Notes

INTRODUCTION:

The Seven Years’ War and the Disruption of the Old British Empire

1. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York, 1997), xi.

PROLOGUE: Jumonville’s Glen, MAY 28, 1754

1. This account reflects inferences drawn from a variety of documents and described below, in notes for chapter 5. It derives from: W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington,Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1748-August 1755 (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 107–25 (Washington to Dinwiddie, 29 May 1754 [two letters]; to Joshua Fry, 29 May 1754; to John Augustine Washington, 31 May 1754; to Dinwiddie, 3 June 1754); from “Journal de Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry, Lieutenant des Troupes, 1754–1755,” Archives de Québec: Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec, 1927–28, esp. 372–3, 378–80; the deposition of John Shaw, 21 Aug. 1754, in William L. McDowell, ed., Colonial Records of South Carolina: Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, 1754–1765 (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 3–7; evidence from the Dinwiddie papers quoted in L. K. Koontz, Robert Dinwiddie: Servant of the Crown (Glendale, Calif., 1941), 313–15. Also George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 54–5; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 30–2; Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 334–6; and Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 240–1.

PART I: THE ORIGINS OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, 1450-1754 CHAPTER ONE: Iroquoia and Empire

1. The British colonists, having already named one war after the reigning monarch, tended to call this conflict the French and Indian War. Historians, equally stumped, have either followed the colonists’ practice, invented other names (the Fourth Intercolonial War, the Great War for the Empire, the War of the Conquest), or used its European title, the Seven Years’ War—despite the fact that it lasted seven years in Europe, where hostilities extended from 1756 to 1763, and slightly over six in North America. While a case can be made for referring to the European and American phases of fighting by different names, I will use “the Seven Years’ War” to describe the entire conflict.

2. Tanaghrisson’s origins: Francis Jennings et al., eds., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy (Syracuse, N.Y., 1985), 250–1; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Tanaghrisson.” On the Great League and the Confederacy see esp. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 1–49; and id., “Ordeals of the Longhouse: The Five Nations in Early American History,” in id. and James Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987), 11–27; also Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1970), 21–107. The Iroquois were called the Five Nations until the 1720s, when they became the Six Nations by admitting the Tuscarora Indians to the Great League. On the defeat of the Tuscaroras by the Carolinian colonists, the Tuscarora migration to New York, and the adoption by the Iroquois, see Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (Durham, N.C., 1928), 158–61; Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Federation of Indian Tribes with the English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York, 1984), 297; and id. et al., Iroquois Diplomacy, 173.

3. On mourning war, ritual torture, and adoption practices, see Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 40 (1983): 528–59. For the epic of Deganawidah and Hiawatha, see Paul A. W. Wallace, The White Roots of Peace (1946; reprint, Port Washington, N.Y., 1968). On the condolence ceremony as a basis for Iroquois diplomacy, see William N. Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,” in Jennings et al., Iroquois Diplomacy, 3–36, esp. 18–21; also Richter, Ordeal, 30–49.

4. Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago, 1982), 26; Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 42–3; Richter, “War and Culture,” 528–59.

5. Francis Jennings, “Iroquois Alliances in American History,” in id. et al., Iroquois Diplomacy,39.

6. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Republics, and Empires in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991); see esp. 1–185. I have adopted White’s conceptual scheme and with it most of his terminology. Thus I speak of the refugee groups who gathered west of Lake Michigan (the heart of the geographical “middle ground”) as Algonquians, even though, as White points out, the Algonquians were only the predominant linguistic grouping among peoples who included Iroquoians (the Huron-Petuns) and Siouans (Winnebagos). Although I have spoken of fatherhood in terms of Algonquian kinship systems, the cultural role of father as mediator was also common to the Iroquois, who like their enemies reckoned kinship matrilineally. (In both cases, the disciplinary parenting responsibilities belonged to mothers and maternal uncles.) The word “father” resonated very differently for Europeans— whose kinship structures were patrilineal and who thought in terms of patriarchal power— than for Indians in matrilineally organized cultures. As the French experience suggests, however, divergent meanings could open a path to fruitful intercultural relations, built creatively out of mutual misunderstanding; but this could happen only if the Europeans refrained from exercising power coercively.

7. Richter, Ordeal, 190–235.

8. For varying views of the character of Iroquois neutrality, see Jennings, “Iroquois Alliances,” 39; Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 111–14; Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–1754 (Detroit, 1983), 15–18 et passim; and Richter, Ordeal, 236–54.

9. For the French perspective on these aspects of the Iroquois policy, which served French interests but also, through the entente with the Far Indians, exacerbated the difficulties woven into the structure of the fur trade, see esp. W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1983), 133–6. White tends to agree, although he argues for more complexity; see Middle Ground, 119–85. Jennings believes the French enjoyed more benefits; see “Iroquois Alliances,” 39.

10. “Aggressive neutrality”: Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 112. My account of the policy’s operation follows Wallace’s (111–14), Richter’s (Ordeal, 236–54), and Aquila’s versions (Iroquois Restoration, 15–18 ff.).

The Ohio Country included the territory between the Allegheny River and Lake Erie and stretched westward down the Ohio Valley as far as the French-controlled pays des Illinois—i.e., the area lying to the south of Lake Michigan, bounded roughly by the Wabash, the Mississippi, and the Illinois Rivers. See Jennings, Ambiguous Empire, 350–1; also Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 132–85, especially maps at 161, 169; and Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York, 1997).

11. On the Illinois Country, see Winstanley Briggs, “Le Pays des Illinois,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 47 (1990): 30–56; and Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 12–18, 53–64, 90–9. The importance of the Ohio Valley to France’s strategic arc: “Memoir of the French Colonies in North America by the Marquis de la Galissonière” [Dec. 1750], in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., Wilderness Chronicles of Northwestern Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Pa., 1941), 27–9; Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 154–6; and George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 35–6.

12. The depopulation of the Ohio Country: Richter, Ordeal, 15, 60–6. Shawnee migrations: Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 18–22; James Howard, Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native Indian Tribe and Its Cultural Background (Athens, Ohio, 1981), 1–8; and Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 14–15. The Ohio Indians of the eighteenth century repopulation: id., “The Peoples ‘In Between’: The Iroquois and the Ohio Indians, 1720–1768,” in Richter and Merrell, Beyond the Covenant Chain, 93–112; Jennings, Ambiguous Empire, 350–3; and id., Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 22–5. Tanaghrisson and Scarouady: Jennings et al., Iroquois Diplomacy, 250–2.

13. The operation of the system and the importance of the Ohio: Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 112–13. The numbers of Iroquois and Ohio warriors, for 1738 and 1748 respectively: Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 31–2. The Indian expert cited was Conrad Weiser, Pennsylvania’s chief official interpreter, writing in late 1744 to Thomas Lee of Virginia; see Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia, 1945), 200–1. The populations that Weiser cited were reasonable enough; the claim that such vast numbers of warriors would join the Iroquois when summoned, utterly fanciful.

14. On wampum and diplomatic gifts, see Mary A. Druke, “Iroquois Treaties: Common Forms, Varying Interpretations,” and Michael K. Foster, “Another Look at the Function of Wampum in Iroquois-White Councils,” in Jennings et al., Iroquois Diplomacy, 85–114; also Wilbur Jacobs, Wilderness Diplomacy and Indian Gifts: Anglo-French Rivalry along the Ohio and Northwest Frontiers, 1748–1763 (Stanford, Calif., 1950).

15. Aquila, Iroquois Restoration, 85–91; Jennings et al., Iroquois Diplomacy, 165–9.

CHAPTER TWO: The Erosion of Iroquois Influence

1. Ives Goddard, “Delaware,” in William C. Sturtevant, gen. ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce Trigger (Washington, D.C., 1978), 213–22; Michael N. McConnell, “The Peoples ‘In Between’: The Iroquois and the Ohio Indians, 1720–1768,” in Daniel K. Richter and James Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987), 93–112; id., A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 5–46; Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 31–5; id., The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with the English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York, 1984), 309–46; Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York, 1997), 119–28.

2. Jennings, Ambiguous Empire, 356–60; Kenneth P. Bailey, The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792: A Chapter in the History of the Colonial Frontier (Glendale, Calif., 1939), 105–6.

3. Jennings, Ambiguous Empire, 360–2; quotation from Bailey, Ohio Company, 117.

4. On the Mohawk experience in King George’s War and its effects on relations with New York, see Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York, 1990), 18–27. On New York’s politics and the neutrality of Albany’s merchants, see Stanley Nider Katz, Newcastle’s New York: Anglo-American Politics, 1732–1753 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 164–82.

5. Yoko Shirai, “The Indian Trade of Colonial Pennsylvania, 1730–1768: Traders and Land Speculation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985), 35–9.

6. Croghan quotation: Albert T. Volwiler, George Croghan and the Westward Movement, 1741–1782 (Cleveland, 1926), 35. The rise of Pickawillany and Memeskia’s activities: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Republics, and Empires in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 215–22; and R. David Edmunds, “Pickawillany: French Military Power Versus British Economics,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 58 (1975): 169–84. Croghan’s enterprises: Nicholas Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 5–37. The bounty on Croghan’s head was $1,000, the equivalent of £225 sterling (Volwiler, Croghan, 78). In general it appears that Croghan could offer manufactures at about a fourth the price that French traders charged for comparable items: a testimony to the growing power of the British industrial economy that helps explain the anxiety of the French when confronted with the prospect of English competition in the Indian trade.

7. Inscription: Donald H. Kent, The French Invasion of Western Pennsylvania, 1753 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1954), 8, my translation. Céloron quotation: George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 38. This encounter was at Scioto, and English traders as well as Indians were present.

8. Alarm at the numbers of traders: ibid. Céloron’s report: ibid., 33–9; Gustave Lanctot, A History of Canada, vol. 3, From the Treaty of Utrecht to the Treaty of Paris, 1763 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 75–6; Kent, French Invasion, 6–10. Both White, Middle Ground, 204–8, and Andrew R. L. Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), 20–5, add significantly to these older accounts. Céloron’s journals are translated in A. A. Lambing, ed., “Journals of Céloron de Blainville and Father Joseph Pierre de Bonnecamps,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society Quarterly 29 (1920): 335–423.

9. Bailey, Ohio Company, 68–9.

10. Gist’s surveys: Bailey, Ohio Company, 90, 94, 95. Croghan and Gist’s cooperation: Wainwright, Croghan, 48–50. On the Logstown conference in general, see McConnell, A Country Between, 75–7; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 136–8; and White, Middle Ground, 236–7. The minutes of the conference appear in Lois Mulkearn, ed., George Mercer Papers Relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia (Pittsburgh, 1954), 127–38. Tanaghrisson was particularly dependent on the gifts the British had to offer; his ability to distribute these enabled him to create a following among locally powerful headmen. This made him more ardently pro-British than most of the Shawnees and Delawares, and for that matter more than the Great Council would have preferred (Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 37–45; McConnell, A Country Between, 75–6; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 138).

11. On Logstown’s significance for the Ohio Indians, see McConnell, A Country Between, 77–82; and Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 21–45.

12. Quotations from Charles A. Hanna, The Wilderness Trail, or The Ventures and Adventures of the Pennsylvania Traders on the Allegheny Path . . . , vol. 2 (New York, 1911), 292. The English document that describes Langlade’s raid is Alfred T. Goodman, ed., Journal of Captain William Trent from Logstown to Pickawillany (1871; reprint, New York, 1971). See also the versions in Volwiler, Croghan, 78–9; Stanley, New France, 45–6; White, Middle Ground, 228–31; Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 23–35; and the single most complete account, Edmunds, “Pickawillany.” The predominance of Ottawas and Chippewas in the raiding party—peoples who practiced ritual cannibalism to transfer their enemies’ spiritual power to themselves— explains the aftermath of the surrender. Langlade took no part but understood the importance of the feast and turned Memeskia over to the Indians (“some of [whom],” White notes, were “Langlade’s own kinsmen”) as a means of quite literally reincorporating him into the French alliance (White, Middle Ground, 231).

13. Bailey, Ohio Company, 154–5.

14. Pennsylvania-Virginia competition: ibid., 103–22. Gist’s and Croghan’s cooperation at Logstown: Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 44; Wainwright, Croghan, 48–50.

15. Bailey, Ohio Company, 64–9.

16. Duquesne’s orders: Antoine-Louis Rouillé, comte de Jouy, Minister of Marine, to Duquesne, 15 May 1752, quoted in Stanley, New France, 45. Construction of French forts: ibid., 47–8; Lanctot, History 3: 85–6; and esp. Kent, French Invasion, 15–68.

CHAPTER THREE: London Moves to Counter a Threat

1. Except as noted, the following account derives from T. R. Clayton, “The Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Halifax, and the American Origins of the Seven Years’ War,” Historical Journal 24 (1981): 573–84. On Newcastle, see Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 82–8.

2. A few words about the curious institutional structure of the British empire and the conduct of foreign relations are in order. The king was responsible for all executive functions in the eighteenth-century British state but delegated authority to the members of his Privy Council, a body of dignitaries that varied in size from thirty to eighty members. Some of the councillors had purely advisory roles and ceremonial offices, while others were responsible for the actual administration of government. In 1696, King William III, worried that Parliament meddled too much in commercial and colonial affairs that were rightfully within his prerogative powers, created the Board of Trade and Plantations as a subcommittee of the Privy Council. Sixteen officials formally known as the “Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations” comprised the board: eight were Privy Council dignitaries; eight were salaried permanent members who did the board’s real work.

The Board of Trade advised the Privy Council and the king on the appointment of officers in colonial governments, reviewed the legislation passed by the colonial assemblies to make sure that it was consistent with British law and the best interests of the realm (the Privy Council could “disallow,” or veto, any repugnant colonial acts), and served as a clearinghouse for all official information on the colonies. Except for two problems, the Board of Trade might have become a genuinely effective agency for formulating and implementing colonial policy. The first difficulty was that the board had to concern itself not just with the colonies, but with literally all of England’s trade and with many related issues. Thus among other duties it was charged with advising on all commercial treaties, supervising the state of domestic industries and the fisheries, and devising useful employments for the poor of the realm. But the second problem would ultimately prove worse: because the board could only advise on colonial matters, it had neither the authority to appoint officers in the colonial governments nor any executive power to compel the various government departments concerned in colonial affairs to follow its policies. All executive authority remained with the Privy Council, which in turn delegated power over the colonies to the secretary of state for the Southern Department.

The two secretaries of state, both privy councillors, together formulated “His Majesty’s pleasure” in official papers and decrees and were therefore crucial intermediaries between the king and the rest of the British government. The division of responsibility between these “principal Secretaries” was traditional rather than legal—a circumstance that allowed them to meddle in each other’s affairs more or less at will. The secretary of state for the Northern Department customarily exercised responsibility over the internal administration of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and over foreign relations with those states that lay north of a line bisecting Europe from Cape Gris-Nez on the north coast of France to Constantinople. The secretary of state for the Southern Department conducted foreign relations with all the world to the south of that line and administered colonial affairs. Colonial governors reported to the Southern secretary and received their instructions from him. From 1704 onward, he also exercised the undisputed right of patronage appointment within the colonial sphere. Needless to say, anyone charged with conducting foreign relations with France in an age of continual tension and hostility would have had his hands full; but to add to that burden the responsibility for relations with the rest of Catholic Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the colonies meant that the secretary of state for the Southern Department was a very busy man indeed. Far too busy, in fact, to pay meticulous attention to the colonies—or even to inquire very closely about them. Most Southern secretaries simply ignored the colonies, using the patronage available within the colonial system to meet the pressing needs of domestic politics rather than seeking out capable officers to administer the colonial governments.

Thus the administration of the American colonies was not merely disorderly and confused but chaotic at its very heart. The Board of Trade knew everything there was to know about the colonies but had no power to translate its knowledge into policy. The secretary of state for the Southern Department had executive authority over the colonies but no real knowledge of them and little reason to inform himself on colonial affairs before he appointed officials or promulgated policies. This fundamental division between knowledge and power, together with the fragmentation and internal competitiveness of the bureaucracy, the absence of coherent direction given the colonial governments, and the paucity of effective political power available to the governors, hobbled the British government’s ability to assert control over the colonies.

Even beyond these limits on the efficiency of the imperial system, however, the fact that most English administrators conceived of the empire in strictly commercial terms kept them from trying to make it into anything more than a structure for the control of trade. In a sense, the British empire in the 1750s was not and never had been a territorial entity, and it had never really governed much more than the produce and goods and credit that had traversed the Atlantic Ocean. The added fact that the Crown’s colonial policy for most of the first half of the eighteenth century was to do nothing—showing, in Edmund Burke’s famous phrase, a “wise and salutary neglect” of the colonies—only lent the weight of inertia to the institutional incapacity of English officials to influence American affairs. To intervene in the local government of the provinces themselves, as imperial administrators well understood, was to invite intense local opposition, which at the very least would be bad for business.

On the apparatus of imperial administration, see Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, vol. 4, England ’s Commercial and Colonial Policy (New Haven, Conn., 1938), 272–425; Thomas Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1760–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 106–12; Arthur H. Basye, The Lords Commissionersof Trade and Plantation, Commonly Known as the Board of Trade, 1748–1782 (New Haven, Conn., 1925); Oliver M. Dickerson, American Colonial Government, 1696–1765: A Study of the British Board of Trade in Its Relations to the American Colonies (Cleveland, 1912); and Leonard Woods Labaree, Royal Government in America: A Study of the British Colonial System before 1783 (New Haven, Conn., 1930). Burke quotation: id., Speech . . . on . . . Conciliation with the Colonies . . . (London, 1775), par. 30.

3. On British balance-of-power politics before the Seven Years’ War, see Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming), chap. 1; Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in the Age of Walpole (Edinburgh, 1985); id., A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy 1660–1793 (London, 1991); H. M. Scott, “ ‘The True Principles of the Revolution’: The Duke of Newcastle and the Idea of the Old System,” in Jeremy Black, ed., Knights Errant and True Englishmen: British Foreign Policy 1600–1800 (Edinburgh, 1989), 55–91.

4. Instructions to governors: cabinet minutes, 21 Aug. 1751. Circular letter: the earl of Holdernesse to the governors, 28 Aug. 1753. Both quoted in Clayton, “American Origins,” 584.

5. Holdernesse to Dinwiddie, 28 Aug. 1753, in Kenneth P. Bailey, The Ohio Company of Virginiaand the Westward Movement, 1748–1792: A Chapter in the History of the Colonial Frontier (Glendale, Calif., 1939), 202–3 n. 486.

6. Conference minutes quoted in Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 81.

7. Lords of Trade to Sir Danvers Osborne, 18 Sept. 1753, quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune,82 n. 28.

8. Robert C. Newbold, The Albany Congress and the Plan of Union of 1754 (New York, 1755), 17–37.

9. On Dinwiddie, see Bailey, Ohio Company, 57–8; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 2, The Southern Plantations, 1748–1754 (New York, 1960), 16–17; L. K. Koontz, Robert Dinwiddie (Glendale, Calif., 1941), 33–49; and J. R. Alden, Robert Dinwiddie: Servant of the Crown (Charlottesville, Va., 1973), 18–19.

10. On the pistole fee controversy, see Alden, Dinwiddie, 26–37; Koontz, Dinwiddie, 201–35; and Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963), 158–65.

11. Hayes Baker-Crothers, Virginia and the French and Indian War (Chicago, 1928), 18.

CHAPTER FOUR: Washington Steps onto the Stage . . .

1. Charles Moore, ed., George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation (Boston, 1926), rules 2, 9, and 13. On the formation of Washington’s character, see Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington, Man and Monument (Boston, 1958), 35–60; James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (Boston, 1974), 5–18; John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (Knoxville, Tenn., 1988), 8–20; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 1, Young Washington (New York, 1948); Thomas A. Lewis, For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748–1760 (New York, 1993), 3–43; Paul Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), 1–24; Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition (Athens, Ga., 1985), 1–38; Edmund Morgan, The Genius of George Washington (Washington, D.C., 1980); and id., The Meaning of Independence: John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, Va., 1975), 29–36.

2. This account follows Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 4, Zones of International Friction: North America, South of the Great Lakes Region, 1748–1754 (New York, 1967), 296–301; and Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 60–8. On Van Braam, see L. K. Koontz, Robert Dinwiddie (Glendale, Calif., 1941), 243 n. 299; and W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1983), 205 n. 15.

3. Legardeur’s amusement: Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 63. Dinwiddie’s warning: Dinwiddie to Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., Wilderness Chronicles of Northwestern Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Pa., 1941), 76–7. Washington’s notes: “Washington’s Description of Fort Le Boeuf,” ibid., 79. The scope of Legardeur’s career and achievements as an officer and diplomat can be fully appreciated in the excellent collection of documents edited with commentary by Joseph L. Peyser, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre: Officer, Gentleman, Entrepreneur (East Lansing, Mich., 1996); the documents dealing with his encounter with Washington are at 201–4.

4. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre to Dinwiddie, 15 Dec. 1753, in Stevens and Kent, Wilderness Chronicles, 78; cf. the more literal translation in Peyser, Legardeur, 205–6. Washington’s return: Lewis, For King and Country, 114–19.

5. Dinwiddie to Trent, 26 Jan. 1754, quoted in Gipson, North America, 300.

6. Ibid., 299–302.

7. Ibid., 302–4. Croghan later wrote to Pennsylvania’s governor: “The government may have what opinion they will of the Ohio Indians, and think they are oblig’d to do what the Onondago Counsel will bid them, butt I ashure your honour they will actt for themselves att this time without consulting the Onondago Councel” (to Gov. James Hamilton, 14 May 1754, quoted in Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959], 61).

8. Supply shortage: Ward testimony, 1765, quoted in Gipson, North America, 304. Approach of the French: Ens. Ward’s deposition, 7 May 1754, ibid., 309–10 n. 113 (quotations from 309).

9. On the Virginia fort, see Gipson, North America, 307–10 n. 113; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 64–5; and George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 51–3, 53. Fort Duquesne: Charles Morse Stotz, Outposts of the War for Empire: The French and English in Western Pennsylvania: Their Armies, Their Forts, Their People, 1749–1764 (Pittsburgh, 1985), 81–7.

CHAPTER FIVE: . . . And Stumbles

1. For Washington’s views on the undersupplied, underpaid quality of his troops, see Washington to Dinwiddie, 7 and 9 Mar. 1754, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1748–August 1755 (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 75–87; on the poor pay of officers, same to same, 18 May 1754 (two letters), ibid., 96–100. For Dinwiddie’s lack of sympathy for Washington’s complaints, see Dinwiddie to Washington, 15 Mar. and 25 May 1754, ibid., 75–7, 102–14 (quotations from Dinwiddie at 102). See also Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 22–30; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 46–72; and Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 65–70.

2. “Instructs to Be Observ’d by Majr Geo. Washington on the Expeditn to the Ohio” [Jan. 1754], Papers of Washington, 1:65.

3. George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 54. My account follows Stanley’s version, with additional information from Gipson, Years of Defeat, 30–2; Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 333–6; and Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 66–70.

4. On the topography of Great Meadows and vicinity, see Tom Thomas and Margaret DeLaura, Fort Necessity National Battlefield, Pennsylvania (Historic Resource Study, Sept. 1996: Denver Service Center, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior), 91, 94–6, 99, et passim. Gist’s plantation, established in 1753 on the divide between Red Stone Creek and the Youghiogheny River, was to be a way station for migrants to the Ohio Company’s lands; twenty families had already settled there in 1754. See Thomas A. Lewis, For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748–1760 (New York, 1993), 68–70.

5. Donald Jackson, ed., The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 1, 1748–65 (Charlottesville, Va., 1976), 195 (27 May 1754 entry).

6. Cf. the phraseology in the diary and that in Washington to Dinwiddie, 29 May 1754, Papers of Washington, 1:110; same to same, 29 May 1754, ibid., 116; and Washington to John Augustine Washington, 31 May 1754, ibid., 118. In addition to Washington’s record and the accounts analyzed below, a fifth (much later) witness’s narrative also survives. Written by Captain Adam Stephen to prove that the Virginia troops had not been the aggressors but had behaved with discipline and observed the rules of civilized warfare, this embroidered version adds no verifiable facts to the other documents and distorts a good deal of what did occur (suggesting, for example, that the Virginians “advanced as near [the French] as we could with fixt Bayonets, and received their Fire,” before executing the kind of bayonet charge that European regulars might make, but of which the half-trained Virginians were incapable). Stephen’s account appeared in the Maryland Gazette, 29 Aug. 1754, and the Pennsylvania Gazette, 19 Sept.

