1688 - Franco-British Contests
By 1700 only France and Britain remained as major contenders in the imperial struggle for dominance in the Caribbean and North America. Spain’s economic decline since the late 16th century left it little choice but to concentrate its resources on protecting the mainland colonies of Mexico and Peru, as well as Havana, its most strategic American port. As the Franco-British rivalry extended into the North American interior, Spain’s remaining colonies in New Mexico and Florida became increasingly vulnerable. For their part, Native Americans–through the play of alliances and intertribal wars–exercised a decisive role in the North American theater of war and thereby helped to determine the fate of the French and British empires.
During the War of the Grand Alliance (1688-97), British colonists in New England openly challenged French possessions in New France, Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay. Engagements between French colonists (working in alliance with Iroquois settled near Montreal and Abenaki Indians in Acadia) and English colonists in New York and upper New England were bloody and highly destructive. In Acadia and Newfoundland, local disputes over fishing rights became part of the larger imperial struggle, requiring the deployment of naval forces on both sides. Meanwhile, French and British colonists in Acadia fought over alliances with the Micmac and Abenaki Indians. At Hudson Bay, where the British Hudson Bay Company served as the Royal Navy’s proxy, Franco-British rivalry remained in a kind of stalemate for more than a decade after 1697. At war’s end, the imperial struggle in North America remained much as it was in 1688.
The War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) changed this situation. As in the War of the Grand Alliance, there was significant fighting between French and British forces in both North American and the Caribbean. While France retained her Caribbean colonies more or less intact, the French were forced to cede important parts of their North American empire.
In the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that ended the war, France ceded to Britain sovereignty over Newfoundland, Acadia (Nova Scotia), and Hudson Bay. Of France’s North American empire, only Canada (as the term was then understood), Cape Breton Island, and Ile St.-Jean remained. Equally momentous, the treaty acknowledged two British “rights” that played a destabilizing role in the postwar period. First, it granted British traders the right to trade with natives in the “west,” meaning western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley. Second, it recognized British suzerainty over the Iroquois, but without Iroquois consent. In the following years, French officials in New France reacted to these setbacks and attempted to remedy these territorial losses. In 1720, on Ile Royale, where French fisheries were concentrated, metropolitan authorities erected the fortress of Louisbourg to guard the entry to the St. Lawrence River.
French officials also consolidated their empire in the interior of the continent. From 1701, with the founding of Detroit and the creation of the colony of Louisiana, Louis XIV sought to block British expansion by weaving a network of posts in the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi Valley. This program became clearer in the years 1715-25, with the construction or restoration of numerous forts. The policy of expansion led generally to the consolidation of Franco-Indian alliances, which relied on the presence of numerous posts and officers, to assure the smooth functioning of trade and the distribution of the king’s gifts to chiefs in the neighboring villages.
The French encountered the hostility of certain tribes, however, including the Fox (in a war that lasted from 1712 to 1738), the Sioux, the Chickasaws, and the Natchez. The French fought the Natchez during the years 1729-31. In the late-1740s when the governor made deep cuts in his budget for allocating gifts, traditional Indian alliances in the southern Great Lakes region appeared to be imperiled, as the Miami and Huron Indians especially formed closer ties with British traders from Pennsylvania and Virginia.
By the 1740s and 1750s French possessions in North America were eclipsed by its Caribbean colonies, especially Saint-Domingue and Martinique, which were undergoing a period of rapid expansion and development.
France’s Caribbean colonies were at the heart of its long-distance colonial trade and had become, in the eyes of metropolitan officials, the pearl of the French-American empire. This point of view was evident when, during negotiations for the Treaty of Paris, French diplomats made the Caribbean colonies a priority and sought to preserve their sovereignty for France.
In 1713 the inhabitants of the Acadian / Nova Scotia peninsula were mostly French farmers and fishermen, living about Minas Basin and on Annapolis River. Over these people the English Government exercised only slight control. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Halifax was founded, that the English themselves began to make settlements in the country. Between the English and French settlers a jealousy soon sprang up, which was increased by the beginning of the Seven Years' War, in which the two mother countries were to settle the question of supremacy in North America.
The French engaged in a long dispute with the English regarding the boundaries of Acadie, which had not been clearly agreed upon by treaty. The sympathies of the Acadians were, of course, with the French, but they claimed the right to remain neutral in all disagreements between the Governments. One point that caused great trouble was the oath of allegiance to the Crown of England. The Acadians refused to take this oath, except in a form that would excuse them, in case of war, from fighting against the French, to whom they were bound by ties of blood and religion.
Most of the Acadians were probably simple-minded and peaceful people, who only wanted to live quietly on their own land and trouble nobody; but there were a few restless and spirited young men, and some priests, who made no secret of their hatred for the English, and their intention of defying the power that now ruled in the peninsula. As the feeling between the two nationalities grew more bitter, the problem of how to deal with the Acadians became more difficult to the English colony. The officers of the colony finally resolved, without consulting the home Government, to remove the Acadians to other parts of North America, distributing them through the Eastern and Southern Colonies, so that there would be no danger of their getting together for purposes of revenge.
On 02 September 1755, Lieutenant Colonel John Winslow announced that the Acadians were all to be removed from the country. the Acadians — men, women, and children, to the number of seven thousand — were carried away to North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. In the haste and confusion of embarking, many families and friends were separated, some of whom were never again united. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Evangeline" is the story of such a separation. "This is the forest primeval".
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