Capture of Louisbourg by the New England Militia: Ii

ON board one of the transports was Seth Pomeroy, gunsmith at Northampton, and now major of Willard’s Massachusetts regiment. He had a turn for soldiering, and, ten years later, fought in the battle of Lake George. Twenty years later still, when Northampton was astir with rumors of war from Boston, he borrowed a neighbor’s horse, rode a hundred miles, reached Cambridge on the morning of the battle of Bunker Hill, left his borrowed horse out of the way of harm, walked over Charlestown Neck, then swept by the fire of the ships of war, and arrived at the scene of action as the British troops were forming for the attack. When Israel Putnam, his comrade in the French war, saw, from the rebel breastwork, the old man striding, gun in hand, up the hill, he shouted: “ By God, Pomeroy, you here ! A cannon shot would waken you out of your grave! ”

But Pomeroy, with other landsmen crowded in the small and malodorous fishing vessels that were made to serve as transports, was now in the gripe of the most unheroic of maladies. “ A terrible northeast storm ” had fallen upon them, and, he says, “ we lay rolling in the seas, with our sails furled, among prodigious waves.” “ Sick day and night,” writes the miserable gunsmith, “ so bad that I have not words to set it forth.” ¹ The gale increased, and the fleet were scattered, there being, as a Massachusetts soldier writes in his journal, “ a Very fierse Storme of Snow, som Rain and Very Dangerous weather to be so nigh ye Shore as we was, but we escaped the Rocks and that was all.”

On Friday, April 5, 1745, Pomeroy’s vessel entered the harbor of Canseau, about fifty miles from Louisbourg. Here was the English fishing hamlet, the seizure of which by the French had first provoked the expedition. The place now quietly changed hands again. Sixtyeight of the transports lay here at anchor, and the rest came dropping in from day to day, sorely buffeted, but all safe. On Sunday there was a great concourse to hear Parson Moody preach an open-air sermon from the text, “ Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power,” concerning which occasion the soldier diarist observes, “ Several sorts of busnesses was Going on, Som a Exercising Som a Hearing Preaching.” The attention of the listeners was, in fact, distracted by shouts of command and the awkward drill of squads of homespun soldiers on the pasture hard by.

Captain Ammi Cutter was ordered to remain with two companies at Canseau, to protect it from further vicissitudes. A blockhouse was also built, and mounted with eight small cannon. Some of the armed vessels had been sent to cruise off Louisbourg, which they did to good purpose, and presently brought in six French vessels loaded with supplies. They brought, on the other hand, the ominous news that Louisbourg harbor and the adjoining bay were so blocked with ice that, for the present, landing was impossible. This involved long delay, likely to ruin the expedition, as the expected ships of war might arrive meanwhile from France. In fact, they had already begun to appear. On Thursday, the 18th, heavy cannonading was heard far out at sea, and again on Friday, writes Pomeroy, “the cannon fired at a great rate till about two of the clock.”It proved to be some of the provincial cruisers attacking a French frigate of thirty-six guns, called the Renommée. Their united force being too much for her, she kept up a running fight, outsailed them, and escaped after a chase of thirty hours ; being, as Pomeroy quaintly calls her, “ a smart ship.” She carried dispatches to the governor of Louisbourg, and, as she could not deliver them, sailed back for France to report what she had seen.

On Monday, the 22d, a clear, cold, windy day, a large ship, under British colors, sailed into the harbor, and proved to be the frigate Eltham, escort to the annual mast fleet from New England. On orders from Commodore Warren, she had left her charge in waiting and sailed for Canseau to join the expedition, bringing the unexpected and welcome news that Warren himself would soon follow. On the next day, to the delight of the army, he appeared in the ship Superbe, of sixty guns, accompanied by the Mermaid and the Launceston, of forty guns each. Here was force enough to oppose any ships likely to come to the relief of Louisbourg; and Warren, after communicating with Pepperell, sailed to blockade the port, along with the provincial cruisers, which, by order of Shirley, were placed under his command.

