The Battle of Fort Bull was a French attack on the British-held Fort Bull on 27 March 1756, early in the French and Indian War. The fort was built to defend a portion of the waterway connecting Albany, New York to Lake Ontario via the Mohawk River.
Lt. Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry led his command consisting of forces from the Troupes de la Marine, Canadien militia, and Indian allies on an attack against Fort Bull on 27 March 1756. Shielded by trees they sneaked up to within 100 yards (91 m) of the fort. Léry ordered a charge at the fort with bayonets. They stuck their muskets into the narrow openings in the fort and shot the defenders. Léry repeatedly asked for their surrender. Finally, the gate was crashed in and the French and Indians swarmed in, killing everyone they saw. The French soldiers looted what they could and set the powder magazines on fire. The fort was burned to the ground.
Background
The establishment of Fort Oswego (modern Oswego, New York) in the 1720s on the south shores of Lake Ontario (called Lac de Frontenac by the French) represented the first British toehold in what until then had been a "French lake", and was regarded as a major threat by the French. The French had dominated the Great Lakes and with it the lucrative fur trade, and were determined to keep the Great Lakes for themselves. However, the 1720s-30s were a period of Anglo-French détente in Europe with both the duc d'Orleans, the Regent for the boy king Louis XV in France, and Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole in Britain, being committed to a policy of peace. Though the French protested at the establishment of Fort Oswego, saying the Great Lakes were part of New France, neither Paris nor London wanted a war over a fort in far-away North America, and so the matter rested for the moment. Versailles and Whitehall both agreed to an understanding that the British would not build any more forts on the Great Lakes in exchange for which the French tolerated Fort Oswego. Fort Oswego was a remote frontier post located in the wildness, and in the words of the Canadian historian René Chartrand its "Achilles heel" was its supply lines. The period of Anglo-French détente and peace which both Walpole and the duc d'Orleans pursued gave way to a period of war in the middle 18th century. France and Britain went to war in the inconclusive War of the Austrian Succession which was followed by the Seven Years' War, which began in North America in 1754 when the Virginia militia under the command of George Washington made a very unsuccessful attempt to expel the French from the Ohio river valley.
Following the failure of aggressive British campaign plans in 1755, a chain of forts along the Mohawk River riverway connecting the Hudson River to Lake Ontario were garrisoned during the winter of 1755–1756. The largest garrison was left at Fort Oswego, at the end of the chain, which depended on the others for its supplies. Two forts along the Oneida Carry were a key element of this supply chain. The Oneida Carry traversed an unnavigable section between what is now Rome, New York and Wood Creek that was between one and six miles long, depending on seasonal water levels. Wood Creek in its turn flowed into Oneida Lake, which flowed into the Oswego river that ran into Lake Ontario. On the other side of the Oneida Carrying Place was the Mohawk river, which flowed into the Hudson river, which in its turn flowed into the Atlantic Ocean. Fort Williams, on the Mohawk, was the larger of the two, while Fort Bull (modern Rome, New York), several miles north of Fort Williams on Wood Creek, was little more than a palisade surrounding storehouses. Fort Bull was garrisoned by a small number of men from Shirley's Regiment under William Bull, and held large quantities of military stores, including gunpowder and ammunition, destined for use in the 1756 campaign. Shirley's Regiment was a British Army regiment raised in New England with the majority of the soldiers coming from the colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island Plantation, and Connecticut.
The assemblies of Pennsylvania and Virginia had only voted for enough money to defend their frontiers while the assemblies of the New England colonies had raised more men than what Shirley had requested after London had promised to pay off their debts if they would contribute to the war. Shirley took the surplus men into the 50th Regiment of Foot, known as Shirley's Regiment. The majority of the Shirely's regiment, who arrived in the Oneida Carry on 2 September 1755 were described by the American historian Gilbert Hagerty as "raw" and "untrained". Following the Battle of Lake George in September 1755, an Anglo-Haudenosaunee victory that saw the deaths of many of the warriors from the Six Nations who had been fighting on the British side, the Six Nations had pulled out of the war and declared their neutrality. Shirley had ambitious plans for the 1756 campaign to take Fort Duquesne (modern Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Fort Rouillé (modern Toronto, Ontario), Fort Saint-Frédéric (modern Crown Point, New York), Fort Niagara (modern Youngstown, New York), and Fort Frontenac (modern Kingston, Ontario) with the campaign to culminate with taking Quebec City. Since the New England colonies had voted more money and raised more men than did either Pennsylvania and Virginia, Shirley was focused on his plans for a campaign on the Great Lakes rather in the Ohio river valley.
In the fall of 1755, Onondaga Indian travelers passing through Montréal mentioned to the French that the British were building two warehouses at the Oneida Carrying Place. Pierre de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnial, the Governor-General of New France, hired Ou8atory<sic>, an Oswegatchie of Oneida descent, to work as a spy, and find out what was going on at the Oneida Carrying Place. Ou8atory returned to report that the British had built two supply-houses at the Oneida Carry, where they were stockpiling weapons, ammunition, bateaux, and other supplies for a spring offensive.
