Siege of Fort William Henry

Between August 3 and 9 in 1757, forces of French and Indian fighters under Louis-Joseph de Montcalm laid siege to the British stronghold of Fort William Henry. Positioned at the southern tip of Lake George, the fort sat on the boundary separating the British Province of New York from the French Province of Canada, and its defense fell to a thinly reinforced contingent of British regulars and provincial militia commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Monro.

Days of relentless shelling drove casualties upward, and Monro ultimately yielded the fort to Montcalm, whose ranks swelled with nearly 2,000 warriors drawn from various Indian tribes. Under the surrender agreement, the garrison would march to Fort Edward, and the French military pledged to shield the British from the Indians during their withdrawal from the region.

What followed became one of the French and Indian War's darkest episodes. Montcalm's Indian allies broke the surrender terms and fell upon the departing British column, which had already been stripped of its ammunition. Soldiers and civilians alike were killed and scalped in large numbers, while women, children, servants, and slaves were seized as captives; sick and wounded prisoners were also slaughtered. The earliest tellings of these events branded it a massacre and suggested a death toll as high as 1,500, though scholars now doubt that more than 200 people, under 10 percent of the British fighting strength, actually perished in the attack.

Historians continue to dispute how many people truly died and whether Montcalm and his fellow French officers tried to restrain their Indian allies or quietly permitted the violence. The trauma of these killings left its mark on British military leadership, shaping the decisions of commanders such as General Jeffery Amherst throughout the rest of the conflict.

Background

Territorial friction between the North American holdings of France and Great Britain, in what would become western Pennsylvania and northern New York, ignited the French and Indian War in 1754, itself an offshoot of the broader Seven Years' War. The spark came when Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, riding with a handful of Mingo allies, fell upon a body of French Canadians, taking them prisoner and slaughtering many afterward. That clash, remembered as the Battle of Jumonville Glen, shattered the fragile calm that had existed between the two colonial powers.

Britain's early war effort faltered badly. General Edward Braddock's grand expedition of 1755 collapsed into disaster, and no fresh campaigns could be launched the following year. Matters worsened further when General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm led a combined French and Indian force to seize the garrison and level the defenses at the Battle of Fort Oswego in August 1756. That same July, command of British forces in North America passed to the newly arrived Earl of Loudoun, who took over from William Shirley, the officer who had held the post temporarily following Braddock's death.

By September 1756, Loudoun had sent London his strategy for the coming year, centering everything on one grand strike at Quebec City, the very heart of New France. Along the contested frontier, particularly the corridor formed by the Hudson River and Lake Champlain linking Albany with Montreal, his plan called strictly for holding defensive ground.

Following the 1755 Battle of Lake George, the French had raised Fort Carillon, later renamed Fort Ticonderoga, near Champlain's southern tip, while the British answered with Fort William Henry at the foot of Lake George and Fort Edward on the Hudson, some 16 miles (26 km) to the south. All three sites lie within present day New York. The British fort's construction aimed at securing dominance over Lake George, known to the French as Lac Du Saint Sacrement, and thereby countering French ambitions in the region. Between the two opposing forts stretched an untamed wilderness centered on the lake itself, a stretch the historian Ian Steele once called a military waterway separating enemy guns by mere days of travel.

Success for Loudoun's design hinged on reaching Quebec before French troops could be diverted toward frontier targets, forcing them instead to defend Canada's core along the Saint Lawrence. Yet upheaval within the London government over the war's course, both in North America and across Europe, brought William Pitt the Elder into control of military affairs, and Loudoun heard nothing back regarding his proposal until March 1757. In the interim, he pressed ahead with plans for the Quebec expedition and coordinated with the colonial governors of the Thirteen Colonies on frontier defense, assigning each province a militia quota.

When Pitt's orders at last reached him that March, they redirected the expedition toward Louisbourg, on the Atlantic shore of Île Royale, now Cape Breton Island. This shift left the core planning largely intact but carried major implications for the frontier, since French troops along the Saint Lawrence would be too distant to aid Louisbourg and thus free to act elsewhere. Loudoun funneled his finest units into the Louisbourg effort, leaving Brigadier General Daniel Webb in charge of the New York frontier with roughly 2,000 regulars, chiefly from the 35th and 60th (Royal American) Regiments, while the colonies were expected to furnish him some 5,000 militiamen.

