The colonial wars take their formal dates from simultaneous wars in Europe, but the fighting between English and French colonists, and their Indian proxies, often preceded the declarations of war and continued after the signing of Old World peace treaties. Colonists had their own reasons for fighting, reasons divorced from European diplomacy. Conflicts over fishing rights, religious differences, and the desire for revenge reinforced the struggle to dominate the fur trade and the western areas. The colonial wars merely gave intermittent official sanction to the nearly constant warfare that plagued North America between 1689 and 1763.
Although neither side was prepared for conflict in 1689, when King William’s War began, the French reacted more quickly. Count Frontenac, who became Canada’s governor in October of that year, understood the importance of the Iroquois–New York alliance and brought from France a plan for the conquest of New York, which would isolate the Five Nations militarily, weaken the English colonies by cleaving them in two, and safeguard the fur trade. However, the plan was too ambitious for Canada to implement, and Frontenac settled for a loosely coordinated three-pronged attack against the New England-New York frontier. In the first half of 1690, combined forces of French and Indians inflicted massacres on Schenectady, Salmon Falls, and Falmouth.
Even as Frontenac’s grisly offensive unfolded, Massachusetts was preparing the first British colonial attack of the war, aimed at thinly populated French Acadia. Leading the venture was Sir William Phips. In May 1690, his 700-man force captured Port Royal, the principal outpost in Acadia, subdued the remainder of the area, and returned to Boston in triumph. Phips’s exploits were strategically insignificant, since the French soon reoccupied Port Royal, but they bolstered morale throughout New England.
Meanwhile, the northern colonies girded for a major effort. In late April an intercolonial conference met in New York City, attended by representatives from New York, Connecticut, Plymouth, and Massachusetts. This conference demonstrated that some colonists realized the problem posed by Canada was beyond the resources of any single colony and required intercolonial cooperation. The delegates adopted a sound plan that became a virtual blueprint for almost all subsequent efforts against New France. The plan envisioned a dual thrust to sever the vital artery of the St. Lawrence River. Moving overland from Albany, an army would strike Montreal while a seaborne force ascended the St. Lawrence and attacked Quebec. If the forces could converge on their targets simultaneously, Canada’s sparse manpower would be divided trying to defend both cities. Either Montreal or Quebec would capitulate, making the other city easy prey once the attackers united their forces. With the trunk severed, the colony’s roots and branches would wither and die.
The proposal was good in theory but poorly executed. The colonies raised fewer militiamen for the Montreal army than had been promised at New York, and instead of the expected hundreds of Iroquois warriors, only a few dozen met the militia at Wood Creek near Lake Champlain. A smallpox epidemic swept the ranks, provisions were scarce, and too few boats existed to transport the army down Lake Champlain. In late summer the commander canceled the expedition. Meanwhile the Quebec force, some 2,000 strong and commanded by Phips, departed late and made slow progress, not arriving at its objective until early October, when the nip of winter was already in the air. The city occupied a strong defensive position atop steep cliffs, and with the threat to Montreal evaporated, Frontenac had reinforced the garrison so that it now out-numbered the attackers. Phips put a substantial force ashore, but it made little headway against the French and suffered from inadequate supplies and the bitter cold. Discouraged, Phips and his army headed home.
Exhausted in spirit and heavily in debt, the colonies made no effort similar to the 1690 campaign during the remainder of the war. The conflict became “a Tedious war” of frontier raids for the next seven years. Canadian raiding parties, composed of a few coureurs de bois (woodsmen) and militiamen and numerous Indians and perhaps commanded by a French regular officer, struck outlying homesteads and settlements. These war parties of “Half Indianized French and Half Frenchified Indians” appeared suddenly, destroyed livestock and property, killed or captured settlers, and then disappeared into the wilderness. The high success rate of these assaults demonstrated—as had the previous Indian wars—the militia’s inability to provide frontier protection. Relief columns usually arrived only in time to bury the mutilated corpses. Unable to prevent these calamities, the English retaliated with similar expeditions against the Canadians. Both sides also urged their Indian allies on to the warpath; acting independently, they added to the mayhem.