The transports lay at Canseau nearly three weeks, waiting for the ice to break up. The time was passed in drilling the men and forming them into divisions of four and six hundred each, according to the programme of Shirley. At last, on Friday, the 26th, they heard that Gabarus Bay was free from ice, and on the morning of the 29th, with the first fair wind, they sailed out of Canseau harbor, expecting to reach Louisbourg at nine in the evening, as prescribed in the governor’s receipt for taking the fortress “while the enemy were asleep.”² But a lull in the wind defeated their plan, and after sailing all day they found themselves becalmed towards night. It was not till the next morning that they could see the town ; no very imposing spectacle, for, with a few exceptions, the buildings were small, and the massive ramparts that belted them round rose to no conspicuous height.

Louisbourg stood on a tongue of land which lay between its harbor and the sea, and the end of which was prolonged eastward by reefs and shoals that partly closed the entrance to the port, leaving for ships a passage not half a mile wide. This passage was commanded by a powerful battery called the Island Battery, being upon a small rocky island at the west side of the channel, and was also secured by another detached work called the Grand, or Royal, Battery, which stood on the shore of the harbor opposite its entrance, and more than a mile from the town. Thus, a hostile squadron trying to force its way in would receive a flank fire from the one battery, and a front fire from the other. The land front of the town consisted of a line of works about twelve hundred yards long, drawn from the harbor on one side to the sea on the other, across the base of the triangular promontory on which the town was built. The ditch was here eighty feet wide, and from thirty to thirtysix feet deep, and the rampart of earth, faced with masonry, was about sixty feet thick. The glacis sloped down to a vast marsh, which formed one of the best defenses of the place. The fortress, without counting its outworks, had embrasures for a hundred and forty-eight cannon, but the number in position was much less, and is variously stated. Pomeroy’says that at the end of the siege a little above ninety were found, besides a “ great number of swivels ; ” others say seventy-six.³ In the Grand and Island batteries there were sixty heavy pieces more. Against this formidable armament the New England men had brought thirty-four cannon and mortars of much inferior weight, to be used in bombarding Louisbourg if they should fail to capture it. “ while the enemy were asleep.” They seem to have distrusted the efficacy of their siege train, though it was far stronger than Shirley at first thought sufficient; for they brought with them a good store of balls of forty-two pounds, to be used in French cannon of that calibre which they proposed to capture. their own largest pieces being but twenty-two-pounders.

According to the Habitant de Louisbourg, the garrison consisted of five hundred and sixty regular troops, two or three companies of whom were Swiss, and some thirteen or fourteen hundred militia, inhabitants partly of the town and partly of the neighboring settlements.⁴ The regulars were in bad condition. About Christmas they had mutinied, being dissatisfied with their rations, and exasperated with getting no extra pay for work on the fortifications. The affair was so serious that, though order was at last restored, some of the officers lost confidence in the men, and this distrust proved most unfortunate during the siege. The governor, Chevalier Duchambon, successor of Duquesnel, who had died in the autumn, was not a man to meet a crisis, being deficient in decision of character, if not in capacity. He expected an attack. “ We were informed of the preparations from the first.” says the Habitant de Louisbourg. Some Indians who had been to Boston carried to Canada the news of what was going on there, but the story was thought so improbable that it excited no alarm. It was not so at Louisbourg, where, observes the French writer just quoted,

“ we lost precious moments in useless deliberations and resolutions no sooner made than broken. Nothing to the purpose was done, so that we were as much taken by surprise as if the enemy had pounced upon us unawares.”

It was about the 25th of March⁵ when the garrison first saw the provincial cruisers hovering off the mouth of the harbor. They continued to do so at intervals till daybreak of the 30th of April, when the whole fleet of transports appeared, standing towards Flat Point, which projects into Gabarus Bay three miles west of the town.⁶ On this, Duchambon sent Morpain, a famous privateer or “ corsair,” to oppose the landing. He had with him eighty men, and was to be joined by forty more, already on the watch near the supposed point of disembarkation. At the same time, cannon were fired and alarm bells rung in Louisbourg to call in the militia of the neighborhood.

