Friday, September 14

     Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.

      On this day in 1759, Louis-Joseph Montcalm died of a wound he received the day before on the Plains of Abraham just outside Quebec City. The British enemy had climbed a steep slope up to the Plains during the night and surprised the French guards. As the British dug in, Montcalm's officers suggested he wait for reinforcements before attacking the British, but Montcalm wouldn't listen. The battle only lasted an hour and the British had the best of it. As Montcalm was retreating to the walls of the city, he took a musket ball just below the ribs and died early the next morning. The British commander, James Wolfe, was also killed during the battle.
     I always liked the biblical sound of the "Plains of Abraham," for the battle was to have earth shattering consequences. After the battle, the French withdrew from Quebec City and eventually ceded all their holding in eastern North America to Britain. New France became British much to the  chagrin of the French habitants who remained. With the threat of the French gone, the colonists in the Thirteen Colonies felt free to kick the British out and set up on their own (with crucial help from the French). This inspired the French peasants to revolt against their own king, and on and on it goes.
    Upon further research, I discovered that the Plains of Abraham were named not for the patriarch in the book of Genesis, but for Abraham Martin, the farmer who owned the land. This knowledge trivialized the whole matter for me, but also highlighted how the fate of nations often hangs from a slender thread. On the night before the battle, French guards saw the boats bringing the British soldiers to their landing spot upstream, but thought they were a French convoy transporting provisions. No one told the guards the convoy had been cancelled. There should have been several hundred French troops in place to repel the British as they came up the 175 foot slope from the river, but most of these soldiers had been sent off to help with the harvest. Montcalm's officers warned that this was a vulnerable spot, but Montcalm said no one would dare attack up such a steep slope. And to top it all off, when a French sentry challenged the upcoming enemy, the British officer was able to answer him in perfect French.
     On a less trivial note, had Montcalm waited for reinforcements, he would have been able to push the British down the slope to annihilate them on the banks of the river. Historians call Wolfe's attack "desperate." After a three months siege, Wolfe wrote home that he needed to force the issue, indicating that he would prefer to die nobly with his soldiers than return home in disgrace, which is exactly what he did. Victory turns all things right.

I once asked a Québecois what he was remembering. "1759, naturellement," he said.