The Big Bad Wolfe

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When General James Wolfe scam­pered up the steep path that car­ried him onto the Plains of Abraham and into the pages of the his­tory books, what was he think­ing? Given that 250 years have passed since his assault on the gates of Quebec City, one would expect that the answer to that ques­tion would be known. Quite to the con­trary, Wolfe’s motives and abil­i­ties remain as con­tentious today as they have ever been.

Was he a noble hero who fell in bat­tle achiev­ing a great vic­tory for his coun­try? Or was he an incom­pe­tent fatal­ist who was try­ing in his clumsy fash­ion to com­mit sui­cide? Both claims have been made in recent books about the events that tran­spired at Quebec on September 13, 1759 and seem par­tic­u­larly apt in this year of cel­e­bra­tion of the 400^th anniver­sary of the birth of the great fortress city and the 100^th anniver­sary of the cre­ation of the bat­tle­field his­toric park. 

On any list of Canada’s most impor­tant his­tor­i­cal events, the bat­tle for Quebec has to come near the top. It took only a few min­utes to fight but its out­come has echoed down through the years. French and English have more or less agreed to dis­agree about its mean­ing. Was it a lib­er­a­tion for the Québécois, as Anglophones used to learn in school? Or was it a con­quest from which French-speaking Canada never recov­ered? And what about the so-called vic­tor, General James Wolfe? Was he a wily tac­ti­cian who spot­ted the only path to vic­tory? Or an unsta­ble roman­tic who knew he was about to die and was deter­mined to go out with guns blazing?

Despite Wolfe’s sta­tus in the pan­theon of Canadian war heroes, his­to­ri­ans have never agreed about him. In C.P. Stacey’s biog­ra­phy of Wolfe in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, he dis­misses him as “inef­fec­tive” and “vac­il­lat­ing,” more lucky than capa­ble. Several years ago the American his­to­rian Fred Anderson, writ­ing in Crucible of War (Knopf, 2000), his his­tory of the Seven Years’ War, con­cluded that Wolfe had no expec­ta­tion of vic­tory when he went ashore to scale the cliff. He expected, says Anderson, to encounter enemy resis­tance that would either kill him, in which case he would earn the glo­ri­ous death he so desired, or drive him back, in which case he could give up and go home at least hav­ing given it a try. In the event, French resis­tance was min­i­mal, and Wolfe, much to his own sur­prise, found him­self in com­mand of the heights. Even so, he should have been defeated. He had led his men into an unten­able posi­tion, Anderson argues, for no other rea­son than to grat­ify his own death wish. It was only the incom­pe­tence of the French that brought vic­tory to the British.

More recently, Stephen Brumwell has defended Wolfe against his detrac­tors. In Paths of Glory (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), Brumwell, a British writer liv­ing in Amsterdam, takes a more con­ven­tional view, con­clud­ing that Wolfe was a brave, tal­ented sol­dier who deserved every bit of the lav­ish praise that his con­tem­po­raries heaped upon his memory. 

This notion of the tragic hero was taken up by Benjamin West in his paint­ing The Death of General Wolfe. Much of what was believed about Wolfe after his death was medi­ated through this huge — and hugely pop­u­lar — can­vas and the many copies that were made of it. Unveiled in London in 1771, it shows Wolfe dying on the field of bat­tle in the arms of his men while in the back­ground con­tend­ing armies clash. Claiming to be a depic­tion of real­ity, it is largely a work of fic­tion. Wolfe died away from the field of bat­tle and only one of the men seen in the paint­ing was actu­ally present at his death. Never mind. West had pro­duced “the grandil­o­quent lie the pub­lic craved,” as Simon Schama puts it in his study of Wolfe and his leg­end. The artist became court painter to the king, and The Death of General Wolfe was repro­duced on teacups, wall hang­ings and beer mugs across the Empire. 

In the end, Wolfe’s rep­u­ta­tion is less impor­tant than the British vic­tory he spear­headed. New France fell to the British invaders and took its place as a colony in the British Empire, and Canada has been try­ing to work out the impli­ca­tions ever since. “The Conquest is the bur­den of Canadian his­tory,” Ramsay Cook once wrote, mean­ing, I sup­pose, that nav­i­gat­ing the French-English rela­tion­ship has been our big his­tor­i­cal project. As Brumwell points out, “for Quebec’s French-speaking major­ity, Wolfe is less a hero than a sym­bol of oppres­sion.” (Of course, that is assum­ing he is thought about at all. Former Quebec pre­mier Lucien Bouchard, describ­ing the his­tory edu­ca­tion he received at a col­lège clas­sique dur­ing the 1950s, said that he and his class­mates spent many weeks study­ing the Conquest from the French per­spec­tive. “It was so sad when Montcalm died,” Bouchard recalled, but “we didn’t care much about Wolfe.”) While most Anglo-Canadians believe the French should just get over it, for many Quebecers the Conquest is a wound that only inde­pen­dence will heal. For 250 years it has divided us, right down to the sov­er­eignty ref­er­enda of 1980 and 1995, which came close to undo­ing with the bal­lot box what Wolfe had accom­plished by force of arms.

The Conquest is one of those impor­tant Canadian mile­stones that we are not allowed to cel­e­brate for fear of giv­ing offence. Re-enactments of the bat­tle, when they take place, are now politely declared a draw and the two sides shake hands in the spirit of national unity. Victory and defeat are not accept­able con­cepts in con­tem­po­rary Ca­nada; bet­ter to empha­size the role of the Plains as a civic park — the “Central Park of Quebec,” as one gov­ern­ment web­site calls it. As Robert Fulford once remarked, the Conquest remains “per­haps the only eighteenth-century bat­tle, any­where, that can­not be dis­cussed with­out anxiety.”

In this sense it might be said of Wolfe, as it has been of Pierre Trudeau: He haunts us still.