7. Contrecoeur’s report was published in Europe. Translated into English in London, it appeared along with other documents on the beginning of the European phase of the war as A Memorial Containing a Summary View of Facts, with Their Authorities. In Answer to the Observations Sent by the English Ministry to the Courts of Europe (reprint, New York, 1757). The passage quoted appears in the reprinted version at 69; it is reproduced in Papers of Washington,1:114. For the original, see Fernand Grenier, ed., Papiers Contecoeur et autres documents concernant le conflit anglo-français sur l’Ohio de 1745 à 1756 (Québec, 1952). That members of the French party had been sleeping or had only recently awakened at the time of the attack—a detail mentioned by neither Washington nor Stephen—would seem clear from the fact that Monceau escaped without pausing to put on shoes. When an Indian messenger from the Forks joined Washington at Great Meadows on June 5, he reported having “met a Frenchman who had made his Escape in the Time of M. de Jumonville’s Action, he was without either Shoes or Stockings, and scarce able to walk; however he let him pass, not knowing we had fallen upon them” (Diaries of Washington, 1:199).

8. “Affidavit of John Shaw,” in William L. McDowell Jr., ed., Colonial Records of South Carolina: Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, 1754–1765 (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 4–5.

9. Size and composition of Jumonville’s party: Summary View, 67. I am much in debt to my colleague Dennis Van Gerven, professor of physical anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for explaining how skull bone would fragment under a blow from an edged weapon, the qualities of the meningeal sac, the volume of blood in the head, the consistency of brain tissue in a living (or recently killed) human being, and other aspects of violent trauma to the head.

10. Michael N. McConnell makes a parallel argument, though he stops short of describing Tanaghrisson as a refugee. See id., A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 110.

11. “Journal de Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry, lieutenant des troupes, 1754–1755,” Archives de Québec: Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec (1927–28), 372–3. My translation differs somewhat from that in the only other English version I have seen, a Works Progress Administration mimeograph publication in the Frontier Forts and Trails Survey series: Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., Journal of Chaussegros de Léry (Harrisburg, Pa., 1940), 27–8. I am grateful to my colleague, Professor Martha Hanna, for help with the translation.

12. We may reasonably infer that the sight of Tanaghrisson’s act would have temporarily rendered Washington incapable of acting. Even though he, like virtually all colonial Virginians, would have seen animals slaughtered and slaves whipped, it is extremely unlikely that he would ever have seen blood gush in such quantities as would have issued from the wound that Jumonville sustained: because at any given moment nearly a third of the human blood supply is in the brain, under great pressure, the discharge of fluid would have been prodigious. Such sights frequently induce physiological shock in observers; there is no reason to assume that Washington would have been immune to the reaction. (Again I thank Dennis Van Gerven for his careful explanation of the brain and its properties, and for his description of the effect on modern witnesses of seeing wounds similar to the one Jumonville sustained.)

13. Washington to Dinwiddie, 29 May (two letters), 3 June, and 10 June 1754, Papers of Washington,1:110–12, 116–17, 124, 135. In the 3 June letter, Washington varied his story to come close to admitting what had happened, without suggesting that he bore any responsibility for it. In speaking of the encounter he noted that only seven of Tanaghrisson’s warriors were armed, adding that “There were 5, or 6 other Indian[s], who servd to knock the poor unhappy wounded in the head and beriev’d them of their Scalps.” This statement—an aside—was ambiguous enough to allow Dinwiddie to infer that the killing occurred between the cessation of firing and Washington’s acceptance of the French surrender. Lewis draws exactly that conclusion on the basis of Washington’s letter in his able, careful account of Washington’s youth: “Thoroughly panicked, the French turned and ran toward the Virginians again, waving their arms in the air. Before Washington could get down to the floor of the ravine to accept their surrender, the Iroquois began tomahawking the wounded and collecting scalps” (For King and Country, 143).

14. Washington to Dinwiddie, 29 May (physical stamina), and 10 June 1754 (ardent wish for direction of an experienced officer), Papers of Washington, 1:107, 129.

15. Entry of 2 June 1754, Diaries of Washington, 1:199.

16. “That little thing”: Tanaghrisson’s speech at Aughwick, 3 Sept. 1754, quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 67. “The attack of 500 men”: Washington to Dinwiddie, 3 June 1754, Papers of Washington, 1:124.

17. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 32–3; Nicholas Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 62–3.

18. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 1, Young Washington (New York, 1948), 391–3; Diaries of Washington, 1:202–7 (entries of 16–21 June 1754).

19. Tanaghrisson quoted by Conrad Weiser, “Journal of the Proceedings of Conrad Weiser in His Way to and at Auchwick . . . in the Year 1754,” 3 Sept. 1754, in Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia, 1945), 367. Tanaghrisson’s followers returned to the Forks and made their peace with the French. His successor as half-king, the Oneida chief Scarouady, had been with Tanaghrisson and Washington when Jumonville was killed. He remained as a refugee in Pennsylvania until 1756 (see Duquesne to the minister of marine, 3 Nov. 1754, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., WildernessChronicles of Western Pennsylvania [Harrisburg, Pa., 1941], 84; Francis Jennings et al., eds., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy [Syracuse, N.Y., 1985], 250–2; and McConnell, A Country Between, 110–11).

20. Freeman, Young Washington, 395–7; “Minutes of a Council of War,” 28 June 1754, Papers of Washington, 1:155–7.

21. Lewis, King and Country, 152.

22. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 35.

23. Maryland Gazette, 29 Aug. 1754, quoted in Gipson, Years of Defeat, 39; see also Harry M. Ward, Major General Adam Stephen and the Cause of American Liberty (Charlottesville, Va., 1989), 10–11.

24. “Account by George Washington and James Mackay of the Capitulation of Fort Necessity,” 19 July 1754, and “George Washington’s Account of the Capitulation of Fort Necessity,” 1786, in Papers of Washington, 1:159–64, 172–3; affidavit of John Shaw, 21 Aug. 1754, South CarolinaIndian Affairs, 5–7. The quotation on the composition of the Indian allies originated with Robert Callender (a business partner of Croghan’s who was present at Fort Necessity), who reported it to a resident of Paxton, Pa., who in turn included it in a letter to Gov. James Hamilton, 16 July 1754; quoted in Gipson, Years of Defeat, 41, emphasis added. In general see ibid., 37–43; Lewis, For King and Country, 153–7; and Leach, Arms for Empire, 339–42.

25. English casualties: Gipson, Years of Defeat, 41 n. 60; French casualties: Varin to Bigot, 24 July 1754, in Stevens and Kent, Wilderness Chronicles, 81.

26. Physical condition and desertion: Titus, Old Dominion, 55–7; and Leach, Arms for Empire, 342. Quotation: Washington to William Fairfax, 11 Aug. 1754, Papers of Washington, 1:186–7.

27. Stanley, New France, 57; W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760 (Albquerque, N.M., 1983), 164–7.

CHAPTER SIX: Escalation

1. Hayes Baker-Crothers, Virginia in the Seven Years’ War (Chicago, 1928), 41–5; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 103–6; L. K. Koontz, Robert Dinwiddie (Glendale, Calif., 1941), 319–20; J. R. Alden, Robert Dinwiddie: Servant of the Crown (Charlottesville, Va., 1973), 47–8.

2. Newcastle to the earl of Albemarle, 5 Sept. 1754, quoted in T. R. Clayton, “The Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Halifax, and the American Origins of the Seven Years’ War,” Historical Journal 24 (1981): 590–1.

3. On Braddock’s career and character, see Lee McCardell, Ill-Starred General: Braddock of the Coldstream Guards (Pittsburgh, 1958); on the plan and Halifax’s reaction, see Clayton, “American Origins,” 593; and James Henretta, “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton, N.J., 1972), 333–40.

4. Stanley Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, New York, 1968), 31–3.

5. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 124.

6. Clayton, “American Origins,” 596–7, 603.

7. Newcastle seized on the French proposals as genuinely aimed at preserving the peace, but Halifax sabotaged the negotiations in Feb. 1755 by publishing a Board of Trade map of British claims in North America that precluded further compromise. Negotiations continued, fruitlessly, until June. Clayton, “American Origins,” 597–601; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 5, Zones of International Friction: The Great Lakes Frontier, Canada, the West Indies, India, 1748–1754 (New York, 1967), 298–338.

8. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 359–65.

9. Newcastle to Bentinck, 17 Dec. 1754, quoted in Clayton, “American Origins,” 598; I have reversed the order of Newcastle’s sentences (“the conduct . . .” and “the great System . . .”) for the sake of clarity.

PART II: DEFEAT, 1754-1755 CHAPTER SEVEN: The Albany Congress and Colonial Disunion

1. See Thomas Pownall to My Lord [Halifax], 23 July 1754, in Beverly McAnear, ed., “Personal Accounts of the Albany Congress of 1754,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (1953): 742, 744; and William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of the State of New-York, ed. Michael Kammen, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 161.

2. Lydius and the Wyoming scheme: Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 5, Zones of International Friction: The Great Lakes Frontier, Canada, the West Indies, India, 1748–1754 (New York, 1967), 90; Smith, History of New-York, 2:88–9; Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 106–7, 153; James Thomas Flexner, Lord of the Mohawks: A Biographyof Sir William Johnson (Boston, 1979), 75–7, 128–30, et passim. The Susquehannah Company’s scheme to acquire land within Pennsylvania rested on Connecticut’s charter grant, which antedated Pennsylvania’s and set the colony boundary at the Pacific Ocean. The Connecticut Assembly, whose members included many stockholders in the Susquehannah Company, refused to agree to the Plan of Union because it would have modified the charters of provinces with sea-to-sea patents. See Gipson, Great Lakes Frontier, 150; and Robert C. Newbold, The Albany Congress and the Plan of Union of 1754 (New York, 1955), 137–40.

3. On Weiser’s activities, see Gipson, Great Lakes Frontier, 121–2; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 103–6; and Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia, 1945), 358–60.

4. On De Lancey, Johnson, Pownall, and the congress, see Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971), 171–8; Stanley N. Katz, Newcastle’s New York: Anglo-American Politics, 1732–1753 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 200–13; and Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 71–108. De Lancey’s formidable connections included his former Cambridge tutor who had gone on to become archbishop of Canterbury, and his brother-in-law, Admiral Sir Peter Warren, a member of Parliament who had procured the lieutenant governorship for De Lancey. Warren was also the uncle of William Johnson, who had initially come to New York in 1737 to manage his interests in the Mohawk Valley. On the Warren-Johnson connection, see Flexner, Lord of the Mohawks, 13–27; Milton W. Hamilton, Sir William Johnson, Colonial American, 1715–1763 (Port Washington, N.Y., 1976), 3–14; and Julian Gwyn, The Enterprising Admiral: The Personal Fortune of Admiral Sir Peter Warren (Montréal, 1974), 29–93.

5. Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 84–97; Pownall to My Lord [Halifax], 23 July 1754, in McAnear, “Personal Accounts,” 744.

6. Hutchinson: Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), esp. 1–34. During King George’s War, Shirley had backed Gov. Clinton of New York, a fellow Newcastle client and thus an enemy of De Lancey’s; Shirley thought De Lancey’s faction “a factious, vain, upstart Crew” (Shirley to Clinton, 26 June 1749, quoted in Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 206).

7. Reception of the Plan: Newbold, Albany Congress, 135–171. (Franklin to Peter Collinson, 29 Dec. 1754, expresses his views on compulsory union; summarized at 171.) See also Gipson, Great Lakes Frontier, 123–40.

CHAPTER EIGHT: General Braddock Takes Command

1. Braddock’s appointment: Lee McCardell, Ill-Starred General: Braddock of the Coldstream Guards (Pittsburgh, 1958), 124–8; Paul E. Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela (Pittsburgh, 1977), 7–8, 277 n. 10; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 57–8. Braddock’s rebukes: Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755–1763 (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), 76. Quotation: Braddock to Robert Hunter Morris, 28 Feb. 1755, in Gipson, Years of Defeat, 69. Governors’ conference: ibid., 64–70.

2. John Schutz, William Shirley: King’s Governor of Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 189–98; Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 355–6; Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 146–8; Gipson, Years of Defeat, 70–5.

3. Schutz, Shirley, 197.

4. Impossibility of establishing a fund: “Minutes of a Council Held at Alexandria,” 14 Apr. 1755, quoted in Gipson, Years of Defeat, 71. Braddock bound by instructions: Leach, Arms for Empire, 355. Route: “Sketch for the Operations in North America,” 16 Nov. 1754, in Stanley Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 45.

5. Schutz, Shirley, 198–9.

6. Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 153, 162 ff.; Gipson, Years of Defeat, 143 ff., 163; Milton W. Hamilton, Sir William Johnson, Colonial American, 1715–1763 (Port Washington, N.Y., 1976), 125–39.

7. “Fine Cuntry”: “The Journal of Captain Robert Cholmley’s Batman,” 21 Apr. 1755, in Charles Hamilton, ed., Braddock’s Defeat (Norman, Okla., 1959), 11. Washington and Braddock: Robert Orme to Washington, 2 Mar. 1755, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1748–August 1755 (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 241–2; Washington to Orme, 15 Mar. and 2 Apr. 1755, ibid., 242–8; Washington to William Fairfax, 5 May 1755, ibid., 262–4; Washington to Augustine Washington, 14 May 1755, ibid., 271–3. Washington had two motives in serving as a volunteer: to obtain a regular commission, which could come from serving with Braddock, and to avoid demotion. Virginia had restructured its provincial forces for 1755, abolishing the regiment in favor of independent companies commanded by captains, who would take orders from regular field officers. Had he accepted a demotion to captain, Washington would have lost more status and honor than a proud Virginia gentleman could afford, and he could never have attracted Braddock’s attention.

8. Franklin makes himself useful: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. L. Jesse Lemisch (New York, 1961), 145–51 (quotations at 146 and 149); Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 149–51; Gipson, Years of Defeat, 75–6. Braddock’s improved opinion of Pennsylvania: id. to Robert Napier, 8 June 1755, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 85.

CHAPTER NINE: Disaster on the Monongahela

1. “The Journal of Captain Robert Cholmley’s Batman,” 20 and 23 May 1755, in Charles Hamilton, ed., Braddock’s Defeat (Norman, Okla., 1959), 15–16.

2. Braddock’s Indian diplomacy: Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 151–5 (quotation from Franklin’s Autobiography is at 152; quotations from Shingas’s account of the conference at 154–5); also Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 119–21; and Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 85–9. Numbers of Indians accompanying Braddock: “A Return of His Majesty’s Troops,” 8 June 1755, in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 86–91.

3. John Rutherford to Richard Peters, recd. 13 Aug. 1755, quoted in Wainwright, Croghan, 90.

4. “An hundred and ten Miles”: quoted ibid., 85. Artillery: Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 79; Pargellis, Military Affairs, 91. (The siege train included four twelve-pound naval guns dismounted from H.M.S. Norwich and placed on wheeled carriages, six six-pound fieldpieces, four eight-inch howitzers, and fifteen Coehorn mortars. The twelve-pounders weighed more than a ton each.) Division of the column: “The Journal of a British Officer,” 16 June 1755, in Hamilton, Braddock’s Defeat, 42; also Cholmley’s batman’s diary, 29 May–19 June 1755, ibid., 17–22.

5. Order of march: Paul E. Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela (Pittsburgh, 1977), 31–49. There were only seven Mingo scouts because Scarouady’s son had been shot dead, three days earlier, by a soldier who mistook him for a hostile Indian—a great blow to Scarouady, who “was hardly able to support his loss” (“Journal of a British Officer,” 6 July 1755, in Hamilton, Braddock’s Defeat, 48). Washington’s malady: “Memorandum,” 8–9 July 1755, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1748–August 1755 (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 331. Use of flanking parties to provide security: Peter E. Russell, “Redcoats in the Wilderness: British Officers and Irregular Warfare in Europe and America, 1740 to 1760,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978): 629–52.

6. Papers of Washington, 1:332 n. 3; Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 19–30; Gipson, Years of Defeat, 90–2.

7. The Indians deployed in a half-moon attack formation; see Leroy V. Eid, “ ‘A Kind of Running Fight’: Indian Battlefield Tactics in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 71 (1988): 147–71.

8. Openness of woods: Sir John St. Clair to Robert Napier, 13 June and 22 July 1755, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 94, 103. On Indian burning practices, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 49–52.

9. Disintegration of order: Robert Orme’s account, in Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela,214. (The eighteenth-century platoon was a firing echelon of a company, made up in theory of twenty-five to thirty-five men; given the company strengths in Braddock’s force, these platoons probably had no more than twelve to fifteen men each.) Regular reactions, rear guard, and flight of teamsters: ibid., 79; Patrick Mackellar, “A Sketch of the Field of Battle . . . , No. 2,” in Pargellis, Military Affairs, facing 115; quotation from Mackellar, “Explanation,” ibid., 115; Don Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan, Revolutionary Rifleman (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 4–6; John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer(New York, 1992), 36–8. Fate of women: Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 31, 47, 137; Contrecoeur to Vaudreuil, 14 July 1755, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 132 (twenty women made captive).

10. Quotation: “Relation sur l’action . . . par Mr. de Godefroy,” in Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 259.

11. “Old Standers”: “Journal of a British Officer,” 16 June 1755, in Hamilton, Braddock’s Defeat,

42. Quotations on difficulty of seeing Indians: extract of a letter from Fort Cumberland [Rev. Philip Hughes?], 23 July 1755, in Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 203; Cholmley’s batman’s diary, 9 July 1755, in Hamilton, Braddock’s Defeat, 29. War cries: Duncan Cameron’s account, in Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 178. Stories of Indian barbarity: account of “British A,” ibid., 164. Memory of war cries: letter of Matthew Leslie, 30 July 1755, ibid., 204.

12. Firing by platoons: “Journal of a British Officer,” in Hamilton, Braddock’s Defeat, 50. Deaths by friendly fire: account of “British B,” in Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 170. Washington believed that two-thirds of British casualties resulted from friendly fire; see id. to Dinwiddie, 18 July 1755, Papers of Washington, 1:340. Medical evidence supports his estimate: “that the men fired irregularly one behind another,” Dr. Alexander Hamilton reported, “appeared afterwards by the Bullets which the surgeons Extracted from the wounded, They being distinguishable from those of the French & Indians by their Size, As they were considerably larger, For the bore of the Enemys Muskets . . . was very small. Among the wounded men there were two for one of these larger bullets extracted by the Surgeons, and the wounds were chiefly on the back parts of the Body, so we may reasonably conclude it must have also been among the killed” (to Gavin Hamilton, Aug. 1755, ibid., 341 n. 7).

13. Adam Stephen to John Hunter, 18 July 1755, in Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 226–7; also Harry M. Ward, Major General Adam Stephen and the Cause of American Liberty (Charlottesville, Va., 1989), 17–20.

14. Rum: Duncan Cameron, in Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 87, 179. Cameron hides in tree: ibid., 177–9 (quotation at 178). On Indian cultural values and their effects on warfare, see Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York, 1990), 10–18; and Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 40 (1983): 528–59.

15. Washington quotation: Biographical Memorandum, c. 1786, Papers of Washington 1: 332–3 n. 4.

16. Cholmley’s batman’s diary, 12–17 July 1755, in Hamilton, Braddock’s Defeat, 32–3.

17. Of 1,373 Anglo-American enlisted men “in the Field,” 430 were killed or left for dead on the battlefield, while 484 were wounded; of the 96 officers, 26 were killed and 36 wounded. These figures, reported weeks after the battle, included only soldiers; no figures survive for the total of civilians (women, teamsters, and other camp followers) killed or wounded. Contrecoeur’s report of the battle, however, mentioned “around 600 men killed, with many officers, and the wounded in proportion” but only “20 men or women made prisoner by the savages.” This suggests an additional 150 killed from the camp followers. See the “Explanation” of Mackellar’s map 1 and “Extrait de La Lettre part M^r De Contrecoeur . . . a Monsieur Le marquis De Vaudreuil ... 14^e Juillet 1755,” in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 114, 131, 132, my translation.

18. Maggots: Cholmley’s batman’s diary, 13 July 1755, in Hamilton, Braddock’s Defeat, 32. (These may actually have had a beneficial effect in eating away putrescent tissue, and certainly they did less damage than the surgeons’ attempts to clean and dress the wounds.) Dunbar requests winter quarters: Gipson, Years of Defeat, 128.

19. On contemporary opinions of Braddock’s responsibility, see esp. Russell, “Redcoats in the Wilderness,” 629–30.

20. “Dastardly behaviour”: Washington to Dinwiddie, 18 July 1755, Papers of Washington, 1:339. “How little does the World”: Washington to Warner Lewis, 14 Aug. 1755, ibid., 361. Later recollections (1783): Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 247–8. None of Washington’s letters at the time of the battle criticized Braddock; see Papers of Washington, 1:331–54. Scarouady’s address, 22 Aug. 1755: Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 152.

CHAPTER TEN: After Braddock: William Shirley and the Northern Campaigns

1. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 165–8; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 54; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991) 102–3; Thomas Lewis, For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748–1760 (New York, 1993), 201–2.

2. Virginia casualties: Washington to Mary Ball Washington, 18 July 1755, and Washington to Robert Dinwiddie, 18 July 1755, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1748–August 1755 (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 336, 339, 342 n. 10. Refugees and losses in autumn: Titus, Old Dominion, 71, 74. Quotation: Washington to Dinwiddie, 11 Oct. 1755, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 2, August 1755-April 1756 (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 105.

3. Hayes Baker-Crothers, Virginia in the French and Indian War (Chicago, 1928), 82–5; Titus, Old Dominion, 73–7, 108–11. The ten-pound scalp bounty only served to encourage the murder of neutral, Christianized, and friendly Indians and was repealed as having not “answer[ed] the purposes . . . intended,” in 1758 (W. Stitt Robinson, The Southern Colonial Frontier, 1607–1763 [Albuquerque, N.M., 1979], 214). The Burgesses canceled the act only when parliamentary reimbursements enabled Virginia to offer cash enlistment bounties for the Virginia Regiment.

4. Acceptance of French alliance: Michael N. McConnell, “Peoples ‘In Between’: The Iroquois and the Ohio Indians, 1720–1768,” in Daniel K. Richter and James Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987), 106. Scarouady’s address to Morris and the council, 22 Aug. 1755, quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 165. Iroquois embassy to Vaudreuil: Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756–1760, ed. Edward Hamilton (Norman, Okla., 1964), 30. Captain Jacobs: Shingas’s narrative, quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 166.

5. Cannon: Shirley to Robert Hunter Morris, n.d., quoted in John Schutz, William Shirley: King’s Governor of Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 201. Dispute with Johnson: memorandum, “Summary of Disputes Between Governor William Shirley and General William Johnson, 1755,” in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 153–4. Shirley’s grief: Thomas Hutchinson, History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, vol. 3 (1936; reprint, New York, 1970), 24.

6. Schutz, Shirley, 209; Gipson, Years of Defeat, 106–15, 132–3.

7. Schutz, Shirley, 212–16.

8. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 5, Zones of International Friction: The Great Lakes Frontier, Canada, the West Indies, India, 1748–1754 (New York, 1967), 186–90, 193–206; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, s.v. “Le Loutre, Jean-Louis.”

9. Enthusiasm for expedition: Hutchinson, Massachusetts-Bay, 3:20–1. Parallel progress of Braddock’s and Nova Scotia expeditions: “The Journal of Captain Robert Cholmley’s Batman,” 2 June 1755, in Charles Hamilton, ed., Braddock’s Defeat (Norman, Okla., 1959), 18; J. T. B., ed., “Diary of John Thomas,” entries of 2–3 June 1755, Nova Scotia Historical Society, Collections 1 (1878): 122; John Frost diary, entries of 16 and 19 June 1755, ibid., 125, 126.

10. Carl Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803 (Baton Rouge, 1987), 22–34; Gipson, Years of Defeat, 212–344.

