This Day in Canadian History (Wolfe Defeats Montcalm in Battle for Quebec)

September 13, 1759—One hundred and fifty years of French rule in Canada came to a sudden end, as the forces of British General James Wolfe surprised and routed those of General Louis Montcalm in less than a half hour on the Plains of Abraham in the Battle of Quebec.

Besides the larger meaning of the battle—a conclusion to the worldwide Seven Years War (called, in its North American component, the French and Indian War)—what electrified Great Britain was how it was accomplished.

“What a scene!” wrote Horace Walpole after learning the news. “An army in the night dragging itself up a precipice by stumps of trees to assault a town and attack an enemy strongly entrenched and double in numbers!”

The consequences of the battle, in which the two opposing commanders were mortally wounded, were enormous. At a stroke, Britain vastly enlarged its overseas empire, while France saw its own vastly diminished.

The defeat also brought with it the possibility of forced repatriation of a host of French-speaking citizens in Quebec. Four years before Wolfe and Montcalm engaged in their momentous clash, Col. Charles Lawrence, the acting governor of Nova Scotia, had ordered the deportation of disbelieving Acadians to be scattered “among the several colonies on the continent.”

Given that track record, as well as how Britain had exiled rebellious Irishmen to the West Indies, the French-speaking population of Quebec was amply justified in fearing for the worst.

“The worst” did not happen, at least partly because, through the Quebec Act passed in 1774, Britain gave legal recognition to French civil laws, the seigneurial system, and Roman Catholicism. (The legislation was lumped together by patriots to the south as part of the “Intolerable Acts.” The vehement anti-Catholicism thus expressed did not endear American forces under Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold when they invaded Canada in late 1775.)

Nevertheless, the French loss meant that North America, whether in the 13 colonies or the Canadian territory now in the hands of the Hanoverian monarchs, would now be a vast expanse in which Protestantism would be the dominant religious norm. Moreover, Canadiens would become accustomed to a government in which, unlike the absolute monarchy they had long known, the power of the head of state would be checked by elected representatives.

In the province of Quebec—a population increasingly aggrieved in recent years at the Anglophone Parliamentary majority in Ottawa—Montcalm’s loss can still rankle.

A year or two ago, one French-speaking Canadian, a work colleague of mine, dismissed the French commander as an idiot, noting that Montcalm was so startled by Wolfe’s daring strategy—as Walpole indicated above, scaling the cliffs west of Quebec—that he’d lost the battle in only about 15 minutes.

Before his audacious move, Wolfe had been stymied in an old-fashioned siege—a move necessitated both by Quebec's advantageous geographical position (on a great height overlooking the St. Lawrence River, where it would be easy to spot and fend off invaders) and by his adversary’s deft deflection of any attempt on the city.

“Montcalm is at the head of a great number of bad soldiers and I am at the head of a small number of good ones,” Wolfe wrote at one point. He might have been surprised to learn that Montcalm shared his assessment, as well as an inability to get along with partners in his military adventure.

A fervent believer in the regular French army, Montcalm had little use for colonial troops, even though they had rebuffed Wolfe’s first attempt to seize Quebec, in July 1759, at Montmorency Falls. And, while Wolfe was squabbling with his subordinates on how to take the city, Montcalm was increasingly disregarding the man whose cooperation he should have courted, New France Governor-General Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil.

Throughout the long siege, Montcalm had been cautious to a fault—leading Wolfe to resort to what was, in effect, a Hail-Mary gambit. But Montcalm made some mistakes at the worst possible time that undoubtedly have fueled my friend’s annoyance:

* He dismissed Vaudreuil’s fear of a landing at Anse-au-Foulon: “We need not believe the enemy has wings!” Bad guess.

* He thought that even if the British scaled the cliffs, a light force in this commanding position would be enough to fight them off. Again, wrong.

* He was caught so off-guard by seeing an army of redcoats in front of him that he decided he couldn’t allow Wolfe any more time to consolidate his forces, and had to attack right then. Had he waited for cannon, he might have pummeled Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, where the British commander would be hard-pressed to retreat.

The great narrative of the fall of the campaign, Montcalm and Wolfe, was written by Francis Parkman. The New England historian—who struggled for years to complete his epic France and England in North America while plagued with nervous breakdowns and failing eyesight—completed this section about the great conflict out of chronological sequence in his multi-volume work, for he wanted the concluding volume to be finished in case he died.

