Fort Carillon - Fort Carillon 1757

Fort Carillon 1757

Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, in command of the French troops at Fort Carillon decided to attack Fort William Henry from Fort Carillon. On August 9, 1757, Montcalm, with an army of 7,000 men consisting of French soldiers, Canadian militia, and Indians from various tribes, took Fort William Henry, situated at the southern point of Lake George. The Indians, who thought that an agreement had been made without their consent, revolted. What ensued were violent attacks by the Indians intoxicated by alcohol. There were, according to sources, between 70 and 150 people killed, scalped, and decapitated. After this massacre, the French soldiers accompanied the survivors to Fort Edward to avoid further bloodshed.

After his victory, Montcalm could have taken Fort Edward, but he took instead the destroyed Fort William Henry, and returned to Fort Carillon. The British had been humiliated and Montcalm had shown the compassion of a great general by stopping any further bloodshed by the Indians and accompanying the survivors. However, Montcalm knew that he had to withdraw because of the anger and loss of the Indians as allies, as well as a shortage of provisions.

In 1756, New France had suffered a disastrous crop failure. Montcalm was forced to release the Canadian militiamen who made up more than half of his force. The Canadians were urgently needed to return home for the harvest. However, in 1757, disaster struck again and the harvest was the worst in Canadian history. Conditions were particularly bad around Montreal, which was "the granary of Canada." By late September, the inhabitants were subsisting on a half-pound of bread a day, and those at Quebec on a quarter-pound of bread. A month later, there was no bread at all. "The distress is so great that some of the inhabitants are living on grass," Bougainville wrote. There was a feeling of dispirited despair in the colony and the conclusion was that its military prospects would soon become indefensible.

After a string of French victories in 1757, the British were prompted to organize a large-scale attack on the fort as part of a multifaceted campaign strategy against Canada. In June 1758, British General James Abercromby began amassing a large force at Fort William Henry in preparation for the military campaign directed up the Champlain Valley. These forces landed at the north end of Lake George, only four miles from the fort, on July 6. The French general Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, who had only arrived at Carillon in late June, engaged his troops in a flurry of work to improve the fort's outer defenses. They built, over two days, entrenchments around a rise between the fort and Mount Hope, about three-quarters of a mile (one kilometer) northwest of the fort, and then constructed an abatis (felled trees with sharpened branches pointing out) below these entrenchments. Abercromby's failure to advance directly to the fort on July 7 made much of this defensive work possible. Brigadier General George Howe, Abercromby's second-in-command, had been killed when his column encountered a French reconnaissance troop. Abercromby "felt most heavily" and may have been unwilling to act immediately.

1757 was therefore a bad year for the British in North America, not only because of their defeat in northern New York, but in the Ohio Valley and Nova Scotia as well. That year, British Prime-Minister William Pitt named General James Wolfe commander of the British troops in North America.