Crucible of War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Illustrations

  Maps

  Introduction - THE SEVEN YEARS’, WAR AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE OLD BRITISH EMPIRE

  PROLOGUE - JUMONVILLE’S GLEN

  PART I - THE ORIGINS OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR

  CHAPTER 1 - Iroquoia and Empire

  1450-1735

  CHAPTER 2 - The Erosion of Iroquois Influence

  1736-1754

  CHAPTER 3 - London Moves to Counter a Threat

  1753

  CHAPTER 4 - Washington Steps onto the Stage . . .

  1753-1754

  CHAPTER 5 - . . . And Stumbles

  1754

  CHAPTER 6 - Escalation

  1754

  PART II - DEFEAT

  CHAPTER 7 - The Albany Congress and Colonial Disunion

  1754

  CHAPTER 8 - General Braddock Takes Command

  1755

  CHAPTER 9 - Disaster on the Monongahela

  1755

  CHAPTER 10 - After Braddock WILLIAM SHIRLEY AND THE NORTHERN CAMPAIGNS

  1755

  CHAPTER 11 - British Politics, and a Revolution in European Diplomacy

  1755

  PART III - NADIR

  CHAPTER 12 - Lord Loudoun Takes Command

  1756

  CHAPTER 13 - Oswego

  1756

  CHAPTER 14 - The State of the Central Colonies

  1756

  CHAPTER 15 - The Strains of Empire CAUSES OF ANGLO-AMERICAN FRICTION

  1756

  CHAPTER 16 - Britain Drifts into a European War

  1756

  CHAPTER 17 - The Fortunes of War in Europe

  1757

  CHAPTER 18 - Loudoun’s Offensive

  1757

  CHAPTER 19 - Fort William Henry

  1757

  CHAPTER 20 - Other Disasters, and a Ray of Hope

  1757

  CHAPTER 21 - Pitt Changes Course

  DECEMBER 1757

  PART IV - TURNING POINT

  CHAPTER 22 - Deadlock, and a New Beginning

  JANUARY-MAY 1758

  CHAPTER 23 - Old Strategies, New Men, and a Shift in the Balance

  EARLY 1758

  CHAPTER 24 - Montcalm Raises a Cross THE BATTLE OF TICONDEROGA

  JULY 1758

  CHAPTER 25 - Amherst at Louisbourg

  JUNE-JULY 1758

  CHAPTER 26 - Supply Holds the Key

  1758

  CHAPTER 27 - Bradstreet at Fort Frontenac

  JULY-AUGUST 1758

  CHAPTER 28 - Indian Diplomacy and the Fall of Fort Duquesne

  AUTUMN 1758

  CHAPTER 29 - Educations in Arms

  1754-1758

  PART V - ANNUS MIRABILIS

  CHAPTER 30 - Success, Anxiety, and Power THE ASCENT OF WILLIAM PITT

  LATE 1758

  CHAPTER 31 - Ministerial Uncertainties

  1759

  CHAPTER 32 - Surfeit of Enthusiasm, Shortage of Resources

  1759

  CHAPTER 33 - Emblem of Empire FORT PITT AND THE INDIANS

  1759

  CHAPTER 34 - The Six Nations Join the Fight THE SIEGE OF NIAGARA

  JULY 1759

  CHAPTER 35 - General Amherst Hesitates TICONDEROGA AND CROWN POINT

  JULY-AUGUST 1759

  CHAPTER 36 - Dubious Battle WOLFE MEETS MONTCALM AT QUÉBEC

  JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1759

  CHAPTER 37 - Fall’s Frustrations

  OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1759

  CHAPTER 38 - Celebrations of Empire, Expectations of the Millennium

  OCTOBER 1759

  CHAPTER 39 - Day of Decision QUIBERON BAY

  NOVEMBER 20, 1759

  PART VI - CONQUEST COMPLETED

  CHAPTER 40 - War in Full Career

  1760

  CHAPTER 41 - The Insufficiency of Valor LÉVIS AND VAUQUELIN AT QUÉBEC

  APRIL-MAY 1760

  CHAPTER 42 - Murray Ascends the St. Lawrence

  JULY-AUGUST 1760

  CHAPTER 43 - Conquest Completed VAUDREUIL SURRENDERS AT MONTRÉAL

