A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (13 page)

When governors and other officials of the empire, such as tax collectors and naval officers, administered the laws, they did so with considerable laxity, waiving or reducing duties in cases of friendship or outright bribery (which was widespread because of the low pay of the administrators). For the most part, the administrators approached the Navigation Acts with a policy of salutary or benign neglect, postponing any serious harms contained in the taxes until the laws were enforced in the future. This process of benign neglect may well have continued indefinitely had a critical event not forced a change in the enforcement of the laws: the last of the colonial wars, the French and Indian War.

Franco-British Warfare, 1689–1748

Tensions between England, France, and Spain led to several European conflicts with American theaters. In America, King William’s War (1689–97), Queen Anne’s War (1701–13), the War of Jenkins’s Ear (1739–42), King George’s War (1744–48), and the French and Indian War (1756–63) served as provincial mirrors of European rivalry. The first two conflicts saw fierce fighting in both the southern and northern colonies, from the Caribbean to Canada. In the South, Spain allied with France to fight British sailors and soldiers over the contested lands lying between the Carolinas and Florida (Georgia was not yet a colony). The northern theater of King William’s and Queen Anne’s wars saw naval and land forces clash throughout the Atlantic maritime region—the modern-day Canadian provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, and the American states of New York and Maine. The St. Lawrence River Valley outpost of Quebec and the Atlantic coastal towns of Louisbourg, Falmouth, and Port Royal became coveted prizes in both of these colonial wars.

Queen Anne’s War resulted in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, with France ceding Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to England. This, and the War of Jenkins’s Ear, almost seamlessly merged with King George’s War (known in Europe as the War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–48).
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In the American theater, Britain, again pitted against the French, focused on the north, especially the important French naval base at Louisbourg. Located on Cape Breton Island, just north of Nova Scotia, Louisbourg guarded the entrance to the all-important St. Lawrence River. In a daring and uncharacteristic move, American colonials grabbed the military initiative themselves. Massachusetts governor William Shirley raised money and troops to launch a 1745 attack led by Maine colonel William Pepperrell. On June 17, 1745, Pepperrell and his 4,000 troops successfully captured Louisbourg, the “Gibraltar of the New World.”

Despite the glorious Louisbourg victory, King George’s War dragged on inconclusively for two and a half more years. Savage guerrilla warfare stretched from Spanish Florida/Georgia to Vermont, western Massachusetts, and the frontiers of New York and Maine. The 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle was more of a truce than a true conclusion to the war, and it greatly disappointed the American colonists by returning Louisbourg and other French territories (though not Nova Scotia) to France.

Inadvertently, King George’s War created what would soon become a unique American subculture—the Louisiana Cajuns. Before the end of the war, Governor William Shirley pointed to the dangers posed by French nationals residing in British (formerly French) Nova Scotia. Shirley feared that these Acadians, who still bore the name of their old province in France, would remain loyal to France and would thus constitute an “enemy within” the British colonies. Even after King George’s War came to a close, fear of the Acadians remained strong. In 1755, at the start of the French and Indian War, Nova Scotia’s governor, Colonel Charles Lawrence, expelled six thousand Acadians to the lower thirteen American colonies. This Acadian diaspora saw some of the exiles return to France and the French Caribbean, whereas others trickled back to Nova Scotia. However, sixteen hundred Acadians trekked to Louisiana between 1765 and 1785. Although the Gulf Coast climate and geography proved a drastic change, they sought the familiarity and protection of Franco-American culture. Today these French Cajuns (a slurred version of “Acadian”) still reside in or near the marshes and Louisiana bayous where they fled more than 250 years ago, retaining a speech pattern as impenetrable as it was in the 1700s.

