The Conquest of New France; A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars

by George McKinnon Wrong

[CHAPTER IV.]

Louisbourg And Boston

For thirty years England and France now remained at peace, and England had many reasons for desiring peace to continue. Anne, the last of the Stuart rulers, died in 1714. The new King, George I, Elector of Hanover, was a German and a German unchangeable, for he was already fifty-four, with little knowledge of England and none of the English, and with an undying love for the dear despotic ways easily followed in a small German principality. He and his successor George II were thinking eternally of German rather than of English problems, and with German interests chiefly regarded it was well that England should make a friend of France. It was well, too, that under a new dynasty, with its title disputed, England should not encourage France to continue the friendly policy of Louis XIV towards James, the deposed Stuart Pretender. England had just made a new, determined, and arrogant enemy by forcing upon Spain the deep humiliation of ceding Gibraltar, which had been taken in 1704 by Admiral Rooke with allied forces. The proudest monarchy in Europe was compelled to see a spot of its own sacred territory held permanently by a rival nation. Gibraltar Spain was determined to recover. Its loss drove her into the arms of the enemies of England and remains to this day a grievance which on occasion Spanish politicians know well how to make useful.

Great Britain was now under the direction of a leader whose policy was peace. A nation is happy when a born statesman with a truly liberal mind and a genuine love of his country comes to the front in its affairs. Such a man was Sir Robert Walpole. He was a Whig squire, a plain country gentleman, with enough of culture to love good pictures and the ancient classics, but delighting chiefly in sports and agriculture, hard drinking and politics. When only twenty-seven he was already a leader among the Whigs; at thirty-two he was Secretary for War; and before he was forty he had become Prime Minister, a post which he really created and was the first Englishman to hold. Friendship with France marked a new phase of British policy. Walpole’s baffled enemies said that he was bribed by France. His shrewd insight kept France lukewarm in its support of the Stuart rising in 1715, which he punished with great severity. But it was as a master of finance that he was strongest. While continental nations were wasting men and money Walpole gloried in saving English lives and English gold. He found new and fruitful modes of taxation, but when urged to tax the colonies he preferred, as he said, to leave that to a bolder man. It is a pity that any one was ever found bold enough to do it.

Walpole’s policy endured for a quarter of a century. He abandoned it only after a bitter struggle in which he was attacked as sacrificing the national honor for the sake of peace. Spain was an easy mark for those who wished to arouse the warlike spirit. She still persecuted and burned heretics, a great cause of offense in Protestant Britain, and she was rigorous in excluding foreigners from trading with her colonies. To be the one exception in this policy of exclusion was the privilege enjoyed by Britain. When the fortunes of Spain were low in 1713, she had been forced not merely to cede Gibraltar but also to give to the British the monopoly of supplying the Spanish colonies with negro slaves and the right to send one ship a year to trade at Porto Bello in South America. It seems a sufficiently ignoble bargain for a great nation to exact: the monopoly of carrying and selling cargoes of black men and the right to send a single ship yearly to a Spanish colony. We can hardly imagine grave diplomats of our day haggling over such terms. But the eighteenth century was not the twentieth. From the treaty the British expected amazing results. The South Sea Company was formed to carry on a vast trade with South America. One ship a year could, of course, carry little, but the ships laden with negroes could smuggle into the colonies merchandise and the one trading ship could be and was reloaded fraudulently from lighters so that its cargo was multiplied manyfold. Out of the belief in huge profits from this trade with its exaggerated visions of profit grew in 1720 the famous South Sea Bubble which inaugurated a period of frantic speculation in England. Worthless shares in companies formed for trade in the South Seas sold at a thousand per cent of their face value. It is a form of madness to which human greed is ever liable. Walpole’s financial insight condemned from the first the wild outburst, and his common sense during the crisis helped to stem the tide of disaster. The South Sea Bubble burst partly because Spain stood sternly on her own rights and punished British smugglers. During many years the tension between the two nations grew. No doubt Spanish officials were harsh. Tales were repeated in England of their brutalities to British sailors who fell into their hands. In 1739 the story of a certain Captain Jenkins that his ear had been cut off by Spanish captors and thrown in his face with an insulting message to his government brought matters to a climax. Events in other parts of Europe soon made the war general. When, in 1740, the young King of Prussia, Frederick II, came to the throne, his first act was to march an army into Silesia. To this province he had, he said, in the male line, a better claim than that of the woman, Maria Theresa, who had just inherited the Austrian crown. Frederick conquered Silesia and held it. In 1744 he was allied with Spain and France, while Britain allied herself with Austria, and thus Britain and France were again at war.

In America both sides had long seen that the war was inevitable. Never had French opinion been more arrogant in asserting France’s right to North America than after the Treaty of Utrecht. At the dinner-table of the Governor in Quebec there was incessant talk of Britain’s incapacity, of the sheer luck by which she had blundered into the occupation of great areas, while in truth she was weak through lack of union and organization. A natural antipathy, it was said, existed between her colonies and herself; she was a monarchy while they were really independent republics. France, on the other hand, had grown stronger since the last war. In 1713 she had retained the island of Cape Breton and now she had made it a new menace to British power. Boston, which had breathed more freely after the fall of Port Royal in 1710, soon had renewed cause for alarm in regard to its shipping. On the southern coast of Cape Breton, there was a spacious harbor with a narrow entrance easily fortified, and here France began to build the fortress of Louisbourg. It was planned on the most approved military principles of the time. Through its strength, the boastful talk went, France should master North America. The King sent out cannon, undertook to build a hospital, to furnish chaplains for the service of the Church, to help education, and so on. Above all, he sent to Louisbourg soldiers.

