Battle of Fort Frontenac - Background

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.

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.

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. 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. 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. Noyan was alerted to the expedition's advance when Indian scouts took some prisoners, and authorities in Montreal organized reinforcements. However, these forces would not arrive before the British.