Masschusetts governor William Shirley had assumed command of British forces in North America following the death of Major General Edward Braddock in the disastrous expedition to take Fort Duquesne.

Shirley had laid out his plans for 1756 at a meeting in Albany in December 1755.

In addition to renewing the efforts to capture Niagara, Crown Point and Duquesne, he had proposed attacks on Fort Frontenac on the north shore of Lake Ontario and an expedition through the wilderness of the Maine district and down the Chaudière River to attack the city of Quebec.

Bogged down by disagreements and disputes with others, including William Johnson and New York's Governor Sir Charles Hardy, Shirley's plan had little support.

The Duke of Newcastle, Prime Minister of Great Britain, had replaced him in January 1756 with Lord Loudoun, with Major General James Abercrombie as his second in command.

Neither of these men have as much campaign experience as the trio of officers France sent to North America.

French regular army reinforcements arrive in New France in May 1756, led by Major General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and seconded by the Chevalier de Lévis and Colonel François-Charles de Bourlamaque, all experienced veterans from the War of the Austrian Succession.

England formally declares war on France on May 18, 1756, nearly two years after fighting had broken out in the Ohio Country.

This expands the war into Europe, later to be known as the Seven Years' War.

Loudoun's plan for the 1757 campaign is focused on a single expedition aimed at the heart of New France, the city of Quebec.

Submitted to the government in London in September 1756, the plan calls for a purely defensive posture along the frontier with New France, including the contested corridor of the Hudson River and Lake Champlain between Albany, New York and Montreal.

Following the Battle of Lake George in 1755, the French had begun construction of Fort Carillon (now known as Fort Ticonderoga) near the southern end of Lake Champlain, while the British had built Fort William Henry at the southern end of Lake George, and Fort Edward on the Hudson River, about sixteen miles (twenty-six kilometers) south of Fort William Henry.

The area between William Henry and Carillon is a wilderness dominated by Lake George.

Loudoun's plan depends on the expedition's timely arrival at Quebec, so that French troops will not have the opportunity to move against targets on the frontier, and will instead be needed to defend the heartland of the province of Canada along the Saint Lawrence River.

However, political turmoil in London over the progress of the Seven Years' War both in North America and in Europe has resulted in a change of power, with William Pitt the Elder rising to take control over military matters.

Loudoun consequently does not receive any feedback from London on his proposed campaign until March 1757.

Before this feedback arrived he had developed plans for the expedition to Quebec, and had worked with the provincial governors of the Thirteen Colonies to develop plans for a coordinated defense of the frontier, including the allotment of militia quotas to each province.

When William Pitt's instructions finally reach Loudoun in March 1757, they call for the expedition to first target Louisbourg on the Atlantic coast of Île Royale, now known as Cape Breton Island.

Although this does not materially affect the planning of the expedition, it is to have significant consequences on the frontier.

The French forces on the Saint Lawrence will be too far from Louisbourg to support it, and will consequently be free to act elsewhere.

Loudoun assigns his best troops to the Louisbourg expedition, and places Brigadier General Daniel Webb in command of the New York frontier.

He is given about two thousand regulars, primarily from the 35th and 60th (Royal American) Regiments.

The provinces are to supply Webb with about five thousand militia.

Fort William Henry, built in the fall of 1755, is a roughly square fortification with bastions on the corners, in a design that is intended to repel native attacks but is not necessarily sufficient to withstand attack from an enemy that has artillery.

Its walls are thirty feet (nine point one meters) thick, with log facings surrounding an earthen filling.

Inside the fort are wooden barracks two stories high, built around the parade ground.

Its magazine is in the northeast bastion, and its hospital is located in the southeast bastion.

The fort is surrounded on three sides by a dry moat, with the fourth side sloping down to the lake.

The only access to the fort is by a bridge across the moat.

The fort is capable of housing only four to five hundred men; additional troops are quartered in an entrenched camp seven hundred and fifty yards (six hundred and ninety meters) southeast of the fort, near the site of the 1755 Battle of Lake George.

Fort William Henry had been garrisoned during the winter of 1756–57 by several hundred men from the 44th Foot under Major Will Eyre.

In March 1757 the French send an army of fifteen hundred to attack the fort under the command of the governor's brother, François-Pierre de Rigaud.

Composed primarily of colonial troupes de la marine, militia, and natives, and without heavy weapons, they besiege the fort for four days.

Lacking sufficient logistical and artillery support, and hampered further by a blinding snowstorm on 21 March, French forces are unable to take the fort and the siege is called off.

Although the French fail to take the fort itself, their forces do destroy three hundred bateaux and several lightly armed vessels beached on the shore, a saw-mill and numerous outbuildings before retreating.

Eyre and his men are replaced by Lieutenant Colonel George Monro and the 35th Foot in the spring.

Monro establishes his headquarters in the entrenched camp, where most of his men are located.

The French may have not been able to take the fort, but the destruction of so many boats crippled Monro’s ability to sortie reconnaissance parties further up the lake to assess French and native movements.

The loss of the boats and manpower shortages make patrolling and scouting outside the protective walls of Fort William Henry precarious for Monro and he is unable to send out sufficient scouts.

The natives, spurred on by French rewards of brandy, guns, ammunition, and clothing, have sortied on raiding parties from Fort Carillon south towards Fort William Henry throughout the spring and early summer, kidnapping and scalping anyone who dared venture beyond the protective walls of the fort.

Monro can do little to respond to the native raids or gain intelligence on French movements until sufficient reinforcements arrive.

He also moves slowly to re-construct the buildings and boats destroyed by the French months earlier.

