The siege of Fort William Henry (3–9 August 1757, French: Bataille de Fort William Henry) was conducted by a French and Indian force led by Louis-Joseph de Montcalm against the British-held Fort William Henry. This fort, located at the southern end of Lake George, on the frontier between the British Province of New York and the French Province of Canada, was garrisoned by a poorly supported force of British regulars and provincial militia led by Lieutenant Colonel George Monro.
After several days of bombardment and increasing casualty rates, Monro surrendered to Montcalm, whose force included nearly 2,000 Indians from various tribes. The terms of surrender included the withdrawal of the garrison to Fort Edward, with specific terms that the French military protect the British from the Indians as they withdrew from the area.
In one of the most notorious incidents of the French and Indian War, Montcalm's Indian allies violated the agreed terms of surrender and attacked the departing British column, which had been deprived of ammunition, as it left the fort. They killed and scalped numerous soldiers and civilians, took as captives women, children, servants, and slaves, and slaughtered sick and wounded prisoners. Early accounts of the events called it a massacre and implied that as many as 1,500 people were killed, although it is unlikely more than 200 people (less than 10% of the British fighting strength) were actually killed in the massacre.
Whether or not Montcalm and the other French officers present encouraged or opposed the actions of their Indian allies, and the total number of victims, remain matters of historical debate. The memory of the killings influenced the actions of British military commanders, especially those of General Jeffery Amherst, for the remainder of the war.
Background
The French and Indian War, an extension of The Seven Years' War, started in 1754 over territorial disputes between the North American colonies of France and Great Britain in areas that are now western Pennsylvania and northern New York. The war was sparked when Lieutenant Colonel George Washington and a small contingent of Mingo allies ambushed a force of French Canadians resulting in the capturing and massacring of said force. This conflict is known as the Battle of Jumonville Glen and broke the struggling peace between France and Britain's colonies.
The first few years of the war did not go particularly well for the British. A major expedition by General Edward Braddock in 1755 ended in disaster, and British military leaders were unable to mount any campaigns the following year. In a major setback, a French and Indian army, led by General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, captured the garrison and destroyed fortifications at the Battle of Fort Oswego in August 1756. In July 1756, the Earl of Loudoun arrived to take command of the British forces in North America and replaced William Shirley, who had temporarily assumed command after Braddock's death.
British planning
Loudoun's plan for the 1757 campaign was submitted to the government in London in September 1756. It was focused on a single expedition aimed at the heart of New France, Quebec City. It called for a purely-defensive postures along the frontier with New France, including the contested corridor of the Hudson River and Lake Champlain between Albany and Montreal.
After the Battle of Lake George in 1755, the French had begun construction of Fort Carillon, now known as Fort Ticonderoga, near the southern end of Lake Champlain, and the British had built Fort William Henry, at the southern end of Lake George, and Fort Edward on the Hudson River, about 16 miles (26 km) south of Fort William Henry (all three forts are now in New York State). The purpose behind the construction of the fort was to gain control of Lake George (French: Lac Du Saint Sacrement). This was done in order to rival French claims to the surrounding area. This area between Forts William Henry and Carillon was a wilderness dominated by Lake George. The historian Ian Steele described it as "a military waterway that left opposing cannons only a few days apart."
Loudoun's plan depended on the expedition's timely arrival at Quebec so that French troops would not have the opportunity to move against targets on the frontier, and would instead be needed to defend the heartland of Canada along the Saint Lawrence River. However, political turmoil in London over the progress of the Seven Years' War in North America and in Europe resulted in a change of power, with William Pitt the Elder rising to take control over military matters. Loudoun consequently did not receive any feedback from London on his proposed campaign until March 1757.
Before that feedback arrived, he developed plans for the expedition to Quebec and worked with the provincial governors of the Thirteen Colonies to develop plans for a coordinated defence of the frontier, including the allotment of militia quotas to each province.
When Pitt's instructions finally reached Loudoun in March 1757, they called for the expedition to target Louisbourg on the Atlantic coast of Île Royale, which is now known as Cape Breton Island. Although that did not materially affect the planning of the expedition, it would have significant consequences on the frontier. The French forces on the Saint Lawrence would be too far from Louisbourg to support it and would consequently be free to act elsewhere. Loudoun assigned his best troops to the Louisbourg expedition and placed Brigadier General Daniel Webb in command of the New York frontier. He was given about 2,000 regulars, primarily from the 35th and 60th (Royal American) Regiments. The provinces were to supply Webb with about 5,000 militia.
French planning
After the success of his 1756 assault on Fort Oswego, Montcalm had been seeking an opportunity to deal with the British position at Fort William Henry to provide the British with a launching point for attacks against Fort Carillon. He was initially hesitant to commit his limited resources against Fort William Henry without knowing more about the disposition of British forces. Intelligence provided by spies in London arrived in the spring and indicated that the British target was probably Louisbourg. That suggested that troop levels on the British side of the frontier might be low enough to make an attack on Fort William Henry feasible. The idea was further supported by the French questioning deserters and captives who had been taken during periodic scouting and raiding expeditions, which both sides conducted, including one resulting in the January Battle on Snowshoes.
As early as December 1756, New France's governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, began the process of recruiting Indians for the following summer's campaign. Fueled by stories circulated by Indian participants in the capture of Oswego, the drive was highly successful by drawing nearly 1,000 warriors from the Pays d'en Haut, the more remote regions of New France, to Montreal by June 1757. Another 800 Indians were recruited from tribes that lived closer to the Saint Lawrence.
