Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the War of the Austrian Succession, was the ultimate confirmation of the absurdity of the entire exercise, except for the party that started it. Frederick the Great was recognized as ruler of Silesia, a brilliant coup that pushed Prussia forward as a great power, alongside Russia, Austria, France, and Great Britain. Maria Theresa lost Silesia of course, but certainly made her point that she ruled the empire, and her husband possessed the euphonious and honorific title of Holy Roman Emperor. She had to concede back Parma and Piacenza to Spain, but kept Genoa and Modena, which the French and Spanish had tried to take. Maria Theresa also regained everything France had taken in the Austrian Netherlands, because the British graciously agreed to return Louisbourg and Cape Breton to France if France would give back Madras to Great Britain and the Austrian Netherlands to Maria Theresa. It was not a sensible arrangement for France, and French statesmanship must be faulted. France had won what is now Belgium and could have held it; it had no more ability to fight the British in India than it did in Canada, and unless French policy were turned on its ear (Jenkins got full vengeance for his severed ear, as Spain conceded the continuation of British control of the slave trade) and it was prepared to buy off European rivals, which now included the frightening Prussian garrison state and the numerous Slavonic masses of Russia, France would never be able to rival Britain on the high seas while protecting its land frontiers. The offended vanity of the French caused them to trade hard-won and important towns on their borders, including Brussels, for the return of Louisbourg and Cape Breton, which had little strategic value and could not possibly be held if the British were serious about taking them back. Handing over Madras was acceptable, though it was a marvellous victory for Dupleix, because the French could not retain it either and could not possibly supply troops in combat in India across thousands of miles in two oceans dominated by the British.

  The disparity in strategic judgment of the main powers was becoming clear: Britain was generally able to assure the avoidance of continental dominance by any power, and welcomed the rise of both Prussia and Russia as adding further complexity to the power equations of Europe, making it more difficult for France or Austria to be preeminent. It had demonstrated again its naval superiority other than in French home waters in the Mediterranean, and even there the French had had to combine with the Spanish.

  Several events of this war would resonate ominously through the next two centuries, including the march of a Russian army to the Rhine, the sudden Germanic unleashing of unanticipated and undeclared war on a tight timetable of a pre-mobilized and highly trained military, and recourse by the French to an unjustified nostalgia for defensive installations. In failing to choose between continental and overseas objectives, France would be unable to maintain both. Austria was holding her position, Britain consolidating and expanding hers, and Russia and Prussia were ambitious newcomers adding to their stature. The rise of those countries added further bulwarks against the incursions of the Turks, who had been beaten back from the gates of Vienna in 1683 with the help of over fifty thousand Polish and German troops who came to the assistance of the Austrians at the request of Pope Innocent XI, who then organized an alliance with the Russians, Poles, Austrians, and Venetians that cleared the Turks out of Hungary. The Turks would be in steady retreat out of Europe all the way into the twentieth century.

  France sent the Marquis de La Galissonière to New France even before King George’s War was over, as deputy governor to the less energetic La Jonquière. He was a very capable man, the highest grade of noble French colonial statesman, and he convinced himself, and passionately advocated, counterbalancing events in Europe by maintaining a French presence in North America. This was heartfelt and eloquently argued in his letters back to his government from Quebec,42 but he was mistaken. The way to succeed was to seek and maintain peace with Britain. That was the only country that could deprive France of its empire, and if France were not at war with Britain, it could not be threatened by any land power. It could have conceded Britain a modest superiority in the colonial arena, but a much less one-sided balance than ultimately emerged, and in exchange extracted British approval of some French gains in Belgium, the Rhineland, and Italy, and the two countries between them and together could have operated some sort of balance between the Central and Eastern European powers and taken what they wanted from the empires of Spain and Portugal. They did get to this point about one hundred years later, jointly supporting the Turks against the Russians in Crimea and at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, but France so misjudged the strength of Prussia that it virtually midwifed the unification of Germany more than a century after these events.

  In fact, La Galissonière’s government did more than it should have to strengthen his beau geste romantic notions of the future of New France. La Galissonière sought a French naval buildup and reinforcement of its position in Acadia and on the Ohio. He thought that the French presence in the interior could be strengthened to the point where it effectively blocked the growth of the British seaboard colonies across the Appalachians. The British sent three thousand military settlers to Nova Scotia as soon as the late war ended and surveyed and created the port of Halifax, named after the president of the Board of Trade, the Earl of Halifax. Both sides increased their presence in the Ohio Valley, and in 1752, the pro-French Ottawa burned down a British fort, sent the British traders back unharmed, but tortured their Miami Indian allies and literally ate their leader. In 1753, La Galissonière sent a mission of 2,200 marines, militia, and Indian allies to make a portage from Lake Erie to the Ohio and build Fort Le Boeuf on the Ohio almost midway between its formation by the joining of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, and where it flows into the Mississippi.

