Years later, reflecting on the weeks he spent in the summertime of 1704 travelling by New England to go to and worship along with his coreligionists, Quaker Thomas Story remembered, “it was a dismal time in these elements; for no man knew, in an atypical method, on his mendacity right down to sleep, however that he would possibly lose his life earlier than the morning, by the palms of a cruel savage.” The passing of time had not clouded his recollections of strife.
When Story made his tour of the communities north of Boston, he discovered their inhabitants, solely 4 years faraway from a horrific battle with the French in Canada and their American Indian allies, mired in one other ghastly battle.
This battle—Queen Anne’s Conflict—had change into far worse than something they might recall or conceive. Though Boston stood in no actual hazard of falling to the Indians or French, the Puritans’ “Metropolis upon a Hill,” their mannequin of an exemplary Protestant society that will draw the eyes of the world, confronted its best existential disaster.
Incompetent Defenders
Most New Englanders had wished no a part of one other battle in 1702, however as in 1689, when the Conflict of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697) got here to North America the place it was referred to as King William’s Conflict, the pull of the Conflict of the Spanish Succession (1701–1715) proved too highly effective to flee.
All through the 1690s, the theocrats who dominated Massachusetts had proven that, whereas they might provide jeremiads that prophesied the upcoming fall of their Christian experiment within the New World, they might not lead the protection of New England. Prayer conferences and quick days had not stopped Indians and Frenchmen from penetrating the northern frontier, and a number of makes an attempt to take the battle to New France had led to whimpers of pathos.
Some satisfaction got here with the loss of life of the savior of New France in King William’s Conflict, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, however his replacements as governor-general, first Louis-Hector de Callière after which Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, may nonetheless name on Canada’s skilled troopers within the troupes de la marine.
Furthermore, the mission Indians who lived in Catholic mission cities within the Saint Lawrence River Valley and the multitude of warriors of the Wabenaki Confederacy (the Abenakis, Maliseets, and Mi’kmaq) on the Maine and Acadia frontiers additionally supplied their companies. Extra worrisome for Boston’s elites, and the settlers and militia who would bear the burden of combating, they knew they might be with out Indian help if hostilities broke out. Frontenac had adroitly snapped the Covenant Chain that had made the Iroquois League allies of the English.
New England Left On Its Personal
The Grand Settlement of 1701 noticed the League declare peace with the French in Canada, in addition to its neutrality in any future Anglo-French struggles. Added to all that, England had supplied its Puritan colonies with no materials assist in the primary go-round with the French and Indians; nobody thought support can be forthcoming from Europe throughout this battle. New England thus was left to face the disconcerting actuality that it might be really by itself.
Regardless of the graduation of hostilities in Europe, Callière thought higher of dashing into battle so long as the Abenakis maintained a defensive buffer zone between Canada and New England. In the summertime of 1702, at Casco Bay, Maine, New England negotiators conceded to the Jap Indians a number of factors of rivalry. Callière was hardly prescient, nonetheless, when he predicted the English would renege on their guarantees of higher habits; by December, that they had.
He thereupon requested the Wabaneki Confederacy to affix the French the subsequent spring in spreading terror alongside the New England frontier. Callière died within the spring of 1703, however Vaudreuil remained absolutely dedicated to utilizing the Indians as a cudgel to batter the English. Canada’s new governor-general didn’t exaggerate when he boasted the Indians have been “able to take up the hatchet towards the English at any time when he gave them the order,” and proved as sensible a strategist as Frontenac. He would let the English spend the summer season in bucolic peace, clearing their lands, constructing their sawmills and gristmills, and elevating their crops and animals. Then, at harvest time, marines and Indians would plunder or destroy all of it.
“Six Horrible Days”
In August, Vaudreuil despatched Alexandre Leneuf de La Vallière de Beaubassin, an Acadian marine officer, to sack English settlements alongside the coast of Maine. Beaubassin divided his forces into small, fast-moving groups that operated independently and with no directions aside from to put waste to every part of their grasp.
Samuel Drake, New England’s nineteenth-century chronicler of its Indian wars, known as the primary week of what would change into a two-month-long Franco-Indian marketing campaign of destruction, the “Six Horrible Days.” His “Diary of Depredations” stuffed pages. One battle social gathering killed and captured thirty-nine settlers at Wells. One other burned to the bottom the fishing station at Cape Porpoise. Winter Harbor held out for a number of days earlier than surrendering to Frenchmen who carried a false flag of truce.
