by Dan Snow
Britain had won but had paid a spectacular price. Britain’s national debt had mushroomed, by early 1762 Newcastle was struggling to raise money on the financial markets even at interest rates of 5 per cent; dogged French armies still threatened Hanover and Spain had invaded Britain’s ally, Portugal. Britain wanted a lasting peace; to attain one she would have to hand back some of her conquests. Belle Isle, an island off the south coast of Brittany which the British captured in 1761, was returned, as were Goree in West Africa, St Lucia, Martinique, and some settlements in India that were to remain unfortified. Perhaps most controversial of all was the debate around whether Britain should keep Canada or the rich sugar-producing island of Guadeloupe. Although Canada is now the ninth largest economy in the world and site of the planet’s second largest reserves of oil, in the mid-eighteenth century it had been a huge drain on the French crown and its climate and soil were thought to be unsuitable for huge expansions of agriculture and population. One British polemicist wrote that there was no economic reason for retaining it, ‘for what does a few hats signify?’2 Yet Americans overwhelmingly desired to see the removal of the only remaining hostile power on the continent, while many in Britain believed on economic and strategic grounds that a small rump of Canada should be returned to France and more lucrative conquests retained. Guadeloupe produced an estimated £300,000 of sugar per year; furs, the only Canadian export, brought in just £140,000 and the costs of running and protecting this vast space were obviously substantially higher. A more subtle British argument was that the balance of power in North America was desirable. It kept the Americans scared, and a scared subject is a loyal one. During the war the Americans had needed British guns, ships, leadership, and redcoats. With no French infantrymen in Canada, no violent raids along the frontier, and no men of war patrolling the St Lawrence the Americans would soon realize that they could shed their ties to the mother country. The same journalist wrote that the new enlarged British North America ‘at such a distance, could never remain long subject to Britain’. ‘They are always grumbling and complaining about Britain,’ he continued, ‘even while they have the French to dread. What may they not be expected to do if the French is no longer a check upon them?’ In short, ‘If we were to acquire all Canada, we should soon find North America itself too powerful and too populous to be long governed by us at this distance.’3 Another journalist wrote that British North American colonies would become more ‘licentious from their liberty, and more factious and turbulent from the power that rules them’.4 A more vicious journalist sought to disparage Canada’s climate, people, and prospects. It was a ‘cold, barren, uncomfortable and uninviting country’. It had been peopled with the ‘refuse’ of French society, prostitutes and petty criminals. Now her national character was ‘the united good qualities of a whore and a thief’.5
Benjamin Franklin weighed in to the debate. He decried talk of British and American positions instead insisting that their interests were indivisible. A population explosion in North America was ‘fantastic’ he wrote. Trade would increase and with it the power of the Royal Navy. The American colonies would never unite against Britain. They had been unable to coordinate their response to a violent foreign power in the mid-1750s as France made moves to seize the Ohio country. If attempts at union failed when faced with a bitter enemy then how could they ever unite ‘against their own nation which protects and encourages them, with which they have…ties of blood, interest, and affection, and which…they all love much more than they love one another’. Such a threat was ‘impossible’. Although Franklin cleverly added that the only chance of it coming about was if Britain insisted on ignoring American demands to the whole of New France. Canada was a vast domain, crying out for an influx of immigrants. As the population expanded there so would the market for British manufactured goods. He pointed out that Britain made more money exporting to North America than she did from imports of sugar from the Caribbean.6
In France the debate also raged. Enlightened opinion was hostile to colonies which they saw as a drain on the state and a nest of corruption and reactionary religious practices. Voltaire, who had described the war as being over ‘a few acres of snow on the borders of Canada’, wrote in Candide that ‘they spend more money on this glorious war than the whole of Canada is worth’.7 He regarded the entire war as ‘a trifling quarrel’ over ‘a country to which neither had the least right’.8 In November 1760 he wrote to François Claude Bernard Louis de Chauvelin, a close confidant of the King, saying ‘would I dare, I would beg you on my knees to forever rid the government of France from Canada. If you lose it, you lose almost nothing; if you want it returned to you, all you will be returned is an eternal cause of war and humiliation. Consider that the English are at least fifty to one in northern America.’9 The King’s new leading minister, the Duc de Choiseul, was more than happy to cede Canada but determined to hold on to the fishing rights on the Newfoundland Banks, which was a nursery of sailors and shipping as well as a vast maritime larder. The St Malo Chamber of Commerce petitioned Versailles begging them to insist on continued access to the fisheries. It was a ‘branch of trade more precious to the state than all the gold of Peru, for gold cannot create a single sailor and it creates several thousand sailors every year’. Without these fishing grounds France would have no more sailors and no sailors meant ‘no navy, no real power’.10 Other Chambers of Commerce weighed in. Marseilles, La Rochelle, and, in particular, Bordeaux submitted, loyally but firmly, that Canada was a vital part of the French imperial project. They were also concerned that they would not be paid what they were owed by the Canadian government and individuals if it was ceded to Britain.
