Colonial America
Page 80
Despite the overall success of the 1758 campaign, the British ministry felt that there could be no relaxation of military activity until the whole of Canada had been conquered. Thus for 1759 a similar three-pronged campaign was devised. This time the amphibious forces under General Wolfe were to sail directly for Québec. Amherst himself would succeed Abercromby in an operation to take Ticonderoga and Crown Point before proceeding to Montréal. Finally, General Prideaux and Sir William Johnson would advance on Niagara (Forbes having died at the end of the last campaign). As in 1758, the colonists would be mainly involved in the overland operations.
Wolfe sailed from Halifax on June 4, 1759, arriving off Québec at the beginning of July. For the next 10 weeks he searched in vain for a way through the French defenses until he was able to scale the cliffs, known as the Heights of Abraham, above the city. In the ensuing battle he was killed, as was Montcalm, but he left Québec in British hands.
Figure 37 A view of Québec. From Popple's American Atlas. Art Archive.
Amherst's campaign was, by comparison, a pedestrian affair. Once more the provincials found it difficult to keep to Pitt's timetable. With Montcalm at Québec, however, the British capture of Ticonderoga and Crown Point was assured. Amherst then found it necessary to gain naval command of Lake Champlain, by which time it was too late to advance on Montréal. Nevertheless, his advance meant that the backcountry of New York and western Massachusetts was now secure.
Figure 38 The Death of General Wolfe, by Benjamin West. Engraving by Wm. Woollett, 1776. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
In the West, Prideaux and Johnson were also victorious at Niagara. Again the Indians played a key role in the battle's outcome. Many of the Iroquois were concerned about their waning influence with the Delawares and had decided by late 1758 that a renewed alliance with the British would enable them to regain their prestige among the various Indian nations. Therefore the Iroquois abandoned their policy of neutrality and joined the British war effort. A large number of Iroquois warriors joined Prideaux and Johnson's men as they surrounded Fort Niagara in 1759. However when 30 French-allied Senecas decided to stay inside the fort with the French, the British-allied Iroquois changed their minds and decided not to participate in the battle. When a French relief party arrived, including both Canadian militiamen and warriors from the Great Lakes tribes, the Iroquois changed their minds a second time and decided to fight. The British and their Iroquois allies quickly overwhelmed the French and their allies. Although Prideaux was killed, Johnson carried the operation to a successful conclusion on July 25, 1759.11
Although the British had now achieved their original war aims, they would not relax their campaign until the whole of Canada had been conquered. Hence orders were again issued by Pitt for a final campaign in 1760 to win Montréal. The removal of an immediate threat of attack as well as the haughty treatment of provincial forces by British officers made many colonial men reluctant to volunteer for this campaign, even though the same generous financial terms were offered. Governor Thomas Pownall secured only 4,000 men from Massachusetts. Yet with Iroquois support the British had gained the advantage, especially since western and southern Indians were now abandoning the French and making new treaties with the British, desperate for a supply of the arms upon which they had come to depend.
The campaign plan for 1760 was similar to that of the previous year. Three armies were to converge on Montréal. General Murray was to advance from Québec, General Haldimand was to resume the northward movement by way of Lake Champlain, while Amherst himself would advance with the main force via the River Mohawk and Lake Ontario to approach from the west. Significantly, this time the army was accompanied by a large body of Iroquois, though a contemptuous Amherst determined that such fickle allies should not benefit from the plunder they clearly anticipated. The campaign itself was nearly ruined when Murray was defeated by the French under the Chevalier Levis early in the spring before the ice in the river had melted. For a few weeks it was not certain whether Québec itself might fall to the French again. Fortunately for the British, reinforcements arrived by river and the French were forced to retire. Thereafter, all three British armies advanced steadily, finally linking up near Montréal at the beginning of September. The position of the French was now hopeless, and they surrendered on September 7, 1760.
Though the surrender of Montréal effectively ended hostilities between the European powers on mainland America, fighting continued between Britain and France in both Europe and the Caribbean and had the effect of drawing Spain into the conflict. Spain had remained on the sidelines throughout the war, fearing that a French victory in North America might give France too much power. Then early in 1761 the British navy seized the French island of Martinique. This was a major prize, especially since the British had also conquered another enormously productive French sugar island, Guadeloupe, almost two years earlier. At this point Spain became concerned that the French, growing desperate in the face of its mounting losses, would agree to a territorial settlement that threatened Spanish strategic interests. Therefore Spain formed an alliance with France in August 1761 and entered the war the following May. This gave the British navy a justification for seizing the long-sought prize of Havana, Cuba, from the Spanish in August 1762. Having entered the war too late to make a difference to the outcome in North America, Spain had now lost one of its most important bases in the West Indies. This loss was compounded in October when a British fleet captured Manila in the Philippines.12
As a result of these conquests, Britain was able to negotiate a handsome peace by the end of 1762. France would give up its least profitable North American colonies in Canada and the Illinois Country so as to regain possession of its sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique and end the war. Spain would give up Florida in exchange for the return of Cuba. Finally France would give Louisiana, in which its own strategic interest was now vastly diminished, to Spain, who wanted the colony as a strategic buffer to prevent western expansion by the British. Britain would now possess the whole of eastern North America from Hudson Bay to the Mississippi, and Spain would possess Louisiana as well as everything west of the Mississippi. The only link France retained with the continent was two small islands near the Newfoundland fishery.
