NOTE FROM THE - Lord Jeffery Amherst · Lord Jeﬀery Amherst’s tour of duty in North America 1758-1763 NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS Don MacNaughton, ... self-interest, greed and deceit

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Lord Jeffery Amherst’s tour of duty in North America 1758-1763

N O T E F RO M T H E

AUTHORSDon MacNaughton, Amherst ’65, a retired lawyer, was fascinated by 18_ century English history, and had studied it in depth. When the student demonstrations at Amherst College took place in late 2015 and early 2016, one of the most divisive issues became the story that Lord Jeffery Amherst had been involved in a plan to distribute smallpox- infected blankets in an attempt to spread the disease among troublesome Native Americans. Don wrote a thoroughly researched history of General Amherst’s role regarding this question, as well as his interesting tour of duty in North America.

At the same time, Gordon Hall, Amherst ’52, had questioned Lord Jeff ’s banishment as a mascot, and had delivered his class’s concerns in a letter to the Trustees.

After the official vote of the Trustees, there still remained the commonly held perception that the legend of General Amherst’s participation in the infected blankets incident was factual. Perceptions can be as important as facts, and at the time, the College had no choice.

Don and Gordon knew one another from having worked together on the Alumni Fund many years earlier. Gordon approached Don about the idea of changing the tone of Don’s work and distributing it as a straightforward history, relating the events and importantly, the context of the times. Both Don and Gordon agreed that setting the matter straight in a scholarly and dispassionate manner is important. This is the result.

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Lord Jeffrey Amherst Lord Jeffrey Amherst

In 2016 the Amherst College Board of Trustees,

under intense pressure from its students and faculty,

determined to disassociate the College from Lord Jeffery

Amherst, its mascot of over 100 years. The Board

concluded that Lord Jeffery’s image had become too

divisive and disruptive. Indeed it had, and the President

and Trustees were right to remove the mascot, as he no

longer is, and cannot be, a unifying symbol. We do not

seek to challenge or overturn that decision. Rather, in

this paper we wish to present a full and balanced scholarly

history of the man. We do so in an attempt to correct

the misimpression of many in our society who believe

that Lord Jeffery Amherst was an inherent bigot who

gladly practiced germ warfare against Native Americans.

This is not what history tells us. Instead it is a far more

complicated story.

The sources for this paper include highly respected

historical scholarship on the Seven Years’ War and

Pontiac’s Uprising, including several epic works by Francis

Parkman published over 100 years ago, and those of

Prof. Fred Anderson, published within the past 15 years

(see Bibliography for sources). Directly on point is the

authoritative paper by Dr. Philip Ranlet published in the

journal Pennsylvania History in the summer of 2000. Also

informative are several other classic works: Prof. John Shy

on the problems confronting the British Army in North

America prior to the Revolution; Prof. Jack Sosin on the

role of the Midwest in British colonial policy during the

same period; and Dr. Peter Silver’s recent study of the

fear, hatred, and violence engendered in response to the

brutal Indian assaults on colonial settlements in Middle

Pennsylvania at the outset of the Seven Years’ War in

1755, and during Pontiac’s Uprising in 1763.

A career army officer, Jeffery Amherst had served with

distinction in several European conflicts, but he had no

prior experience with American Indians when he was

hand-picked by First Minister William Pitt in 1758 over

numerous more senior officers to command all British

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forces in North America during the Seven Years’ War.

Parkman describes Amherst as “energetic and resolute,

somewhat cautious and slow, but with bulldog tenacity

of grip.” Shy explains how the challenges confronting

the British and French forces in North America were

primarily logistical in nature. Accordingly, Shy writes,

Amherst was the right man for this assignment:

“[Amherst’s] talents were managerial, not inspirational

or tactical. His experience as quartermaster in Germany

had revealed and developed the qualities of care and

method so essential to the North American theater, and

his personality matched his talents.” It was Amherst’s

young subordinate, James Wolfe, the budding resourceful

superstar, who was expected to shine in the field, as he

eventually did.

