The news that Louisbourg was taken, reached Boston at one o'clock in the morning of the 3d of July by a vessel sent express. A din of bells and cannon proclaimed it to the slumbering townsmen, and before the sun rose, the streets were filled with shouting crowds. At night every window shone with lamps, and the town was ablaze with fireworks and bonfires. The next Thursday was appointed a day of general thanksgiving for a victory believed to be the direct work of Providence. New York and Philadelphia also hailed the great news with illuminations, ringing of bells, and firing of cannon.
In England the tidings were received with astonishment and a joy that was dashed with reflections on the strength and mettle of colonists supposed already to aspire to independence. Pepperrell was made a baronet, and Warren an admiral. The merchant soldier was commissioned colonel in the British army; a regiment was given him, to be raised in America and maintained by the King, while a similar recognition was granted to the lawyer Shirley. [Footnote: To Rous, captain of a provincial cruiser, whom Warren had commended for conduct and courage, was given the command of a ship in the royal navy. "Tell your Council and Assembly, in his Majesty's name," writes Newcastle to Shirley, "that their conduct will always entitle them, in a particular manner, to his royal favor and protection." Newcastle to Shirley, 10 Aug. 1745.]
A question vital to Massachusetts worried her in the midst of her triumph. She had been bankrupt for many years, and of the large volume of her outstanding obligations, a part was not worth eightpence in the pound. Added to her load of debt, she had spent £183,649 sterling on the Louisbourg expedition. That which Smollett calls "the most important achievement of the war" would never have taken place but for her, and Old England, and not New, was to reap the profit; for Louisbourg, conquered by arms, was to be restored by diplomacy. If the money she had spent for the mother-country were not repaid, her ruin was certain. William Bollan, English by birth and a son-in-law of Shirley, was sent out to urge the just claim of the province, and after long and vigorous solicitation, he succeeded. The full amount, in sterling value, was paid to Massachusetts, and the expenditures of New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were also reimbursed. [Footnote: £183,649 to Massachusetts; £16,355 to New Hampshire; £28,863 to Connecticut; £6,332 to Rhode Island.] The people of Boston saw twenty-seven of those long, unwieldy trucks which many elders of the place still remember as used in their youth, rumbling up King Street to the treasury, loaded with 217 chests of Spanish dollars, and a hundred barrels of copper coin. A pound sterling was worth eleven pounds of the old-tenor currency of Massachusetts, and thirty shillings of the new-tenor. Those beneficent trucks carried enough to buy in at a stroke nine tenths of the old-tenor notes of the province,—nominally worth above two millions. A stringent tax, laid on by the Assembly, paid the remaining tenth, and Massachusetts was restored to financial health.
[Footnote: Palfrey, New England, V. 101-109; Shirley, Report to the Board of Trade. Bollan to Secretary Willard, in Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., I. 53; Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., II. 391-395. Letters of Bollan in Massachusetts Archives.
It was through the exertions of the much-abused Thomas Hutchinson, Speaker of the Assembly and historian of Massachusetts, that the money was used for the laudable purpose of extinguishing the old debt.
Shirley did his utmost to support Bollan in his efforts to obtain compensation, and after highly praising the zeal and loyalty of the people of his province, he writes to Newcastle: "Justice, as well as the affection which I bear to 'em, constrains me to beseech your Grace to recommend their Case to his Majesty's paternal Care & Tenderness in the Strongest manner." Shirley to Newcastle, 6 Nov. 1745.
The English documents on the siege of Louisbourg are many and voluminous. The Pepperrell Papers and the Belknap Papers, both in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, afford a vast number of contemporary letters and documents on the subject. The large volume entitled Siege of Louisbourg, in the same repository, contains many more, including a number of autograph diaries of soldiers and others. To these are to be added the journals of General Wolcott, James Gibson, Benjamin Cleaves, Seth Pomeroy, and several others, in print or manuscript, among which is especially to be noted the journal appended to Shirley's Letter to the Duke of Newcastle of Oct. 28, 1745, and bearing the names of Pepperrell, Brigadier Waldo, Colonel Moore, and Lieutenant-Colonels Lothrop and Gridley, who attest its accuracy. Many papers have also been drawn from the Public Record Office of London.
Accounts of this affair have hitherto rested, with but slight exceptions, on English sources alone. The archives of France have furnished useful material to the foregoing narrative, notably the long report of the Governor, Duchambon, to the Minister of War, and the letter of the Intendant, Bigot, to the same personage, within about six weeks after the surrender. But the most curious French evidence respecting the siege is the Lettre d'un Habitant de Louisbourg contenant une Relation exacte & circonstanciée de la Prise de l'Isle-Royale par les Anglois. A Québec, chez Guillaume le Sincère, à l'Image de la Vérité, 1745. This little work, of eighty-one printed pages, is extremely rare. I could study it only by having a literatim transcript made from the copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale, as it was not in the British Museum. It bears the signature B. L. N., and is dated à … ce 28 Août, 1745. The imprint of Québec, etc., is certainly a mask, the book having no doubt been printed in France. It severely criticises Duchambon, and makes him mainly answerable for the disaster.
For French views of the siege of Louisbourg, see Appendix B.]