For Parkman, the 32-year-old Wolfe became, in effect, a stand-in for himself—a representative of the Anglo-Saxon race who imposed his indomitable will over precarious health in order to achieve his great life’s work.

At one point, Parkman relates how Wolfe, perhaps to calm his nervous tension, recited Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” dwelling especially on “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

“Gentlemen,” the general told his subordinates, “I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec.” In his fatalistic acceptance of death, Wolfe reminds me of nobody so much as another poetry-loving military hero two centuries later: John F. Kennedy, asking his wife Jacqueline to recite his favorite poem, Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous With Death.”

(The image accompanying this post is, of course, Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe. )

This Day in Canadian History (The British Ally With Tecumseh)

July 11, 1808—At Fort Amherstburg, the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, Francis Gore, reached out to one thousand Indian warriors and one hundred of their chiefs—careful not to launch them on the warpath against Americans, mind you, but urging them to stay “on your guard against any attempt that may be made by any enemy whatever to disturb the peace of your Country.”

Gore expected to see Tenskwatawa (The Prophet), a Shawnee who had sought to unite Indians—and thereby provoke American distrust and anger—by insisting that tribal land was held in common and therefore could not be sold to whites piecemeal, without the consent of all Indians. A short, ugly man whose life had been turned around by a mystical vision in which the “Master of Life” had urged him to lay aside the ways of the white man (e.g., alcohol, guns, iron cookware, and glass beads), The Prophet would have been a handful all by himself.

Instead, Gore met The Prophet’s older brother, Tecumseh, whose translated name, “Shooting Star,” gives only the most cursory idea of his actual—and potentially even greater—influence on the future shape of North America.

I came upon the Gore-Tecumseh meeting in The Invasion of Canada, 1812-1813, by Pierre Berton, the late Canadian journalist-historian whose books ought to be better known in the U.S.—especially for anyone who wants to understand our neighbors to the north.

The comparatively little I knew about the formidable Indian chief was gleaned from the outdoor spectacle Tecumseh!, which I saw about 20 years ago in Chillicothe, Ohio, with my oldest brother and my sister-in-law. After all this time, however, the details of his life had gotten a bit fuzzy. Berton’s narrative represented an excellent refresher course on his life, as well as on the War of 1812, a war with as much military and administrative mismanagement as any in American history.

Gore knew practically nil about Tecumseh, but after the meeting wrote that he found him to be “a very shrewd intelligent man.” And well Gore might think so, since, among all the chiefs gathered to listen to the white man, only Tecumseh was prepared to go to war with the Anglos to the south. He’d been doing so for the past quarter-century, as a matter of fact.

A good thing Tecumseh only had another five years to live—few Native-Americans (few Anglo-Americans, for that matter) combined tactical brilliance in battle with such a grand yet sensible overall strategic vision. It was his life’s mission to forge a confederation of Indians—a successor organization to Pontiac’s—that would oppose the whites from Upper Canada down to Florida and, if possible, win back their ancestral homelands.

As Gore assessed the situation in his province, he knew he would need the help of Tecumseh and his brother—sooner rather than later. In Upper Canada three out of five settlers were transplanted Americans. These weren’t ideologically driven emigrants, such as, say, Vietnam-era draft resisters—they tended to be economically motivated. Their allegiance was uncertain at best, downright suspect at worst. The British in Canada would need every one of Tecumseh’s highly motivated Indian allies not just in battle but to help bolster the thinly populated forts.

Lt. Gov. Gore was going all out to prepare for the worst. In the last year, in the wake of the U.S. outcry over the impressments of 6,000 men from American ships, he fully expected hostilities to break out soon. Over the next two years, he accomplished the following:

* he checked to make sure the Indians had enough rations
* he secured authority for militia units to serve outside their province in the event of war or insurrection
* he arranged for them to receive adequate provisions

Contrast Gore with what the Americans were doing south of their border—especially President Thomas Jefferson:

* Not wanting war, he signed the ruinous Embargo Act, which called for ceasing trade with any European power that interfered with American ships. It ruined American shipping without bringing either France or Britain to heel.
* Believing that small was beautiful, he embarked on a massive program of gunboat building instead of the larger, Federalist-backed vessels such as the U.S.S. Constitution. It was fine in theory, except that even in their own native, smaller waters, the firepower of the gunboats was no match against a frigate. (Irony of ironies: Jefferson did not believe adding slightly to the national debt, but very much did so when it came to his own affairs).
* Even when war came, in August 1812 (nearly four years after he left office), Jefferson wrote friend William Duane that that capturing Quebec would be “a mere matter of marching” for the Americans. This ignored the disastrous Richard Montgomery-Benedict Arnold assault on the city during the Revolution, not to mention what would happen when that small-is-beautiful militia force that Jefferson loved wouldn’t fight on foreign soil.