At Saco Fort, the French and Indians killed eleven defenders and took twenty prisoners. At Spurwick, Indians killed or captured twenty-two members of the Jordan household. The siege at Scarborough was lifted solely after militia from additional down the coast miraculously appeared.
Extra disasters, nonetheless, have been in retailer for the English following that sole vivid flip of occasions. The small neighborhood at Perpooduck Level close to Falmouth (now Portland) suffered, per capita, probably the most. 9 households repeatedly lived there. In August 1703, the boys have been off working within the forests reducing timber. The Indians “inhumanely butchered” twenty-five kids and girls, one in every of whom, “being large with Youngster, they knockt her on the top, and ript open her Womb, reducing one a part of the Youngster out; a Spectacle of horrible Barbarity.” All advised, French and Indian raiders destroyed settlements alongside greater than forty-five miles of the seaboard. Drake didn’t exaggerate when he lamented, “Maine had practically acquired her death-blow.”
Vaudreuil had, for his autumn 1703 operations, purposely left New York untouched. The latter’s leaders have been reluctant to change into embroiled in one other battle with Canada, particularly with the Mohawks adamant that they meant to carry quick to the Grand Settlement for concern that an Anglo-French battle would possibly morph into an internecine battle with their mission-dwelling cousins at Kanawake.
Conserving Stress On The English
Nonetheless, Vaudreuil wished to maintain the stress on the English. He acknowledged that, though the Kanawakes may be hesitant to raid into Maine or unwilling to take action west of Hudson’s River, the English cities within the Connecticut River Valley supplied tempting targets. Phrase of the Wabanaki Confederacy’s smashing success in Maine then reached Montréal, and mission-dwelling Indians, moderately than miss out on plunder, supplied to boost the hatchet.
Whereas New England, it appeared, struggled to seek out even one competent militia captain able to defending a hard and fast blockhouse, Vaudreuil may select from dozens of battle-tested marine officers to steer New France’s army forces. In the long run, he appointed Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville to command the 250 males (fifty marines and 200 Abenaki and Kanawake allies) that will prey upon Western Massachusetts.
It was an incredible honor for the thirty-six-year-old Jean-Baptiste, a chance to stay as much as the legacy of his father, Joseph-François “The Hero” Hertel de La Fresnière, who had led the sensible 1690 raid into New England.
Hertel and his troops arrived exterior Deerfield on February 28, 1704. His scouts reported that the villagers appeared to be anticipating an assault—the Mohawks had, in reality, warned the English that one was coming—and had taken refugee behind a big palisade.
Earlier than daybreak on February 29, Leap Day in additional methods than one, a number of Indians jumped from the snowdrifts that reached the highest of the palisade, disabled the sentry, and opened the village gates. Reverend John Williams later recalled the raiders fell “like a flood upon us.”
Setting A Entice
As soon as contained in the village, Hertel’s marines and indigenous allies moved from home to deal with, killing and scalping, taking prisoners, and placing to the torch every part in sight. Williams’s dwelling was one of many first to return beneath assault; raiders killed two of his kids and a servant, and took he and the remainder of his household with one other servant prisoner. The assault ended moderately shortly when, unexpectedly, a big group of raiders gathered 109 captives—forty % of the village’s inhabitants—and retreated. They left behind seventeen burned homes and forty-four English corpses, fifteen of whom had gruesomely died from immolation.
The militia from Hadley and Hatfield, alerted by the billowing smoke fifteen miles to the north, rushed towards Deerfield. After killing a number of Frenchmen and Indians who had dallied to plunder, they gave chase to Hertel’s important physique. The Englishmen—farmers and shopkeepers who have been erratically matched towards marines and warriors in a operating combat by the forest—thought that they had caught the enemy’s rearguard within the meadows north of Deerfield. After a quick skirmish, the Indians appeared to flee. It was, in fact, a lure and the English rushed headlong into it. 9 of them have been killed and a handful of others wounded. Having realized the arduous method that discretion is the higher a part of valor, the survivors retreated to the nonetheless burning ruins of Deerfield. Within the course of, they left the prisoners to their fates.