11. Brasseaux, New Acadia, 23; Schutz, Shirley, 204, finds the evidence of Shirley’s involvement only compelling enough to merit a footnote. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 261, notes that Shirley planned to neutralize the Acadian “threat” as early as 1747 but stops short of suggesting that he planned the expedition as a final solution to the Acadian problem. George A. Rawlyk, Nova Scotia’s Massachusetts: A Study of Massachusetts–Nova Scotia Relations, 1630 to 1784 (Montréal, 1973), 145–64, does not assign Shirley a decisive role in the deportations. On the New England occupation, see ibid., 217–21.

12. Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York, 1990), 36.

13. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 139–40; Johnson to Pownall, 3 Sept. 1755, quoted ibid., 186.

14. Ibid., 165–8.

15. Steele, Betrayals, 43; unless otherwise noted, my account of French preparations follows his excellent second chapter, “To Battle for Lake George,” 28–56.

16. Peter E. Russell, “Redcoats in the Wilderness: British Officers and Irregular Warfare in Europe and America, 1740 to 1760,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978): 633; Steele, Betrayals, 44–6; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Dieskau, Jean-Armand ( Johan Herman?), Baron de Dieskau.”

17. Steele, Betrayals, 47–8; Seth Pomeroy to Israel Williams, 9 Sept. 1755, in Louis Effingham DeForest, ed., The Journals and Papers of Seth Pomeroy, Sometime General in the Colonial Service (New Haven, Conn., 1926), 137. On the Mohawks’ formation, see Leroy V. Eid, “ ‘National’ War among Indians of Northeastern North America,” Canadian Review of American Studies 16 (1985): 129.

18. Steele, Betrayals, 48–9; Seth Pomeroy to Israel Williams, 9 Sept. 1755, in DeForest, Journalsand Papers of Pomeroy, 137; Peter Wraxall to Henry Fox, 27 Sept. 1755, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 139; Milton W. Hamilton, Sir William Johnson, Colonial American, 1715–1763 (Port Washington, N.Y., 1976), 157–60.

19. Wraxall to Fox, 27 Sept. 1755, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 139; Wraxall was Johnson’s private secretary.

20. Daniel Claus’s narrative, quoted in Steele, Betrayals, 50. That Dieskau was facing what amounted to a mutiny is confirmed in Dieskau to d’Argenson, 17 Sept. 1755, quoted in Gipson, Years of Defeat, 172.

21. Pomeroy to Williams, 9 Sept. 1755, in DeForest, Journals and Papers of Pomeroy, 138 (“6 Deep & as I judg’d about 20 rods in Length Close Order ye Indians . . . hilter Scilter ye woods full of them—they Came with In about 20 rods & fir’d Regular Plattoons but we Soon brook there order ye Indians & Cannadians Directly took tree with In handy gun Shot”). Effects of artillery: anonymous gunner quoted in Steele, Betrayals, 50. Effects of Legardeur’s death: Vaudreuil to the minister of marine, 30 Oct. 1755, in Joseph L. Peyser, ed., Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre: Officer, Gentleman, Entrepreneur (East Lansing, Mich., 1996), 225–6.

22. Wraxall to Fox, 27 Sept. 1755, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 139.

23. Quotation: Wraxall to Fox, ibid., 140. The taking of trophies: Steele, Betrayals, 53.

24. Aftermath of battle: Seth Pomeroy diary, entries for 9–11 Sept. 1755, in DeForest, Journals and Papers of Pomeroy, 115–16. Casualties: Steele, Betrayals, 47, 53; Wraxall to Fox, 27 Sept. 1755, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 139. (The Anglo-Americans suffered 223 dead and 108 wounded; the official French tally was 149 dead, 103 wounded, and 27 taken prisoner, exclusive of Indian casualties. Including Indians, the total losses were almost identical, with 331 English casualties and 339 French; the French force, however, suffered the highest casualty rate, approximately 23 percent, as against 14 percent for the English.) Johnson, aware of the demands of mourning war, gave all the prisoners except Dieskau to the Mohawks after the battle; aware, too, of the expectations of European war-making, he hid the fact from Shirley (Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America [New York, 1994], 193).

25. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 174–5; Steele, Betrayals, 55–6; Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 10.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: British Politics, and a Revolution in European Diplomacy

1. See Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 194-253 passim, esp. 222–3; and Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 3–4.

2. W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 260–1.

3. H. M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990), 29-52; id., “ ‘The True Principles of the Revolution’: The Duke of Newcastle and the Idea of the Old System,” in Jeremy Black, ed., Knights Errant and True Englishmen: British Foreign Policy 1600–1800 (Edinburgh, 1989), 55–91; also see, more generally, Eliga Gould, The Persistenceof Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming), chaps. 1 and 2.

4. Browning, Newcastle, 219–21; Speck, Stability and Strife, 262–3.

5. Pitt’s speech in the House of Commons, 13 Nov. 1755, quoted in Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 170; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 378–9.

6. Ibid., 386–91. On Frederick’s fear of Russia, see Speck, Stability and Strife, 263; and Christopher Duffy, The Military Life of Frederick the Great (New York, 1986), 83–4.

7. Armies and populations: André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789, trans. Abigail Siddall (Bloomington, Ind., 1979), 113, table 1, “Effectives in the Regular Armies and Populations of the States.”

8. On the demise of the Austrian alliance, see Gipson, Years of Defeat, 369, 379. On the ministry’s newfound security, see Browning, Newcastle, 228–30.

9. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 187–8; Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 39–40.

10. Shirley’s estrangement from Newcastle: John Schutz, William Shirley: King’s Governor of Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 153–4, 166–7, 226. Filius Gallicae: Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 106–9 (the letters are reprinted in American Historical Association, Report 1 [1896]: 660–703). Shirley’s recall: Gipson, Years of Defeat, 188–9; Schutz, Shirley, 232–3; Pargellis, Loudoun, 76–7. Quotation: Fox to Shirley, 31 Mar. 1756, quoted in Gipson, Years of Defeat, 188.

11. Ibid., 188–91; Schutz, Shirley, 225–6, 232–4, 240–3, 245.

12. Ibid., 30–43.

13. On the effects of French efficiency vs. British slowness and commitment to introducing more conventional military order into American operations, see Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 195–6.

PART III: NADIR, 1756-1757 CHAPTER TWELVE: Lord Loudoun Takes Command

1. Francis Parkman’s depiction of Montcalm as tragic hero continues to influence American historians; see David Levin, ed., Francis Parkman: France and England in North America, vol. 2, Montcalm and Wolfe (New York, 1983), 1088–92. W. J. Eccles’s more judicious appraisal has greater value; see Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de, Marquis de Montcalm.” Ian K. Steele surveys the fluctuations in Montcalm’s historical reputation in Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York, 1990), 176–81; see also id., Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 199–201, 205–6, 215–19.

2. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 183–4; Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 381–2; “Information of Captain John Vicars of the 50th Regiment,” 4 Jan. 1757, in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1763 (1936; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 286–90.

3. Shirley’s activities: John Schutz, William Shirley: King’s Governor of Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 224–30. Enlistments in 1755: Gipson, Years of Defeat, 181 n. 65; for means of estimating these as a proportion of the population in the prime military age range of sixteen to twenty-nine years, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 60 n. 83. (This evidently matched the rate of participation in Connecticut; see Harold E. Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut [New Haven, Conn., 1990], 166–70.)

4. Schutz, Shirley, 227–9; Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, vol. 3 (1936; reprint, New York, 1970), 32–4.

5. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 177–81.

6. Anderson, A People’s Army, 169; Douglas Edward Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 119–20.

7. Report of the Solicitor General to Sir Thomas Robinson, 3 Dec. 1754, quoted in Leach, Roots of Conflict, 111.

8. Anderson, A People’s Army, 174.

9. Pargellis, Military Affairs, xviii, 187 n. 2; id., Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 155–7.

10. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 184–5, 193; Pargellis, Loudoun, 88; Schutz, Shirley, 231.

11. Pargellis, Loudoun, 83 ff.

12. Ibid., 89–90.

13. Anderson, A People’s Army, 170; Pargellis, Loudoun, 88–9.

14. Ibid., 81–2; the description quoted is from Peter Wraxall, who had accompanied Sir William Johnson to wait on the new commander in chief.

15. Ibid., 47–9, 52–66, 81. Loudoun replaced the earl of Albemarle, who had recently died, as governor of Virginia; Dinwiddie remained as lieutenant governor.

16. Ibid., 132–66; Loudoun to Cumberland, 20 Aug. 1756, in id., Military Affairs, 223–30.

17. “A tree to a man”: id., Loudoun, 44. Provincials ahead of regulars: Loudoun to Cumberland, 3 Oct. 1756, in id., Military Affairs, 240 (“It looks odd on the Map, to see the Provincials advanced before the Troops”). Contractualism and resistance to joint command: Anderson, A People’s Army, 167–95, esp. 171–3; Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755–1763 (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), 69–71; Pargellis, Loudoun, 83–93. “Dissolution”: Winslow to Shirley, 2 Aug. 1756, in Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Correspondence of William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts and Military Commander in America, 1731–1760 (New York, 1912), 2:497–8.

18. “First contriver”: Loudoun to Cumberland, 20 Aug. 1756, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 226. Promulgation of the Rule of 1755: id., Loudoun, 92; Anderson, A People’s Army, 169.

19. “Ready and willing”: Winslow to Loudoun, 10 Aug. 1756, quoted in ibid., 174. “Terms and conditions”: Joseph Dwight to Loudoun, 11 Aug. 1756, ibid. The terms were that Winslow was to be commander in chief of the provincials; that the men were to receive the wages, bounties, and subsistence stipulated by their respective provincial assemblies; that their service was to be confined to the Lake George–Lake Champlain region; and that they were to serve no longer than twelve months from the date of enlistment.

20. Ibid., 174–5.

21. Loudoun’s outrage: id. to Fox, 19 Aug. 1756; to Cumberland, 20 and 29 Aug. 1756, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 223–33. Provisioning: Anderson, A People’s Army, 179–85; Pargellis, Loudoun, 184–5.

22. Ibid., 195–6; Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 82–3, 75–89, passim; Loudoun to Cumberland, 29 Aug. 1756, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 231.

23. Albany quartering incident: id., Loudoun, 195–6; Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 83–4. Quotation: Loudoun to Cumberland, 29 Aug. 1756, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 230.

24. “Opposition” and “Cyphers [who have] sold”: Loudoun to Cumberland, 22 Nov.–26 Dec. 1756, in ibid., 272–3. “From whence”: Loudoun to Halifax, 26 Dec. 1756, quoted in id., Loudoun, 185–6.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Oswego

1. Patrick Mackellar, “A Journal of the Transactions at Oswego from the 16th of May to the 14 of August 1756,” in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 207 (entry of Aug. 10); Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756–1760, ed. Edward P. Hamilton (Norman, Okla., 1964), 25 (entry of 10 Aug. 1756); Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 199.

2. Vaudreuil quoted in Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 379. Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 197–200 and 205–6, masterfully explains the significance of Vaudreuil’s commitment to petite guerre strategy and Montcalm’s distaste for it— and for him.

3. Montcalm’s strength: Leach, Arms for Empire, 385; George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 143. Indians: Bougainville, Adventure, 21, 24 (entries of 30 July and 6 Aug. 1756); Steele, Warpaths, 199–200.

4. Road: Mackellar’s journal, 11 Aug. 1756, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 208. Fortifications: Major W. H. Bertsch, “The Defenses of Oswego,” New-York Historical Society, Proceedings 13 (1914): 108–27, esp. 114–20.

5. Mackellar’s journal, 25 May 1756, and id., “Plan of Oswego with Its Forts,” in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 189–90, 210 and facing page. Quotation from Sarah Mulliken, ed., “Journal of Stephen Cross of Newburyport, Entitled ‘Up to Ontario,’ the Activities of Newburyport Shipbuilders in Canada in 1756,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 76 (1940): 14 (entry of 13 Aug.); see also 75 (1939): 356–7 (entries of 10–12 Aug.). Strength of the garrison: Leach, Arms for Empire, 385.

6. Stephen Cross journal, 13 Aug. 1756, 15.

7. Ibid.

8. Cf. Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York, 1990), 78–9.

9. Stephen Cross journal, 14 Aug. 1756, 16.

10. Montcalm to d’Argenson, 28 Aug. 1756, quoted in Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 296.

11. Bougainville to his brother, 17 Sept. 1757, in Bougainville, Adventure, 332.

12. Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 164–5.

13. Gipson, Years of Defeat, 208; Loudoun to Cumberland, 20 Aug., 3 Oct., and 22 Nov.–26 Dec. 1756, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 223–33, 239–43, 263–80.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The State of the Central Colonies

1. “Troops in the Pay of the Province of Pennsylvania and Where Posted,” 23 Feb. 1756, in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 166–7; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 94–5; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 38. Montcalm quotation: Montcalm to d’Argenson, 12 June 1756, in Stephen F. Auth, The Ten Years’ War: Indian-White Relations in Pennsylvania, 1755–1765 (New York, 1989), 36. Washington quotation: Washington to?, late 1756, in Titus, Old Dominion, 181 n. 54.

2. Gipson, Victorious Years, 35–6, 45–6. Washington actually traveled to Boston in Mar. 1756 to ask Shirley to decide the question of seniority; Shirley ruled in Washington’s favor. See Thomas Lewis, For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington (New York, 1993), 200–7.

3. Hayes Baker-Crothers, Virginia in the French and Indian War (Chicago, 1928), 102–3; Titus, Old Dominion, 77–100 passim; John Ferling, “Soldiers for Virginia: Who Served in the French and Indian War?” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 94 (1986): 307–28. Quotation: Washington to Loudoun, 10 Jan. 1757, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 4, November 1756–October 1757 (Charlottesville, Va., 1984), 86.

4. Quotation: ibid., 88, 83. Appropriations: Baker-Crothers, French and Indian War, 102–3.

5. Virginia Regiment’s record in 1756: Washington to Loudoun, 10 Jan. 1757, Papers of Washington,4:83. Growth of discipline: Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition (Athens, Ga., 1985), 7–38. Tenuousness of Virginia’s frontier and Indian diplomacy: Titus, Old Dominion, 96–8.

6. Peter L. D. Davidson, War Comes to Quaker Pennsylvania, 1682–1756 (New York, 1957), 163–4.

7. Gipson, Victorious Years, 48–9; Davidson, Quaker Pennsylvania, 163–5; Jack Marrietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia, 1984), 150–6; Benjamin Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway: A Political Partnership (New Haven, Conn., 1972), 21–32.

8. Ibid., 5–32; Marietta, Reformation of American Quakerism, 150–86, passim; Davidson, Quaker Pennsylvania, 166–96.

9. Prisoners and scalps: Report of Claude Godfrey Cocquard, c. Mar. 1757, in Auth, Ten Years’ War, 37. Burning of Fort Granville: Loudoun to Robert Hunter Morris, 20 Aug. 1756, ibid.,

36. “Deplorable situation”: Denny to the council, 15 Oct. 1756, ibid., 37. Raid on Lebanon: Gipson, Victorious Years, 52–4.

10. Raid on Upper Kittanning: Davidson, Quaker Pennsylvania, 185–6; Gipson, Victorious Years, 53; Auth, Ten Years’ War, 204 n. 5. “Without . . . Encouragement”: Shingas’s narrative, quoted in Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 166. “Seldom mist”: Armstrong’s report, quoted in Auth, Ten Years’ War, 204 n. 5. “He could eat fire”: “An Account of the Captivity of Hugh Gibson Among the Delaware Indians . . . ,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 3rd ser., 6 (1837): 143. “Leg and Thigh”: Pennsylvania Gazette, 23 Sept. 1756.

11. Auth, Ten Years’ War, 37–9, 30–5, 62–5. Anthony F. C. Wallace’s King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Philadelphia, 1949) remains critical to understanding the ensuing diplomatic encounters at Easton.

12. Factions: Auth, Ten Years’ War, 64. Effects of war: Wallace, Teedyuscung, 161–2. On the tenuousness of life at Shamokin and the significance of Fort Augusta, see esp. James Merrell, “Shamokin, ‘the very seat of the Prince of darkness’: Unsettling the Early American Frontier,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Frederika Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 16–59.

13. Quotation from Easton treaty minutes, cited in Wallace, Teedyuscung, 76.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Strains of Empire: Causes of Anglo-American Friction

1. Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 201–2, Denny quoted on 202.

2. Quartering disputes broke out in New York, Aug.–Dec. 1756; Pennsylvania, Oct.–Dec. 1756; Maryland, Nov. 1756; Massachusetts, Oct.–Dec. 1757; and South Carolina, June 1757–Feb. 1758. New Jersey and Connecticut towns quartered troops with less dislocation in 1757, but only after their assemblies (conscious of previous disputes) agreed to reimburse the towns in question. See ibid., 204–10; and Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistanceto British Authority, 1755–1763 (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), 84–7.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Britain Drifts into a European War

1. Pitt’s speech in the House of Commons, quoted in Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second (London, 1846), 2:189. For the collapse of the Fox-Newcastle ministry, see Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 230–4; and Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 22–46.

2. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 405–11.

3. George Bubb Dodington, The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington, ed. John Cars-well and Lewis Dralle (Oxford, 1965), 341–2.

4. On Byng’s defeat, see Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 1 (London, 1918), 107–24; on the loss of the Minorca garrison, see Gipson, Years of Defeat, 413–14; and Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:131–2. On disintegration of the ministry, see Middleton, Bells, 5. Fox quotation: Dodington, Political Journal, 342.

5. Encouraging admirals: Voltaire: Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, ed. Donald M. Frame (New York, 1961), 78–9. Frederick decides to invade Saxony: Christopher Duffy, The Military Life of Frederick the Great (New York, 1986), 86–8; Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), 132–5.

6. Browning, Newcastle, 238–45; Middleton, Bells, 5–6; Gipson, Years of Defeat, 419–26.

7. Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 186–8; Middleton, Bells, 6–8; Browning, Newcastle, 254–6.

8. Rt. Hon. John, Lord Sheffield, ed., Autobiography of Edward Gibbon (London, 1907; reprint, 1972), 105. Gibbon valued his military service because “the habits of a sedentary life were usefully broken by the duties of an active profession” and because it made him “an Englishman, and a soldier. . . . In this peaceful service I imbibed the rudiments of the language, and science of tactics, which opened a new field of study and observation. I diligently read, and meditated, the Mémoires Militaires of Quintus Icilius (Mr. Guichardt), the only writer who has united the merits of a professor and a veteran. The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire.”

9. Ayling, Elder Pitt, 189–91 (policies), 200–3 (king’s distrust). Marie Peters, in “The Myth of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, Great Imperialist. Part 1: Pitt and Imperial Expansion,” Journalof Imperial and Commonwealth History 23 (1993): 40–2, argues persuasively that at most Pitt can be credited with opportunism, and not with a consistent set of views on the colonies.

10. Fox and Cumberland: Browning, Newcastle, 257–8; Ayling, Elder Pitt, 202–3; Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733–63 (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 193–202. “Inter-ministerium”: Walpole, Memoirs of George II, 3:20.

11. Middleton, Bells, 16–17.

12. “Minister of measures” and “minister of money”: Browning, Newcastle, 260–1. Allocation of offices: Ayling, Elder Pitt, 100–1, 205–6; Middleton, Bells, 17–18.

13. Relief and optimism: Middleton, Bells, 18; Ayling, Elder Pitt, 209. King’s antagonism: Browning, Newcastle, 259. Newcastle on Pitt: Ayling, Elder Pitt, 206. “Bitter . . . cup”: ibid., 208.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Fortunes of War in Europe

1. Frederick, quoted in W. F. Reddaway, Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia (New York, 1904), 225. “Dreadful auspices”: the earl of Bute to Pitt, 1 July 1757, quoted in Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 209. Deteriorating strategic position: Dennis E. Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), 177–8; Reddaway, Frederick and Prussia, 214–18. For clear accounts of this campaign and astute (though differing) analyses of Frederick’s generalship, see Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 167–95; Showalter, Wars of Frederick, 148–57; and Christopher Duffy, The Military Life of Frederick the Great (New York, 1986), 101–8.

2. Ayling, Elder Pitt, 211.

3. Showalter, Wars of Frederick, 176–7 (quotation at 176).

4. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 120–2; Charles Chenevix Trench, George II (London, 1973), 283–4.

5. Ayling, Elder Pitt, 193; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 113–21.

6. Clive in Bengal: Ibid., 127–36. “This cordial”: Pitt to Bute, n.d., quoted in Peter Douglas Brown, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: The Great Commoner (London, 1978), 152. “Infinitely happy”: same to same, n.d., ibid., 154.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Loudoun’s Offensive

1. Pitt’s plans vs. Loudoun’s: Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 231–2; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 90–5. “Refused nothing”: Archibald Campbell, duke of Argyll, to Loudoun, Feb. 1757, quoted in Pargellis, Loudoun, 236.

2. On the supply system, see Daniel J. Beattie, “The Adaptation of the British Army to Wilderness Warfare, 1755–1763,” in Maarten Ultee, ed., Adapting to Conditions: War and Society in the Eighteenth Century (University, Ala., 1986), 62–4; and Pargellis, Loudoun, 292–6. On the resistance of the New England assemblies to Loudoun’s reforms, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 180–5.

3. Beattie, “Adaptation,” 65–7; Pargellis, Loudoun, 296–9. In 1756 the cost of moving a barrel of beef to the lake was one pound nine shillings New York currency; in 1757 Bradstreet’s estimate of the cost of transporting a barrel from Albany to Fort Edward (about fifty miles) was seven shillings (ibid., 296, 298).

4. In 1757 Loudoun requisitioned only four thousand men from the New England provinces; see ibid., 212–16. Plans to substitute light infantry for rangers: ibid., 301–4. Americans had used ranger companies as substitutes for Indians during previous wars; they probably grew out of earlier attempts to fight Indians by offering bounties and encouraging backwoodsmen to form private scalp-hunting companies. These units had seldom distinguished themselves in woodland warfare, although in King George’s War a ranger company (largely composed of Christian Indians) under the command of John Gorham of New Hampshire performed useful service on the Louisbourg expedition (Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A MilitaryHistory of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 [New York, 1973], 183–5, 235). During the Seven Years’ War, rangers first served on the Crown Point expedition in 1755—a New Hampshire company under Captain Robert Rogers and Lieutenant John Stark. In 1756 there were three such companies; in 1757, four. Shirley had, typically, handled the establishment of the ranging companies in an irregular manner, paying their officers on the same scale as regulars and their men as provincials. Ultimately he provided for them out of his own funds, in effect making them independent companies, paid by the Crown, on an establishment separate from both the regular army and the provinces. Loudoun systematized the arrangement, continuing to pay the rangers from his own contingency money, but enlisting them (unlike provincials) for the duration of the war. Both their notorious lack of discipline and the expense of keeping them in service plagued him; in 1758, nine companies of rangers cost £35,000 sterling to maintain—twice as much as a regiment of regulars (Pargellis, Loudoun, 303).

The colonial rangers, while a subject of military legend and popular fascination, have not yet been adequately treated in historical scholarship. The best existing work is John R. Cuneo, Robert Rogers of the Rangers (1959; reprint, New York, 1987). An excellent doctoral dissertation, completed too late to influence this book, promises to fill this lacuna in the historiography: John Edward Grenier, “The Other American Way of War: Unlimited and Irregular Warfare in the Colonial Military Tradition” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1999); see esp. chaps. 2-4.

5. Quartering bill: Pargellis, Loudoun, 194. Submission of colonial governments: ibid., 198–201. Probably because of his insecurity in the Commons in early 1757, Pitt never introduced the promised quartering bill, and the measure lay dormant until it was revived at General Gage’s request in 1765.

6. Loudoun to Henry Fox, 22 Nov.–26 December 1756, Loudoun Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

7. Pargellis, Loudoun, 265; Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755–1763 (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), 93–5.

8. Loudoun to Fox, 8 Oct. 1756, Loudoun Papers.

9. Pargellis, Loudoun, 266–7; Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 94–7.

10. Gipson, Victorious Years, 97–103; Pargellis, Loudoun, 214–27. The naval escort consisted only of one fifty-gun man-of-war, H.M.S. Sutherland, and two frigates (ibid., 238).

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Fort William Henry

1. On Webb, see Loudoun to Cumberland, 5 Jan. 1757, and Loudoun to Webb, 20 June 1757, in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 293, 370–1; and Dictionaryof American Biography, s.v. “Webb, Daniel.” Quotation: Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 234.

2. Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York, 1990), 75–7; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 67–9. Another sloop was damaged but not destroyed in the attack, and a third survived unhurt; several “Bay boats and Gondolas” also survived, probably because they had sunk offshore, the previous fall, to be raised after the thaw—a common means of protecting vessels from winter damage (Loudoun to Webb, 20 June 1757, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 371).

3. Carillon scout and Rogers’s wound: John R. Cuneo, Robert Rogers of the Rangers (1959; reprint, New York, 1987), 45–53. French and Indian activities: Steele, Betrayals, 84–5.

4. “Swimming”: Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756–1760, ed. Edward P. Hamilton (Norman, Okla., 1964), 116 (entry of June 15). Ransom: Steele, Betrayals, 79.

5. French strength: Bougainville, Adventure, 152–3 (entry of 29 July 1757. The army included 6 battalions of “French Troops,” or regulars, totalling 2,570; a battalion of “Colony Troops,” or troupes de la marine, numbering 524, under Rigaud; 3,470 Canadian militia and volunteers, organized into 8 battalion-strength territorial “brigades”; and 180 artillerists). Indian participation: see ibid., 150–1 (entry of 28 July 1757); and the interpretation in Steele, Betrayals, 80–1, 111. “In the midst”: Bougainville, Adventure, 149 (entry of 27 July 1757).

6. Garrison strength: Steele, Betrayals, 96. “An old Officer”: Loudoun to Cumberland, 25 Apr.–3 June 1757, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 344. “At daybreak”: Bougainville, Adventure, 142–3 (entry of 24 July 1757); see also Steele, Betrayals, 91, 96–7, 217 nn. 46, 47.

7. Gipson, Victorious Years, 79–81; Steele, Betrayals, 229–30 n. 49.

8. Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 399–400; Bougainville, Adventure, 154–6 (entry of 31 July 1757). “We know”: Monro to Webb, 3 Aug. 1757, quoted in Steele, Betrayals, 98.

9. Bougainville, Adventure, 157 (entry of 1 Aug. 1757).

10. Steele, Betrayals, 98–9; Bougainville, Adventure, 158–60 (entry of 3 Aug. 1757). Garden: “A Plan of Fort William Henry . . .” in Gipson, Victorious Years, facing 78.

11. Steele, Betrayals, 99.

12. Quotation: G. Bartman to Monro, 4 Aug. 1757, facsimile copy in ibid., 103 (fig. 9). Montcalm suggests surrender: Bougainville, Adventure, 163, 166–7 (entries of 5 and 7 Aug. 1757).

13. Ibid., 160–9 (entries of 4–8 Aug. 1757); Steele, Betrayals, 102–5.

14. Eleven of twenty-one guns had split or exploded by the end of 7 Aug., including both of the fort’s thirty-two–pounders. Most of the fort’s guns were iron and hence vulnerable to metal fatigue after prolonged firing. Brass guns stood up better under sustained use, but all ten of the brass cannon in the fort and the camp were small-bore fieldpieces, unable to damage the besiegers’ fieldworks (ibid., 100–8).

15. Ibid., 105–6, 108.

16. Situation report: ibid., 107–8, 109. (The shortage of ammunition was far from absolute, for the French would later list 2,522 solid shot, 542 shells, and 35,835 pounds of powder in their “Return of Artillery Found in the Fort.” Rather the problem was of a severe shortage of shot and shell for the five small-caliber cannon that remained functional. See Bougainville, Adventure,177 [entry of 22 Aug. 1757].) “Quite worn out”: Frye, quoted in Gipson, Victorious Years, 84.

17. Terms of surrender from Steele, Betrayals, 110; see also Gipson, Victorious Years, 84–5.

18. Steele, Betrayals, 110–11.

19. Ibid., 111–12. “More than usual malice”: Joseph Frye, A Journal of the Attack of Fort William Henry by the French on the third day of August 1757 and the surrender of the 9th of the same month, Parkman Papers, vol. 42, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

20. Steele, Betrayals, 115–19 (killing and taking of prisoners), 144 (maximum number killed; Steele’s lower-bound estimate is 69), 134 (number of captives), 121 (number sheltered by French and early departure of Indians).

21. Refugees’ arrival: Rufus Putnam, Journal of Gen. Rufus Putnam, Kept in Northern New York during Four Campaigns of the Old French and Indian War, 1757–1760, ed. E. C. Dawes (Albany, 1886), 42–3 (entries of 10–19 Aug. 1757). Montcalm’s reassurances and efforts to recover captives: Steele, Betrayals, 129–31. Captive returns: ibid., 139 (table 2).

22. Ibid., 130.

23. Ibid., 132, 144–8, 154–6, 165–70; Kerry Trask, In the Pursuit of Shadows: Massachusetts Millennialismand the Seven Years’ War (New York, 1989), 234–56.

24. Jean Elizabeth Lunn, “Agriculture and War in Canada, 1740–1760,” Canadian Historical Review 16 (1935): 123 n. 3, 133–4, 136; Bougainville, Adventure, 171, 182, 185 (entries of 9 Aug., 10–22 and 27 Sept., 1–10 Oct. 1757).

25. Connecticut response: Harold E. Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 110. Massachusetts response: Thomas Pownall to William Pitt, 16 Aug. 1757, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 1:94–7. Militia at Fort Edward: Steele, Betrayals, 127. This conservative figure reflects Webb’s desire to blame his failure to reinforce Monro on the laggard response of the American militia. Another witness estimated the number of militiamen who had reached Fort Edward by 15 Aug. at seven thousand ( Pennsylvania Gazette, 25 Aug. 1757).

26. Expense: Selesky, War and Society, 110. Militia vs. provincial wages: Massachusetts House of Representatives resolve, 12 Jun. 1758, stipulated a two shillings eightpence daily wage for militia privates, plus subsistence and horse hire, or the equivalent of four pounds per month; provincial privates earned one pound sixteen shillings per month, exclusive of bounties and subsistence. (Massachusetts Archives, vol. 77, 623–3a; Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984], 225.) Comparison to England: The authorized strength of the English militia was 32,000, but the only time that more than 16,000 men actually served was at the height of the French invasion threat of 1759. Even at its theoretical maximum, the English militia would have amounted to less than 3.3 percent of the male population in the sixteen to thirty age range. See Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 191; and Eliga Gould, Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming), chap. 3.

CHAPTER TWENTY: Other Disasters, and a Ray of Hope

1. P. M. Hamer, “Anglo-French Rivalry in the Cherokee Country, 1754–1757,” North Carolina Historical Review 2 (1925): 303–22; id., “Fort Loudoun in the Cherokee War, 1758–1761,” North Carolina Historical Review, 422–58; Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military Historyof the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 486–8; Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New York, 1993), 96–9.

2. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 45–6, 144; Hayes Baker-Crothers, Virginia in the French and Indian War (Chicago, 1928), 119–20.

3. “Want nothing but Commissions”: Washington to Dinwiddie, 10 Mar. 1757, in W. W. Abbott et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 4, November 1756–October 1757 (Charlottesville, Va., 1984), 112–15; a fuller statement than the one he presented in the Memorial to John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun, 23 Mar. 1757, ibid., 120–1, and probably closer to the case as he stated it in person. Loudon’s response: Stanwix to Washington, 23 May 1757, ibid., 159–60.

4. Difficulties of defending backcountry: Gipson, Victorious Years, 43–5; Baker-Crothers, Virginiain the French and Indian War, 111–26; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 73–120 passim. Detachment to Charleston: Harry M. Ward, Major General Adam Stephen and the Cause of American Liberty(Charlottesville, Va., 1989), 42–6. Abandonment of forts: Gipson, Victorious Years, 41–2. Indians: Washington to Dinwiddie, 10 June 1757, Papers of Washington, 4:192–5 (quotation at 192).

5. “Another campaign”: Washington to Dinwiddie, 24 Oct. 1757, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 5, October 1757–September 1758 (Charlottesville, Va., 1988), 25; cf. Washington to Stanwix, 8 Oct. 1757, ibid., 8–10. “Nothing very important . . . into the forest”: Vaudreuil to the minister of marine, 13 Feb. 1758, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., Wilderness Chronicles of Northwestern Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Pa., 1941), 109–10. For a sense of the character of the war in western Virginia in 1757, see Samuel Kercheval, A History of the Valley of Virginia (1833; reprint, Strasburg, Va., 1973), 78–80, 95–6, 72–108 passim.

6. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 281, 334–48; also, in general, Stephen F. Auth, The Ten Years’ War: Indian-White Relations in Pennsylvania, 1755–1765 (New York, 1989), 81–90; and Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Philadelphia, 1949), 155–60.

7. “In the morning”: Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, 29 Jan. 1757, quoted in Nicholas Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 123. Character of negotiations: Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 339–40.

8. Ibid., 346–7.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Pitt Changes Course

1. Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 1 (London, 1918), 168–9, 171.

2. Loudoun to Holburne and Holburne to Loudoun, 4 Aug. 1757, ibid., 171–2.

3. Ibid., 177–8.

4. Loudoun to Cumberland, 17 Oct. 1757, in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 399–403.

5. Loudoun’s activities: id., Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 348. Resistance: ibid., 125–9.

6. Ibid., 268–76, 276 n. 45.

7. “My Sittuation”: Loudoun to Argyll, 16 Feb. 1758, quoted ibid., 350. Wine: ibid., 167–8.

8. Ibid., 346.

9. For the strategic position of Cumberland and the provisions of the convention, see esp. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:223–7; also Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 210–12; and Peter Douglas Brown, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: The Great Commoner (London, 1978), 155–6. For Frederick’s position in the fall of 1757, see Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (New York, 1996), 177–80; and W. F. Reddaway, Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia (New York, 1904), 232–3.

10. “A convention”: king to Cumberland, 21 Sept. 1757, quoted in Charles Chenevix Trench, George II (London, 1973), 284. “His honour”: Newcastle [memorandum?], quoted ibid., 284. “Here is my son”: Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George II, vol. 3 (London, 1846), 61. No regret: ibid., 62–5.

11. For Pitt’s strategic plans and policies, see Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:8–9, 28–9, 148, 150–2, 189–91, 374–6; and Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985). For the character of his support among those who favored imperial growth, see Marie Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1980); and (for a skeptical view of his strategy, stressing pragmatism over any unifying vision) id., “The Myth of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, Great Imperialist, Part 1: Pitt and Imperial Expansion, 1738–1763,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21 (1993): 31–74.

12. Pitt’s speech on the army estimates for 1758, 14 Dec. 1757, quoted in Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–66 (London, 1939), 19–20 n. 2.

13. Frederick to Newcastle, 26 July 1756, quoted in Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:148.

14. Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 344–5; John Schutz, Thomas Pownall, British Defender of American Liberty: A Study of Anglo-American Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Glendale, Calif., 1951), 81.

15. Pargellis, Loudoun, 231, 342–5, 351, 358–9.

16. Anson: Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, (London, 1846), 3:32 (Pitt’s nomination of Anson); Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:180. Ligonier: ibid., 33–4, 230–2; Ayling, Elder Pitt, 191, 213.

17. Descents: Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:192–6, 262–8, 287–9, 293–304. Ferdinand and Hanover: ibid., 227–30. Newcastle and Pitt: Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 261 ff.; Middleton, Bells, 54, 60–1, 88–9, 113–18, 141, 148, 153–9, 193–4, 205–6, 213; Ayling, The Elder Pitt, 204–39 passim; Peters, “Myth of Pitt,” 42–8; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1989), 170–6.

18. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:232–4; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the British Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760, 125–6; Showalter, Wars of Frederick, 177–206.

PART IV: TURNING POINT, 1758 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Deadlock, and a New Beginning

1. E. C. Dawes, ed., Journal of Gen. Rufus Putnam, Kept in Northern New York during Four Campaigns of the Old French and Indian War, 1757–1760 (Albany, 1886), 49–50 (entry of 18 Nov. 1757); Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam (Boston, 1903), 16.

2. Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 403; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 151–3. Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, New York, 1968), 275–6.

3. Learned: Buell Memoirs of Putnam, 16. Quotation: Dawes, Journal of Putnam, 50–2 (entry of 2 Feb. 1758).

4. Ibid., 54–6 (entries of 8–10 Feb. 1758); Buell, Memoirs of Putnam, 21.

5. “He is a good Soldier”: ibid., 17.

6. “Concert measures”: “Resolutions of the Massachusetts General Assembly,” 24 Dec. 1757, in John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, vol. 7, 1757 to 1769 (Providence, 1861), 115–16. Loudoun and Pownall: Pargellis, Loudoun, 268–73; Loudoun to Cumberland, 17 Oct. 1757, in id., ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (New York, 1936), 404–5.

7. John Schutz, Thomas Pownall, British Defender of American Liberty: A Study of Anglo-AmericanRelations in the Eighteenth Century (Glendale, Calif., 1951), 85.

8. Pownall’s principles: ibid., 98. Breach with Loudoun: Schutz, Pownall, 110–18 (esp. Pownall to Loudoun, 15 Dec. 1757, quoted at 116–17); Pownall to Pitt, 1 and 28 Dec. 1757, 2 Jan., 15–19 Jan., and 20 Jan. 1758, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America, vol. 1 (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 128–9, 132–3, 155–6, 161–5, 166–7.

9. “There is a Spirit”: Pownall to Pitt, 15 Jan. 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:162–3. Schutz, Pownall, 119–22; Pargellis, Loudoun, 270–2.

10. Loudoun to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:188–9.

11. Pargellis, Loudoun, 356–8, 276–7, and n. 45.

12. Ibid., 277; Schutz, Pownall, 127; quotations: Pownall to Pitt, 14 Mar. 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:203.

13. Pitt to governors in North America, 30 Dec. 1757, ibid., 135.

14. Pitt to the governors of Mass. Bay, N.H., Conn., R.I., N.Y., and N.J., 30 Dec. 1757, ibid., 136–8.

15. Ibid., 138–9.

16. Legislators’ reaction: Pownall to Pitt, 14 Mar. 1757, ibid., 203; Schutz, Pownall, 128. Loudoun’s departure: Loudoun to Pitt, 31 May 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:263.

17. For the numbers of men voted, see the letters of various governors to Pitt in Pitt Corr., 1:203, 209–11, 213, 216, 222, 227, 229, 230, 234, 235–6, 239, 240–1, 244, 311, 329–32. Maryland’s assembly had fallen out with Loudoun in 1757 over the garrisoning of Fort Cumberland and had severed all ties with the commander in chief. At the time of Loudoun’s recall the issue remained unresolved. Maryland’s lack of participation after Loudoun returned to England had less to do with opposition to the war than with the dynamics of proprietary politics. In Apr. 1758 the House of Delegates voted to appropriate £45,000 and raise a thousand provincials, but the council refused its assent because the money would have been raised by a method of taxation repugnant to the proprietary family. See Horatio Sharpe to Pitt, 16 Mar., 18 May, and 27 Aug. 1758, ibid., 209–11, 242–5, 327–32; and Pargellis, Loudoun, 220–1.

18. This is not to say that no colonists enlisted in regular-army units; in fact, Thomas Purvis has estimated that eleven thousand Americans did so (“Colonial American Participation in the Seven Years’ War, 1755–1763” [paper presented at the 10th Wilburt S. Brown Conference in History, University of Alabama, Feb. 11–12, 1983]; Don Higginbotham cites the number as authoritative in “The Early American Way of War: Reconnaissance and Appraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 [1987]: 235. I have not been able to determine whether the estimate includes slaves enlisted in British West Indian regiments). Most of these enlistments occurred in the ethnically diverse Middle Colonies, especially Pennsylvania, where regular recruiters attracted substantial numbers of German-speaking colonists to the four-battalion 60th Regiment—the Royal Americans—in the early years of the war.

While the social contexts of war and military service have yet to be studied in Pennsylvania as thoroughly as in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia, three factors (a high level of indentured servitude among men in the military age range, a large concentration of young tenant farmers in the eastern part of the province, and a socioeconomic makeup strongly shaped by poorer German and Scotch-Irish immigrants) would have tended to promote enlistment in the regular forces. It must be borne in mind, however, that these enlistments tended to come before 1758, when Parliament’s subsidies began to enable the colonies to offer high bounties to attract men to their own provincial regiments; and that in order to enlist men, regular recruiters were compelled to offer term enlistments of three years or the duration of the war, rather than the life (twenty-year) enlistments typical of the British army as a whole.

Yet American enlistees never filled the ranks as Braddock and Loudoun assumed they should. Unlike provincial units, which tended after 1757 to recruit close to their full complements, regular units remained chronically and indeed increasingly understrength throughout the war. There were shortages of 1,710 men in America’s 21 regular battalions in Jan. 1758; 3,280 in the equivalent of 24 battalions in Oct. 1758; 4,492 in 25 battalions in 1759; 4,750 in 25 battalions in Mar. 1760; and a shortfall of 7,000 the following Oct. (see Pargellis, Loudoun, 110–11). Such deficiencies in volunteers were compensated for by a variety of expedients, but for the most part replacements came in the form of drafts from Irish regiments. Thus, by Jan. 1759, only a quarter of the troops in the Royal American Regiment, whose soldiers were supposed to be recruited exclusively in the colonies, were in fact colonists (largely Germans). Apart from a few more Germans recruited directly from Europe, the bulk of the Royal Americans were “the ‘refuse of the army in Ireland’ ” (ibid., 112).

More research needs to be done to clarify the social and economic contexts of colonial enlistment in regular regiments and to explore the wartime experiences of those soldiers. A Ph.D. dissertation in progress at the University of Western Ontario may answer many of these questions: Alexander V. Campbell, “Anvil of Empire: The Royal American Regiment, 1756–1775” (forthcoming). Campbell generously allowed me to read the thesis prospectus (April 1998), which contains a sketch of his argument.

19. New England enlistments: Abercromby to Pitt, 28 Apr. 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:226. Virginia’s lack of enthusiasm before 1758: John Ferling, “Soldiers for Virginia: Who Served in the French and Indian War?” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 94 (1986): 308–9; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 102–3, 138–9. (In 1755 the Virginia Regiment had come up to only 25 percent of its authorized strength; in 1756, 41 percent; in 1757, 55 percent. Less than 10 percent of the men in the army of 1756 reenlisted to serve in 1757.) Virginia’s reversal of attitude, 1758: John Blair to Pitt, 29 June 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:289. The Burgesses now revoked the statute placing bounties on enemy Indian scalps: the end of the fantasy that a war they were unwilling to finance as a public venture could somehow be carried on by private enterprise.

20. Quotation: Sir John St. Clair to Col. Henry Bouquet, 27 May 1758, quoted in Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 2, Young Washington (New York, 1948), 309.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Old Strategies, New Men, and a Shift in the Balance

1. Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 356–8.

2. Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Abercromby, James,” “Amherst, Jeffery,” “Wolfe, James,” “Forbes, John,” and “Howe, Richard.” Additionally, on Amherst, see J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst (New York, 1933); and Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976); on Wolfe, Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (New York, 1909); on Forbes, Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 247–8; on Abercromby, ibid., 211. On their selection, see Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army, 1702–1770 (Oxford, 1958), 236–42. George II disapproved of irregular promotions and resisted Amherst’s appointment so stoutly that the critical offensive of 1758 might be said to have been conducted not in the field but in the royal bedchamber, where Lady Yarmouth, his favorite mistress, lobbied on Amherst’s behalf, at Ligonier’s urgent request.

3. Gipson, Victorious Years, 177; Whitworth, Ligonier, 240–1; Beattie, “Amherst,” 66.

4. Canadian defense forces: George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 165–6; W. J. Eccles, “The French Forces in North America during the Seven Years’ War,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, 1741 to 1770, xvii–xviii. (In practice the Canadian militia was much more effective than its counterpart in the British colonies and routinely detached men for service with expeditionary forces. Yet it was still a body mainly useful for home defense, for to remove any substantial number of men from availability for planting and harvest threatened the food supply of Canada, which was marginal at best.) Disaffection of Indians of the pays d’en haut: Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756–1760, ed. Edward P. Hamilton (Norman, Okla., 1964), 197, 204 (entries of 1–13 Mar. and 12–20 May 1758).

5. Failed harvests and high prices: Jean Elizabeth Lunn, “Agriculture and War in Canada, 1740–1760,” Canadian Historical Review 16 (1935): 128, 130. (A minot was equivalent to about a third of a bushel.) Rationing and expedient substitutes: Bougainville, Adventure, 71–2 (22 Nov. 1756). Horse meat: Stanley, New France, 194. (Horse meat was available because animals were slaughtered to conserve fodder.) Protests: Bougainville, Adventure, 195 (12 Dec. 1757–12 Mar. 1758). Dwindling rations, 1758: ibid., 201–2 (entries of 15–25 Apr. and 3 May 1758). “Some of the inhabitants”: ibid., 206 (21 May 1758). Four-ounce bread ration: ibid., 209 (30 May 1758).

6. Stanley, New France, 191–2.

7. Ibid., 201–6; Bougainville, Adventure, 196.

8. Inflation: ibid., 198 (8 Nov. 1757). Lack of circulating medium: Gustave Lanctot, A History of Canada, vol. 3, From the Treaty of Utrecht to the Treaty of Paris, 1713–1763 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 162. Hoarding: Stanley, New France, 196–200.

9. Bougainville, Adventure, 213 (18–19 June 1758) and 215 (23 June 1758); Stanley, New France, 165; Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (Oxford, 1994), 205–6, 211–12; Stanley, New France, 211–12; Lanctot, Utrecht to Paris, 3:159, 162, 165.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Montcalm Raises a Cross: The Battle of Ticonderoga

1. Abercromby’s expedition: Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 217. “Every thing here”: E. C. Dawes, ed., Journal of Gen. Rufus Putnam, Kept in NorthernNew York during Four Campaigns of the Old French and Indian War, 1757–1760 (Albany, 1886), 63 (entry of 28 June 1758). “Covered the Lake”: Pennsylvania Gazette, 27 July 1758. “Valuable Baggage”: Dawes, Journal of Putnam, 67 (entry of 6 July 1758). Howe: Abercromby to Pitt, 12 July 1758, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretaryof State, with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America, vol. 1 (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 297.

2. “His death” and “Granny”: Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam (Boston, 1903), 23. “I felt it” and dispatch of engineer: Abercromby to Pitt, 12 July 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:298, 299. “A little Stagnant”: Fabius Maximus Ray, ed., The Journal of Dr. Caleb Rea, Written during the Expedition against Ticonderoga in 1758 (Salem, Mass., 1881), 25 (entry of 7 July 1758).

3. Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756–1760, ed. Edward P. Hamilton (Norman, Okla., 1964), 221 (30 June 1758), 231 (“List and Composition of the French Army, July 8, 1758”), 222 (1 July 1758), 229–30 (7 July 1758).

4. Gipson, Victorious Years, 226–9; William Eyre to Robert Napier, 10 July 1758, in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 420–1; Bougainville, Adventure, 230 (7 July 1758). Although firing at extreme range, guns on Rattlesnake Hill would have enfiladed the French lines and quickly made them too risky to man. With too few provisions to withstand a siege, Montcalm would have been forced to withdraw; but the only escape was by boat, and even a few cannon atop the hill would have made a shambles of the embarkation.

5. Lt. Matthew Clark was, according to Capt. Charles Lee of the 44th Foot, Abercromby’s “favourite Engineer,” but “a stripling, who had never seen the least service” (Lee, “Narrative,” enclosed in id. to Miss Sidney Lee, 16 Sept. 1758, New-York Historical Society, Collections 4 [1871]: 12).

6. “To march up”: Abercromby to Pitt, 12 July 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:300. The British attacked with 15 battalions, or about 13,000 men, organized in 3 brigades; the French opposed them with 7 understrength regular battalions reinforced by troupes de la marine and Canadian militia for a total of fewer than 3,500 men. For the Anglo-American order of battle, see William Eyre to Robert Napier, 10 July 1758, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 420; and John Cleaveland, “Journal,” Bulletin of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum 10 (1959): 199 (“Map Made July 8”). French order of battle: Bougainville, Adventure, 231–2 (8 July 1758).

