4
Major-General James Wolfe explains collateral damage to a young Quebec couple in misogynist fashion. “Mercy, general,” they beg. “My orders are firm,” he replies. “For every man captured, a bullet. For every woman—two.” The drawing is by Wolfe’s irreverent subordinate, Brigadier-General George Townshend.
For over a hundred years, from 1689 to 1815, North America was the seat of war. The wars were at first extensions of other and sometimes older conflicts—between the Iroquois and the French, or the Iroquois and the Algonquins, for example—but they fitted into the rivalry between the French and the English, and between the Spanish and the English, and were fought on a global scale.
The wars resulted in the destruction of the military capacity and hence the independence of the Indian nations of North America. They marked the rise of Great Britain and the relative decline of France’s ability to sustain an overseas empire. And they brought about the division of North America along unanticipated lines, with the French settlers of Canada as part of a British Empire and most of the British colonists no longer British but American.
The French government set the scene. Unable to match the flood of immigration into the English colonies, the French decided to build posts in the interior. The peace of 1701 among the Indians and the French allowed the latter to travel freely along the Great Lakes. To secure their position, the French minister of marine, the official responsible for the colonies, established a fort at Detroit. Detroit would sustain the fur trade, to be sure, but its real purpose was to assist France’s Indian allies in blocking the expansion of the English.
Detroit fitted into a strategy that connected Quebec to newly founded Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico. Theoretically connected by the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence system, the French Empire in North America now extended, at least in maps, from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico and on to the tropics, to the French island colonies in the West Indies.
As the mapmakers depicted it, New France was vast, dwarfing the English colonies on the coast and overshadowing French islands like Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint Domingue, the modern Haiti. Over half the population of French America was Indian—indeed well over half. France directly ruled very little of North America, and very little of New France, Acadia, and Louisiana. It controlled only the valley of the St. Lawrence, a few pockets of settlement in Acadia, and a couple of posts in the interior. In effect, size and authority cancelled each other out.
Economically, New France was tiny compared with any one of the French islands, Guadeloupe, Martinique, or Saint Domingue, with their lucrative sugar exports. Despite the best efforts of the intendants and the encouragement of the home government, whatever profit accrued in New France came from the fur trade. Even there profits fluctuated wildly. In the 1690s the government even attempted, briefly, to close the west to traders, because too many furs had swamped the French market.
Nor were the interior forts simply little outposts of France. The western fur factories were intended to be rented out to entrepreneurs, who bore the costs and took the profits. This should have meant that the cost of government, which was really the cost of asserting French sovereignty in the wilderness, was borne by the market. Unfortunately, theory and reality only occasionally coincided. In times of too little profit, or none at all, the posts were handed back to the government and the entrepreneur became a civil servant until things looked up on the capricious Parisian fur market. For the government proposed to maintain its posts, and the empire they represented, at all costs.
QUEEN ANNE’S WAR
The war of 1689–97 between England and France was inconclusive. In North America it changed little; it might even be said to have preserved a French advantage through the seizure of the English Hudson Bay forts and aggression against the English fishery in Newfoundland. There were no large armies, few professional soldiers, and certainly no great fleets on the western side of the Atlantic: the outcome of the war was decided in Europe, and for European reasons.
Louis XIV did not abandon his dreams of empire. The decisions to found a post at Detroit, to establish a colony in Louisiana, and to construct a series of alliances among the Indians of the interior were a minor and local aspect of a larger French policy.
In 1700, Louis did two things. On the death of his cousin, the exiled James II of England, he recognized James’s son as king of England. The aggressively Catholic king of France gave credence to a Catholic claimant (or “pretender”) to the English throne. Second, Louis secured the Spanish throne for his grandson, who became Philip V of Spain. Philip had a claim to that throne, but so did the Austrian royal family. The Pyrenees notwithstanding, France and Spain united in a family alliance; perhaps on Louis’s death they would be united in fact. It would certainly be a formidable combination, all the more so when France and Spain’s American empires were added to the equation.
The war that resulted occurred mostly during the reign of Anne, Protestant daughter of James II and half-sister of his son the pretender, the so-called James III. In Europe the war was known as the War of the Spanish Succession, for obvious reasons. In English America it was remembered as “Queen Anne’s War,” for equally obvious reasons.
The war was mostly fought in Europe, and the details of the battles on that continent need not detain us. The strategy of the war was nevertheless important, as it affected not only the war underway but the wars to come in North America. The English enjoyed what might be called an economic advantage—that is, English finances were soundly based, allowing the government in London to build and maintain a large navy that gradually overshadowed that of France. The French might have been able to match the English at sea, but they were tied down in endless battles in Germany against the Austrian and English armies. In these battles Louis’s generals were generally unsuccessful, and as the war progressed it moved from Germany and Belgium into France. The lesson, imperfectly realized and sometimes forgotten, was that the American empire, English or French, was best defended in Europe.
In America New France was bolstered by two main factors. First, there were hundreds of kilometres of trackless wilderness between the French colony and the nearest English settlements in New England and New York. Second, there were the Indians.
