonium of an infantry fire-fight, two rounds per minute of calm, well-directed fire were preferable to four frenzied rounds that flew over the target. Wolfe’s Canterbury orders also assumed that any clash with the French would be a brief affair: ‘after firing a few rounds’ the men would probably be commanded to charge with fixed bayonets. If the enemy attacked in massed column formation, Wolfe cautioned, the section of the line destined to face it must reserve its fire. Ideally, the men should load their muskets with one or two extra balls. Such a double – or even triple – charge, with each lead ball weighing more than an ounce, would have delivered a bruising jolt to the firer’s shoulder; it was a drastic and unorthodox gambit, but it became a Wolfe trademark. Wolfe’s no-nonsense ‘volley and bayonet’ tactics prefigured those that underpinned many celebrated British victories over the French during the Peninsular War (1808-14). Their genesis deserves investigation. Given the timing, they possibly drew inspiration from the ‘Highland charge’, essentially a combination of short-range firepower backed by a determined application of cold steel – broadswords, dirks and axes – which Wolfe and many other British soldiers had faced during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46.

Another influence upon Wolfe’s tactical thinking may have been the exceptionally aggressive doctrine evolved by the Swedish army under Gustavus Adolphus (r.1611-32) and perfected by Charles XII (r.1697-1718). The formidable Carolinian army was feared for its gå på or ‘go on’ tactics, with point-blank volleys followed by bayonet charges. In 1756, when recommending reading for a younger officer, Wolfe revealed his undisguised admiration for both of the warrior Swedes, observing: There is an abundance of military knowledge to be picked out of the lives of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII. Whatever their origins, the simplified tactics favoured by Wolfe swiftly spread throughout the British Army; their popularity among regiments massed on the Isle of Wight in 1757, prior to a bungled amphibious expedition to Rochefort in the Bay of Biscay, incurred the displeasure of the army’s Captain-General, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, who railed against such flouting of his official regulations. By the onset of 1759, redcoats on both sides of the Atlantic were employing ‘alternate fire’, their tactical edge honed by intensive training. When the men of the 43rd Foot tested it in live firing exercises in a wheat field during the Quebec campaign, Lieutenant John Knox noted how their concentrated fire chopped the crops before them like a scythe. But war across the Atlantic required more than just proficiency in musketry. Long before first setting foot in North America in the spring of 1758, Wolfe had taken a keen interest in adapting the redcoats’ tactics to the irregular warfare characteristic of its rugged and heavily wooded terrain. The challenge was made clear in July 1755, when Major-General Edward Braddock suffered catastrophic defeat at the hands of the French and their Native American allies in the forest near Fort Duquesne (modern-day Pittsburgh).

The slaughter was widely blamed upon the cowardice of the ordinary soldiers, who, it was reported, panicked and abandoned their gallant officers. Wolfe was at first inclined to accept these assessments, telling his father he had ‘but a very mean opinion’ of the infantry’s courage, and lamenting the dire effects of ‘Geneva and pox’ upon them. Writing soon after to his uncle Walter, however, Wolfe identified inadequate training, and the novelty of wilderness warfare, as contributing factors in the disaster: ‘You know how readily the infantry under the present method of training are put into disorder even on the battlefield of Europe. How much more then when they are led on to encounter a horde of savages ambush’d behind timber in an unknown trackless country!’ Slowly and painfully, Britain’s army adapted itself to American conditions. Denied significant support from Indian allies, and increasingly disillusioned with the unruly and expensive colonial American ‘rangers’, by early 1758 British commanders had evolved units of regular light infantry, formed from wiry marksmen capable of fighting in looser formations than typical of the European battlefield. Wolfe witnessed the worth of these crack troops when he served alongside them at Louisbourg and was keen to have as many of them as possible for his own Quebec army. Besides a composite battalion formed from the light companies raised within each regiment, commanded by Colonel William Howe, who had served as a captain under Wolfe in the 20th Foot, he organised another three-company-strong unit under Major John Dalling.