  It was clear that this was just another ceasefire, and a brief one at that, especially in North America. The British Americans were outraged that Louisbourg, which they had taken for king and country, had been given back for a fortress city in India and concessions to the Austrians. Shirley’s call to arms against the French and their Indian allies was taken up in America and resonated strongly in London too. For New France, as a French colony, the omens were sombre, but there was an alternative perspective. By the end of King George’s War in 1748, New France had fifty thousand French-speaking inhabitants and was a self-sustaining entity. If it came into the hands of the British, they would have no interest or ability to impose deracination of the population by inundating them with English-speaking people or deporting them. And Great Britain was the only power that could ultimately protect New France from being swamped by the Americans. Quebec was now a viable and permanent entity, and while it could not determine its own destiny, it could play a role in choosing it.

  The English colonies had a steady demographic lead of between twenty and thirty to one over New France. The prospects of the French colony were always in doubt and were now, in the mid-eighteenth century, precarious. However, if the objective is not seen as a permanent French possession in North America, but rather as a largely French country in North America separate to that which would arise from the English colonies, then the omens were not entirely unfavourable. For such a largely French country to exist, it could not be based initially on British immigration, as any such entity would ultimately cohere with the English colonies, if not as colonies then as components of an independent successor to them. But the French population that was growing on the St. Lawrence would have to have British protection to survive. A French entity governed by France would ultimately be overwhelmed by the British, or by the Americans themselves, as the British would be unwilling to assist the French in the retention of their American possessions, and the Americans would eventually be too powerful for France to deter it from swallowing New France. And as Quebecers have always recognized, any association with the United States, however agreeable in other ways, would spell the end of Quebec as a French-speaking society. Britain, with the world’s most powerful navy, would be too strong for the Americans to make
war on it in North America, other than briefly and for narrowly defined objectives, for at least another two centuries. (At which point it could have been hoped, with good reason, that there would be no serious differences between Great Britain and what became the United States. Of course, this was what happened.)

  Whoever lived in the northern part of North America, despite an often severe climate, was bound to do well, as it is a rich place. But if those people wished to have their own country, the components of it would have to be diverse and would have to come through a protracted and difficult minuet.

  Quebec would have to be culturally French to resist the temptations of American union, from fear of cultural assimilation, and would have to be British politically, to deter the Americans from simply seizing it. So to survive, New France would have to become British-governed, and America would have to cease to be British-governed. And then a loyal English component would have to be found to add to the French Canadians to make them all adequately numerous to populate a transcontinental country and to attract the sponsorship of the British Empire, while retaining a will not to be subsumed into the English-speaking American state to the south.

  The odds against all this happening in the right sequence and such a country being born and surviving were long, but there was a chance of it. No one thought of it at this time, as far as is known, but conditions changed more quickly in the New World than in Europe. Frontenac had died in Quebec just eight years before the birth in Philadelphia of one of the principal founders of the American Republic, Benjamin Franklin. For the idea of Canada, all would depend on this intricate and precise sequence of associations and disengagements. There was probably no one in the world who realized, at the start of the eighteenth century, that there had at least been a conception of the Canada that has arisen in the subsequent three hundred years. That national soul was embryonic, but it was healthy and would prove tenacious of life.

  Sir Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester (1724–1808), acting governor and governor of Quebec 1766–1778, commander and co-chief negotiator of British forces in North America 1782–1783 (where he more than held his own with George Washington); governor general of The Canadas 1786–1796, chief author of the Quebec Act. Though dour and grim and disappointed in much of his career, Carleton was a capable soldier, governor, and statesman whose relatively generous policy to the French Canadians was essential to the survival of Canada in the American Revolution and the subsequent success of Canada, and a model that distinguished the British from other empires.

  * Along with his grandson’s “L’état c’est moi,” his great-great-grandson’s “Après moi le deluge” (Louis XIV and XV), Napoleon’s “From the sublime to the ridiculous is a single step” as he left Moscow and started the retreat, and Charles de Gaulle’s “France has lost a battle; France has not lost the war.” (Only the comments of Napoleon and de Gaulle are certain to have been uttered by them, but the others are possible, appropriate, and in character.)

  * Henri de Tonty (1649–1704) was a Sicilian-born explorer whose family fled Sicily for France shortly after he was born because of his father’s involvement in an unsuccessful revolt against the Spanish occupation of Sicily. His brother, Alphonse de Tonty, was co-founder of Detroit.