7. “Trees were fell down”: Eyre to Napier, 10 July 1758, in Pargellis, Military Affairs, 420, 421. “Cut . . . Down”: Joseph Nichols diary, 8 July 1758, Huntington MS 89, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. “The fier began”: Archelaus Fuller, “Journal of Col. Archelaus Fuller of Middleton, Mass., in the Expedition against Ticonderoga in 1758,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 46 (1910): 209–20 (entry of 8 July 1758).

8. David Perry, “Recollections of an Old Soldier . . . Written by Himself,” The Magazine of History 137 (1928), 9–10 (reprinted from a pamphlet by the same title, pub. Windsor, Vt., 1822).

9. “Constant peele”: Buell, Memoirs of Putnam, 24 (8 July 1758). “When I came”: Dawes, Journal of Putnam, 70–1 (8 July 1758).

10. “It was therefore judged”: Abercromby to Pitt, 12 July 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:300. “News came”: Joseph Nichols diary, 9 July 1758. Abercromby reported 1,610 regular casualties (464 dead, 1,117 wounded, 29 missing) and 334 among the provincials (87 killed, 239 wounded, 8 missing). The first battalion of the 42nd Foot (the Black Watch) lost 203 killed and 296 wounded, or half its strength.

11. “Shamefully retreated”: Artemas Ward diary, 8 July 1758; reproduced in Frederick S. Allis, ed., The Artemas Ward Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society microfilm edition; Boston, 1967), reel 4. “This Day”: John Cleaveland diary, 10 July 1758, 200. “Astonishing Disappointment”: Joseph Nichols diary, 11 July 1758; providentialism, 12 July 1758. “The General [and] his Rehoboam-Counsellors”: John Cleaveland diary, 12 July 1758 (orthography follows MS at Fort Ticonderoga Museum rather than printed version cited above). A closer look at the Bible illuminates what Cleaveland and similarly minded New Englanders made of the defeat: when the Israelites complained to King Rehoboam that their burdens were too heavy, he took counsel not with the wise elders, but only with his boon companions. They told him to say to the people, “whereas my father laid upon you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.” This provoked an uprising, and “Israel has been in rebellion against the house of David to this day” (2 Chron. 10:6–19; quotations at vv. 11, 19). Rehoboam’s reign destroyed Israel’s unity: “He did evil, for he did not set his heart to seek the Lord” (2 Chron. 12:14).

12. Dawes, Journal of Putnam, 71 (retrospective entry preceding 20 July 1758).

13. Charles Lee, “Narrative,” 12. A musket ball had broken two of Lee’s ribs, and he was convalescing at Albany when he wrote.

14. Bougainville, Adventure, 235 (10 July 1758); 242 (12 July 1758); 264 (12 Aug. 1758). The Latin translates more literally as follows:

Who was the leader? Who was the soldier? What was the spread-out, immense wood? Behold the sign! Behold the victor! This God, God himself triumphs.

My thanks to Professor Steven Epstein for providing this translation.

15. Ibid., 262 (10–12 Aug. 1758).

16. Ibid., 273–6 (6–12 Sept. 1758). Montcalm had asked to be recalled after the victory of July 8. The unlikelihood of this request being granted made him despair of his chances to stave off the British in the coming year. Something of his state of mind can be deduced from the chimerical plan he began to formulate in the fall of 1758. Thinking of the Anabasis of Xenophon, he resolved to resist the expected invasion of the St. Lawrence Valley, then to retreat westward at the head of as many regulars and troupes de la marine as he could save. After acquiring what support and provisions he could in the Illinois Country, he would descend the Mississippi and make his last stand in Louisiana. See Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, vol. 2, Montcalm and Wolfe (New York, 1983), 1313, 1317–18.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Amherst at Louisbourg

1. “A rash . . . attempt”: Wolfe to Maj. Walter Wolfe, 27 July 1758, in Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (New York, 1909), 384–5. As usual Wolfe was trying to minimize the credit due to his superior officer and to emphasize his own role. British prepare for siege: Amherst to Pitt, 11 June 1758, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissionersin America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 1:274; also map, “The Landing on Cape Breton Island . . . 1758,” in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), facing 195. For a complete account, see J. Mackay Hitsman and C. C. J. Bond, “The Assault Landing at Louisbourg, 1758,” Canadian Historical Review 35 (1954): 314–30. The British lost fifty dead (the majority drowned), sixty-two wounded, one missing; the French lost a hundred killed and seventy captured.

2. Louisbourg’s defenses: Christopher Moore, Louisbourg Portraits (Toronto, 1982), 209–15. Disposition of defenders in 1758: Gipson, Victorious Years, 198–201. On Amherst’s role in the siege, see Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 66–90. For the naval vessels in the harbor, a formidable force including six line-of-battle ships and five frigates, see Boscawen to Pitt, 28 July 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:308.

3. Moore, Louisbourg Portraits, 215.

4. This account of the siege follows Gipson, Victorious Years, 197–207; Amherst to Pitt, 11 and 23 June, 6 July, 23 July, and 27 July 1758, in Pitt Corr., 1:271–5, 281–4, 291–3, 303–7; and Boscawen to Pitt, 28 July 1758, ibid., 307–9.

5. Beattie, “Amherst,” 83. Since the landings, the British had lost just 172 dead and 354 sick or wounded; naval casualties numbered approximately 50.

6. “Journal of the Proceedings of the Fleet,” quoted in Gipson, Victorious Years, 196 n. 109.

7. Wolfe to Maj. Walter Wolfe, 27 July 1758, Life and Letters of Wolfe, 385.

8. Beattie, “Amherst,” 85–6.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Supply Holds the Key

1. Boscawen’s task force: Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 66; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 180–5. Osborne and Hawke: ibid., 188–90; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 1 (London, 1918), 258–62. Effectiveness of British naval interdiction: Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 210–11. Most of the British navy’s achievement owed to its effectiveness in breaking up convoys and blockading ports, but one of Osborne’s captains fought the most spectacular single-ship action of the war in the Mediterranean off Cartagena. On 28 May 1758, H.M.S. Monmouth, a fast sixty-four–gun line-of-battle ship, chased and eventually closed to pistol-shot range with the far more powerful Foudroyant, an eighty-gun vessel. In a bloody four-hour engagement the Monmouth shot away two of its opponent’s masts and forced her commander to surrender. This action fascinated contemporaries because the Foudroyant had been Admiral Galissonière’s flagship in Byng’s defeat off Minorca two years before; the Monmouth’s captain, Arthur Gardiner, Byng’s flag captain in that action, engaged the heavily armed French vessel to wipe the stain of Minorca off his reputation; and the officer who surrendered the Foudroyant to Gardiner’s lieutenant (Gardiner having been killed in the fight) was Admiral Ange de Menneville, marquis de Duquesne. The British repaired the Foudroyant, which became one of the Royal Navy’s most celebrated vessels. Duquesne’s defeat seriously damaged morale at Versailles even as it fanned British public enthusiasm for the war effort.

2. Gipson, Victorious Years, 247–60.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Bradstreet at Fort Frontenac

1. On Bradstreet generally, see William G. Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit and Preferment in Colonial North America: John Bradstreet’s Quest (Waterloo, Ont., 1982); also the same author’s entry in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, s.v. “Bradstreet, John.” John Shy expresses similar views of Bradstreet’s energy and a less favorable assessment of his character in Toward Lexington:The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 169–71. For his career before 1758, see Godfrey, Pursuit, 21–6, 50–1, 58–9; Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1966; reprint, New York, 1969), 187–8 (“bridel” quotation at n. 2); and Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 365–6. Bradstreet’s advancement owed much to Shirley, whose plan to conquer Louisbourg depended on Bradstreet’s unusually precise knowledge of the fortress. Bradstreet had come by that knowledge by supplying relatives on his mother’s side of the family with English goods to sell in the city. For a regular officer to trade illegally with a foreign colony was of course frowned upon, and Bradstreet’s English patron soon advised him to “Knock off” lest he ruin his career. Typically, Bradstreet did not knock off until war was imminent (Godfrey, Pursuit, 15–20; quotation from King Gould to Bradstreet, 15 Mar. 1742, at 17).

2. Bradstreet to Sir Richard Lyttleton, 15 Aug. and 5 Sept. 1757 in Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1968), 342 n. 14; Godfrey, Pursuit, 99–110. Bradstreet could offer to fund the expedition privately because his post as quartermaster general had given him access to excellent lines of credit in the Albany merchant community, and he was never excessively scrupulous about separating private from public business; moreover, he did nothing to conceal the fact that Fort Frontenac’s stocks of peltry and trade goods made it the richest prize in the interior.

3. Abercromby’s orders, quoted in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 238–9.

4. Ibid., 239.

5. Ibid., 240; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 366; Godfrey, Pursuit, 126; George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 183. Quotation: [John Bradstreet], An Impartial Account of Lieutenant Colonel Bradstreet’s Expedition to Fort Frontenac, to which are added a few reflections on the conduct of that Enterprize, ed. E. C. Kyte (Toronto, 1940), 15.

6. Stanley, New France, 185; Gipson, Victorious Years, 243.

7. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, s.v. “Payen de Noyan et de Chavoy, Pierre-Jacques ”; Godfrey, Pursuit, 129–30. (Because the flag of France under the Bourbons was white, French officers typically called for a truce with red.)

8. “Uncrediable”: Capt. Thomas Sowers’s account, quoted in Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 436–7. “The stores”: Benjamin Bass, “Account of the Capture of Fort Frontenac by the Detachment under the Command of Col. Bradstreet,” New York History 16 (1935): 450 (entry of 17 Aug. 1758). “The garrison made no scruple”: Bradstreet to Abercromby, 31 Oct. 1758, “The Expedition to . . . Fort Frontenac in 1758,” Colonial Wars 1 (1914): 210 n. Bradstreet estimated that the goods divided at Fort Bull amounted to less than “the one fourth part of what were burnt” in the destruction of the fort (Impartial Account, 25–6).

9. Expected reinforcements and demolition of fort: ibid., 22. Division of spoils: Godfrey, Pursuit, 130–1. Bradstreet was entitled to claim a quarter of the plunder, in which case an equal amount would have been divided among the officers, and the remaining half would have gone to the men. Thus he forwent about eight thousand pounds sterling, a remarkable act in a man not normally indifferent to money, but explicable by his own admission that he did it “to encourage the people” (id. to Charles Gould, 21 Sept. 1758, ibid.). Bradstreet had promised his soldiers equal shares at the outset and understood their contractualist views well enough to know that to stint their share would be to invite mutiny and tarnish an achievement from which he hoped his reputation—and his career—would benefit.

10. “To abandon their settlements”: Impartial Account, 29. Abercromby demurs: Godfrey, Pursuit, 133.

11. “Had any one measure”: Impartial Account, 29–30. “Blunders”: Charles Lee to Miss Sidney Lee, 16 Sept. 1758, New-York Historical Society, Collections 4 (1871): 7–8.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Indian Diplomacy and the Fall of Fort Duquesne

1. On Johnson’s lack of help and Forbes’s intention to rely instead on Cherokee scouts, see Forbes to Abercromby, 22 Apr. 1758, in Alfred Procter James, ed., Writings of General John Forbes Relating to His Service in North America (Menasha, Wis., 1938), 69. Forbes’s cousin, James Glen, governor of South Carolina from 1743 through 1756, had pursued diplomatic ties with the Cherokee; retiring as governor, he had stayed on as a merchant and used his contacts to obtain warriors for Forbes (see Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Caroliniansthrough the Era of Revolution [New York, 1993], 69–79). Difficulties in coping with Indians: Forbes to Pitt, 19 May 1758, Writings of Forbes, 92; Forbes to Abercromby, 7 June 1758, ibid., 109. “A very great plague”: Forbes to Henry Bouquet, 10 June 1758, ibid., 112. Alienation of Cherokees: Hatley, Dividing Paths, 102.

2. “He has the Publick Faith”: Forbes to Denny, 3 May 1758, Writings of Forbes, 81–2. “A Treaty on foot”: Francis Halkett to Washington, 4 May 1758, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 5, October 1757–September 1758 (Charlottesville, Va., 1988), 164. The Iroquois had not forwarded peace belts from the Pennsylvania government to the Ohio tribes, nor had Sir William Johnson pressed them to do so. This made perfect sense: the Confederacy had no interest in allowing the Ohio peoples to treat directly with the English, while Johnson’s diplomatic position (like his future as a speculator in western lands) depended on preserving the Covenant Chain alliance system.

3. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 384.

4. Forbes requests permission: id. to Abercromby, 27 June and 9 July 1758, Writings of Forbes, 126–8, 134–40 (Abercromby granted Forbes authority to conduct independent negotiations on 23 July; see endorsement, ibid., 140). Diplomatic success: Theodore Thayer, Israel Pemberton, King of the Quakers (Philadelphia, 1943), 155–7; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 393–4; Anthony F.C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Philadelphia, 1949), 191; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 250; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 129–30. Pisquetomen’s companion, Keekyuscung, was an important counselor.

5. On Post, see Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. “Post, Christian Frederick.” He encountered two Frenchmen near Venango on 7 Aug.; see “The Journal of Christian Frederick Post, from Philadelphia to the Ohio, on a Message from the Government of Pennsylvania to the Delawares, Shawnese, and Mingo Indians, Settled There,” in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, vol. 1 (Cleveland, 1904), 191.

6. “Journal of Post,” 18–19 Aug. and 1 Sept. 1758, in Thwaites, Travels, 1:198–9, 213–17.

7. “It is plain”: ibid., 214. “We long for that peace”: 3 Sept. 1758, ibid., 218–20.

8. 8–22 Sept. 1758, ibid., 226–33; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 396.

9. There is no detailed record of Post’s encounter with Forbes. I have constructed this account from Forbes to Pitt, 6 Sept. 1758; to Denny, 9 Sept. 1758; to Washington, 16 Sept. 1758; to Horatio Sharpe, 16 Sept. 1758; to Bouquet, 17 Sept. 1758; to Abercromby, 21 Sept. 1758; to Bouquet, 23 Sept. 1758; and Francis Halkett to Sharpe, 30 Sept. 1758; all in Writings of Forbes, 210–22.

10. Forbes to Bouquet, 23 Sept. 1758, ibid., 218–19.

11. Forbes to Abercromby, 21 Sept. 1758, ibid., 215–16; Grant to Forbes, n.d. [c. 14 Sept. 1758], in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., The Papers of Col. Henry Bouquet, ser. 21652 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1940), 130–5.

12. Forbes to Bouquet, 23 Sept. 1758, Writings of Forbes, 218–19.

13. Forbes to Abercromby, 8 and 16 Oct. 1758, ibid., 227, 234.

14. Forbes to Richard Peters, 16 Oct. 1758, ibid., 234–7. I have interpolated the phrase “all the Waggoners . . . as brave as Lyons” from a letter Forbes wrote to Abercromby the same day; ibid., 234.

15. The following account of the Easton congress has been drawn from the versions in Thayer, Pemberton, 162–70; Stephen F. Auth, Ten Years’ War: Indian-White Relations in Pennsylvania, 1755–1765 (New York, 1989), 90–108; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 396–404; Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 145–51; and Wallace, Teedyuscung, 192–207.

16. Teedyuscung’s speech quoted in Wallace, Teedyuscung, 206; spelling of “Bough” altered for clarity, from original “Bow.”

17. King quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 400.

18. Thayer, Pemberton, 168 n. 27.

19. Denny’s message to the Ohio tribes, quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 403.

20. Wallace, Teedyuscung, 239–40; Thayer, Pemberton, 169.

21. “One of the worst”: “Journal of Christian Frederick Post, on a Message from the Governor of Pennsylvania, to the Indians of the Ohio, in the Latter Part of the Same Year [1758],” in Thwaites, Travels, 1:241–2 (hereafter cited as “Second Journal of Post”), quotation from entry of 6 Nov. 1758. “I embrace this opportunity”: Forbes to the Shawanese [sic] and Delawares on the Ohio, 9 Nov. 1758, Writings of Forbes, 251–2; see also id. to Kings Beaver [Tamaqua] and Shingas, 9 Nov. 1758, 252–3.

22. Hostile reception at Kuskuski: “Second Journal of Post,” 253, 254, quoted from entries of 19 and 20 Nov. 1758. “The Indians concern themselves”: 23 Nov. 1758, ibid., 258.

23. 29 Nov. 1758, “Second Journal of Post,” 278. “Ketiushund” was Keekyuscung, Pisquetomen’s companion in the Delawares’ diplomatic mission of early July; when he spoke to Post, therefore, his words carried more than casual weight.

24. 3–4 Dec. 1758, “Second Journal of Post,” 281–3; Charles Morse Stotz, Outposts of the War for Empire (Pittsburgh, 1985), 121–5.

25. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Le Marchand de Lignery, François-Marie.” Reductions in Fort Duquesne’s garrison: Vaudreuil to the minister of marine, 20 Jan. 1759, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., Wilderness Chronicles of Western Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Pa., 1941), 126–31.

26. Account of raid and mistaken identity: Forbes to Abercromby, 17 Nov. 1758, Writings of Forbes, quotations at 255–6; also Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the AmericanRevolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 282. Washington did not describe the episode in his contemporary correspondence but later recalled that he tried to stop the firing by “knocking up with his sword the presented pieces” (David Humphrey’s notes toward a biography of Washington, quoted in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 6 [Charlottesville, Va., 1988], 122 n. 1). Another contemporary account, however, suggests that “Colonel Washington did not discover his usual activity and presence of mind upon this occasion,” and that Capt. Thomas Bullitt stopped the firing by running “between the two parties, waving his hat and calling to them.” “This censure . . . gave rise to a resentment in the mind of General Washington which never subsided” (Quoted from William Marshall Bullitt, My Life at Oxmoor, 3–4, in Papers of Washington, 6:123 n. 1).

27. General Orders and Brigade Orders, 14–15 Nov. 1758, Papers of Washington 6:125–9; Gipson, Victorious Years, 283.

28. 20 Nov. 1758, “Second Journal of Post,” 255–6.

29. Vaudreuil to the minister of marine, 20 Jan. 1759, in Kent and Stevens, Wilderness Chronicles,128–9.

30. Forbes to Abercromby and Amherst, 26–30 Nov. 1758, Writings of Forbes, 263.

31. Quotations from Forbes to Amherst, 26 Jan. and 7 Feb. 1759, Writings of Forbes, 283, 289. See also Forbes to Amherst, 18 Jan. 1759, 282–3.

32. James Grant to Bouquet, 20 Feb. 1759, ibid., 300. Per tot discrimina: Through so many dangers; Ohio Britannica Consilio manuque: By force and resolve, Britain [seized] the Ohio. (My thanks to Professor Steven Epstein for translating this inscription.)

33. Forbes’s obituary, Pennsylvania Gazette, 15 Mar. 1759.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Educations in Arms

1. I have argued the following points at greater length in A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), esp. 65–164 and 196–223. In the following paragraphs specific citations will be made only to direct quotations.

2. Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam (Boston, 1903), 25 (entry of 9 July 1758).

3. Fabius Maximus Ray, ed., The Journal of Dr. Caleb Rea, Written during the Expedition against Ticonderoga in 1758 (Salem, Mass., 1881), 36–7 (entry of 25 July 1758). Punishments other than flogging were commonplace and often applied at the company level without benefit of court-martial proceedings. In roughly escalating order of severity, the most common company punishments were the wheel, the mare, the gauntlet, the picket, and laying neck and heels. A man bound to the wheel would be spread-eagled across a wagon wheel for a day or longer: thirst, hunger, loss of sleep, and the humiliation of fouling himself publicly were the intended results. To ride the mare, or the wooden horse, was to be made to straddle the spine formed by boards nailed together in an inverted V. Muskets might be tied to the subject’s ankles to increase his discomfort; the punishment might last from several minutes to more than an hour. A man subjected to the gauntlet would be forced to walk shirtless between parallel lines of men (usually the members of his company) armed with musket ramrods; each would give him a blow on the back as he passed. The victim’s pace would be controlled by another man walking backward ahead of him and carrying a musket with bayonet fixed and pointed at his chest. To be picketed, a man would first have his shoes removed, then have his left wrist bound to his right ankle, and then be hoisted on a gallows by a rope tied around his right wrist. A sharpened stake, or picket, would be set beneath him. If the punishment was prolonged, the only way the victim could prevent his arm from being dislocated was to stand on the point of the picket with his bare foot. The most severe of the informal punishments was to be laid (or tied) neck and heels: a man with hands tied would have a noose slipped around his neck, the other end of which would be tied about his ankles and tightened to arch his back, drawing neck and heels toward one another. A man might be left in this position of semistrangulation for an hour or more. Although laying neck and heels remained in the range of customary punishments through the whole of the eighteenth century, it was seldom practiced during the Seven Years’ War because it too often resulted in the death of expensive, hard-to-replace soldiers.

4. “Extracts from Gibson Clough’s Journal,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 3 (1861): 104 (entry for 30 Sept. 1759).

5. “Obstinate and Ungovernable”: Lieut. Alexander Johnson to Loudoun, 20 Dec. 1756, quoted in Douglas Edward Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 130–1. “Dirtiest most contemptible”: James Wolfe to Lord George Sackville, 30 July 1758, in Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (New York, 1909), 392.

6. Anderson, A People’s Army, 58–62; Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 166–70. Selesky, in the most complete study to date of a colonial military system, estimates that 60 percent of the eligible men served in the Connecticut forces during the war; my own earlier estimate that 40 percent of the eligible men in Massachusetts served was based on scrappier evidence and was intended to be as conservative as possible. In fact, participation in Massachusetts probably equaled that of Connecticut.

7. Washington to Francis Fauquier, 9 Dec. 1758, and Christopher Hardwick to Washington, 12 Dec. 1758, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 6, September 1758–December 1760 (Charlottesville, Va., 1988), 165–7.

8. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 2, Young Washington (New York, 1948), 301–2, 316–21.

9. Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition (Athens, Ga., 1985), 15; Freeman, Young Washington, 368–99.

10. Washington to Bouquet, 6 Nov. 1758, Papers of Washington, 6:116.

PART V: ANNUS MIRABILIS, 1759 CHAPTER THIRTY: Success, Anxiety, and Power: The Ascent of William Pitt

1. John C. Webster, ed., Journal of William Amherst in America, 1758–1760 (London, 1927), 33–4.

2. Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George II (London, 1846), 3:134.

3. Quotation: Walpole to George Montagu, 21 Oct. 1759, in Paget Toynbee, ed., The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1903), 314. News of Ticonderoga: Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 233–4; Peter Douglas Brown, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: The Great Commoner (London, 1978), 179. News of Forts Frontenac and Duquesne: see Pitt to Amherst, 23 Jan. 1759, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondenceof William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:12. (Pitt learned of Duquesne’s fall on 19 Jan.)

4. Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1986), 62–3; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victori ous Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 129–30; Russell Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 180–8; Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), 207–8.

5. Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 233–53; Showalter, Wars of Frederick, 208.

6. Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 1 (London, 1918), 271–281, 286.

7. Reginald Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1966), 86, 460–1.

8. Annual expenses: Middleton, Bells, 92. Strategic situation at the end of 1758: Savory, Army, 112–15.

9. Weigley, Age of Battles, 188–90; Showalter, Wars of Frederick, 212–30.

10. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:286–304; Middleton, Bells, 81–2.

11. Newcastle’s financial anxieties: Middleton, Bells, 88–90; Reed Browning, “The Duke of Newcastle and the Financing of the Seven Years’ War,” Journal of Economic History 31 (1971): 344–77. Newcastle’s loyalty, and Pitt’s growing regard: id., The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 261–2, 268.

12. Walpole, Memoirs of George II, 3:185.

13. Ayling, Elder Pitt, 232; on the king’s blindness and loss of hearing, see Charles Chenevix Trench, George II (London, 1973), 292.

14. George, prince of Wales, to the earl of Bute, c. 8 Dec. 1758, in Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766 (London, 1939), 18.

15. On the character of British military institutions, see Sylvia Frey, “British Armed Forces and the American Victory,” in John Ferling, ed., The World Turned Upside Down: The AmericanVictory in the War of Independence (New York, 1988), esp. 167–70.

16. On Barrington, see Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733–1763 (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 299–300; and John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 223–4, 231–50, 365–70. Pitt disliked Barrington for his connections to Halifax and thus to the Bedford Whigs; dealing directly with Anson and Ligonier offered a way to avoid dealing with him.