By 1697 the combatants in North America and in Europe had battered each other into exhaustion without either side achieving an appreciable advantage, and in September the European powers signed the Treaty of Ryswick. Under its terms the situation on both continents essentially reverted to the prewar condition. It did not take prophetic genius to foresee that the conflict would soon be renewed. “For the present the Indians have Done Murdering,” wrote a Puritan minister, adding “they’ll Do so no more till next Time.”
In 1701 a new war erupted in Europe and spread to the colonies, where it became known as Queen Anne’s War. During the brief interval after the Treaty of Ryswick, New France had been able to view the future with optimism. Emerging unbeaten from a decade of warfare against a more numerous enemy, it built an outpost at Detroit and established settlements in Louisiana. Most important, in 1701 the French achieved a stunning diplomatic success. The Iroquois, who had suffered grievously in King William’s War, resented the inability of the English to unite among themselves and with the Iroquois confederacy in a concerted effort to destroy New France, and in 1701 they signed a neutrality treaty with Canada. British colonists feared encirclement by a French empire stretching from Acadia up the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf.
Fighting occurred in three regions in North America during Queen Anne’s War. Since France and Spain were now allied, military operations took place along the southern frontier. In the fall of 1702 South Carolina’s governor, James Moore, conducted a campaign against St. Augustine. He easily occupied the city, but when Spanish reinforcements arrived, his army retreated to Charleston. The next year Moore, although no longer governor, partially avenged his failure when his army devastated the Apalachee region between Pensacola and St. Augustine. Encouraged by Moore’s success, others undertook similar, though smaller, expeditions into Spanish territory. The English also sent their Indian allies, notably the Creeks, to attack the Choctaws and other French-aligned natives. The only significant enemy effort came in 1706 when a Spanish-French force unsuccessfully attacked Charleston. Indian allies of Spain and France, bearing the brunt of English offensives and seeing the feebleness of Spanish and French defenses, increasingly came under British influence. By 1712 the English had, as one Carolinian asserted, “firm possession . . . from Charles Town to Mobile Bay, excepting St. Augustine.”
While the southern frontier was a new arena of strife, New York, which had been in the maelstrom of the previous conflict, did not become involved in Queen Anne’s War until 1709. When the war began, Canada and the Five Nations adhered to their neutrality treaty. Concerned for the safety of its citizens and eager to profit from an uninterrupted fur trade, New York’s government took no action that endangered the peace along its border.
The entire war in the north fell upon the third region, New England. As in King William’s War, New Englanders primarily fought “a barbarous war with cruel and perfidious savages” rather than with Frenchmen. But colonists realized that “the root of all our woe” was Canada, which supplied the Indians with the necessities of war. New Englanders agreed they could never live in safety as long as New France survived, but, remembering Phips’s disaster, they believed the mother country must assist them. England had viewed the war in North America as a sideshow to the greater struggle in Europe, but in early 1709 the Queen approved a plan reminiscent of the 1690 campaign.
She pledged ships and men to a dual thrust aimed at conquering Canada, one army moving through the Champlain trough toward Montreal and another sailing up the St. Lawrence to Quebec.
New Englanders believed these expeditions would be no repetition of 1690, since they would be well supplied and steeled by professionals. Furthermore, New York could not refuse to participate in a campaign sanctioned by the Queen. Forced to go to war, New Yorkers persuaded the Iroquois to discard their neutrality pact with Canada. The colonies responded to the opportunity to destroy Canada with unparalleled cooperation and enthusiasm. By July, after great exertion and expense, two forces stood poised to assault the archenemy. One army of more than 1,500 men, composed of militiamen from four colonies and several hundred Iroquois, assembled at Wood Creek under the command of Colonel Francis Nicholson. The other army, composed of more than 1,200 New England militiamen, gathered at Boston, ready to sail up the St. Lawrence with the promised British armada when it arrived. But in early summer England canceled its part of the bargain. Although the government immediately dispatched a message informing the colonies, it did not arrive until October. Militiamen had endured months of deprivation for nothing, and the vast expenditures had been for naught.