The Iroquois did not take a major role in Queen Anne’s War. Their interest lay in keeping both sides out of their territory and their affairs, and taking whatever advantage they could from battles fought by others. Some of the English colonists considered this an entirely sensible attitude, especially after Indian raids demonstrated how vulnerable their frontier settlements really were. In the middle of the war, emissaries from Massachusetts visited Quebec and negotiated with the French authorities in the hope of securing some kind of modus vivendi between their colonies and New France.1 No agreement was reached, perhaps because the French authorities did not take the possibility of a threat from the scattered and disunited English colonies very seriously.
In fact, not all the English colonies were equally at risk during the war. New York largely escaped French incursions, but New England was a different matter. The European colonists had no great military advantage over the Indians along their border: the militia was ill-trained and prone to panic, and the Indians preyed on the fears of the English. As settlement pushed out from the coast in New England it became extremely vulnerable.
The settlers naturally feared violence and massacre. They also feared captivity. In the wars between 1689 and 1760 roughly sixteen hundred New Englanders were captured by Indian raiders and became, as a Boston minister put it, “Captives, that are every minute looking when they shall be roasted alive, to make a sport and a feast, for the most execrable cannibals. Captives, that must endure the most bitter frost and cold, without rags enough to cover their nakedness. Captives, that have scarce a bit of meat allow’d them to put into their mouths, but what a dog would hardly meddle with; captives, that must see their nearest relations butchered before their eyes, yet be afraid of letting those eyes drop a tear.”2
Sometimes the English were massacred, or killed after torture. The torture was spectacularly gruesome, of a kind that by the eighteenth century in Europe was performed behind the walls of fortresses or prisons. There was also cannibalism, which in Europe was regarded with the utmost horror and aversion. Many prisoners, probably most, were more kindly treated, and were marched away to Indian settlements and adopted into Indian families.3 Many were later ransomed, but many others remained with their captors, absorbed into the culture and society that had kidnapped them. Despite a requirement in the eventual peace treaty to secure the return of captives, some never came back.
The New England colonies hadn’t the means to reply against the Indians or their sponsors, the distant French in Quebec. They did have the means to harass the nearest and most accessible French colony, Acadia. Seaborne raids distressed some of the outlying French settlements in 1704, but did not attempt the tiny capital, Port Royal. Two further raids on Port Royal in 1707 had no effect. Projects to invade New France overland aroused some interest in the colonies, but the home government in London eventually vetoed them.
Finally, in 1710, the colonists had their way. Reinforced with ships and men provided by the home government, they appeared before Port Royal in September, besieged it for a week, and received the surrender of its garrison, outnumbered ten to one. A combined Acadian and Indian attempt to retake the fort in 1711 failed.4
In Europe the war was going badly for the French. Louis XIV sued for peace but refused the terms he was offered. The British government then decided that it would strike the French overseas, and in 1711 mounted a large and expensive sea expedition with the objective of taking Quebec. Sixty-four ships carrying five thousand troops—more than the population of Quebec—sailed from Britain. Poor charts, bad weather, and indifferent navigation defeated the fleet in the lower St. Lawrence: eight ships were wrecked, and the British turned back.5
The political balance in Britain was shifting. The war party, the Whigs, lost the support of the queen and then lost power, and their Tory successors were anxious to make peace as quickly as possible. Peace still took some years, but eventually, in 1713 at Utrecht, Holland, a treaty was signed.
The Treaty of Utrecht gave France a better peace than Louis XIV might have expected. Bankrupt, the French government needed peace badly, and some of the terms at Utrecht reflected that need. As far as America was concerned, the French gave up the Hudson Bay posts, “all Nova Scotia or Acadia,” and Newfoundland. They managed to keep the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, including the two largest, Isle St. Jean (now Prince Edward Island) and Cape Breton. (They had been ready to give up Cape Breton, even though its loss would have bottled up New France behind a screen of British islands and bases.) They did not give up Louisiana, or the interior forts, and as a result the imperial strategy of 1701 survived.
There were ambiguities in the treaty. There was no map showing the boundaries of Acadia, and the French interpreted them as narrowly as possible, meaning the Nova Scotian mainland only. The French inhabitants of ancient Acadia, now Nova Scotia, could stay and remain Catholic, “as far as the laws of Great Britain do allow.” It was the British turn to be ambiguous, for British law was discouraging, to say the least, where Catholics were concerned.
Catholic or not, the British wanted the Acadians to remain in Nova Scotia, for without their farms the position of the few British troops there was doubtful indeed. The French authorities, meanwhile, urged the Acadians to leave for the remaining French territories, particularly Cape Breton Island. In the event, most of the Acadians stayed, unwilling to abandon their property for the hazard of a new colony. Yet they informed the British authorities that their allegiance to the British crown had strict limits—they would not fight against the French in any future war. Dismayed, the British accepted these conditions—conditionally, as it were, for as long as they had to.6
AN INTERVAL OF PEACE
France and Great Britain remained at peace for thirty years, though the British fought practically everyone else in that period. The French government recognized that it had lost the war, and that Louis XIV’s bellicose policy had been fruitless. France needed time to recover under his successor, Louis XV, who came to the throne, aged five, on his great-grandfather’s death in 1715.
New France needed the peace as well. The strategic advantages that had given Britain the victory in 1713 hadn’t changed. The British had a larger economy, more disposable revenue, and a larger fleet than the French. If war came again, New France could be cut off by sea, by an enemy who could choose the time and place of attack, as long as it was in range of the ocean. Needing constant supply from France, and dependent on the transport of furs to Europe, New France had little choice but to appreciate the benefits of peace and pray that they continue.
