On June 29 the expedition reached the Allegheny, where the men halted. With great ceremony Céloron ordered the ranks to attention. Father Bonnecamps said a few prayers as Céloron buried an engraved lead plate announcing the French king's claim to the territory. Then, with equal dignity, he nailed to a large tree a plaque emblazoned with the king's arms. Céloron and his men continued south to the Ohio. En route they encountered British traders; Céloron told them they were trespassing and ordered them out. On one occasion he gave to a party of Englishmen a letter addressed to the governor of Pennsylvania, warning His Excellency about the perils of trespassing on the French king's lands.
Not surprisingly, burying lead plates and tossing out errant traders had minimal effect. At Logstown on the Ohio the Indians were bold enough to declare to Céloron "that the land was theirs and that while there were any Indians in those Parts they would trade with their Brothers the English."4 Despite Céloron's bluster and engraved lead plates, the Indians knew that in a few days the French tide would ebb and the British would flow back.
From Logstown the French floated down the Ohio to the Miami River. At the junction of the two rivers Céloron buried his last plate and then turned north. The party stopped at Pickawillany, the village of La Demoiselle, a Miami chief known to the British as Old Briton. Céloron ordered him to leave the area and warned him of the consequences if he continued to do business with the English. Old Briton, true to his name, dismissed Céloron's threats. Five days later the party reached the French post at Fort des Miamis, and from there they traveled overland to Detroit and then via the lakes and St. Lawrence home to Montreal, reaching the city on November 10.
By the time Céloron returned to deliver his alarming reports about British incursions, the imprisoned Jonquiere had been released and was in Montreal. Galissonière was already on his way home to France. Jonquiere read Céloron's report with grave concern. The old soldier had not minced words. "All I can say," Céloron wrote, "is that the natives of these localities are very badly disposed towards the French, and are entirely devoted to the English. I do not know in what way they could be brought back. "5
While Jonquiere pondered Céloron's gloomy assessment of the French position, Galissonière was halfway across the Atlantic. Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts was at the same time traveling home to London aboard the ship Boston. Both governors spent their time at sea preparing reports about affairs in North America. Their views differed in nearly every respect, with one exception. Both men delivered dire warnings that the rivalry in North America was growing more intense and violent. Each urged decisive action against the other.6
Shirley argued that Massachusetts and the other colonies would never be secure as long as the French were present in North America. Henry Pelham, the prime minister, and his brother Thomas Pelham Holies (the duke of Newcastle), secretary of the Northern Department, the ministry in charge of diplomatic relations with Protestant Europe and Russia, greeted Shirley's bellicose messages with caution. Others in the government, particularly the imperialist faction led by Henry Dunk (the earl of Halifax), and the duke of Cumberland, applauded Shirley's aggressive stance. Recognizing an ally in Shirley, Halifax and Cumberland engineered a special mission for the governor.
In their rush to end the War of Austrian Succession, the peace negotiators had left a number of critical disputes unresolved, especially the convoluted border issues in North America. These questions were referred to a special Anglo-French commission to which Shirley, thanks to Halifax and Cumberland, was appointed. His fellow commissioners were a lawyer named William Mildmay and the ambassador to France and titular governor of Virginia, the earl of Albemarle. The composition of the commission—Shirley, the bellicose expansionist; Albemarle, the governor of a colony under French threat; and Mildmay, who owed his appointment to Cumberland and Halifax—sent a clear message that the English were not likely to make any concessions. In Shirley's words, the aim was to keep talking until the moment arrived "when it shall be thought proper to reduce 'em."7 The French commission would be equally unyielding. "Because of the promptness with which he sacrificed his repose, his inclination and personal interests to the pressing needs of the service," the king promoted Galissonière to the rank of rear admiral, placed him in charge of the Hydrographic Office, and appointed him to lead the commission.
