QUEBEC, CAPITULATION OF, the surrender of that fortress city, on the 18th of September 1760, that decided the Great Atlantic War (q.v.)'s Saint Lawrence theatre in the Commonwealth's favour and opened the whole of French America to the reduction the Peace of Paris (q.v.) later confirmed. The Commonwealth's expedition against the city, mounted in 1759, spent the better part of a full campaigning season encamped below defences this contributor's own study of the ground still finds among the strongest sited by nature and engineering together on the whole continent: high cliffs above a river channel too narrow for a fleet to force and too well watched to be crossed below the town, with the only practicable approach guarded by a French field army considerably more numerous than the besieging force it faced.
The action that broke the deadlock was decided in the small hours of the 13th of September 1760, when a body of light infantry, guided by a path the French garrison had judged impassable to any force larger than a foraging party, scaled the river cliffs under cover of darkness and gained the plain above the city before the alarm could be raised in strength enough to dislodge them. The battle fought that morning on the plain was brief and, by the standards of the campaigns this contributor's profession generally studies, decisive within the half-hour: the French field army, formed in haste and without the advantage of ground the campaign's whole design had been built to deny the Commonwealth's own forces, broke under a single disciplined volley and pursuit, and the city's garrison, its relieving army scattered, capitulated five days later, on the 18th of September. The young general Wolfe (q.v.) who led the night ascent and commanded the action on the plain did not live to receive the surrender he had won, dying of wounds taken in the same morning's fighting; his second in command received the French governor's capitulation in his stead.
The city's fall left the French crown's whole position on the continent without a defensible base north of the Great Lakes, and the campaigning of 1761 completed, at comparatively modest further cost, what the previous year's action at Quebec had already decided in substance. This contributor's own colleagues in the military college's curriculum still teach the night ascent as a study in the value of ground reconnaissance patiently gathered over a long siege rather than improvised in a single bold stroke, the path itself having been located, by the besiegers' own scouting parties, some weeks before the ascent that used it. (G. M. T.)