At four points, according to the English plan of campaign Canada was to be threatened and the French advance was to be checked. Braddock, with his two English regiments, was to march on Fort Duquesne. From Albany the second and {235} the third expeditions were to start. One, marching due north, was to master Crown Point on Lake Champlain; the other, taking the route of the Five Nation cantons, and having for its advanced base Oswego on Lake Ontario, was to reduce the French fort at Niagara. The fourth effort was to be made in Acadia. This last enterprise proved successful, as has already been seen, Shirley having previously prepared the way by building a fort on the mainland behind the peninsula, at the portage between the Kennebec and the Chaudière rivers. What fate befell the other expeditions must now be told. [Sidenote: _General Braddock._] History has been unkind to General Braddock. His name is associated for ever with a great disaster in North America, as the name of Wolfe is linked to a crowning victory. Like Wolfe, Braddock was mortally wounded on the field of battle; he was defeated, and obloquy was heaped on his name. Wolfe triumphed, and all men spoke well of him. The accounts of Braddock are largely derived from the spiteful gossip collected by Horace Walpole, and from the writings of Franklin--never a lover of the mother country, and, after the War of Independence, glad, like others of his countrymen, to throw the blame of an English defeat upon a commander sent out from England. We have a portrait given us of a brutal, blustering, and incompetent soldier, a man of coarse habits and broken fortunes, with little to recommend him but personal honesty and courage. 'Braddock is a very Iroquois in disposition,'[7] writes Horace Walpole. Before the fatal battle the same writer tells us in the same letter, 'the duke (of Cumberland) is much dissatisfied at the slowness of General Braddock, who does not march as if he was at all impatient to be scalped.' After the disaster he writes, 'Braddock's defeat still remains in the situation of the longest battle that ever was fought with nobody.'[8] The {236} Braddocks of England, with all their failings, have deserved better of their country than the Horace Walpoles. [Footnote 7: _Letters of Horace Walpole_ (Bohn's ed., 1861), vol. ii, p. 459 (Letter of Aug. 25, 1755).] [Footnote 8: Ibid. p. 473 (Letter of Sept. 30, 1755).]