The War That Made America

The remaining campaigns of 1755 began more promisingly for the Anglo-Americans, but even so the results were hardly reassuring. All three of the remaining expeditions fell under the charge of William Shirley, the political virtuoso and military novice who unexpectedly found himself commander in chief of British forces in North America. All three showed the mark of Shirley’s creative thinking and the signature of his military inexperience.

The three campaigns—directed against Fort Niagara on Lake Ontario, Fort Saint Frédéric on Lake Champlain, and the French forts on the Chignecto Isthmus in Nova Scotia—proceeded almost simultaneously. Shirley assumed personal control of the campaign against Niagara, which was arguably the most strategically important of the three. Niagara, dominating the portage between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, controlled the supply route to the Ohio forts, Detroit, and points west. If that post could be taken, all French influence in the interior of North America would wither. To reach Niagara, however, was no easy task: it was at least four hundred miles away from Albany by way of the Mohawk River, Wood Creek, Lake Oneida, and the Onondaga River, as well as Lake Ontario itself. Thus the expedition had to proceed in two stages, pausing at the old trading fort of Oswego on Lake Ontario, where a base of supply could be established and vessels built to carry the siege guns, supplies, and troops up the lake.

Shirley’s campaign, manned by twenty-five hundred colonists recruited into the Fiftieth and Fifty-first Regiments and a battalion of New Jersey provincials, was in theory as much of a regular-army operation as Braddock’s expedition. In fact Shirley was far less experienced militarily than most provincial colonels, while the raw recruits of the Fiftieth and Fifty-first were no better soldiers than any comparable number of provincial troops. When problems of supply and discipline emerged, Shirley’s men responded just as provincials would have, with massive desertions. By the time the little army finally reached Oswego, fully eight hundred of its men had unofficially discharged themselves from His Majesty’s service. Shirley, who had now become commander in chief, could do no more than repair, enlarge, and man Oswego’s fortifications with a view to holding the post over the winter, building the necessary sailing vessels, and resuming the expedition the following spring. Unfortunately Oswego lay more than 150 miles from Albany, and Shirley and his subordinates had not planned adequately for the garrison’s food supply. As winter came on with ice and heavy snows that isolated the post from Albany’s warehouses, the troops suffered horribly from malnutrition, scurvy, and other diseases. By spring there would be no question of an early campaign against Niagara; the Fiftieth and Fifty-first were so weak that they could barely defend themselves, and in no condition at all to undertake the heroic exertions that an expedition and siege required.

The problems Shirley faced in getting his men to Oswego largely resulted from competition for troops, Indian auxiliaries, supplies, arms, and boats between his expedition and the one that was preparing to proceed against Fort Saint Frédéric, at Crown Point. William Johnson, as commander of the latter campaign and Shirley’s political enemy, did what he could to thwart Shirley’s plans, particularly by interfering with his recruitment of Indian scouts. Johnson, meanwhile, had the advantage of a relatively accessible goal—Fort Saint Frédéric was only about a hundred miles from Albany—and ample support from the Mohawks, with whom he enjoyed a relationship that went back nearly twenty years. Fort Saint Frédéric, moreover, was an old post, with walls no longer capable of withstanding a prolonged bombardment. Johnson’s force of thirty-five hundred provincials from New England and New York, together with two hundred Mohawk warriors, should have stood a superb chance at success. What happened, however, was anything but a quick march to victory.

Portrait of William Shirley, by Thomas Hudson, 1750. Massachusetts governor William Shirley (1694-1771) sat for the English artist Thomas Hudson in 1750, shortly before the resumption of Anglo-French conflict in North America. Shirley succeeded Braddock as British commander in chief in North America in 1755, only to find that his lack of military experience and training would expose him to severe censure once his successor, Lord Loudoun, arrived the following year. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY)

Like Shirley’s expedition, Johnson’s had to proceed in two stages, cutting a road from its base of supply at Fort Edward on the upper Hudson to the head of Lac Saint-Sacrement, sixteen miles to the north, the body of water by which the expedition would gain access to Lake Champlain. At the lake (which Johnson renamed Lake George in honor of his king) the force was to pause and construct the boats it needed to advance to Crown Point, which lay only fifty miles to the north. The men had only barely made camp at Lake George, however, when it became clear that they were not alone in the woods. On September 3, scouts from the contingent of Mohawk warriors headed by Chief Hendrick (Theyanoguin) reported seeing the tracks of more than a hundred native warriors just a few miles away; on the seventh they reported seeing the tracks of several hundred Europeans. Hurriedly Johnson’s men felled trees around the Lake George camp, dragging them into barricades and clearing fields of fire. The next morning Johnson dispatched one-third of the men in his command—a thousand provincials, with two hundred Mohawks—to reinforce Fort Edward, which had been left only lightly defended, with its fortifications still in a rudimentary state. If the French seized that vulnerable post, Johnson would be unable to remain at the lake and the campaign against Crown Point would have to be abandoned.

