Queen Anne's War (1702–1713)
Course of the War
Florida and Carolina
Prominent French and English colonists understood at the turn of the 18th century that control of the Mississippi River would have a significant role in future development and trade, and each developed visionary plans to thwart the other's activities. The French Canadian explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville had, in the aftermath of the last war, developed a "Project sur la Caroline" that called for establishing relationships with natives in the Mississippi watershed and then leveraging those relationships to push the English off the continent, or at least limit them to coastal areas. In pursuit of this grand strategy he rediscovered the mouth of the Mississippi (which had first been found by La Salle in 1670), and established Fort Maurepas in 1699. From this base, and Fort Louis de la Mobile (founded in 1702), he began to establish relationships with the local Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, and other tribes.
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville was instrumental in French efforts to control the Mississippi River and trade in the south
English traders and explorers from Carolina had, since its founding in 1670, already established a substantial trading network across the southeastern part of the continent that extended all the way to the Mississippi. Its leaders, who had little respect for the Spanish in Florida, understood the threat posed by the French arrival on the coast. Both Joseph Blake, Carolina's governor until his death in 1700, and James Moore, who succeeded Blake in 1702, articulated visions of expansion to the south and west at the expense of French and Spanish
The Spanish Empire was a colonial empire governed by Spain and its predecessor states between 1492 and 1976. One of the largest empires in history, it was the first to usher the European Age of Discovery and achieve a global scale, controlling vast territory. It was one of the most powerful empires of the early modern period, reaching its maximum extent in the 18th century. interests.
In January 1702, before the war broke out in Europe, Iberville had approached the Spanish with the recommendation that the Apalachee warriors be armed and sent against the English
The Kingdom of England was a sovereign state on the island of Great Britain from about 927, when it emerged from various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, until 1 May 1707, when it united with Scotland to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Viking invasions of the 9th century upset the balance of power between the English kingdoms, and native Anglo-Saxon life in general. The English lands were unified in the 10th century in a reconquest completed by King Æthelstan in 927. and their allies. The Spanish organized an expedition under Francisco Romo de Uriza that left Pensacola in August for the trading centers of the Carolina backcountry. The English, with advance warning of the expedition, organized a defense at the head of the Flint River and routed the Spanish-led force, with upwards of 500 Spanish-led natives killed or captured.
When formal notification of hostilities arrived, Governor Moore organized and led a force against Spanish Florida. In the 1702 Siege of St. Augustine, 500 English soldiers and militia along with 300 Indians captured and burned the town of St. Augustine. The English were unable to take the main fortress, and withdrew when a Spanish fleet arrived from Havana. In 1706 Carolina successfully repulsed an attack on Charles Town by a combined Spanish and French amphibious force sent from Havana.
The Apalachee and Timucua of Spanish Florida were virtually wiped out in a raiding expedition by Moore that became known as the Apalachee Massacre of 1704. Many of the survivors of these raids were relocated to the Savannah River, where they were confined to reservations. Raids consisting of large native forces, sometimes including a small number of white men, continued in the following years, including major expeditions directed at Pensacola in 1707 and Mobile in 1709. The Muscogee (Creek), Yamasee, and Chickasaw, armed and led by Englishmen, dominated these conflicts at the expense of the Choctaw, Timucua, and Apalachee, the latter being somewhat more pacific in nature than the Creek and Chickasaw.
New England and Acadia
Throughout the war, New France
New France was the territory colonized by France in North America, beginning with the exploration of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Great Britain and Spain in 1763 under the Treaty of Paris. In the 16th century, the lands were used primarily to draw from the wealth of natural resources such as furs through trade with the various indigenous peoples. In the seventeenth century, successful settlements began in Acadia and in Quebec. and the Wabanaki Confederacy were able to thwart New England expansion into Acadia, whose border New France defined as the Kennebec River in southern Maine. In 1703, Michel Leneuf de la Vallière de Beaubassin, who commanded a few French Canadians and 500 of the natives in the Wabanaki Confederacy, led attacks against New England settlements from Wells to Falmouth (present-day Portland, Maine) in the Northeast Coast Campaign. They killed or took prisoner more than 300 settlers.