In the end Choiseul so desired to be rid of Canada and recover Guadeloupe that he refused to sign the treaty until this was agreed to. Britain returned Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Marie Galante in the Caribbean and conceded French access to the Newfoundland fisheries. The tiny islands of St Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland were retained by France as bolt-holes for their shipping to protect them from storms and places to dry their catch, and remain French to this day. Britain gained Canada, the Ohio country, and all of New France east of the Mississippi River with the exception of the town of New Orleans. The rest of France’s vast domains in North America went to Spain as recompense for drawing her into a war against the British which had brought nothing but defeat. The Native American inhabitants of those lands were not present, nor were they consulted or, indeed, considered. Britain gained Florida in return for handing back Cuba; Spain also agreed to withdraw her troops from Britain’s ally, Portugal. France also promised finally to end her flirtation with the exiled Stuart family and recognize the British Protestant succession.
Peace saw Britain reborn as the global hegemon. A network of trading outposts, footholds, and influence around the world, which had been slowly expanding for generations, was now transformed into a formal empire. It was a, if not the, defining moment in the rise of the British Empire, the largest and most populous the world has ever seen. Seventeen fifty-nine and the campaigns before and after it had resolved one of the greatest geopolitical questions in the history of the human race: the ethnic, religious, and political complexion of the North American continent.
Britain controlled the continent north and east of the Mississippi. Union flags flew over Detroit, Toronto, Montreal, Miami, and Pittsburgh. The English language, legal code, and political economy spread inexorably throughout and beyond this area through the course of the next two centuries. Despite a small minority largely concentrated in the province of Quebec clinging to their language, religion, and traditions, the North American continent would become a bastion for Anglo-Saxon values. In the twentieth century this area would first bolster and then supersede Britain as she fought yet more battles against other nations that sought global hegemony. When asked at the end of the nineteenth century by a journalist, an aged Otto von Bismarck said, ‘The most significant event of the twentieth century will be the fact that the Nort
h Americans speak English.’ He was absolutely right.
Unlike many seismic historical shifts there was an awareness of this at the time. Robert Kirk, a Highland soldier, who left a journal of his adventures during the Seven Years War in North America, travelled across New France as part of an expedition to take control of the furthest forts for the British crown. He wrote that ‘this vast continent may be justly called, the new world, there being land enough to contain all the people in Europe, and part of Asia, and if there was people to be spared, to inhabit it, would become a more formidable world than ever was conquered by an Alexander’. It was, he believed, ‘one of the finest countries in the universe’.11
The conquered French faced an uncertain future. Civil society was left shattered. Some in the elite had been killed; others returned to France, while many had been utterly ruined. British and American merchants bought up distressed assets at bargain prices. Quebec and Montreal became economically dominated by Anglophone gentry. The new French subjects of George III were, however, allowed to retain their religion and many of their customs. The British proved to be benign conquerors. An absence of the kind of vigorous expulsion and cultural extermination seen in Nova Scotia meant that French Canadians were not pushed into irreconcilable hostility to their British masters. Indeed, the protection given to the Francophones and their religion by the British imperial authorities helped to preserve their culture. It is significant that they sided overwhelmingly with the British against the rebel colonies during the American Revolution. The destruction of the old France following the revolution of 1789 led many social and religious conservatives in Quebec to conclude that they were better off under British rule. The motto of Quebec today is Je me souviens, ‘I remember’, usually understood to reflect Quebecers’ pride in their distinct past. In fact, Eugène-Étienne Taché, the architect who had it carved over the door of the Quebec parliament building, may well have had a more ambiguous message. His granddaughter claimed that it was a shortened form of a longer phrase: ‘I remember/ That born under the lily/ I grew under the rose.’12
It appeared that Britain had decisively won the centuries old battle with the Dutch, French, and Spanish for control of North America. Yet now, that victory is seen not as the end but as a beginning. British and American society fragmented under the gigantic scale of their success. Britain’s empire required policing. The British infatuation with low taxation and a minimal standing army was unsustainable now that she controlled a bigger area of land than King Louis. Garrisoning North America with 10,000 men in twenty regular battalions would cost £350,000 a year. The national debt had doubled to £135,000,000. Ironically, William Pitt had conquered by adopting the wild ‘spend now, pay later’ philosophy that would come to characterize the conti-nent’s attitude to credit. The interest on this unprecedented debt was £5,000,000 a year out of revenue of just £8,000,000. Attempts to make the colonies take their share of the fiscal burden of the new imperial project foundered on the determination of the Americans not to have their rights as British subjects infringed. They would not pay taxes voted on in distant London without the assent of their own representatives. The problem became acute when the Native Americans reminded the crown that they were yet to be conquered. A widespread assault on British forts and settlements, bearing the name of one of its leaders, Pontiac, began in May 1763. The war ended in stalemate. The British crown attempted to mollify the Native Americans by limiting American moves west, enraging their colonists who believed it their manifest destiny to settle all the land to the Pacific.
