The Colonial Wars “ If n a t io n s g o to wa r f o r ev er y d eg re e o f in ju ry , th er e wo u ld n e ve r b e p ea ce o n ea r th .” – T h o m a s J ef f er s o n
The United States, as the American poet Walt Whitman once observed, “is not merely a nation, but a nation of nations. ” It is this shared paradigm that makes us uniquely different and, at the same time, it is what makes us so much alike. The American experience, diversity, has become, through the intertwining of evolution of time and growing pains, to become an inspired model of democracy. North America, during the latter half of the seventeenth century, was a household of three with England, France, and Spain each jockeying for the right to stake its claim and control the New World. The spigot of blood flowed unendingly from European battlefields, the result of successive battles for land, political power and retributions. At the same time, religious beliefs and a faith that life could be better in the new world, cost the political trinity dearly. At its height, the mass exodus of England’s population, for instance, would cost the nation two percent of her inhabitants. As untamed and undiscovered as the New World was in the 17th Century, the England of the 1600’s was equally different, regarded internationally as a second-class power. Internally, the country was ripe with dissension, religious and political. King James, the son of Mary Queen of Scots and her second husband, was the first in the House of Stuart to rule Britannia, and rule by divine right or so he claimed. The two prevailing viewpoints that his loyal subjects had of their Scottish-born monarch describe him as either very crafty and cunning in petty things who believed that he was a the wisest fool in Christendom, or that he was a very bad king prone to fear, mistrust and suspicion. To make matters worse, the king’s Scottish background failed to translate well into a changing English society. Although Anglican in public, monarchs from the House of Stuart were Catholic in their private sympathies acerbating the religious fervor that ruled 17th Century England. Puritans saw Counter-Reformation lurking in palace anterooms, evidenced by James and subsequently King Charles who had Catholic queens and noblemen and privy counselors who announced their conversions to the Church of Rome. The Stuart provocations and the Protestant paranoia intertwined to produce a cacophony of religious acrimony that fueled 17th Century English politics and further laid the foundation for the beginnings of America and the Colonial Wars. Worried about the political, religious and moral course of England under the monarchy of the House of Stuart, Puritans were increasingly disgruntled and became the principle architects and settlers in the New World.
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The Puritan beliefs were basic to the tenet of their faith and included a lifestyle of biblical study, conviction that God has established in advance everything that is going to happen and that nothing can change the course of events. Paradoxically, their suspicion of Rome was more evident than in the lives of most other members of the Church of England. In the Puritan way of life, Sunday was a day of intense religious preoccupation. And yet, while they believed strongly that the English were a Chosen People many were equally worried about losing God’s favor through some shortcoming, especially failure to promote moral reformation. Moreover, Puritans opposed the apostolic authority claimed by bishops and resisted efforts to enforce doctrinal and liturgical conformity to the Prayer Book and the canon law. Virtually all looked to the Bible for daily guidance, which made sermons and the interpretive abilities of ministers all-important. Rare were the Puritans who did not deplore the drunkenness, laziness, corruption, and carousing they saw prevalent in the land. So great was religious dissention in England that it served as the basis of an event that both confirmed and fueled James' own paranoia. On November 5, 1605, on a day when the king was supposed to open a session of Parliament, Guy Fawkes and four other Catholic dissenters were caught attempting to blow up the House of Lords. Arrested and tried, the conspirators were executed, but a fresh wave of anti-Catholic sentiments washed across England. Nothing, if not sly, King James used these growing negative feelings to his advantage. James