The benefits of peace were apparent. With little immigration, New France doubled its population every thirty years. Settlement spread back from the riverbanks, with long, narrow farms reaching back in regular rangs or concessions. Parallel to the river, roads linked the farmhouses.
The houses resembled those of western France, particularly Normandy. Sometimes settlers constructed dwellings of large vertical timbers, with clay or rubble as infill, a common French technique. They may well have been the first in North America to build log cabins—horizontal logs with clay infill, the classic log cabin found everywhere in English-speaking North America, but not actually introduced in the English colonies until the eighteenth century.7 The log house was and remained the dominant rural dwelling in New France and Quebec.
The towns of New France were more likely to be built of stone by the eighteenth century. Frequent fires disposed of most of their wooden predecessors, and the authorities mandated stone replacements. It was, however, the prosperity of the towns, with their steady diet of government contracts and military pay, that made the inhabitants prosperous enough to afford building in stone. In Quebec, crowded on a stubby peninsula, the houses were high and narrow in the Lower Town, beneath the cliffs; in the more fashionable Upper Town, seat of the governor and the bishop, houses were lower but more spacious.
The governor and the bishop lived ceremoniously and, as far as colonial circumstances permitted, comfortably. The governor had his own guard, presenting arms and beating drums when he passed, even if only to the neighbouring church. But it was the Church that had pride of place in Quebec, with numerous churches, convents, and a Jesuit college that a Swedish visitor described, in 1749, as four times larger than the governor’s “palace,” and “the finest building in town.”8
From Quebec the governor—properly the “governor general”— presided over an empire millions of hectares in extent. Most of his “subjects” weren’t French, nor white, but rather Indians whose relationship to the French crown would certainly have puzzled the authorities in Paris. To the Indians, the governor general was Onontio—a Mohawk version of the name of an early governor, Montmagny, subsequently applied to all his successors. Onontio was father, protector, and gift-giver, for as an intendant put it, referring to France’s Indian allies, “These tribes never transact any business without making presents to illustrate and confirm their words.”9
But which tribes? They were mostly the Algonquian-speaking nations of the Great Lakes region—the Ottawas, for example—but they also included a sizeable number of Iroquois (especially Mohawks) as well as the remnants of the Hurons and other tribes dispersed during the wars of the seventeenth century. The Mohawks were divided, some favouring the English, some the French. Some had come to the French as refugees, others as Catholic converts, and they were given land on the fringes of New France, outside Montreal (for the Mohawks) and at Ancienne Lorette outside Quebec City. These settlements were the direct ancestors of the later Indian reserve system adopted by the British and Canadian governments.
In council the governor was addressed as “father,” and he replied to his “children,” but it was not a relationship that allowed the French to command and force the Indians to obey. As in typical families, relationships weren’t always harmonious, and were spiced by the existence of a British rival for the Indians’ attention and custom. British traders to the north and south of New France, around Hudson Bay and in the Ohio River Valley, challenged French domination of the fur trade; and without this domination the French claims to the interior would shrivel and die, for the economics of fur were indissolubly linked to the pretensions of empire.
Yet in many, indeed most, respects the French succeeded in sustaining and expanding their fur empire. Operating from a very few posts, principally Detroit and Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes, the French scooped up most of the furs exported from North America. Confronted with the establishment of Hudson’s Bay Company posts, in the 1720s and 1730s French traders and explorers pressed onward, penetrating the Great Plains and arriving in sight of the Rockies. As usual they were looking for a route to the Pacific, which as always eluded them, but they were also seeking to attract the Plains Indians to the French fur market, and in this they were successful. The Bay traders noticed their supplies drying up and their profits falling, but it wasn’t enough to stimulate them to explore the interior themselves.
The French interior posts were lightly staffed and sparsely garrisoned. Aside from their economic function and residual symbolic value, they also served as way stations on an interior communications line that linked Quebec with New Orleans—a thin thread of reality that bound the parts of the French Empire together.
Most of the fur-trading enterprise depended not on permanent traders but on annual fur brigades setting forth from Montreal, year after year, for the interior. These men were born in the colony—and were increasingly known as Canadiens to distinguish them from their increasingly distant French cousins. They had to be relatively young, healthy, and vigorous to survive the rigours of the voyage, and they had to be adventurous and adaptable too, for they would be living in societies whose customs and expectations were far removed from those of France, or even New France. Naturally they came mostly off the farm, and to the farm most of them would eventually return. In the meantime they would experience life without governors, priests, or military officers, once they had passed Michilimackinac.
Only traders bound for Detroit and Michilimackinac could hope to see their homes again in the same year. The others, most of the fur traders, were bound to be away for two or three years, without serious hope of news from home. They took society as they found it, living in Indian villages, eating as the Indians did, and finding consolation with Indian women. Such unions weren’t always based on physical need or desire, but conferred advantage on both parties—affording Frenchmen an entrée into Native society and valuable links to the Native political systems.10 Some formed strong attachments and stayed with their women and their mixed-race children, generally called the mixed ones, or the Métis. At one point in the early eighteenth century, a witness called the French of the interior and their Indian neighbours, allies, and hosts “one people,” and certainly so many Frenchmen adapted to Indian ways that there is some justification in the comment.11
The Métis often became traders on their own, symbolizing what the historian Richard White has called “the Middle Ground” between the European colonies on the coast and the Native societies to the west. In the eighteenth century the Middle Ground was always expanding—a new society neither purely European nor purely Indian, reflecting the conflicting pressures and demands of each side. The Middle Ground would not, however, determine which empire would prevail in the contest for North America.