17. Savory (Army, 88–9) suggests that Ferdinand decided to go on the defensive between 14 and 24 July when it was clear that his opponents far outnumbered him and that his own strength was largely spent.

18. On Cumming and the expedition, see James L. A. Webb Jr., “The Mid-Eighteenth Century Gum Arabic Trade and the British Conquest of Saint-Louis du Sénégal, 1758,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997): 37–58, the most complete account; also Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 174–7; and Ayling, Elder Pitt, 193–4, 224, 238. On the economic impact of the venture, see John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen ContinentalColonies (New York, 1989), 2:1144–6 (table E-45); and id. and Russell Menard, The Economy of Colonial British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 158, fig. 7.1.

19. Beckford to Pitt, 11 Sept. 1758, quoted in Gipson, Culmination, 84.

20. On Martinique’s exports, see McCusker, Rum and Revolution, 1:143–4, 329 (tables 4-2 and 5-2). On Martinique’s significance as a privateering base, see J. K. Eyre, “The Naval History of Martinique,” U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings 68 (1942): 1115–24. Most of the fourteen hundred Anglo-American ships taken in the West Indies during the war were lost to privateers operating out of Martinique.

21. On the strength and organization of the expedition, see Marshall Smelser, The Campaign for the Sugar Islands: A Study in Amphibious Warfare (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), 16–27. On Anson’s fears, see Middleton, Bells, 87. Financial burdens: Ayling, Elder Pitt, 242; Gipson, Victorious Years, 289; Middleton, Bells, 113; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1989), 117 (fig. 4.7). Quotation: Walpole to Horace Mann, 25 Dec. and 27 Nov. 1758, in W. S. Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Cor respondence,vol. 21, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Sir Horace Mann (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 261, 257.

22. Diplomatic and naval initiatives: Middleton, Bells, 96, 108–11. Army and militia: J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1802 (London, 1965), 135–61; also see Eliga Gould, Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming), chap. 3, for the riskiness of the decision to rely on the militia, which had provoked resistance and even riots in 1757 among men unwilling to be pressed into militia service.

23. Pitt to the governors of Mass. Bay, N.H., Conn., R.I., N.Y., N.J., 9 Dec. 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:414–16; id. to the governors of Pa., Md., Va., N.C., S.C., 9 Dec. 1758, 417–20.

24. “A Memorandum of Orders Sent to General Amherst,” 9 Dec. 1758–23 Jan. 1759, ibid., 426–7; quotation, Pitt to Amherst, 29 Dec. 1758, ibid., 433.

25. Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 135.

26. “No objection”: Wolfe to Pitt, 22 Nov. 1758, in Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (New York, 1909), 400. The suggestion that Pitt found in Wolfe a kindred spirit is a virtual commonplace, although nowhere documented directly: see, e.g., J. H. Plumb, Chatham (New York, 1965), 75; Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York, 1991), 15.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Ministerial Uncertainties

1. Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 115–16; J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1802 (London, 1965), 154.

2. On Martinique, see Marshall Smelser, The Campaign for the Sugar Islands: A Study in Amphibious Warfare (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), 39–65; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 88–94; and Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 1 (London, 1918), 378–80.

3. Hopson’s frailty: Gipson, Culmination, 86–7; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Hopson, Peregrine Thomas.” Expedition stalls at Basse-Terre: Smelser, Campaign, 75–102; Gipson, Culmination, 98–101; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:380–1. Hopson was evidently about seventy-five years old at the time of his appointment, which came at the direction of the king.

4. Smelser, Campaign, 113–20; Gipson, Culmination, 101–2; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 1:382–5.

5. Middleton, Bells, 115–20; Western, Militia, 154–6; Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army, 1702–1770 (Oxford, 1958), 297; Reginald Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1966), 118–50.

6. The earl of Holdernesse, 17 May 1759, cited in Western, Militia, 156.

7. Middleton, Bells, 120; Smelser, Campaign, 127–43; Gipson, Culmination, 102–3; Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (Oxford, 1936), 186–95.

8. Smelser, Campaign, 113–15, 143–7.

9. Gipson, Culmination, 94–5; John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies (New York, 1989), 2:707 (table B-99).

10. Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 239; McCusker, Rum and Revolution, 2:924 (table D-20). On slave imports, see ibid., 673 (table B-70). Exports to the mainland: Pares, War and Trade, 488 n.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Surfeit of Enthusiasm, Shortage of Resources

1. Pitt to Barrington, 7 July 1759, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:137.

2. Chests of coin arrive at Boston: Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 312, 317–8. Default narrowly averted: Thomas Pownall to Pitt, 30 Sept.–2 Oct. 1758, Pitt Corr., 1:358–64. Gipson, Victorious Years, 317–8. Military participation and a feared shortage of laborers: Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1758, vol. 34 (Boston, 1963), 340, 364, 372, 376 (hereafter cited as JHRM). Between a fourth and a third of all men in the prime military age range served in the Massachusetts provincial forces in 1758; a sufficiently concerning fact that on 14 Mar. 1758 a special legislative committee had been formed to determine what the likely impact of such participation would be. The committee felt strongly enough about the issue to set its conclusion in italics. “[T]he great Scarcity of Labourers, which will be the natural Consequence of so large a Body of Forces as are rais’d and to be rais’d for his Majesty’s Service within this Government the present Year,” the committee found, “makes it necessary that such as are left be not called off from their Labour”; they therefore recommended that all men not serving as provincials be excused from militia training during planting and harvest to ensure an adequate labor supply. The House passed the resolution, in an apparently unanimous voice vote, on 23 Mar. 1758.

3. Report on governor’s speech, 10 Mar. 1759, JHRM 1759, vol. 35 (Boston, 1964), 273; also Pownall to Pitt, 16 Mar. 1759, Pitt Corr., 2:70–3.

4. Address to the governor, 17 Apr. 1759, JHRM 1759, 35:336–8.

5. Bounty: ibid., 335. With interest due, the net earnings for a Massachusetts private approximated thirty pounds in province currency, or twenty-two pounds ten shillings sterling—at least double an agricultural laborer’s wages for the same period. On contemporary awareness of the consequences of such exceptional wages, see Thomas Hutchinson to Col. Israel Williams, 24 Apr. 1759: “I hope we shall not have occasion hereafter to go into the disagreeable measure of impressing men. The Bounty is extravagant & more than I would vote for on the Committee & will be a bad precedent, at least it appears to me who, I assure you, often think of the deplorable State we must be in if we have no reimbursement” (quoted in Gipson, Victorious Years, 321 n. 128). To ensure that the province’s subsidy would not be held up, Hutchinson—now the lieutenant governor—personally screened all claims and prepared the paperwork for Parliament.

6. Gov. Thomas Fitch to Pitt, 14 July 1759, Pitt Corr., 2:140; see also same to same, 16 Apr. 1759, ibid., 84–7; see also Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 149 (table 5.1), 150.

7. Gipson, Victorious Years, 308–10 (N.J.), 309–10 (N.Y.), 325–8 (N.H.), 313–15 (R.I.). Also see John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, vol. 6 (Providence, 1861), 181, 194, 207, 213–14. Rhode Island’s attempt to retain men over the winter reflected the unusual conditions within a colony where as much as a fifth of the male population in the military age range was engaged in privateering and where many merchants were trading heavily with the enemy’s West Indies islands. The attractiveness of privateering necessitated paying men over the winter merely to have a claim on their services the following spring; meanwhile anxiety that the British government would punish the colony for its illicit trade made the assembly’s merchants eager to avoid giving offense to the commander in chief in point of raising troops. On Rhode Island’s trade with the enemy, see esp. Loudoun to Cumberland, 22 June 1757, in Stanley M. Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748–1765: Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (1936; reprint, New York, 1969), 376.

8. Gipson, Victorious Years, 317.

9. Amherst’s financial problems: Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 133–5. Colonies’ willingness to lend money: Gipson, Victorious Years, 310. Amherst quotation: id. to De Lancey, 8 July 1759, quoted ibid.

10. Ibid., 290–2, 296–8; Gov. Henry Ellis to Pitt, 12 Feb. and 1 Mar. 1759, Pitt Corr., 2:38–40, 45; Gov. William Henry Lyttleton to Pitt, 26 Mar. and 15 Apr. 1759, ibid., 77, 84.

11. Gipson, Victorious Years, 293–6. The Burgesses renewed their offer of a ten-pound bounty and once more filled the ranks with volunteers, including the first substantial numbers of veterans; see James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 197 n. 23.

12. Gipson, Victorious Years, 301–7. In 1760 the Board of Trade and the Privy Council condemned the legislature’s action and ordered it to make restitution to the Penn family.

13. That there was real concern about this is clear from the panicky reaction of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the rumor that Byrd was about to be named commandant at Pittsburgh. The assembly hurriedly sent a delegation to Denny to discover whether there was any truth to the reports and to warn him that if there was, the assembly would deny all support for the coming campaign (ibid., 300–1).

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Emblem of Empire: Fort Pitt and the Indians

1. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 300; Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 160–1.

2. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 411–12; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 255. The raids continued and indeed intensified until May, when a French and Indian party from Venango killed thirty people near Fort Ligonier: one of the deadliest raids of the war in Pennsylvania (Wainwright, Croghan, 159).

3. Plan of trade: Eric Hinderaker, “The Creation of the American Frontier: Europeans and Indians in the Ohio River Valley, 1673–1800” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1991), 312–13, quotations from “An Act for Preventing Abuses in the Indian Trade” (1758). Pemberton and the Pittsburgh trade: John W. Jordan, ed., “James Kenny’s ‘Journal to ye Westward,’ 1758–59,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1937): 440 (entry of 2 Sept. 1759); Theodore Thayer, Israel Pemberton, King of the Quakers (Philadelphia, 1943), 171–4.

4. Hinderaker, “Creation of the Frontier,” 316–19; see also Wainwright, Croghan, 161–3.

5. Wainwright, Croghan, 159–63.

6. Construction of Fort Pitt: Gipson, Victorious Years, 340–1 (measurements based on “A Plan of the New Fort at Pitts-Burgh or Du Quesne,” facing 340). Cannon and barracks: anonymous letter, 21 Mar. 1760, quoted in Charles Morse Stotz, Outposts of the War for Empire: The French and English in Western Pennsylvania: Their Armies, Their Forts, Their People,1749–1764 (Pittsburgh, 1985), 131.

7. “James Kenny’s Journal,” 433 (entry of 24 July 1759, recounting conversation of 9 July). Comparative sizes of Forts Pitt and Duquesne: Stotz, Outposts, 56, 81, 133, 137. All of Fort Duquesne could have been situated comfortably on the parade square in the middle of Fort Pitt, which encompassed 1.3 acres.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: The Six Nations Join the Fight: The Siege of Niagara

1. Amherst to Pitt, 19 June 1759, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:124–5; “Prideaux and Johnson Orderly Book,” James Sullivan, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 3 (Albany, 1921), 55 (entry of 27 June 1759). Prideaux arrived at Oswego with about four thousand men, having detached about a thousand soldiers (mainly provincials) to garrison the forts at the Carrying Place. He left another thousand at Oswego to hold the river’s mouth and to begin constructing a new post, Fort Ontario. Thus when he left for Niagara his force consisted of about two thousand regulars, a thousand provincials, and a thousand Iroquois warriors. For units and dispositions see Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 344; and Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 143 and app. 2. For the best overall account of the Anglo-American campaign and French defense, see Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Siege—1759: The Campaign against Niagara (Youngstown, N.Y., 1996).

2. Mercer to Forbes, 8 Jan. 1759, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., The Papers of Col. Henry Bouquet, ser. 21655 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1943), 25–6.

3. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 414–15. Quotation: Johnson to Amherst, 16 Feb. 1759, Johnson Papers, 3:19. That a delegation of Iroquois approached Johnson is a surmise on my part, based on the episode that Mercer reported from Pittsburgh.

4. See esp. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, 1992), 23–46; also Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 186–268. That the Iroquois regarded the threat as being of the utmost importance can be read in the number of Indians that accompanied Prideaux to Niagara: to field a thousand warriors was to make something like a total mobilization of the Confederacy’s military manpower. In c. 1736 (the only year for which there is anything like a reliable estimate) the Iroquois could muster about eleven hundred warriors; given the slow growth of populations in Iroquoia it would seem unlikely that there were many more than that among the Six Nations in 1759. To send so many men with Prideaux was both an immense commitment and a great risk, since few warriors would have been left to defend the villages of Iroquoia. The Confederacy council could never have countenanced such extreme measures unless a powerful consensus justified it. (On Iroquois populations, see Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 31–2.)

5. Prideaux was only forty-one, and a colonel only since Oct. 1758, when he replaced Howe as commandant of the 55th Regiment of Foot; see Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Prideaux, John.” On Niagara, see Charles Morse Stotz, Outposts of the War for Empire: The French and English in Western Pennsylvania: Their Armies, Their Forts, Their People, 1749–1764 (Pittsburgh, 1985), 71, and esp. Dunnigan, Siege, 11–22, 34–44.

6. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Pouchot, Pierre.” Unless otherwise noted, the account of the siege follows this excellent sketch and the account in Gipson, Victorious Years, 347–56.

7. “Bad business”: Pouchot, Memoir upon the Late War in North America, . . . 1755–60, 11–14 July 1759, quoted in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 417. Besides Gipson’s account of the conferences of 11–14 July in Victorious Years, 349–51, see Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 216–17, and Dunnigan, Siege, 57–60.

8. Ibid., 61–75; Victorious Years, 348–9.

9. Ibid., 351–2; Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 455–6; Dunnigan, Siege, 77–82.

10. Ibid., 88–93; “floating island”: anonymous witness quoted in Gipson, Victorious Years, 352.

11. For the most comprehensive account of the engagement at La Belle Famille and the pursuit after the battle, see Dunnigan, Siege, 93–8. The Pennsylvania Gazette, 23 Aug. 1759, reported that the Iroquois hunted the retreating French through the woods to a “vast Slaughter.” Captain Charles Lee of the 44th Foot reported to his sister that Lignery’s men “were totally defeated . . . with the entire loss of officers and men, their Indians excepted,” and remarked to his uncle that “almost their entire party [was] cut off” (id. to Miss Sidney Lee, 30 July [1759], The Lee Papers, vol. 1, New-York Historical Society, Collections 4 [1871]: 19; Lee to Sir William Bunbury, 9 Aug. 1759, ibid., 21). Captain James De Lancey, commander of a regular light infantry detachment at the abatis, reported that “Our Indians as soon as they saw the Enemy give way pursued them very briskly and took and killed great numbers of them . . .” (Capt. James De Lancey to Lt. Gov. James De Lancey, 25 July 1759, in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, 15 vols. [Albany, 1856–1887], 7:402). Lignery: see Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Le Marchand de Lignery, François-Marie”; the author, C. J. Russ, suggests that Lignery died on 28 July. Johnson, however, did not leave Niagara until 4 Aug., at which time Lignery was still alive; see Johnson to Amherst, 9 Aug. 1759, Johnson Papers, 3:121.

Joseph Marin de La Malgue (called Marin fils, baptized 1719), son of the man to whom Duquesne had assigned the task of building the Ohio forts in 1752; his story is one of those small odysseys that illuminates the nature of eighteenth-century European colonialism. Marin fils had spent most of his life as a merchant, government administrator, and officer in the troupes de la marine, serving in posts over a huge geographical range, from Minnesota to Acadia. Imprisoned in New York after the battle, he was “repatriated” to France—a country he had never seen—in 1762. After failing to establish himself there he eventually participated in the attempt to establish a colony in Madagascar, where he died in 1774 (Dictionary of CanadianBiography, vol. 4, s.v. “Marin de la Malgue, Joseph”).

12. Johnson to Amherst, 31 July 1759, Johnson Papers, 3:115.

13. “Settling an Alliance”: ibid. Amherst sends Gage to take command: Amherst to Johnson, 6 Aug. 1759, ibid., 3:118–20.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: General Amherst Hesitates: Ticonderoga and Crown Point

1. News of Niagara’s fall: see Amherst to Johnson, 6 Aug. 1759, in James Sullivan, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 3 (New York, 1921), 118. The campaign to date: Daniel John Beattie, “Sir Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 137–63; on Bradstreet’s role, see William G. Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit and Preferment in Colonial North America: John Bradstreet’s Quest (Waterloo, Ont., 1982), 142–52.

2. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967) 361–4; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Bourlamaque, François-Charles de”; Beattie, “Amherst,” 153–9, 164.

3. “Great Post”: Amherst’s journal, quoted in Beattie, “Amherst,” 164. Estimate of strategic situation: Amherst to Pitt, 22 Oct. 1759, a journal letter recounting developments from 6 Aug. onward; see esp. entries of 6–18 Aug. (Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America [1906; reprint, New York, 1969], 2:186–90). On 1 Sept. Amherst ordered a third vessel built, the Boscawen, to counter a new sixteen-gun French sloop. This necessitated a new sawmill and further delays. Rufus Putnam supervised the mill’s construction (Beattie, “Amherst,” 161; E. C. Dawes, ed., Journal of Gen. Rufus Putnam, Kept in Northern New York during Four Campaigns of the Old French and Indian War, 1757–1760 [Albany, 1886], 91 [entries of 26 July–4 Aug. 1759]; Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam [Boston, 1903], 26–8).

4. Anticipations of Wolfe’s failure: John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 95. Preparations and roads: Amherst to Pitt, 22 Oct. 1759, entries of 6–31 Aug., Pitt Corr., 2:186–92.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Dubious Battle: Wolfe Meets Montcalm at Québec

1. Course of the campaign: C. P. Stacey, Quebec, 1759: The Siege and the Battle (Toronto, 1959), 51, 75–80. “Reduced [his] Operations”: Brig. George Townshend to Charlotte, Lady Ferrers [his wife], 6 Sept. 1759, ibid., 93. “Windmills, water-mills”: Capt. John Knox, An Historical Journal of the Campaigns in North America, for the Years 1757, 1758, 1759, and 1760, ed. Arthur G. Doughty, 3 vols. (Toronto, 1914–16), 1:375. Atrocities: Stacey, Quebec, 91. Scalpings were common in the New England–raised ranger companies, but regulars also engaged in the practice, as when a detachment of the 43rd Regiment captured, killed, and scalped a priest and thirty of his parishioners at Ste. Anne on August 23. Wolfe himself sanctioned scalping, if not necessarily mass murder, by an order of 27 July, which sought to systematize what had already become a general practice: “The Genl. strickly forbids the inhuman practice of scalping, except when the enemy are Indians, or Canads. dressed like Indians” (General Orders in Wolfe’s Army [Quebec, 1875], 29).

2. Christopher Hibbert, Wolfe at Quebec (New York, 1959), 107–19.

3. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 389.

4. Failed harvest: Jean Elizabeth Lunn, “Agriculture and War in Canada, 1740–1760,” CanadianHistorical Review 16 (1935): 2, 128–9. Severity of the winter: George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 221–2. Bougainville’s arrival: Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 205–6; Gipson, Victorious Years, 389–90. Vaudreuil vs. Montcalm: Roger Michalon, “Vaudreuil et Montcalm—les hommes— leurs relations—influence de ces relations sur la conduite de la guerre 1756–1759,” in Conflits de sociétés au Canada français pendant la Guerre de Sept Ans et leur influence sur les operations, ed. Jean Delmas (Ottawa: Colloque International d’Histoire Militaire, Ottawa, 19–27 Aug. 1978), 43–175, esp. 153–4.

5. Gipson, Victorious Years, 388–9.

6. Stacey, Quebec, 43–4; Stanley, Last Phase, 223–4; Steele, Warpaths, 219.

7. Knox, Historical Journal, 1:375.

8. Stacey, Quebec, 41–2.

9. “My antagonist”: Wolfe to his mother, 31 Aug. 1759, in Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (New York, 1909), 469. Deadlock and council of war: Gipson, Victorious Years, 405–7, Willson, Letters of Wolfe, 466–8; Stacey, Quebec, 99–102 and app. (“Wolfe’s Correspondence with the Brigadiers, August 1759”), 179–81.

10. Stacey, Quebec, 104–5.

11. Robert C. Alberts, The Most Extraordinary Adventures of Major Robert Stobo (Boston, 1965).

12. Stacey, Quebec, 106–8.

13. Wolfe to Brigadier [Robert] Monckton, 81⁄2 o’clock, 12 Sept. 1759, in Willson, Letters of Wolfe, 485.

14. Ibid., 482–3, 493. Jervis, of course, would become a notable fighting admiral in the Napoleonic Wars, winning the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, 14 Feb. 1797, and earning the peerage, as Lord St. Vincent, that he would bear until he became admiral of the fleet and finally first lord of the Admiralty (a task at which, unlike battle, he did not distinguish himself).

15. Stacey, Quebec, 127–30; Hibbert, Wolfe at Quebec, 134–8.

16. There is obviously a substantial degree of speculation in this, for we cannot know Wolfe’s state of mind or his plans for the assault. However, certain evidence does point in this direction. Brig. Gen. James Murray, the fourth-in-command on the expedition, never forgave Wolfe’s “absurd, visionary” conduct and especially resented his abandonment of the brigadiers’ advice to carry out the upriver landing at Pointe aux Trembles, where he could have cut off Québec’s supplies as well as at L’Anse au Foulon, but with infinitely less risk to the army. In 1774 Murray was still angry enough to write: “It does not appear to me that it ever was Mr Wolfes intention to bring the Enemy to a general Action” on the Plains; the landing was “almost impossible,” and “successful . . . thanks to Providence” (to George Townshend, 5 Nov. 1774, quoted in Stacey, Quebec, 176).

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the Canadian intendant, Bigot, investigated Wolfe’s plans. On 25 Oct. 1759 he wrote to Marshal Belle-Isle, “I know all the particulars of that landing from English officers of my acquaintance who have communicated them to me; adding, that Mr. Wolf did not expect to succeed; that he had not attempted to land above Quebec [at Pointe aux Trembles or Cap Rouge, the two strategically sound objectives], and that he was to sacrifice only his van-guard which consisted of 200 men; that were these fired on, they were all to reëmbark” (quoted in Gipson, Victorious Years, 416 n. 58).

Another French document, the anonymous Journal tenu à l’armée que commandoit feu Mr. de Montcalm lieutenant general, tells a similar tale. In a supposed council of war, Wolfe is said to have declared his intention to take 150 men ashore, “and the entire army will be prepared to follow. Should this first detachment encounter any resistance on the part of the enemy, I pledge you my word of honor that then, regarding our reputation protected against all sorts of reproach, I will no longer hesitate to reëmbark” (ibid).

Although the form in which it is reported (as a speech to a council of war) is an obvious fabrication, this sensitivity to reproach in fact rings true for Wolfe, who worried about his reputation for brilliance and who feared losing it rather more than he feared death. In 1755 he had written to his mother that “the consequence [of my reputation] will be very fatal to me in the end, for as I rise in rank people will expect some considerable performances, and I shall be induced, in support of an ill-got reputation, to be lavish of my life, and shall probably meet that fate which is the ordinary effect of such conduct” (letter of 8 Nov. 1755, Willson, Letters of Wolfe, 280).

17. Knox, Historical Journal, 2:94–102 (including quotation on the weather); Stacey, Quebec, 130–2; Gipson, Victorious Years, 414–16. For a masterful assessment of the British and French positions and their comparative advantages, see W. J. Eccles, “The Battle of Quebec: A Reappraisal,” in id., Essays on New France (Toronto, 1987), 125–33, esp. 129 ff.

18. Stacey, Quebec, 121, 133–5; Gipson, Victorious Years, 416–17.

19. Stacey, Quebec, 137 (quotation: Major Malartic to Bourlamaque, 28 Sept. 1759).

20. Vaudreuil to Bougainville, 13 Sept. 1759 (“At a quarter to seven”), ibid., 135.

21. M. de Montbeillard, quoted ibid., 145–6.

22. Willson, Letters of Wolfe, 491–2; Knox, Historical Journal, 2:99. Eighteenth-century infantry commanders generally avoided ordering men to assume prone positions because it could be difficult to get them up from the relative safety of the ground to the much more dangerous standing position. In this case, however, Wolfe’s men were thoroughly disciplined and separated from the enemy by a third of a mile; he had every reason to trust that they would rise to meet the French attack.

