The Battle of Lake George

The Battle of Lake George

On April 19, 2025, our nation will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord, the opening salvo in a grinding eight-year struggle for American independence. This rebellion against Britain’s colonial rule would reimagine the politics and geography of North America, which had already been upended just twenty years earlier in a conflict known as The Seven Years’ War. In the earlier war, Britain and its colonists were faithfully aligned against territorial claims by France. So, what motivated a loosely organized rural populace to challenge the British empire—with one of the most highly trained armies in the world—in a series of brisk skirmishes that would lead to the Revolutionary war?

In searching for answers, most historians focus on the aftermath of that earlier conflict. From 1763 to 1775, Britain attempted to reduce the massive debt incurred in fighting the French by imposing additional taxes on British colonists. Those taxes, along with a lack of Parliamentary representation, have been well documented as catalysts for the Revolution. Often overlooked is another military engagement that occurred during the chaotic beginnings of The Seven Years’ War. On September 8, 1755, a remarkable sequence of battles at Lake George, New York planted seeds of rebellion and independence in the burgeoning American psyche that subsequently blossomed at Lexington and Concord.

Samuel Blodget’s The Battle of Lake George (1755)

The New York Historical has digitized one of its rarest documents—a 1755 map that highlights this momentous series of events. Its creator, Samuel Blodget, witnessed the battles in his role as a sutler, someone who supplies troops with provisions. Blodget was not a trained draftsman, but his sketch would become “The earliest engraving produced in this country representing an American historical scene.”¹

The map depicts two of the three battles fought that day. By juxtaposing the view of the Hudson River and Fort Edward with the Lake George battle site, Blodget created a sense of movement and elapsed time. His innovative use of a bird’s eye view format, which would not be popularized for another century, captures the mixed modes of fighting styles and the rugged North Country topography. Blodget dispensed with the conventions of scale used in most maps. Instead, he expanded the camp site width and shortened the length of the morning march affording a focused view of the days’ events.

Blodget does introduce scale in his inset map of the Hudson River that appears at the top. This was the first map of the Hudson River to be produced since Van Kuelen’s Dutch map of 1684, a testimony to how uncharted the wilderness was where the Battle of Lake George took place. In addition to Fort Edward, there is an inset of yet to be completed Fort William Henry. Designed by British engineer William Eyre, this is the first known depiction of the famous fort.

After the battles, Blodget sought out Thomas Johnston, one of the foremost engravers in the colonies. Johnston transformed Blodget’s sketches into line drawings on a copperplate from which prints were made. The map is considered Johnston’s signature work.

The Battle of Lake George is especially remarkable because it was printed by Johnston at a time when very few maps were produced in North America. Although some British soldiers and engineers contributed surveys to large scale maps of North America, the maps themselves were invariably printed in London, Paris or Amsterdam. Printers in those cities were highly skilled engravers with well-equipped print shops and ample help from apprentices.

The Boston printing of the map was available by mid-December 1755, just three months after the battles took place. Very few copies were printed because neither Blodget nor Johnston had the capital needed for a larger print run. Only five or six copies are known to survive and several of those are in very poor condition.

The importance of the map was soon confirmed when Thomas Jeffreys, London’s leading map publisher, reprinted the map in early 1756, declaring it “the only piece that exhibits the American method of bush fighting.”²

On Jeffreys’s issue of the map, the drawing of the Hudson River appears at left rather than at top, as it is on the 1755 Johnston printing. The altered orientation makes the 1756 printing easy to differentiate.

To enhance our understanding, Blodget also produced a detailed pamphlet that referenced thirty- nine key features that are numbered on the map. The map was likely folded and inserted into the pamphlet.³

The pamphlet is not just a key to the specific points on the map but also an ardent promotion of the map. Blodget emphasizes that both the map and the pamphlet contain “the real Truth” because “I was myself present in the Camp; and though I could not be in the Front, and Rear, and on either Wing, at the same Time, yet being an independent Person, not belonging to the Army, I had, it may be, as good an Opportunity as any Person whatever, to observe the whole Management on both Sides.” To further emphasize the accuracy of the map, he states that he has “not therefore contented myself with my own Observations, but made it my Business to converse with those, at the Camp, who were most capable of enabling me to give a fair and full Account of the Transactions of this memorable Day.” Before examining the historical detail embedded in Blodget’s battle maps, some contemporary background and context are useful.

The Seven Years’ War

The New York battles of September 1755 took place against a backdrop of colonial turmoil. Vast stretches of land and seemingly endless natural resources lured a succession of European colonists—Spanish, French, British, and Dutch—to North America beginning in the sixteenth century. Territorial disputes arose frequently between colonial powers and with Native Americans. The French had proven particularly adept at crafting alliances with Native American tribes with established trade routes and settlements which allowed them to dominate the Great lakes, the St. Lawrence River and Lake Champlain. By the 1750s both France and Britain had laid claim to the Ohio River valley and built forts to claim what they believed to be their territory.