A force of fifteen hundred French regulars, Canadians, and Indians was waiting for the provincials and Mohawks, about four miles away, at a point where the road to Fort Edward ran along the floor of a steep-walled ravine. The baron de Dieskau had arrived safely in Canada with more than sixty companies of troupes de terre in June, and had deployed them largely at Fort Saint Frédéric. From there he had taken a smaller force, made up of two hundred troupes de terre, six hundred Canadian militiamen, and seven hundred Abenakis and Catholic Mohawks from the réserve of Caughnawaga, and ascended Lac Saint-Sacrement to disrupt Johnson’s expedition. Although Dieskau was every inch a professional officer, he was by no means a conventional one. His service as an aide-de-camp to France’s greatest field marshal, the comte de Saxe, during the War of the Austrian Succession had alerted him to the value of partisan irregulars, the grassins and pandours who operated as raiders in the penumbra of regular forces. Dieskau had no difficulty in seeing an analogy between his own Indians and Canadian militiamen and those dangerous European partisans, and had no objection to using them in the same way.

Chief Hendrick, engraving. Theyanoguin (1692-1755), also known as Hendrick, persuaded about three hundred Iroquois warriors (mostly fellow Mohawks) to accompany the provincial major general William Johnson’s 1755 expedition against Fort Saint Frédéric. This engraved portrait may commemorate Hendrick’s 1740 trip to London. He died in the sharp fighting with Canadian Indians and militia in the Bloody Morning Scout on September 8, 1755. (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

He had been encouraged in this kind of thinking on the ship that carried him to Canada by one of his fellow passengers, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnal, marquis de Vaudreuil, who had lately been appointed as governor-general of New France. A Canadian by birth, Vaudreuil had served in the troupes de la marine as a young man and knew war in the eastern woodlands intimately; his service as governor of Louisiana from 1743 to 1752 had given him a matchless sensitivity to the conduct of intercultural diplomacy. He had urged Dieskau to understand the Indians as allies, not auxiliaries, and to give them a wide scope in fighting the common enemy. That was precisely what Dieskau did on September 8; so much so, indeed, that he used his regulars as auxiliaries to the Indians.

The provincial and Mohawk force that marched into the ambush that Dieskau and his Indians had prepared was similar in size to Braddock’s, yet for a variety of reasons it did not suffer Braddock’s fate. When the Catholic Mohawks in Dieskau’s force saw that the warriors in the advance guard were Mohawks from New York and hence their kinsmen, they called out a warning. Chief Hendrick, who was mounted on horseback at the head of the column, rode forward to investigate, only to be felled by a shot, probably from one of the French troops. The Mohawks, however, had already had enough warning to retreat, while the lead unit of Massachusetts provincials tried to assault the ambushers and then withdrew fighting, in a more or less orderly way, alongside the warriors. This melee, known as the Bloody Morning Scout, was the opening phase of what came to be called the Battle of Lake George. Casualties on the English side were substantial—about thirty Mohawks and fifty provincials—but far from catastrophic. The bulk of the provincials farther back in the column simply ran for the camp—an inglorious but effective response that undoubtedly saved the men’s lives.

When the survivors streamed into the fortified camp, they found their comrades, alerted by the sound of firing, busy reinforcing the barricade with overturned wagons and boats, and positioning four cannon to cover the road. The sight of this improvised defensive line stopped the Indians in Dieskau’s pursuing force in their tracks. Seeing that they had no interest in throwing their lives away in a frontal assault, Dieskau encouraged them to take cover and fire at the provincials manning the barricade while he organized his regulars—all of them grenadiers, the biggest, strongest men of the régiments Languedoc and La Reine—into a compact column and ordered them to charge the guns. He hoped that if they forced their way into the camp, the Indians and Canadians would follow. The grenadiers had to cover about 150 yards from the forest’s edge to the barricade, and when they fixed bayonets and charged with a shout they showed all the courage and élan for which the French army was famous. They were halfway to the barricade when the guns opened up with grapeshot that cut “lanes, streets, and alleys” through their formation, killing a third of them in a matter of seconds and convincing the Mohawks and Abenakis that Dieskau (who was himself wounded) must be a madman. Thereafter the Canadians and Indians continued for most of the afternoon to fire from long range at Johnson’s men, who suffered comparatively few casualties as a result. When it was all over, the French and Indian force retreated to Fort Saint Frédéric, leaving the wounded Dieskau to be taken prisoner.