vehemently disliked the Puritans who had become excessively demanding of their king, resulting in the first wave of English immigrants to North America. The Puritans were comprised of English Protestants who followed the teachings of James Calvin and wanted to purify the Church of England of all Roman Catholic Ceremony and decoration, hence the name Puritans. Their religious beliefs were identical to those of the Huguenots in France, the Presbyterians in Scotland and the Calvinists of the United Provinces, Germany and, of course, Geneva. Whether a sly attempt to appease his Puritan critics or whether a product of Byzantine thinking, James did manage to commission an authorized version of the Bible, printed in English in 1611. His attempt at divine notwithstanding, the king’s relationship with Parliament was steadily eroding. In the collective eyes of Parliament the king was less than credible, and politicians blamed him for extravagant spending, inflation and bungled foreign policies further discrediting him. Parliament flatly refused to disburse funds to a king who ignored their concerns. Succeeding his father, Charles fared no better, inheriting James’ never-ending financial problems. Charles had been a weak, sickly boy who ascended to the throne of his father whose strong will would ultimately lead to a showdown with Parliament and thrust England into a civil war. Charles' advancement of his father's failed policies coupled with his marriage to a devoutly Catholic French princess and her devotion to put the needs of
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her Catholic friends above those of the realm further divided the country, ultimately ending his 11-year rule leading to a civil war. The long fuse burning down to England’s Civil War quickened after Charles’ attempt to force a new prayer book on the Scottish, who rebelled immediately. Unfortunately for Charles, the timing could not come at a worse time. The seeds of financial difficulties sown by his father, King James, now bore bitter fruit; Charles' forces were ill prepared to fight due to lack of proper funds. Charles’ struggle to hold onto his crown and forge his will on the country divided England between two groups that were focused on two main issues: religion and the economy. On one side, supporters of the monarchy, made up largely of peasants and nobility of Protestant roots faced off against supporters of Parliament who were comprised of the emerging middle class and tradesmen of the Puritanical movement. Even within both groups of supporters there was great disparity about the changing English way of life. The Puritans’ basic religious beliefs, for example, of simple order of worship and a simple organization of the church would ultimately force them to boldly leave king and country and venture a nearly three month trans-Atlantic trek to a strange new world that held the promise of a better life. A band of Puritans, under the leadership of William Brewster in 1608, had tried unsuccessfully to start anew. They fled from England to Holland to avoid persecution, a move that led to other similarly small groups breaking away from the Church of England. Although the exodus was well intentioned, from their perspective, it was while in Holland that they discovered they preferred farming to city life and also grew to fear their children were becoming more Dutch than English. There was also the looming threat of war between Spain and Holland. They longed to return to their English way of life, and at the same time, still keep their own kind of worship. The only alternative, their only salvation as they saw it, was the New Land in America. So, in July 1620 Brewster’s group returned to England to prepare for their bold trip into the unknown: the trans-Atlantic voyage to the New World.
Initially the plan was for the voyage to be made in two vessels, the Mayflower and the Speedwell. However, the Speedwell kept leaking forcing the Mayflower to make the trans-Atlantic trip alone. Finally, on September 6, 1620, Mayflower set sail with her passengers, crew and cargo from Plymouth, England, for the new world. The intended destination was a section of land in the area near the Hudson River. Forced off course by poor weather, the Mayflower arrived at Cape Cod after 66 days at sea. As a result of the delay, the settlers did not arrive until the onset of winter, which made adapting to their new surroundings difficult for them.
