1775 (49 page)

Some of the northern tribes wanted to join in. As we have seen, during July and August, chiefs from the Abenaki and Penobscot visited General Washington outside Boston and promised their assistance. The real question, in late August, as invasion plans went forward, was whether summer was too far along and the first north country snow and sleet too near at hand. The great opportunity had been in June and July, when the first proposals came in and alternative routes were put forward.

Of the potential invasion corridors shown on
map 8
, three were broadly familiar: the Hudson–Lake Champlain corridor, mainstay for a century of northward and southward aggressors; the sea routes New Englanders had long followed to Nova Scotia and the Gulf of St. Lawrence; and the more recently adopted Mohawk River–Oswego path to and from the Great Lakes. Other trails included the Kennebec-Chaudière route through Maine (used by Benedict Arnold to reach Quebec in 1775) and the never-finished military road belatedly begun to speed the movement of troops from New England’s Connecticut Valley to the Richelieu River forts guarding Montreal.

The fact that American plans ultimately miscarried should not inhibit attention to how close they came to success or to how wide open Canada briefly was. For Britain, meanwhile, the strategic cost in 1775 and early 1776 of having one army bottled up in Boston and other forces obliged to concentrate in Canada was substantial. The Patriot faction, as
Chapter 9
detailed, used this grace period to build up a vital grassroots civic and military infrastructure across the colonies. By mid-1775, British officials could not even count on many of their northern Indian allies. The Caughnawagas and Hurons preferred to be neutral so long as His Majesty’s forces in North America remained penned up in enclaves like Boston and Quebec—a humiliation that prevailed through the autumn and winter of 1775–1776.

New Alliances and Old Hostilities

There was a cultural logic to how invading largely French-speaking Canada became a New England priority within two to three weeks after Lexington and Concord. In fact, Samuel Adams and a few associates had begun
plotting months earlier. New France had been New England’s hereditary enemy, and the provocative Quebec Act of 1774 had revitalized this psychology and woven it into the mentality of the American Revolution.

Memories were powerful. Francis Parkman, the great nineteenth-century chronicler of New England’s French wars, explained the traditional animosities in
A Half-Century of Conflict: France and England in America Before the French and Indian War.
“The French of Canada,” he said, “often use the name New England as applying to the British colonies in general.” The term “les Bastonnais” was applied just as broadly.
²

Puritan New England more than returned the fixation. For over a century, its leaders had devilized Jesuit priests—the hated “black robes”—who guided birch-bark flotillas of painted savages down the Connecticut and Kennebec rivers to massacre English settlers and carry off their children to be raised as Catholics in some St. Francis or Huron bark hut. Parkman’s own books were known to stereotype a priest-ridden Canada scarcely evolved beyond corruption, religious massacres, and medievalism. Nor, as Canadian historians have noted, was it all Puritan imagination. Militant New France did not allow Protestant settlers. As a supplement to French rule, seventeenth-century Jesuits, in one historian’s words, arranged for Quebec to “owe an even superior allegiance to the See of Rome. Until very recently [the 1960s], the papal ensign was as common a sight in Quebec as the fleur-de-lis.”
³
Boston, in turn, was the last major American city to vilify Catholicism with the annual mockery of “Pope Day.”

Canadian forts and citadels like Quebec, Montreal, and Port Royal (Nova Scotia) had been prime New England targets for generations, and the first Yankee attack on Port Royal—five more would follow—harked back to 1654. Amid the chaotic colonial politics of 1774, then, the British government had miscalculated in establishing a seeming second incarnation of French and Indian Quebec as a new buffer state. Much of inland Maine, New Hampshire, and the future Vermont still retained bitter memories. Towns like Adams in Massachusetts, Walpole in New Hampshire, and Hoosic and German Flats in New York had suffered French and Indian raids as late as the 1750s. What hardly anyone, back in 1760, could have imagined—as the British flag rose over a conquered Canada—was that fifteen years later New England’s military ire would again turn northward against a seeming new Quebec threat put in place by new imperial strategists. This time those officials would speak English. Small wonder this issue could move so quickly to the fore in the spring of 1775.

Through the new legislation, imperial Britain had stepped into much of the Canadian footprint loathed by generations of New Englanders. Part of that repositioning, moreover, was intentional. Although the Quebec measure was not designed to supplement the Coercive Acts, its enactment within the same time frame had made many Americans so perceive it. The act did more than recognize the Catholic Church in Quebec, entrench the French seigneurs, establish French civil law rather than English, and deny an elected legislature. It also vastly enlarged Quebec’s boundaries, extending them south to the Ohio River. The result was to collect within one presumably hostile jurisdiction many of eastern North America’s most warlike Indian tribes while simultaneously blocking and disallowing the western territorial claims of Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts based on their seventeenth-century charters. In terms of ill will, this provocation was
British.

As to Yankee ambitions for expanded access to the Grand Banks and St. Lawrence fisheries, these were not denied by the Quebec Act per se. However, since 1763, such hopes had been gainsaid by a new British mindset. William Pitt, the former first minister who had urged a Protestant and English-language reorientation of conquered Quebec, had likewise advocated a peace treaty that would have expelled the French from the fisheries. Pitt put great emphasis on the fisheries. Instead, King George III virtually forced Pitt’s resignation and also accepted a softer treaty (1763) under which France retained two islands off Newfoundland, St. Pierre and Miquelon, and kept a significant North Atlantic fisheries foothold. In fact, New England’s interests and Britain’s were steadily diverging.