Buoyed by his 1756 triumph at Oswego, Montcalm had long eyed Fort William Henry, whose capture would strip the British of a staging ground for strikes against Carillon. He hesitated to commit his stretched forces, though, until he better understood British troop strength. Spring brought word from spies in London suggesting Louisbourg was indeed the British objective, hinting that frontier defenses might be thin enough to make an assault on Fort William Henry practical. Interrogations of deserters and prisoners taken during the raids and scouting missions both sides conducted, including the clash known as the January Battle on Snowshoes, reinforced this assessment.

Beginning as early as December 1756, Vaudreuil, the governor of New France, set about recruiting Indian warriors for the next season's campaign. Tales spread by veterans of the Oswego capture fueled remarkable success: by June 1757 nearly 1,000 warriors had traveled from the distant Pays d'en Haut to Montreal, joined by another 800 drawn from tribes settled n

Siege

Montcalm's native allies had already pushed southward when the French vanguard left Fort Carillon on July 30, marching under Lévis's command along the western edge of Lake George, since there were not enough vessels to ferry every soldier by water. Montcalm followed with the rest of the army by boat the following day, joining Lévis that evening at Ganaouske Bay. By the next night, Lévis had pitched camp a mere three miles, or 4.8 kilometers, from Fort William Henry, with Montcalm's column trailing close behind. In the predawn hours of August 3, Lévis's men and the Canadians cut off the route linking Edward and William Henry, clashing with Massachusetts militiamen who had just arrived on the scene.

At eleven in the morning, Montcalm called upon Monro to yield the fort, but Monro turned down the demand and dispatched runners southward to Fort Edward, warning of the grim circumstances and pleading for reinforcement. Webb, wary of Lévis's presence, would not release any part of his roughly 1,600 troops northward, since that force alone shielded Albany from the advancing French. On August 4 he wrote back to Monro urging him to secure whatever terms he could, but French hands intercepted the letter and passed it along to Montcalm.

Meanwhile, Montcalm instructed Bourlamaque to launch formal siege works. Trenches were dug to the northwest of the fort, aimed at positioning cannon against its northwest bastion. On August 5, French artillery commenced firing from a distance of 2,000 yards, or about 1,800 meters, a display that thrilled the sizable native force looking on. A day later, a second battery, situated 900 feet, roughly 270 meters, further along the same trench line, added its fire to create a crossing pattern of shot. The defenders' answering fire achieved little beyond chasing French crews from their trenches now and then, while several of the garrison's own cannons either broke from their mounts or exploded from overuse.

On August 7, Montcalm dispatched Bougainville to the fort under a flag of truce to hand over the captured letter. By this point the walls had already been breached, numerous guns inside stood ruined, and the defenders had suffered heavy losses. Following yet another day of shelling, during which French trenches crept for

Massacre

Under the surrender agreement, the British and those accompanying their camp would be escorted by the French to Fort Edward and permitted to retain full military honors, provided they stayed out of the fighting for eighteen months. They could keep their muskets and one ceremonial cannon, though no powder or shot went with them. British authorities, for their part, were bound to free French captives within three months.

Before he would consent to these conditions, Montcalm sought assurance that his native allies grasped what they meant and that their chiefs could hold their warriors in check. This proved difficult given how varied the encampment of Indians actually was; some among them spoke tongues no European on the scene could follow. Once the garrison moved out of the fort and into the entrenched camp, Monro took quarters among the French. It was then that Indians swept into the abandoned fort, looting its contents and slaughtering some of the sick and wounded men left behind. French sentries stationed around the entrenched camp managed only partial success in keeping the Indians at bay, and considerable effort went into stopping further looting and scalping there. Montcalm and Monro had originally intended to send the prisoners marching south the following day, but witnessing the fury among the Indians, they resolved instead to attempt the departure under cover of night. Word of the impending movement spread among the Indians, however, drawing crowds around the camp and forcing the commanders to postpone everything until daylight.

Come morning, violence erupted again even before the British had assembled into marching order. At five o'clock, Indians broke into huts sheltering wounded soldiers who were meant to be under French medical care, and there they killed and scalped the helpless men. Monro protested that the surrender's terms had been broken, yet his men still had to hand over part of their baggage just to set the march in motion. Once underway, the column found itself besieged by Indians grabbing at soldiers, tearing away muskets and garments, and dragging off by force any