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On December 28, 1620, just two days after arriving, the 41 men agreed upon and signed a document they named the Mayflower Compact, establishing a form of local government in which the colonists agreed to abide by majority rule and to cooperate for the general good of the colony. The Compact set a precedent that other colonies soon followed, as they began establishing and setting up their own governments. While the colonists stood for the first time on the snow-covered ground of New England, they could feel the trans-Atlantic tug of their homeland like a gravitational pull on their emotional heartstrings. While many had left behind family and friends to seek out fulfillment of their new lives in this new land, they were still very much connected to the world they left behind. Although not yet American, they were still English, Spanish and French. The Mayflower was the beginning of the next wave that followed English explorers, who in the 16th century, were sent to the New World in order to seek passage to the Indies. However, the English Parliament gradually became convinced that establishing colonies overseas would provide a source of raw materials for the country’s expanding industries and a market for its manufactured goods. Settlements began to grow and dot the New England territory and, as residents began populating, spreading ever westward, the vast wilderness of the New World slowly became dissected. And still, waves of émigrés came by the shipload – inspired by the success of those who had gone before. But the reality of life in the New World was a cold slap in the face to the frontier stories that had were being told across the Atlantic. Stirred by the success of Spanish explorers who had found gold in South America, approximately 100 men and young boys landed in present-day Virginia in 1607 and founded Jamestown after sailing from England. They soon discovered, however, a hostile environment that threatened to destroy their little colony. Insatiability, not democracy, ruled the New World. Fishermen in New England and Canada competed on the Grand Banks in the North Atlantic. Likewise, Colonial fur traders and their Indian allies vied for product, customers and sales territory stretching from Spanish Florida to English Hudson Bay. Mistrust and fear ran deep among the early Colonists, each having packed their own subset of religious, political and ethnic luggage to take with them for the great adventure. English Protestants, for example, detested the French and Spanish because they were Catholics, and they tended to blame them for their troubles with the Indians, whether there was good reason or not. In Europe the English, French and Spanish trinity was repeatedly engaged in war, and each time war broke out, the colonies in America were swept up into the conflict, as were the Indians, with one group of settlers pitted against another. Of course, measured by the size of the wars in Europe, the colonial hostilities were strictly small scale, tiny by comparison to the conflicts in Europe that triggered them.
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The English colonists preferred to name the wars after their monarchs; these were other people's wars, not their own. They named the European War of the League of Augsburg (1689-1697) King William's War and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) Queen Anne's War. King George's War (1740-1748) was their name for the War of Jenkins' Ear against Spain and the War of the Austrian Succession against France. The fighting in these conflicts consisted mainly of surprise attacks on frontier settlements and raids on strong points such as Port Royal in Nova Scotia, Fort Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island off the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, and St. Augustine and other Spanish posts in Florida. The colonies were merely pawns in these wars; though casualties at times were heavy, relatively few Americans participated in the fighting and those who did were militiamen, not regular army soldiers. Colonists had almost no influence on the peace settlements. For example, the New Englanders who captured Fort Louisbourg during King George's War were dismayed when the British returned the fort to France under the terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The French and Indian War (1754-1763) was a different in size, in how it started, in how it was fought, and in its significance. By 1750, fur traders and land speculators in Pennsylvania and Virginia were becoming interested in the lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, a region long claimed by France. When the French built a line of forts south from Lake Erie to the headwaters of the Ohio River in what is now western Pennsylvania, Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia sent a young surveyor named George Washington to protest. Washington returned in January 1754 with word that the French refused to withdraw. Dinwiddie then sent him back with 150-armed men, but a larger French force defeated this little army. The British government then sent 1,400 Redcoats commanded by Gen. Edward Braddock to Virginia to drive