The French strategy of alliance with the Indians was as much the product of necessity as of an enlightened refusal to subjugate the Native population of New France. The number of people in New France wasn’t sufficient to support the colonization of the interior. The French had moved into the largely empty lands of the St. Lawrence in the seventeenth century, and there they stayed, with more than enough land for the immigrants and their descendants until the end of the eighteenth century. The French frequently pointed out to their Indian allies and clients the contrast between the benign French incursions, characterized by presents and protection, and the British colonization that displaced the Indians and gobbled up the land along the frontier.
Actual French settlements in the interior were few—a few farms to supply the needs of trading posts, and forts like Detroit or St. Louis on the Mississippi. Detroit was the largest, and relations there between the French and the Indians weren’t always peaceful. Farther south in Louisiana were larger French colonies, for example around Natchez on the Mississippi. There, French brutality and arrogance produced a full-scale Indian rebellion, with the massacre of 227 French settlers and the capture of fifty French women and children in 1729. Given the meagre numbers of the French in Louisiana, this was a notable setback for the colony.
Retaliation followed. The French enlisted other tribes, enemies of the Natchez Indians, and killed and enslaved as many as they could find. “When it served their purpose,” the historian Alan Taylor writes, “the French massacred and enslaved natives as vigorously as did the British.” A French priest drew the moral of the experience: “God wishes that they [the Indians] yield their places to new peoples,” as they certainly did.12
THE BRITISH CHALLENGE
The British Empire had emerged as the prime challenger to French supremacy in North America. It was no longer English, but British. Dynastic marriages, the merger of the English and Scottish royal families, and the Reformation, which converted most of the English and Scots into Protestants, created the foundation of a common state that was constitutionally united in 1707 into the kingdom of Great Britain. Its inhabitants became British, an invented identity that nevertheless took hold. It would be British armies, not English, that invaded New France, and the Scots became the most enthusiastic proponents of “Britishness.”
The British monarchy was a Protestant monarchy. The kings and queens must be Protestants, and only Protestants could be elected to the House of Commons or hold office. Good Britons held the Catholic, “Popish,” practices of France to be abhorrent. The French were dreadful not only because they were French—witness the long history of medieval wars between England and France—but because they were slavish followers of the Pope in Rome. In an age of enlightenment and increasing tolerance, not every Briton held these views, but they ignored them at their peril.13 As late as 1780 London was convulsed by anti-Catholic rioting, and religion (at least the Catholic–Protestant variant of it) remained a lively and often determining issue in the politics of Great Britain and all English-speaking peoples well into the twentieth century—and beyond.
Great Britain was smaller in population and size than rival France. It was, however, increasingly rich, and by the mid-eighteenth century had outstripped France in wealth, industry—and tax revenues.14 The taxes went to support wars with France and the construction of a fleet that was second to none in Europe. All this, it should be emphasized, had little to do with North America; the wars of 1689–97 and 1702–13 were overwhelmingly European conflicts that projected into the colonies and not the other way around. The colonies contributed little to British finances, and those on the mainland of North America were economically insignificant in terms of trade with Great Britain until the middle of the eighteenth century.
France nevertheless remained rich—rich enough to try to compensate for the disadvantages conferred on it by the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. The cession of Acadia and Newfoundland to Great Britain imperilled sea communications from France to New France. There remained only the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, especially the easternmost, Cape Breton Island. Investigation revealed a large harbour on the eastern shore, and the site, named Louisbourg after the French king, Louis XV, became a French fortress.
Louisbourg was designed as a naval base and a commercial harbour, a point of refuge for French ships pursued by the British in time of war. Its elaborate and expensive defences, supposedly the best that military science could design, guarded the harbour with fortifications and plentiful artillery. (The French led the world in fortress design, thanks to Louis XIV’s military architect, Marshal Vauban.) The French government sent endless money and supplies to build Louisbourg, but in the event there was less there than met the eye. Government agents complained of inadequate workmanship and poor construction materials. There was also a design flaw, for defences on the landward side were added only as an afterthought, in the 1730s and early 1740s. Maintaining the fort was another problem, and there were problems of morale in the garrison. Alarmed, officials at the fortress reported that Louisbourg could not be defended without substantial reinforcements, especially ships.
But when war—called in America King George’s War after George II, the British monarch—broke out, finally, in 1744, the ships weren’t there, nor could they be sent. (The war was actually a continental European war between Austria and Prussia about the right of a female, Maria Theresa, to inherit the throne of Austria, or at any rate those parts of it that Prussia wanted—and hence was known in Europe as the War of the Austrian Succession.) France had other commitments, mainly on land, and relative to the British the French navy was weak. The British, as a result, commanded the western Atlantic, and after a slight delay confined the French fleet in its ports on the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. As a further ominous portent, the troops at Louisbourg mutinied; only abject concessions from Louisbourg’s authorities brought them back to their duty.
