1775 (50 page)

In 1776 and 1777, the British government became willing to signal, in private communications, that parts of the Quebec Act could be repealed and the earlier map restored. However, proclaiming those new boundaries in 1774 had been an irretrievable mistiming—further confirmation that senior officials intended to cut the thirteen colonies back to size by commercial and territorial amputations. Religious liberalization for Quebec, in itself a reasonable Crown concession given the fast-growing number of Catholics within the British Empire, could have been proclaimed within Quebec’s pre-1774 boundaries.

Many of the British officials convinced that the Quebec Act would effectively deny rather than infuriate the older North American colonies also indulged a second misconception. To wit: however grand the Crown’s 1759–1760 military triumphs in Canada might seem in London, a different view of history prevailed in New England, especially in Boston. There a deeper negative impression had been ingrained over generations by English ineptness and unreliability in prior Canadian campaigns.

This aspect requires a few supporting paragraphs. After 1654, when Bay Colony troops captured Port Royal in French Acadia (now Nova Scotia), English negotiators returned it to France in the Treaty of Breda. What New England thought didn’t matter. A generation later, in 1690, Sir William Phips, a Massachusetts-born mariner knighted years earlier for salvaging a gold-filled treasure galleon, led an expedition of New England militia that once again captured Port Royal. But Old England sent no regular garrison, and in 1691 the French took it back.

New Englanders tried again in 1704 and 1707, angered by the success of Port Royal–based privateers in harassing their fishermen. No help came from England, and neither effort succeeded. In 1710, after British naval officers in America declined to aid another expedition planned by Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, Francis Nicholson, an audacious former governor of Virginia and Maryland, traveled to London and obtained the assistance of 500 Royal Marines. This time the outnumbered French did surrender, and the British 40th Regiment took over
as a garrison. Port Royal was renamed Annapolis Royal in honor of the queen and remained British thereafter.
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In 1740, however, the French completed a new and much stronger fortress near the northern tip of Cape Breton Island, an ideal location for a French naval base, close to the fisheries, and a safe lair for Gallic privateers. This was the citadel of Louisbourg, soon labeled the Gibraltar of North America for its forbidding 30-feet-high stone walls able to mount 250 cannon. However, it fell in 1745 to a large and highly motivated New England expedition—dozens of vessels, and militiamen from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island—led by William Pepperrell, a militia colonel from the district of Maine, who soon became Sir William Pepperrell. New England celebrated widely but prematurely. In 1748, by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Britain returned the great stone bastion to King Louis, in return for the French yielding Madras in India and surrendering fortresses that French armies had captured in Flanders. Time after time Boston and New England had seen Port Royal or Louisbourg handed back or shrugged off because higher priorities—invariably European—had overridden colonists’ interests.

Come 1757, the Earl of Loudoun made the first British attempt of that great conflict to regain Louisbourg. However, he dawdled, giving the French time to reinforce their Acadian citadel. Loudoun then decided to give up, and as further luck would have it, a hurricane sank part of the British fleet. Benjamin Franklin described this campaign as “frivolous, expensive and disgraceful to our Nation beyond conception.”
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In 1758, the French held their other great new fortress, Ticonderoga, against a bungled assault by yet another mediocre British commander, James Abercrombie—nicknamed “Nabbycrombie” by Yankee militia—who lost despite commanding a force that outnumbered the French defenders by three to one. Three weeks later the war’s second expedition against Louisbourg, this one led by Sir Jeffery Amherst,
did
prevail—carefully following the old plan of landing at Gabarus Bay, by which the New Englanders had triumphed thirteen years earlier.
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Amherst’s success marked a turning of the tide. Now British forces toppled French forts like dominoes: first Frontenac, then Duquesne, and then Niagara. Finally in September 1759, under General James Wolfe, Quebec itself fell. Giddy Britons celebrated 1759 as the miracle year that raised the empire to global dominance. Colonials in Philadelphia and New York, beneficiaries of massive wartime expenditures (and profits), celebrated almost as enthusiastically. Fewer did so in Boston; arguably its imperial hour had come and gone earlier—in 1691, 1710, and 1745—with the mother country hindering more than assisting.

If these pre-1759 annals of hauteur and ineptitude seem repetitious, that is exactly the point. Port Royal and Louisbourg were hardly the only targets in Canada mishandled or casually deprioritized by British authorities over the years. Serious attempts had also been made on Quebec—in 1690, 1709, and 1711. The last two failures left especially sour memories of British nonsupport or incompetence. In 1709 London “laid aside” its plans for Quebec without telling the supporting New York, Jersey, and New England forces that had moved up to Lake Champlain under Francis Nicholson.
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In 1711 British ineffectiveness took a different form. A new Tory government in London, out to succeed in Canada where previous Whig ministries had not, sent to Boston the largest expeditionary spectacle North Americans had ever seen—60 ships under Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker and 5,000 redcoats under General John Hill. Just as they had two years earlier, New York and New England militias marched to Lake Champlain in support. However, squalls, fog, and inexpert navigation sunk eight transports on the rocks near the mouth of the St. Lawrence. A skittish Walker sailed back to England, with the concurrence of army commander Hill.
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Bostonians were outraged. “Jack Hill” was not a real general; he had never held a command before. His qualification lay in being the court-figure brother of Mrs. Masham, the lady of the bedchamber who had replaced the Duchess of Marlborough as the power behind the throne of the aged Queen Anne. Francis Parkman, in an acid nineteenth-century portrait, observed that Marlborough himself had called Hill good for nothing, while Admiral Walker was “a man whose incompetence was soon to become notorious” after an embarrassed Admiralty sacked him.
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To make things worse, the Walker-Hill expedition was one that Massachusetts, in particular, had been pressured to assist. Local sailors and pilots were pressed into service; merchants were ordered to furnish supplies at low prices or see them seized. When the colonial troops, assembled at Lake Champlain, heard about the debacle, frustration with British unreliability boiled over, just as it did in Boston. The force commander—Francis Nicholson again—was “so beside himself with rage” that he “tore off his wig, threw it on the ground and stamped upon it, crying out ‘roguery! Treachery!’”
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In the early eighteenth century, and again in the 1740s, Boston paid a steep social, cultural, and economic price for the mother country’s disregard. Still the largest urban and commercial center in North America through the
1740s, the city had poured money and manpower into winning the battle for the North Atlantic. Had France been pushed out of Nova Scotia and denied access to Labrador and Newfoundland, their departure, Bostonians thought or hoped, would leave a maritime opening that Massachusetts could have filled. By 1775, frustration with Britain had become hostility.