The captives’ ordeal on the march to Canada grew to become the stuff of New England horror tales. A number of of them managed to flee within the first days of the trek, however Hertel’s subsequent warning to Williams that any recaptured escapees can be summarily executed put an finish to additional makes an attempt at absconding. A number of others died from each mistreatment by the hands of their captors and the climate. Williams’s spouse and toddler baby have been two of the primary to perish. Fewer than ninety prisoners made it to Montréal to be finally ransomed and returned to New England.
Non secular Battle
It proved a sickeningly bitter capsule for Williams to swallow when he realized that his ten-year-old daughter Eunice, whom he had been compelled to depart behind when he and his different kids have been despatched to Boston as a part of a prisoner change in 1706, embraced Roman Catholicism and, at age sixteen, married François-Xavier Arosen, a Kanawake. Regardless of continued entreaties from her father to return dwelling, she vociferously refused repatriation.
The nice irony of the “Deerfield Bloodbath”—one not misplaced on his contemporaries—grew to become that the daughter of the village’s Puritan minister, whose grievous struggling by the hands of the “Jesuit-corrupted” Kanawakes and Abenakis impressed his captivity narrative, The redeemed captive returning to Zion, stood because the exemplar for New England’s “unredeemed captive.”
New England’s response to the French offensives of 1703 and early 1704 fell on the shoulders of scalp hunters and rangers. Massachusetts positioned beneficiant bounties on Indian scalps, however few males talked about venturing throughout the frontier to gather them. In June and July, Main Benjamin Church, who thirty years earlier in King Philip’s Conflict had fashioned New England’s first firms of rangers, and all through King William’s Conflict performed “expeditions” in Acadia, once more led his prices towards the French settlements in present-day New Brunswick and within the Minas Basin. In a tit-for-tat for Deerfield, Church burned Mi’kmaw camps, captured as many Acadians as he may, and burned Grand Pré. The ultimate accounting, nonetheless, confirmed that he inflicted little lasting harm. Absent the specter of continued assaults from the enemy such because the Maine settlers confronted, the Acadians dusted themselves off and set about rebuilding their properties.
Church’s raid, and the belief that France harbored no intention of sending him help, led Vaudreuil to think about a truce with New England. As a tentative first step, he proposed to Massachusetts’s crown-appointed governor, Joseph Dudley, a prisoner change. Pierre Maisonnat, Acadia’s most completed privateer captain, had fallen into English palms; the Puritans due to this fact noticed it as a manifestation of God’s windfall when Vaudreuil supplied to swap Reverend Williams and others for him.
Retreat To Boston
As soon as safely again at Port Royal, Acadia’s capital, Maisonnat and his ships’ crews recommenced systematically devastating the New England service provider marine and the fishing fleet that plied the Grand Banks. By the top of 1706, it was obvious—a minimum of to Boston’s ship house owners and their traders—that the French had once more outsmarted them.
Sir William Phips and a New England military had sacked Port Royal in 1690 on their approach to Québec; New Englanders hoped that one other military may absolutely accomplish a minimum of that in the summertime of 1707. John March, a Newbury service provider who doubled as a militia colonel, thus assumed command of a number of hundred males and sailed for Acadia.
Though March’s military outnumbered Port Royal’s defenders, he couldn’t execute a lot of a siege as a result of, like Phips’s exterior Québec seventeen years earlier, his engineers and artillerists didn’t know how you can carry their heavy weapons to bear on the “citadel,” in reality only a dilapidated earthen and wood fort.
March withdrew his besieging drive after eleven days, maybe to learn up on the fundamentals of early eighteenth-century siege work. On August 22, he began his second siege. Daniel d’Auger de Subercase, Acadia’s governor, involved that the English might have discovered a approach to correctly work their heavy weapons as siege weapons, organized a number of sorties from the fort. Within the face of that “spirited” resistance, March retreated all the best way again to Boston.
At Their Wits’ Finish
New England’s Puritan leaders had reached their wits’ finish. They raged towards New York’s authorities for failing to affix the battle, and Cotton Mather, one in every of Boston’s most influential clergymen, excoriated Dudley for agreeing to the truce with Vaudreuil. He leveled claims that the governor and his allies, none extra so than Samuel Vetch, had engaged in unlawful and traitorous commerce with New France. Anti-government paranoia had paralyzed New England’s makes an attempt to cope with both the French or the Indians.