After a series of skirmishes in western Pennsylvania in 1754, British General Edward Braddock attempted to wrest control of the Forks of the Ohio from the French on July 9, 1755, in what would become known as the Battle of Monongahela. It was a crushing defeat for the British. It was also one of the first battles of the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763), also known as the French and Indian War.

As Braddock prepared to travel across the Alleghenies to attack Fort Duquesne, he ordered William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts, to capture Fort Niagara on Lake Ontario and William Johnson to capture the French Fort Saint-Frédéric near the southern shore of Lake Champlain.

William Johnson had arrived in New York from Ireland in 1738 to supervise an estate owned his uncle, Peter Warren. The property was within the territory of the Mohawk nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. Johnson quickly realized he could profit by trading with the Mohawks for fur. To that end, he learned the Mohawk language and customs.

Hendrick Theyanoguin, a Mohawk sachem, was one of Johnson’s closest Native American allies. During a Congress of Colonial Governors in 1754 (The Albany Congress), Theyanoguin exhorted the British to stand strong against the French. His speech was so impressive it was excerpted in Gentleman’s Magazine in London in June 1755.⁴ Johnson, who had virtually no military experience, turned to Theyanoguin when he received the order from Braddock. Together they led a force of British colonial troops and Mohawk warriors north from Albany. In August 1755, they arrived at the Great Carrying Place, a 15-mile Native American portage between the last navigable point on the Hudson and Lac du Saint Sacrement. There they erected a fortified storehouse that would later become Fort Edward.

Lt. Colonel Seth Pomeroy of Massachusetts, who would see military service into the early days of the Revolution, kept a journal of the subsequent march to Lac du Saint Sacrement.⁵ It describes the challenges for the untrained army—heat, poor provisioning, camp sicknesses, mutinies, and erecting fortifications and roadways. The latter required hundreds of axe men to clear the towering hemlock and gnarled pitch-pine forests so that supplies and large “Battoes” (an Anglicization of the French word “Bateaux,” used to describe a flat-bottomed cargo boat) could be hauled across land to Lac du Saint Sacrement in anticipation of the assault on French fortifications further north.

When Johnson reached the shores of that Lake, he renamed it Lake George in honor of the then British king, George II, and erected a crude stockade for the troops and supplies.

Lead up to the Battle of Lake George

Meanwhile, word of the military movements out of Albany had reached the Baron de Dieskau, commander of all French forces in North America and a seasoned veteran of European conflicts. Dieskau rapidly moved a portion of his army south from Fort Frontenac in Ontario with the objective of taking Fort Edward.

Dieskau’s force of 200 French regular troops, 600 French Canadian militia troops, and approximately 600 Mohawk warriors of the Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanesatake mission communities in what is now Quebec, as well as members of other Native communities friendly to the French, arrived near Fort Edward on the evening of September 7, 1755. When Dieskau announced his plans to attack the British at Fort Edward, the Canadian Mohawks objected, declaring they would only fight the British on French territory. Their threat to abandon the campaign forced Dieskau to accommodate their request, and he set his sights on the British and Mohawk contingent encamped near the southern shores of Lake George.⁶

On the following morning, September 8, Johnson became aware of the French presence and proposed sending out two scouting parties under Theyanoguin and Colonel Ephraim Williams of Massachusetts. Theyanoguin counseled Johnson against dividing his force, demonstrating how a single stick could be easily broken but several held together could not. Theyanoguin’s advice was taken but he remained uneasy, observing that “if they are to be killed, they are too many, if they are to be fight, they are too few.”⁷ Despite his apprehensions, Theyanoguin rallied the Mohawk warriors and assumed the vanguard as 1000 of Johnson’s 1300 fighters moved forward.

It is at this point that the history imbedded in Blodget’s drawing and commentary comes alive.

Aftermath

Overall, the military outcome favored the British colonial and New York Mohawk troops. General Dieskau had been critically wounded and captured and St Pierre killed. The French had been routed and retreated North, but the British forces had also sustained heavy losses. William Johnson had been wounded and both Theyanoguin and Colonel Ephraim Williams were killed.⁸ Johnson would not resume the campaign to take Crown Point, deeming his force too weakened. It was a decision severely criticized by William Shirley, the acting Commanding General following Braddock’s death.⁹

But this did little to quell the immediate fame that accrued to William Johnson both in the colonies and Britain. King George II made him a baronet and, in 1756, he was named Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern colonies. An untested battlefield commander with an untrained colonial soldiery had managed to maintain British control over Fort Edward and build Fort William Henry with the military support of Mohawk allies. These outcomes were in stark contrast to Braddock’s fiasco at the Monongahela. Even more important than the victory at Lake George was the profound effect the military operations had on the psyche of the colonists in North America. Farmers and townspeople who had served as soldiers now had ample evidence that the vaunted prowess of British and European armies could be bested by irregular fighting on the rugged interior of North America. They would take their lead from the Native American warriors they fought side-by-side with in 1755, willing to engage in guerilla warfare, when the Revolutionary war began in 1775.