Battle of the Plains of Abraham (Battle of Quebec), 1759: Wolfe against Montcalm

In September 1759 the war for North America came down to one morning on a field outside Quebec. After a summer of failed attacks, General James Wolfe slipped a British army up a cliff path in the dark. The Marquis de Montcalm, who had held him off for almost three months, chose to fight at once instead of waiting for help. The battle that followed, called the Battle of the Plains of Abraham or the Battle of Quebec, was short. Its consequences shaped Canada and, a generation later, the United States. Our 13 September page tells the day in brief; this is the full story, from both sides.²

Why did Britain attack Quebec in 1759?

Quebec was the capital of New France and the key to the St. Lawrence River, the highway into the colony. The war Americans call the French and Indian War was the North American part of the Seven Years' War, which Britain and France also fought in Europe, India and at sea. The French won the early rounds in America, and Montcalm himself threw back a much larger British army at Carillon (Ticonderoga) in July 1758. But that same summer the British took the fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, which opened the sea road up the St. Lawrence.³

For 1759 London planned two blows: one by Lake Champlain and one by the river against Quebec. William Pitt gave the river command to James Wolfe, a 32-year-old brigadier who had made his name at Louisbourg. It was a gamble, as the historian C. P. Stacey notes, because Wolfe had never planned and run a campaign of his own. His army was small but good: Stacey and W. J. Eccles both put it at about 8,500 men, the core of them British regulars, carried by a fleet under Vice-Admiral Charles Saunders.⁴

On 27 June Wolfe landed his main body on the Île d'Orléans, below the city, and looked across at the French positions. His first plan, to land on the Beauport shore east of Quebec and attack the town from its weak land side, died at once. Montcalm had seen it coming.⁵

How did Montcalm defend Quebec?

Montcalm commanded the defense under the governor general, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, with whom, as W. J. Eccles shows, he quarreled bitterly. Their forces were large but mixed. Eccles counts 15,000 to 16,000 men under Montcalm; the Canadian Encyclopedia gives more than 18,000, about 11,000 of them Canadian militiamen with little training and no experience of pitched battle, together with French regulars, colonial troops of the Marine, sailors and nearly 1,800 Indigenous warriors.⁶

The French plan was simple and sensible. They entrenched the shore from the St. Charles River to the Montmorency falls and kept the main army there. Time was on their side: the British had to win before autumn, while Montcalm, in Eccles's words, did not have to defeat Wolfe, only make sure Wolfe did not defeat him. When ice formed on the river, the fleet would have to leave.⁷

The plan had one weakness. To keep the army in being, the French did not stock food in the city. The supply ships that reached Quebec in May were sent upriver to Batiscan, and the city and the army lived on convoys brought down the river. If the British ever got astride that line above Quebec, Montcalm would have to come out and fight to reopen it.⁸

A summer of failure: Montmorency and a burning countryside

The British took Pointe-Lévy, across the river from the city, and from 12 July their batteries bombarded Quebec. The shelling went on for two months and left much of the town in ruins. It did not bring the French army out of its lines.⁹

On 31 July Wolfe tried a direct assault near the Montmorency falls, at the eastern end of the French lines, where the Chevalier de Lévis commanded. Grenadiers stormed up the beach, the attack broke down under heavy fire, and Wolfe called it off. Stacey counts more than 200 British killed; the French lines held.¹⁰

Frustrated, Wolfe ordered the settlements along the river laid waste, hoping that the burning farms would draw Montcalm into the open. They did not. In August Wolfe fell seriously ill. When he asked his three brigadiers, Monckton, Townshend and Murray, to propose a plan, they rejected his ideas for another attack at Beauport and argued for a landing above the city instead. There, they wrote, the French general would have to fight on British terms, cut off from his provisions. Wolfe accepted.¹¹

How did Wolfe get his army up the cliffs?