  AUGUST 1760

  CHAPTER 44 - The Causes of Victory and the Experience of Empire

  1758-1760

  CHAPTER 45 - Pitt Confronts an Unexpected Challenge

  OCTOBER 1760

  VICTORY RECOLLECTED - Scenographia Americana

  PART VII - VEXED VICTORY

  CHAPTER 46 - The Fruits of Victory and the Seeds of Disintegration

  1761-1763

  CHAPTER 47 - The Cherokee War and Amherst’s Reforms in Indian Policy

  1760-1761

  CHAPTER 48 - Amherst’s Dilemma

  1761

  CHAPTER 49 - Pitt’s Problems

  1761

  CHAPTER 50 - The End of an Alliance

  1762

  CHAPTER 51 - The Intersections of Empire, Trade, and War HAVANA

  AUGUST 1762

  CHAPTER 52 - Peace

  SEPTEMBER 1762-APRIL 1763

  CHAPTER 53 - The Rise of Wilkes, the Fall of Bute, and the Unheeded Lesson of Manila

  SPRING 1763

  CHAPTER 54 - Anglo-America at War’s End THE FRAGILITY OF EMPIRE

  1761-1763

  CHAPTER 55 - Yankees Invade Wyoming— and Pay the Price

  SPRING 1763

  CHAPTER 56 - Amherst’s Reforms and Pontiac’s War

  1763

  CHAPTER 57 - Amherst’s Recall

  AUTUMN 1763

  PART VIII - CRISIS AND REFORM

  CHAPTER 58 - Death Reshuffles a Ministry

  1763

  CHAPTER 59 - An Urgent Search for Order GRENVILLE AND HALIFAX CONFRONT THE NEED FOR REVENUE AND CONTROL

  SUMMER-AUTUMN 1763

  CHAPTER 60 - The American Duties Act (THE SUGAR ACT)

  1764

  CHAPTER 61 - The Currency Act

  1764

  CHAPTER 62 - Postwar Conditions and the Context of Colonial Response

  1764

  CHAPTER 63 - An Ambiguous Response to Imperial Initiatives

  1764

  CHAPTER 64 - Pontiac’s Progress

  1764-1765

  CHAPTER 65 - The Lessons of Pontiac’s War

  1764-1769

  PART IX - CRISIS COMPOUNDED

  CHAPTER 66 - Stamp Act and Quartering Act

  WINTER-SPRING 1765

  CHAPTER 67 - Grenville’s End

  MAY-JULY 1765

  CHAPTER 68 - The Assemblies Vacillate

  SUMMER 1765

  CHAPTER 69 - Mobs Respond

  SUMMER 1765

  CHAPTER 70 - Nullification by Violence, and an Elite Effort to Reassert Control

  OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1765

  PART X - EMPIRE PRESERVED?

  CHAPTER 71 - The Repeal of the Stamp Act

  JANUARY-MARCH 1766

  CHAPTER 72 - The Hollowness of Empire

  1766

  CHAPTER 73 - Acrimonious Postlude THE COLONIES AFTER REPEAL

  1766

  CHAPTER 74 - The Future of Empire

  1766-1767

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  ALSO BY FRED ANDERSON

  Copyright Page

  To Virginia, at last

  Acclaim for FRED ANDERSON’s CRUCIBLE OF WAR

  “Unquestionably the most insightful, provocative and comprehensive look at this crucial period in American history.” —The State (Columbia, South Carolina)

  “Fascinating. . . . [Anderson’s] ability to empathize with his characters . . . is one of this exceptional work’s many virtues. As with any great historical work, this book is not a mere chronicle but a study in statecraft.” — Forei
gn Affairs

  “Anderson writes vividly. . . . He interweaves the stories of European kings and imperial officers with those of Indians, traders and the rich mixture of varied colonial peoples.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Crucible of War is likely to stand as the standard account of the French and Indian War.” —The Boston Globe

