by Conrad Black
In Europe, the war had gone poorly for the Anglo-Prussian alliance in 1759, as the Prussians had lost ground to the Russians and Austrians, and Frederick had contemplated abdication and even suicide. Hanover was safe, and the British didn’t care what happened in Central and Eastern Europe, as long as no individual power became preeminent among Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Maria Theresa’s armies regained Saxony and again pushed into Silesia. The Russian empress, Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter, even briefly took Berlin until Frederick rushed back from the frontier to evict her army, but she remains more than 250 years later the only Russian leader except Stalin to take Berlin.
In the spring of 1760, Lévis suddenly arrived at the western approaches to Quebec and defeated Murray at the Battle of Sainte-Foy and drove him back into the walled city of Quebec, but he had no artillery with which to reduce the ramparts and had to withdraw. Murray had begun a grand tradition of important implications by fostering cordial relations with the French through the winter and not interfering at all with their law and customs and local officials. Amherst arrived at Montreal in the summer. The city had no fortifications and had had no supplies from France for several years, and on generous and respectful conditions from Amherst, Vaudreuil surrendered it. The war in North America was over and New France ended with it.
The war in Europe dragged on a little longer. France couldn’t invade Britain, had no interest in intervening in Central or Eastern Europe, and couldn’t even bring itself to a full-hearted attack on Hanover, especially after George II died in 1760 and was succeeded by his grandson, the very headstrong George III, who disliked his grandfather and had no interest at all in Hanover. He was the first Hanoverian British king to speak English properly, or even as a first language. Choiseul succeeded, inexplicably, in dragging Spain into the war on France’s side, in 1762, claiming that Britain would next be attacking Spanish possessions in the New World. The British, who had almost run out of French imperial extremities to attack, responded by seizing Havana. Pitt and then Newcastle were sacked by George III, who distrusted Pitt’s brilliance and force and considered Newcastle, after thirty-six years in cabinet, and with some reason, a slippery politician. The king put in as prime minister his tutor, the Earl of Bute, who was completely unqualified to take their place.
Czarina Elizabeth died in 1762, and the throne of Russia was held briefly by her dull-witted German nephew, Peter III, who worshipped Frederick the Great, withdrew from the war, and was promptly murdered with the presumed complicity of his wife (in one of the most unevenly talented marriages in history), the formidable Catherine the Great, as she became. (Frederick, a cultured man and friend, as Catherine was, of Voltaire, wrote a couplet about Elizabeth when she died: “The Russian Messalina, the Cossacks’ whore, / Gone to service lovers on the Stygian shore.”6 The death of Elizabeth was the salvation of the hard-pressed Frederick, and in 1945 the Nazi leaders hopefully compared the death of Roosevelt with it.7)
British debt had risen through the war from 74.5 million pounds to about 133 million pounds, and bonds to cover the deficit had to be issued at punitive rates of interest. Both France and Britain faced financial problems and peace beckoned, as it did to war-weary Austria, and certainly Frederick’s beleaguered Prussia as well. Spain was not prepared to cede Havana, and Choiseul worked out a compromise whereby he gave Louisiana, which France clearly could not hold and which the British were capable of seizing at any moment, to Spain in exchange for Spain ceding to Britain the Gulf Coast from the Mississippi to the eastern border of Alabama, and Britain gave Havana back to Spain in exchange.