Prior to Amherst’s appointment, the war with the French

had gone very badly for the British, with the destruction

of Braddock’s force on the Monongahela in 1755, the fall

of Ft. Oswego in 1756, and the loss of Ft. William Henry

at the foot of Lake George in 1757. Each of these disasters

had been accompanied by horrific atrocities. Amherst and

his team succeeded in reversing the tide, culminating in

Wolfe’s stunning capture of Quebec in 1759, as well as

Amherst’s own success at Montreal in 1760. At the end of

this last campaign in late 1760, colonial America rejoiced

at the defeat of the French and their native allies, bringing

to a successful close over 100 years of conflict on the

continent.

Not only were the French ejected from this theater,

but their departure also signified what most colonials

expected to be the end of the repeated surprise Indian

raids on frontier settlements that had resulted in the

death, torture, and enslavement of several thousand

settlers. It had been French policy for decades to induce

their native allies to engage in these marauding actions.

One of the worst of these episodes was the Deerfield

massacre of 1704 when Abenaki warriors swept into the

town of 300, killing 48 inhabitants and dragging off 112

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men, women, and children as

captives, forcing them to march

several hundred miles into

Canada.

As a career army officer,

Amherst had developed

a strong sense of what was

right and wrong conduct in warfare, based solely on his

European experiences. During the American campaign,

he was appalled by the wartime behavior of the Native

American warriors, both those who fought for him

and those against him. What was acceptable, if not

admirable, behavior in their native culture was considered

by Amherst to be horrible barbarities. Perhaps the worst

example was the way French officers stood by while their

native allies brutally massacred the British garrison that

had been given a safe conduct passage as its members

filed out of Ft. William Henry in August 1757. Even the

sick and wounded, remaining bed-ridden in the captured

fort, were slain in the massacre.

For these reasons, when it came

time in late 1760 to negotiate

terms with the French officers at

the conclusion of the fighting in

North America, Amherst refused

French requests for the traditional

terms of honor because, as he

stated at the time, French officers repeatedly had “incited”

their Indian allies to commit “the most horrid and

unheard of barbarities,” and Amherst wished “to manifest

to all the world by [the terms of] their capitulation my

detestation of such practices.”

Following his victory over the French, Amherst wished

to return home where he could expect to receive all

the honors of the conquering hero. He was also deeply

troubled by reports of his wife’s deteriorating sanity.

Instead, Amherst was ordered to take on the difficult task

of garrison duty in North America. This was a daunting

Fort William HenryAttack on Deerfield 1704

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assignment. Amherst and his superiors in London were

thoroughly dissatisfied with the pre-war failures of the

several colonial governments to regulate trade adequately

with the Indians and to protect Indian territory as

recognized by the British Government. As Prof. Sosin

has demonstrated, rather than resort to the old system

of giving the colonies control over such matters, the

British concluded that the best way to avoid any further

warfare with the Indians after 1760 was to step in and

directly manage their affairs. Sosin emphasizes that, as

commander in chief on the ground, Amherst participated

fully in the development of this new policy based upon

the principle of protecting the natives from unscrupulous

colonials.

Amherst was instructed by the Earl of Egremont,

Amherst’s superior in London, to “treat the Indians

upon ... principles of humanity and proper indulgence”

and to beware colonial traders who made “no scruple

of using every low trick and artifice ... to cheat those

unguarded ignorant people .... ” The Indians were to be

accorded “every act of strict justice” and “protection from

encroachments on [their] lands.” Amherst and his Indian

agents consequently issued orders to the western garrisons

commanding that all trade with the Indians take place at

assigned locations and under a licensing system intended

to protect the natives. Other regulations set up an Indian

Reserve beyond the Allegheny Mountains, which was not

to be settled by the colonials. The British army was to

enforce this new system.

Accordingly, after the War General Amherst was required

to try to keep the peace between colonial settlers and

Indian tribes occupying thousands of square miles. He

was compelled to do so, however, with a substantially

depleted force.