By early September the army was aboard ships above Quebec. The brigadiers wanted to land well upstream, but Wolfe changed the place at the last moment to the Anse au Foulon, a cove about three kilometers (two miles) from the city walls where a narrow path climbed the cliff. Stacey, no admirer, calls it a far riskier choice; Eccles notes that it put the British army between Quebec and the French troops guarding the shore upstream.¹²

Wolfe's last orders, issued on 12 September, told his men to march straight at the enemy and drive them from any post, and reminded them what a body of soldiers inured to war could do against five weak French battalions mingled with a disorderly peasantry. The words show how he read the French army: a few regular battalions propped up with militia.¹³

That night the boats drifted down with the tide from the ships off Cap-Rouge while other boats staged a feint off Beauport, below the city. The current carried the first wave a little past the planned landing point. At about four in the morning of 13 September Lieutenant-Colonel William Howe's light infantry, the same Howe who later commanded the British army in the American Revolution, scrambled up the wooded slope and overran the small French post above.¹⁴

By about eight o'clock Wolfe had some 4,500 men drawn up across the plateau, less than a mile from the city walls. The Canadian War Museum gives 4,800 landed. The British line ran across the field with the St. Lawrence on its right, and Lieutenant Malcolm Fraser of the Highlanders recalled skirmishing with Canadians and Indigenous warriors in the woods until about ten.¹⁵

Why did Montcalm attack at once?

Montcalm was with the main army in the Beauport lines, below the city, when news of the landing came. He rode up to the heights, saw the British line and brought his troops up from Beauport to attack. His decision to fight before the British could settle in has been argued about ever since.¹⁶

He had reasons. The British now stood between Quebec and its food, and between the army and Bougainville's detachment upstream. Every hour let Wolfe dig in and bring up guns. His senior artillery officer recorded him saying that if they gave the enemy time to establish himself, they would never be able to attack him with the sort of troops they had. A French general who saw his own army as half amateurs had good cause to strike before it faced an entrenched enemy.¹⁷

Eccles thinks this was the fatal error. He argues that Montcalm only had to wait a few days and Wolfe, cut off on a plateau with a cliff behind him, would have had to try a costly withdrawal. Instead Montcalm attacked with about 4,500 men, less than half the force he could have gathered, and without ordering Bougainville's troops upstream to close in on the British from behind. Bougainville's biographer, Étienne Taillemite, adds that those troops were strung out along the river and could not be gathered in time. Vaudreuil, in his own dispatch as Eccles reports it, said he had asked Montcalm to do nothing hasty.¹⁸

What happened on the Plains of Abraham?

The French formed on rising ground in front of the walls and came on in the middle of the morning, about ten by Stacey's account and nearer eleven by Fraser's. Many of the regular battalions had recently taken militiamen into their ranks, and some had just run up from Beauport. As they crossed rough, brushy ground the formations began to come apart. Canadian and Indigenous marksmen kept up a galling fire from the bushes on the British flanks.¹⁹

The French opened fire at long range, around 120 meters by the Canadian Encyclopedia's estimate. The British held their fire. Townshend reported that his troops waited until the enemy was within forty yards; Fraser put it at thirty or forty. Then they fired volley after volley down the line, and the French broke. Fraser thought the heavy firing lasted six or eight minutes; the Canadian War Museum calls the whole battle an intense 30 minutes.²⁰

The French regulars streamed back toward the city and the St. Charles River. The Highlanders drew their broadswords and chased them to the gates. The rout did not become a massacre because the Canadian militia, firing from the woods and the edge of the slope, held up the pursuit. Fraser's own regiment took most of its losses in that fight in the bushes, and Vaudreuil wrote that the Canadians checked the British right at heavy cost to themselves while the regulars crossed the river.²¹

In the afternoon Bougainville appeared behind the British with about 2,000 men, by the reckoning of Townshend and Fraser. Townshend turned two battalions and two guns toward him, and Bougainville drew off. Townshend chose not to risk the victory by chasing him into the woods.²²

How did Wolfe and Montcalm die?

