Paths of Rehabilitation

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, which took only a morning to fight a short distance from Quebec City in September of 1759, was an improvised, even desperate affair with world-shaking consequences: It determined the fate of the North American continent, led to the American Revolution, allowed the global ascendancy of the British Empire and the decline of the French.

But two weeks before the battle, things looked anything but heroic.

General James Wolfe was feverish, bedridden, stewed in drugs and paralyzed with indecision. He had a quarter of the British Navy at his disposition, thousands of infantry, and most of the summer, and yet his campaign to capture Quebec was a failure. All he had managed to do was ravage the countryside and burn settlements in a campaign that bordered on savagery. In the field of battle, he had blundered strategically and lost hundreds of men in a failed amphibious attack against the French position. His generals were openly...