Shy describes how the majority of Amherst’s 17,000-man

battle-tested army had been reassigned to the West Indies

as a new phase of the Seven Years’ War opened with Spain

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in 1761-1762. Of the remaining 8,000 regulars available

to him, nearly three quarters were tied down in Canada

to control the French population there. This left only

a handful of troops--fewer than 1,000--to be assigned

across small outposts in the American West, a territory

stretching from western Pennsylvania to Wisconsin.

Neither the British Government nor the colonial

legislatures was willing to spend any more money for

additional troops or augmented fortifications, a stalemate

that eventually led to the Revolution. As a result, with

woefully inadequate resources, Amherst found himself

caught between two overwhelming forces, a tidal wave of

colonial settlers moving West and Indian tribes growing

increasingly aggrieved at such incursions. As Anderson

eloquently observes,

“The intertwined histories of land speculation and frontier

settlement in the postwar colonies seem no more than a snarled

skein of ambition, self-interest, greed and deceit. But these

instances …, in fact, reveal patterns that help clarify the

essential processes of change in the 1760s. The fundamental force

at work in them all, and the power that animated the whole

system of settlement and speculation, was the dynamism of a

farming population seeking opportunity. In the aftermath of

the Seven Years’ War, American farmers moved to take up new

lands regardless of virtually every factor but the safety of their

families. Only violent resistance by native peoples … could

effectively restrain the movements of a population that paid

little heed to any contravening laws, boundaries or policies of

colonial governments.”

British efforts to keep colonial settlers off native lands

failed for lack of manpower. Efforts to prevent colonial

traders from supplying the natives with alcohol and arms

only increased the tensions between native tribes and the

British authorities.

The descent of the French on St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1762

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As Parkman describes, in the aftermath of the war,

an Indian prophet named Neolin preached a return

to old-time warrior instincts, which appealed to many in

the Midwest at the time. The British were criticized for

failing to bestow gifts of arms and alcohol as the French

had done. Neolin’s acolytes also blamed the British

for failing to keep settlers out of their hunting grounds

beyond the Alleghenies.

After several years of relative

calm, the impending storm

suddenly erupted in early May

1763, when an Ottawa chief,

Pontiac, attacked Ft. Detroit.

The uprising spread like wildfire

among numerous other tribes

in the Ohio Country. Eight isolated British garrisons in

Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were wiped

out completely in the next several weeks, with the loss of

225 of Amherst’s men. Hundreds of defenseless settlers,

men, women, and children, were also attacked. The

violence was horrific. For example, the commanding

officer of one overwhelmed garrison was roasted alive over

several nights. Another of Amherst’s officers was boiled

and eaten, and a third had skin from his dead body turned

into a tobacco pouch. Here was a tragic cultural clash

wherein the warlike behavior of one culture was shocking

and anathema to a very different military tradition.

It took many weeks for the full picture to emerge at

Amherst’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. At first, he

disbelieved the severity of the problem. Meanwhile, in the

West events were moving rapidly. By mid-June 1763, Ft.

Pitt had been cut off and surrounded by hostile warriors.

The lives of several hundred settlers who had fled to the

garrison seeking safety were at risk, along with the troops

stationed there. There was little hope for prompt relief.

On June 24, two Delaware tribal leaders came to the fort

demanding its surrender. Distrusting promises of safety,

the garrison commander, Capt. Simeon Ecuyer, rejected

the Indian demands.

In a famous council on April 28, 1763, Pontiac urged listeners to rise up against the British. (19th century engraving by Alfred Bobbett).

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On parting, the two chiefs were given two blankets and

a handkerchief taken from the garrison’s quarantined

smallpox house. Most leading historians agree that it

is impossible to say with any certainty whether this led

to a new outbreak of the disease among the Indians

because for several years previous smallpox outbreaks had

occurred among the Ohio tribes. Dr. Ranlet’s extensively

researched paper, relying on the journals of colonial

traders who lived among the Indians and upon scientific

analysis of the epidemiology of smallpox, concludes that it

is highly unlikely that the two blankets and handkerchief

caused or could cause an outbreak of the disease.