the French out of the disputed territory. In July 1755, however, the French and Indians in the forest south of Fort Duquesne ambushed Braddock’s army, accompanied by a small colonial force under Washington. Braddock was killed and the remnants of his expedition driven back into Virginia. What historians called, ‘the Great War for the Empire’ had begun. In 1756 the conflict spread to Europe and eventually to Asia, with the British, in alliance with Prussia, opposing Austria and Spain as well as France. In North America the war went badly for the Anglo-American armies at first, despite the fact that they vastly outnumbered the French. The tide turned, however, after William Pitt became virtual prime minister of Great Britain in 1757. Realizing that control of an entire continent was at stake, Pitt committed masses of troops, powerful fleets, and huge sums to the contest, and he found and swiftly promoted talented officers, most notably James Wolfe and Jeffrey Amherst, to top commands. Wolfe and Amherst recaptured Fort Louisbourg in the summer of 1758, and the next year the British mounted a three-pronged drive that resulted in the capture of Fort Niagara in the west, Fort Crown Point at the southern end of Lake Champlain in New York, and Quebec on the St. Lawrence. In July 1760 Montreal was captured and the last French
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resistance in Canada collapsed. British victories elsewhere in the world followed and in 1763 what was referred to in Europe as the Seven Years' War ended with the signing of the Peace of Paris. Canada and all of North America east of the Mississippi River, including Spanish Florida, became British territory. For the English colonists the triumph appeared to open a new era of peace and prosperity. Gratitude to the British was universal. British soldiers had borne the brunt of the fighting, and Britain had paid most of the cost of maintaining their own troops and the large numbers of colonials who took up arms. A Massachusetts town was named after General Amherst, and Fort Duquesne, the capture of which had frustrated Washington and Braddock in the 1750s, was renamed Fort Pitt. Within a decade this universal spirit of admiration and loyalty was replaced by scorn and revolution. Changes in British policy, particularly Parliament's attempt to tax the colonies, was the chief cause of the change. But the roots of the break can be located in the relations of British and American soldiers during the war. The Americans admired the courage and professional skills of the Redcoats, but they were shocked by their profanity and lewdness and horrified by the imperiousness and brutality of their officers, who could condemn a man to death for refusing to obey an order and who thought nothing of administering hundreds of lashes to soldiers caught gambling. For their part British officers characterized colonial troops as dirty, cowardly, and disorganized, "the world's worst soldiers." They used them mostly for fatigue duty and as camp guards. This belief explains why, for example, General Thomas Gage assumed that "rebels" would run at the very sight of Redcoat bayonets and marched his men in close ranks against entrenched Patriots at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. Such opinions reflected the degree to which English and colonial values and traditions had diverged, and they suggest that separation of the two societies was not merely possible but probably inevitable. THE WARS
The Pequot War: 1637 From the outset an uneasy truce existed between the European colonists and the Native Americans. While both groups sometimes cooperated, fear became an overriding emotion among the settlers that continued to grow, producing a relentless displacement of the Natives from the most favorable parts of the land. Understandably, Native Americans frequently resisted this process and did so violently. The unsettled peace was broken in1637 when fighting broke out between the Pequot Indian tribe and the New England settlers in what was to become the first of many wars
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between whites and Indians. The Pequot was a warlike tribe that lived along the Thames River in southeastern Connecticut. By 1630, under their chief, Sassacus, the tribe had pushed west to the Connecticut River. There they had numerous quarrels with colonists, culminating in the murder by the Pequot of John Oldham, a trader, on July 20, 1636. The following month, Governor John Endicott of Massachusetts Bay Colony organized a military force to punish the Indians for the killing. On May 26, 1637, the first battle of the Pequot War took place when the New Englanders, under John Mason and John Underhill, attacked the Indian stronghold near present-day New Haven. The Indian forts were burned and about 500 men, women, and children were killed. The survivors fled in small groups. One group, led by Sassacus, was caught on July 28 and nearly all were killed or captured. The colonists made many of the captives slaves; others were sold in the West Indies. Mohawk Indians put Sassacus and the few who escaped with him to death. The few remaining Pequot were scattered among other southern New England tribes.