Pepperell managed the critical work of landing with creditable skill. The rocks and the surf were as dangerous as the enemy. Several boats filled with men rowed towards Flat Point ; but on a signal from the flagship Shirley they rowed back again, and Morpain flattered himself that his appearance had frightened them off. On reaching the flagship they were joined by several other boats, and the united party, one hundred men in all, pulled for another landing-place, called Freshwater Cove, or Anse de la Cormorandière, two miles farther up Gabarus Bay. Morpain and his men ran to meet them, but the boats were first in the race. As soon as the New England men got ashore they rushed upon the French, killed six of them, captured as many more, and put the rest to flight, with the loss on their own side of two men slightly wounded. Further resistance to the landing was impossible, for a swarm of boats pushed against the rough and stony beach, and the men dashed through the surf, till before night about two thousand were on shore.⁷ The rest, or about two thousand more, landed at their leisure on the next day.

On the 2d of May Vaughan led four hundred men to the hills near the town, and saluted it with three cheers, somewhat to the discomposure of the French, although they describe their unwelcome visitors as a disorderly crowd. Vaughan’s next proceeding pleased them still less. He marched behind the hills in rear of the Grand Battery to the northeast arm of the harbor, where there were extensive magazines of naval stores. These his men set on fire, and the pitch, tar, and other combustibles made a prodigious smoke. He was returning, the next morning, with a few of his party, behind the hills, when, coming opposite the Grand Battery, and observing it from the ridge, he saw neither flag on the flagstaff nor smoke from the chimneys. One of the men with him was a Cape Cod Indian. Vaughan bribed him with a flask of brandy which he had in his pocket, — though, as his clerical historian takes pains to assure us, he never drank it himself, — and the Indian, pretending to be drunk, or, as some say, mad, staggered towards the battery to reconnoitre. Nothing was stirring. He clambered in at an embrasure, and found the place empty. The rest of the party followed, and one of them, William Tufts, of Medford, a boy of eighteen, climbed the flagstaff, holding in his teeth his red coat, which he made last at the top as a substitute for the British flag, — a proceeding that drew upon him a volley of unsuccessful cannon shot from the town batteries.⁸ Vaughan then sent this hasty note to Pepperell : “ May it please your Honour to be informed that by the grace of God and the courage of thirteen men I entered the Royal Battery about nine o’clock, and am waiting for a reinforcement and a flag.” Soon after, four boats filled with men approached from the town to reoccupy the battery, in order, no doubt, to save the munitions and stores and complete the destruction of the cannon. Vaughan and his thirteen followers, standing on the open beach under the fire of Louisbourg and the Island Battery, plied the boats with musketry, and kept them from landing till Lieutenant - Colonel Bradstreet appeared with a reinforcement, on which the French pulled back to the town.⁹

The English supposed that the French in the battery, when the clouds of smoke drifted over them from the burning storehouse, imagined that they were to be attacked in force, and abandoned their post in a panic. This was not the case. “ A detachment of the enemy,” writes the Habitant de Louisbourg, “ advanced to the neighborhood of the Royal Battery.” This was Vaughan’s four hundred on their way to burn the storehouses. “ At once we were all seized with fright,” pursues this candid writer, “ and on the instant it was proposed to abandon this magnificent battery, which would have been our best defense if our commanders had known how to use it. Various councils were held in a tumultuous way. It would be hard to tell the reasons for such a strange proceeding. Not one shot had yet been fired at the battery, which the enemy could not take except by besieging it, so to speak, in form, making regular approaches as if against the town itself. Some persons remonstrated, but in vain ; and so a battery of thirty cannon, which had cost the king immense sums, was abandoned before it was attacked.”

Duchambon says that soon after the English landed he received a letter from Thierry, the officer commanding at the Grand Battery, advising that the cannon should be spiked and the works blown up. It was then, according to the governor, that the council was called, and a unanimous vote passed to follow Thierry’s advice, on the ground that the fortifications of the battery were in bad condition, and that the four hundred men posted there could not hold out against three or four thousand.¹⁰ The engineer, Verrier, opposed the blowing up of the works, and they were therefore left untouched. Thierry and his garrison came off in boats, after hastily spiking the cannon, without stopping to knock off the trunnions or burn the carriages. They threw their loose gunpowder into the well, but left behind a good number of cannon cartridges, two hundred and eighty large bombshells, and other ordnance stores, invaluable both to the enemy and to themselves.