Amherst was not aware of Ecuyer’s actions, and he had

nothing to do with the captain’s decision to hand over the

blankets and handkerchief. Amherst was in Manhattan

and Ecuyer was in western Pennsylvania. It would

have taken several weeks for them to communicate with

each other, assuming the safe passage of a messenger

through hostile Indian territory. There is no evidence

that Amherst ever learned of the Fort Pitt incident,

and if so, when and how he reacted to it. To quote Dr.

Ranlet, “Neither Amherst nor [his Ohio territory theater

commander, Col. Henry] Bouquet actually tried germ

warfare. The attempt to disseminate smallpox took place

at Fort Pitt independent of both of them.”

This is the only incident

of its kind that we know

of throughout Amherst’s

five-year tenure in North

America. Prior to this time

Parkman mentions one other smallpox incident. Twelve

years earlier, in 1751, the French commanding officer of

Ft. Detroit expressed his hope that reports of smallpox

raging among various Ohio tribes (then allied with the

British) were true, as he believed the epidemic “would be

fully as good as an army.”

In June 1763, Ecuyer may have similarly hoped for this

as a salvation, and as the best chance to save those under

The Siege of the Fort at Detroit, depiction of the 1763 Siege of Fort Detroit by Frederic Remington.

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his protection in the surrounded Ft. Pitt. Yet we need not

focus on Ecuyer and the morality of his actions, as it is

Amherst whom we are trying to understand.

Back at headquarters in New York,

Amherst had been receiving increasingly

disturbing reports from Col. Bouquet,

in Philadelphia. As first Bouquet, and

then Amherst, gradually learned more of

the tragic events unfolding in the far-off

West, the dialogue between them became animated. From

their exchange of letters in June-July 1763, it is obvious

that both European-trained officers were incensed by

the level of the atrocities committed against their troops

and non-combatants. Both men were well aware of the

extraordinary steps undertaken by the British forces to

protect the Indians and their lands. They were angered

that the intended beneficiaries of this protection had so

counterproductively breached the peace, and done so with

such violence. Passions ran very high. Both men used

extreme and abusive language about the rebellious Indians

Henry Bouquet

and spoke of the need to extirpate them. Quotes taken out

of context today as evidence of Amherst’s alleged “racism”

most often arise from this time frame. It is in this context

that Amherst’s correspondence with Bouquet in mid-July

1763 gives us reason to pause. First, Amherst ordered a

“take no prisoners” policy for all Indian warriors involved

in the attacks. Second, Amherst asked Bouquet, “Could

it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among the

disaffected tribes?” Bouquet replied in a manner somewhat

lacking in enthusiasm, writing in a postscript that he

would try it with infected blankets while taking care not

to get the disease himself.

Amherst responded, also in a postscript, “You will do

well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets,

as well as to try every other method that can serve to

extirpate this Execrable Race.” This exchange occurred

several weeks after the incident that had occurred on June

24 at Ft. Pitt. There is no evidence that Bouquet ever

implemented this idea first advanced by Amherst in July,

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or that Amherst ever followed up with any criticism for

the failure to do so, or with an order commanding that it

be done. Over the course of the past 150 years of historical

scholarship, no evidence has been discovered of any other

blanket incidents during Amherst’s North American

tenure beyond what had taken place at Ft. Pitt several

weeks before.

Amherst and Bouquet were far from the only people in

the colonies to react strongly to the sudden resumption

of Native American violence in mid-1763. Dr. Silver’s

research on the Pennsylvania frontier at the time details

the widespread fear and outrage among colonial men

and women as the Indians engaged in raids on their

settlements. The colonials reacted, not only with words,

but with the vilest of deeds. For example, responding to

offers made by colonial leaders, vigilante bands, seeking

the bounties offered for Indian scalps, resumed Indian

raids and murdered and pillaged native villages without

regard to the culpability of the victims. In this context,

the racially charged outbursts of Amherst and Bouquet in

June-July 1763 were by no means unusual or extreme.

