WOLFE, JAMES (1727-1760), soldier, who commanded the night ascent of the river cliffs below Quebec and died on the plain above the city on the morning of the 13th of September 1760, five days before the garrison he had beaten in the field surrendered the place he did not live to see fall. He had served since his sixteenth year, distinguished himself in the Continental campaigning of the war's earlier seasons chiefly by an attention to the drilling and provisioning of the ordinary soldier that this contributor's own profession still finds instructive reading in his surviving orderly books, and was given the Quebec command, over officers a good deal senior to him, on the strength of a reputation for careful preparation rather than for any previous action of great note.
That reputation was earned again, and more permanently, in the campaign's final weeks. The path up the river cliffs that his light infantry used on the night of the ascent had been located by patrols he had personally sent out over the preceding fortnight, at a point the French garrison's own engineers had judged too steep to require close watching, and the whole action — the silent crossing, the climb, the gaining of the plain before the alarm could bring the French field army up in strength — bears, on this contributor's close study of the surviving orders, the mark of a commander who had spent a full campaigning season reconnoitring an approach he meant to use only once and could not afford to use badly.
He was struck three times in the fighting that followed on the plain, the last wound mortal, and died within the hour, informed, by an aide sent back from the pursuit, that the French line had broken before his eyes had closed; his own last recorded words, set down by more than one officer present and not, on this contributor's assessment of the sources, materially improved upon by the retelling, concerned the pursuit's proper conduct rather than his own condition. He did not live to see the city's formal capitulation five days later, nor the Peace of Paris that confirmed, three years afterward, what his own night's work had substantially decided; a monument raised to him at Oceana some years after records the ascent and the action in terms this contributor's own military training finds accurate rather than merely admiring, which is not always the case with monuments to soldiers who die at the moment of their own greatest success. (G. M. T.)