Benjamin Franklin had been the agent of Pennsylvania and some other American colonies in London since 1757, and had never ceased to lobby and agitate for the permanent expulsion of France from Canada. There was a considerable body of opinion in Britain that wanted to keep France’s rich Caribbean islands, and leave France with Canada, which Voltaire described, in a phrase that rankles yet in Quebec, as “a few acres of snow.” All Franklin’s voluminous correspondence at this time, including his widely circulated “Canada Pamphlet,” fervently advocated the British takeover of Canada. As long as a great European power was bordering the American colonies, they were not safe. It worked out as Franklin had hoped and advocated. France regained its Caribbean islands, the African slave-trading station at Gorée, and the Indian port city of Pondicherry, and kept the Gulf of St. Lawrence islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, with which to service its fishing fleet and continue to train seamen for France’s navy. Britain ruled North America and India. There is no evidence that Franklin thought explicitly of American independence, but he made it clear that he anticipated the Americans would outnumber the people of the Mother Country about the time it happened (eighty years later) and saw the balance of power within the British world shifting steadily across the Atlantic. But if New France were governed by the British and by home rule, and not by the Americans, the Americans could not claim to be threatened, but neither could they lay claim to Quebec. Franklin had a vision of the greatness of America, but no one had any idea what to do with French Canada. It was a self-sufficient entity with a national identity and a heroic tradition. It had a reasonable framework of laws and was devoutly Roman Catholic, an ultramontanist outpost that, but for geographic inconvenience, could virtually merge with the Papal States.
The Treaty of Paris was signed on February 10, 1763, and the Peace of Hubertusburg five days later between the Eastern European powers. Maria Theresa regained Saxony, but Frederick retained Silesia. The Seven Years War had been utterly stupid for everyone except the British and Americans. The other countries made war almost continuously, at great cost in lives, treasure, and physical damage, for marginal gains and losses of territory; the royal dynasts amused themselves with inter-dynastic marriages and quarrels for which the people paid. Talented autocrats like Richelieu and Frederick the Great, and for a time Louis XIV, could make the system work for them and their nations’ interests, up to a point, but ordinary despots just squandered what they blowzily believed to be their divine right to rule capriciously. France had lost prestige, and lost an empire. Prussia did not gain an inch, but was confirmed in the fraternity of the great powers, with Britain, France, Austria, and Russia. Britain had a debt bomb it would soon wish to share with America. Pitt had been the great war statesman (starting a tradition that would be followed after successful British wars with other great powers, he was ousted as the trumpets of victory were sounded), Frederick was the great commander, and Franklin was the great strategic prophet.
New France had been a bold and a brave experiment. It was never going to be able to compete with the colonies to the south, peopled by the British, a seafaring nation around all their island perimeter, a nationality that liked to explore and resettle and possessed a great navy. But New France was now, in peacetime, serene and untroublesome. All the French establishment in Quebec except the clergy departed. (Lévis became a marshal of France and died in 1787. His son fled to Britain during the French Revolution, but with the civilizing gentleness of the Reign of Terror, Lévis’s widow and three daughters were executed on the guillotine for the crime of nobility.) French Canada was self-sufficient in food and trade, and was accustomed to a prodigious birthrate that was certain to provide a natural population increase. Deportation was out of the question, as the population was much greater than that of the Acadians, and the French Canadians had not had unlimited affection for the French, who hastily deserted them, but liked what they saw of the British, who provided a security against the Americans the colony had never had and governed without the unappealable authoritarianism and corruption the French often brought with them. The achievements of the early Canadians, such as d’Iberville, Joliet, and La Vérendrye, had been astounding. The tenacity and national integrity of the French Canadians were impressive, and impressed all who came in touch with them.
As long as the British protected the French Canadians, they would flourish. The British were already looking to
the Americans, who had the most prosperous 20 per cent of the world’s British, to help them pay for the cost of the late war, and without the French threat on their northern border, the Americans could be much feistier, as was their nature, with the home country than before. The French Canadians were pliant clay for a new nationality and the conditions for Canadian nationhood were starting, imperceptibly, to fall into place. The embryo of Canada of half a century before was now a fetus.