Prof. Anderson describes how once Amherst’s initial

“hysterical reaction [to the uprising] … had passed,”

a long-term strategy was devised and implemented

to quell it and to rescue those trapped at Ft. Pitt and

Ft. Detroit. The uprising ran its course in 1764, but

not before Amherst had been recalled to England in

November 1763. By this time the Pitt Government

had fallen and Amherst, with little remaining political

support at Whitehall, was exposed to criticism for having

allowed the uprising to occur. William Pitt was returned

to the government in 1766, and Amherst’s reputation

was gradually restored. He was promoted and raised to

the peerage as Baron Amherst in 1776. In 1778 he was

appointed commander in chief of all British forces world-

wide, a cabinet position. At that time, he was among

the candidates considered to take charge of British forces

fighting in the American Revolutionary War, but after he

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insisted that it would take a huge force of 75,000 troops to

defeat the rebellious colonials, the offer was withdrawn.

He continued to serve in England in a variety of senior

positions through the 1780s and ‘90s, and died in 1797.

These are the facts as we know them today. What should

we make of this man, and of what he said and did? Some

will recognize the context of his position and unfortunate

remarks about the Native American foes. They will

emphasize the fact that his suggestion to use “germ

warfare” was made in anger and never implemented.

Others will focus on the words themselves as inexcusable

under any circumstances, whether acted on or not.

Neither point of view is unreasonable, and therefore Lord

Jeffery has become a divisive figure.

The passage of time also appears to have played a role in

the differing perspectives of the man. For many decades

after retiring to England, General Amherst remained a

hero on this continent. He had stopped the horror and

bloodshed that had prevailed for over a century. It is no

wonder that towns in New York, New Hampshire, Ohio,

Virginia, and Canada, as well as Massachusetts, celebrated

Amherst’s name by taking it as their own. That is the

context of Lord Jeffery over 200 years ago.

The context of 2016 is very different. Society’s guilt for

the manner in which we treated Native Americans in

the intervening 253 years, and changes in our culture

and laws, have provided many of us with a very different

attitude. During this period Amherst’s correspondence

with Bouquet was discovered and published by Parkman,

and over time, as people looked more closely, their

perception of the man changed. No longer is Lord

Jeffrey Amherst deemed to be the perfect conquering

hero. Rather, a fable has grown that he practiced what

we today have outlawed in international conventions as

“germ warfare,” and that he did so without any plausible

motivation other than unbridled hatred for the natives.

As we have demonstrated, the facts available to us today

dispel the fable, but nonetheless, General Amherst’s

blemishes remain.

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These facts by no means excuse Amherst for writing such

vehement racial recriminations in today’s context, but they

do enable us to understand the man in the context of his

times over 200 years ago.

We have provided this information in the most

complete detail that available and reliable records make

possible. Amherst College deservedly prides itself on its

scholarship. We feel closure on the banishment of Lord

Jeff, the mascot whose time was over, is not complete until

a scholarly correction and understanding of the history of

General Jeffery Amherst, the man, is part of the College’s

literature.

Donald T MacNaughton, class of 1965 Gordon Hall, class of 1952

Bibliography01.

02.

03.

04.

05.

06.

07.

08.

Parkman, Francis. The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War, 6th ed. Boston: Little Brown, 1871.

Parkman, Francis. Montcalm and Wolfe. Boston: Little Brown, 1884.

Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000; London: Faber and Faber, 2000

Anderson, Fred. The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Philip Ranlet, “The British, the Indians, and Smallpox: What Actually Happened at Fort Pitt in 1763?” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 67 (2000): 427-441, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27774278.

Shy, John. Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.

Sosin, Jack M. Whitehall and the Wilderness, The Middle West in British Colonial Policy 1760-1775. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

Silver, Peter. Our Savage Neighbors, How Indian War Transformed Early America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.

Alessandra Bianchi Herman, class of 1986Copy Editor:

British fort taken by Indians

British fort attacked but not taken

British fort abandoned

French fort

Battle site

Point of interest

Colonial town

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Lord Jeffrey Amherst

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NOTE FROM THE - Lord Jeffery Amherst · Lord Jeﬀery Amherst’s tour of duty in North America 1758-1763 NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS Don MacNaughton, ... self-interest, greed and deceit