  “Fred Anderson presents us with an opportunity to consider the background and causes of the American Revolution from a fresh perspective. . . . A pivotal point in world history, told with reserved power.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Important and beautifully written. . . . It will be a long time before the tale of this great war for empire in the New World needs to be told again. And it’s unlikely that it will ever be told so well.” —Kirkus Reviews

  Illustrations

  MAPS

  Following page xxvii:

  1. Progress of the Seven Years’ War

  2. New France and the British Mainland Colonies in the Seven Years’ War

  3. Indian Groups, Regions, and Topography of the North American Interior

  4. New England, New York, New France, and the Lake Champlain–Hudson Corridor

  5. St. Lawrence River Valley and Québec, JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1759

  6. Caribbean Operations, 1759-62

  7. Central European Operations, 1756-62

  8. Western Europe

  9. Indian Subcontinent

  Maps

  Introduction

  THE SEVEN YEARS’, WAR AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE OLD BRITISH EMPIRE

  FEW REVERIES HAUNT history professors more insistently than the dream of writing a book accessible to general readers that will also satisfy their fellow historians’ scholarly expectations. At least that dream has haunted me, and I must admit that I wrote this book because of it. What follows is a narrative intended to synthesize a sizable range of scholarship, which can (I hope) be read without specialized prior knowledge. Because my understanding of the period before the American Revolution differs from what I take to be the conventional one, however, it seems only fair to begin by sketching the broad outlines of the book’s context, intent, design, and argument.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT event to occur in eighteenth-century North America, the Seven Years’ War (or as the colonists called it, the French and Indian War) figures in most Americans’ consciousness of the past as a kind of hazy backdrop to the Revolution. As citizens of a nation created by an act of collective secession from the British empire, we Americans have always tended to take as our point of reference the thirteen rebelling colonies, not the empire as a whole—or the North American continent. This perspective has generally limited our ability to see the continuities between our pre-Revolutionary past and the rest of our history. Coming to grips with the Seven Years’ War as an event that decisively shaped American history, as well as the histories of Europe and the Atlantic world in general, may therefore help us begin to understand the colonial period as something more than a quaint mezzotint prelude to our national history. For indeed, if viewed not from the perspective of Boston or Philadelphia, but from Montréal or Vincennes, St. Augustine or Havana, Paris or Madrid—or, for that matter, Calcutta or Berlin—the Seven Years’ War was far more significant than the War of American Independence.

  Unlike every prior eighteenth-century European conflict, the Seven Years’ War ended in the decisive defeat of one belligerent and a dramatic rearrangement of the balance of power, in Europe and North America alike. In destroying the North American empire of France, the war created a desire for revenge that would drive French foreign policy, and thereby shape European affairs, for two decades. At the same time, the scope of Britain’s victory enlarged its American domains to a size that would have been difficult for any European metropolis to control, even under the best of circumstances, and the war created circumstances of the least favorable sort for Whitehall. Without the Seven Years’ War, American independence would surely have been long delayed, and achieved (if at all) without a war of national liberation. Given such an interruption in the chain of causation, it would be difficult to imagine the French Revolution occurring as it did, when it did—or, for that matter, the Wars of Napoléon, Latin America’s first independence movements, the transcontinental juggernaut that Americans call “westward expansion,” and the hegemony of English-derived institutions and the English language north of the Rio Grande. Why, then, have Americans seen the Seven Years’ War as little more than a footnote?

  In part it has been the intensity of our focus on the Revolution as a seminal event, one that even professional historians have assumed determined both the shape of our national institutions and all the significant outcomes of our national development before the Civil War. With so much riding on it, scholarly discussion of eighteenth-century American history has necessarily been dominated by concern over the fundamental character of the Revolution and perforce its origins. In the mid-1970s, when I was in graduate school, much of what early Americanists debated in one way or another related to the motivations of the Revolutionaries: Were they fundamentally driven by material interests or by ideological concerns? It was a Big Question then and remains a powerful one even now that it has achieved a scholastic—not to say sterile— maturity. By the late 1980s, when I undertook this project, the question had generated distinctive lines of interpretation that framed the ways historians explained eighteenth-century America almost as decisively as Vauban’s magnificent fortifications framed eighteenth-century military campaigns.

