Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

against Fort Duquesne with a force of about six thousand men, the majority
colonial militia. Again the French defenders were hopelessly outnumbered,
having no more than one thousand men. Even though the
Virginia route to Duquesne had already been built by Braddock, Forbes
decided to hew a new road from Pennsylvania. The issue could not be
in doubt, however, and at the end of November the retreating French
destroyed Fort Duquesne. The fort was soon rebuilt by the British and
fittingly renamed Fort Pitt.
With all the main French positions west and east captured—except for
Fort Niagara—and enjoying absolute command of the sea, the British at
the start of 1759 were in a firm position to strike into the Canadian heartland.
Montcalm, commanding about ten thousand men and low on provisions,
confronted the prospect of opposing five times that number, and knew
that he could only concentrate his forces in the heartland and hope for a
general peace. He was, however, beset by troubles both from a governor who
had no conception of the danger and dreamed absurdly of retaking Lake
Ontario and even Fort Pitt, and from a corrupt and venal statist bureaucracy
in Canada.
The first tasks of the British in 1759 were to capture Fort Niagara and
the Lake Champlain forts of Carillon and St. Frederic, after which the assault
on Canada itself could be mounted. General John Prideaux, with several
thousand men, laid siege to less than five hundred at Fort Niagara. Despite
a series of blunders that included the accidental killing of Prideaux by
British shells, sheer British numbers overwhelmed the fort at the end of
July. Furthermore, a poorly organized French relief party of nearly fifteen
hundred was captured and destroyed. The west was firmly in British hands.
In the meanwhile, Amherst advanced with about twelve thousand men,
approximately half British and half provincials, against only twenty-five
hundred French at Fort Carillon. The French could only blow up Fort Carillon
and then Fort St. Frederic and retreat northward. By the end of July, the
British had thus cleared all the outposts south of Canada and were ready
for the climactic blow. In fact, the British probably could have finished the
war swiftly if Amherst had had the tenacity to march north from Lake
Champlain and capture Montreal. Instead, Amherst wasted a great deal of
precious time building elaborate forts at Crown Point and Ticonderoga,
which were irrelevant both to the current war and to the future frontier.
After this, Amherst dawdled until the onset of winter suspended operations.
While Montreal was to remain as the major British effort of the following
year, the climactic battle of the war was achieved in the capture of Quebec
—the goal of so many British expeditions since the seventeenth century.
In June 1759, a force of about nine thousand under young General James
Wolfe launched an amphibious campaign up the St. Lawrence. The huge
fleet, under Vice Admiral Charles Saunders, included one hundred seventy
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