Perfect Tide, Ideal Moon: An Unappreciated Aspect of Wolfe's Generalship at Québec, 1759

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Perfect Tide, Ideal Moon: An Unappreciated Aspect of Wolfe's Generalship at Québec, 1759 | Notes and Documents | The William and Mary Quarterly, 59.4 | The History Cooperative

Notes and Documents

Donald W. Olson, William D. Liddle, Russell L. Doescher, Leah M. Behrends, Tammy D. Silakowski, and François-Jacques Saucier

IS it possible, after nearly 250 years and several shelves of published accounts, to say anything new about the battle fought on the Plains of Abraham on September 13, 1759? Barring the discovery of a cache of letters or memoirs in Canada, England, or France, little if any more insight into the actions of the chief participants is likely than what C. P. Stacey provided nearly half a century ago. During the early morning hours of September 13, 1759, General James Wolfe shattered the marquis de Montcalm's confidence by placing the bulk of his army in a "thin red line" stretching across the Plains of Abraham.¹ The results of the battle that followed, secured by Britain's great naval victory at Quiberon Bay later that fall, sealed the fate of New France and thereby decisively shaped the subsequent history of North America. The young British general, dying on the battlefield but immortalized in Benjamin West's famous canvas, promptly became celebrated as a flawless hero in the public imagination and in more substantial published accounts as well. More recently, military historians have portrayed Wolfe as a rather inept commander and attributed the famous victory more to good luck than to impressive generalship. Yet Wolfe's command decisions, flawed as they often were during other stages of this long campaign, deserve some rehabilitation. Modern computational methods allow us to reconstruct the physical conditions that Wolfe exploited as he planned and carried out his army's crucial approach to the battlefield.² Calculating the distance from the British anchorage at St. Nicholas to Anse (cove) au Foulon (from which the army had to ascend a nearly vertical cliff to the Plains of Abraham), factoring in the time the tide turned in the St. Lawrence River and the speed of the tidal currents, and taking into consideration the intensity and direction of the moonlight, Wolfe managed to select the one night in September 1759 best suited to his plan. Those calculations may have made all the difference.

The means by which the British army reached its battlefield position were more critical and intriguing than the events that occurred during the battle itself. In assessing military engagements, historians usually pay less attention to how the armies got to their positions on the field of combat than to what they did after they arrived. ³ The affair on the Plains of Abraham should be one of the exceptions. Wolfe had to get the vanguard of the army down the river to the Anse au Foulon (the navy would ferry the remainder across the river subsequently) without alerting the French as to what was afoot, for the whole enterprise would fail if the French discovered them in transit and responded. A botched approach on the river would have meant no successful ascent to the Plains of Abraham and no British victory there, a possibility with wide-ranging implications.

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