  CHAPTER 2

  Carleton, American Wars, and the Birth of Canada and the United States

  The British defeat the French, the Americans and French defeat the British, and the British and Canadians draw with the Americans, 1754–1830

  1. New France Becomes French Canada: The Seven Years (French and Indian) War, 1754–1763

  Always before, wars between European powers had been triggered in Europe, but in 1754 to 1756, the opening shot in what became the Seven Years War* was fired in the wilderness of America, and on the authority of a subaltern who in the ensuing forty years would become one of the titans of world history, a young plantation owner from Virginia, George Washington. Washington, twenty-one in 1753, was already a substantial acquirer of land when he volunteered to take two hundred men assigned by Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie and deliver a letter to the French commander at the Forks of the Ohio asking him to “desist” and withdraw. Showing an impetuosity he did not much exhibit at the height of his career, Washington determined on an assault on the French, who had just evicted by force and with casualties the British from the site of the present Pittsburgh (named after the eminent contemporary British statesman William Pitt, later Earl of Chatham). Coming upon a thirty-five-man French and Indian scouting party, the Americans attacked the French and killed their commander, a M. Jumonville, and nine others. Washington’s own account of this is a bowdlerized and self-serving description of a defensive response to a French attack. The French and some of Washington’s followers claim that Washington’s party initiated fire, allegedly in fidelity to Dinwiddie’s instructions, although the Virginia governor had no authority to urge an attack on the military of a foreign power. One of Washington’s Indian allies sank a tomahawk into Jumonville’s skull preparatory to relieving him of his scalp.

  Washington quickly repaired to a stockade he constructed and named Fort Necessity, but was soon invested by a much larger French siege force that poured fire into the fort, causing his men to panic and crack open the rum supply. He accepted an offer of honourable withdrawal, leaving two hostages (including the soon-to-be-famous Captain Robert Stobo) and pledging on his honour that none of his men would return to the Ohio country within a year. He had taken thirty dead and seventy wounded to fewer than ten French casualties. His men carried off the corpses, assisted the wounded, and made for home, though many deserted as soon as they were clear of the French. Washington remained calm, brave, and collected, but it was a fiasco that has been somewhat obscured, and his men did fire the first shots in what would be one of history’s more important wars.

  The British government was led by the Duke of Newcastle as prime minister, who had been over thirty years in government, first with the great Whig leader Robert Walpole and then with Newcastle’s brother, Henry Pelham. Newcastle was a crafty political manoeuvrer in domestic and foreign matters. He appeased his monarch with generous grants to George II’s native Hanover (which George, who spoke German even in London, still ruled) and maintained an alliance with Austria, Spain, Denmark, and Hanover. He worked up a plan with George II’s favourite son, the Duke of Cumberland, who had a mixed military record, to send two Irish regiments to America under the command of General Edward Braddock, a spit-and-polish professional with no knowledge at all of warfare in the interior of North America. Braddock was to uproot the entire network of forts Duquesne (the French commander who succeeded Jonquière as governor of New France) had built from the Great Lakes to and down the Ohio to the Mississippi. Newcastle had no military aptitude: “Annapolis must be defended, to be sure Annapolis must be defended … where is Annapolis?”1 (Duquesne had built this network with a force of eleven thousand French, Quebec militia, and Indians, and had lost four hundred of his men in skirmishes and spent four million livres on this project, which grew from the Marquis de La Galissonière’s plan.) Braddock arrived in America in February 1755 and immediately aroused great discontent by his haughty dismissal of the local militia as a band of roughnecks.

  Sites of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812

  Braddock and Cumberland had devised a wildly ambitious plan to blockade the Gulf of St. Lawrence; Governor Shirley of Massachusetts would lead his militia against the French fort at Niagara; and Braddock himself would mop up the French forts south of the Great Lakes and join Shirley for an attack into Canada at the west end of Lake Ontario and then east and north to Montreal, Trois-Rivières, and Quebec. On July 10, 1755, Braddock’s “flying column” of fifteen hundred, which managed five miles a day and included hundreds of civilian workers and a number of the officers’ whores, was attacked by eight hundred French and Indian forest war veterans, who sniped at them from all sides while the Indians emitted their blood-curdling screams. Braddock was mortally wounded, and
Washington, who was along as an aide, though suffering from dysentery and hemorrhoids, gallantly organized a retreat. It was a disaster: the British redcoats suffered a thousand dead and wounded, to twenty-three dead and sixteen wounded among the French and their Indian allies. “The Indians and Canadians stepped out among the wounded and the killed to pick up such plunder as they had never known, and to lift for the wigwams of the up-country such strings of scalps as Canadian winds had never dried.”2 The wreckage of Braddock’s force plodded back to Philadelphia in July and announced it was taking quarters for the winter, which would only begin in five months. The 1755 campaign was over. Shirley never did advance on Niagara, which was the only part of the plan that made any sense, as that was the bottleneck for the flow of men and supplies and furs between Quebec and the web of French forts and posts down the spine of America. Shirley, who had been sputtering “Delenda est Canada” for over ten years, was made a scapegoat for the debacle, sacked a year later, and returned to Britain for a time.

  The British did better in Acadia, seizing the French fort at the narrow isthmus connecting Cape Breton and Nova Scotia and deporting fourteen thousand French and French-speaking Indians from Cape Breton, and what are now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. The deportees went in approximately equal numbers to France, Louisiana (where they became the basis of the Cajuns), and were assimilated into the population of New England or resumed residence in Acadia when conditions improved. It was a forerunner of ethnic cleansing and a shabby episode for which there was not the least excuse. There was also the usual ineffectual feint toward Montreal, and the Royal Navy stopped a couple of French ships in the St. Lawrence, but most men and supplies came through.