Imprisoned in Quebec

Marquis de la Galissoniere was the Governor-General of Canada, with whom this interesting conversation was had. He was a hunchback; but his deformed person was animated by a bold spirit and a penetrating intellect. He was a devoted student of natural science, and a very distinguished naval officer of France. He had but recently come to Quebec as Governor-General, and was only destined to remain less than three years; but he stayed long enough to give his King most excellent advice, as to the matter of increasing the population of Canada by new colonists, as to a plan of uniting Canada and Louisiana by chains of forts strong enough to hold back the British colonists, and as to the management and Christianization of the Indians. In short, he was one of the ablest and best of a long line of French governors of Canada, closed in 1759 by Pierre Vaudreuil, the best of all, son of Philippe de Vaudreuil, Governor from 1703 till his death in 1725, and brother of Rigaud de Vaudreuil, captor of Fort Massachusetts. The two brothers returned to France on the downfall of French Canada, the late Governor to be imprisoned in the Bastille on charges preferred by the friends of Montcalm, and stripped of most of his possessions, though exonerated and released, and the brave soldier was still living at St. Germaine in 1770.

The Governor-General and the Intendant of Canada answered to those officials in a French province at home. The Governor was usually a military noble, and the Intendant drawn from the legal class. The Governor was superior in rank to the Intendant, since he commanded the troops, conducted relations with foreign colonies and Indian tribes, and took precedence on all occasions of ceremony. Unlike the provincial Governor in France, he had great and substantial power. As we have already seen, there were local governors at Montreal and Three Rivers; but their power was carefully curbed, and they were forbidden to fine or imprison any person, without authority from Quebec. The Intendant, on the other hand, was a sort of official spy on the Governor-General, of whose proceedings and of everything else that took place, he was required to make report to the home government. The Governor, too, wrote long letters to the Minister of State; and each of the two colleagues was jealous of the letters of the other. Indeed, the French Court did not desire the perfect accord of the two officials; nor, on the other hand, did it desire them to quarrel; while it aimed to keep them on such terms, as, without disturbing the machinery of administration, should make each of them a fair check on the other.

About a week after this, David Warren and Phinehas Forbush, two of the captured garrison, who had been behind with the Indians, came into the prison at Quebec, and reported that John Aldrich was still in the hospital at Montreal. A few days later, Jacob Shepherd, of Westboro, another of the fort-captives who had been behind with the Indians, was brought into the common prison-house; and on Sunday, October 5, the remaining three of the enforced stragglers came in, namely, Nathaniel Hitchcock, Stephen Scott, and John Aldrich. The entire number captured at Fort Massachusetts were now together in the prison, except Josiah Reed, who had died at Dutch Hoosac (now Petersburg Junction) two days after the surrender; but his place had been taken, so to speak, by Captivity

Smead, the infant born the same night that he died and at the same place, but the full ranks of the thirty were soon to be thinned by death, as we shall see.

The good Chaplain does not obtrude his private griefs even upon the pages of his private journal; but he was doubtless thinking, when he sent in his petition, of his young wife and two little girls left in the garrison at Fort Shirley two months before, when he expected to return to them from Fort Massachusetts in "about a month." One of the little girls he was never destined to see alive. Captain Ephraim Williams, the founder of the College, commanded Fort Shirley that autumn and winter, and doubtless ministered as best he could to the wants of this poor woman.

The sickness increasing and spreading itself so greatly, we sent a very humble petition to his lordship, the Governor-General, entreating that the sick might be removed out of the hospital, lest the whole prison should- be infected; but he refused to send our people to the hospital, for they told us that their hospital was full of their own sick; yet he did not wholly neglect our petition, but ordered that one of the most convenient rooms in the prison should be assigned for the sick, where they should all be carried, and have their attendance, and this was directly done, and the sick were all brought in.

The sickness thus increasing, there were many taken sick [in the prison], which I don't pretend to mention. The sickness also got into the prison-keeper's family. He lost a daughter by it, the 4th instant [January]. Upon this the Governor ordered a house to be provided for the sick, where they were all carried the 12th instant, about twenty in number, with three men to attend them; and after this when any were taken sick, they were carried out to this house.

The Chaplain did not forget, in the prison-house of his foes and amid personal sicknesses, that he was a minister of the glad tidings. On this 4th of January, the day the prison-keeper's daughter died, as we learn from another source than his own journal, he preached two discourses from Psalm 60 : 11, — "Give us help from trouble; for vain is the help of man." He had quoted, however, in his diary, when the sickness first began, several passages of Scripture from both the Testaments, of which these two may serve as samples: "My virgins and my young men are gone into captivity."

"Abroad the sword devoureth, at home there is death."

This was the brave woman who was delivered of a child about thirty-six hours after the surrender of the fort, at the junction of the Little Hoosac with the Hoosac River.