The outbreak of war caused alarm in the British colonies as well. Massachusetts had suffered heavily from French and Indian raids forty years before, and the years of peace had only solidified the attachment of the Indian nations between the British and French frontiers—to the French. The situation in Acadia was unclear. The boundaries were imprecise, the Indians (mostly Mi’kmaq) were unfriendly, and the French had a strong point of attraction in nearby Louisbourg. True, the inhabitants, nearly ten thousand by the 1740s, had remained after the colony was ceded to Britain and renamed Nova Scotia, but that was a doubtful advantage, for they were at best neutral and might welcome the return of the French. Finally, Massachusetts was a fishing colony, and took a strong interest in the fisheries off Nova Scotia. Anything that could make the fishery more certain, exclude rivals, and attach it more firmly to Massachusetts was bound to find support there.
Governor Shirley of Massachusetts, assisted by the Royal Navy, mounted a land and sea attack on Louisbourg in the spring of 1745. His expedition proved the gloomy reports on Louisbourg’s defences to be correct. The fortress’s only hope was the appearance of the French navy, and the navy did not come. Marshal Vauban had established not merely the way to defend a fort but the way to take it. Using his prescribed methods of converging trenches and artillery bombardment, the Anglo-American force obliged the French garrison to surrender.
The siege of Louisbourg was the only great battle to be fought in North America in a war that lasted from 1744 to 1748. The main events of the war were in Europe, with an edge to the French, and in India, where the French had better luck than in America, capturing the important British trading fort of Madras. British predominance at sea was a crucial factor, but the British were assisted by the weather when a French fleet was wrecked by storms on its way to recapture Louisbourg in 1746.
In the interior of the continent, the French alliances with the Indian nations held. The Iroquois remained neutral, and the peoples of the Ohio Valley generally stood by the French, while trading with the British. The French alliance wobbled, but did not collapse under the pressure of scarce trading goods held back at their source across the Atlantic by British sea power.
The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the war in 1748. The British exchanged Louisbourg for Madras, to the fury of the New Englanders who had captured it. Louisbourg had its importance, however, for it was British possession of the fortress that induced the French to accept a stalemated end to the war, with each side returning to the prewar status quo.15 The treaty did not, however, resolve the exact boundaries of Nova Scotia, and, of course, it did not remove the counter-attraction of Louisbourg for the Acadian French.
NEITHER WAR NOR PEACE
King George’s War made plain to the French authorities in Quebec that their American empire was precariously balanced between the British navy and the uncertain alliances that bound the Indians along the French frontier to King Louis rather than King George. New France depended on money, supplies, and troops from the mother country, and to get them across the ocean in time of war required a reinforced navy as well as the maintenance of French defences that stretched, thinly, from Louisbourg to New Orleans. As for the alliances, they demanded cheap and plentiful trade goods—in other words, constant subsidy—in order to compete with British traders from Virginia and Pennsylvania. These were fundamentally financial questions—unwelcome to a French government that didn’t want to contemplate new and heavy expenditures. So the French prescribed what most governments do under the circumstances—half measures mixed with hope and fronted with a show of determination. Determination took the form of an aggressive promotion of French interests against the British traders in the Ohio country and the feeble British establishment in Nova Scotia. Before long troops were on the move, building forts and enforcing French territorial claims.
It was a dangerous game. King George’s chief minister, the Duke of Newcastle, was soon complaining about “the wild French governors in America.” The French couldn’t justify their aggressive policies, and as for the British, Newcastle stated, “We can’t bear [it].”
The first consequences of the aggressive French policy fell on the Acadian inhabitants of Nova Scotia. In the 1720s and 1730s, with an indefinite peace at hand, the French settlers had lived peaceably with the tiny British garrison of Port Royal. The British made no attempt to settle in Nova Scotia, and French missionaries maintained their influence over the local Indians, the Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, and Malecite. These nations were also under no direct threat from British settlement or the direct extension of British government.
The war changed all this. French missionaries took the lead in intimidating the Acadians and in encouraging the Indians to harass the British. War flared in the Acadian borderlands, though the French were unsuccessful in their attempts to capture the British capital at Annapolis Royal, the former Port Royal. The Acadians resented French demands for aid and furnished supplies only under coercion. But they wouldn’t fight for the British either, and while that was better than nothing, it irritated some of the British authorities.
Peace in Nova Scotia was therefore little more than an armed truce. To reinforce their authority and to balance Louisbourg, the British poured three thousand settlers and £700,000 into a new base around the splendid natural harbour at Halifax, named in honour of the relevant British minister, the Earl of Halifax. The settlement did not flourish. The French and their Indian allies harassed the settlers, making the colony dangerous as well as primitive, and soon its reputation deterred most potential settlers. But not all: New Englanders were attracted to a maritime colony much like their own.
The Acadians had shown how to carve a respectable and comfortable living out of the marshlands around the Bay of Fundy. Economically, at least, their practice was exemplary. Politically, however, the Acadians were vulnerable. They regarded themselves as only conditional British subjects, and the reach of the king of France extended into their villages through the hands of his missionaries. The British did not, in the 1730s and early 1740s, press the issue: the local authorities even conceded that the Acadians did not have to bear arms in defence of their British monarch, George II. But the governors of the 1750s were less comfortable with that notion than their predecessors had been. To them, if the Acadians weren’t wholly or reliably British, then they must be something else—and if they weren’t subjects of the British king, then they must belong to the king of France. In a country with an uncertain frontier and an inconclusive war just over, the Acadians were a temptation to the French and a burden to the British. It wouldn’t take much to get the Acadians to return to their old allegiance; could the British take that chance?