Drawing of Thomas Williams’s powder horn, by Rufus Grider. The Massachusetts native Thomas Williams (1718-1775) served in the provincial corps commanded by his brother, Colonel Ephraim Williams, who fell mortally wounded in the Bloody Morning Scout. Thomas’s engraved powder horn, made in 1755 and sketched by the nineteenth-century antiquarian Rufus Grider in 1888, commemorates the Battle of Lake George. (Accession number 1907.36.97, negative number 34425. Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

First, Johnson’s men were too shocked and demoralized by the battle to pursue the enemy, who regrouped at Crown Point and then set out to build a new fort at the foot of Lake George, on the promontory of Ticonderoga. Fort Carillon, as they called it, would become both the main obstacle on the Lake Champlain invasion route and a base for raids against the New England frontier. To counter it, Johnson’s men built a post of their own on the site of the battle: Fort William Henry, named for two of George II’s sons. Over the next four years, the forty miles of lake and shoreline that separated the forts would mask the grim reality of war in deceptively lovely vistas of island, water, and balsam forest.

Second, the Mohawks had seen with unmistakable clarity that the price of their alliance with the British would be bloody confrontations with their Canadian Catholic cousins. At the end of the battle they withdrew to their homes to mourn the dead, taking with them several French prisoners, whom Johnson quietly gave them, knowing full well what their fate would be. He hoped that once the Mohawks had mourned their dead, they would return. They did not. In their absence the British struggled mightily to develop scouts to replace them, enlisting frontiersmen and Christian Indians from Stockbridge and other Massachusetts “praying towns” as “rangers” in a desperate, and largely frustrated, attempt to replace an Iroquois ally they could ill afford to lose. The paucity of scouts on the British side, and the shortage of intelligence about enemy movements and strength that resulted from it, would heavily contribute to the indecisive nature of operations on the New York frontier for the next four years.

The final Anglo-American campaign, in Nova Scotia, proceeded with a speed and decisiveness missing from the Crown Point and Niagara ventures. Unlike the others, this offensive had been planned well in advance; indeed as early as mid-1754 Shirley and Nova Scotia’s acting governor, Charles Lawrence, had proposed removing the pair of forts—Beauséjour and Gaspereau—that the French had built on the isthmus of Chignecto in 1750. These “encroachments,” as the British called them, served a double purpose. Practically speaking, they enabled the French to maintain overland communication between Louisbourg and Quebec. Symbolically, and of greater concern to the British, was that they reminded the twenty thousand or so Catholic and Francophone Acadians that even though they lived under the jurisdiction of a British government, they had not been forgotten; in the event of a new war, they would have a refuge defended by French troops to which to flee.

The two forts probably concerned British officials more than they interested the Acadians, who were for the most part peasant farmers with little interest in involving themselves in imperial disputes. Ever since France had ceded Acadia to the British by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the French population of the peninsula had enjoyed both the freedom to practice Catholicism and the privilege of remaining neutral in conflicts between France and Britain. Because the colony’s Anglophone population consisted primarily of soldiers and sailors (an army garrison at Annapolis Royal and a naval base at Halifax), in 1755 the Acadians still outnumbered the British by nearly ten to one. This worried the British greatly, because those numerous Acadians enjoyed a close relationship with the three thousand Mi’kmaq Indians of the peninsula—a group that was also Catholic, and overtly hostile to the British. A British attempt to change the character of the province by settling German-speaking Protestants near Halifax had enjoyed only small success. By 1755 the Germans were too few in number to make a dent in the Acadian dominance, and showed little eagerness to take up arms in behalf of the British crown.

Over the previous four decades the fear of an Acadian fifth column had repeatedly driven British governors to demand that the Acadians take loyalty oaths; the Acadians had repeatedly refused, fearing that to swear allegiance to a Protestant monarch meant abjuring their spiritual allegiance to the pope. Always before, the British had backed down because they had had no way to force the Acadians into taking the oath. The arrival of thousands of Anglo-American troops for the Chignecto campaign, however, gave the British a kind of coercive capacity they had previously lacked. That the Acadians had always been a peaceful people mattered less than the strategic threat that seemed implicit in their intimacy with the Mi’kmaqs and the fact that Acadian farms had been the main source of provisions for Louisbourg since the founding of the fortress in 1718. Seizing the Chignecto forts, Shirley and Lawrence believed, eliminated the possibility that they would serve as sources of arms and sedition, should relations between Britain and France collapse into war.