It gradually became clear that the removal of the French threat to the colonies had also reduced Britain’s value as protector. A group in America emerged who argued strongly that British tyranny should also be cast off allowing Americans to trade with whoever they pleased, to tax themselves as they wished, and exploit the western lands at their own pace. This radical new philosophy tore apart both British and American society. Just fifteen years after the surrender of de Lévis and Vaudreuil at Montreal, as the sun rose on 19 April 1775 fighting broke out between American colonials and British redcoats at the village of Lexington near Boston. It was the start of a civil war. France and Spain saw the chance to win back some of what they had lost in the Seven Years War and intervened decisively on America’s behalf. Larger navies with reformed and highly professional officer corps inflicted stunning defeats on the Royal Navy. 13 An unending guerrilla war and defeat at sea forced Britain to the negotiating table. America was given its independence; it was the most disastrous war in the history of the British state.
One man had foreseen this disaster. Montcalm had written to Versailles at the end of August 1759. As usual he says that the colony is lost and his life forfeit ‘but I console myself,’ he wrote, ‘that the loss of this colony, this defeat will one day be of more service to my country than a victory’. ‘The conqueror, in aggrandizing himself, will find a tomb even in that. The English must breathe the air of freedom, and these Americans more so; and the children of these are not degenerated from the republican principles of their parents. Their maxim is to obey as little as possible and when their interests are touched they will revolt. Can England send 300,000 men to oppose them at this distance?’14
Wolfe’s antagonist had accurately predicted that his victory on the Plains of Abraham and the subsequent conquest of New France would produce not only Britain’s imperial apogee but also its inevitable nadir.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Manuscripts
National Maritime Museum (NMM)
ADM/L Lieutenant’s Logs
Public Record Office (PRO)
ADM 2 Admiralty Out-Letters
ADM 52 Master’s Logs
CO 5/51 Colonial Office, Correspondence of the Secretaries of State with the Governors and Commanders in America
WO 34/46b Amherst’s Correspondence
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI)
DOD 162/77 Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’
DOD 678
National Archives of Scotland
GD 45/3/422 Anecdote of Wolfe’s Army from Sergeant Thompson
GD 216/213 Letter of Sir James Cockburn to Samuel Mitchelson
GD 202/68/12 Letters of William Fraser to John Cameron
Library and Archives Canada (LAC)
MG 1 Serie E, E 143 Petition of Captain Louis Dupont de Chambon de Vergor, 1761
MG 18
H54 Ramezay Papers
L5 MS 2207 fols. 37-69 Letters from Wolfe to Captain William Rickson
L6 Thomas Bell
L7 George Townshend
L9 Henry Parr
M1 Monckton Papers, including,
XX: Documents Relating to the Preparation of the Expedition
XXI: Documents Relating to the Expedition…
XXII: A Series of Twenty-eight Autograph Letters from General Wolfe to General Monckton
XXVIII: ‘Relation du siège de Québec, posépar les Anglois en l’anée 1759’
XXIX: ‘Journal du siège de Québec’
N18 George Williamson Papers
N21 Williamson Papers
N43 Diary of Jeremiah Pearson
N45 Aemilius Irving
N51 Correspondence Relating to Wolfe. Miscellaneous Items Relating to Wolfe
N52 Journal of Colonel Laurence Holloran
MG 23
GII 1 James Murray Collection
MG 24
GII 1 James Murray Collection
K2 vol. V James Thompson Journal
Royal Green Jackets Museum, Winchester
‘Order Book of the Royal American Regiment at Quebec from 24th September 1759 to 27th February 1760’
Printed Original Materials
An Accurate and Authentic Journal of the Siege of Quebec, 1759, by a Gentleman in an Eminent Station on the Spot (London, 1759)
Carver, P. L., ed., Wolfe to the Duke of Richmond: Unpublished Letters (Toronto, 1938)
Casgrain, H. R., ed., Collection des manuscrits du Maréchal de Lévi
s (12 vols., Montreal and Quebec, 1889-95)
