The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (15 page)

The harsh truth was that the frontier tribes had long ago abandoned a culture based upon stone, animal skins and bone and become dependent on the goods offered by the colonists. Warning the Creek Indians against making war in April 1774, Sir James Wright, the Governor of Georgia, brutally outlined their predicament. ‘And what can you do?’ he asked. ‘Can you make guns, gunpowder, bullets, glasses, paint and clothing, etc.? You know you cannot make these things, and where can you get them if you quarrel with the white people and how will your women and children get supplied with clothes, beads, glasses and scissors and all other things that they now use and cannot do without?’
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In return, the Indians could offer beaver pelts and furs. The beaver pelt, carefully trimmed to leave a thin covering of fur, was a tough, waterproof material that had been used for hat-making in Europe since the mid-seventeenth century. The familiar tricorn hat, a mark of social respectability and universally worn throughout most of the eighteenth century (Governor Wright no doubt wore his when he addressed the Creek Indians), had its origins in the rivers and streams of North America. Europe’s millinery fashions provided the staple trade of the North American frontier; by the 1750s, the annual value of beaver pelts exported from New York and the Hudson’s Bay Company posts in northern Canada was £250,000.
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Further south, in Pennsylvania, the trade in beaver pelts and furs was worth £40,000 a year.

From its start in the mid-seventeenth century, the commerce in furs and beaver skins had been intensely competitive. The French had tried, vainly, to evict the Hudson’s Bay Company traders from their bases and had taken systematic steps to secure a monopoly of fur and beaver-pelt trading with all the tribes along the St Lawrence basin and the shores of the Great Lakes. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, French governors in Quebec had negotiated treaties with the Indians that allowed them to build a chain of fortified posts which ran west from Montreal to the northern tip of Lake Michigan. Each was strategically sited to seal the narrow waterways between the lakes and so control the routes taken by fur-traders. Forts Frontenac, Niagara, Detroit and Mackinac were more than guard-posts, they marked the southern limits of New France and laid a tenuous claim to a wilderness that would shortly be entered by British settlers.

French domination of this area was challenged in 1727, when New York established a fort at Oswego on the south-eastern shore of Lake Ontario. Four years later, the French countered by erecting a stronghold at Crown Point on the southern extremity of Lake Champlain. It served both to defend the approaches to Montreal and as a barrier against New York colonists advancing along the Hudson.

Fort-building and efforts to win over the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, who occupied the region south of Lake Ontario, were part of a cold war between the British colonists and the French. The strengths and weaknesses of both sides were exposed in 1744 when Britain and France declared war. There was a series of minor actions at various points along the frontier, the most serious of which were a sequence of Franco-Indian raids which devastated isolated settlements on the upper Hudson and Mohawk rivers. In the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Indians, the French had the upper hand, largely because both parties were apprehensive about the scope of British expansion.

The British colonists’ war effort was fragmented and therefore ineffectual. The colonies were disunited and without an apparatus to prepare and execute a common defensive strategy. Nevertheless, in 1745, the New Englanders had responded enthusiastically to a summons to send volunteers to the siege of Louisbourg. There were widespread festivities when the fort was taken and many who celebrated were already looking ahead to the collapse of New France and, with it, opportunities to move into and settle the empty lands of Lower Canada. The land-hungry were disappointed; the peace of 1748 restored the situation in North America to what it had been at the start of the war.

There was no peace in the disputed territory between New France and British North America. After 1748, the focus for contention shifted to the upper Ohio, where the Ohio Company was in the process of buying 200,000 acres from the local Indians. The French reaction was swift and designed to stem the inevitable flow of pioneers into the region. The Marquis Duquesne, governor of Quebec, ordered an armed reconnaissance of the Ohio valley in 1749. This expedition was followed by further shows of force and, by the end of 1752, a string of outposts had been constructed which linked the southern shores of Lake Erie with Fort Duquesne, placed at the confluence of the Ohio, Monagahela and Allegheny rivers. British settlers and fur-traders who ventured too close to the new centres of French power were warned off.

Duquesne’s bold move in the frontier chess game stunned the British colonists. Pennsylvania, the colony immediately threatened, was in a state of disarray since the Quaker minority, which dominated political life, had for years refused to contemplate any measures to defend the colony. Still without any machinery with which to plan and coordinate a common defence policy, the response of the other colonies was fumbling. An attempt by a detachment of the Virginia militia, commanded by a young landowner, George Washington, to keep a toehold in the Ohio region came unstuck in April 1754 when he was driven to abandon Fort Necessity.

This setback panicked the colonies into action. Representatives from each assembled at Albany in the spring of 1755 in an effort to create a common front against the French and the Iroquois. Seen from the perspective of a small town in New York, the colonists’ position appeared extremely perilous. They were confronted by what seemed the overwhelming strength of New France, an offshoot of Europe’s greatest military power. Recent events indicated that France was now intent on pursuing an aggressive frontier policy which, if it succeeded, would confine the British to a coastal strip of North America. Moreover, France was a Catholic nation, which aroused deep fears among the colonists, a large proportion of whom were Presbyterians. Their anxiety was not solely based upon an ancestral loathing of Popery; Catholic priests and missionaries were abroad among the Iroquois and, with official approval, were warning them that the British intended to seize all Indian lands.
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The outcome of the Albany assembly was an appeal to the British government for help. Alone, the colonists could not hope to beat regular French troops and their Indian auxiliaries. The desperation implicit in the request convinced Newcastle’s cabinet that recent French encroachments would, if unchecked, ‘endanger all the Northern colonies, and tend to the total Destruction thereof and their Trade’. Britain would not allow the colonies and their wealth to slip from her grasp, even if this meant a war with France, although, during the summer of 1754, the government hoped that the conflict would remain localised.

