Philadelphians had seen the grim spectacle of a wagon-load of corpses brought by mourning friends and relatives of the dead and laid down at the door of the Assembly to show to pacifist legislators what was really happening.The French regular officers, as we have seen, had hated this kind of warfare Bougainville says that his soul shuddered at the sights in Montreal, where the whole town turned out to see an English prisoner killed, boiled, and eaten by the savages.Worse still, captive mothers were obliged to eat the flesh of their own children.The French believed that they could not get on without the savage allies who committed these outrages, and they were not strong enough to coerce them.Amherst, on the other hand, held his Indians in check and rebuked outrage.Now he was stern to punish what the French had permitted.He could write proudly to a friend that the French were amazed at the order in which he kept his own Indians.Not a man, woman, or child, he said, had been hurt or a single atrocity committed.It was a vivid contrast with what had taken place after the British surrender to Montcalm at Fort William Henry.The day of retribution had come.Because of such outrages, the French army was denied the honors of war usually conceded to a brave and defeated foe.The French officers and men must not, Amherst insisted, serve again during the war.
Levis protested and begged Vaudreuil to be allowed to go on fighting rather than accept the terms, but in vain.The humiliation was rigorously imposed, and it was a sullen host which the British took captive.
France had lost an Empire.It was nearly three years still before peace was signed at Paris in 1763.To Britain France yielded everything east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, and to Spain she ceded New Orleans and everything else to which she had any claim.The fleurs-de-lis floated still over only two tiny fishing islands off the Newfoundland shore.All the glowing plans of France's leaders--of Richelieu, of Louis XIV, of Colbert, of Frontenac, of the heroic missionaries of the Jesuit Order--seemed to have come to nothing.
The fall of France did much to drag down her rival.Already was America restless under control from Europe.There was now no danger to the English in America from the French peril which had made insecure the borders of Massachusetts, of New York, of Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and had brought widespread desolation and sorrow.With the removal of the menace went the need of help and defenses for the colonies from the motherland.The French belief that there was a natural antipathy between the English of the Old World and the English of the New was, in reality, based on the fact of a likeness so great that neither would accept control or patronage from the other.Towards the Englishman who assumed airs of superiority the antagonism of the colonists was always certain to be acute.Open strife came when the assumption of superiority took the form of levying taxes on the colonies without asking their leave.In no remote way the fall of French Canada, by removing a near menace to the English colonies, led to this new conflict and to the collapse of that older British Empire which had sprung from the England of the Stuarts.
When Montreal fell there were in the St.Lawrence many British ships which had been used for troops and supplies.Before the end of September the French soldiers and also the officials from France who desired to go home were on board these ships bound for Europe.By the end of November most of the exiles had reached home.Varying receptions awaited them.Levis, who took back the army, was soon again, by consent of the British government, in active service.Fortune smiled on him to the end.He died a great noble and Marshal of France just before the Revolution of 1789;but in that awful upheaval his widow and his two daughters perished on the scaffold.Vaudreuil's shallow and vain incompetence did not go unpunished.He was put on trial, accused of a share in the black frauds which had helped to ruin Canada.
The trial was his punishment.He was acquitted of taking any share of the plunder and so drops out of history.Bigot and his gang, on the other hand, were found guilty of vast depredations.