What else Shirley and Lawrence intended to follow from the destruction of the forts became clear only after the brief June campaign in which two thousand New England provincials under Major General John Winslow, together with 270 British regulars under Colonel Robert Monckton, besieged and took Fort Beauséjour, and then occupied Fort Gaspereau, which surrendered without a fight. With the forts neutralized, Governor Lawrence demanded that the Acadians take an unconditional oath of loyalty. When they refused, Winslow’s provincials and Monckton’s regulars swept down on their communities, rounding up as many of them as they could catch, herding them on board ships, and deporting them to mainland colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia. In order to discourage them from returning, the Anglo-Americans systematically devastated their farmsteads, burning buildings, killing or dispersing livestock, and breaking the dikes by which the Acadians had reclaimed coastal lands for agriculture. By the end of 1755, approximately seven thousand Acadians had been deported as de facto prisoners of war. Shirley and Lawrence expected that most would be sold as indentured servants in the colonies to which they were sent, to serve for whatever contractual period local authorities cared to stipulate. They believed that the Acadians would soon learn to speak English, forget their Catholic religious identity, and assimilate into colonial populations as loyal British subjects.

Two-thirds of the Acadians in the peninsula escaped the first deportations. Some made their way to Île Royale; others established refugee settlements in the Saint John River Valley in what is now New Brunswick; still others took refuge with the Mi’kmaqs, beginning a long guerrilla struggle against British power in the peninsula. The British used companies of rangers, mainly raised in New England, to wage ruthless campaigns aimed at clearing Nova Scotia’s lands of all Mi’kmaqs and any refugee Acadians they harbored. The goal was what the late twentieth century would label ethnic cleansing: to transform a purged province by resettling it with Protestant immigrants from New England, Scotland, and Germany.

Charles Deschamps de Boishébert et de Raffetot, Marquis de Boishébert, artist unknown, c. 1753. The Canadian nobleman Boishébert (1727-1797) entered the colony troops as a cadet in 1739 and gained military experience raiding the frontiers of New York and Nova Scotia in the 1740s. After leading the advance detachment of Governor Duquesne’s Ohio expedition in 1753, Boishébert spent much of the war organizing partisan resistance to British forces in Acadia and on Cape Breton Island. (Accession number M967.48, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal)

This remained impossible so long as the French maintained a military presence in the area, and while Louisbourg remained unconquered the refugees who had avoided deportation could hope to return. When British forces seized the fortress in 1758, however, a second great roundup followed on Île Royale, netting most of those who had escaped in 1755. Two years later, the British and the Mi’kmaqs negotiated a peace that guaranteed the surviving Indians their hunting and fishing rights and opened trade on favorable terms. Notwithstanding these efforts, however, surprising numbers of Acadians managed to continue living in Nova Scotia, evading capture by Anglo-American and British patrols until the mid- 1760s. With the return of peace, these fugitives became a valuable source of labor for the new wave of Anglophone immigrants, and were allowed to remain. Most Acadians, however, never returned after what they called le grand dérangement. Instead they dispersed to settle in the Saint John Valley, Quebec, the littoral of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the west coast of Newfoundland, the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and the bayou country of Louisiana.

A View of the Plundering and Burning of the City of Grimross, by Thomas Davies, 1758. The British commander Robert Monckton led an expedition in 1758 to destroy French settlements along the Saint John River in present-day New Brunswick. More than two thousand Acadians, many of them refugees from the British expulsions, had gathered in the area. Many fled overland to Quebec, where food shortages and smallpox created further suffering and death. (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 1954)

The Acadian episode illuminates, within a small frame, several important issues. The essential requirements for membership in the eighteenth-century British imperial community were few: willingness to affirm allegiance to the king of England, adherence to some form of Protestantism, anti-Catholicism, and Francophobia. Those who met these criteria could find a place in the empire even if (like the Germans) they spoke no English, claimed no ethnic connection to British populations, and had no previous experience with English political or legal institutions. This ease of entry permitted the empire to operate primarily on a voluntarist basis, and created a surprisingly robust social and political order within a remarkably diverse community. It was not, however, an imperial order that welcomed those who refused to embrace its fundamentally anti-Catholic and anti-French spirit. Nor did it offer much of a place to those native groups who refused to surrender lands coveted by white farmers and remove themselves beyond the pale of Anglo-American settlement.

The willingness, even eagerness, of New England provincials to participate in the ethnic cleansing of Nova Scotia beginning in late 1755 indicated how fully they participated in the anti-French, anti-Catholic, anti-Indian spirit of British imperialism. Like the New Englanders, Anglo-American colonists generally wanted to think of themselves as partners with metropolitan Britons in a great war for empire, a crusade that would eliminate forever the threat of popery and savagery, secure a lasting peace, and open the lands of North America to occupation by people like themselves. In the bleak dawn of a war that would change their world forever, it had not yet occurred to most Anglo-American colonists that British authorities might have reason to think about the future of the empire, and the colonists’ place in it, in entirely different ways.