The decision to send troops to North America had far-reaching consequences. It was a recognition of how vital the colonies were for Britain and, in a short time, it transformed North America into a war zone in which British forces were fighting for complete dominance of the region. Furthermore, and this was not fully appreciated by all those involved, the colonists had been placed under an obligation to the home government which would have to be redeemed. For their part, the colonists had for the first time found the will to shed their particularism and join together.

The first priority in 1754 was the reassertion of British authority in the Ohio valley. In September, General Edward Braddock was sent to Virginia with two regiments of foot, an artillery battery and orders to expel the French from Fort Duquesne. He was a competent officer who had learned his trade on the battlefields of Europe where warfare had become an exact art. Firepower – that is concentrated, synchronised, close-range musketry – was the key to victory. Therefore soldiers, elegantly uniformed and drilled, manoeuvred in rigid lines to take positions from where they could most effectively fire the volleys which won battles. It would be very different in the backwoods of North America as Braddock soon discovered.

In May 1755, Braddock set up his forward base at Fort Cumberland, a hundred or so miles from Fort Duquesne. His regulars had been augmented by some Virginian militiamen, who resembled Falstaff’s ragged regiment and were rated by Braddock ‘very indifferent men’.
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Equally unpromising, at least in the eyes of a professional soldier, were the droves of Indians who congregated around the fort and offered their services. All these men, and in many cases their wives, doxies and children, needed rations and these were carried by packhorses and horse-drawn wagons which were obtained, with much difficulty, from colonial governors. The horses came from local copers whose tendency to sell the army worn-out and sickly beasts provoked much irritable comment about dishonest colonials.

Transport problems had to be put on one side after Braddock received intelligence that 3,000 French regulars, under the command of Johann Herman von Dieskau, were expected in Quebec by mid-summer. Von Dieskau was a specialist in what was then the novel art of partisan warfare in rough country, a subject about which Braddock knew next to nothing. Nevertheless, he had with him men like Washington who knew the rudiments of a type of fighting in which concealment, ambushes and rapid withdrawals were all important.

If Braddock received any advice on this subject it was ill-heeded, since he took no precautions against sudden attack nor sent men ahead to spy out the land. His column, with its cumbersome tail of horses and wagons, trundled through the forests, watched at every turn by unseen Indian scouts in the French service. Soon after it forded the Monagahela River, the vanguard was ambushed by a Franco-Indian detachment who drove it in confusion back into the centre of the column. Panic followed; a third of Braddock’s army was lost and he was fatally wounded. Prisoners were tortured to death by the Indians, a practice which was tolerated by the French, and for which the British would later take condign revenge. The detritus of Braddock’s army retired to Fort Cumberland, leaving the French masters of the region.

The disaster on the Monagahela shook the colonists and bruised British prestige, but it did not alter the balance of power in North America. The French army there was scattered across the mid-west in penny packets and was nowhere strong enough to deliver a sustained offensive. It did, however, give its opponents some nasty surprises; in August 1756 Fort Oswego was captured and, during the following year, there were raids against settlements in the Mohawk valley.

In the meantime, the colonial authorities and the British army took stock of the situation. The Quakers were ousted in Pennsylvania and the colony placed on a proper war footing. Most significantly Braddock’s successor, John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun began a programme of training soldiers to fight a bush war. Loudoun was well-qualified for the task since he had had experience of guerrilla fighting during and after the 1745-6 Jacobite rebellion. Undistinguished as a field-commander, he had the good sense to realise that a new form of warfare required a new type of soldier. They were the Ranger, an American huntsman or trapper, and the light infantryman, a British regular chosen for his stamina, agility and quick-wittedness. They were given practical uniforms, often dark green or dun-coloured, which allowed them to pass unnoticed through woodland and bush.

The Ranger and light infantryman learned the arts of woodcraft, marksmanship and rapid movement across rough terrain, accomplishments which enabled the British army to fight a partisan war on equal terms with the French and Indians. Such troops, deployed as scouts and skirmishers ahead of a column, were also an insurance against the sort of disaster that had overtaken Braddock.

Flexible and imaginative commanders were needed if soldiers adept in frontier warfare were to be used to the best effect. These were provided by Pitt, who sent to North America two outstanding and energetic young officers, Major-General Jeffrey Amherst and Brigadier James Wolfe. Amherst was thirty and Wolfe two years older and each took his profession seriously, an uncommon virtue among George II’s officers.

The new high command in North America in 1758 was the instrument of Pitt’s grand strategy for the invasion and conquest of Canada. The cabinet was convinced that nothing short of the complete extinction of French power in North America would guarantee the future security of Britain’s colonies there. Such an ambitious undertaking required a massive concentration of sea and land forces and, it went without saying, a tight sea blockade that would deny succour and reinforcements to the French commander, Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm.

Three armies invaded New France in 1758. General Lord Abercromby, the commander-in-chief, with 11,000 regulars, advanced on Forts William, Henry and Ticonderoga. Brigadier John Forbes, with nearly 7,000, mostly colonial militia, followed in Braddock’s tracks to take Fort Duquesne. The third and largest army of 30,000 was led by Amherst, who was directed to make a seaborne attack on Louisbourg and then, if time permitted, proceed down the St Lawrence to assault Quebec. His transports were escorted by a squadron of twenty-three battleships and nineteen frigates commanded by Boscawen.