Most of all, Jefferson was unaware of how his own land policies were alienating the tribes. A secret message he sent Congress in 1803 called for more trading houses among the Indians, “leading them thus to agriculture, to manufactures, and civilization.” Note the condescension.

More hard-headed than Jefferson, Tecumseh was reluctant to trust the assurances of any white man—even one such as Gore. The Indian was ready to attack the Americans, Gore wrote to his superior, Sir James Craig, but only if “their father the king should be in earnest and appear in sufficient force they would hold fast by him.”

Tecumseh’s caution was understandable: the British had closed the gates on their Indian allies at Fort Miami after Anthony Wayne defeated them at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. The Indian warrior’s worst fears would come true five years after his encounter with Gore at the Battle of the Thames, when British soldiers fled the battlefield, leaving Tecumseh and his braves to fight on alone.

They say Tecumseh died from an American bullet; I say it was from a heart broken by the realization that shiftless allies had doomed his dream of a confederation once again.

On the other hand, the British ended up much the better for their encounter with the chieftain. The presence of so many intimidating Indian warriors early in the conflict did much to ensure that Upper Canada would remain relatively quiescent until British forces--toghether with their distrustful allies--could decide the fate of the province on the battlefield. The American dream of annexing Canada was ended. Luckily, the British made enough mistakes later in the way to ensure that the young American republic would not be dismembered--until we almost did it to ourselves nearly 50 years later.

This Day in Canadian History (Pierre Trudeau Becomes Prime Minister)

April 20, 1968—"Canada's JFK," Pierre Elliott Trudeau, became Prime Minister, beginning 16 years (except for a nine-month interval) in which he would leave an imprint far more on his country's institutions than his American predecessor had the opportunity to do in his "Thousand Days." In the process, he took a country that had been somewhat more conservative than the U.S. and transformed it into one a good deal more liberal.

If you're an American of a certain age, you're likely to remember Trudeau as a kind of character from a Moliere comedy, a middle-aged husband utterly unable to control a pretty wife only half his age. This, it turns out, is deceptive, for reasons going beyond the fact that a tragedy was being played out, unbeknownst to either the country or the principals themselves, offstage. (Margaret Trudeau’s misdiagnosed bipolar disorder was revealed a few years ago.)

That Trudeau should be known for far more than his difficult private life was borne home to me when I was visiting his country more in late September 2000, when news of his death from prostate cancer sparked an outpouring of retrospectives. I realized then what a major impact he had on his country.

Differing Views of Trudeau’s Legacy
If you're an American liberal from the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party, Trudeau-influenced Canada is likely to seem everything America should be but isn't, a paradise of access to inexpensive medical care and liberated attitudes toward sexuality. If you're a conservative, the nation will appear more like either a piece of Scandinavian governmental flotsam found on North American shores or, more likely, Massachusetts moved north, enlarged and taken to its natural extreme.

Whatever your ideological inclinations, 40 years later, it is impossible to imagine either Canada’s current institutions or atmosphere without gauging his record as prime minister or, earlier, minister of justice under predecessor Lester Pearson. Canadians were correct in naming Trudeau, in a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. poll, one of the “10 greatest Canadians.” (One of the few things liberals and conservatives can probably agree on is that a subject of one of my earlier posts, Wayne Gretzsky, deserves his inclusion on the same list.)

As the comparison to JFK indicates, the 1960s were a big decade for political charisma. Everybody wanted it.

