Battle of the Plains of Abraham

On the morning of 13 September 1759, a British army under General James Wolfe met French regulars and Canadian militia led by the Marquis de Montcalm on a plateau just west of Quebec City. The fighting lasted roughly an hour, both commanders were mortally wounded, and within days the city surrendered. The British victory decided the struggle for French Canada during the Seven Years' War, known in the American colonies as the French and Indian War.

By 1758 the war in North America had turned against France. British forces captured the fortress of Louisbourg that August, opening the St. Lawrence River to an attack on Quebec, the capital of New France. In June 1759 Wolfe arrived with about 7,000 regular soldiers, carried by a fleet under Vice-Admiral Charles Saunders. His troops landed on the Île d'Orléans on 28 June and soon set up guns across the river that pounded the lower town.

Montcalm kept most of his men behind a long chain of fortified positions on the Beauport shore, east of the city. A British attempt to land there on 31 July failed badly, costing Wolfe around 450 casualties. Through the rest of the summer, British troops and American rangers burned French settlements along the river, hoping to lure Montcalm out, but he refused to give battle. Sickness spread through the British camps, and Wolfe himself fell ill.

Wolfe and his brigadiers decided to land upstream of the city instead. On 12 September Wolfe chose a cove called L'Anse-au-Foulon, beneath a cliff about 53 metres high. French sentries, expecting a supply convoy that night, were reportedly fooled when a Highland officer answered their challenge in French. Before dawn, a small party under Colonel William Howe scaled the slope and overran the weakly manned French post at the top, and the rest of the army followed up a narrow track. By sunrise Wolfe had his men drawn up on the plateau, which took its name from Abraham Martin, an early farmer there.

Montcalm chose to attack at once rather than wait for Louis Antoine de Bougainville's column, stationed upriver at Cap-Rouge. Each side committed only a few thousand men: Canadian government figures, based on the historian André Charbonneau, put the British at about 4,400 and the French force at a similar size, combining regulars, militia and Indigenous allies. Around 10 a.m. the French advanced. The British held their fire until the attackers were very close, then delivered two crushing volleys that broke the French line.

Wolfe was hit several times and died on the field after hearing that the enemy was fleeing. Montcalm was struck during the retreat and died early the next morning inside the city. Each side lost perhaps 650 to 700 killed and wounded, and the British also took around 350 prisoners.

Governor de Vaudreuil pulled the French field army away to the west, leaving a garrison in the city. On 18 September its commander signed a capitulation, and Quebec passed to British control. In April 1760 Montcalm's successor, the Chevalier de Lévis, defeated the British at Sainte-Foy and besieged the city, but the first ships to arrive in May were British, and the siege failed. Montreal surrendered on 8 September 1760. Under the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France gave up Canada and its lands east of the Mississippi to Britain, a change that shaped the later history of Canada.

The battle remains a sensitive subject in Quebec. Plans for a re-enactment on its 250th anniversary in 2009 were cancelled after objections from Quebec separatists and fears of public disorder.

Our 1715 map shows French North America as part of the Kingdom of France, while the 1783 map shows the St. Lawrence valley within the British Empire.