Returned to its 1713 boundaries after King George’s War, Britain’s fifteen-hundred-mile-long American territory was thin, often extending no farther than a hundred miles inland. Huge chunks of unsettled open territory divided the colonial towns, and genuine differences in regional culture split the American colonies further. Still, for all their internal disagreements, the British colonies had distinct advantages over the French in any American conflict. France’s unwillingness to encourage colonial settlement weakened its military designs in the New World. England could transport troops from home, and her colonies could also draw upon local militias, which meant that despite the fact that the population of New France had doubled since 1660, the population of the British colonies, 1.5 million, greatly exceeded that of the 60,000 French in North America. Moreover, the British, taking advantage of a navy much superior to France’s, could command seacoasts, trading ports, and major rivers.

The latter advantage proved particularly acute when considering that the French hitched their fate to the success of fur trading operations. Important port cities like New Orleans (founded 1718), Biloxi, and Mobile in the South and Detroit, Montreal, and Quebec in the North rivaled Boston, Philadelphia, and other Atlantic urban areas, but they were vulnerable to surgical attacks by the British navy, even to the extent that the inland waterways (especially the St. Lawrence River) became primary targets. France’s trading strategy of sparse settlement and an emphasis on fur trading left her only one significant asset: her good relations with the Indians.

Advantages provided by alliances with Indians, however, could not overcome the vulnerabilities created by making fur trading the cornerstone of the French economic and colonial policy. The wars with England exposed these weaknesses, wherein the small French population and nonexistent industrial base proved incapable of raising, equipping, and supporting large militias in North America. Even with their Indian allies, the French found themselves outnumbered and, more important, outproduced in every geopolitical conflict with England. Worse, the French had tied themselves to allies who did not embrace the Western way of war, rendering them even less effective than other traditional European armies.

Meanwhile, the Indians, who realized that the English settlers were arriving like locusts, were pushed toward the French, although each tribe had to weave its own tapestry of diplomatic alliances carefully and shrewdly. Indeed, northeastern Indians, unlike those in most other regions, shared a common threat: the Iroquois Confederacy, made up of the Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras. Fresh from a total victory over the Hurons, the Iroquois established themselves as a force in the region. For a time, they managed to maintain neutrality between the British and the French, all the while realizing that they must eventually choose a side.

Initially, the Iroquois favored the British by allowing English traders into their territories, a practice that convinced the French that British colonists soon would follow in greater numbers. French troops therefore moved into the Ohio Valley in the late 1740s, building forts as a buffer against further English expansion, determined to demonstrate control over the trans-Appalachian frontier lands by occupation—something the British had never done systematically. From 1749 to 1754, France continued this construction program, establishing outposts at strategic points that guarded the approaches to Canada, producing a situation where British settlers and speculators were almost certain to bump up against them.

The French and Indian War

France’s eviction from North America began in 1753, when Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie dispatched an expedition against Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania. At the head of the militia was a young patrician landowner and surveyor, George Washington.
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Meeting early success, Washington reached the Ohio Valley, where he defeated a tiny force of Canadians, then constructed Fort Necessity near the French outpost. In 1754 a French counterattack captured Fort Necessity and forced a bloodless surrender by Washington—hardly an auspicious start for the American Revolution’s “indispensable man.” Still, the encounter showed something of Washington’s mettle: he wrote that he “heard the bullets whistle and…there is something charming in the sound.”
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Of more immediate concern to Washington and his fellow Virginians, however, was the fact that the episode signaled the American origins of the French and Indian War, called the Seven Years’ War in Europe.

Leaders of the thirteen colonies, virtually all of whom faced a threat from either the French or the Indians, decided in 1754 that they had to unify to meet the enemy. The English government agreed, and it instructed them to negotiate a treaty with the Iroquois. Representatives from all the New England colonies, as well as Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York met in Albany in 1754 and quickly concluded an agreement with the five northern tribes. Some delegates used the gathering for more than concluding a nonaggression pact with the natives, however. Benjamin Franklin, a representative from Pennsylvania, proposed a plan of union that would create a federal council composed of delegates from all the colonies. Under Franklin’s Albany Plan, the council would have the power to treat with the Indians, levy taxes, and raise armies. Delegates approved the plan, but the colonial assemblies rejected the concept, fearing that it would infringe on the independence of the individual colonies.