23. Knox, Historical Journal, 2:103, notes that entrenching tools were not brought to the heights until after the battle.

24. Even if Wolfe did not recite Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard on the night before the battle or exclaim that he would rather have written that poem than take Québec, as the legend maintains, he was clearly attached to it. His fiancée had given him a copy, which he annotated during the voyage from England. He underlined Gray’s famous admonition that “The paths of glory lead but to the grave” but seems to have been more impressed by his observation on the adverse effects of “Chill penury,” in response to which he penned an extended comment. See Beckles Willson, “General Wolfe and Gray’s ‘Elegy,’ ” The Nineteenth Century and After 434 (1913): 862–75.

25. Pessimism: Stacey, Quebec, 84. Topography and the battle: John Keegan, Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (New York, 1996), 127–8.

26. Quotation: Malartic to Bourlamaque [28 Sept. 1759?], in Stacey, Quebec, 147.

27. Five other battalions were also on the field: the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 60th (Royal American) Regiment and the 15th Foot, deployed at a right angle to the line at the left, against a flanking maneuver; the 35th Foot, arrayed similarly on the right; and Howe’s Light Infantry, in a line to the left and rear of the battlefield, to guard against Indian and Canadian skirmishers as well as to defend against Bougainville’s column, should it make an appearance. See Stacey, Quebec, map 6; also Beattie, “Amherst,” app. 2.

28. Stacey, Quebec, 147 (“one knee” is from Montbeillard, without citation); Gipson, Victorious Years, 420 n. 72 (“scattering shots” is from the journal of Major “Moncrief ” [Mackellar]). “Musket-shot” range referred to the extreme limit of lethal musket fire, about three hundred yards, not to the much shorter maximum effective range of about eighty yards. Rounds fired at “half-musket-shot” range were only randomly effective. Major George Hanger, a British cavalry officer, later wrote that “a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded . . . at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aims at him . . .” (General Hanger to All Sportsmen . . . [London, 1814], quoted in Anthony D. Darling, Red Coat and Brown Bess [Bloomfield, Ont., 1971], 11).

29. “This false movement”: Malartic to Bourlamaque, 28 Sept. 1759, quoted in Stacey, Quebec, 147. “Close and heavy discharge”: Knox, Historical Journal, 2:101. This quotation combines one of Knox’s footnotes (from “close and heavy discharge” to “une coup de canon”) with the independent clause that follows the position of the asterisk in his text (from “Hereupon they gave way” to the end).

The loss of battalion integrity among Montcalm’s forces did not indicate indiscipline so much as the coexistence within the same force of two different training regimes, only one of which was adapted to open-field battle. The regulars had been trained to do exactly what they did: fire, reload quickly, and advance. The militia, on the other hand, knew how to fight only in the bush and reloaded “according to their custom,” either prone or under cover; thus they fell behind the regulars, breaking the line of battle. After Braddock’s defeat the British had trained regulars in woodland as well as open-field tactics, taking care not to employ provincials in any role that required maneuver. The French regulars also knew how to fight both in the woods and in the open, but Montcalm had not been sufficiently alive to the dangers of diluting their ranks with militiamen trained only in woodland tactics.

30. Stanley, New France, 232; Stacey, Quebec, 149–50. Probably the most accurate version of Wolfe’s death is Knox’s, in Historical Journal, 2:114. There is little reason to doubt the general tenor, at least, of his last words as Knox reported them (“Now, God be praised, I will die in peace”). The captain interviewed eyewitnesses, and the quotation was quite in keeping with the tormented general’s character. It also, at least in substance, squares with his last words as reported in a letter from Quebec, quoted in the Pennsylvania Gazette of 25 Oct. 1759: “I am satisfied, my Boys.”

31. Gipson, Victorious Years, 422; Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 218; Stacey, Quebec, 152–5; Stanley, New France, 231–3; Willson, Letters of Wolfe, 494 n., 495–6; Knox, Historical Journal, 2:102–8.

32. Stacey, Quebec, 156–8.

33. Gipson, Victorious Years, 423–4.

34. Knox, Historical Journal, 2:121–32; Gipson, Victorious Years, 424–6; Stacey, Quebec, 159–61.

35. Gipson, Victorious Years, 424–6.

36. On Lévis, see esp. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, s.v. “Lévis, François (François-Gaston) de, Duc de Lévis.”

37. On preparations for winter quarters at Quebec, see Gipson, Victorious Years, 429–30; Monckton to Pitt, 8 Oct. 1759, and Murray to Pitt (abstract), 12 Oct. 1759, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:177–83.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: Fall’s Frustrations

1. Amherst journal, 9 Oct. 1759 [?], quoted in Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 180.

2. Amherst to Pitt, 22 Oct. 1759, entries dated 9–21 Oct., in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Militaryand Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:198–201.

3. “Robert Webster’s Journal,” Bulletin of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum 2 (1931): 146–8 (entries of 26 Oct.–18 Nov. 1759).

4. Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam (Boston, 1903), 28–31 (reflections following entries of 26 July and 16 Dec. 1759); quotations at 31. After completing the mill, Putnam went to Crown Point to work as a master carpenter under “Major Skean” [Philip Skene], who promised him the wage of a dollar a day for returning to Ticonderoga. Skene had commanded the post at Stillwater from which Putnam and the rest of Learned’s company had deserted in Feb. 1758. If Skene recognized Putnam as a deserter, he may have intended to visit some small retribution on him, for a crime he could no longer punish.

5. B. F. Browne, comp., “Extracts from Gibson Clough’s Journal,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 3 (1861): 104–5 (entries of 26 Sept.–3 Nov. 1759; quotations from 26 and 30 Sept.).

6. “Made up [his] mind”: Buell, Memoirs of Putnam, 31. “When I get out”: “Extracts from Gibson Clough’s Journal,” 104 (entry of 3d [30] Sept. 1759). For troop disorders among New Englanders and their significance, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 167–95; and Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 187–9.

7. “The provincials have got home in their heads”: Amherst’s journal, entry of 3 Nov. 1759, quoted in Beattie, “Amherst,” 192. “The Disregard of Orders”: Amherst to Duncan, 6 Dec. 1761, quoted in Douglas Edward Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 132.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: Celebrations of Empire, Expectations of the Millennium

1. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Gazette, 24 Jan. 1760. New York: Pennsylvania Gazette, 15 Nov. 1759.

2. Boston Evening Post, 22 Oct. 1759; cf. the account in Pennsylvania Gazette, 25 Oct. 1759.

3. Samuel Langdon, Joy and Gratitude to God for . . . the Conquest of Quebec (Portsmouth, N.H., 1760), 37–8; see also quoted and explicated passages in James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, Conn., 1977), 211.

4. Samuel Cooper, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Thomas Pownall, Esq. . . . October 16, 1759. Upon Occasion of the Success of His Majesty’s Arms in the Reduction of Quebec . . . (Boston, 1759), 38–9; see also passage as quoted in Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986), 251.

5. Langdon, in Joy and Gratitude, spoke of Québec as “a token of assurance that God would ‘continue his care of the reformed churches, till all the prophecies of the new testament against the mystical Babylon are accomplished,’ ” including Prussia as a leading partner in the “ ‘protestant interest’ ” (Davidson, Millennial Thought, 210). Providentialists had no problem explaining the previous indecisive outcomes of the Anglo-French wars because in these the Protestant British had allied themselves with the Catholic Austrians.

6. “A mighty empire” and “Methinks I see”: Jonathan Mayhew, Two Discourses Delivered October 25th, 1759. . . . (Boston, 1759), 60–1. On these sermons’ millennialist content, see Davidson, Millennial Thought, 209–10.

7. Stout, New England Soul, 253; Kerry Trask, In the Pursuit of Shadows: Massachusetts Millennialism and the Seven Years’ War (New York, 1989), 223–86.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: Day of Decision: Quiberon Bay

1. Pitt’s gloom and recovery: Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 261–2 (“with reason . . . gives it all over”—Newcastle to Hardwicke, 15 Oct. 1759, quoted 261). Wolfe’s despair: Wolfe to Pitt, 2 Sept. 1759, in C. P. Stacey, Quebec, 1759: The Siege and the Battle (Toronto, 1959), 191 (“at a loss”); Wolfe to Holdernesse, 9 Sept. 1759, in Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (New York, 1909), 475 (“so far recovered”).

2. “The incidents”: Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second (London, 1846), 3:219. “Pronounced a kind of funeral oration”: ibid., 229–30.

3. On the Battle of Minden, 1 Aug. 1759, and its aftermath, see Reginald Savory, His BritannicMajesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1966), 162–84; also, in general, see Piers Mackesy’s superb account, focusing on the actions of Lord George Sackville [later Germaine], The Coward of Minden (New York, 1979).

4. Battle of Lagos: Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 224; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 31–40. French finances: Walpole, Memoirs of George II, 3:223–4. (“Even their future historians will not be able to parry” such a disgrace, Walpole chortled. “Defeated Armies frequently claim the victory, but no nation ever sung Te Deum upon becoming insolvent” [223].)

5. Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), 243–52; Weigley, Age of Battles, 190–1, gives the number of Prussians engaged as 53,000 and their losses as 21,000. Christopher Duffy’s estimate, in The Military Life of Frederick the Great (New York, 1986), 183–92, agrees with Showalter’s.

6. Naval operations: Weigley, Age of Battles, 225–6; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:48–52; Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 142–3. (The French used Le Havre to stage invasion preparations until a raid in July by Rear Admiral George Romney destroyed many of the invasion craft; thereafter they shifted preparations to other ports on the Brittany coast. By fall most were in the island-studded Quiberon Bay, a hundred miles to the southwest of Brest.) Vulnerability of Britain to invasion: J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1802 (London, 1965), 162–8, 194 n., et passim. (Parliament, reluctant to arm large numbers of Scots and Irishmen, had created an English—not British—militia, leaving the defense of Scotland and Ireland to regulars, of whom there were too few both to guard against an attack and to suppress the uprising that would inevitably accompany it.)

7. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:57–60; Weigley, Age of Battles, 227.

8. On the dead hand of the Fighting Instructions of 1653, see Weigley, Age of Battles, esp. 145–7; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 1 (London, 1918); 116 ff.

9. Character of the battle and its results: Weigley, Age of Battles, 228–9; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:60–70. Howe: Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Howe, Richard.” “Had we had but two hours”: Hawke’s report to the Admiralty, 24 Nov. 1759, in Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:69.

10. Threats to public credit: Middleton, Bells, 113–18, 136 (in Mar.–May, and again in July, there had been crises of confidence arising from the shortage of money available to meet current government obligations). Economic expansion and security of government finance: ibid., 153; Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 52–4. Perhaps as much as military victories, the highly atypical experience of prosperity in wartime—for British exports and reexports rose by a third during the war years, trade with the colonies increased to new levels with surges in demand for consumer goods, and the economy in general expanded as in no other military conflict—helped generate the sense of security that underlay this willingness to accept such increases in public indebtedness. No statistical series could testify more eloquently to this mood than the letter the earl of Pembroke wrote to Captain Charles Lee late in 1759. After expatiating on the victories of the year and relating army gossip, he concluded, “It don’t often happen here, or any where else, I believe, but there is certainly at present amongst all here the greatest spirit and unanimity imaginable, and no appearance of want, much debauch and good living, so pray come amongst us soon” (26 Nov. 1759; New-York Historical Society, Collections, Lee Papers 1 [1871]: 23).

11. Pitt to the governors of Mass., N.H., Conn., R.I., N.Y., and N.J., 7 Jan. 1760; to the governors of Pa., Md., Va., N.C., and S.C., 7 Jan. 1760; to Amherst, 7 Jan. 1760; in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:231–42.

PART VI: CONQUEST COMPLETED, 1760 CHAPTER FORTY: War in Full Career

1. Amherst to Pitt, 8 Mar. 1760, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:260–1; Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 200.

2. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1968), 446–7; Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 171.

3. The decision to retain men beyond the standard enlistment term caused great concern in both the House of Representatives and the Council, especially once the dissatisfaction of the men in “the Eastward service”—the Louisbourg garrison—became known. On 24 Apr. 1760, the members of both houses warned Pownall (and, by extension, Amherst) against further altering the enlistment terms of men unwilling to volunteer for further service. Their reasoning, identical to that of Winslow and his officers in 1756, indicates that even in the more cooperative atmosphere fostered by Pitt’s policies, New Englanders had not changed their contractual notions concerning military service.

What we have to Remark is, That the Time for which these Men inlisted into his Majesty’s Service, is expired; they have a right therefore to a Discharge, and [a right to] Demand it. Their Detention hitherto is justifiable from the Necessity of it; but that Necessity no longer subsists. If they should be any longer detained, it will be not only unjust to them, but greatly lessen the Power of the Government to raise Men for his Majesty’s Service in future. Men will never inlist, when they cannot depend upon the Promise of the Government for their Discharge: Justice therefore demand[s] and good Policy requires that these Men should be discharged. We have plighted our Faith, and your Excellency in your Proclamation, your Promise[,] that they should be discharged. The General’s Acceptance of these Men, was an Acceptance of them with the Condition on which they were raised; namely, that they should be discharged at the Expiration of the Time for which they were inlisted. The General’s Honour is therefore engaged as well as your Excellency’s, and our own to procure the Liberation of these Men . . . ( Journals of the House of Representatives ofMassachusetts, 1759–60 [Boston, 1964], 36:333 [Message to His Excellency the Governor, respecting the Detention of the Forces at Nova-Scotia, &c., 24 Apr. 1760]. Hereafter cited as JHRM).

4. Expenses of retaining and enlisting soldiers: JHRM, 36:113–14 (7 Nov. 1759), 191 (24 Jan. 1760); 37, part 1 (1760–61); 11 (30 May 1760). The men who remained at Louisbourg stood to make sizable sums, especially if they acted as artificers, which was the case with both Clough and Jonathan Procter (another private in the same regiment). Procter earned sixty-three pounds, five shillings lawful money in his twenty months at Louisbourg, including bounties, wages, and additional compensation for his work as a carpenter. During that time he spent about thirteen pounds, so Procter ended his service with fifty pounds in his pocket—a remarkable sum for a man who, even at the high wartime wages civilian artisans commanded in the Bay Colony, could have earned no more than forty-five pounds for the same period at home, and who would as well have had to purchase his own lodging, food, and clothing, items supplied as part of his ordinary compensation while on active duty. See “Diary Kept at Louisbourg, 1759–1760, by Jonathan Procter of Danvers,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 70 (1934): 31–57.

5. Gipson, Victorious Years, 445–6. The figure of four thousand for Massachusetts is from Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, vol. 3 (1936; reprint, New York, 1970), 58. The evident shortfall in Massachusetts’s contribution probably stems from the way Hutchinson counted them, as 3,300 having enlisted for general service and 700 having remained in service at Louisbourg. Unlike the other northern provinces, the Bay Colony also garrisoned forts on its own, including Castle William in Boston, a chain of forts along the western and northern frontiers of the province, and Forts Shirley, Western, and Pownall in Maine. Since these were manned and commanded entirely by provincials, they were not counted as part of the general service (i.e., as soldiers placed at the disposal of the commander in chief). This was, however, a distinction lost on the members of the General Court, who saw all the province’s troops as equal in expense and importance, regardless of where and under whose command they had been placed. Thus by the reckoning of the General Court, if not that of Hutchinson or Amherst, the province met (indeed exceeded) the 5,000-man quota to which it initially agreed.

Finally, a word on the slowness of the provincials to arrive at their points of rendezvous for the campaigns, which was a matter of constant complaint for the commanders in chief from Braddock onward. At least in the later years of the war this was probably less a function of the reluctance of men to serve than of two other factors: the need to complete the spring planting, which afforded good wages to plowmen and rural laborers, and therefore delayed their enlistments; and the ability of men who intended to serve to wait until the government announced the impressment quotas of each militia regiment, and then to sell their services to the impressed men as substitutes. Because each of the provinces had statutes authorizing men to be drafted from the militia if enlistment quotas were not met voluntarily, impressment was routinely undertaken to fill out the last vacancies in the ranks. Because the decision on who would be drafted was left to local militia officers, however, the impressed men were not always, or even generally, the vagrants and unmarried men singled out by the statutes as the proper targets. Rather militia officers tended to impress men who had the money to hire substitutes to take their places. This in turn meant that men—and especially veterans like Rufus Putnam, who hired himself out as a substitute in 1759—would wait to strike a bargain with an impressed man (or men, since two or more draftees would sometimes pool their resources to hire a substitute), and then enlist on his behalf. Because the hired man was technically a volunteer, he was entitled to all the normal bounties as well as his wages.

Although it is difficult to know precisely what the going rate for substitutes was in the later years of the war, there would seem to be no doubt that a vigorous secondary market had arisen in military labor by 1758. As the war continued to demand more and more men and as bounties rose, so must the price needed to hire substitutes have risen; but as these were private transactions, we have no systematic evidence on the costs involved. The only documented case of which I have direct knowledge is that of Rufus Putnam, who in 1759 agreed to serve on behalf of Moses Leland of Sutton, in return for fourteen pounds thirteen shillings lawful money—a sum one shilling higher than the maximum bounty offered in that year (see Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam [Boston, 1903], 25 n. 1). As a result of this bargain, Putnam in 1759 would have earned in excess of forty-four pounds lawful money for his service not counting the additional wages he received as an artificer and the increment he received when he was promoted to orderly sergeant. Thus unless Putnam’s case represents an aberration—and there is no reason to suspect that it does—there were substantial economic incentives to delay enlisting, even in the years of high bounties: inducements that would have virtually guaranteed that the provincials would be slow to be raised and slow to appear in the field.

6. This highly conservative approximation is based upon figures in Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 118–19. Main shows that between 1756 and the end of 1759 the price of oxen on the hoof rose by 71 percent; of cows, by 33 percent; of pork, by 50 percent. The price of sheep during the same years doubled—a probable result not of demand for meat, but for wool, in high demand for the blankets that were issued as a part of the bounty in every province through every year of the war.

7. Hutchinson, History, 3:57. One good indicator of the prosperity that had overtaken the province was that one of the taxes laid to pay for the war was an excise on three prime consumer products, “Tea, Coffee and China-Ware.” See JHRM, 36:111–12 (6 Nov. 1759).

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: The Insufficiency of Valor: Lévis and Vauquelin at Québec

1. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 434–5.

2. On Lévis’s plans and the difficult but far from hopeless state of Canada’s defenses, see esp. George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 242–4.

3. Ibid., 244–5 (quotation at 244).

4. Stanley, New France, 245–6; Gipson, Victorious Years, 438 n. 40. When the French landed at Pointe aux Trembles, a bateau had overturned, dumping a man into the frigid water; he scrambled onto an ice floe, floated downriver, and was fished out by the British, to whom he revealed the approach of Lévis’s army.

5. Murray to Pitt, 25 May 1760, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:292.

6. Gipson, Victorious Years, 432–4, 428.

7. Quotations: Murray to Pitt, 25 May 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:292. Murray takes the field: Stanley, New France, 246–7; Gipson, Victorious Years, 438–9.

8. This account of the battle follows Stanley, New France, 246–8; Gipson, Victorious Years, 438–9; and Murray to Pitt, 25 May 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:291–7.

9. Quotation: Lt. Malcolm Fraser, Journal of the Operations before Quebec, quoted in Stanley, New France, 297 n. 15. (Fraser concluded that Murray was “possessed of several virtues, and particularly the military ones, except prudence.”) Artillery duel: ibid., 248–9.

10. On the destruction of the Bordeaux convoy, see Gipson, Victorious Years, 436–7; Stanley, New France, 259–61; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 113; Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 220–1; and Alexander, Lord Colville, to Pitt, 12 Sept. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:333–4.

11. Desandrouins quotation: Stanley, New France, 259. Vauquelin: ibid., 172, 250; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, s.v. “Vauquelin, Jean.” Before the Atalante ran out of ammunition her crew sank one of the two frigates that it had engaged, H.M.S. Lowestoft. Captain Vauquelin recovered from his wounds, was later released from British custody, and returned to French service. He participated in attempts to establish colonies in Guiana and on Madagascar until his death in 1772. A commoner, he never advanced beyond the rank of lieutenant commander. A better measure of his skills as a naval officer than his promotion record can be found in the comment of Admiral Boscawen, who declared at Louisbourg—after Vauquelin had given his own captains the slip—that if the Frenchman had been one of his officers, he would have put him in command of a ship of the line.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: Murray Ascends the St. Lawrence

1. Capt. John Knox, The Siege of Quebec and the Campaigns in North America, 1757–1760, ed. Brian Connell (Mississauga, Ont., 1980), 262–5; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 458.

2. Knox, Siege of Quebec, 267–8.

3. Ibid., 268.

4. Gipson, Victorious Years, 457–61; George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 251–3.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: Conquest Completed: Vaudreuil Surrenders at Montréal

1. “Samuel Jenks, His Journall of the Campaign in 1760,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 25 (1890): 353–68 (entries of 22 May–16 Aug. 1760); Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 449–50.

2. George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 256.

3. Gipson, Victorious Years, 461–2.

4. Fortifications: Capt. John Knox, The Siege of Quebec and the Campaigns in North America, 1757–1760, ed. Brian Connell (Mississauga, Ont., 1980), 301; “Plan of the Town and Fortifications of Montreal or Ville Marie in Canada,” in Gipson, Victorious Years, facing 463. Defenders’ strength: Amherst to Pitt, 4 Oct. 1760, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:336.

5. Indians abandon French alliance: Journal de Lévis, quoted in Gipson, Victorious Years, 462.

6. Stanley, New France, 257.

7. Amherst never grasped this fact; in his official reports he mentioned the Indians only to compliment Johnson for having restrained them from the savagery he expected. See Amherst to Pitt, 8 Sept. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:332. It is also worth noting that while Amherst believed procuring Iroquois warriors was inordinately expensive—he had laid out gifts that came to a penny or two over twenty-four pounds New York currency for each warrior—they cost almost exactly as much, per man, as provincials from Connecticut (twenty-four pounds nineteen shillings) and Massachusetts (twenty-six pounds four shillings) who participated in the campaign (Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut [New Haven, Conn., 1990], 151, 152; Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984], 226). Like his predecessors, Amherst never understood that the scarcity of labor in America meant that soldiers would necessarily be expensive. Since the Iroquois warriors represented a majority of the male population of the Six Nations, they were actually an infinitely bigger bargain than Amherst knew.

8. “Samuel Jenks, His Journall,” 376–7 (entries of 6 and 7 Sept. 1760).

9. Amherst’s journal, quoted in Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 216.

10. Proposed conditions: Gipson, Victorious Years, 464; Gustave Lanctot, A History of Canada, vol. 3, From the Treaty of Utrecht to the Treaty of Paris, 1713–1763 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 181–2. Terms as finally agreed: ibid., 225–36.

11. “Must lay down their arms”: “Articles of Capitulation of Montreal,” article 1, ibid., 225. “The infamous part”: Knox, Siege of Quebec, 289, quoting Amherst’s reply to M. de la Pause, a French officer, who protested “the too rigorous article” that denied the honors of war. Money was also an important element in the officers’ anger, for their inability to serve during the war would place them on half-pay for the duration—a huge personal loss, since an infantry captain received only ninety-five livres per month and typically parlayed that pittance into a respectable salary by collecting the wages of nonexistent men carried on his company roll. Article 1 thus doomed to poverty every officer who lacked independent means of support (Lee Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Military Organization and Administration [Durham, N.C., 1967], 70, 96 n. 39).

12. Amherst to Pitt, 4 Oct. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:335.

13. Amherst’s journal, quoted in J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst (New York, 1933), 135.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: The Causes of Victory and the Experience of Empire

1. Daniel John Beattie, “General Jeffery Amherst and the Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976), 125–6 (quotation, from an anonymous officer’s letter, 12 June 1758, at 125); and id., “The Adaptation of the British Army to Wilderness Warfare, 1755–1763,” in Maarten Ultee, ed., Adapting to Conditions: War and Society in the Eighteenth Century (University, Ala., 1986), 71–4.

2. Ibid.

3. The significance of so many forts and the roads that connected them has been more often remarked upon than analyzed for its significance in American history. For a stimulating attempt to come to terms with the topic, see John Keegan, Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (New York, 1996).