The question of why the British won the war in North America has provoked considerable thinking among historians recently. The traditional argument was that the British won because they brought more regulars to North America to fight the war, possessed a more effective navy, and had the superior ability to mobilize credit to pay for the cost of war. Certainly these factors were crucial. British naval blockades prevented French ships from supplying New France and its forts, which led to food shortages and starvation for the French and Indian populations. The British government's ability and willingness to borrow and spend vast sums of money to wage war, thanks to the development by the mid eighteenth century of some of the most modern financial institutions in the world, enabled it to pay for the cost of transporting and maintaining a large and well-trained army in North America. Local militias simply lacked the training and the experience to be able to fight effectively in most settings, and Britain's ability to bring in more regular troops gave it a decisive advantage in key battles after 1757.13
Yet the traditional emphasis on British military superiority ignored another set of factors which has more recently been given its due by historians: the influence of decisions made by Native Americans as well as the French on the war's outcome. France had been able to build and hold an empire in North America despite the fact that its colonial population was smaller than that of the British. It did so because of the trading relationships and alliances it had built with Native Americans from the pays d'en haut to the Canadian Catholic mission settlements. It was Native Americans who provided the French with better intelligence and a stronger fighting capacity than the British during the first two years of the war and stymied the British in their original objective of securing the Ohio Valley. Nati
ve American raids on backcountry settler communities were highly effective in creating panic among the British settler population and made it difficult for the colonies to organize an effective defense. Indeed, in the end it was Native American decisions to abandon the French that weakened French ability to hold out against British assaults. By 1758 many French-allied Indians were exhausted by the stresses of the war and offended by General Montcalm's diplomatic bungling. The French had become unable to supply them with sufficient trade goods, threatening the Indians' economic well-being as well as their ability to continue fighting.
Believing it was in their people's interest to stop fighting, most of the Indians in the Ohio Valley agreed to peace with the British in 1758. Unfortunately, their decision to make peace with the British contributed to their own destruction. For as long as they could remember, they had done best by playing off Britain, France, and Spain against one another when they could, avoiding conflict with Europeans when they could not. They did not foresee that the French government might lose the war and be driven out of North America entirely, making it impossible for the Indians to pursue their time-honored survival strategies in the future.14
4 The War's Consequences
The British victory over the French transformed the balance of power in North America and thereby changed the fates of all the peoples and nations who had fought to control the continent for the century and a half leading up to 1763. Some became more powerful, others less. Just as the story of the colonization of North America had different beginnings for each of its diverse groups of participants, it would have different outcomes as well.15
For the British people in general, the signing of the Peace of Paris in 1763 seemed to herald a glittering era for Britain as a world power with possessions in every corner of the globe. A new king, George III, had recently ascended the throne to begin what promised to be an Augustan age. The British people felt a surge of pride in having defeated France and Spain, a victory that represented not only a great military feat but also the triumph of Protestant liberty in the contest against the absolutist regimes and the hated Roman Catholic Church.
Equally promising were the prospects of most British North American colonists, particularly those of white men. They could anticipate that the removal of the French would open vast new quantities of land for settlement, enabling the sons of family farmers to obtain farms of their own for generations to come. The doubling of the population every 25 years opened up the possibility that within a century North America might become the center of the British empire. And with their long tradition of local political autonomy, these colonists expected that they would continue to be governed by local leaders sympathetic to their interests.
For many new and prospective immigrant men from Europe, the future looked just as bright. New economic opportunities beckoned, especially for those with skills and education. In the future they would also be more likely to become assimilated with the Anglo-American population. Whereas before the war recent immigrants had thought of themselves as members of distinct ethnic and religious groups, their shared wartime experience enduring Indian assaults on their frontier communities had bound many of them together and changed their collective identities. They had begun for the first time to define themselves in terms of race and to refer to themselves as the “white people.”16
Of course for most white women, children, and servants in the British North American colonies, the opening of territory would be less momentous. While their labor would be just as vital to building self-sustaining farms and households in a frontier economy, they would still be legally dependent on adult male household heads or masters. For enslaved African Americans, too, the future probably looked about the same as before the war. In fact, though they could not have known it, the opening of land would in the long run require the labor of even more slaves and enable the system of slavery to expand and become more entrenched in North American society. As for poor people in colonial cities, opportunities would actually erode once the British army withdrew and stopped contracting with local businesses to outfit its troops and build its ships.
