The History of the Thirteen Colonies of North America 1497-1763

by Reginald W. Jeffery

From the very first the relations between the colonies and Canada had been unfriendly, but the feelings of antagonism increased as the seventeenth century grew in years; and by the time that Frontenac ruled Canada and Thomas Dongan was English Governor at New York, this feeling had reached a climax. So pressing had the question become that the colonies, in 1684, held a general conference at Albany, the outcome of which, to the alarm of the French, was a firm alliance with the Five Nations or Iroquois. No greater struggle, however, resulted than an acrimonious literary warfare between the energetic Dongan and the capable Denonville concerning numerous attacks upon English and Dutch traders.

The English Revolution, the recall of Dongan, and the reappointment of Count Frontenac as governor of Canada were contemporaneous and were sufficient reasons for more trouble. The acceptance of William and Mary in England meant war in Europe; and Frontenac, seeing his opportunity, began what was called by the English settlers King William's war. The French governor made elaborate plans to attack New York, but having failed, found on his return that the Iroquois had disastrously raided Canada and massacred the people of Lachine. A fresh expedition was planned at a most unfortunate moment for the English colonists, who were suffering from the effects of the Revolution; and New York, in particular, was in the throes of the already mentioned Leisler rising. For Frontenac it was the ideal chance; now if ever he felt that he was bound to succeed against the English. His plans were well laid: his force was divided into three parties, which were to strike their blows at the same time and paralyse the settlers with terror. The first party with a band of Indians, under the famous rangers the brothers D'Iberville, started along the familiar waterway of the Richelieu River, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, to attack Albany. By mischance they turned to the west and fell upon the little Dutch settlement of Schenectady, which was unguarded except for a few militiamen from Connecticut. The scene can only be described as one of helpless and hideous massacre; all who resisted were butchered and the place was deliberately and ruthlessly burnt. The second expedition was no less successful in carrying out their horrible task. It was mere murder. For three months they worked their way down to the settlement of Salmon Falls on the borders of New Hampshire and Maine. Here the settlers, little expecting such a terrible visit, were murdered while sleeping. Elated with these horrors, the French and Indians moved on to join their other comrades, and together, between four and five hundred strong, attacked Fort Loyal in the settlement of Falmouth, where now stands the town of Portland. Sylvanus Davies, the commander of the fort, surrendered on the promise of quarter and freedom; the promise was so much waste paper, and some of the English suffered the fate of the inhabitants of Schenectady, while others were led captive to Quebec.

The lesson learnt by the English colonists was a salutary one, and the immediate result of Frontenac's three successes was a tendency on the part of the settlers to unite. At a solemn conference held in 1690 at Albany, the colonies came to the conclusion that a combined naval and military force must attack the French at once. The authorities in Massachusetts took the lead; the "Bostonnais," as the French called them, were seamen to the backbone. They had come, as has been shown, of a sturdy Puritan stock, and as dwellers by the sea and traders on its waters, they possessed those very characteristics which the Canadians so sadly lacked. It was therefore the people of Boston who did all they could to further the attack by sea, by which the main effort was to be made; the land forces were not supported with the same enthusiasm and were thereby insufficient for the work in hand, as events afterwards proved, and instead of a magnificent military exhibition against Canada, the soldiers did little more than raid a French settlement at La Prairie.

