Episode Details

By 1757 the most powerful empire on earth was losing — beaten up one side of the continent and down the other by a smaller, poorer enemy with a better general. This is the story of the Marquis de Montcalm at the height of his power: the fall of Oswego, and then the siege of Fort William Henry, the fort on Lake George that ended in the most infamous bloodletting of the war. We trace why it happened — not as the “savagery” of legend, but as the collision of two ways of war, when a European surrender on the honors of war denied two thousand Native allies the captives and plunder they had crossed a continent to claim. And we follow the quieter war in the colonial cities, where a British commander who could not grasp why free men would not quarter his soldiers ran headlong into the rights of Englishmen. At the center are a doomed fort, a general who bared his chest to his own allies to stop a massacre he had helped set in motion, and an argument between an empire and its colonies that a burning fort did nothing to settle.