Parkman, who rarely dwelt on economics, was blunt: “What with manning the coast-guard vessels, defending the frontier against Indians, and furnishing her contingent to the Canada expedition, more than one in five of her able bodied men were in active service in the summer of 1711. Years passed before she [Massachusetts] recovered from the effects of her financial exhaustion.”
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So, too, in the 1740s. By one account, “the Cartagena and Louisbourg expeditions of 1743–1745, whatever they may have done for Yankee self-esteem, imposed heavy taxes on the middle and lower classes, drained the provincial treasury and left hundreds of families in Boston fatherless and husbandless. Eight years later, Boston’s leaders will still be lamenting the staggering burden which the war had imposed.”
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What Boston economic primacy King George’s War (1739–1748) had not dissipated, the 1754–1763 conflict did. Here is colonial historian Carl Bridenbaugh: “The events of the French and Indian War took an extra toll from Boston. Understandably, people were war-weary before the conflict officially broke out…Nevertheless, inspired by Governor Shirley, Boston put forth the greatest war effort in money and taxes of all America…No testimony to the effect of the war on the city’s well-being is more pointed than the bankruptcy notices of twenty-eight merchants, shopkeepers and master craftsmen published in the
Boston Evening Post
at the very time of the second capture of Louisbourg [1759].”
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If Bostonians had little confidence in British ministries and army generals, they had even less regard for the Royal Navy, which used maritime Massachusetts as a principal whipping post for both punitive customs policies and the forced impressment of local seamen. During the 90 years before 1775, Philadelphia and New York had only a few riots against impressment, while Boston led with six—in the 1690s, 1702, 1741, 1745, 1747, and 1758. In these years, one must remember, impressment on a ship of the Royal Navy was seen as “approximating a death sentence because of the miserable conditions that prevailed, and according to the [Boston] town meeting in 1746 it was this fear that drove many shipwrights and other artisans to satellite ports.”
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In some years, so many fishermen were pressed that catches and codfish exports plummeted.
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Consensus-driven accounts of the Revolution tend to omit or downplay such history and events, which is a mistake. They seeded Boston’s unique anger—the waterfront and street mobs, the tarring and feathering of customs officials, the looting and gutting of the mansions of rich officeholders—so visible during the 1760s and 1770s. Depredations in New York and Newport were minor by comparison. The roots of disillusionment ran deep, and in and around Boston one can suggest that the mother country of yesteryear had become a wicked stepmother figure.

New maritime trespasses were on the horizon. In early 1775, after the New England Restraining Act barred the four Yankee provinces from all offshore Atlantic fishing, additional legislation enacted by Parliament subsidized England’s migratory cod-fishing industry and allowed mercantile interests in Ireland to take over when American provisions were barred from Newfoundland and other fisheries.
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Massachusetts was unlikely to ever be back in good graces.

In the spring of 1775, with Boston under siege, both General Gage and Admiral Graves wrote to the governors of Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Newfoundland requesting them to ship provisions to Boston under special license.
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As recent beneficiaries of favorable policies and subsidies, all three responded avidly, shipping quantities of livestock, beef, mutton, poultry, vegetables, and cheese. Nova Scotia sent so much at such cost that Gage complained about price gouging.
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Parenthetically, the Canadian colonies had not responded to invitations to attend the Continental Congress. And that body (on May 17), followed by many local committees of inspection, took strong countermeasures, prohibiting exports to Nova Scotia, Quebec, Newfoundland, and other fisheries.
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Massachusetts leaders understood that the Crown’s relationship with New England had soured, and that regimes in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Quebec were taking the king’s side. If the Quebec Act had in some ways scrambled old political, religious, and territorial sensitivities, it had left them cloaked in familiar northern geography: Canada, and how best to invade. By the summer of 1775, the opportunity appeared to be there, with more avenues than ever before.

The Champlain-Hudson Corridor

For Yorkers and New Englanders, this was the old, familiar war road. It ran from Albany north along the Hudson to
Lake George, by portage from Lake George to Lake Champlain, and then north on that lake to Canada’s Richelieu River. The Richelieu, in turn, flowed northward for 30 miles until it became a foaming stretch of impassable rapids. After a portage, travelers had a short trip down the rest of the river to the St. Lawrence. From there Montreal was in sight. No ships of any size could go from Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence. But for the most part, the water and land segments were not difficult for battalions or regiments marching north.

John Brown, an agent sent by Samuel Adams in February 1775, reported back by letter in March. When war comes, Brown said, seize the two gateway fortresses. If the familiar route exercised a strong attraction, so did the 300 cannon at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. New Englanders captured them, but moderates in Congress at first temporized, saying the cannon should not be taken to Boston or Hartford but held for rapprochement with Britain.