The future seemed gloomier to most French settlers in Canada and the West. French Canadians, numbering about 79,000 in 1762, were shocked that their government had abandoned them and ceded their territory to Britain. Yet despite their disappointment, most would stay in North America. The British government was eager to prevent them from rebelling and therefore guaranteed their religion, property, and legal customs. To a large degree the French Canadians would retain their land, their culture, and their distinctive relations with the Indians. The French in Illinois, on the other hand, had little stomach for the prospect of living under British government. Most of them crossed the Mississippi to found St. Louis, in territory that France had ceded to Spain. They continued to make their living as fur traders, an occupation in which their understanding of Native American cultures gave them continuing advantages over their British competitors.
The French inhabitants of Louisiana, including 4,000 whites and 5,000 enslaved blacks, found themselves now under the government of Spain. They faced an increase in economic regulation, leading to a rebellion by Louisiana merchants and planters against Spanish rule in 1768. Yet despite their fears, their economic prospects would actually improve, thanks to the growth of their economy. Spanish officials encouraged immigration, first by Acadians who began to resettle in the colony from around 1765, and then by Spanish citizens from the Canary Islands. With additional imports of enslaved Africans from the West Indies, the combined settler–slave population in the region would triple by 1783. Meanwhile exports of tobacco, indigo, deerskins and lumber grew at a steady pace.
Spanish people in Florida faced a future as exiles. Although the Peace of Paris guaranteed them the right to continue practicing their religion if they stayed, Catholics in Florida understandably feared a purge by the vastly more numerous British colonists and their governments. When Spain encouraged them to leave by offering them property in Cuba, all 3,000 of the Spanish citizens in the region chose to evacuate. Members of the free black community at Mose and a few Christian Indians left too, along with the Spanish. In Havana refugees faced initial hardships but eventually most survived and became assimilated into Cuban society.
For the European governments who had just engaged in their vast land swap at the Peace of Paris, the future held different challenges – and opportunities. For the French government, the aftermath of the war offered the chance to rebuild its navy and revive its trade. It could also plan for the next war against Great Britain. That war, it turned out, was not so far in the future, and would be one in which a revitalized navy would give France a decisive advantage.
The Spanish government had acquired Louisiana, which threatened to make the costs of administering their northern frontier even heavier than before the war. Spain now faced the additional problem of governing the Indians west of the Mississippi, now that the French were gone. The Spanish would increasingly follow the French example by building alliances through trade. Although such a strategy had proven more effective in retaining the loyalty of the Indians than reliance on missions, it was nonetheless an expensive strategy. Spanish officials still had difficulty supplying trade goods, thanks to trade restrictions imposed by the empire. Moreover Spanish colonizers faced incessant hostility from the Comanche and Apache peoples, who now had horses and guns and were determined to expand their own sphere of influence. The question would be how long Spain could maintain its control.
British government officials were of course enthusiastic about Britain's new acquisitions. Yet the king's ministers understood far better than most British citizens that managing this vast new empire would be difficult. One major problem would be the expense. The British national debt had nearly doubled over the course of the war. By 1763 annual government expenses including interest payments on the debt amounted to about £14 million per year, well in excess of its annual revenues of less than £10 million. Added to its revenue p
roblem was a dramatically new set of challenges in governing North America.
For the past century, since the earliest development of its navigation laws, the British empire had been most successful when it acted as a regulator of trading relationships between the colonies and the mother country. Attempts to exercise simultaneous jurisdiction over English settlers and Native American peoples during the seventeenth century had all failed. The attempt to centralize control over the colonies during the era of James II had resulted in full-scale rebellions in three separate colonies. The British empire would now have to govern a vast new area of territory acquired by conquest, in effect confronting challenges it had failed to meet in the past, only on a larger scale. It would be responsible for maintaining order among the thousands of French Canadians who had suddenly, and unwillingly, been placed under its control, and would need to consolidate its authority over recently evacuated territory in Nova Scotia and Florida. Now that the French government was gone there would be border disputes between different colonies that claimed land to the west and north of the settled areas. The British government would have to mediate these. And it would face an even more difficult challenge in managing its transformed relationship with all of the North American Indians living west of the Allegheny Mountains,17 especially given the expectations of the settlers in the British colonies that land in the Ohio Valley was about to be opened up to settlement.
The Indians west of the British colonies faced the most difficult dilemma. With the French government gone, they had lost the ability to play the French off against the British so as to maintain their autonomy. Spain would be too preoccupied with defending its possessions in New Mexico, Louisiana, and Texas to pay much attention if British American settlers moved onto Native American land. In any case the Spanish were notoriously poor suppliers of the trade goods on which the Indians' way of life had come to depend. The Indians would have to rely almost entirely on the British for guns and ammunition. And yet, as officials who were charged with maintaining order in Indian country would soon discover, they were far from ready to submit to British domination.