Reports of these wonderful things reached the English colonies and caused fears and misgivings. New England believed that Louisbourg reflected the pomp and wealth of Versailles. The fortress was, in truth, slow in building and never more than a rather desolate outpost of France. It contained in all about four thousand people. During the thirty years of the long truce it became so strong that it was without a rival on the Atlantic coast. The excellent harbor was a haven for the fishermen of adjacent waters and a base for French privateers, who were a terror to all the near trade routes of the Atlantic. On the military side Louisbourg seemed a success. But the French failed in their effort to colonize the island of Cape Breton on which the fortress stood. Today this island has great iron and other industries. There are coal-mines near Louisbourg; and its harbor, long deserted after the fall of the power of France, has now an extensive commerce. The island was indeed fabulously rich in coals and minerals. To use these things, however, was to be the task of a new age of industry. The colonist of the eighteenth century—a merchant, a farmer, or a fur trader—thought that Cape Breton was bleak and infertile and refused to settle there. Louisbourg remained a compact fortress with a good harbor, free from ice during most of the year, but too much haunted by fog. It looked out on a much-traveled sea. But it remained set in the wilderness.

Even if Louisbourg made up for the loss of Port Royal, this did not, however, console France for the cession of Acadia. The fixed idea of those who shaped the policy of Canada was to recover Acadia and meanwhile to keep its French settlers loyal to France. The Acadians were not a promising people with whom to work. In Acadia, or Nova Scotia, as the English called it, these backward people had slowly gathered during a hundred years and had remained remote and neglected. They had cleared farms, built primitive houses, planted orchards, and reared cattle. In 1713 their number did not exceed two or three thousand, but already they were showing the amazing fertility of the French race in America. They were prosperous but ignorant. Almost none of them could read. After the cession of their land to Britain in 1713 they had been guaranteed by treaty the free exercise of their religion and they were Catholics to a man. It seems as if history need hardly mention a people so feeble and obscure. Circumstances, however, made the rôle of the Acadians important. Their position was unique. The Treaty of Utrecht gave them the right to leave Acadia within a year, taking with them their personal effects. To this Queen Anne added the just privilege of selling their lands and houses. Neither the Acadians themselves, however, nor their new British masters were desirous that they should leave. The Acadians were content in their old homes; and the British did not wish them to help in building up the neighboring French stronghold on Cape Breton. It thus happened that the French officials could induce few of the Acadians to migrate and the English troubled them little. Having been resolute in acquiring Nova Scotia, Britain proceeded straightway to neglect it. She brought in few settlers. She kept there less than two hundred soldiers and even to these she paid so little attention that sometimes they had no uniforms. The Acadians prospered, multiplied, and quarreled as to the boundaries of their lands. They rendered no military service, paid no taxes, and had the country to themselves as completely as if there had been no British conquest. They rarely saw a British official. If they asked the British Governor at Annapolis to settle for them some vexed question of rights or ownership he did so and they did not even pay a fee.

This is not, however, the whole story. England’s neglect of the colony was France’s opportunity. Perhaps the French court did not follow closely what was going on in Acadia. The successive French Governors of Canada at Quebec were, however, alert; and their policy was to incite the Abenaki Indians on the New England frontier to harass the English settlements, and to keep the Acadians an active factor in the support of French plans. The nature of French intrigue is best seen in the career of Sebastien Rale. He was a highly educated Jesuit priest. It was long a tradition among the Jesuits to send some of their best men as missionaries among the Indians. Rale spent nearly the whole of his life with the Abenakis at the mission station of Norridgewock on the Kennebec River. He knew the language and the customs of the Indians, attended their councils, and dominated them by his influence. He was a model missionary, earnest and scholarly. But the Jesuit of that age was prone to be half spiritual zealot, half political intriguer. There is no doubt that the Indians had a genuine fear that the English, with danger from France apparently removed by the Treaty of Utrecht, would press claims to lands about the Kennebec River in what is now the State of Maine, and that they would ignore the claims of the Indians and drive them out. The Governor at Quebec helped to arouse the savages against the arrogant intruders. English border ruffians stirred the Indians by their drunken outrages and gave them real cause for anger. The savages knew only one way of expressing political unrest. They began murdering women and children in raids on lonely log cabins on the frontier. The inevitable result was that in 1721 Massachusetts began a war on them which dragged on for years. Rale, inspired from Quebec, was believed to control the Indians and, indeed, boasted that he did so. At last the English struck at the heart of the trouble. In 1724 some two hundred determined men made a silent advance through the forest to the mission village of Norridgewock where Rale lived, and Rale died fighting the assailants. In Europe a French Jesuit such as he would have worked among diplomats and at the luxurious courts of kings. In America he worked among savages under the hard conditions of frontier life. The methods and the aims in both cases were the same—by subtle and secret influence so to mold the actions of men that France should be exalted in power. In their high politics the French sometimes overreached themselves. To seize points of vantage, to intrigue for influence, are not in themselves creative. They must be supported by such practical efforts as will assure an economic reserve adequate in the hour of testing. France failed partly because she did not know how to lay sound industrial foundations which should give substance to the brilliant planning of her leaders.