2. Toward Conciliation in Canada and Schism in America, the Quebec Act, 1763–1774
The British Army ruled with exemplary tact and fairness in the quiet interregnum in Quebec from 1760 to the end of the Seven Years War in Europe in 1763, when it was not clear whether Canada would be retained by Britain or returned to France. Franklin lobbied perfervidly in London for the former course. Amherst, who was officially the chief authority as theatre military commander in New York, posted a “placard” throughout Montreal and Trois-Rivières advising the inhabitants that they could keep those firearms necessary for hunting, that the Canadian militia would be replenished, and that all requisitions by the British Army were to be paid for at a fair price and in cash, which caused a mutiny in Quebec, as the soldiers were accustomed to these things being provided for them by the British government. Murray put down the mutiny, which was a salutary lesson to everyone, including the inhabitants, who had not been accustomed to such discouragement of official rapine under the French. Civil adjudication was to be by captains of militia, with appeals, under Murray in the Quebec district, to the existing courts of what had been New France. Murray spoke French well and liked, and was liked by, the French and French Canadians, and he was confirmed as governor of Quebec after the Treaty of Paris allocated it to Britain. Murray took a dim view of the first few hundred British arrivals, mainly opportunistic American sharpers and swindlers claiming to be the merchant class of the new British colony with the conqueror’s pride of place.
When it came in 1763, the Treaty of Paris only allowed the Québécois to practise their “religion according to the rites of the Romish church as far as the laws of Great Britain permit,” which was not very far. But there was little change, and the position of the Catholic Church was undisturbed. The fifth bishop of Quebec,* Henri-Marie Dubreil de Pontbriand, had died in 1760, and the British were not prepared to allow a nominee of the king of France or the pope until matters were settled. The diocese (which technically extended to New Orleans) was directed by the vicars general of Quebec and Montreal, with conspicuous concern for the wishes of the governors, and the Jesuit, Sulpician, and Récollet parish priests were not interfered with, but were closely watched by the British for any subversive tendencies. There were few incidents. Jean-Olivier Briand was chosen by the Holy See, consecrated in France, and informally advised in England to go to Quebec and assume his role without fanfare. He did this and was eventually recognized, in the terms of the occupiers, as “Superintendent of the Romish Church” (in other words, bishop). The playing-card money resorted to in Quebec was rejected by the British as of no value, and the colonial administration was bankrupt. Bigot and his friends took with them everything that was left except the copper roofs of the main buildings. The outrages inflicted by the British on the Acadians served as a cautionary warning to the people of New France. The seigneurial land and tenancy arrangements were respected, as was the French civil law, but the harsh French criminal law was replaced with the British version of criminal justice, draconian by contemporary standards, but a soft impeachment and penalization of the wrongdoer by the standards of France. Amherst gave those residents unable to accept the change eighteen months to pack up and leave Quebec. Most of the secular leadership of New France departed.
The native people who had been allied with the French were less quiescent. The individual American colonies all had territorial ambitions to the west, if there were not another colony separating them from the politically unorganized interior. And those colonies that did not adjoin the Indians, such as most of New England, had classes of settlers and speculators who invoked the patronage of their colonies of origin, unofficially setting up colonies of colonies in the interior. The relations with the Indians were conducted as much in the private sector as by governments and were replete with the most dubious practices, most frequently the plying of Indians with alcohol and then purporting to buy tracts of their land at risible prices. When, as inevitably happened, the Indians rebelled at this trickery, hostilities broke out and the western frontier developers who had despised and evaded the control of the colonial governments screamed like banshees for their protection as ambassadors of civilization and progress beset by the lowly savages and heathen, and the colonists, full of complaints though they habitually were toward the Mother Country, echoed the concerns of the frontiersmen in demanding Imperial protection for their depredations on the Indians.
The Cherokee War of 1758 to 1761 was the first such problem, and was doubtless instigated by the French traders and soldiers who worked with the Cherokee. The British stabilized this and other dissatisfied Indian groups. Amherst, while respectful of Britain’s ancient and majestic foe across the English Channel, regarded the North American Indian with complete disdain aggravated by a total lack of curiosity. He assumed that with the end of their ability to play the French and British off against each other, the Indians would roll over like poodles and confine their savagery to internecine squabbles. More knowledgeable and successful were a Swiss brigadier in the British frontier forces, Henry Bouquet (a soldier of fortune who had also served in the Dutch and Sardinian armies), and the supreme British expert in relations with the North American Indians, Sir William Johnson. (Johnson was British superintendent of Indian affairs from 1756 to his death in 1774. He carried his interest in the natives to rather energetic intimacy with Indian women, siring between twenty and one hundred illegitimate children with many women of a number of tribes and bands. He may have exploited not only his position but the tribally approved promiscuity of young Indian women until they found their mate.) Between them, by an artistic combination of tact and force, Bouquet (who founded and named Pittsburgh) and Johnson stabilized the outer frontier edges of the British-American colonies.