Within the meantime, most of the Jap Abenaki bands had grown bored with the battle. With the English pushed from Maine and their impotence in Acadia uncovered for all to see, they advised Vaudreuil that they now not noticed a cause to boost the hatchet. The governor-general known as their bluff and summoned 400 of them for marketing campaign in the summertime of 1708. Most of them begged off, which left Hertel with primarily mission Indians to affix his marines. These allies, at their rendezvous with the French in New Hampshire, then introduced they have been unwilling to stray a lot farther from their properties. Hertel concluded {that a} raid on Haverhill, the frontier village that a number of the similar warriors might have attacked eleven years earlier close to the top of King William’s Conflict, supplied his finest, maybe his solely, probability of creating productive use of the marines and few Indians putatively beneath his command.
The French and their indigenous allies descended on the village earlier than daybreak on August 29, 1708. Clio appeared intent on repeating herself—homes have been burned, captives taken, and thirty to forty settlers killed—earlier than occasions performed out in another way.
Through the militia’s professional forma chase of the raiders, it killed 9 and wounded eighteen marines and Indian combatants in Hertel’s rear guard. One other militia firm stumbled upon the provides the raiders had cached for his or her journey to Canada. With out meals and drugs, the retreat proved as troublesome for captors as for captives; again at Montréal, the mission Indians let it’s recognized that that they had had sufficient and henceforth meant to take a seat out the battle.
Uncommon Colonial Unity
Assist typically comes from probably the most surprising locations. In late 1708, crown officers authorised Vetch’s plan to ship a military from Albany towards Montréal and an amphibious drive up the Saint Lawrence River to put siege to Québec. Vetch’s was basically the identical scheme that the colonies had tried in King William’s Conflict, however with one vital modification: English officers would command the 4,000 skilled troopers and sailors who would conduct the siege of Québec. A lot of the colonies have been ecstatic, and, in a uncommon occasion of colonial unity, they set about enlisting 3,000 males. The one outlier, New York, had no selection however to take part as a result of the queen had licensed the marketing campaign.
The preparations progressed at a breakneck tempo. In April 1709, Vetch and Virginia’s former governor, Francis Nicholson, arrived in Boston. Vetch would maintain the logistics (and skim a pleasant revenue off the highest within the course of), and Nicholson, an outsider amongst New England’s fixed squabbling events, would whip the militia into form. A yet-to-be-named British—after 1707 and the Acts of Union, Scotland, England, and Wales have been official joined as Nice Britain—officer would direct the Québec thrust.
As a result of no New Englanders possessed the experience, or abdomen, to command the Albany contingent, Nicholson agreed to steer it. By early summer season, teamsters had begun carrying provides to Wooden Creek within the south finish of the Lake Champlain Valley and 1,500 militia from all through the colonies had poured into Albany.
Better of all from Nicholson’s perspective, 4 of the 5 tribes of the Iroquois League had renounced their neutrality within the Anglo-French battle—higher the British flip their massive military on Canada than on the Mohawk Valley. In Boston, lots of of militia arrived within the city, which gave it, for the primary time in its historical past, a quasi-martial air.
In all of this, Mather once more noticed the hand of God at work. The arrival of the British regulars, he exclaimed, promised long-suffering Puritan New England its long-awaited Armageddon with Canada. He carried no doubts as to that battle’s final result.
The regulars by no means made it to America. London had concluded that peace was on the verge of breaking out, and no level was to be gained in spending sources on an try to take Canada when any treaty ending the long-stalemated European battle probably would return issues to the established order ante bellum.
The Marketing campaign Is Cancelled?
Finally, in mid-October, Dudley realized that English officers had cancelled the marketing campaign. The colonies squandered a lot of the campaigning season ready for the British; Vetch and Nicholson had no selection however to disband the militia. Their determination most likely couldn’t have come at a greater time, particularly for the troopers in New York. Smallpox and “putrid fevers” wracked them all through the summer season, morale had reached its nadir, and mutiny loomed. Whether or not they once more would come out for one more “Wonderful Enterprise” was left for the management in Boston to ponder over the winter.