Her Majesty partially redeemed herself in 1710 when British warships and a regiment of marines aided a militia force in capturing Port Royal and made Acadia a British province. Encouraged that the home government had not forsaken them, colonists implored London to resurrect the 1709 plan. In 1711 England again agreed to attempt the pincer movement against New France. In late June a British fleet commanded by Sir Hovenden Walker arrived at Boston, accompanied by seven regular regiments and a marine battalion. Walker was in overall command of the Quebec pincer, and Brigadier General John Hill commanded the regulars, who were reinforced by thousands of militiamen. Colonel Nicholson again commanded the western pincer of more than 2,000 militiamen and Indians.
When the armada departed for the St. Lawrence, the northern colonies exuded confidence. But Walker lacked the courage and determination that allows great commanders to overcome adversity. He knew that fog, storms, and uncertain currents and tides made the St. Lawrence difficult to navigate, and he worried that his force might be trapped by ice and forced to winter in Quebec, where resupply would be impossible. He became obsessed with these problems. On the night of August 23, as his fleet inched upriver in dense fog, it strayed against the north shore of the river, several ships foundered, and almost a thousand men drowned. A hastily convened council of war agreed to abandon the attempt on Quebec. Walker believed the armada should attack a lesser target, perhaps Placentia, but Hill disagreed. A second war council concurred with Hill, and eventually the fleet returned to England without striking a single blow against New France. Nicholson’s army, toiling through the northern forests, was recalled far short of Montreal. Canada rejoiced, the disillusioned Iroquois hastily renewed their neutrality treaty with the French, and New England and New York brooded.
The fiascos of 1709 and 1711 had a significance beyond the simple fact of failure. Both years witnessed extensive efforts at intercolonial cooperation from Pennsylvania northward. The question of security had a nationalizing influence, forging mutual military efforts on the stern anvil of survival. As the colonies gained confidence in each other, the nonarrival of one British fleet and the precipitous withdrawal of the other sowed a sense of disgust with England and its professional military men. The Walker expedition’s appearance in Boston especially strained relations between professional soldiers and New Englanders. The colonists argued that despite the imperious behavior of Her Majesty’s officers, they themselves had done as much as possible to aid Walker, whom they blamed for the expedition’s failure. Walker and his fellow officers responded that citizens had provided insufficient provisions and inflated the price of what they supplied, they sheltered deserters, and pilots knowledgeable about the treacherous St. Lawrence refused to accompany the fleet. In their opinion, the colonists had begged the Queen for help, she had responded generously, and now the recipients of her kindness were ungrateful. The British found such behavior incomprehensible and reprehensible. Echoing his comrades, a colonel wrote that until England placed the colonists under more stringent control “they will grow every day more stiff and disobedient, more burthensome than advantageous to Great Britain.” Lexington and Concord were years in the future, but the events of 1709 and 1711 planted a seed of distrust in the imperial relationship.
When the European combatants signed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, New France, except for Acadia, remained unconquered. But at the negotiating table France surrendered much of what its colony had preserved by force of arms. The mother country, defeated in other areas of the globe and economically exhausted, ceded to England the shores of Hudson Bay, Acadia, and Newfoundland. The situation in the south returned to the status quo antebellum, disappointing the Carolinians, who had hoped to eliminate French control in Louisiana and Spanish sovereignty in Florida. England’s territorial gains shifted the North American balance of power in its favor, but New France, though wounded, was far from moribund.
Struggling for Control of North America
The Treaty of Utrecht ushered in twenty-five years of uneasy peace between England and the Bourbon powers (France and Spain). In North America, however, relations among the colonists continued in turmoil. One cause was the continuing quest for Indian allegiance. Indian diplomacy heightened colonial anxieties. The apparently fickle natives, squeezed by technologically and numerically superior white cultures and striving to maintain their independence, played the Europeans off against each other with consummate skill. A second, related, cause was the colonists’ construction of outposts in strategic locations to improve security and to exert influence on nearby natives. Located in the unoccupied zones between expanding colonial frontiers, these forts created new tensions.