King Philip’s War: 1675 - 1676 King Philip's War was not only a general Indian uprising resulting from a continued expansion of the English colonies in New England, but in fact was one of the most disastrous wars in America’s history, As the first generation of settlers began to die off, the uneasy alliance and the personal bonds, which had helped to create a working peace, ended. Differing ways of life and use of the land, two major divergences that existed between both cultures, had caused increased tension for many years. Another continuing problem was that the colonist’s livestock was trampling Native cornfields. While legally responsible for the damage, the colonists were not held liable because such laws were difficult to enforce in remote areas. Increased competition for resources such as land for planting, hunting and fishing merely exacerbated the growing friction between the two groups. The world was changing, particularly for the bewildered Native American. Economically, the Indians saw the fur trade collapse, leading many Native People to support themselves by selling their land. With the governments of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut competing to establish their territories, Plymouth wanted exclusive rights to purchase land from the Wampanoag. All the Indians in the area were trapped in a decreasing area between the expanding colonies along the coasts and the even more hostile Iroquois and Mohican tribes to the west. The smallpox epidemics and the Pequot War had reduced native population and brought 40 years of relative peace. It was the bloodiest of the Indian wars in terms of relative casualties; several tribes were virtually or totally eliminated. One in every ten soldier on either side was killed in the conflict. The war proved a critical turning point by destroying the interdependent world
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constructed jointly by the first generation of white colonists and Native Americans and replacing it with a new culture in which native peoples were marginalized and the white settlers were dominant. Philip was the Christian name assigned to Metacomet, the Chief of the Wampanoag Indians. Massachusetts’s colonial settlers frequently referred to the Native chiefs as Kings. Philip had become chief in 1662 and he increased the contact between the Wampanoag and the colonists. By 1670 the entire area from the Atlantic west to the Connecticut River Valley was still mostly wilderness, but had 40 or 50 colonial towns and villages scattered throughout with a similar number of Indian settlements interspersed, sometimes side-byside. After several incidents, the court in Plymouth forced Philip’s band to turn over many of their firearms to the colony in 1671. But this only increased tensions. Just below the surface of apprehension was the attempted conversion of the natives. Many settlers were attempting, and sometimes succeeding, to convert the Indians to Puritanism. Those who were converted were called "praying Indians". But conversion came with a heavy price; some natives were killed when they attempted to resist following the white man’s God. The spark that ignited the war was a controversial report from a "praying Indian" named John Sassamon. He wrote of an Indian conspiracy to attack the European settlements. Before the charges could be investigated, Sassamon was found murdered in a pond, allegedly by Wampanoag angry at his betrayal. The settlers arrested three Indians from the area, convicted them of his murder, and hanged them on June 8, 1675 at Plymouth. The Wampanoag believed the trial and sentencing was an insult, and the incident inflamed tempers further. In 1675, hostilities broke out in the town of Swansea, and the war was on. It spread as far north as New Hampshire, and as far southwest as Connecticut. Not all Native People, however, sided with Philip. Most Natives who had converted to Christianity fought with the English or remained neutral. The English, however, did not always trust these converts and interned many of them in camps on outlying islands. The war quickly spread, and soon involved the Podunk and Nipmuch tribes. During the summer of 1675 the Indians attacked at Mendon, Brookfield, and Lancaster. In early September they attacked Deerfield, Hadley, and Northfield. The New England Confederation declared war on the Indians on September 9, 1675. The next colonial expedition was soundly defeated in the battle of Bloody Brook near Hadley on September 18. The attacks on frontier settlements continued at Springfield and soon after, Hatfield. The next expansion to the war came from the colonists. On November 2, Josiah Winslow led a force from Plymouth to attack the Narragansett tribe. The Narragansett had not yet been involved in the war, but they occupied desirable land throughout the colonies, and the colonial view was that any Indian was an enemy. Several Indian towns were burned,