Brigadier Waldo was sent to occupy the battery with his regiment, and Major Pomeroy, the gunsmith, with twenty soldier mechanics, was set at drilling out the spiked touchholes of the cannon. These were twenty-eight fortytwo-pounders and two eighteen-pounders.¹¹ Several were ready for use on the next morning, and immediately opened upon the town, which, writes a soldier in his diary, “ damaged the houses and made the women cry.” “ The enemy,” says the Habitant de Louisbourg, “ saluted us with our own cannon and made a terrific fire, smashing everything within range.”

The English occupation of the Grand Battery may be called the decisive event of the siege. There seems no doubt that the French could have averted the disaster long enough to make it of little help to the invaders. The water-front of the battery was impregnable. The rear defenses consisted of a loopholed wall of masonry, with a ditch ten feet deep and twelve feet wide, and also a covered way and glacis, which General Wolcott describes as unfinished. This was a mistake. These parts of the fortification had been partly demolished with a view to reconstruction. The rear wall was flanked by two towers, which, says Duchambon, had been destroyed ; but General Wolcott testifies that swivels were still mounted on them, and he adds that “ two hundred men might hold the battery against five thousand without cannon.” The English landed their cannon near Flat Point, but before the guns could be used against the Grand Battery they must be dragged four miles over hills and rocks, through spongy marshes and jungles of matted evergreens. This would have required a week or more. The alternative was an escalade, in which the undisciplined crowd would no doubt have met a bloody rebuff. Thus, the Grand Battery, which, says Wolcott, " is in fact a fort,” might at least, have been held long enough to save the munitions and stores, and effectually disable the cannon which supplied the English with the only artillery they had competent to the work before them. The hasty abandonment of this important post was not Duchambon’s only blunder, but it was the worst of them all.

On the night after their landing the New England men slept in the woods, wet or dry, with or without blankets, as the case might be; and in the morning they set themselves to encamping with as much order as they were capable of. A brook ran down from the hills, and entered the sea two miles or more from the town. The ground on each side, though rough, was high and dry, and here most of the regiments made their quarters, — Willard’s, Moulton’s, and Moore’s on the east side, and Burr’s and Pepperell’s on the west. Some of those on the east saw fit to extend themselves towards Louisbourg as far as the edge of the intervening marsh, but were soon forced back to a safer position by the cannon balls of the fortress which came bowling amongst them. This marsh was that green, flat sponge of mud and moss that stretched from this point to the glacis of Louisbourg.

There was great want of tents, as proper material for them was scarce in New England. Old sails were often used instead, being stretched over poles, perhaps after the fashion of a Sioux tepee. When such shelter could not be had, the men built huts of turf, with roofs of spruce boughs overlapping like a thatch ; for at that early season the bark would not peel from the trees. The landing of guns, munitions, and stores was a formidable task, consuming many days and destroying many boats, as happened again when Amherst landed his cannon at this same place. Large flat boats, brought from Boston, were used for the purpose, and the loads were carried ashore on the heads of the men, wading through ice-cold surf to the waist; after which, having no change of clothing, they slept on the ground through the chill and foggy nights, reckless of future rheumatisms.¹²

A worse task was before them. The cannon must be dragged across the marsh to a place called Green Hill, where the first battery was to be planted, and thence onward to more advanced stations, — a distance in all of more than two miles, which the French engineers and inhabitants thought impassable.

So in fact it seemed, for at the first attempt the wheels of the cannon sank in mud and moss; then the carriage, and finally the piece itself, slowly disappeared. Lieutenant-Colonel Meserve, of the New Hampshire regiment, by trade a ship-builder, presently overcame the difficulty. By his direction sledges of timber were made, sixteen feet long and five feet wide ; a cannon was placed on each of these, and it was then dragged over the marsh by a team of two hundred men, harnessed with rope traces and breast-straps, and wading to the knees. Horses or oxen would have foundered in the mire. The path had often to be changed, as the mossy surface was soon churned into a hopeless slough along the line of march. The work must be done at night or in thick fogs, the men being completely exposed to the cannon of the town. Thirteen years later, when General Amherst besieged Louisbourg, he dragged his cannon to the same hill, over the same marsh: but having at his command, instead of four thousand militiamen, eleven thousand British regulars, with all appliances and means to boot, he made a road with prodigious labor through the mire, and protected it from the French shot by an epaulement, or lateral earthwork.

