When was the Battle of Carillon?

It was fought on 8 July 1758, during the French and Indian War, outside Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga in present-day New York.

Who won the Battle of Carillon?

The French under the Marquis de Montcalm won, defeating a British and colonial army about four times their size under General James Abercromby.

Why did the British lose at Carillon?

Abercromby sent his infantry straight at a log breastwork protected by an abatis of felled trees without using his artillery, after his best officer, Lord Howe, had been killed two days earlier.

How many soldiers died at Carillon?

EBSCO gives British losses as 550 killed, 1,355 wounded and 27 missing, and French losses as 106 killed and 266 wounded. It was the bloodiest battle of the French and Indian War.

Is Fort Carillon the same as Fort Ticonderoga?

Yes. The French called it Fort Carillon after its site; the British and Americans knew the place as Ticonderoga, the name the fort kept after the French left it in 1759.

Battle of Carillon, 1758: Montcalm's victory at Ticonderoga

Plan du fort Carillon et du camp retranché, French manuscript plan of the action of 8 July 1758, Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Quick answer

What happened at the Battle of Carillon?

On 8 July 1758 a French force of about 3,600 men under the Marquis de Montcalm, entrenched behind a log breastwork and a tangle of felled trees outside Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga, defeated a British and colonial army several times its size under General James Abercromby. Abercromby sent his infantry against the barricade without bringing up his artillery, and wave after wave was shot down. With some 2,000 casualties, the British retreated in panic down Lake George. It was the bloodiest battle of the French and Indian War.¹

By 1758 Britain and France had been fighting for North America for four years. The British Prime Minister, William Pitt, planned three offensives that summer: one against Fort Duquesne on the Ohio, one against the fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, and one up the chain of lakes that led from New York toward Montreal. The key to that last route was Fort Carillon, which the French had begun in 1755 at Ticonderoga, where the La Chute River runs from Lake George into Lake Champlain.²

The largest army in America

Command of the northern army went to Major General James Abercromby, a veteran officer whom the American Battlefield Trust's Isaac Makos describes as not especially dynamic and BritishBattles.com as raised by political influence. Its real spirit was his second in command, Brigadier Lord Howe, who had worked to train the army for forest warfare. The counts vary: the Trust's article speaks of more than 12,000 men, half of them British regulars and half colonial provincials, EBSCO of 15,391, and the Trust's own battle summary of 18,000. All agree it was the largest army yet assembled in North America. On 5 July it embarked on Lake George in a flotilla of some 800 to 1,000 boats.³

Disaster struck the next day. Landing at the north end of the lake, Howe went forward to scout, ran into a French party in the woods and was killed in the skirmish. His death, writes Makos, seemed to slow the whole army.⁴

Montcalm's wall

Montcalm, commander of the French troops in North America, had fewer than 4,000 men. The fort was unfinished and, the Trust notes, had food for only nine days, so he decided to fight outside it. Three-quarters of a mile west of the fort his troops built a breastwork of logs about six feet high, and in front of it an abatis, a thicket of felled trees with sharpened branches pointing at the enemy. They worked through the night, and reinforcements under the Chevalier de Lévis joined them behind the barricade.⁵

Abercromby did not go to look for himself. He sent a young engineer, Lieutenant Clarke, who reported that the line could be carried by infantry, and, according to EBSCO's account, fear of French reinforcements pushed Abercromby to attack at once rather than turn the flanks or bring up his siege guns.⁶

"Cut down like grass"

The assault began around midday on 8 July; BritishBattles.com puts the first moves soon after 9 a.m., EBSCO the main attacks between 1 and 7 p.m.. Abercromby meant a single coordinated attack along the whole line, but the regiments went in at different points and different times. The abatis broke up every formation, and the French fired into the struggling men from behind their logs. One observer wrote that the redcoats were "cut down like grass"; a survivor sheltering behind a stump said a man could no more stand up without being hit than stand in a shower without getting wet.⁷

Abercromby kept ordering new attacks, six in all by EBSCO's count, which only added to the toll. Late in the day the 42nd Highlanders, the Black Watch, came forward from the reserve and some of them reached the French line, but they could not break it. The regiment lost about 490 men, its major Duncan Campbell of Inverawe among the mortally wounded.⁸

A rout without a pursuit

At nightfall Abercromby ordered a withdrawal, and rumors of a French counterattack turned it into a stampede back to the boats. By the evening of 9 July the army was back where its campaign had started, at the south end of Lake George, having fled from an enemy a quarter of its size that was in no state to follow. EBSCO gives British losses as 550 killed, 1,355 wounded and 27 missing, and French as 106 killed and 266 wounded; the Trust's battle summary puts them at 2,600 and 750. Montcalm credited his victory to God and raised a great cross on the field.⁹

After Carillon

The victory lifted French morale and Montcalm's reputation and held up the British advance toward Montreal for a year. It did not save New France. Louisbourg and Fort Duquesne fell that same year, Abercromby was replaced by General Jeffery Amherst, and in 1759 the French destroyed Carillon and fell back into Canada. Rebuilt and renamed Ticonderoga, the fort changed hands twice more in the Revolution, before the war in the north was decided at Saratoga in 1777.¹⁰