The French now began to back up their territorial claims with military force. They sent an army detachment to the isthmus of Chignecto, between modern New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and built a fort, Beauséjour. The British too sent troops, mostly from Massachusetts, and built their own fort, Lawrence, named after the governor of Nova Scotia. There, through the early 1750s, the garrisons glowered at each other across a narrow river, waiting for a war they knew must come.
The French authorities were also setting matters in motion in the Ohio country. Their actions highlighted the differences between the British colonies, scattered, disunited, and unmilitary in their outlook, and New France, where large numbers of militia could easily be raised and dispatched long distances along the colony’s river-highways.
Until the late 1740s the French could rely on the power of the Iroquois to hold the balance along the frontier and to act as a barrier between the British colonies and the lands claimed—but not occupied—by France. The Iroquois—first Five Nations and then, in the 1720s, Six—pursued their own interest, accepting gifts from both the British and the French but refusing to intervene on either side. In the 1720s and 1730s the Iroquois, their dependants, and their allies dominated the Ohio country. The nations of the Ohio and beyond contributed to Iroquois power, inflating to more than ten thousand the number of warriors the Iroquois could put in the field. (The Iroquois themselves could muster barely eleven hundred.)16
The Iroquois grip on the interior was, however, loosening, just at the point when pressure was building in Pennsylvania and Virginia for expansion. The Iroquois made what they thought were nominal concessions to the colonists, but in fact they gave, or seemed to give, far more than they understood—the right to occupy the whole of the Ohio Valley.
British settlers and land speculators followed British traders across the Appalachian Mountains, to the dismay of the existing inhabitants who were no longer protected by the Iroquois. The settlers made clear that they wanted the Indians off their land claims. The settlers’ pretensions, as well as their behaviour toward the Indians, were a political bonanza for the French. The French told the Indians that it was the British who would dispossess them and drive them from their homes, and that the French themselves posed no such threat. The British, on the other hand, told the Indians that the French were blocking competition and the freedom to trade.
The fragile Iroquois empire could not support the contradiction between British and French interests and those of its subjects. In the 1740s Iroquois dominance frayed and then broke. The French began to intervene in Native affairs more forcefully, at first staking territorial claims. Then, in 1753, one of the “wild governors” in Quebec sent an army, the largest ever raised in New France up to that point.
Three hundred regular troops (the troupes de la marine), seventeen hundred Canadian militia, and two hundred Indians left Montreal for the Ohio country. The numbers weren’t large by European standards, but for a colony with a total population of fifty-five thousand this was a major effort. They were to build a road the short distance from Lake Erie to the headwaters of the Ohio River and to establish forts along the route. The purpose was to keep out the British, whether traders or settlers, and thereby to reinforce the French alliances with the Indian nations of the interior.
The expedition was successful, in a manner of speaking. The troops built the road and forts and reinforced French prestige in the area. On the other hand, by the time the expedition reached the portage from Lake Erie to the Ohio, only eight hundred troops were still able to do the work; finally, four hundred of the two thousand died of disease, a tremendous loss for a small colony.17 There was a legacy of bitterness among the survivors, for it was common knowledge that the authorities in Quebec, especially the intendant, François Bigot, had profited greatly by cheating the king and the king’s troops. As the army in Quebec grew, with regular reinforcements from Europe, so did the opportunity for profit for the intendant and his associates by keeping and reselling supplies destined for the army. The soldiers certainly bolstered the defences of the colony, but local geography—expressed in distance and in roadless wilderness and disease—was still the principal defence of New France.
THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR
The wild governors had set the scene for an outbreak of hostilities along their fortified frontiers in Acadia and the Ohio country. The British responded with bluster, and then with force. Virginia sent the young officer George Washington—aged twenty-two—on a series of journeys across the Appalachians and into the Ohio Valley, and it was Washington’s troops who fired the first shots at the French. Washington, captured by the French in 1754, was lucky to escape with his life.
The next British expedition, in 1755, wouldn’t be so lucky. The British government raised £1 million and sent reinforcements to Nova Scotia and Virginia. The army in Virginia was commanded by General Edward Braddock; Washington would be his aide-de-camp. Braddock’s army marched through the wilderness toward a French fort, Duquesne, on the site of modern Pittsburgh. They never reached the fort, having been ambushed and decimated by a small French and Indian force. Braddock was killed.
Another pitched battle occurred at the bottom end of Lake Champlain, the frontier between New France and New York. Despite a British attempt to intercept them, the French successfully sent twenty-six hundred regular troops to New France. (The British captured about four hundred of the original number.) The French sent the troops south, up the Richelieu River and Lake Champlain, to what is now Crown Point on Lake George. There the British defeated the French, regular troops and militia, and captured the French commander, Baron Dieskau, creating a vacancy in the military command in New France.
Finally, British troops—provincial troops from Massachusetts actually— captured Fort Beauséjour on the Acadian–Nova Scotian frontier. The Nova Scotian government, backed by the Massachusetts troops, now turned its attention to the Acadians. They were summoned, one last time, to swear unconditional allegiance to the British, and to agree to bear arms for King George if required. The Acadians, one more time, refused.