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and in December the Narragansett stronghold in Rhode Island was taken. About 300 Indians were killed and winter stores destroyed, but most of the warriors escaped into the swamp. Facing a winter without food and shelter the Narragansett joined the uprising. Throughout the winter of 1675-1676 the Indians destroyed an increasing number of frontier settlements. In the spring of 1676 the combined tribes reached and attacked Plymouth Plantation on March 12. Even though the town withstood the assault, they had shown that they could attack anywhere. All but five of the outlying settlements were deserted, and the colonists were thrown back on the seacoast. In May a militia force of 200, led by William Turner, set out from Springfield to destroy a camp of the Indians who had raided Hatfield. At dawn on May 14 they attacked the sleeping camp, and killed about 200 Indians. In a strategic blunder, they had not considered their withdrawal. Surrounding camps closed in, and half the force, including Captain Turner, never made it home. To compound this, in their absence, some braves got into Springfield and burned substantial parts of the town. Native soldiers fighting on the side of the colonists helped turn the tide of the war. This had become a war of attrition, and both sides were determined to eliminate the other. The Indians had nearly succeeded in driving their enemy into the sea, but their supplies were running out. The colonists continued to be supplied by sea, and although the war ultimately cost them over £100,000, they would emerge victorious. The Indian hopes for supplies from the French were not met, except for some ammunition in Maine. The colonists allied themselves with the Mohican tribe to the west, and King Philip found his forces surrounded. With the help of the Mohicans, the colonists won at Hadley on June 12, and scattered the survivors into the wilds of New Hampshire. Later that month, a force of 250 Indians was routed near Marlboro. The colonial militia had asked for aid from Britain. Britain went to protect its colony and investment. Philip's allies began to desert him. By early July, over 400 had surrendered to the colonists, and Philip himself had taken refuge in a Swamp near Providence, Rhode Island. He was ultimately defeated when he was tracked down by Rangers, led by Captain Benjamin Church at Mt. Hope where he was shot and killed by an Indian member of the group named John Alderman on August 12. With his death, the war was largely over. The casualties for both sides were high: over 600 colonists and 3,000 Indians had been killed. Several hundred more natives who had surrendered or been captured were sold as slaves in the Caribbean. Members of the Chief’s extended family were placed for safekeeping among colonists in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. Some colonists married their Christianized captives. Other survivors were forced to join more western tribes, mainly as captives. The Narragansett, Wampanoag, Podunk, Nipmuch, and several smaller bands were virtually eliminated, while the Mohicans was greatly weakened.
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Because the British forces had bailed the settlers out of a lot of trouble, the British soldiers were already in the colony of Massachusetts. Since it was expensive to ship the soldiers back, they stayed in the colony. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were now fully open to European colonization.
King William's War (1690-1697) Like his countrymen, King James of England was extremely religious. Unlike his subjects, the vast majority of which were Protestants, the king’s religion was that of Rome. England’s population most likely would have submitted to a Catholic king had he not used his official power to try to convert the nation to Catholicism. In three short years, from the time of his accession to the throne in 1685 the unrest in England increased, until the opposition was so formidable that the monarch fled his kingdom and took refuge in France. James’ daughter, Mary and her husband William became the joint sovereigns of England. Louis XIV, the king of France, was a Catholic and in full sympathy with James who believed that it was wrong for the people to change sovereigns, and espoused the cause of his dear, godly friend; war between the two nations was inevitable. Although confined to England and France the war spilled over into America, as King William rejected a request of neutrality from the colonists. The King’s would have none of that and his action labeled the conflict, at least among the Anglo-Americans, as ‘King William’s War.’ The English colonies had long watched the French encroachments on the north and through the vast Mississippi basin. Each was jealous of the other concerning the fisheries and the fur trade. But the subtext to the war was the intense feeling of religion. The New England colonies were wholly Protestant except Maryland, although the Protestants held a large majority. New France, on the other hand, was purely Catholic and the two forms of Christianity had not yet learned to dwell together, or near together, in harmony. King William's War was very different in aim and meaning in the colonies from what it was beyond the Atlantic. In America it was the first of several fierce contests, covering seventy years; or, it may be said, it was the beginning of a seventy years' war with intervals of peace, for the supremacy in North America. The war began by a series of Indian massacres instigated by Louis de Buade, comte de Frontenac et de Palluau, the governor of Canada. The first of these was the destruction of Dover, New Hampshire, a town of fifty inhabitants. One night in July 1689, two squaws came to the home of Major Waldron and begged a night's lodging from the elder military officer. In the middle of the night while the rest of the members of the household were asleep, the two Native women got up and let in a large number of Indians. They band of warriors killed Waldron but not before they tortured him unmercifully and without end.