The memory of David Kirke's attack upon Quebec was still green, although sixty years had passed since that event. The aforetime ship's carpenter and sea-rover, Sir William Phipps, governor of Massachusetts, was now burning to renew the old glories of the colonial navy at the expense of France. He had already, at the time of the French attack upon Falmouth, taken possession of their one stronghold in Acadia, Port Royal, and returned with much booty, some prisoners, and an increased reputation as a brave, patriotic man. In August 1690, with 34 ships and 2200 men, Phipps sailed from Nantucket to attack Quebec, the headquarters of the French Government. The inhabitants had been lulled by continuous peace into a sense of security, which was neither justified by past experience not by daily occurring events. The expedition, however, landed too late in the year. What happened to it was what Wolfe dreaded nearly seventy years later. It was late in October before the men had disembarked and the wet and cold season had already set in. The food supplies ran short; sickness broke out and the little party was easily outnumbered. Phipps bombarded the lower town to his heart's content, but he made the fatal mistake of trying to attack from Beauport, instead of by means of the path, which was afterwards discovered by Wolfe, and which had already been shown to the "Bostonnais" general. The failure of the gallant band from Massachusetts was complete; but there was something truly magnificent about the whole affair. The man who had once tended sheep, who had been a common seaman, and worked his way up the rungs of the ladder of fame and prosperity, now pitted himself against the Count de Frontenac, noble of France; the humble citizens of Boston, who, up to that moment, had shown more interest in religious intolerance and the rejection of any unnecessary pressure from England, had dared to attack the ancient fortress of New France, garrisoned by trained forces and skilled backwoodsmen warriors; practically one humble Puritanic colony strove against the pomp and might of his Catholic Majesty, Louis Quatorze.

The New England colonies, headed by Massachusetts, were bound to struggle against the French with more determination than any of their colonial brethren. New York did occasionally suffer severe attacks such as that which had been intended for Albany; but the French realised very clearly that their raids in this direction were always liable to be repulsed, not by the settlers themselves, but by the warlike Iroquois, who were in every way bound to the English and antagonistic to France. The Puritan colonies, on the other hand, were threatened by Indian foes just as friendly to the Canadians as the Iroquois were towards the New Yorkers. The Abenaki Indians were an ever constant danger along the New England borders, and their hostile attitude was intensified by the Jesuits, who had acquired over them an influence even greater than that which they had gained over other tribes. It was, in fact, the priests' main task, particularly during the latter years of the seventeenth century, to incite the Indians in their attacks upon the English. Wild, looting, scalping, murdering bands poured in upon the unhappy settlers who dwelt along the borders of New Hampshire and Maine. The French feared, and with reason, that unless they kept this blood-lust at fever heat, the Abenaki like the Iroquois would be won over by the English owing to the fascination of a lucrative commerce.

The onslaughts that had to be resisted were not only from the Indians. The success of Phipps at Port Royal, and his daring attack upon Quebec, forced the Canadians to cry aloud for some form of retaliation, which swiftly came. No sooner had Villebon recaptured Port Royal in Acadia, than, in 1692, a definite series of massacres were organised along the colonial sea-coast, and for years the English frontiers were swept with desolating raids. York in Maine was the first to suffer the horrors of this combined Indian and French warfare. Wells, further north, was more successful in its resistance; for here Convers and thirty militiamen drove back a party of Indians and French who had hoped to perpetrate the usual butchery. The terror began again in 1694, and the settlers at Oyster River were either immediately killed or carried into captivity. That such things were tolerated by the New Englanders, and especially by the people of Massachusetts, who had been so energetic in their naval expeditions, is extremely surprising; there can be little doubt that the settlers in the larger towns exhibited extraordinary indifference to these raids upon their more isolated brethren. Massachusetts, with a population of 50,000, was quite capable of building a strong line of forts and organising a well-equipped border police. A few forts they certainly had, but these were ill-protected and worse cared for. The only one of any importance was that of Pemaquid, which lay as a rampart in the path of any Abenaki attack on New England; but so dilatory was the conduct of the settlers that, at the very moment when they might have expected serious trouble with the French, they withdrew most of their troops and in 1689 allowed the fort to be taken by the Indians. The energetic Phipps had done his best, and in 1692 Pemaquid was rebuilt and regarrisoned. The later story of this fort is one that causes Englishmen to blush for the scandalous and dastardly action of one of their countrymen. In 1696, acting under the orders of Stoughton, lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, Chubb tempted a party of Abenaki to come to the fort, and there killed some and kidnapped others. The French immediately seized the opportunity to revenge this cowardly treatment of the savages, and on August 14, Iberville, after making a triumphal progress from Quebec, capturing English vessels as he sailed along the coast, appeared before Fort Pemaquid. Chubb scornfully refused to surrender, and supported his vainglorious words by capitulating the very next day.