It was a fatal error. As many Acadians as the British could catch were rounded up, interned, and in the fall of 1755 placed aboard ships bound for other British possessions and, in some cases, Great Britain itself. In the process, families were broken up and farms burned. The precious dikes that protected the farmland were abandoned; the New Englanders certainly didn’t know how to maintain them. The deportation of the Acadians did not account for all the French settlers—some fled into the wilderness or to French territory—but it changed forever the balance of population and thus of power in Nova Scotia. The Acadians were swiftly replaced by settlers from New England, and Nova Scotia became a British colony in fact as well as in name.
All this occurred in time of peace, when the British and French governments maintained diplomatic relations in Europe. But the pressure of events in America helped precipitate first a diplomatic rupture and then an actual declaration of war, in May 1756. (Later it would become known as the Seven Years’ War.) In Europe the war was fought, mainly in Germany, between France, Austria, Spain, and Russia on one side and Great Britain and Prussia on the other.
The actual date of the declaration of war was almost irrelevant, because war in America and in the seas surrounding America was well underway. The French sent reinforcements to Quebec while they still could, under a new general, the marquis de Montcalm. There was a new governor general, too, the marquis de Vaudreuil, who was, incidentally, Canadian born.
Montcalm acted swiftly. In August 1756 he captured the only British post on the Great Lakes, Fort Oswego. The British authorities meanwhile dithered, while the various colonial governments varied wildly in their reaction to a crisis that promised to inflame their frontiers.
The next year, 1757, was no better. The British poured troops and generals into North America, and succeeded at very little. At sea, the French again managed to land reinforcements in Quebec, which Montcalm used in another audacious campaign, this time taking the British Fort William Henry near Lake Champlain.
The capture of that fort is best known for the subsequent massacre by Montcalm’s Indian allies of some of the surrendered garrison, immortalized in James Fenimore Cooper’s later novel, The Last of the Mohicans. The events that followed the surrender of the fort were not precisely as advertised. Certainly some of the British prisoners were murdered by the Indians, while others were captured by them, for a captive Briton was a rare source of profit from ransom—a regular practice in the colonial wars.18 Montcalm did rescue some of the captives from the Indians, almost certainly condemning others to death when their captors saw the hope of profit vanishing.
It was a clash of cultures. For the French and British, surrendered prisoners were sacrosanct. For the Indians, they were not. Indeed, Montcalm’s Indian allies felt betrayed by the French general’s interference in their normal practice of war. Many would not serve again with the French, a serious loss to French arms in this war. Montcalm certainly grew to loathe his Indian allies, not to mention the undisciplined colonial militia, and the events at William Henry were a stage in the disintegration of France’s colonial military power.
Finally the British, both in the colonies and in the mother country, were appalled by the tales of robbery and murder that survivors of the massacre—and there were many—brought home with them. It marked a stage in British perceptions of the Indians, who were sometimes seen as romantic beings, “noble savages” unsullied by civilization. After William Henry, some opinions hardened. Indians weren’t a better version of humanity than the civilized European, but much worse. There wasn’t unanimity on the subject, and in this difference of opinion British Indian policy would be created.19
After two dismal years, British luck turned in 1758. A stronger government at home, headed by William Pitt the elder, along with better generals and stronger finances, began to count. Pitt lavishly subsidized the colonies to induce them to provide crucial assistance, in troops and supplies, for the army and fleet he sent across the ocean. The British fleet, the Royal Navy, kept the French navy tied up at the docks in port in France.
Montcalm and the other colonial commanders would have to rely on their own resources, or at most on whatever their colony could supply. Unluckily for the French, the harvest in Canada was bad and supplies began to run short—and to rise in price, to the great delight of the intendant, Bigot, and his cronies. General Montcalm and Governor Vaudreuil disagreed on strategy and tactics. But even their quarrelling could do little to alter the general picture, which was governed by British predominance at sea. The British could cut most of the links that bound New and old France together—and they did.
Sea power brought a British army unopposed to Louisbourg in 1758. Once the British had landed, nothing could prevent their victory, since they outnumbered and outgunned the French. Louisbourg surrendered in July 1758. Remembering Fort William Henry, the British commander, General Jeffrey Amherst, refused to grant the French the usual honours of war.
At the same time, the British were also victorious in the interior. One expedition captured Fort Frontenac (modern Kingston) on Lake Ontario, while another took Fort Duquesne in the Ohio country. Only on Lake Champlain did Montcalm prevail, defeating the British at Ticonderoga. But in the face of the other French defeats Montcalm took a very bleak view of his prospects in the campaign that must come the next year.
Montcalm anticipated a British attack on the colonial capital, Quebec, and he was right. In June 1759 a British fleet brought an army of eighty-five hundred under the command of General James Wolfe. Wolfe might have seemed an improbable choice—he was only thirty-two, sickly, unafflicted by charm, and jealously watched by his older, more experienced subordinates. Wolfe was, however, ambitious and politically well connected—well enough to get the command of the Quebec expedition.
Montcalm had prepared as best he could, establishing a long line of fortifications along the north shore of the St. Lawrence. Quebec, on its promontory, was protected by high cliffs and a narrow shore. Anyone wishing to take the city would either have to go around it or climb those cliffs.