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The town was burned to the ground, about half the people were massacred, and the remainder were carried away and sold into slavery. The following month the small town of Pemaquid, Maine, met a similar fate. In February 1690, a body of French and Indians, sent by Frontenac, came to the town of Schenectady on the Mohawk. With dreadful yells they fell upon the sleeping village. In a few hours it was all over; the town was laid in ashes. More than 60 settlers were massacred, many were taken captive, a few escaped into the night and reached Albany. The towns of Casco and Salmon Falls soon after met a similar fate. A spirit of war raced throughout the colonies like a musket shot. One casualty of war that the settlers did not anticipate was the debt of the colony to pay for munitions to fight prolonged battles. It had reached an enormous figure, and to meet it, bills of credit, or paper money, were issued to the amount of £40,000. King William was hard pressed at home, and he left the colonies to fight their own battles, further eroding relations with the homeland. The war dragged on for several years until1697 when a treaty of peace was signed at Ryswick, a village near The Hague, and the cruel war was temporarily over. Acadia, which had been prematurely incorporated with Massachusetts, was restored to France. But this treaty was only a truce. The English and French nations had not learned to love each other, and the questions in dispute had made no progress toward settlement. After the death of William and Mary the crown of England settled next to Anne, the sister of Mary in 1702 on Anne, less than a year after James, the exiled king, died in France. The French sovereign, still meddling in English affairs of state, proclaimed James’ son, known as James the Pretender, king of England. This act alone was reason enough to ignite another war, but another provocation did the deed. King Louis of France placed his grandson, Philip of Anjon, on the throne of Spain, thus greatly increasing his power among the dynasties of Europe. It was all that the English could stand. They found this act more distasteful than the one that sparked King William’s war, and the conflict that followed was known as the War of the Spanish Succession. In America, however, it was called Queen Anne's War.
Queen Anne's War (1702-1714) After a brief season of peace the colonists were obliged to face another long and murderous war. Unresolved conflicts from the King William’s war fueled waves acrimony and rancor. In character this war was similar to that which preceded it, a territorial contest over Acadia and New France, consisting of surprises and bloody massacres.
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Early in the conflict the coast of Maine was swept by bands of savage red men and equally savage Frenchmen, and hundreds of men, women, and children were tomahawked or carried away into captivity. On an intensely cold morning in February 1704, at daybreak, a party of nearly four hundred French and Indians swept down on the town of Deerfield, and with their terrible war cry began their work of destruction and slaughter. A few years later Haverhill, Massachusetts, met with a fate similar to that of Deerfield. In 1710 the British government, having at last decided to aid its colonies, sent a small fleet under Colonel Nicholson, which was joined by an armament from Boston. It was the beginning of a number of successful strikes by English soldiers. The fleet consisted of nine war vessels, sixty transports, and numerous smaller craft, bearing in all twelve thousand men. Nothing like it had ever before been seen in American waters. In August 1711, this imposing fleet moved northward, and at the same time a land force of twentythree hundred men under Colonel Nicholson started for Montreal by way of Lake Champlain. The objective was to strike at New France, and add all of Canada to the British dominions in America. But there was one fatal obstacle to success, and that was Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker who, although heavily armed and fortified with troops, not only lacked the capacity to command such a force, but was also wanting in courage. The whole movement came to nothing. Walker lost eight ships and a thousand men in a dense fog at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and refused to go further, believing that the disaster was a blessing in disguise, a merciful intervention of Providence to save his men from "freezing, starvation, and cannibalism." Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, the Governor-General of Canada, heard of the enemy's approach and was prepared as best he could. The people were thrown into a state of wild consternation; but when they heard of the disastrous failure of the fleet, they rejoiced and praised God that He had preserved them and dashed their enemy to pieces. Both nations were now weary of the war, resulting in the Treaty of Utrecht under which Acadia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay territory were ceded by France to England; and the Five Nations of Native Indians were acknowledged to be British subjects. The aging king of France used the last efforts in his power to avoid giving up Acadia, but did not have it in him to fight to the end. Like the Treaty of Ryswick sixteen years before, the Peace of Utrecht, was only a nominal fix that would remain unbroken for 30 years. The treaty did not mark the boundary between the British colonies and Canada. The great problems in America were left unsettled, questions that would eventually have to be settled, if not through negotiations then on the battlefield. But there was another question of far greater importance, and that was whether France or England would obtain control of the great Mississippi valley.