In the U.S., the Democrats spent the rest of the decade pining for the second coming of Kennedy, including enduring tragedies involving both his surviving brothers. Conservative Republicans looked to former movie B-lister Ronald Reagan as a new hope emerging from the West Coast who could bring them back from the Goldwater disaster. Even at the municipal level, the search for this quicksilver quality continued. Bostonians thought they’d found it in Kevin White, New Yorkers in John V. Lindsay. It was columnist Murray Kempton’s apt description of Lindsay that captured the special appeal of these men (and, for that matter, Barack Obama today): “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired.”

Trudeaumania
“Trudeaumania” was yet another manifestation of this phenomenon, even before he assumed power. Teenage girls squealed at the sight of him. Autograph hounds even chased him across Parliament Hill grounds! The general election called after he won control of the Liberal Party leadership not only secured a solid majority but cemented his image as the ascot- and cape-wearing, celebrity-dating style maven, as he conducted a legendary “kissing campaign.” (This latter tactic is the one element of the Trudeau style that American politicians of all stripes wouldn’t mind importing—which might be one reason why politics has in recent years been defined as “show business for ugly people.”)

The new Prime Minister was brilliant, and like other such people his tendency to demonstrate it all the time struck many as arrogant. In a photo from February 1968, showing him listening at a conference to an aggrieved speaker advocating independence for Quebec, Trudeau didn’t even attempt to hide his amused contempt.

At other times, this arrogance could be self-destructive and stupid. “Why should I sell your wheat?” he asked farmers from the West—a remark they would recall in delivering one drabbing after another to the Liberals in that region. His inability to hide his annoyance with American leaders needlessly strained relations. And he executed a pirouette once behind Queen Elizabeth II—something that even I, a committed anti-monarchist, regard as singularly immature, insulting and superfluous, since the British royals are essentially toothless.

Trudeau’s Two Greatest Legacies
Two achievements toward the beginning and end of his time in office--keeping his country united and providing it with a written constitution –might constitute Trudeau’s greatest legacies.
A bilingual President, he served as a symbol for French speakers who wondered if Quebec really had a place in an Anglo-dominated country. His ethnicity might have also given him credibility in that province as he reacted to the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte (a terrorist organization dedicated to Quebec independence) by invoking the War Measures Act in October 1970.

The act, which provided the government with emergency powers in the event of “war, invasion or insurrection, real or apprehended,” strikes this American observer as reminiscent in intent to America’s Patriot Act. Its invocation was especially unusual in view of the fact that Trudeau’s ardent civil libertarianism as minister of justice.

While most of the public heartily endorsed Trudeau’s use of the measure at this time, it is possible in retrospect to ask if he had resorted to it too readily. Under its provisions, more than 450 people were arrested without charge, with most subsequently released with no charges pressed. Civil libertarians asked at the time if Trudeau had overreacted. I believe they have a legitimate point.

Those looking to Canada as a bastion of rights need to rethink how justified that really is in the light of Trudeau’s actions. Only two government officials were threatened (Cross was eventually released, Laporte murdered) in the October crisis. In contrast, the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. resulted in the loss of nearly 3,000 lives. The threat was far more apparent and wide-ranging.

Unlike George W. Bush, Trudeau escaped large-scale condemnation over time for his actions for several reasons, I think: his Justice Ministry record, his eloquence in pushing for “the Just Society,” and the ratcheting up of tensions by the Quebec separatist movement, which created a large pool of support for any actions he took to quell disturbances. But like Bush, his actions—and occasional overstepping—during a crisis left a precedent that future leaders could invoke under far less justifiable circumstances.

In 1980, Trudeau decisively faced down the threat of Quebec separatism again, winning a referendum on the issue. As part of his campaign, he vowed to provide province and country with a new constitutional order, one that would not depend on amending it in Britain. Two years later, Queen Elizabeth II assented to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, entrenching a Bill of Rights into the Constitution of Canada, severing Canadian dependence on the British Parliament, and codifying federal-provincial relations.

Over the course of more than a decade, the record of any leader is bound to be mixed. Such was the case with Trudeau. In his stress on broad geopolitics and attention to lifestyle issues (the state, he famously said, “has no business in the bedrooms of the nation”) and sometimes merely fitful attention to bread-and-butter economic issues, he sounded at times like an American blue-state politico. And, as I’ve just noted, his handling of the October Crisis is not beyond criticism.

But he kept his nation whole and gave it a written body of laws and greater autonomy than it had known before. When he is written up in the history books—as surely he will—those are the achievements that will be recalled and honored.