Battle of Ticonderoga (1759)

Fought on July 26 and 27, 1759, the clash at Fort Carillon, later called Fort Ticonderoga, counted as a small-scale engagement within the broader French and Indian War. General Sir Jeffery Amherst led a British force numbering over 11,000 men, positioning artillery on elevated terrain that looked down upon the fort. Defending that position was Brigadier General François-Charles de Bourlamaque, whose garrison consisted of only 400 French troops.

Instead of holding his ground, de Bourlamaque chose to pull his men back, acting on orders handed down by General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm alongside New France's governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil. Before withdrawing, he tried to destroy the fort outright. This effort succeeded in wrecking the powder magazine, though the surrounding walls survived largely intact. British troops subsequently took possession of the site, which came to be known thereafter as Fort Ticonderoga. From there, they undertook various improvements throughout the area and started building a fleet meant for military campaigns on Lake Champlain.

Though this French strategy managed to keep Amherst's troops from linking up with James Wolfe during the fighting at the Plains of Abraham, it came at a cost: some 3,000 French soldiers were pinned down and unavailable to help defend Quebec. Notably, the fort had turned back a much larger British force just a year before its eventual capture, and this success became one element of what the British referred to as the "Annus Mirabilis" of 1759.

Background

Beginning in 1754, the conflict over contested land in present-day western Pennsylvania and upstate New York, known as the French and Indian War, brought a run of French successes through 1756 and 1757 before fortunes shifted toward the British by 1758. That year saw British forces seize both Louisbourg and Fort Frontenac. France's lone notable triumph came at the Battle of Carillon, where a smaller French contingent overcame James Abercrombie's much larger army. As winter set in afterward, French officers pulled most of their soldiers out of Fort Carillon, known to the British as Ticonderoga, redirecting them toward the defense of Quebec City, Montreal, and other French positions along the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River.

Long before Samuel de Champlain first encountered it in 1609, the site of Carillon near the southern tip of Lake Champlain already held considerable strategic value, since it commanded a vital portage connecting Champlain and Lake George on the principal route between the Hudson River valley and the Saint Lawrence. This region marked the boundary between the British colony of New York and French Canada once fighting broke out, and British forces had already checked French movement southward at the 1755 Battle of Lake George. Still, the fortification's placement posed problems: needing solid rock foundations, the French built it a fair distance from the water's edge, leaving it overlooked by hills nearby.

As the 1759 campaign season approached, William Pitt, serving as British secretary of state, tasked General Jeffery Amherst, fresh from his victory at Louisbourg, with leading forces northward across Lake Champlain into Canada. Simultaneously, James Wolfe, who had earned distinction fighting alongside Amherst at Louisbourg, would push toward Quebec via the Saint Lawrence with a separate force. Colonial governors throughout the Thirteen Colonies received orders to muster 20,000 provincial militiamen in support of these operations. Roughly 8,000 provincial troops ultimately gathered at Albany, drawn from provinces stretching south to Pennsylvania and New Jersey. New Jersey contributed 1,000 soldiers while New York supplied 3,000. Massachusetts assembled 6,500 men total, sending about 3,500 to Albany and dispatching the rest to serve under Wolfe at Quebec or elsewhere in Nova Scotia. Additional provincial soldiers came from Pennsylvania and the remaining New England colonies. Initially reluctant given its Quaker population, Pennsylvania only agreed to provide troops after Amherst threatened to pull garrisons from its western frontier forts along the Ohio River Valley, positions already vulnerable to French and Indian threats.

Learning from Sir William Johnson that the Iroquois League stood ready to assist British efforts against French frontier strongholds, Amherst determined to launch an expedition against Fort Niagara. That May, he dispatched 2,000 provincial troops westward from Albany accompanied by 3,000 regulars under Brigadier General John Prideaux. Amherst himself guided the remaining provincials, mostly drawn from Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut, northward to Fort Edward. There they linked up with 6,000 regular troops, including approximately 2,000 Royal Highlanders, the 17th, 27th, and 53rd regiments of foot, the 60th Foot's 1st Battalion, roughly 100 Royal Artillery personnel, 700 members of Rogers' Rangers, and 500 light infantry commanded by Thomas Gage.