On August 31, 1750, the commissioners held their first meeting at Galissoniere's private apartments in Paris. The conversation was polite, perfunctory, and pointless. Most of Louis XV's close advisers thought Canada not worth a great deal. Critics outside Versailles shared similar views. Voltaire dismissed Canada contemptuously as a "few acres of snow."8 But Galissonière argued vehemently that the loss of Canada would bring France's entire overseas empire tumbling down. Without Canada, France's fisheries, the source of wealth and sailors, would vanish, leaving the nation's merchant marine and navy in a precarious position unable to defend other parts of its overseas empire.
William Shirley, governor of Massachusetts
The marquis understood how far the English had encroached on his king's lands. Virginians had invaded the Ohio Valley; land-hungry New Englanders were pushing at the borders of Acadia; New Yorkers were moving north up the Hudson Valley toward Lac Sacrement (Lake George) and Lake Champlain. On every border there was conflict. Galissonière demanded that the contending parties carve a wide swath of neutral turf between New France and the English colonies to protect both sides from encroachment and violent contact.
Shirley was wary. Galissonière's demands, as he saw them, would deny the English their rightful claims to western lands by raising a Gallic barrier to inland expansion. Deadlocked in their discussions, the two sides stopped meeting face-to-face and fell to exchanging detailed written briefs accompanied by heavily annotated maps, crisscrossed with dozens of lines pretending to be borders. Neither Shirley nor Galissonière was unhappy with the lack of progress. They were partners in a diplomatic dance, playing for time so that each might prepare for the inevitable war to come.9
When Shirley returned to London, Halifax welcomed him warmly. The collapse of negotiations served his lordship's expansionist plans. Newcastle and Pelham, on the other hand, were cool. Shirley's truculent attitude had done little to improve relations across the Channel, and his marriage to a French innkeeper's daughter was an embarrassment to the ministry. When Shirley requested the governorship of New York as a reward for his "good work," Newcastle and Pelham ignored him and instead sent him packing back to Boston to resume his post in Massachusetts, a place Shirley had hoped never to see again.10
Both Pelham's financial acumen and his obsession with patronage were legendary. Paying off the national debt and finding jobs for friends and relatives were his chief goals. He was appalled at the cost of the War of Austrian Succession and had little appetite for doing anything that might precipitate another major upheaval. Tranquillity suited him. One London wag noted that the years of Pelham's administration were a time when "a bird might have built her nest in the Speaker's chair or in his periwig."11
Aside from the continuing rise of parliamentary influence, the most notable feature of Pelham's era was the extraordinary increase in English foreign trade. By the mid-eighteenth century as many as one in five families in Great Britain were directly dependent for their livelihood on foreign commerce. Even more dramatic was the change in direction of trade. While Continental markets grew modestly, colonial markets expanded at an astonishing rate. In the first half of the eighteenth century British exports to North America grew fourfold, those to the West Indies doubled, while East India tea imports increased an incredible forty times. Ninety-five percent of the increase in Britain's commodity exports was sold into protected colonial markets. But the price of prosperity could be high. Continued growth in trade depended upon a relentless expansion of colonial commerce, which inevitably caused conflict as competing nations struggled to protect and enlarge their own overseas interests.12
Revenue from levies on trade
was key to Pelham's fiscal plan. Should tax receipts from overseas commerce fall, he knew his government would have to raise domestic taxes. And not even Pelham's legendary political skills could save him from the wrath of landed interests should he try to reach deeper into their pockets. From Pelham's perspective peace meant profit, whereas war offered only a painful bill of costs.
Philip Yorke (the earl of Hardwicke), the lord chancellor and Newcastle's and Pelham's longtime ally, agreed. These three formed the center of a moderate coalition within the government willing to negotiate and make concessions. Their challenge was to defend, and if possible expand, overseas trade at the expense of the French and Spanish without unduly alarming those kingdoms. The risk was that colonial conflicts might reverberate in Europe, uncouple alliances, and precipitate war.