Wolfe, it seemed, would do neither. He bombarded Quebec with his artillery and reduced much of the city to ruins without reducing Montcalm’s defences in any significant respect. Wolfe then ordered the burning and devastation of farms and dwellings up and down the St. Lawrence, an act of notable savagery that did little to assist in the immediate task of defeating Montcalm. (It may have contributed in the medium term to a healthy respect for British power, or at least what the British would do with it, if provoked.)
It seems clear that by early September Wolfe had despaired of his task, just as Montcalm on his side despaired of his. As a last desperate gamble Wolfe decided to land his army under cover of darkness on a lightly defended shore, scale the cliffs above Quebec, and confront the French in the fields outside the walls of the city—the Plains of Abraham.20
Wolfe may well have been seeking a heroic death that would atone for his anticipated failure. Instead, he found a heroic death unencumbered by failure—a fortuitous victory handed him by the thoughtless and irrational response of his adversary, Montcalm. Descriptions of the battle have focused on the difficult climb up the cliffs to the Plains of Abraham on the morning of 13 September 1759. The problem was that if there was any serious resistance, or if the French were victorious, there was no way of getting down those cliffs.
The French were not victorious. Montcalm might have sheltered behind the walls of Quebec; he might have waited for reinforcements or circled around Wolfe’s army. Fully assembled, the French outnumbered the British, and they had competent officers to lead them into a well-organized battle. Montcalm, however, did not wait. Relying too heavily on the Canadian militia—brave but disorganized—he sent his troops toward the British lines. Eighteenth-century armies were trained for the moment in which they stood in line and fired, calmly and regularly, at an approaching enemy. The British fired; the French lines crumpled and then fled. Montcalm was mortally wounded and was carried inside the city.
Quebec surrendered a few days later. The bulk of the French army was still intact and circled around the city, en route to Montreal, which remained in French hands. The British now had the unenviable task of occupying a city that had been largely ruined by their own artillery, with scanty supplies to keep them going, until relieved the following spring. The bulk of the British troops and fleet then departed, and Quebec entered its long winter’s isolation.
Montcalm’s successor, the very capable Chevalier de Lévis, brought the French army back to Quebec the following spring. They duly defeated the ill-considered response of Wolfe’s successor, General James Murray, who imitated Montcalm by marching his army outside Quebec’s walls. A chastened Murray hung on inside the walls, hoping that the first ship up the St. Lawrence would be British, not French. As it was.
The French had tried their best to reach Canada and extricate their fleet from the British blockade. Alert and talented British admirals frustrated them—in particular Admiral Hawke at Quiberon Bay on the west coast of France in November 1759. Hawke’s victory was at least as significant as Wolfe’s, and probably more so—but Hawke had the good fortune not to be killed, and so escaped the combination of romantic death and military triumph that immortalized Wolfe and the battle of the Plains of Abraham.21
The final episode in the conquest of Canada occurred in the summer of 1760. Under the overall command of General Jeffrey Amherst, three British armies converged on Montreal—from Lake Ontario, down Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, and up the St. Lawrence. They met in front of Montreal in September 1760—a highly unusual feat of organization for eighteenth-century armies. Outnumbered and outgunned, Lévis sought terms, which Amherst granted in the same manner as at Louisbourg. The French would not get the honours of war, and would not be allowed to march away with their flags and banners, towing a (symbolic) cannon. Lévis burned his flags, and the French duly surrendered on 9 September 1760. Lévis and his troops would be shipped back to Europe and eventually to France.
The military terms of the surrender were the ones remarked on at the time. The civilian terms were the more important. They dictated the departure of the senior civilian administrators and commanded the obedience of the remaining population to the British king. Existing laws and customs continued. The inhabitants of New France were guaranteed their property and the exercise of their Roman Catholic religion, though the British state was officially and determinedly Protestant. It was a provisional settlement, to be sure, an armistice, pending the conclusion of an official treaty of peace.
MAKING PEACE
The string of British victories in America was mirrored by British victories at sea, in Europe and in India. The British followed up, in 1762, with the siege and capture of Havana, property of France’s luckless Spanish ally. Most of France’s Caribbean islands also fell to British arms—the richest prizes of all.
There was one last Canadian episode—a French invasion of Newfoundland in 1762. The French were too few, and they duly surrendered—the last incursion of French military power on what is now Canada.
The British government was strongly inclined to make peace. The reasons were largely domestic and political. There was a new king, George III, new ministers, and new policies. Peace was highly desirable, and the British made some concessions to get it. The French of course were the principal losers. They gave up Canada, formerly New France, and Louisiana, partly to Great Britain and partly to compensate their ally Spain. Spain lost Florida, but regained Cuba. The French kept a toehold on two islands off Newfoundland, and kept the right to dry fish on the north coast of the island—the so-called French Shore.
The British gained the most, and especially in America. The entire continent east of Mississippi became British. New France was no more, and, with the direct French peril removed, the formerly French subjects of North America were leniently treated. The inhabitants of New France could go or stay, as they chose—to France if they preferred, or they could opt to stay in the valley of the St. Lawrence. Much remained to be decided, but it was clear that the British intended to rule peaceably as far as possible. That the Canadian part of Britain’s new possessions would have a French character, a different character from the existing older colonies, was also indicated. Yet the French, too, would be changed by what had happened, and what was to come.