If the career of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville marked the culmination of New France’s heroic seventeenth century, then the symbol of the new priorities of the eighteenth century may have been Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, Governor General from 1703 to 1725. According to his biographer, Vaudreuil had “one of the most remarkable careers in the history of New France but... one totally devoid of glitter and panache.” During Vaudreuil’s tenure, in fact. New France finally reached a time when even its governors could permit warlike panache to yield to more workaday virtues.
Vaudreuil was a younger son from the provincial aristocracy of France. He had come to New France as a senior military commander in 1687 and soon married into the colonial nobility. He became governor soon after the start of the War of the Spanish Succession, when Louis xiv’s dynastic ambitions united nearly all the powers of Europe against him. New France could not avoid the war (which provided d’Iberville and other colonial soldiers with such opportunities for heroic exploits), but Vaudreuil grasped that with the Iroquois peace newly achieved, and with the overextended fur trade in full retreat, his colony had little to gain by war in North America. To support his threatened Mi’kmaq and Abenaki allies, he authorized petite guerre against the encroaching settlements of New England, but he spared the New York frontiers to avoid antagonizing the Iroquois out of their neutrality. Hudson Bay, which the peace treaty of 1697 had left partly in British hands, partly in French, saw no further conflict. The Atlantic seaboard saw the most campaigning: the French scourged English Newfoundland in 1706 and 1709, and the New Englanders captured Acadia in 1710. A British plan to attack Quebec City foundered when seven ships of Admiral Hovenden Walker’s naval fleet were shipwrecked on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in August 1711. In celebration, a Quebec City church, named Notre-Dame de la Victoire in honour of Frontenac’s defence of the city in 1690, was renamed Notre-Dame des Victoires. When events in Europe ended the imperial war in 1713, Vaudreuil was ready to lead New France into a peace that would last until 1744. It was the longest peace in all New France’s history, and even then there were clashes on the frontiers.
The War of the Spanish Succession had left France bankrupt and beaten, and for the sake of peace Louis xiv made colonial concessions. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France ceded all of French Newfoundland to Britain, and acknowledged British title to occupied Acadia. France withdrew from the forts it had captured on Hudson Bay and accepted British title to the bay and its entire watershed. France even recognized British title to the lands of the Iroquois confederacy. These were not France’s to yield nor Britain’s to hold, but Britain claimed that the alliance, or covenant, that New York traders had long maintained with the Iroquois actually constituted a transfer of land title, and France now accepted this pretence. The Iroquois, however, had no intention of being displaced by the terms of a treaty between the French and British. They remained where they were and even increased their strength. In these years the Tuscarora tribe moved north to become part of the confederacy. The Five Nations of the Iroquois became the Six Nations, as they have been since.
New France received some compensation for what it lost by the Treaty of Utrecht. Newfoundland had been yielded to the British, but French fishermen (who still vastly outnumbered the settled population) retained the right to fish and dry their catch on the island’s north coast, which became known as “the French shore.” France acquired clear title to Cape Breton Island and He St-Jean, the future Prince Edward Island. By forcing France to yield all claims to Hudson Bay, the treaty confirmed Montreal as the unchallenged centre of the French fur trade and reinforced the commercial contest between the rival trading empires. But for the colonists of New France, the prospect of peace was probably the greatest benefit of the treaty. The size and influence of the colony’s military establishment would not shrink, but peace more than war would shape the affairs of northern North America in the first half of the eighteenth century.
World History