Pepperell writes warmly of the cheerfulness of his men under almost incredible hardships.” Shoes and clothing failed, till many were in tatters and many barefooted ; yet they toiled on with unconquerable spirit, and within four days had planted a battery of six guns on Green Hill, which was about a mile from the King’s Bastion of Louisbourg. In another week they had dragged four twenty-two-pound cannon and ten coehorns —gravely called 舠 cowhorns ” by the bucolic Pomeroy — six or seven hundred yards farther, and planted them within easy range of the citadel. Two of the cannon burst, and were replaced by four more and a large mortar, which last burst in its turn, and Shirley was begged to send another from Boston. Meanwhile, a battery, chiefly of coehorns, had been planted on a hillock four hundred and forty yards from the West Gate, where it greatly annoyed the French; and on the next night an advanced battery of fascines was placed opposite the same gate, and scarcely two hundred and fifty yards from it. This West Gate, the principal entrance of Louisbourg, opened on the tract of high, firm ground that lay on the left of the besiegers, between the marsh and an arm of the harbor which here extended westward beyond the town, and ended in what was called the Barachois, a salt pond formed by a projecting spit of sand.¹³ On the side of this arm of the harbor was a rising ground, on which had stood the house of a habitant named Martissan. Here, on the 20th of May, a fifth battery was planted, consisting of two of the fortytwo-pound French cannon found in the Grand Battery, to which three others were afterwards added. Each of these heavy pieces was dragged to its destination by a team of three hundred men over rough and rocky ground swept by the French artillery. This fifth battery, called the North West, or Titcomb’s, Battery, proved most destructive to the fortress.

All these operations were accomplished with the utmost ardor and energy, but with a scorn of rule and precedent that amazed and bewildered the French. The raw New England men went their own way, laughed at trenches and zigzags, and persisted in trusting their lives to the protection of the night and the fogs. Several writers say that it was the English engineer, Bastide, who tried to teach them wisdom on this occasion ; but this could scarcely be, for Bastide, whose station was Annapolis, did not reach Louisbourg till the 5th of June, when the batteries were finished and the siege was nearly ended. A French writer makes the curious statement that it was one of the ministers or army chaplains who took upon him to instruct his flock in the art of war.

The ignorant and self-satisfied recklessness of the besiegers might have cost them dear if the French, instead of being perplexed and startled at the novelty of their proceedings, had taken advantage of it; but Duchambon and some of his officers remembered the mutiny of the past winter, and were afraid to make sorties, lest their soldiers might desert or take part with the enemy. This danger seems to have been small. In his letters, Warren speaks with wonder of the rarity of desertions, of which there seem to have been but three during the siege. A bolder commander than Duchambon would not have stood idle while his own cannon were planted to batter down his walls; and whatever the risks of a sortie, the risks of not making one were greater. 舠 Both troops and militia eagerly demanded it, and I believe it would have succeeded.” writes the intendant Bigot. The attempt was actually made more than once, in a hesitating and half-hearted way ; notably on the 8th of May, when the French attacked the nearest battery, and were repulsed, with little loss on either side.

The Habitant de Louisbourg remarks, “The enemy did not attack us with the least regularity, and made not the least intrenchment to cover themselves.” This last is not exact. As they were not wholly demented, they made intrenchments such as they were, at least at the advanced battery; otherwise they would have been swept out of existence, being under the concentred fire of several French batteries within close range.

The scarcity of good gunners was one of the chief difficulties of the besiegers. The privateering, not to say piratical, habits of certain New England towns had taught some of Pepperell’s men how to handle cannon; but their number was small, and the general sent a note to Warren, begging that he would lend him a few experienced gunners to teach their trade to the raw hands at the batteries. Three or four were sent, and they found apt pupils.