Cumberland and Halifax dismissed Pelham's caution as pusillanimous. They believed the Pelhamites exaggerated the risk of war with France because that nation would never hazard a major war in Europe over territorial squabbles abroad. Cumberland and company held blindly to the unrealistic notion that somehow colonial issues could be kept separate from European power politics, that actions in one sphere need not spill into the other. Events were to prove them wrong.
If the American borders were still unsettled, the situation on the Continent was just as unstable. In 1701, in order to ensure a Protestant successor to the English throne, Parliament had passed the Act of Settlement, providing that upon the death of the childless Queen Anne the throne should pass to her cousin George Louis, the Protestant elector of Hanover. Anne died in August 1714, and in accordance with the plan George Louis was proclaimed George I. The "Hanoverian succession" ensured peace within the kingdom. It also, however, dragged England into the quagmire of German politics since George and his successors were simultaneously kings of England and electors of Hanover.
Roughly twice the size of the colony of Massachusetts Bay (excluding Maine), Hanover lies in the northwest corner of Germany. One of several small states making up the long dysfunctional Holy Roman Empire, the electorate was weak, exposed, and vulnerable, conditions its powerful land-hungry neighbors Austria, Russia, and Prussia were eager to exploit. This threat was carefully monitored by the kings of England between 1714 and 1760, George I and George II; Hanoverians by birth and allegiance, they held Hanover's interests as dear as England's. Pelham often sputtered and fumed that familial attachments were tying a great nation's destiny to the coattails of a puny German state, but there was little he could do about it. Any minister who slighted the electorate, either by word or by deed, risked the wrath of the king.
Europe at the time of the Seven Years War
In the topsyturvy world of eighteenth-century international politics, the aftermath of war always brought about new diplomatic alignments, and by the early 1750s emissaries were scurrying about the Continent seeking new partners, even as they were abandoning old friends. Where each nation would end up was uncertain except for one immutable fact: England and France would be on opposite sides.
Beyond threats to Hanover, England was concerned over Frances lust for the Low Countries. Whoever controlled that coastal region held the best place from which to launch a cross-Channel invasion of England. France could never be allowed to enter the Low Countries. A less serious concern was France's courtship of Spain. Though greatly diminished, the Spanish empire still offered profitable opportunities for trade.
The other major players, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, had no overseas colonial interests. They did, however, covet one another's national territory. Of the three, Austria was by far the least satisfied with the status quo. That nation had been England's ally during the War of Austrian Succession. England, however, was a fickle friend, and when peace was proposed Pelham's government pressured Austria into surrendering its province of Silesia to France's ally Prussia as the price to end hostilities. Unable to carry on the war without England's support, Austria had no choice but to accept this humiliating condition. The insult festered, and Austria's empress, Maria Theresa, yearned for revenge against both her German neighbor and her untrustworthy ally. In Paris the empress's able envoy, Count Wenzel von Kaunitz, watched closely as England and France fenced. He was waiting for an opening, fully aware that his country's only hope for recovering Silesia lay in abandoning England and forging an alliance with France against Prussia.
Russia too was ruled by an empress—Czarina Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great. She and Maria Theresa shared a distrust for Prussia and a personal hatred for its king, Frederick II. Prussia's support of Russia's traditional Baltic rival Sweden, and its ongoing dalliances with the Ottomans, Russia's enemy in the east, convinced the czarina that Prussia's intentions were hostile.
With enemies on all sides, Frederick faced a daunting challenge. Although he had been France's ally in the war against Austria, and had gained Silesia for his trouble, he distrusted the French. He called them "men made of cotton. "13 To be their ally, he once remarked, was to be their slave. He knew, however, that he could not stand alone. Austria would do everything in its power to retake Silesia, while his other neighbor Russia coveted Prussia's eastern lands.