Wolfe also wanted the light companies of the three regiments left in garrison at Louisbourg, but the governor, Brigadier-General Edward Whitmore, refused to relinquish them. Besides their expertise in ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ warfare, by 1759 Wolfe’s men were uniquely experienced in mounting amphibious operations in conjunction with the Royal Navy. Most of the ten battalions assembled for the Quebec campaign had participated in landing drills at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the spring of 1758, before the attack on Louisbourg. These exercises set guidelines destined to be followed for decades to come, stressing the necessity for calm and silence and the importance of securing the beachhead without delay. Here again, Wolfe played a personal role in training the troops. An observer at Halifax noted: ‘In all these operations you may imagine that General Wolfe was remarkable active. The scene afforded scope for his military genius.’ Orders issued on June 3rd, 1758 by the expedition’s commander, Major-General Jeffery Amherst, also suggest Wolfe’s influence: When any of our troops are to attack the French Regular forces they are to march close up to them, discharge their pieces loaded with two bullets, and then rush upon them with their bayonets The Louisbourg task force lacked purpose-built landing craft, being obliged to resort to an assortment of men-of-war’s boats, flat-bottomed New England bateaux, and whaleboats used by the Greenland fisheries. On June 8th, 1758 Wolfe nonetheless led an elite force of light infantry, grenadiers and Highlanders in a hazardous but spectacularly successful commando-style assault against the formidable French shore defences. Wolfe’s Quebec expedition enjoyed the benefit of purpose-built landing craft. These shallow-draft ‘flat-bottomed boats’, designed to carry 60 to 70 soldiers and disembark them swiftly, were introduced by the Admiralty during the previous summer and would play an important role at Quebec.

By the onset of the Quebec campaign, Wolfe’s battalions were all seasoned by North American warfare, learning their trade through hard and bloody experience: for example, the 48th Foot had been at Braddock’s defeat on the Monongahela River; part of the 35th was at Fort William Henry in 1757, enduring the siege and notorious ‘massacre’ of the garrison by Montcalm’s Indian allies. All save the 43rd Foot had fought at Louisbourg. Even the 43rd, garrisoned in Nova Scotia, was combat-hardened by vicious guerrilla warfare against the local Acadians and their Micmac allies. Such shared experience welded a veteran ‘American Army’ from diverse manpower, with both officers and the rank-and-file reflecting an unusually wide spectrum of skills. The varied backgrounds of the ordinary soldiers at Quebec are clear from a register of men wounded there and subsequently examined for their pensions at Chelsea’s Royal Hospital on March 18th, 1760: for example, 27-year-old John Harrison of the 47th Foot was a tailor from Hull; Birmingham-born Robert Harrison, aged 30, of the 48th Foot, had been a shoemaker; Joseph Barker, 26, of the 28th Foot, was a weaver from Astbury, near Congleton; while James Caldwell, 29, from Ayr, ‘North Britain’, had been a labourer. Three veterans of the 60th, or ‘Royal American Regiment’, reveal that unit’s exceptionally wide recruitment net: a labourer from Cullen, Limerick, 33-year-old Lot Connor epitomised the Georgian Army’s heavy reliance upon Irish manpower. But two of his comrades were less typical of the redcoat rank-and-file: John Horn, 24, was a former cobbler from Philadelphia; while Frederick Soylor, aged 45 and a wigmaker, had been born in Sweden. The largest battalion in Wolfe’s army, the 78th Foot or ‘Fraser’s Highlanders’, produced a correspondingly long line of disabled applicants at Chelsea – most, like Neil McIntosh, aged 25 and from the Isle of Skye, were unskilled ‘labourers’.