Control of the fisheries was grand policy. From New England to Labrador, a series of huge shoals or shallow areas off the Atlantic Coast constituted—and still constitute—the world’s leading cod fisheries. In the eighteenth century, when France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and Holland were contesting national access, the waters of the Georges Bank off Massachusetts were among the richest. The Indian word for the region,
Naumkeag,
meant “fishing place,” and Cape Cod itself was reasonably named. To take full advantage, New England shipbuilders pioneered the fast, agile schooner—from the Yankee colloquialism
scoon,
“to skim lightly over the water.”
⁴

By the mid-eighteenth century, New England fishermen looked beyond nearby waters to covet the Grand Banks and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. By the 1760s, though, serious
fischpolitik
compelled New England to reassess its place within the British Empire. Not only did London conceive Nova Scotia in buffer-state terms, but Crown policy also favored two other fisheries:
those centered on Newfoundland, and those in England’s West Country, based on ports like Plymouth in Devon and Poole in Dorsetshire. Great Britain, too, was a fishing nation, indeed a competitor in North Atlantic waters—and mercantilist enough to close its own markets for fish to American imports. For some British ministers, curbing maritime New England was more than a political or constitutional abstraction.

Britain and New England: Emerging North Atlantic Rivals

In the first half of the eighteenth century, while Boston still remained the major North American city, most New Englanders pursued seaward expansion through the empire. In March 1775, Edmund Burke explained their determination to an ever-less-sympathetic Parliament: “Look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on their fisheries. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice and behold them penetrating into the deepest recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis Straits…we hear that they have pierced in to the opposite [Antarctic] region of polar cold…No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries, no climate that is not witness to their toil. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France nor the dexterity and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hearty industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people.”
⁵

But by 1774, such praise raised more hackles than pride. In New England, as in Old England, fishing and large-scale smuggling were often interwoven, as we saw in
Chapter 9
.
⁶
Even in the 1740s, while Yankee politicians and preachers thundered against both the French Antichrist and the Louisbourg privateers that menaced Massachusetts fishermen, hundreds of Yankee vessels were trading with the French. Then during the 1750s, New Englanders contrabanded on a grand scale in the French West Indies; in the decade before 1775, they traded in a lesser way with the two French fishery islands in the North Atlantic.
⁷

As the Royal Navy intensified its 1760s harassment of New England commerce, the French foreign ministry began to see a potential for shifting relationships. In 1765 Americans angry over the Stamp Act were rumored to have sent an agent to Europe to query possible French backing; and in 1768, Du Chatelet, the new French ambassador to London, had proposed to Foreign Minister Choiseul that Paris begin to court the “Nouveaux Angleterriens” with trade opportunities in the French West Indies. Being huge
molasses producers, the French islands were a better commercial fit for New England than the British Caribbean islands were. By 1775, it was no huge step for Massachusetts newspapers to make occasional wistful reference to French fleets and assistance.
⁸

Massachusetts’s commitment to pursuing its interests under a British banner was obviously fading in 1774. To understand the particular reversal represented by the overlapping emergence of Quebec and a newly imperialized Nova Scotia in buffer roles, a revealing picture is worth many more than a thousand words.
Map 8
adapted from volume two of the
Oxford History of the British Empire,
shows both the pre-1774 and post-1774 boundaries of Quebec, as well as the new contours of Nova Scotia, which included today’s New Brunswick.
⁹
The newly expanded Quebec, five times the land mass of the old one, abutted the thirteen colonies like the edge of a crude tomahawk, stretching from New England through New York and Pennsylvania south and west as far as the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Within these inflated boundaries—or so many Americans believed and feared—the British Crown was creating the weighty counterforce to English-speaking North America that French kings Louis XIV and Louis XV had never quite managed.

Canadian historians have been more candid than their British or U.S. colleagues. Quebec’s first two appointed British governors—James Murray (1763–1765) and Guy Carleton (1765–1780)—both came to admire Canada’s seigneurs and Catholic bishops and, more specifically, to see a French Quebec as a better imperial buffer than an Anglicized Canada run by ambitious English speakers: Yankees, Yorkers, and British merchants. “In the authoritarian structure of Quebec society,” said one chronicler, Carleton “thought that he discerned a sheet anchor for British power in North America.” In 1774 few in the House of Commons paid attention when the radical Charles James Fox had raised a similar point: that “to go at once and establish a perfectly despotic government [in Quebec], contrary to the genius and spirit of the British constitution, carries with it the appearance of a love of despotism, and a settled design to enslave the American people.”
¹⁰

In
The Path of Destiny,
a much-acclaimed book of the 1950s, Canadian historian Thomas H. Raddall pictured the act as both mistake and provocation: “By a stroke of the pen it would restore the old menace in the north and west which had kept the American colonists in check for half a century. The ministers assumed with quite false optimism that
habitants
of Canada would be willing to fight, if necessary, to support the British Crown which had granted them this boon; and that merely placing the fierce tribes of the
Middle West under the old auspices of the Chateau St. Louis would hold quiet forever the turbulent American frontiersmen, the best fighting men in the colonies. Thus the Quebec Act lost its original innocence and became a challenge to rebellion, and in America the gifted agitators fell upon it with fury and with glee. All the old passions of the French and Indian wars were dragged out of their dusty cupboards and rubbed hot.”
¹¹
Exactly so.