So delighted were the French by their success that in the following year they determined to capture Boston. The Marquis de Nesmond was to command the fleet, while Frontenac was to lead the land forces. Delay for one reason or another, contrary winds and stormy weather, kept the expedition back until the summer was passed, when it was found to be too late in the season to proceed. By the time that any fresh expedition could be undertaken King William's War was over, and the Treaty of Ryswick had been signed and was proclaimed in America in 1698. The importance of the treaty with regard to the American colonies is to be found only in the fact that it gave breathing-space to the combatants. Both parties regarded it as a truce more than a treaty, and both looked forward to a not far distant date when their differences might once again be decided by the arbitrament of war.

The long-looked-for day came in 1701 when James II. died, and Louis XIV., with that spirit, half-bravado half-chivalrous, declared the Old Pretender James III. of England. The real fighting that now ensued took place not in the forests of North America but in the lowlands of Europe. The Netherlands, the cockpit of Europe, were once again to be drenched with blood. The battles of Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet played an important part in the history of North American colonies. Fighting, however, was not unknown in the West, and on May 4, 1702, war was openly declared. The old raiding expeditions began again, and the French led the way by an attack on Wells, situated on Casco Bay. The little town was terribly beset by the marauding Abenaki Indians, and was almost at its last gasp when succoured by an armed force by sea from Massachusetts. Then followed the historic attack upon Deerfield in 1704. It was a small town of 300 inhabitants on the north-west border of Massachusetts. The French and their Indian allies burst upon it in February. Fifty of the people were butchered and one hundred were carried into a captivity made famous by John Williams, one of the prisoners, in The Redeemed Captive returning to Sion. "The direct and simple narrative of Williams is plainly the work of an honest and courageous man."[255] He tells of his own and his fellow-captives' sufferings; and, in particular, of how the Jesuits promised him untold wealth if he would be converted, to which he replied, "the offer of the whole world would tempt him no more than a blackberry."[256] As years went by the captives were either exchanged or, having been converted, married Canadians and settled at Quebec or Montreal.

The disgrace of these murdering expeditions falls upon the French Government, for they were planned by French officials and were carried out for the most part by savage Indians. It must be allowed, however, that the havoc on the border settlements of Canada had been caused by the Five Nations, the friends of the English. Thus retaliation was the feeling that grew up on both sides. The Canadians cared nothing for the horrors that they perpetrated in the New England colonies; while the English settlers naturally vented their wrath upon the nearest object of attack, Acadia, for their indignation had been fanned to white heat by the unspeakable horrors of Indian war. In revenge for the massacre at Deerfield, Major Benjamin Church with a force from New England appeared before Port Royal in 1704, and burnt the French settlement at Grand Pré. Three years later Colonel John March, supported by a company of volunteers from Massachusetts, made an attack upon Acadia, which proved abortive. This expedition, together with a French raid upon Haverfield on the Merrimac, had the effect of stirring Massachusetts to more grandiose schemes, and in 1708 Samuel Vetch was sent to England to ask for the assistance of regular troops.

The emissary selected by the "Bostonnais" had been well-chosen, for in the colonies he was one of the most notable men of his day. He had lived in the tropical heats of Darien; he had sojourned amongst the French Canadians; and he had mixed with the cosmopolitan population of New York. His adventurous life had given him an intimate knowledge of the affairs and methods of the English and French colonial systems. He was a shrewd, self-made man; very impetuous and sanguine, but at the same time astute and wary. Above all he was filled with determination and ambition, and if he had his own advance at heart, it was only in conjunction with the true welfare of his country and her colonies. His great ambition was, that "Her Majesty shall be sole empress of the vast North American Continent." Vetch had the common sense to see that this glorious object could only be accomplished by a united and aggressive action against France. The first-hand knowledge that Vetch possessed seems to have had considerable influence at the English Court; and as Marlborough's victories had been so decisive in Europe, it was thought that something might be done in America. In fact, the agent was granted all that he had asked, and he returned to Massachusetts with a promise of a fleet and five regiments, amounting in all to about 3000 men.