All of the men examined by the Hospital had accumulated sufficient active service to qualify as true veterans: Harrison’s 11 years in the 48th marked him down as a survivor of Braddock’s defeat; with two years and 10 months under his belt, Neil McIntosh had the shortest service, but even that was long enough to have embraced the Louisbourg campaign. Wolfe’s battalions mustered a mixture of volunteers and men conscripted under the Press Acts enforced in 1756-57. An example of the first category was Private James Miller of the 15th Foot. According to his unpublished ‘Memoirs’, Miller enlisted in 1756 ‘at a very tender age’, having been lured by promises of fame and gold. Like Wolfe, Miller experienced both the shame of the botched 1757 expedition to Rochefort and the euphoria of the following summer’s conquest of Louisbourg. The testimony of a more reluctant recruit survives in a remarkable letter from an unnamed private soldier of the 35th Foot sent home to his parents from Quebec, and printed in the Derby Mercury of November 30th, 1759. In 1756 he was pressed in London with ‘a great many more creditable Persons … to serve his Majesty as a Soldier in North America’. He was at Fort William Henry when the Indians ‘kill’d, scalp’d and took Prisoners a great Number [of] our Men, and robb’d and stripp’d all the rest’. The next year he witnessed the remarkable upsurge of British fortunes at Louisbourg, before participating in ‘the long and tedious’ Quebec campaign.

While the author of this letter remains anonymous, names and faces can be given to some of his comrades in the 35th. An advertisement in the New York Gazette on August 17th, 1761, provides detailed descriptions of deserters from the regiment. They hardly conformed to heroic models: Lawrence Answorth, 5ft 7½ inches tall, about 22 years of age and born near London, had fair hair and a ruddy complexion and was ‘bad lim’b, and grose in body’. A Scot aged about 32, who had been ‘bred up a pedlar’, James Oglevie had sandy hair, a ruddy complexion, was ‘well made’, but just 5ft 2½ inches tall. Edward Taylor, 27, a weaver born near Hasington, Lancashire, was 5ft 9 inches tall, with a ‘slender and straight body’, fair hair, and was ‘very much marked with the small pox’. Orders issued at Montreal reveal that another man of the 35th, Robert Taylor, who broke out of the provost’s lock-up there on August 14th, 1761 was about 28 years old, 5ft 8 inches tall, with a ‘brown complexion, down look [and] the air of a sailor’. He absconded wearing a green jacket, a brown bob wig and with a silk handkerchief round his neck. Born near ‘Newcastle upon tine’, Taylor spoke both ‘French and Indian’, accomplishments which suggest he was among those abducted at Fort William Henry by Montcalm’s Native American allies. Wolfe’s officers were an equally mixed bunch, although they too shared veteran status. For example, Captain Matthew Leslie of the 48th Foot, Wolfe’s Deputy-Assistant-Quartermaster-General at Quebec, had served in North America since 1755, when he was badly wounded at Braddock’s defeat. Describing that encounter in a letter of July 30th, 1755, Leslie conveyed something of its shock: The yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me until the hour of my dissolution. As Leslie informed William Pitt in a 1767 petition, he had served in America ever since, first coming to Wolfe’s attention at the siege of Louisbourg and earning his ‘entire Satisfaction & approbation’ during the ‘active & spirited Campaign’ against Quebec. Leslie’s battalion commander, Colonel Ralph Burton was another survivor of the Monongahela who had remained on active service in America. The seasoned Burton was among the original brigadiers nominated by Wolfe for the Quebec expedition, only to be ousted by Pitt’s inexperienced protégé, George Townshend.