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England and France would, like two crouching tigers, lay in wait for more than two decades for the right time to pounce. In the meantime, the French spent this season of peace strengthening their hold on the Mississippi Valley. France had now two strategic footholds in North America, one amid the Canadian snow and the other in the tropical regions of the South. But two thousand miles of wilderness lay between the two extremes, and the French knew that to hold it something more than merely claiming it must be done. They began to build a chain of forts, or military posts. They built forts at Niagara, Detroit, and other points, to guard the great lakes, and they even encroached on the soil of New York and built a fort at Crown Point. They founded Vincennes and Kaskaskia, in Illinois, and pushed still further southward, while from the Gulf of Mexico they moved northward, establishing one post after another. By the middle of the eighteenth century there were more than sixty forts between Montreal and New Orleans. France now claimed all of North America from Mexico and Florida to the Arctic Ocean. King George's War (1744-1748) Although referred to in America by English and French settlers as King George’s War, the conflict bore no resemblance whatsoever to the War of the Austrian Succession, which is what it was known as in Europe. Upon the death of Charles VI, emperor of Austria, in 1740, the male line of the House of Hapsburg became extinct. Although there were other claimants, the emperor’s eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, ascended the Austrian throne a move that brought on a war of tremendous dimensions, embroiling nearly all the nations of Europe. Once again, France and England were on opposite sides. For the most part, the war was confined to Europe and had little impact in America, aside from the usual Indian massacres. The one great event that marks King George's War is the capture of Louisburg. Louisburg was built on a point of land on Cape Breton Island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River commanding the chief entrance to the great watercourse. It was a powerful fortress, costing six million dollars to build, and taking twenty years to construct. Her high masonry walls made the fort the pride of the French heart in America. She was regarded by New France and in Europe as an impregnable fortress that would keep out every intruder and baffle every foe. So it was an embarrassment to the French that Louisburg, the apple of their military eye, was reduced and captured by a fleet of a few thousand soldiers, made up chiefly of New England farmers and fishermen.
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New England furnished the men, while Pennsylvania sent some provisions, and New York a small amount of artillery. The fleet was composed of something over a hundred vessels of various grades, and just before sailing four English men-of-war from the West Indies joined the small armada. In May 1745, this motley fleet and its crew landed at the walls of Louisburg, and despite every effort of the French to drive them back the militia held their ground. The siege continued for six weeks, when a French war vessel of sixty-four guns, laden with military stores, came to the rescue of the fort. At least, that was the plan. The ship was captured by the English fleet in open view of the helpless men besieged in the fort. The garrison could hold out no longer. By the middle of June the fort surrendered, and the British flag soon waved over the walls of Louisburg. The French king was astonished at the fall of his great fortress in America and set about immediately, determined to recapture it. He sent a fleet to do just that, but the captain died and his successor committed suicide, bringing the project to a halt. The king tried to mount another effort to regain his beloved fort the following year, but the English captured the fleet halting all future efforts and forcing England and France back to the negotiation table. The result was the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Which restored to each power what it had possessed before the war, meaning that Louisburg had to be returned to the French. A huge wave of fury swept over the English colonies when they learned that the fruit of their great victory had been quietly handed back, without their knowledge or consent, to the enemy from whom it had been taken. This, in the minds of the Anglo-Americans in New England, was the final straw and one of the root causes that led the colonists in later years to determine that American affairs must be managed in America and not by a corps of diplomats three thousand miles across the sea, who had little interest in the welfare and future of their kindred in the New World.
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