Pepperell placed the advanced battery in the hands of Captain Joseph, or Josiah,¹⁴ Sherburn, telling him to enlist as many gunners as he could. Sherburn reported on the next day that he had found six, one of whom seems to have been sent by Warren. With these and a number of raw men he repaired to his perilous station, where he says that he found “ a very poor entrenchment. Our best shelter from the French fire, which was very hot, was hogsheads filled with earth. ’ Their chief mark was the West Gate ; but before they could get a fair sight of it they were forced to shoot down the fish-flakes, or stages for drying cod, that obstructed the view. Some of the party were soon killed, — Captain Pierce by a cannon ball, Thomas Ash by a ” bumb, and others by musketry. In the night they improved their defenses and mounted more guns, one of eighteen-pound calibre and the others of forty-two. These were French pieces dragged from the Grand Battery a mile and three quarters round the head of the Barachois.

The cannon could be loaded only under a constant fire of musketry, which was briskly returned by the French, whose practice was excellent. A soldier who, in bravado, mounted the parapet, and stood there for an instant, was shot dead with four bullets. The men on each side called one to another in scraps of bad French and broken English; while the French drank ironical healths to the New England men, and gave them bantering invitations to breakfast.

Sherburn continues his diary : “ Sunday morning. Began our fire with as much fury as possible, and the French returned it as warmly from the Citidale [citadel], West Gate, and North East Battery, with Cannon, Mortars, and continual showers of musket balls ; but by 11 o’clock we had beat them all from their guns. He goes on to say that at noon his men were forced to cease firing from want of powder ; that he went with his gunners to get some ; and that, while they were gone, somebody, said to be Mr. Vaughan, came with a supply, on which the men loaded the forty-twopounders in a bungling way and fired them. One was dismounted and the other burst; a barrel and a half barrel of powder blew up, killed two men and injured two more. Again : “ Wednesday. Hot fire on both sides till the French were beat from all their guns. May 29th. Went to the 2 Gun [Titcomb’s] Battery to give the gunners some directions ; then returned to my own station, where I spent the rest of the day with pleasure, seeing our Shott Tumble down their Walls and Flagg Staff.”

The following is Bigot’s account of the effect of the New England fire : #x8220; The enemy established their batteries to such purpose that they soon destroyed the greater part of the town, broke the right flank of the King’s Bastion, ruined the Dauphin’s Battery with its spur, and made a breach at the Porte Dauphine [West Gate], the neighboring wall, and the sort of redan adjacent.” Duchambon says that the cannon of the right flank of the King’s Bastion could not be served by reason of the continual fire of the enemy, which knocked the embrasures to pieces ; that when he had them repaired they were destroyed again; and that nobody could keep his stand behind the wall of the quay, which was pierced through and through and completely shattered. The town was ploughed with cannon balls; the streets were raked from end to end, nearly all the houses damaged, and the people driven for refuge into the stifling casemates. The results did credit to novices in gunnery. The repeated accidents from the bursting of cannon were due largely to unskillful loading and the practice of double shotting to which the over-zealous artillerists often resorted.¹⁵

It is said, in proof of the orderly conduct of the men, that not one of them was punished during all the siege; but this shows the mild and conciliating character of the general quite as much as any peculiar merit of the soldiers. The state of things in and about the camp was compared by Dr. Douglas to a 舠 Cambridge Commencement,” which academic festival was then attended with much rough frolic and boisterous horseplay by the disorderly crowds, white and black, bond and free, who swarmed among the booths on Cambridge Common. The careful and scrupulous Belknap, who knew many who took part in the siege, says: “ Those who were on the spot have frequently in my hearing laughed at the recital of their own irregularities, and expressed their admiration at the almost miraculous preservation of the army from destruction.” While the cannon were bellowing in the front, frolic and confusion reigned at the camp, where the men raced, wrestled, pitched quoits, fired at marks, — though there was no ammunition to spare, — and ran after the French cannon balls, which were carried to the batteries to be returned to those who sent them. Yet through all these gambols ran an undercurrent of enthusiasm, born in brains still hot from the Great Awakening. The New England soldier, a product of sectarian hotheds, fancied that he was doing the work of God, and was the object of his special favor. The army was Israel, and the French were Canaanitish idolaters. Red-hot Calvinism, acting through generations, had modified the transplanted Englishman ; and the descendant of the Puritans was never so well pleased as when teaching somebody else his duty, whether by pen, voice, or bombshell. The ragged artilleryman, battering the walls of papistical Louisbourg, flattered himself with the notion that he was a champion of gospel truth.