Meanwhile, Washington’s capitulation at Fort Necessity proved only the first British disaster of the war. A year later, General Edward Braddock led a second expedition of 2,500 men against Fort Duquesne. After failing to capture the fort, Braddock retreated in column formation through the thick forests, where French and Indian forces ambushed his troops and slaughtered them. Braddock was killed in the battle, and the apparent British incompetence in forest warfare encouraged the Indians to step up their activities on behalf of the French. Only the Iroquois refused to ally with France. However, the threat from other tribes on the frontier grew so substantial that many English settlers removed themselves eastward of the Allegheny Mountains.

The northern theater of the French and Indian War proved the most critical. There, in 1756, France appointed the Marquis de Montcalm as the commander of the Canadian forces. A capable military leader, Montcalm assessed the situation as less than favorable for France, but he nevertheless launched effective preemptive strikes to stabilize the approaches to Canada. Within one year, he had captured the British forts Oswego and William Henry.
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Montcalm also built Fort Ticonderoga, a new post on Lake Champlain. At the beginning of 1757, the entry points to French territory remained secure. Britain’s new secretary of state, William Pitt, responded to French successes by forging a policy of total war that would simultaneously quell Britain’s enemies in India, Africa, the West Indies, America, and on the high seas. Pitt’s bold plan carried a high price tag: in America he mustered a 50,000-man army, counting colonial militia, and appointed two young generals—Jeffrey Amherst and James Wolfe—to attack the French forts. Those forces captured Louisbourg and Fort Frontenac (and thereby Lake Ontario) by 1758, and avenged Braddock by retaking Fort Duquesne. The following year Pitt believed he was ready for a master stroke. He ordered General James Wolfe to deliver France the “knockout punch” at Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River. The sickly General Wolfe, though only thirty-two years old, possessed a fierce martial spirit. He used the availability of a British naval superiority of two hundred ships to land a 10,000-man force at the foot of the steep cliffs of Quebec City.

After seven weeks of unsuccessful maneuvering, Wolfe located unguarded paths leading up to the bluffs and on the evening of September 12, 1759, marched 4,500 men up to the Plains of Abraham. There, Wolfe controlled the supply routes to Quebec, and his presence constituted a threat to the entire French colony. Had Montcalm waited inside the city’s walls, he might have been relieved, but he lacked confidence in the French navy (with good reason), and embarked on a hurried, ill-conceived attack outside the fort. In the ensuing fifteen-minute battle, Montcalm was wounded (he died a day later) and Wolfe killed.
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By the end of September thirteenth, however, the British held the field, and four days later they marched into Quebec. A year later Montreal itself fell.
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Peace might have been imminent had Spain not entered into the war in 1762. This was too late for Spain to affect the war’s outcome, but allowed sufficient time for her to fully embarrass herself. Soon Britain relieved Spain of Gibralter, Cuba (later traded back to Spain for western Florida), and the Philippines (also later restored to Spain). The war ended in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris, in which France gave England her colonies in India—then considered the most important booty of war. As a reward for loyalty and alliance, France had earlier awarded Spain the Louisiana Territory, which Spain held until giving it back to Napoleon and France in 1802.

The long-term significance of the treaty involved the transfer of Canada and all French possessions east of the Mississippi (and north of Florida and Louisiana) to England. Great Britain now possessed nearly the entirety of eastern North America—an empire unimaginable a few decades earlier.

Enter King George III

In 1760 a young, inexperienced, and not particularly bright George III ascended to the throne as king of Great Britain and presided over the glorious conclusion to the French and Indian War. The first of the Hanoverian monarchs to speak English (instead of low German) as his primary language, the good-looking George III fathered fifteen children and developed a reputation as a solid family man. His domesticity earned him the nickname among the people of the Farmer, and what he lacked in intellect he made up for with hard work.