After two hundred years upland New England still bears his imprint: in a college town of western Massachusetts; at Lake Amherst, Vermont, not far from Calvin Coolidge’s birthplace; in New Hampshire’s Amherst on the old Boston Post Road. North from Charlestown, New Hampshire—the eighteenth-century military base that was once Fort Number Four—one can still trace the indentations of his 1759 Crown Point Military Road as it twists across into the Vermont hill country and on toward Lake Champlain.

Jeffery Amherst was born in 1717 and died in 1797; of his eighty years a mere five were spent in America. Yet those five years, in which he rose from obscurity to commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in North America, weighed more in the balance of his reputation than the other seventy-five grouped together. And all the glitter of those five triumphant years was a reflection from the brilliance of the first two. Amherst’s major achievements—achievements that placed him just below Marlborough and Wellington in the great triumvirate of British generals—were bounded by that bright May day of 1758 when his fog-hampered ship brought him into Halifax Harbor and the lowering September morning before Montreal, in 1760, when he received the unconditional surrender of Canada from the governor of New France, the Marquis de Vaudreuil.

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