Prussia's chief business was war, and "Frederick the Great" was its master. One of the most remarkable men of the eighteenth century—and one of the world's greatest military leaders of all times—Frederick had a clear strategic vision. Prussia's central location, and lack of defensible borders, exposed it to attack from several sides. That weakness, however, was also a strength, for it gave the Prussian army the advantage of interior lines of communication. If attacked, Frederick (not unlike the French in Canada) could move his forces rapidly along secure routes in almost any direction of the compass. To take advantage of his position, Frederick fashioned a military machine of incredible efficiency.
Frederick the Great, king of Prussia
Aside from an occasional ride to visit troops in the field, nearly all eighteenth-century European monarchs were distant armchair commanders. On special occasions, especially their own birthdays, kings and queens might show up to review their splendidly attired troops, but they never deigned to serve with their men in the mud and muck of the field. Not so for Frederick. Both he and his father were generals in the field as well as monarchs in Berlin. During his reign Frederick nearly tripled the size of the Prussian army from thirty thousand to eighty thousand soldiers. Drawing on a country of barely 2.5 million people, this was an astounding accomplishment and simultaneously an incredible national burden. More than three-quarters of the national revenue went to support the army. France, with a population ten times that of Prussia, and a national revenue eight times as great as the German state, struggled to support an army barely twice the size of Prussia's.14
At the core of the Prussian military machine was an extraordinarily well-trained and loyal cadre of officers. To fill the officer ranks, Frederick personally selected sons of the landholding Junker class. He brought these young men to Berlin and enrolled them in an elite military academy. The program was rigorous and intense. Out of the ordeal emerged an officer corps of remarkable elan who displayed unwavering loyalty to their king. In return for their devoted service, Frederick granted these officers position and influence above any other rank in the kingdom.
Not only did Frederick's officers meet his high standards, but they drilled the enlisted men to meet similarly exacting criteria. Prussian leaders commanded the best-trained soldiers in Europe. On the battlefield Prussian battalions delivered heavier volumes of fire and maneuvered more adroitly than any other army in Europe; they moved with the precision of a fine clock. In an age when bloody frontal assaults were the norm, Frederick trained his infantry to attack on the oblique, an intricate maneuver that when properly executed confused the enemy and cut their ranks to pieces.
Frederick's neighbors France, Austria, and Russia fielded much larger armies, but they were ponderous, ill equipped, and poorly led.15 Composed mostly of conscripts, and officered by men who held rank because of
birth rather than merit, these clumsy behemoths were awkward, slow, and prone to collapse in the face of a spirited Prussian assault. Still, size does matter in an army. Frederick's greatest enemy was attrition. Prussia might do well at the outset of war, but it lacked the depth of resources, men, and materiel to sustain losses and endure a long struggle. Frederick's best hope was always a quick victory.
Steering England through the dangerous waters of European power politics required skill, and it is to Pelham and Newcastle's credit that they managed the job so well. They did so by keeping in mind certain fundamental points: They never lost sight of the fact that France was the enemy. However much it bedeviled their lives, they understood that the king's attachment to Hanover was permanent, and that England was firmly committed to the electorate's defense. They recognized that the nation's prosperity depended upon an overseas empire linked by a large merchant marine and defended by the Royal Navy.
All of these factors pointed to England's central dilemma: how to contain France in Europe and at the same time defend the empire. Compounding this problem was that England lacked the essential criterion of European Continental power—a large army. Pelham and Newcastle's most serious shortcoming was their failure to fully appreciate the link between the Continent and the colonies. They thought, mistakenly, that these were separate realms. This view found a voice in Parliament and elsewhere in arguments for a "Continental Strategy," while opponents called for a "Blue Water, Colonial" strategy. George II exemplified the former with his gaze fixed on Hanover. The more globally minded, particularly those with close ties to the navy such as Admiral Edward Vernon, dismissed that view and argued that even if France "were mistress of the whole Continent of Europe the Balance of Power" rested in the colonies.16
Empires at War Page 4