page_title: Battle of Carillon
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Battle of Carillon / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of the British statesman William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778), at three-quarter length, grey wig falling behind shoulders; rich brown velvet suit, white cravat, shirt and wrist ruffles; on the table an inkstand, pen and papers, a letter in his right hand; brown interior background; lit from left.
context_page_description: The Battle of Carillon, also known as the 1758 Battle of Ticonderoga, was fought on July 8, 1758, during the French and Indian War. It was fought near Fort Carillon on the shore of Lake Champlain in the frontier area between the British colony of New York and the French colony of New France.
  In the battle, which took place primarily on a rise about three-quarters of a mile from the fort itself, a French army of about 3,600 men under General Marquis de Montcalm and the Chevalier de Levis decisively defeated an overwhelmingly numerically superior force of British troops under General James Abercrombie, which frontally assaulted an entrenched French position without using field artillery, a lack that left the British and their allies vulnerable and allowed the French to win a decisive victory. The battle was the bloodiest of the American theater of the war, with over 3,000 casualties suffered. French losses were about 400, while more than 2,000 were British.
context_section_description: Prior to 1758, the French and Indian War had gone very poorly for the British, whose military met few of its objectives. Following a string of French victories in 1757 in North America, coupled with military setbacks in Europe, William Pitt gained full control of the direction of British military efforts in the Seven Years' War. Embarking on a strategy that emphasized defense in Europe, where France was strong, and offense in North America, where France was weak, he resolved to attack New France (the colonial holdings of France in North America) in three strategic campaigns. Large-scale campaigns were planned to capture Fort Duquesne on the Pennsylvania frontier and the fortress at Louisbourg (on Île-Royale, now known as Cape Breton Island). The third campaign, assigned to General James Abercrombie, was to launch an attack against Canada through the Champlain Valley. Pitt probably would have preferred to have George Howe, a skilled tactician and a dynamic leader, lead this expedition, but seniority and political considerations led him to appoint the relatively undistinguished Abercrombie instead. Howe was appointed a brigadier general, and placed as Abercrombie's second in command.
  The French, who had started construction on Fort Carillon in 1755, used it as a launching point for the successful siege of Fort William Henry in 1757. Despite that and other successes in North America in 1757, the situation did not look good for them in 1758. As early as March, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, the commanding general responsible of the French forces in North America, and the Marquis de Vaudreuil, New France's governor, were aware that the British were planning to send large numbers of troops against them, and that they would have relatively little support from King Louis XV of France. The lack of support from France was in large part due to an unwillingness of the French military to risk the movement of significant military forces across the Atlantic Ocean, which was dominated by Britain's Royal Navy. This situation was further exacerbated by Canada's poor harvest in 1757, which resulted in food shortages as the winter progressed.
  Montcalm and Vaudreuil, who did not get along with each other, differed on how to deal with the British threat. They had fewer than 5,000 regular troops, an estimated six thousand militia men, and a limited number of Indian allies, to bring against British forces reported to number 50,000. Vaudreuil, who had limited combat experience, wanted to divide the French forces, with about 5,000 each at Carillon and Louisbourg, and then send a picked force of about 3,500 men against the British in the Mohawk River on the northwestern frontiers of the Province of New York. Montcalm believed this to be folly, as the plan would enable the British to easily divert some of their forces to fend off the French attack. Vaudreuil prevailed, and in June 1758 Montcalm left Quebec for Carillon.
caption: William Pitt directed the British war effort
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