  On one hand (the left) ran the works of those scholars, descendants of the Progressive historians, who argued that the class interests of Americans stimulated both a movement for independence and an internal struggle over the forms of government to be imposed in the new United States. For Neo-Progressive scholars, the Revolution was an intensely human process rooted in the experience of social inequity and in a democratic striving against privilege. Concerned as they were with colonial social relations and economic conditions, the Neo-Progressives focused less frequently on the great men of the Revolution than on ordinary people—farmers, artisans, laborers, women—and such dispossessed or marginalized groups as blacks, Indians, and the poor. Looking to the opposite side of the field, one could see arrayed the intellectual fortifications of those numerous historians, sometimes called Neo-Whigs, who believed that republican political ideas determined the allegiance and the actions of the Revolutionary generation. Their Revolution, while not bloodless, was most importantly an ideological and ironic one: ideological because it followed from the shared belief that powerful men had always sought, and would always seek, to deprive their fellow citizens of liberty and property; ironic because in the conservative act of defending their liberties and estates, the decidedly elitist gentlemen who articulated the Revolution’s ideals also liberated egalitarian impulses that would produce the most democratic, individualist, acquisitive society in the world.

  Even in the late 1980s, of course, this military metaphor could hardly be said to depict with literal accuracy the range of scholarly opinion on the late colonial period and its relation to the Revolution. In fact, the positions of scholars fell along a spectrum that ranged from extreme materialism on one hand to an equally extreme idealism on the other. Few subscribed absolutely to a single kind of explanation, although most—if pressed hard enough—would have preferred one end of the spectrum over the other. No matter what their interpretative preferences, however, what most historians assumed without disagreement was a common starting point. And that was the problem I had in mind when I began this study.

  Virtually all modern accounts of the Revolution begin in 1763 with the Peace of Paris, the great treaty that concluded the Seven Years’ War. Opening the story there, however, makes the imperial events and conflicts that followed the war—the controversy over the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act crisis—into precursors of the Revolution. No matter how strenuous their other disagreements, most modern historians have looked at the years after 1763 not as contemporary America
ns and Britons saw them— as a postwar era vexed by unanticipated problems in relations between colonies and metropolis—but as what we in retrospect know those years to have been, a pre-Revolutionary period. By sneaking glances, in effect, at what was coming next, historians robbed their accounts of contingency and suggested, less by design than inadvertence, that the independence and nationhood of the United States were somehow inevitable. With the assumption of inevitability came the desire to fix the original character of the Revolutionary controversies in radical or conservative impulses.

  The more I thought about this problem, the more I became convinced that an alternative understanding might flow simply from beginning the story a decade earlier. Examining the period from a perspective fixed not in 1763 but in 1754 would necessarily give its events a different look and perhaps permit us to understand them without constant reference to the Revolution that no one knew lay ahead, and that no one wanted. To start in 1754 would be to begin in a world dominated by wars between the northern British colonies and New France: conflicts that had been frequent, costly, indecisive, and so central to the thinking of contemporaries that the colonists were all but incapable of imagining themselves apart from the empires to which they belonged. Such a story would begin when the greatest unity the British colonists knew came not from the relations of one colony with another, but from their common connection with what they thought of as the freest, most enlightened empire in history—and from the enemies they also shared, the papist French and their Indian allies.

  Given these assumptions, and the requirements that they imposed on any narrative that would follow from them, other historical factors and agents would take on greater significance. To begin the story in the 1750s would require the inclusion of many more actors, for Indians would be anything but the incidental players they seem in accounts that look ahead to the Revolution. The Seven Years’ War could not have begun unless a single desperate Iroquois chief had tried to keep the French from seizing control of the Ohio Valley; nor could the war have reached the conclusion it did, and created the consequences it did, without the participation of native peoples. This in turn cast subsequent events in a different light, suggesting that an equally interesting way to understand the last half of the eighteenth century was in imperial as well as Revolutionary terms. Perhaps we would be able to understand the founding of the United States differently, I thought, if we explained it not only in terms of political conflict within the Anglo-American community or the working out of Revolutionary ideals, but as a consequence of the forty-year-long effort to subject the Ohio Country, and with it the rest of the Transappalachian west, to imperial control.