Battle of Fort Frontenac

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Battle of Fort Frontenac Part of the Seven Years' War French and Indian War Battle of Fort Frontenac, 1758. (Engraving by J. Walker) Date August 26–27, 1758 Location present-day Kingston, Ontario Coordinates: 44°14′00″N 76°28′43″W / 44.2333333°N 76.47861°W / 44.2333333; -76.47861 Result British victory Belligerents Great Britain France Commanders Lt. Colonel John Bradstreet Pierre-Jacques Payen de Noyan et de Chavoy # Strength 135 regulars 2,500 militia 110 Casualties and losses 11 wounded 2 killed

v • d • e Seven Years' War in North America: The French and Indian War Jumonville Glen – Fort Necessity – Fort Beauséjour – Monongahela – Petitcodiac – Lake George – Fort Bull – Sideling Hill – Great Cacapon – Fort Oswego – Kittanning – 1st Snowshoes – Sabbath Day Point – Fort William Henry – Louisbourg (1757) – Bloody Creek – German Flatts – 2nd Snowshoes – Louisbourg (1758) – Fort Carillon – Fort Frontenac – Fort Duquesne – Fort Ligonier – La Belle-Famille – Fort Niagara – Fort Ticonderoga – Beauport – Quebec – St. Francis – Sainte-Foy – Restigouche – Thousand Islands – Signal Hill

The Battle of Fort Frontenac took place on August 26 and 27, 1758 during the Seven Years' War (referred to as the French and Indian War in North America) between France and Great Britain. The location of the battle was Fort Frontenac, a French fort and trading post which is located at the site of present-day Kingston, Ontario, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario where it meets the St. Lawrence River.

Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet led an army of over 3000 men, of which about 150 were regulars and the remainder were provincial militia. The army besieged the 110 French soldiers garrisoned inside the fort and won their surrender two days later, cutting one of the two major communication and supply lines between the major eastern centres of Montreal and Quebec City and France's western territories (the northern route, along the Ottawa River, remained open throughout the war). The British seized 800,000 pounds of goods from the trading post.

[edit] Background

The British military campaigns for the French and Indian War in 1758 contained three primary objectives. Two of these objectives, captures of Fort Louisbourg and Fort Duquesne met with success. The third campaign, an expedition involving 16,000 men under the command of General James Abercrombie, was disastrously defeated on July 8, 1758, by a much smaller French force when it attempted the capture of Fort Carillon (known today as Fort Ticonderoga). Following that failure, many of Abercrombie's underlings sought to distance themselves from any responsibility for the disaster.^[1]

John Bradstreet

Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet renewed an earlier proposal to capture Fort Frontenac, a French fort and trading post on the northern shore of Lake Ontario near where it empties into the St. Lawrence River. Abercrombie, who had first rejected the idea, citing the need for troops to attack Carillon, approved Bradstreet's plan to move up the Mohawk River valley to the site of Fort Oswego (captured and burned by the French in 1756), and then cross the lake to assault Frontenac.^[1]

Bradstreet assembled an army at Schenectady consisting of just 135 regular army troops and about 3,500 militia, drawn from the provinces of New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. By the time his army reached the ruins of Fort Oswego on August 21, Bradstreet had lost 600 men, primarily to desertion. The trek met with minimal opposition from French and Indian raiding parties, but the route to Oswego, which had been virtually unused since 1756, was overgrown, and some of the waterways had silted up, causing heavily-laden bateaux to ground in the shallow waters.^[2] Bradstreet's flotilla of bateaux crossed Lake Ontario, landing without opposition about one mile (1.6 km) from Fort Frontenac on August 25.

Fort Frontenac was an important trading center for Indian and French fur traders. The trade through the site was so successful that some Indians preferred to trade with the French there rather than the British outpost at Albany, New York, which provided more ready access to inexpensive British goods.^[3] The fortification, a crumbling limestone construction, was only minimally garrisoned, with about 100 French troops along with some militia and Indians under the command of Pierre-Jacques Payen de Noyan et de Chavoy, an elderly veteran of King George's War. While the fort was normally garrisoned by a larger force, the limited means available for the defense of New France had forced French military leaders to reduce its size for the defense of other parts of Canada.

[edit] Battle

The night after landing, Bradstreet's men established gun batteries and began to dig trenches toward the old fort. On the morning of August 26, the guns opened fire, to the surprise of the French. The British approach was so successfully executed that the French flotilla, moored before the fort, was effectively trapped. After token resistance, Chavoy surrendered the next day. Only minimal casualties were incurred due to the bombardment.

[edit] Aftermath

With the capture of Frontenac, the British intercepted significant supplies destined for French forts in the Ohio Country. More than 60 cannons (some of them British cannons the French had captured at Fort Oswego) were found, as were hundreds of barrels of provisions. To the many provincials in Bradstreet's army, the biggest prizes were bales of furs destined for shipment downstream to Montreal. As Bradstreet's orders were not to hold the fort but to destroy it, many of the provisions were burned before the army returned to Oswego, using some of the captured French ships to help carry the loot.

New France's governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, took full responsibility for the French loss, as he had believed that the English "would not dare to enter [Lake Ontario] on which [the French] had vessels."^[4]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Smollet, Tobias (1822 (originally published 1765)). A Complete History of England. London: Baynes and Son. 
• Fowler, William M (2005). Empires at war: The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North America 1754-1763. New York: Walker & Company. ISBN 0-8027-1411-0. 

[edit] External links

• Fort Frontenac - French and Indian War (U-S-history.com)
• Lossing's Field Book of the Revolution (RootsWeb)
• Fall of Fort Frontenac (HistoryOfWar.org)
• Chartrand, René. Fort Frontenac 1758: Saving Face after Ticonderoga. Osprey Publishing Military Books.
• Biography of John Bradstreet at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• Biography of Pierre-Jacques Payen de Noyan et de Chavoy at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online