During the Quebec campaign Wolfe drew heavily on Burton’s experience; it was to Burton, rather than his brigadiers, that Wolfe first confided his final plan to assault the Foulon Cove. Most of the men in Fraser’s Highlanders, like 25-year-old private McIntosh, were too young to have fought for the Jacobites during the '45 Rebellion. But several of their officers had worn the white cockade of the Stuarts. This did nothing to prejudice Wolfe against them; on the contrary, he described Fraser’s as ‘that excellent battalion’, commanded by ‘the most manly corps of officers I ever saw’. They included Captain Archibald Roy Campbell, who had fought at Culloden as an 18-year-old company commander in the Atholl Brigade, and Lieutenant Allan Stuart, a former captain in the Appin clan regiment, who was wounded that same day. Another former Jacobite was Captain Donald MacDonald. Among the men of the French Royal Ecossais regiment sent to bolster the Young Pretender’s army, he was wounded at the siege of Stirling Castle in 1746. Exploiting the General Pardon of 1747, MacDonald renounced his old allegiance and pledged loyalty to George II. In 1757 his proven combat credentials earned him a captaincy in Fraser’s Highlanders; next year he was wounded at Louisbourg. Despite their past, such men were readily absorbed into the British Army, not simply because of their prized military experience, but owing to the international nature of 18th-century soldiering, which was dominated by a shared professional code. Wolfe’s Quebec army offers many examples of this phenomenon, including Captain Gustavus Wetterstroom of the Royal Americans. A long list of ‘Swiss and German’ officers engaged for the regiment in Holland in 1756 reveals that Wetterstroom was in fact born in Stockholm. This polyglot force of veterans, in which Yorkshire weavers and Cockney brick-makers rubbed shoulders with former indentured servants from Maryland and Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, was a proven asset that Wolfe counted upon for the success of his last, risky plan.

His confidence was not misplaced: in those crucial hours, all of the skills acquired by the British Army in North America since 1755, allied to the aggressive tactical ethos injected by Wolfe himself, combined to devastating effect and with far-reaching consequences. The story can be briefly told through the experience of a number of individuals According to his 1767 petition to Pitt, the crucial job of conducting the embarkation and landing of the troops that night was entrusted to Captain Leslie of the 48th and he clearly justified the faith placed in him. Describing the amphibious assault, Private Miller of the 15th Foot remembered how: ‘the army embarked, on board flat boats … [and] driving by the Tide … landed on the N[or]th shore two miles above Quebec, in a cove, since named Wolfes, and immediately ascended the heights’. Captain Donald MacDonald of Fraser’s was among the forlorn group of light infantry that first scaled the cliffs, using his fluent French to dupe a sentry and gain valuable time for the men scrambling up behind him. The anonymous soldier of the 35th Foot told his parents how he and his comrades ‘mounted a Hill one hundred Yards high, being forced to creep on our Hands and Knees up it, and hold by the Bushes that grew on it’. After the redcoats spread over the Plains of Abraham, he continued, ‘the French came out upon us flocking like Bees out of a Hive’. Their attack soon followed. True to form, Lieutenant Knox of the 43rd reported that Wolfe had ordered his men ‘to load with an additional ball’. In Private Miller’s words, although Montcalm’s troops advanced ‘with great spirit … our men Reserved their fire, until the enemy was within forty paces, when every shot told, and the French were repulsed almost immediately, and drove off the field’. Bleeding to death from gunshot wounds sustained while leading his grenadiers in a bayonet charge, James Wolfe lived just long enough to learn that his soldiers had done what he never doubted they would do in an engagement ‘upon even terms’. Wolfe’s own role in the events of 1759 was not simply as a fiery and determined commander. He was also an innovative officer whose influence resonated throughout the British Army and contributed in 1759 to a remarkable revival of its jaded reputation. As the London Magazine recognised that autumn, Wolfe’s contribution was as clear at the Battle of Minden, on August 1st, where his old regiment, the 20th Foot, helped clinch another celebrated victory over the French, as it was on the Plains of Abraham.

Whatever the part played by luck in the outcome of Wolfe’s final plan at Quebec, the most celebrated victory in Britain’s annus mirabilis was no mere fluke. It was the result of painstaking training and the hard-earned experience of men like Captain Leslie, Private Miller and those maimed veterans who later hobbled along to Chelsea in hope of receiving five pence a day in recognition of their services. 

Stephen Brumwell’s biography of General Wolfe, Paths of Glory, received the Distinguished Book Award for 2008 from the Society of Colonial Wars in New York.