Major Benjamin Church - Father of American Ranging
In February 1704, Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville led 250 Abenaki and Caughnawaga Indians and 50 French Canadians in a raid on Deerfield in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and destroyed the settlement, killing and capturing many colonists. More than 100 captives were taken on an overland journey hundreds of miles north to the Caughnawaga mission village near Montreal, where most of the children who survived were adopted by the Mohawk people. Several adults were later redeemed or released in negotiated prisoner exchanges, including the minister, who tried for years without success to ransom his daughter. She became fully assimilated, marrying a Mohawk man. There was an active market in colonists during these years, and communities raised funds to ransom their citizens from Native American captivity.
Unable to effectively combat these raids, New England colonists retaliated by launching an expedition against Acadia. Led by the famous Native American fighter Benjamin Church, the expedition raided Grand Pré, Chignecto, and other settlements. Although French accounts claim that Church attempted an attack on Acadia's capital, Port Royal, Church's account of the expedition describes a war council in which the expedition decided against making an attack.
Father Sébastien Rale was widely suspected of inciting the Norridgewock tribe against the New Englanders. Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley put a price on his head. In the winter of 1705, 275 British soldiers under the command of Colonel Winthrop Hilton were dispatched to seize Rale and sack the village. Warned in time, the priest escaped into the woods with his papers, but the militia burned the village and church.
French and Wabanaki Confederacy raiding activity continued in northern Massachusetts in 1705, against which the English colonists were unable to mount an effective defense. The raids happened too quickly for defensive forces to organize, and reprisal raids usually found tribal camps and settlements empty. There was a lull in the raiding while the French and English leaders negotiated—with only limited success—the exchange of prisoners. Raids by Indians, sometimes with French participation, persisted until the end of the war.
In May 1707, Governor Dudley organized an expedition to take Port Royal. Led by John March, 1,600 men failed to take the fort by siege; a follow-up expedition in August was also repulsed. In response, the French developed an ambitious plan to raid most of the New Hampshire settlements on the Piscataqua River. However, much of the Native American support needed never materialized, and the Massachusetts town of Haverhill was raided instead. In 1709, Philippe de Rigaud Vaudreuil, governor of New France, reported that two-thirds of the fields north of Boston were untended because of French and Native American raids. French-Native American war parties were returning without prisoners because the New England colonists stayed in their forts and would not come out.
In September 1710, 3,600 British and colonial forces led by Francis Nicholson finally captured Port Royal after a siege of one week. This ended official French control of the peninsular portion of Acadia (present-day mainland Nova Scotia), although resistance continued until the end of the war. Resistance by the Wabanaki Confederation continued in the Battle of Bloody Creek (1711) and raids along the Maine frontier. The remainder of Acadia, present-day eastern Maine and New Brunswick, remained disputed territory between New England and New France.
Expeditions against New France
The French in New France's heartland, Canada, opposed attacking the Province of New York. They were reluctant to arouse the Iroquois, who they feared more than they did the British
The Kingdom of Great Britain was a sovereign country in Western Europe from 1 May 1707 to the end of 31 December 1800. The state was created by the 1706 Treaty of Union and ratified by the Acts of Union 1707, which united the kingdoms of England (which included Wales) and Scotland to form a single kingdom encompassing the whole island of Great Britain and its outlying islands, with the exception of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands., and with whom they had made the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. New York merchants were opposed to attacking New France, because it would interrupt the lucrative Native American fur trade, much of which came through New France. Despite the efforts of Peter Schuyler, the Albany commissioner of Indians, to interest them in the war, the Iroquois maintained their neutrality throughout the conflict.
Detail from a 1733 map with the site of the Walker expedition's disaster marked in red
Francis Nicholson and Samuel Vetch, with some financial and logistical support from the queen, organized an ambitious assault against New France in 1709. The plan involved an overland assault on Montreal via Lake Champlain and a sea-based assault by naval forces against Quebec. The land expedition reached the southern end of Lake Champlain, but was called off when the promised naval support for the attack on Quebec never materialized. Those forces were diverted to support Portugal. The Iroquois had made vague promises of support for this effort, but successfully delayed sending support until it seemed clear the expedition was going to fail. After this failure, Nicholson and Schuyler traveled to London accompanied by King Hendrick and other sachems to arouse interest in the North American frontier war. The Indian delegation caused a sensation in London, and Queen Anne granted them an audience. Nicholson and Schuyler were successful in their endeavour—the queen gave support for Nicholson's successful capture of Port Royal in 1710. With that success under his belt, Nicholson again returned to England, and gained support for a renewed attempt on Quebec in 1711.