Along the northern frontier, New France tried to bring the Iroquois into its orbit. To upset French designs, the English established Fort Oswego on the Great Lakes, but the French countered with a fort at Crown Point, which was in territory claimed by New York and gave the French access to the Mohawks. The French also worried about their eastern flank, now vulnerable with Newfoundland and Acadia in British hands. Fortunately for Canada, Cape Breton Island had not been ceded to England, and here the French built Louisbourg, a formidable fortress that guarded the mouth of the St. Lawrence.
In the south, the Carolinians suffered hard times after Utrecht. Their desire to eliminate the Bourbon powers had been forestalled, and in 1711–1712 the French scored a diplomatic triumph akin to the Iroquois treaty of 1701 when they made peace with Carolina’s foremost Indian allies, the Creeks. Then in 1715 the Yamassee War stunned the English. The origins of the war, which was a widespread revolt led by the Creeks and other erstwhile friends, the Yamassees, involved callous actions by Carolina traders, white land greed, and Spanish and French intrigue. To the English the war was a classic example of the omnipresent danger they faced as long as the Bourbons maintained a foothold in the region, and of the Indians’ untrustworthy behavior. Carolina escaped a potentially disastrous situation when the Cherokees refused to join the uprising and instead aided the whites. Although Carolina won the war, its situation was grim. As one man wrote, “We are just now the poorest Colony in all America and have . . . very distracting appearances of ruine.”
Recognizing that the recent Indian war had weakened its North American southern flank and worried that the prospect of French encirclement was no idle nightmare, especially after the French strengthened their hold on the lower Mississippi by founding New Orleans, the British government responded vigorously. The English established several new forts and in 1732 founded the colony of Georgia, which was in part intended as a military buffer zone. Under James Oglethorpe’s assertive leadership, Georgians constructed a series of fortified outposts stretching southward into territory claimed by Spain and coveted by France. When Oglethorpe built Fort St. George on the St. Joh
ns River, the gateway to Florida’s interior and the backdoor to St. Augustine, passions flared and thick war clouds gathered.
Storms had also been brewing in Europe, and in 1739 the clouds burst into a British-Spanish conflict known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. What began as a drizzle became a deluge when this war merged into the War of the Austrian Succession, embroiling one European power after another until 1744, when Britain and France declared war on each other. The war in America—lasting from 1744 to 1748 and pitting English colonists against those of France and Spain—was known as King George’s War, but the entire conflict, first against Spain and then against the combined Bourbon powers, can be labeled the War of the 1740s. From 1739 to 1744 the North American struggle centered around Spanish possessions; after 1744 the focus shifted to the north.
When Oglethorpe learned of the war with Spain, he tried to fulfill Moore’s dream of capturing St. Augustine. Descending on Florida with a force of Georgia and Carolina militiamen, Creek and Cherokee warriors, a newly raised regular regiment, and a small British squadron, he hoped to surprise St. Augustine and take it by storm. But the Spanish were alert, and although Oglethorpe had proclaimed he would succeed or die trying, he did neither, retreating ignominiously with his bedraggled army.
The next year Americans participated in the assault on Cartagena, the most important port on the Spanish Main. In 1739 Admiral Edward Vernon had captured Porto Bello, and the elated British government reinforced his command so that he could make further conquests. A large fleet and army left England to rendezvous with Vernon in Jamaica, while for the first and only time the government asked the colonies to provide troops for a campaign beyond the mainland. In early 1740 the call went out for volunteers. To expedite volunteering, colonial governments offered bounties and promised the troops a fair share of captured booty. Eleven colonies provided thirty-six companies of a hundred men each, organized into an “American Regiment” commanded by Virginia Governor William Gooch. The regiment sailed to Jamaica, meeting Vernon’s fleet and the British army under Brigadier General Thomas Wentworth. The expedition then moved against Cartagena and met with a disastrous repulse. Like Walker’s expedition thirty years earlier, Vernon’s failure had long-term significance, spreading discord between Englishmen living on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The soldiers in the American Regiment fared badly at the hands of the British military establishment. They ate “putrid beef, rusty pork, and bread swimming with maggots,” did an inordinate amount of fatigue duty, were forced to serve on British warships, and for their efforts received little but contempt. Thus Cartagena further reduced British military prestige in America and reinforced the emergent antagonism Americans felt toward regulars.
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