The British military campaigns for the North American theatre of the
Seven Years' War in 1758 contained three primary objectives. Two of these objectives, captures of
Fort Louisbourg and
Fort Duquesne met with success. The third campaign, an expedition involving 16,000 men under the command of General
James Abercrombie, was
disastrously defeated on July 8, 1758, by a much smaller French force when it attempted the capture of Fort Carillon (known today as
Fort Ticonderoga). This defeat was an impetus to attack Fort Frontenac. Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet renewed an earlier proposal to capture Fort Frontenac, a French fort and trading post on the northern shore of
Lake Ontario near where it empties into the
St. Lawrence River. Abercrombie, who had first rejected the idea, citing the need for troops to attack Carillon, approved Bradstreet's plan to move up the
Mohawk River valley to the site of
Fort Oswego (
captured and burned by the French in 1756), and then cross the lake to assault Frontenac. The Indian trade in the upper country (the ''Pays d'en Haut'') would also be disrupted. Fort Frontenac was an important trading center for Indian and French fur traders and was regarded as a threat to Fort Oswego, which was built by the British across the lake from Fort Frontenac in 1722 to compete with Fort Frontenac for the Indian trade, and later enhanced as a military establishment.
General Montcalm had already used Fort Frontenac as a staging point to
attack the fortifications at Oswego in August 1756. Trade through Fort Frontenac was so successful that some Indians preferred to trade with the French at the fort rather than the British outpost at
Albany, New York, which provided more ready access to inexpensive British goods. The fort was a crumbling limestone construction that was only minimally garrisoned with about 100 French troops along with some militia and Indians under the command of Pierre-Jacques Payen de Noyan et de Chavoy, an elderly veteran of
King George's War. While the fort was normally garrisoned by a larger force, the limited means available for the defense of
New France had forced French military leaders to reduce its size for the defense of other parts of
Canada. Noyan was alerted to the expedition's advance when Indian scouts took some prisoners, and authorities in Montreal organized reinforcements. However, these forces would not arrive before the British. Bradstreet assembled an army at
Schenectady consisting of just 135
regular army troops and about 3,500
militia, drawn from the provinces of
New York,
Massachusetts,
New Jersey, and
Rhode Island. By the time his army reached the ruins of Fort Oswego on August 21, Bradstreet had lost 600 men, primarily to desertion. The trek met with minimal opposition from French and Indian raiding parties, but the route to Oswego, which had been virtually unused since 1756, was overgrown, and some of the waterways had silted up, causing heavily laden
bateaux to ground in the shallow waters. Bradstreet's flotilla of bateaux crossed Lake Ontario, landing without opposition about one mile (1.6 km) from Fort Frontenac on August 25. ==Battle==