Wolfe was hit at least twice early in the action, leading the grenadiers on the right; the Canadian Encyclopedia says three times. Knox recorded his last minutes as he heard them. Told that the enemy was running, Wolfe ordered a regiment sent to cut off their retreat at the St. Charles bridge, then said, “Now, God be praised, I will die in peace.” Monckton was also wounded, and command passed to Townshend.²³

Montcalm was struck down during the retreat as he rode back toward the city's Saint-Louis gate. Knox heard that when the surgeons told him the wound was mortal, he answered that he was glad he would not live to see the surrender of Quebec. He died in the night or early morning of 14 September and, in the ruined city, was buried in a crater made by a British shell under the floor of the Ursuline chapel.²⁴

How many died at the Plains of Abraham?

The British count is the firmest. Knox printed a return of 664 killed, wounded and missing of all ranks; the Canadian Encyclopedia gives 658 and the National Army Museum about 650. The American Battlefield Trust says each side lost over 600 men killed and wounded.²⁵

French losses are less certain. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives 650 and the National Army Museum about 640 killed and wounded. Officers on the winning side guessed higher: Townshend reported that the French loss was computed at about 1,500, falling chiefly on the regulars, and Fraser heard about 1,000 killed and wounded. Vaudreuil, as Eccles reports, believed the British had lost as many men as the French.²⁶

Who won the Battle of the Plains of Abraham?

The British won the battle, but not yet the city. The beaten French army got back across the St. Charles to its camp at Beauport. That evening, Eccles writes, Vaudreuil and the intendant Bigot wanted to attack again the next day; the French officers refused, and the army marched away that night around the British toward Pointe-aux-Trembles and Jacques-Cartier, upriver.²⁷

Inside Quebec, the commander Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Roch de Ramezay had orders, drawn up earlier, to surrender rather than face an assault once his food ran out. Lévis hurried down from Montreal, took command and planned to march back to save the city, and Vaudreuil sent Ramezay new orders to hold out. By his biographer's account they arrived too late, because Ramezay had already asked for terms; Vaudreuil's camp held that he ignored them. The capitulation was signed on 18 September.²⁸

The French and Canadien view: who lost Quebec?

On the French side the defeat started a quarrel that has never quite ended. As Eccles quotes him, Lévis wrote to the war minister that the battle was lost by attacking too soon, before all the forces were gathered, though he added that Montcalm had meant well and that the general who is defeated is always wrong.²⁹

Vaudreuil's camp had its own grievance. As Eccles tells it, the governor had argued for defending every frontier with Canadian militia and raiding parties, while Montcalm and his officers looked down on that kind of war and on the Canadians. In Eccles's reading, Versailles later found it easier to blame the colonial government than the dead general and his regulars. For the Canadiens, the irony was that the militia the French officers had disparaged were the ones who covered the retreat.³⁰

Historians also rate the winners coolly. Stacey judged both Wolfe and Montcalm to be second-rate commanders raised to legend by the drama of that morning, and credited the brigadiers, who drew it up with Admiral Saunders, with the plan that won. Wolfe's own fame was sealed by Benjamin West's painting The Death of General Wolfe and by a public that treated him as a martyr.³¹

What happened after the battle? Sainte-Foy and the fall of New France

The war in Canada was not over. The British fleet sailed before the ice, and Murray's garrison spent a hard winter in the battered city, with scurvy cutting down its strength. In April 1760 Lévis marched on Quebec with about 7,000 men. On 28 April, at Sainte-Foy on the same high ground west of the walls, Murray came out to fight and was beaten back into the city.³²

Everything then depended on whose ships came up the river first. In May British ships came up the river first, and Lévis had to lift the siege. Three British armies closed on Montreal, which surrendered on 8 September 1760. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 handed Canada to Britain.³³

The long result reached south of the border. With the French threat gone, the colonists of New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts no longer needed British protection and began to resent paying for it. Both the Canadian Encyclopedia and the National Army Museum trace a line from the Plains of Abraham to the American Revolution, and in 1775 an American army would itself attack Quebec.³⁴

Where was the Battle of the Plains of Abraham fought?

On the plateau just west of the walls of Quebec City, above the cliffs of the St. Lawrence. The name probably comes from Abraham Martin, a seventeenth-century river pilot and fisherman. Most of the battlefield is now Battlefields Park, kept by the National Battlefields Commission, with a museum on the battles of 1759 and 1760. The landing cove below is still known as Wolfe's Cove.³⁵