The plan for 1711 again called for land and sea-based attacks; its execution was a disaster. A fleet of 15 ships of the line and transports carrying 5,000 troops led by Admiral Hovenden Walker arrived at Boston in June, doubling the town's population and greatly straining the colony's ability to provide necessary provisions. Sailing for Quebec at the end of July, the expedition entered the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and a number of its ships foundered on the rocky shores near the mouth of the Saint Lawrence in the fog. More than 700 troops were lost, and Walker called the expedition off. In the meantime, Nicholson had departed for Montreal overland, but had only reached Lake George when word of Walker's disaster reached him; he also turned back. In this expedition, the Iroquois provided several hundred warriors to fight with the English, but they also sent warnings of the expedition to the French.
Newfoundland
Newfoundland's coast was dotted with small French and English communities, with some fishing stations occupied seasonally by fishermen from Europe. Both sides had fortified their principal towns, the French at Plaisance on the western side of the Avalon Peninsula, the English at St. John's on Conception Bay. During King William's War, d'Iberville had destroyed most of the English communities in 1696–7; the island again became a battleground in 1702. In August of that year, an English fleet under the command of Commodore John Leake descended on the outlying French communities but made no attempts on Plaisance. During the winter of 1705 Daniel d'Auger de Subercase, the French governor at Plaisance, retaliated, leading a combined French and Mi'kmaq expedition that destroyed several English settlements and unsuccessfully besieged Fort William at St. John's. The French and their Native American allies continued to harry the English throughout the summer, and did damages claimed at £188,000 to the English establishments. The English sent a fleet in 1706 that destroyed French fishing outposts on the island's northern coasts. In December 1708 a combined force of French, Canadian, and Mi'kmaq volunteers captured St. John's and destroyed the fortifications. Lacking the resources to hold the prize, they abandoned it, and St. John's was reoccupied and refortified by the English in 1709. (The same French expedition also tried to take Ferryland, but it successfully resisted.)
This detail from a 1744 map shows the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, where most of the conflicts took place
This detail from a 1744 map shows the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, where most of the conflicts took place
( Click image to enlarge)
English fleet commanders contemplated, but did not make, attacks on Plaisance in 1703 and 1711 (the latter by Admiral Walker in the aftermath of the disaster at the mouth of the St. Lawrence).
Peace
In 1712, Britain and France
The Kingdom of France is the historiographical name or umbrella term given to various political entities of France in the medieval and early modern period. It was one of the most powerful states in Europe since the High Middle Ages. It was also an early colonial power, with possessions around the world. Colonial conflicts with Great Britain led to the loss of much of its North American holdings by 1763. The Kingdom of France adopted a written constitution in 1791, but the Kingdom was abolished a year later and replaced with the First French Republic. declared an armistice, and a final peace agreement was signed the following year. Under terms of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Britain gained Acadia (which they renamed Nova Scotia), sovereignty over Newfoundland, the Hudson Bay region, and the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. France recognized British suzerainty over the Iroquois, and agreed that commerce with Native Americans further inland would be open to all nations. It retained all of the islands in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, including Cape Breton Island, and retained fishing rights in the area, including rights to dry fish on the northern shore of Newfoundland.
By the later years of the war many Abenakis had tired of the conflict despite French pressures to continue raids against New England targets. The peace of Utrecht, however, had ignored Native American interests, and some Abenaki expressed willingness to negotiate a peace with the New Englanders. Governor Dudley organized a major peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire (of which he was also governor). In negotiations there and at Casco Bay, the Abenakis orally objected to British assertions that the French had ceded their territory (present-day eastern Maine and New Brunswick) to Britain, and agreed to a confirmation of boundaries at the Kennebec River and the establishment of government-run trading posts in their territory. The Treaty of Portsmouth, ratified on July 13, 1713, by eight representatives of some of the tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy, however, included language asserting British sovereignty over their territory. Over the next year other Abenaki tribal leaders also signed the treaty, but no Mi'kmaq ever signed it or any other treaty until 1726.
HISTORY
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This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Queen Anne's War", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
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