Reinforcements finally arrive in June when Provincial and militia units from New York, New Jersey and New Hampshire are sent up from Fort Edward by General Daniel Webb.

Desperate for information and now newly reinforced, Monro decides to act.

Montcalm, in the wake of his successful 1756 assault on Fort Oswego, has been seeking an opportunity to deal with the British position at Fort William Henry, since it provides the British with a launching point for attacks against Fort Carillon.

He is initially hesitant to commit his limited resources against Fort William Henry without knowing more about the disposition of British forces.

Intelligence provided by spies in London arrives in the spring, indicating that the British target is probably Louisbourg.

This suggests that troop levels on the British side of the frontier might be low enough to make an attack on Fort William Henry feasible.

This idea had gained further support after the French questioned deserters and captives taken during periodic scouting and raiding expeditions that both sides conducted, including one resulting in the January Battle on Snowshoes.

As early as December 1756, New France's governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, had begun the process of recruiting natives for the following summer's campaign.

Fueled by stories circulated by native participants in the capture of Oswego, this drive has been highly successful, drawing nearly a thousand warriors from the Pays d'en Haut (the more remote regions of New France) to Montreal by June 1757.

Another eight hundred warriiors have been recruited from tribes that live closer to the Saint Lawrence.

Monro, an officer with virtually no battle experience, decides to risk a reconnaissance in force.

His plan is to gather all available boats, pack them with approximately three hundred and fifty men and sends them north up the lake into an area controlled by an enemy he knows little about.

To command this force Monro chooses Colonel John Parker of the newly arrived Jersey Blues unit.

It is decided to land Colonel Parker’s flotilla of men on Sabbath Day Point situated approximately twenty miles (thirty-two kilometers) north of Fort William Henry on the west side of Lake George.

An advance party of three boats had left for the point on July 20, with Parker’s main force departing in the predawn hours of July 21.

The passage of the first three boats had been spotted by French scouts.

An interception force of approximately four hundred and fifty French and native men under the command of Ensign de Corbiere departs Fort Carillon on July 21.

The French ambush Parker’s three lead boats and while under interrogation by natives, the Provincials tell them exactly where Parker plans to come ashore.

The French trap is now set.

The ambush plan is to place musket-men along the shore of the point and a flotilla of natives in fifty canoes out of view on the opposite side of the point.

Parker’s main force approaches Sabbath Day Point in the early morning hours of July 23, unaware that the French had intercepted his three lead boats and learned his plan.

As Parker's men approach the shore they notice the three boats sent out a day ahead and assume nothing is wrong.

Three decoys aid the French and natives in springing the trap by beckoning Parker’s men towards the shore.

Once within range Parker’s men come under a withering volley of musket fire from the soldiers and natives hidden along the shore.

At the same time, the natives in the canoes break around the point and surround Parker’s men.

The natives jump into the water from their canoes and sink, capsize, or capture all but two of Parker's boats.

Once in the water, many of the Provincials are speared or drowned.

The ensuing battle is severely one-sided as the terrified and overwhelmed soldiers surrender almost without firing a shot.

Barely on hundred of Parker’s men, including Parker himself, escape the onslaught of the French and natives.

Of Parker’s force of three hundred and fifty, nearly one hundred and sixty drown or are killed.

The remainder are taken prisoner.
 
Colonel Parker, lucky to escape the onslaught, leads what is left of his men through the brush and thick forest back to Fort William Henry.

The victors load their prisoners and spoils into boats and head north.

Along the way they sang songs and indulge in the rum taken from the Provincials.

Once back at Fort Carillon the natives, drunk on rum, will boil and eat one unlucky captive.

The native warriors that assembled at Montreal had been sent south to Fort Carillon, where they had joined the French regiments of Béarn and Royal Roussillon under François-Charles de Bourlamaque, and those of La Sarre, Guyenne, Languedoc, and la Reine under François de Gaston, Chevalier de Lévis.

Combined with the troupes de la marine, militia companies, and the arriving natives, the force accumulated at Carillon amounts to eight thousand men.
 
While at Carillon, the French leadership has difficulty controlling the behavior of its native allies.

Although they had stopped one group from forcing a British prisoner to run the gantlet, a group of Ottawas were not stopped when it was observed that they were ritually cannibalizing another prisoner.

French authorities are also frustrated in their ability to limit the natives' taking of more than their allotted share of rations.

Montcalm's aide, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, observed that attempts to curb this activity would have resulted in the loss of some of these forces.

In another prelude of things to come, a large number of prisoners had been taken on July 23 in the Battle of Sabbath Day Point, some of whom had also been ritually cannibalized before Montcalm managed to convince the natives instead to send the captives to Montreal to be sold as slaves.

Webb, who commands the area from his base at Fort Edward, had received intelligence in April that the French were accumulating resources and troops at Carillon.

News of continued French activity had arrived with a captive taken in mid-July.

Following an attack by Joseph Marin de la Malgue on a work crew near Fort Edward on 23 July, Webb had traveled to Fort William Henry with a party of Connecticut rangers led by Major Israel Putnam, and sent a detachment of them onto the lake for reconnaissance.

They had returned with word that natives were encamped on islands in the lake about eighteen miles (twenty-nine kilometers) from the fort.

Swearing Putnam and his rangers to secrecy, Webb had returned to Fort Edward, and on August 2 sends Lieutenant Colonel John Young with two hundred regulars and eight hundred Massachusetts militia to reinforce the garrison at William Henry.

This raises the size of the garrison to about twenty-five hundred, although several hundred of these are ill, some with smallpox.