British preparations
Fort William Henry, built in the fall of 1755, was a roughly square fortification with bastions on the corners in a design that was intended to repel Indian attacks, but it was not necessarily sufficient to withstand attack from an enemy that had artillery. Its walls were 30 feet (9.1 m) thick, with log facings surrounding an earthen filling. Inside the fort were wooden barracks two stories high that were built around the parade ground. Its magazine was in the northeastern bastion, and its hospital was located in the southeastern bastion. The fort was surrounded on three sides by a dry moat, with the fourth side sloping down to the lake. The only access to the fort was by a bridge across the moat. The fort was capable of housing only four to five hundred men; additional troops were quartered in an entrenched camp 750 yards (690 m) southeast of the fort, near the site of the 1755 Battle of Lake George.
During the winter of 1756–1757, Fort William Henry was garrisoned by several hundred men from the 44th Foot under Major Will Eyre. In March 1757, the French sent an army of 1,500 to attack the fort under the command of the governor's brother, Pierre de Rigaud. Composed primarily of colonial troupes de la marine, militia, and Indians and without heavy weapons, they besieged the fort for four days, destroyed outbuildings and many watercraft, and retreated.
Eyre and his men were replaced by Lieutenant Colonel George Monro and the 35th Foot and the 60th (Royal American) Foot. In the spring. Monro established his headquarters in the entrenched camp to the southwest of the fort, where most of his men were located because the fort was too small to quarter this many troops. By June the garrison had increased to about 1,600 men with the arrival of provincial militia companies from Connecticut and New Jersey.
Webb, who commanded the area from his base at Fort Edward, received intelligence in April that the French were accumulating resources and troops at Carillon. News of continued French activity arrived with a captive taken in mid-July. After an attack by Joseph Marin de la Malgue on a work crew near Fort Edward on 23 July, Webb travelled to Fort William Henry with a party of Connecticut rangers led by Major Israel Putnam and sent a detachment of them onto the lake for reconnaissance. They returned with word that Indians were encamped on islands in the lake about 18 miles (29 km) from the fort. Swearing Putnam and his rangers to secrecy, Webb returned to Fort Edward, and on 2 August, he sent Lieutenant Colonel John Young with 200 regulars and 800 Massachusetts militia to reinforce the garrison at William Henry. That raised the size of the garrison to about 2,500, but several hundred of them were ill, some with smallpox.
French preparations
The Indians that assembled at Montreal were sent south to Fort Carillon, where they joined the French regiments of Béarn and Royal Roussillon under François-Charles de Bourlamaque and those of La Sarre, Guyenne, Languedoc, and la Reine under François de Gaston, Chevalier de Lévis. Combined with the troupes de la marine, militia companies, and the arriving Indians, the force accumulated at Fort Carillon amounted to 8,000 men. The French forces included 3,000 regulars, 3,000 militia and nearly 2,000 Indians from various tribes.
At Fort Carillon, the French leadership had difficulty controlling the behavior of the Indian allies. Although the French stopped one group from forcing a British prisoner to run the gauntlet, a group of Ottawa was not stopped when it was observed to be ritually cannibalizing another prisoner. The French authorities were also frustrated in their ability to limit the Indians' taking of more than their allotted share of rations. Montcalm's aide, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, observed that attempts to curb that activity would have resulted in the loss of some of these forces. In another prelude of things to come, many prisoners were taken on 23 July in the Battle of Sabbath Day Point, and some of whom were also ritually cannibalized before Montcalm managed to convince the Indians instead to send the captives to Montreal to be sold as slaves.
Siege
While Montcalm's Indian allies had already begun to move south, his advance force of French troops departed from Fort Carillon on 30 July under Lévis' command, traveling overland along Lake George's western shore because the expedition did not have enough boats to carry the entire force. Montcalm and the remaining forces sailed the next day, and met with Lévis for the night at Ganaouske Bay. The next night, Lévis camped just 3 miles (4.8 km) from Fort William Henry, with Montcalm not far behind. Early on the morning of 3 August, Lévis and the Canadians blocked the road between Edward and William Henry, skirmishing with the recently arrived Massachusetts militia. Montcalm summoned Monro to surrender at 11:00 am. Monro refused, and sent messengers south to Fort Edward, indicating the dire nature of the situation and requesting reinforcements. Webb, feeling threatened by Lévis, refused to send any of his estimated 1,600 men north, since they were all that stood between the French and Albany. He wrote to Monro on 4 August that he should negotiate the best terms possible; this communication was intercepted and delivered to Montcalm.
Montcalm, in the meantime, ordered Bourlamaque to begin siege operations. The French opened trenches to the northwest of the fort with the objective of bringing their artillery to bear against the fort's northwest bastion. On 5 August, French guns began firing on the fort from 2,000 yards (1,800 m), a spectacle the large Indian contingent relished. The next day a second battery opened fire from 900 feet (270 m) further along the same trench, creating a crossfire. The effect of the garrison's return fire was limited to driving French guards from the trenches, and some of the fort's guns either were dismounted or burst owing to the stress of use. On 7 August, Montcalm sent Bougainville to the fort under a truce flag to deliver the intercepted dispatch. By then the fort's walls had been breached, many of its guns were useless, and the garrison had taken many casualties. After another day of bombardment by the French, during which their trenches approached another 250 yards (230 m), Monro raised the white flag to open negotiations.