In early 1756 French military leaders in Canada decided to send a raiding expedition to attack Oswego's supply line. As the waters melted south of Lake Ontario an average of two weeks before the waters north of Lake Ontario did, the French feared the British would be able to launch an offensive in the spring to seize the main French forts, namely Fort Niagara and Fort Frontenac before the French forces in Montréal could come to their relief. Vaudreuil chose to launch a preventive strike to destroy the British warehouses in the Oneida Carrying Place in the winter, and selected Lieutenant Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry of the Troupes de la Marine to command the strike force. Vaudreuil admitted that a winter strike was dangerous, going on to write in a report to Paris "...but the situation became urgent and I could not defer it without running the risk of being forestalled by the enemy at Niagara and at Fort Frontenac".
The Troupes de la Marine were under the control of the Ministry of the Marine, which ran the Royal French Navy and all of the French colonies, dressed in distinctive white and blue uniform, and were recruited in France for an 8-year period of service. Though the men of the Troupes de la Marine were recruited in France, many of the officers were Canadiens. From the 1690s on, the sons of the seigneurs of New France had often been attached to the Troupes de la Marine as cadets starting in their teenage years before securing a commission in the Troupes de la Marine, meaning that many of officers of the Troupes de la Marine were familiar with frontier warfare and knew the Indian languages. Chartrand wrote the Canadian-born officers of the Troupes de la Marine had "...devised an unwritten tactical doctrine that combined the best elements of European organization and discipline with the American Indians' extraordinary ability to travel great distances largely undetected and mount very fierce attacks". In New France, all able-bodied men had to serve in the militia from the ages of 16 to 60 with every parish being organized into a company that practiced war games once every month. The French-Canadian militia wore no uniforms and received no pay, but received a gun, ammunition and other equipment from the French state when called up. As almost every Canadien man owned a gun, was a good shot having been using flintlocks from childhood onward and as many French-Canadians worked as voyageurs in the fur trade, they knew the frontier very well. Chartrand called the militia of New France "fierce and outstanding bush fighters".
In the late 17th century, large numbers of Haudenosaunee were converted to Roman Catholicism by French Jesuits, and as a result, many Catholic Haudenosaunee chose to settle at Kanesatake and Kahnawake outside of Montréal, where they were intended by the French to serve as a buffer to protect Montréal, the center of the French fur trade. Historians call the Catholic Haudenosaunee living outside of Montréal the Canadian Iroquois while the Haudenosaunee who remained in Kanienkeh ("the Land of the Flint", the Mohawk name for their historical homeland in what is now upstate New York) are known as the League Iroquois or Haudenosaunee. Today, the descendants of the Canadian Iroquois are called the Seven Nations of Canada. The Canadian Iroquois considered the French to be their allies, not their superiors, with the Onontio (the Haudenosaunee term for the governor-general of New France) who represented the "Great Onontio" (the King of France) merely an especially important ally whose ways were somewhat strange and had to be constantly humored in order to obtain the European goods that the Haudenosaunee valued so much. As the French did not know the part of Kanienkeh where the Oneida Carrying Place was located very well, they needed the assistance of the Canadian Iroquois to guide them there. Vaudreuil considered destroying the warehouses at the Oneida Carrying Place so important that though he did not want a war with the League Haudenosaunee, he ordered Léry to attack the League Haudenosaunee if any of them objected to the French being in Kanienkeh. From the French viewpoint, it was better to keep the League Haudenosaunee neutral rather than having them fight on the side of British, which was especially the case as the League Haudenosaunee and Canadian Iroquois had a notable reluctance to fight one another.
The Canadian Iroquois chiefs and clan mothers were dubious about the French plans for a winter strike at the Oneida Carry, and Léry reported that one Mohawk chief, Missakin was only convinced on 25 February 1756 "by the words that I [Léry] gave to him in the name of Monsieur de Vaudreuil...He joined me, along with his band". On 29 February 1756, Léry's force of Troupes de la Marine, French-Canadian militiamen and Canadian Iroquois war bands left Montréal. As they marched, Léry picked up more volunteers from the Iroquois communities, by promising them that they would not be assaulting forts and they would only fight against the British, not the League Haudenosaunee. On 9 March 1756, Léry learned from an Akwesasne war band that the British had built two forts at the Oneida Carrying Place, information that he chose not to share with the Canadian Iroquois accompanying his expedition.
On March 12, a company of men left Fort de La Présentation and began an overland trek toward the Oneida Carry. Under the command of Lieutenant Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry, a Canadian-born seigneur, the force consisted of 84 troupes de la Marine, 111 Canadian militiamen, and 110 natives, mostly Iroquois but also some Hurons. On 13 March 1756, an Oswegatchie traveler told the Canadian Iroquois about the British forts at the Oneida Carrying Place, which caused them to demand a halt. The Canadian historian D. Peter MacLeod called the arguments between the French and the Canadian Iroquois a cultural clash, writing
For French officers such as Léry, a military operation could still be a success if half their subordinates became casualties, providing that it had achieved a sufficiently important objective. This perspective was not necessarily shared by soldiers and militiamen for whom personal survival might take precedence over the achievement of abstract imperial goals. For Amerindians, on the other hand, no amount of prestige from a military operation was worth the loss of a single life. When Canadian Iroquois fighters went to war, they employed many of the strategies and tactics of the hunt. Successful hunters used stealth and cleverness to assure themselves of the maximum advantage and sought to kill an animal quietly and efficiently. Getting mauled by a bear, lost, shot by accident and harmed by any of the other dangers incidental to hunting would turn an otherwise successful hunt into a grim failure.