France’s good fortune in the decades of peace helped spawn the conflicts that put an end to France’s empire on the North American continent. In the first half of the century, the expansion of New France’s fur trade, its agriculture, and its fisheries typified the successes of French commerce, both in Europe and in overseas trade as far off as India. A French commercial empire spanning the world seemed a realistic aspiration in these decades, but it was one certain to be challenged by British commercial interests pursuing the same goal. The ground was being cleared for a confrontation between the two great imperial and mercantile powers of eighteenth-century Europe.
The contest opened when Britain and France were drawn into a general European conflict in 1744. Despite the issues at stake, this war did not become a fully-fledged Anglo-Erench colonial struggle. Britain was caught up in a domestic crisis—Bonnie Prince Charlie’s drive for the British throne in 1745-46—and old European alliances drew both powers into an inconclusive continental struggle that dissipated in 1748. In Canada, where the borders seemed secure, the Marquis de Beauharnois, an ageing naval officer who had been Governor since 1726, saw little need to add local struggles to the imperial war.
The only significant military events for New Erance focused on Louisbourg. In thirty years the Erench colony on He Royale had revived Erance’s cod trade and its military presence on the Atlantic seaboard, and the outbreak of war created an opportunity to exert this power. In 1744 Louisbourg seized a New England fishing outpost at Canso in Nova Scotia, barely failed to capture Annapolis Royal and the only British garrison in Acadia, and unleashed its privateers against British shipping. Even in peacetime, the existence of Louisbourg had aroused resentment in the British American colonies, particularly Massachusetts. New Englanders had been willing to trade at Louisbourg, but the French presence in territory New England considered its own hinterland had never been accepted. Now the Erench military successes of 1744 generated a quick riposte—a New England invasion force aimed at He Royale itself
He Royale was no easy target. France had fortified Louisbourg to a point where only a formal artillery siege could threaten it. Considering the lack of formal military organization in New England, France expected that a serious threat to He Royale could come only from Britain. As a result, Louisbourg had only its peacetime garrison and supplies when a hastily assembled New England militia army, supported by a British fleet from the Caribbean, arrived before the fortress in May 1745. The size Of this siege force underlined the latent strength of the British colonies of North America. The little settlements that seventeenth-century English colonists had established along the Atlantic coast had grown large and powerful. The Thirteen Colonies had more than a million people, whose towns and farms had spread far inland from their coastal beginning. Canada, with its far-flung Native alliances and its military traditions, had always maintained the upper hand over the Americans in wilderness warfare, but on the seacoast the advantage was reversed. New England raised, equipped, and sent a four-thousand man army to Louisbourg with only a few months’ preparation, but it proved sufficient. In six weeks of siege the besiegers pounded down the stone ramparts of the fortress, while their naval blockade cut off all relief from France. Louisbourg capitulated late in June 1745.
The colonists of He Royale were hastily deported to France, and with them went France’s military power on the Atlantic coast. Since He Royale had handled much of Canada’s exported grain, wheat prices in Quebec collapsed, and since Louisbourg had always been presented as the outer bastion of the St. Lawrence colony, an urgent building campaign began to provide the city of Quebec with some walls of its own. Neither Britain nor its American colonies, however, followed up New England’s triumph in He Royale. Further military action in North America was slight, and the peace treaty of 1749 restored French possession of He Royale as part of a general return of conquests. Within a year Louisbourg was as busy, populated, and prosperous as ever, and some of the New Englanders who had besieged it in 1745 were returning to trade there. The first skirmish of the mid-century war had been inconclusive. Yet the collision of French and British interests was threatening conflict at several points in North America.
In Atlantic Canada the restoration of French control in He Royale did not restore the status quo. Partly to compensate for the return of Louisbourg to the French, Britain began to assert its control of mainland Nova Scotia. In 1749 two regiments and 2,500 settlers recruited in England arrived at Chebucto Bay to found the city of Halifax, and 1,500 “foreign Protestants” recruited from Germany and Switzerland established Lunenburg in 1753. At first the ill-equipped settlers, harassed by France’s Mi’kmaq allies, suffered and died, but the new colony continued to grow, aided by the arrival of a few New Englanders, whose presence foreshadowed subsequent New England migration to the Nova Scotian coast. One of the New Englanders, John Bushell, began printing Canada’s first newspaper, the Halifax Gazette, in 1752. By the end of the 1750s, Halifax had established itself in its enduring role as Britain’s key
Natives and visiting fishermen had Chebucto’s fine harbour to themselves until a fleet of British soldiers and colonists under Colonel Edward Cornwallis, newly appointed as Governor of Nova Scotia, arrived to found Halifax in 1749. Among them was eighteen-year-old Moses Harris, entomologist and engraver, whose Plan of the Harbour of Chebucto and Town of Halifax (with porcupine and butterflies), dated 1749 and published in the February 1850 issue of The Gentlemans Magazine, is considered to be the first graphic record of the new colony.
Military base on the North Atlantic seaboard of America. The territory first claimed as New Scotland in the 1620s began to take shape as a British colony.
In response to the rise of Halifax, France posted a larger garrison to Louisbourg and fortified the southern limits of the territory it claimed along the Isthmus of Chignecto (the modern boundary of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick). Both developments threatened the isolation that had enabled the Acadians, now perhaps twelve thousand strong, to remain a neutral enclave within British territory. By the 1750s, some Acadians began to migrate to He Royale and He St-Jean. In Newfoundland, a less direct confrontation loomed between British and French. The growing British
Colony there was gradually expanding into territory reserved for French fishing stations, but the real competition concerned the market for cod in Europe. The control of Newfoundland that Britain had gained in 1713 was an important advantage, but French cod trades had recovered in peacetime. Military action in Atlantic Canada was one way to resolve this competition over an industry that was still far more valuable to the European powers than the fur trade.