Pontiac’s War, named after the Ottawa leader who was the most prominent of the many chiefs involved, began in May 1763 after Amherst stopped the practice of presenting gifts to the Indian leaders, which was a matter of prestige in the eyes of their tribes and nations, and the end of the policy was considered humiliating and insulting. Amherst also cut the supply of gunpowder, which the Indians saw as a sinister and unfriendly act (and which had been the effective cause of the Cherokee War). The Indians were all concerned about the incessant westward pressure of the British, where the French had been content just to send agents, missionaries, and armed parties among them but did not constitute the demographic threat of an occupier as the British (Americans) did. Pontiac grouped together the Ottawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Huron, Miami, Wea, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Piankashaw, Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot. They seized a number of the smaller French forts and laid siege to Pittsburgh and Fort Detroit but did not capture them. Johnson successfully negotiated some of the tribes out of the war. Bouquet beat the Indians off at Pittsburgh, but not before he and Amherst had discussed in writing trying to infect the Indians with chicken pox from blankets the British distributed. There was the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763, which recognized the Indians as having some rights to their territory. Amherst was withdrawn to Britain in 1764 and replaced with General Thomas Gage, and Johnson and others produced a negotiated end to all phases of the war by 1766. Amherst’s policies were reversed and the proclamation was interpreted as giving the Indians “reserved” territory (the origin of that word in that context) west of a line along the peaks of the Alleghenies. The British and Americans lost 450 soldiers dead, 2,000 civilians killed or injured, and 4,000 moved to avoid Indian marauding. The Indians lost about 400 dead and an unknown number wounded and afflicted by combat-related illnesses
, perhaps 2,000 or so. Pontiac’s war is generally reckoned a draw.
The Royal Proclamation also established the boundaries of a new British province of Quebec. In accepting reserved Indian territory beyond the Alleghenies, it tried to force further British settlement north into Quebec and south into the Floridas (as they then were). There was some hope of swamping and assimilating the French, but no thought of culturally suppressing or deporting them. But the flow of homesteaders continued to move steadily west and to exacerbate problems with the Indians, who saw with resentment the white man’s advance in a demographic tidal wave, which the vanguard of Euro-American civilization made little attempt to palliate. In 1768, the southern border of Iroquois lands was moved to the west, to the Ohio, by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.
Murray proved a durably enlightened and popular governor. As the Royal Proclamation foresaw an assembly, and British law excluded any Roman Catholic elector or member of such an assembly, the five hundred or so English-speaking merchants in Quebec agitated for the selection and convening of just such a body. Murray construed his authority, as civil governor starting in 1764, to include determining when the assembly would be established, and he did not choose to establish one in these circumstances. Instead, his council was, in so far as there was one at all, the legislature. He packed it with protégés, the like-minded, and sympathizers with the French. He also intervened to vacate the nomination of Vicar General Étienne Montgolfier of Montreal as the next bishop, supporting instead Vicar General Briand of Quebec, who was confirmed by the British Crown and the French Church and the pope.
The greedy American merchants of Montreal and Quebec had enough influence with the Board of Trade in London (a cabinet office) to have Murray recalled in 1766 for his pro-French attitudes. They complained of their inability to monopolize legislative authority to their own less than 1 per cent of the population, and even complained that Murray was an insufficiently regular (Protestant, of course) church attender. The French seigneurs responded in Murray’s favour, but he was further compromised by a peculiar episode in which one of the most bigoted and authoritarian magistrates, Thomas Walker, was assaulted in his home while having dinner with his wife and part of his ear was severed, which caused acute concern in the colony. Despite these perturbations, which affected almost exclusively the English, Murray’s sage and tolerant decisions, unvaried by his successor, provided the thin thread which connected the French Canadians and the British Crown that alone could protect them from the Americans.