Over the identical interval, Queen Anne’s closest advisers developed second ideas concerning the potential for an armistice. Within the spring of 1710, they despatched to Nicholson and Vetch six warships and a regiment of marines to pluck the low-hanging piece of fruit at Port Royal.
The New England militia begrudgingly mustered once more; in late September, 3,500 of them joined the fleet and set out for Acadia. Subercase may do little towards such an awesome drive, and he capitulated inside days of Nicholson disembarking his military and its accompanying skilled artillery officers. New England troops occupied Annapolis Royal—Nicholson’s new title for the city and fort—and Vetch assumed the governorship of Nice Britain’s latest colony: Nova Scotia.
Deliverance?
The favorable final result at Annapolis Royal, plus the arrival in London in 1710 of 4 “Mohawk Chiefs” who obliquely implied that their folks have been ready to assist, led the crown to take one other stab at Canada. Nicholson would once more command the forces arrayed towards Montréal; Rear Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker would lead an armada and practically 5,000 British troops towards Québec.
This time, Anne’s ministers saved their phrase, and in late June, Walker and 7 redcoat regiments arrived at Boston. Nicholson rushed to Albany, after which to Wooden Creek, the place he constructed Fort Anne, assembled one other military of New England militia, and waited for the Mohawks to reach. The Puritans once more thanked God for his or her deliverance.
Boston’s retailers determined that the city’s public shows of piety have been sufficient: Walker’s military must make do with solely the provisions and provides with which they have been keen to half, at costs they refused to barter. Sir Hovenden spent July wrangling with military contractors bent on draining the British treasury, and he grew more and more bitter on your complete expedition as the times handed. Nicholson stood pat at Fort Anne, ready for the Mohawks and phrase that the armada was exterior Québec earlier than he put his military in movement.
Lastly, in mid-August, Walker and his armada sailed for the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Inexplicably to Mather and his followers, God appeared to modify sides. On August 23, the British fleet foundered within the fog and currents close to Île aux Oeufs. Seven transports and 900 sailors and troopers succumbed to the St. Lawrence’s chilly waters. Shaken by the catastrophe, and nonetheless irked with the Bostonians, Walker despatched the New England troops dwelling whereas he and the redcoats sailed for Europe.
Nicholson heard of Walker’s disaster, and extra importantly that the marketing campaign had been known as off, on September 19. After burning Fort Anne to the bottom, and as soon as his apoplectic rage subsided, he disbanded his military. In 1690, after Frontenac repulsed Phips at Québec, the French had named their church “Notre Dame de la Victoire,” however in 1711 they renamed it, “Notre Dame des Victoires.”
A Colonial “Chilly Conflict”
Walker reached England simply in time to be taught that Britain and France had come to peace phrases based mostly on a partition of the Spanish Netherlands, Britain’s acceptance of a Bourbon on the Spanish throne, and Spain’s award of the asiento, the fitting of British merchants to promote enslaved folks in Spanish colonies. With the scribbling of a pen at Utrecht, Queen Anne’s Conflict was over.
New England’s efforts had meant nothing. The “Treaties of Utrecht” set the stage for over thirty years of peace—the “Lengthy Peace”—between Nice Britain and France in Europe, and a chilly battle of kinds within the colonies. France doubled down on the Abenakis as its cordon sanitaire between New France and New England, acknowledged Port Royal was untenable and formally transferred it to the British, and commenced development of the fortress of Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island to protect approaches to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Grand Banks.
Half-hearted celebrations in Boston over the acquisition of Nova Scotia have been brief lived, notably because the crown would commit solely the barest sources (one half-strength infantry regiment) to coping with the Acadian-Mi’kmaq insurgency that washed over the brand new colony. Quashing the “rebels” and maintaining the Abenakis at arm’s size whereas increasing the frontier throughout their lands can be the New Englanders’ duty alone.
Discovering a modus vivendi with New France grew to become a main intention of New England’s new technology of army, diplomatic, and enterprise leaders, who, based mostly on the Puritans’ pathetic efficiency on the helm of state through the battle, supplanted them because the dominant gamers in New England society.
The best consequence of Queen Anne’s Conflict was remodeling New England from a Puritan theocracy to a Yankee stronghold of the British Empire. Inside one other technology, Puritan New England would change into a relic of the previous.