In this three weeks' interval of delirium, someone must have made brief entries in the Chaplain's journal for him, at least of the deaths occurring almost daily; or else he afterwards copied these from the synchronous diary of Sergeant Hawks, which may be still in existence, although this is not likely, since nothing has been publicly heard of it for three-quarters of a century, or since General Hoyt used it in the preparation of his "Antiquarian Researches," published in 1824. Hoyt died at Deerfield in 1850. Rumors have been current that this diary was brought into Berkshire County from Hampshire by the Pomeroy family, when they migrated to Pittsfield, but nothing definite has ever been ascertained in relation to it. Its probable destruction makes all the more precious for preservation the Chaplain's entries, which he evidently recast and expanded somewhat after his return from captivity, and in preparation for the printing of it in Boston in 1748, where it "was sold opposite the prison." As the prison at that time was in Queen Street, where the court-house now is, and as Daniel Fowle is known to have kept in Queen Street at that time, he may probably be supposed to be the printer. Whoever he was, he did not perform his share of the work with much credit to himself, which may be the reason for withholding the printer's name from the pamphlet.

The twenty-nine captives were taken to Quebec to be later exchanged as prisoners of war; only fourteen, ten men and four children, lived to be traded back to the British a year later. To learn what became of the surviving captives, click HERE to read on.

Continued:

The Rebuilding Fort Massachusetts

"A Brief History of Fort Massachusetts with an Emphasis on the Siege of 1746"

was compiled, edited, and with an introduction by C.A. Chicoine. June 2017

Bibliography:

1. "Origins in Williamstown," by Arthur Latham Perry -- Published 1894
2. "Mansion People: Kinship, Class, and Architecture in Western Massachusetts in the Mid-Eighteenth Century," by Kevin M. Sweeney. Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 19, No. 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 231-255. Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc.
3. "The Genealogy and History of the Taintor Family," by Taintor, Charles M. Published 1847 Publisher Greenfield [Mass.]: Merriam and Mirick.
4. "Antiquarian Researches: A History of The Indian Wars," by E. Hoyt, Esq -- Greenfield, MA, Printed by Ansel Phelps, Published December 1824
   1. "English settler's remains buried 250 years after his death," November 12, 2000, North Adams, Massachusetts (AP)
   2. "Capt. Isaac Wyman's Journal of Operations at Fort Massachusetts, in 1756."
   3. "Journal of the Capitulation of Fort Massachusetts, Aug. 1745," by John Hawks [Manuscript transcript included in the body of a letter from Stephen W. Williams to Colonel William L. Stone of New York. Deerfield, MA, 22 September 1842]
5. "A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts: The Times when the People by Whom it was Settled, Unsettled and Resettled, Volume 2," by George Sheldon -- Press of E.A. Hall & Company, 1896 - Deerfield (Mass.)
6. "The History and Genealogy of the Knowltons of England and America," by Charles Henry Wright Stocking, Published 1897
7. "France," Vol. V, by M. Guizot and Madame Guizot de Witt, pg. 95. Published 1900.
   1. "Williamstown and Williams College," by Arthur Latham Perry -- Published 1899
8. "History of North Adams, Mass., 1749-1885," by W. F. Spear -- Published 1885
9. "The Line of Forts: Historical Archaeology on the Colonial Frontier of Massachusetts," by Michael Coe -- University Press of New England, 2006
10. "Colonel Ephraim Williams, a documentary life," by Wyllis E. Wright --1970
11. "Williamstown: The First 250 Years 1753-2003," The First Fifty Years, by Robert R. R. Brooks -- 2005
    1. "Society of Colonial Wars in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts"|Pub. No. 8 -- 1906
12. The "Bloody Morning Scout" references:
    • a. "Antiquarian Researches Comprising A History of The Indian Wars", by E. Hoyt -- published 1824|page 274
    • b. "Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, Volume X", by Brodhead, John Romeyn, Fernow, Berthold, O'Callaghan, and E. B. (Edmund Bailey). Published 1853|Page 342
    • c. "Colonel Ephraim Williams, an appreciation", by William A. Pew (William Andrews) -- Published 1919|page 21

18. "Historical Sketch of the Life and Character of Colonel Ephraim Williams, and of Williams College, Founded in 1793, In Consequence of His Liberal Bequest," from "Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Volume VIII" -- Published 1802

19. "Antiquarian Researches Comprising A History of The Indian Wars", by E. Hoyt -- published 1824

20. "Interesting Facts in the Early History of North Adams," by A. H. Morris. The North Adams Transcript, North Adams, Massachusetts · October 17, 1896, page 2

21. U.S. News & World Report National Liberal Arts Colleges Rankings

All maps from Google Maps.