The Wars

     Even before the first successful British colonies had been founded, British and French captains had burned out each other's embryo settlements on the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine, and it was obvious that eventually the two European rivals would meet each other in direct armed conflict on the soil of North America. Jamestown was founded in 1607, Quebec in 1608. In 1609, Samuel de Champlain came down the Richelieu River and Lake Champlain to what is now Ticonderoga. There, as an ally of the Hurons against the Iroquois, he killed enough Iroquois with his firearms to earn their undying enmity and set the allegiance in the conflict between the French and British for all time. The Iroquois, especially the Mohawks, were over the next one hundred fifty years either neutral or allied with the British; they never supported the French. It was the tribes of the Iroquois Confederation, the famous Five Nations, which controlled access to the furs of the entire Ohio Valley.

However, the French could and did outflank the British, by going further to the west. They traveled across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi, where they founded forts and trading posts, but they never did have sufficient settlers to sustain colonies any­ where but the Saint Lawrence Valley. The British were in solid settlement to the western borders of the thirteen original colonies, and were sending out expeditions into the Ohio Valley by the time the American Revolution began in 1775. Even by 1690, when they first became involved in the major colonial wars, the British­ Americans were so thickly settled, so conscious of themselves as a "peculiar people," that England was no longer home to them. They were on the way to becoming Americans.

There were four official wars between the English and the French in the area of the thirteen original colonies between 1689 and 1763: King William's War (1689-1697), Queen Anne's War (1702-1713), King George's War (1744-1748), and the ultimate war, known in America as the French and Indian War (1754-1763) but appropriately named by the military historian of the era Lawrence Henry Gipson as "The Great War for the Empire." These four were the American manifestations of European conflicts. There were constant battles up and down the frontier which were given local names, such as the Tuscarora War (1711-1713) fought in North Carolina, the Yamasee War (1715-1716) fought in South Carolina, and Governor Dummer's War (1722-1725) fought in the Massachusetts territory of Maine. In the one hundred fifty-six years between 1607 and 1763, the British and French were officially at war with each other over one-third of the time, and it is safe to say that somewhere on the thousands of miles of frontier between the British, the French, and the Indian allies of both sides, aggressive action was being taken on every day of the whole period.

In 1689 the Iroquois, acting to revenge a major raid on their territory by Governor Denonville of New France, wiped out the Canadian settlement of La Chine, above Montreal. The French, who had meanwhile declared war on the new English monarchs, William and Mary, recalled Denonville, and reinstalled the Sieur de Frontenac, the greatest of all the warriors of seventeenth-century New France. Frontenac organized three great raids in retaliation. The first was aimed at Albany, but when the Indians balked was turned against the helpless settlement of Schenectady, and effectively wiped it out. The second destroyed the settlement of Salmon Falls on the New Hampshire-Maine border. The third took the fort at Casco Bay, where Portland, Maine, now stands. The British garrison surrendered under European rules of warfare, but when the soldiers marched out and laid down their weapons, they and their families were overwhelmed by the Indians, many were killed and the rest led away into captivity.

The English were determined to take revenge against the centers of French power. Fitz-John Winthrop, governor of Connecticut, organized an army of seven hundred fifty local soldiers, plus Iroquois, to attack Montreal. Simultaneously Sir William Phips was to sail up the Saint Lawrence and attack Quebec by sea. Winthrop's army of untrained militia levies never got any further than the southern end of Lake Champlain. Phips got to Quebec, unloaded some men, but could do nothing against the well-entrenched French. Sadly, the American fleet re-embarked its soldiers and sailed back to Boston. The only thing approaching an American victory was a successful cattle raid led by John Schuyler against La Prairie, near Montreal. Both the unsuccessful armies had been composed of untrained militia and led by amateur generals. They were also financed locally.

The rest of King William's War was on the same level. John Schuyler's brother Peter led another raid against La Prairie, Frontenac retaliated against the Mohawk Iroquois. Schuyler chased him but was unable to inflict a mortal blow. Another scene of action was the Maine-New Brunswick-western Nova Scotia coasts, the area known to the French as Acadia. Port Royal in Nova Scotia changed hands more than once, York and Wells in Maine were raided, as was Oyster River (Durham, New Hampshire). The fall of the British fort at Pemaquid to the French and Indians in 1696 meant that the whole Maine coast became open to raids from Canada, and settlement pulled back from Downeast.

The heroic brutality of the New England situation was epitomized in the story of Hannah Dustin of Haverhill, Massachusetts. French-led Indians raided the town in the spring of 1697. Hannah was seized and her newborn baby killed. Several weeks later Hannah, the neighbor who had been nursing her, and a small boy paddled down the Merrimack in an Indian canoe. She carried with her ten fresh Indian scalps, which she took to Boston in triumph. The governor dutifully rewarded her £10 for her prowess, and she went back to her anonymous life in Haverhill.

King William's War ended with the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. The Americans learned that they could not, without the help of professional soldiers, take either Montreal or Quebec. The French likewise learned that they might lead Indian raiders against both Indian and British targets, but they could not take any British settlements in the thickly-settled areas. Both found that the Indians were unreliable allies, brutal and erratic, who could not be trusted to carry out the white man's agenda.

The War of the Spanish Succession, or Queen Anne's War, which began in 1701 in Europe, was the war in which the Duke of Marlborough led Anglo-Dutch armies against the French in the Spanish Netherlands, now Belgium. In America, the British achieved some success in the south, but none in the north. In the south, British fur traders coming overland through Georgia, arrived at the Mississippi simultaneously with the French who came downriver. The French were clever diplomats, but the English had better quality trade goods, and the Indians of the southeast became involved in European rivalries. This exacerbated the longstanding rivalry between the English at Charleston and the Spanish at Saint Augustine. Efforts to take the rival cities ended in failure on both sides, but an unofficial raid on Spanish West Florida by the British was very profitable.

In the north, the provincials were to emerge from the war with a deep disgust for the ethics of the British professionals, a disgust which was to color British-American relations throughout the colo­ nial period. The British took and permanently kept Port-Royal in Nova Scotia, which they renamed Annapolis Royal. The Abenaki Indians of Maine wiped out Wells in I703, a great raiding party from Quebec attacked Deerfield, Massachusetts, in I704. But despite the suffering which these raids and others like them caused locally, the French agreed tacitly to leave New York state alone, in order to assure Indian neutrality.

It was attempts to take Quebec by land and by sea that exasperated the colonials. The British repeatedly stranded armies of local militia on the banks of Lake Champlain, while strategy shifted according to purely European considerations. Colonel Francis Nicholson, the American commander, served as either governor or lieutenant governor of five British colonial provinces; he was a most distinguished and able man, yet he was left to stew with his little army three times. None of the American governors, despite having been appointed by the Crown, could persuade the British military establishment to take them seriously. Finally, in 1711, Queen Anne decided to reward the family of her newest favorite, Abigail Masham, by putting her brother in charge of a frontal assault on Quebec. The fleet sailed down the Saint Lawrence only to crash against the northern shore of the great river (seventy miles wide at that point) and never got within one hundred and fifty miles of Quebec. Nicholson again loyally waited on the shores of Lake Champlain for word that never came.