Barefoot and tattered, the home-made warriors toiled on with unconquerable pluck and cheerfulness, doing the work that oxen could not do. and with no comfort but their daily dram of New England rum, as they plodded through the marsh and over the rocks, dragging the ponderous guns through fog and darkness. Their spirit could not save them from the effects of excessive fatigue and exposure. They were ravaged with diarrhœa and fever, till fifteen hundred men were at one time on the sick-list; and at another Pepperell reported that, of the four thousand, only about twentyone hundred were fit for duty. Nearly all at last recovered, for the weather was unusually good, yet the available force remained absurdly small. Pepperell begged for reinforcements, but got none till the siege was over.

It was not his nature to rule with a stiff hand, and perhaps it was well that it was so. Order and discipline, the sinews of an army, were out of the question, and it only remained to do as well as might be without them,—keep men and officers in good humor, and avoid everything that could dash their ardor. For this, at least, the merchant general was well fitted. His popularity had helped to raise the army, and perhaps it helped now to make it efficient. His position was not easy. Worries, small and great, pursued him without end. He kept a bountiful table, made friends of his officers, and labored to soothe their disputes and jealousies and satisfy their complaints. So generous were his contributions to the common cause that, according to a British officer who speaks highly of his services, he gave to it, in one form or another, ten thousand pounds out of his own pocket.

His letter books reveal a swarm of petty annoyances, which perhaps tried his strength and patience as much as more serious troubles. The soldiers complained that they were left without clothing, shoes, or rum ; and when he begged the committee of war to supply their needs, Osborne, the chairman, sent nothing but explanations why it could not be done. Letters came from wives and fathers, entreating that husbands and sons who had gone to the war might be sent back. At the end of the siege a captain “humble begs leave for to go home,舡 because he lives in a dangerous country, and his wife and children are “ in a declining way ” without him. Then two entire companies, raised on the frontier, offered the same petition on similar grounds. Sometimes Pepperell was beset with requests for favors and promotion ; sometimes with complaints from one corps or another that an undue share of work had been imposed on it. One Morris, of Cambridge, writes a moving prayer that his slave, Cuffee, who had joined the army, should be restored to his lawful master. One John Alford sends the general a packet of the Rev. Mr. Prentice’s late sermon for distribution, assuring him that “ it will please your whole army of volunteers, as he has shown them the way to gain by their gallantry the hearts and affections of the Lades.” The end of the siege brought countless letters of congratulation, which, whether lay or clerical, never failed to remind him in set phrases that he was but an instrument in the hands of Providence.

One of his busiest correspondents was his son-in-law, Nathaniel Sparhawk, a thrifty merchant with an unfailing eye to business, who generally began his long-winded epistles with a bulletin concerning the health of “ Mother Pepperell,” and rarely ended them without charging his father-in-law with some commission, such as buying the cargo of a French prize if he could get it cheap ; or thus : “ If you could procure for me a hogshead of the best Clarett and a hogshead of the best white wine, at a reasonable rate, it would be very grateful to me."’ After pestering him with a few other commissions, he tells him that his, Pepperell’s, children “ Andrew and Bettsy send their proper compliments,” and signs himself, with the starched flourish of provincial breeding, “ With all possible Respect, Honoured Sir, Your Obedient Son and Servant.” Pepperell was much annoyed by the conduct of the masters of the transports, of whom he says, “ The unaccountable irregular behaviour of these fellows is the greatest fatigue I meet with ; ” but it may be doubted whether his son-in-law did not prove an equally efficient persecutor.

Francis Parkman.