Note 1439 — Chapter VIII · (continued 3)

Stone’s Johnson, ii. 47. The admirer of Cooper will remember the interest with which he read the story of Fort William Henry as engrafted upon The Last of the Mohicans, but the novelist’s rendering of the massacre is sharply criticised by Martin in his De Montcalm en Canada, chaps. 4 and 5. Cf. also Rameau, La France aux Colonies, ii. p. 306. Cooper, in fact, embodied the views which at once became current, that the French did nothing to prevent the massacre. The news of the fall of the fort reached the eastern colonies by way of Albany, where the fright was excessive, and it was coupled with the assurance that the massacre had been connived at by the French. (N. H. Prov. Papers, vi. 604, 605.) Montcalm had apprehensions that he would be reproached, and that the massacre might afford ground to the English for breaking the terms of the surrender. He wrote at once to Webb and to Loudon, and charged the furor of the Indians upon the English rum (N. Y. Col. Docs., x. 618, 619), and Vaudreuil wrote a letter (p. 631) of palliation. Some later writers, like Grahame (United States, iv. 7), do not acquit Montcalm; but the more considerate hardly go further than to question his prudence in not providing a larger escort. (Warburton, Conquest of Canada, ii. 67.) Potter (Adj.-Gen. Rep. of N. H., 1866, ii. 190) says that of 200 men of that province, bringing up the rear of the line of retreating English, 80 were killed; and he reminds the apologists of Montcalm that, when the English were advised to defend themselves, the French general knew that they had not surrendered till their ammunition was expended. Stone (Johnson, ii. 49) says that thirty were killed. Parkman (i. p. 512) says it is impossible to tell with exactness how many were killed—about fifty, according to French accounts, not including those murdered in the hospitals. Of the six or seven hundred carried off by the Indians, a large part were redeemed by the French. The evidence, which is rather confusing, is examined also in Watson’s County of Essex, N. Y., p. 74. Cf. Les Ursulines de Québec, 1863, vol. ii. p. 295.