Anglo-French interests also clashed on the frontier zone south of the Great Lakes, a region where Canada had felt secure since the Iroquois treaty of neutrality of 1701. By the 1750s, Pennsylvanians and Virginians were pushing west over the Appalachians towards the Ohio River, which would take them to the Mississippi. To stem this westward advance and to retain the trade and support of the Native nations south of Lake Erie, successive governors of New France established forts on the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries. At first fighting was confined to skirmishes between
By the mid-eighteenth century, British newspapers were actively shaping public opinion on many political issues. The domestic popularity of Britain’s globe-spanning campaign against the French Empire spawned many anti-French propaganda cartoons, such as this engraving by John June after Louis-Pierre Boitard’s drawing, printed in London in 1755. Note “Britannia attending to the complaints of her injur’d Americans” (lower left), and “The French overset at the fall of Niagara” (upper centre).
Native clients of the French and Americans, but as French troops and American militia expeditions asserted rival claims to the region, a direct clash became certain.
As these conflicts loomed, France reinforced its North American colony, doubling the complement of the Marine infantry companies, adding artillery companies, and strengthening the engineering corps. With garrisons expanding, expeditions being mounted, and new forts being built, the colony’s expenditures soared. The expenses column of the colonial budget, kept below a half-million livres a year for most of the century, exceeded a million livres for the first time in 1744. By the first years of the 1750s New France’s annual expenditures ranged between three million and six million livres. The colony was officially at peace, but military expenses accounted for virtually all the increase.
These expenditures—they would reach thirty million livres by the war years of the late 1750s—were supervised at Quebec City by Francois Bigot, Intendant of New France since 1748. Because of them. Bigot became one of the legendary figures of New France, supposedly a monster of corruption who diverted the colony’s money into his own pockets at its time of greatest need and thereby became a principal cause of the colony’s downfall. Bigot was certainly corrupt by twentieth-century standards. The year he was appointed Intendant, he joined a commercial venture to ship to Quebec City the goods he would purchase on the colony’s behalf. Throughout his tenure, suppliers associated with him would profit greatly from the purchases he authorized. Bigot made money from his position, and he used his wealth and influence to acquire mistresses and to fund his prominent place in the scandal-fuelling luxury that typified the last years of Quebec’s vice-regal society. Still, it was French imperial policy, not Bigot’s profits, which caused royal expenditures to grow sixtyfold in barely a dozen years. The French Crown was not always prepared to accept the costs of its policies, and its endless demands for economy prompted the new Governor, the Marquis de La Galissoniere, to reply tartly that wars are never made without spending. Military preparations were the main cause of New France’s enormous debts. Versailles complained of the costs, but it continued the policies.
The use of public office for private gain was unique neither to Bigot nor to the French royal service. The eighteenth century tolerated a certain blurring of public and private interests among gentlemen, and little blame accrued as long as the books ultimately balanced. What earned Bigot imprisonment, exile, and infamy was less the profiteering itself than the fall of New France and the Crown’s inability to pay its war debts, for both of which Bigot and his associates became scapegoats. In fact, Bigot’s
Founded in 1713 to restore French power on the Atlantic seaboard, Louisbourg grew into a prosperous fishing port and trading centre. Twice besieged and captured by the British, it was left abandoned within a decade of the second siege, that of 1758—accurately recorded here in an engraving by P. Canot after a sketch “drawn on the spot” by Captain Ince of the 35th Regiment (London; Thomas Jefferys, 1762).
Effort to profit by supplying goods to New France almost certainly strengthened the colony’s preparations for war. Crop failures and increasing militia levies were eroding farm production during the 1750s, and New France became less able to feed itself as the Canadian garrison grew. Despite increased efforts to find supplies within the colony—particularly after a colonial, Joseph-Michel Cadet, took charge of supplying the forces in 1756—the gap between what the military needed and what the colony could supply had to be filled from Europe. Flere a startling success was achieved. When war, the British naval threat, and skyrocketing insurance rates drove out most independent shippers. Bigot’s associates were nearly alone in continuing to ship the vital supplies of food and equipment from France to the embattled colony. Yet shipping tonnages from France to Quebec City doubled and tripled under Bigot’s administration.
In 1754 the border conflict finally brought the French and 7mericans to blows on the Ohio frontier. The experienced and well-organized Marine troops routed the British colonies’ volunteer militias and their commander, a young Virginian named
George Washington, but the looming struggle prompted both empires to raise the stakes. Early in 1755 Britain dispatched two regiments of its regular army to the Thirteen Colonies. For the first time since the Iroquois wars of the 1660s, France sent regular army troops to support the Marine garrison of New France. War remained undeclared as both sides negotiated their European alliances, but the official state of peace prevented neither a British naval attack on the French troop convoy nor large-scale hostilities as soon as the regulars and their generals reached North America.
The campaigns of 1755 showed that the regular army regiments would not immediately transform North American warfare, for their training on the battlefields of Europe proved no advantage in the North American wilderness. The French army commander, Jean-Armand Dieskau, was wounded and captured in an inconclusive engagement south of Fake Champlain, and the British general, Edward Braddock, was killed and his army scattered by a small force of Marine troops and Native allies when he attempted to march on Fort Duquesne, the French Ohio River stronghold (where Pittsburgh now stands). Both sides fell back to rebuild, pending a formal declaration of war in 1756.
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