King George’s War was the American conflict between France and England that paralleled the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) in Europe. The northern colonies were not expected to take a major part, but Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts persuaded his colony’s assembly to approve a force of more than 4,000 volunteers to capture the French base at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Motivated by anti-Catholic sermons and the promise of plunder, the province rallied enthusiastically. Assisted by a fleet under Sir Peter Warren that bombarded the fort, Louisbourg surrendered on June 27, 1745. The following spring a French fleet with 7,000 troops under the duc D’Anville headed to attack the British colonies, but it was decimated by smallpox, scurvy, and storms.
Thereafter, the tide turned. An enthusiastic Shirley raised 7,500 New Englanders in hopes of conquering Canada in 1746. However, a promised British fleet never arrived, and New York, anxious to preserve its profitable and illegal trade with the French and Indians, refused to help. During the winter 900 of the 3,000 provincials who waited at Louisbourg for a British garrison to relieve them died of disease.
British naval vessels also impressed sailors in the colonies into the British navy, somewhat justifiably because American merchants encouraged deserters to operate their lucrative privateering vessels. Two Louisbourg veterans were killed by a press gang in 1745, and in November 1747 the impressment of between 46 and 300 sailors in Boston harbor caused the inhabitants to form a crowd, take hostage British officers on shore, and provoke Captain Charles Knowles to threaten to blow up the town. America’s first antiwar newspaper, The Independent Advertiser, founded by a young Samuel Adams and others, protested the expense of Shirley’s expeditions in lives and money. For the first time in North America, the newspaper also used the doctrine of British philosopher John Locke—that a government that failed to protect life, liberty, and property deserved to be resisted—to justify crowds (or “assemblies of the people”) defending such rights.
At the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle Britain exchanged Louisbourg for Madras in India, leaving unsettled the frontier between Canada and New England. Although Britain reimbursed Massachusetts 183,000 British pounds for war expenses, the colony was bitter that its conquest was so lightly disregarded by a mother country whose sea captains had also proven insensitive to the monumental efforts of the province.
Further reading: Douglas E. Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
—William Pencak
World History