Meanwhile, French strategists concentrated their 1759 war efforts primarily on the European front of the Seven Years' War. That February, war minister Marshal Belle-Isle informed General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, tasked with defending Canada, that substantial French reinforcements would not be forthcoming, largely because English naval supremacy in the Atlantic made transporting a sizable force too dangerous. Belle-Isle nonetheless stressed to Montcalm how crucial it remained to preserve even a minimal presence in North America, warning that losing the territory entirely would make reconquest nearly impossible. Montcalm's reply captured the grim arithmetic facing him: barring unforeseen fortune or some diversion elsewhere on the continent, Canada would fall within the coming campaign season, given that the English f

British advance and French retreat

Orders had instructed General Amherst to set his forces in motion around May 7, weather permitting, yet his 11,000 troops did not actually depart the southern banks of Lake George until July 21. This delay stemmed from multiple causes: logistical complications, since Prideaux's expedition toward forts Oswego and Niagara was launching from Albany at the same time, and the sluggish assembly of provincial militia units.

Once his forces disembarked and moved toward the fort, Amherst welcomed news that the French had given up their outer defenses. Caution still governed his approach, and on July 22 he took possession of the old French lines from the 1758 engagement, even as word arrived that the French were busy loading bateaux at the fort. Originally, Amherst had intended to encircle the position and block the route to Fort St. Frédéric so the French could not escape that way. But since no French forces contested the ground outside the fort, he shifted his focus toward a direct assault on the structure itself.

Over the following three days, British soldiers dug in and constructed siege lines to secure ground near the fort. Because the soil in the area offered little for digging, sandbags became necessary to shield the siege works. Throughout this period, French artillery batteries kept up fire on the British positions, sometimes with considerable intensity. On July 25, men from Rogers' Rangers pushed boats into the lake north of the fort and severed a log barrier the French had installed to block ships from advancing further. Two days later, on July 26, British artillery had been moved to a position just 600 feet (180 m) from the fort's walls.

Bourlamaque, upon learning of the British approach, had already pulled back to Fort St. Frédéric, taking all but 400 of his men with him. The remaining defenders inflicted losses on the besiegers through cannon fire, killing five and wounding 31 more. Captain Louis-Philippe Le Dossu d'Hébécourt, left in charge of the fort, concluded on the evening of July 26 that the moment had come to withdraw. His soldiers turned the fort's cannons toward its own walls, set mines, and laid a powder trail leading to the overfilled magazine. After igniting the fuse, they departed, leaving the French flag still flying above the fort. French deserters brought word of this scheme to the British camp. Amherst promised 100 guineas to anyone brave enough to enter and extinguish the burning fuse, but no soldier stepped forward to claim the reward. Late that night, the fort erupted with a massive explosion. The blast destroyed the powder magazine, and embers scattered by the explosion set several wooden buildings ablaze, though the fort's walls escaped serious damage. Following the explosion, members of Gage's light infantry hurried into the ruins and recovered the French flag. It took two full days before all the fires within the fort were finally put out.

Aftermath

By the following day, British forces had moved into the captured fort. A curious episode unfolded when a French scouting party, unaware of the sudden withdrawal, made its way back to the fort under the assumption that it remained in French control; the British captured all forty of these men.

On July 31, the retreating French set fire to Fort St. Frédéric, an act that opened the door for British forces to launch operations on Lake Champlain, since keeping the British away from that lake had been the whole purpose behind constructing both fortifications. A small French fleet still posed a problem, though, and would have to be dealt with before any such operations could proceed. Amherst's advance stalled further because his men needed time to seize and patch up both forts and to construct vessels suited for use on the lake, and as a result he could not link up with Wolfe's forces at Quebec. Suspecting that Bourlamaque's withdrawal might be a lure into an ambush, Amherst devoted August and September to building a modest naval force, erecting Fort Crown Point beside the ruins of St. Frédéric, and establishing supply routes connecting the area to New England.

Amherst set his troops in motion on October 11, moving them by ship and rowboat northward on Lake Champlain toward Bourlamaque's position at Île-aux-Noix on the Richelieu River. During the following two days, his men seized one French vessel outright, while the French themselves scuttled and torched the rest of their fleet rather than let it fall into enemy hands. News of Quebec's capitulation reached Amherst on October 18. With winter conditions setting in, including ice forming on portions of the lake, and with provincial militia terms of service due to expire on November 1, Amherst abandoned the offensive, released his militia units, and led the army back to its winter quarters.

Canada passed firmly into British hands when Montreal surrendered in 1760. Fort Carillon, known to the British throughout as Ticonderoga after its location, stayed under their control for the remainder of the French and Indian War. Once that conflict ended, only skeleton garrisons occupied the fort until 1775, when American militia seized it in the opening days of the American Revolutionary War.