4. Amherst to Pitt, 4 Oct. 1760, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:335–8.

5. “Samuel Jenks, His Journall of the Campaign in 1760,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 24 (1889): 373 (entry of 28 Aug. 1760), 378 (9 Sept.), 382 ff. (e.g., 28 Sept.: two-thirds of the provincials sick, and smallpox spreading rapidly), 386 (27 Oct.), 387 (31 Oct.), 389 (16 Nov.: Haviland’s broken leg).

6. “Extracts from Gibson Clough’s Journal,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 3 (1861): 201 (entry of 1 Jan. 1761).

7. “Deprived of the honour”: Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam (Boston, 1903), 34 (entry spanning 22 June–19 Nov. 1760). “And now”: E. C. Dawes, ed., Journal of Gen. Rufus Putnam, Kept in Northern New York during Four Campaigns of the Old French and Indian War, 1757–1760 (Albany, 1886), 103 (1 Dec. 1760).

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: Pitt Confronts an Unexpected Challenge

1. Pitt to Amherst, 24 Oct. 1760, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissionersin America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:344; Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 274–5.

2. Pitt to Amherst, 24 Oct. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:344–7. Amherst, whose wife had begun an irreversible descent into madness, longed to return to England and had begged to be relieved of command since Louisbourg. Pitt, to whom Amherst’s personal troubles were meaningless, had always demurred.

3. Reginald Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1966), 201–82 and app. 13, 477–8.

4. Ludwig Reiners, Frederick the Great: A Biography, trans. Lawrence P. R. Wilson (New York, 1960), 208–11.

5. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 144–56.

6. Gipson, Culmination, 159–62.

7. Ibid., 166–71.

8. On Pitt’s views of the war in Europe, and his insistence on the Belleisle venture, see Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 165–9.

9. Walpole to George Montague, 26 Oct. 1760, in Paget Toynbee, ed., The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1903), 439.

10. J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (Boston, 1975), 95.

PART VII: VEXED VICTORY, 1761-1763 CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN:

The Cherokee War and Amherst’s Reforms in Indian Policy

1. Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New York, 1993), 5–16; also David Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival, 1740–62 (Norman, Okla., 1962), 3–12. “As many as seven hundred warriors” reflects Forbes’s estimate, based on provision requirements; Corkran estimates that about 450 served (ibid., 146), while Hatley places the number at “three hundred or more” (Dividing Paths, 100).

2. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 157–9. Thirty deaths must be regarded as a lower-bound estimate. John Richard Alden, in John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier (1944; reprint, New York, 1966), suggests that thirty men were killed from the Lower Towns only (79 n. 15); Gov. William Henry Lyttelton reported in Oct. 1758 that thirty had been killed in the vicinity of Winchester, Virginia, alone (Hatley, Dividing Paths, 100, 268 n. 51).

3. P. M. Hamer, “Fort Loudoun in the Cherokee War, 1758–61,” North Carolina Historical Review 2 (1925): 444; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 167–8, Hatley, Dividing Paths, 109–15.

4. Hatley, Dividing Paths, 111.

5. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 61–5; Hatley, Dividing Paths, 113–15; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 170–83.

6. Hatley, Dividing Paths, 120–5; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 178–90.

7. Gipson, New Responsibilities, 67–8; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 196–8; Hatley, Dividing Paths, 125–9; Alden, John Stuart, 104–5.

8. Hatley, Dividing Paths, 124–5.

9. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 198–205.

10. Ibid., 208–11; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 70–2. Montgomery burned Keowee, Estatoe, Toxaway, Qualatchee, and Conasatche. “The neatness of those towns and their knowledge of agriculture would surprise you,” wrote Lt. Col. James Grant, Montgomery’s second-in-command; “they abounded in every comfort of life, and may curse the day we came upon them” (Grant to Lt. Gov. William Bull, in Hatley, Dividing Paths, 130).

11. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 212–13; Hatley, Dividing Paths, 131; Gipson, New Responsibilities,73–4. Quotation: Amherst to Pitt, 26 Aug. 1760, quoted in Hatley, Dividing Paths, 132.

12. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 217–19; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 75–8; Alden, John Stuart, 116–17.

13. Quotation: South Carolina Gazette, 18 Oct. 1760, quoted in Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 220. Killings and captives: Gipson, New Responsibilities, 78–9; Alden, John Stuart, 118–9; J. Russell Snapp, John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier (Baton Rouge, 1996), 55–6. In a misdated letter from Fort Toulouse, a French naval officer described the torture of “Monsieur Dameri”: “We have just learned that a war party of Cherokees, commanded by Wolf, has captured Fort Loudon, . . . and that the commanding officer, Mr. Dameri, was killed by the Indians. They stuffed earth into his mouth and said, ‘Dog, since you are so hungry for land, eat your fill’ ” ( Jean-Bernard Bossu to the marquis de l’Estrade, 10 Jan. 1760 [1761]; in Seymour Feiler, trans. and ed., Jean-Bernard Bossu’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1751–1762 [Norman, Okla., 1962], 183–4).

14. Theda Perdue, “Cherokee Relations with the Iroquois in the Eighteenth Century,” in Daniel Richter and James Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987), 144; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 236; William Bull to William Pitt, 18 Feb. 1761, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Militaryand Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:394–6. Quotation: Amherst to Grant, 15 Dec. 1760, in Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 245.

15. Ibid., 246, records eighty-one “Negroes” with the expedition; Gipson, New Responsibilities,82, puts the pack train at seven hundred horses and the cattle herd at four hundred head.

16. Casualty figures and quotations from John Laurens to John Ettwein, 11 July 1761, in P. M. Hamer et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 3, Jan. 1, 1759–Aug. 31, 1763 (Columbia, S.C., 1972), 75. Executions: Hatley, Dividing Paths, 139.

17. Perdue, “Cherokee Relations,” 144; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 255–6; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 84.

18. On Stuart’s policies, aimed at reducing tensions by controlling white settlers, see Alden, John Stuart, 134–55; and esp. Snapp, Stuart and the Struggle, 54–67 et passim.

19. Amherst to Johnson, 22 Feb. 1761, in James Sullivan et al., eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 3 (Albany, 1921), 345. On the policy’s significance in light of the propensity of Johnson and Croghan to bestow gifts freely, see Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: ConstructingColonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York, 1997), 146–50.

20. “Chastizement” and “Example”: Amherst to Johnson, 11 Aug. 1761, Johnson Papers, 3:517. “Absolute necessity”: Johnson to Amherst, 24 July 1761, ibid., 513. “You are sensible”: Amherst to Johnson, 9 Aug. 1761, ibid., 515. Amherst previously concluded that, since the Indians could be no threat to a properly organized and supplied force of regulars, they could be dealt with forcibly, as a means of teaching them who was master within the empire. (See, e.g., Amherst to Johnson, 24 June 1761, ibid., 421.) On the Geneseo (or Chenussio) Senecas’ scheme and western Indian relations, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1600–1815 (New York, 1991), 271–3.

21. John W. Jordan, ed., “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” Pennsylvania Magazine of Historyand Biography 37 (1913): 28 (entry of 21 Nov. 1761); Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 148–9.

22. Cf. Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Philadelphia, 1949), 232–7.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: Amherst’s Dilemma

1. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York, 1997), 148–9; John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Comingof the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 104–5.

2. Troop numbers, distribution, and replacements: ibid., 96–9, 112. Detachments: Pitt to Amherst, 7 Jan. 1761, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:384–7. (Amherst took action on these orders as soon as he received the letter, on 26 Feb.; see id. to Pitt, 27 Feb. 1761, ibid., 403.) Request for provincials: Jeffery Amherst, The Journal of Jeffery Amherst, ed. J. Clarence Webster (Chicago, 1931), 267 (entry of 8 June 1761), 332 (“Recapitulation”).

3. Promotion of settlements near forts: Amherst to Pitt, 16 Dec. 1759, Pitt Corr., 2:222–3; Doris Begor Morton, Philip Skene of Skenesborough (Glanville, N.Y., 1959), 17. New York settlements: on the ten thousand–acre tract at the Niagara portage, see Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Siege of Detroit in 1763 (Chicago, 1958), xxviii–xxix; on the authorization of the Fort Stanwix settlement and the accompanying grant of ten thousand acres to “Capt. Rutherford, Lieutenant Duncan and others,” see Walter Rutherford to Amherst, 9 Apr. 1761, and Amherst to Rutherford, same date, in Louis des Cognets Jr., Amherst and Canada (Princeton, N.J. [privately printed], 1962), 310–11. Settlements along the Forbes Road: Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1939), 140–1. (Additional settlements, which Amherst did nothing to discourage, grew up in the vicinity of Fort Burd, near the site of Red Stone Old Fort, near the confluence of Red Stone Creek and the Monongahela River; and on two tracts that Croghan had acquired privately from the Iroquois—one on the Allegheny about four miles upriver from Pittsburgh, the other on the Youghiogheny about twenty-five miles south of the Forks.) Manorial ambitions: Col. William Haviland [at Crown Point] to Amherst, 5 Mar. 1760, quoted in Morton, Skene, 31 (“Major Skeen is . . . so full of the Scheme that he writes once a week to his wife [who had remained in northern Ireland], and I dare say mostly on that subject, as I am sure very little that passes here would afford entertainment so frequent to any one on the other Side of the Water; Indeed he Owned last might that his wife was looking out for People to come and Settle here”).

4. Settlers near Pittsburgh: Alfred P. James, The Ohio Company: Its Inner History (Pittsburgh, 1959), 113; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 89–90. Development around Pittsburgh: Buck and Buck, Planting of Civilization, 140; also Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Philadelphia, 1949), 234; John W. Jordan, ed., “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1913): 28–9. Kenny noted on 20 Oct. 1761 a report that there were perhaps 150 houses outside the walls of Fort Pitt, almost all of which had been built since the fall of 1759.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE: Pitt’s Problems

1. On Frederick, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 204–6. On George’s upbringing at Leicester House: John Brooke, King George III (New York, 1972), 23; cf. J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (London, 1956), 92.

2. Obsessive qualities and love of order: J. H. Plumb, New Light on the Tyrant George III (Washington, D.C., 1978), 5–17 et passim. Diet: Brooke, George III, 291–2.

3. “Horrid Electorate”: George to Bute, 5 Aug. 1759, in Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766 (London, 1939), 28. “Blackest of hearts”: same to same, 4 May 1760, ibid., 45.

4. On the speech, see Bute’s draft and Pitt’s revisions as reprinted in Brooke, George III, 75; and Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 170. George himself wrote the words, “Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name Briton,” in order to distinguish himself from his predecessors, who had been born and educated in Hanover and who had put the interests of that “horrid Electorate” at least on a par with those of the realm. Critics— especially Newcastle—worried that the king’s invocation of a political community that included Scotland signaled the influence that Lord Bute would exercise in the new reign. (See Stanley Ayling, George the Third [London, 1972], 70.)

5. “He must act”: Gilbert Elliot, reporting a conversation between Pitt and Bute, 25 Oct. 1760, quoted in Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930), 120–1. “Unknown”: Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (New York, 1894), 2:9. Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 275; Middleton, Bells, 170–9; Brooke, George III, 76.

6. Russell Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 191; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 104, 288; Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), 285–96; Christopher Duffy, The Military Life of Frederick the Great (New York, 1986), 210–19. Casualty estimates for the Prussians vary from 40 percent to 60 percent. Either way, Torgau was a bloodbath that decided nothing.

7. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:104; Middleton, Bells, 178, 180–1; Reginald Savory, His BritannicMajesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1966), 283–308.

8. Middleton, Bells, 182, 178; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1989), 117; Browning, Newcastle, 276–8.

9. Browning, Newcastle, 275–6; Middleton, Bells, 179; Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 280–2.

10. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:160–70; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 181–4.

11. Middleton, Bells, 188–9; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:141–70, esp. 150–4; Gipson, Culmination,204–52 passim. A Franco-Spanish alliance became possible after the accession to the throne of Charles III, whose Saxon queen, Maria Amalia, loathed her homeland’s conqueror. Pitt knew of the negotiations for this second Bourbon Family Compact in mid-March 1761, when British agents intercepted correspondence addressed to Madrid’s ambassador in London. The deciphered letters suggested that Spain might soon abandon neutrality for an alliance—a plausible shift in light of the aggressive tone in recent negotiations over British logwood cutting in Honduras. The cabinet’s peace party feared Spanish intervention as much as Pitt welcomed it, for exactly the same reasons.

12. Ayling, Elder Pitt, 284; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:172.

13. Quotation: Bedford to Newcastle, 9 May 1761, in Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:172. Gipson, Culmination, 218–21; Browning, Newcastle, 278–80.

14. Gipson, Culmination, 248–51.

15. Middleton, Bells, 192–4; Ayling, Elder Pitt, 289–90; Browning, Newcastle, 280–1; Gipson, Culmination, 222–3.

16. George III to Bute, 19 Sept. 1761, Letters from George III to Bute, 63.

17. Middleton, Bells, 198; Ayling, Elder Pitt, 282, 290–2 (quotations at 291 and 292).

CHAPTER FIFTY: The End of an Alliance

1. Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (New York, 1894), 1:215.

2. Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733–1763 (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 248–58; Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), esp. 121–5. Grenville was the brother of Hester, William Pitt’s wife; Egremont was another of Grenville’s brothers-in-law. Grenville’s acceptance caused a deep, immediate breach within the family. Pitt severed all relations summarily; Earl Temple (George’s older brother and custodian of the family fortune) cut George’s sons out of his will.

3. Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army, 1702–1770 (Oxford, 1958), 358, 364.

4. On Townshend’s rise, see Lewis Namier and John Brooke, Charles Townshend (New York, 1964); and Cornelius Forster, The Uncontrolled Chancellor: Charles Townshend and His AmericanPolicy (Providence, 1978). On manpower shortages and the need for surprise, see Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 202.

5. Quotation: Egremont to the earl of Bristol, 19 Nov. 1761, in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination,1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 252.

6. Ibid., 190–6; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 218–26; Jeffery Amherst, The Journal of Jeffery Amherst, ed. J. Clarence Webster (Chicago, 1931), 280 (entry of 27 Mar. 1762). The British had 97 killed and 391 wounded; French casualties were probably comparable as a proportion of the smaller number of defenders (evidently fewer than 3,000, including militia). Amherst thought there was “surprisingly little loss” of life in the campaign.

7. Gipson, Culmination, 196.

8. Reginald Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1966), 309–59.

9. Frederick to the Gräfin Camas, n.d. [1761], quoted in Ludwig Reiners, Frederick the Great: A Biography, trans. Lawrence P. R. Wilson (New York, 1960), 215.

10. Reiners, Frederick the Great, 216; Gipson, Culmination, 61; Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), 308–10; Christopher Duffy, The Military Life of Frederick the Great (New York, 1986), 226.

11. Reiners, Frederick the Great, 218 (quotation), 283. Frederick II had been married to Princess Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick for nearly thirty years, but the couple remained childless, his homosexuality proving an insuperable obstacle to procreation. Thus his heir, Frederick William, was the son of his brother, Prince Augustus William, whom Frederick had disgraced in 1757 after he had failed to keep the Austrians from seizing a strategic junction and supply magazine. Augustus William died in 1758, a broken man (Duffy, Military Life, 17, 133).

12. Reiners, Frederick the Great, 219 (couplet, my translation); Duffy, Military Life, 233–4; Showalter, Wars of Frederick, 310–13.

13. Newcastle to Hardwick, 10 Jan. 1762, quoted in Middleton, Bells, 205.

14. Browning, Newcastle, 283–5; Middleton, Bells, 205–6. For the Treasury to issue two million pounds in Exchequer bills—short-term debt instruments usually emitted in smaller quantities, in anticipation of taxes—without the backing of the Bank of England, seemed to invite inflation, a fearsome prospect for an investing community that remembered the wartime devaluations of 1709–11. Any rift between the bank and the Treasury would have gravely shaken investor confidence, which had already endured a shock in 1761 when the bank’s shares had fallen in value in anticipation of war with Spain. The buoyant state of trade, low bread prices in London, and military victories overcame this brief crisis, but Newcastle, an inveterate worrier, feared worse effects this time—as indeed did most of the “money’d men,” for whom the fear of default transcended rational calculation. See Reed Browning, “The Duke of Newcastle and the Financing of the Seven Years’ War,” Journal of Economic History 31 (1971): 244–77; Julian Hoppit, “Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39 (1986): 39–58, esp. 48; and John Brewer, The Sinews ofPower: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1988), 193.

15. Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930), 353–80; quotation is from Newcastle to the marquis of Rockingham, 14–15 May 1762, at 376.

16. George III to Bute, c. 19 May 1762, in Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766 (London, 1939), 109.

17. Reiners, Frederick the Great, 219–20.

18. Ibid., 220–1; Duffy, Military Life, 236; H. M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990), 30–1; Showalter, Wars of Frederick, 318–19.

19. Savory, Army in Germany, 360–434; Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 192.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE: The Intersections of Empire, Trade, and War: Havana

1. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 256–60.

2. Walter L. Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740–1763 (New York, 1940), 375; Gipson, Culmination,270–2.

3. John Robert McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 26–45, 106–202.

4. Albemarle’s appointment as general in charge of the expedition marked the completed rehabilitation of the duke of Cumberland, under way since the accession of George III. See Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army, 1702–1770 (Oxford, 1958), 349; J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst: A Soldier of the King (New York, 1933), 163; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 283.

5. Allan J. Kuethe, Cuba, 1753–1815: Crown, Military, and Society (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986), 17; “An Account of the Taking of the Havannah,” Gentleman’s Magazine 32 (1762): 459–64.

6. “Memoir of an Invalid,” quoted in Gipson, Culmination, 266 n. 39.

7. Jeffery Amherst, The Journal of Jeffery Amherst, ed. J. Clarence Webster (Chicago, 1931), 283 (9 June 1762), 287 (5 July 1762); Gipson, Culmination, 264–8; Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:265–82. The Spanish navy had forty-eight ships of the line, only twenty of which were sea-worthy; thus the naval toll at Havana was truly crippling for Spain. (See Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 [Cambridge, U.K., 1985], 210.)

8. The most reliable figures available are only partial, ignoring the toll among provincials and evacuated regular soldiers. They are, nonetheless, horrifying: 5,366 dead in the land forces between 7 June and 18 Oct., 88 percent from disease; 1,300 seamen dead in the same period, 95 percent from disease, and another 3,300 still sick at the time of the report. Dr. Johnson’s response—“May my country be never cursed with such another conquest”—aptly sums up the effects of a siege which was, day for day, Britain’s costliest military operation of the Seven Years’ War. See McNeill, Atlantic Empires, 104, 248–9 nn. 147 and 148. The one provincial unit for which accurate figures are available suggests that the mortality was actually worse than among the regulars: of the 1,050 men in the Connecticut Regiment, 625 (59.5 percent) died before returning home. See [Albert C. Bates, ed.], The Two Putnams: Israel and Rufus in the Havana Expedition 1762 and in the Mississippi River Exploration 1772–73 with some account of The Company of Military Adventurers (Hartford, 1931), 5.

9. Hides: McNeill, Atlantic Empires, 170–3. Tobacco and sugar backlogs and monopoly structure of Cuban-Spanish trade: Kuethe, Cuba, 53–4, 62–3. Demand for labor and transition to sugar: ibid., 66–7; McNeill, Atlantic Empires, 129–30, 166–70. Numbers of ships visiting Havana during the occupation, influx of cheap British goods and slaves: Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore, 1983), 78–9.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO: Peace

1. Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733–1763 (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 269–72; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 300–4; Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 3.

2. Wiggin, Faction of Cousins, 272–6; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, vol. 2 (London, 1918), 297–8, 318, 342, 361–4; Thomas, British Politics,3–4.

3. Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 307–9.

4. Corbett, Seven Years’ War, 2:377–90; Gipson, Culmination, 305–11; Walter F. Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740–1763 (New York, 1940), 378–83.

5. Ibid., 378, 384.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE:

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

1. Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (New York, 1894), 1:184; and see Lewis B. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930), 469–70.

2. Ibid., 469.

3. J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (New York, 1957), 55, 83; Lewis B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (New York, 1957), 299–357; id., England in the Age of the American Revolution, 59–65.

4. On the political ideology of Georgian Britain and the colonies, see esp. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967; rev. ed., 1992); and J. G. A. Pocock, The MachiavellianMoment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975). On popular politics and the press, see John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, U.K., 1976), 139–60. On the significance of the middle classes and professionals, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 55–145.

5. On Wilkes generally, see George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford, 1962); and R. W. Postgate, That Devil Wilkes (New York, 1929). On his context in political culture (and esp. the Scottophobia of his supporters), see Colley, Britons, 105–17 et passim; Brewer, Party Ideology, 163–200; and Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill, and Reform (London, 1962), 1–24. On his ties with the earl Temple and the internal divisions in the Grenville-Pitt faction, see Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733–1763 (New Haven, Conn., 1958), 204–5, 267–8, 294–5.

6. On Grenville’s personality, see John Brooke, King George III (New York, 1972), 107–8; and, more charitably, Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984). The king had a horror of Grenville’s ability to bore: “When he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch to see if he may not tire me for an hour more” (quoted in Brooke, 108).

7. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 22–7.

8. Louis Kronenberger, The Extraordinary Mr. Wilkes: His Life and Times (New York, 1974),

54. Cf. the more favorable estimate of Sandwich’s character and activities in N. A. M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich (New York, 1993), 80–4.

9. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 28–36; quotation is from Thomas Ramsden to Charles Jenkinson, 11 Dec. 1763, quoted at 35. On Martin’s effort to kill Wilkes the best evidence is circumstantial; see Walpole, Memoirs of George III, 1:249–53.

10. Except as noted, the following account of the Manila campaign is based on Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 275–83.

11. Gregorio F. Zaide, The Pageant of Philippine History: Political, Economic, and Socio-Cultural, vol. 2, From the British Invasion to the Present (Manila, 1979), 10. The Manila galleon, taken as it arrived on 30 Oct., was worth about three million dollars in cargo and coin; Manila paid another half million in ransom; and soldiers, sailors, and irregulars seized at least a million dollars’ worth of plunder in the sack of the city.

12. Zaide, Pageant, 2:17–24. On Anda’s resistance, see Capt. Thomas Backhouse to the secretary at war, 31 Jan. and 10 Feb. 1764, and Backhouse to Draper, 10 Feb. 1764, in Nicholas P. Cushner, ed., Documents Illustrating the British Conquest of Manila, 1762–1763 (London, 1971), 196–202. On the costs of administration (below), see “The East India Company’s case with respect to booty,” 2 Oct. 1764, and “Reimbursement requested by the East India Company for the Expedition to Manila,” 28 June 1775, ibid., 208–11.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR: Anglo-America at War’s End: The Fragility of Empire

1. Quotation: Bernard’s speech to the General Court, 14 Apr. 1762, Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, vol. 38, part 2, 1762 (Boston, 1968), 302 (hereafter cited as JHRM). Bernard (1711–79), allied by marriage with the family of Viscount Barrington, the secretary at war, had been governor of New Jersey from 1758; he moved to Massachusetts after Thomas Pownall was recalled, arriving on 2 Aug. 1760. (See Dictionary of American Biography and Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Bernard, Sir Francis.”)

2. In 1759, the colonies as a whole fielded 81.4 percent of the men requested for the year (16,835 of 20,680); in 1760, 75.3 percent (15,942 of 21,180); in 1761, 9,296 of 11,607, or 80.1 percent; in 1762, 9,204 of 10,173, or 90.5 percent. Insofar as these were virtually all voluntary enlistments, it would seem that the northern colonies suffered little diminution in popular enthusiasm for the imperial enterprise once the French and Indian threat had been eliminated. The records of individual colonies bear this out in comparing the percentages of men raised to the number requested in each year from 1760 to 1762. Note the general consistency of Virginia, New York, New Jersey, and the New England provinces (with the exception of Rhode Island, where the availability of berths on privateersmen cut heavily into the willingness of men to enlist in provincial regiments).

The qualitative assessments of contemporaries tend to bear out the quantitative implications of this chart. See, for example, Bernard’s comment to the Massachusetts General Court on the raising of provincials in 1762:

Whatever shall be the Event of the War, it must be no small Satisfaction to us that this Province hath contributed its full Share to the Support of it. Every Thing that has been required of it hath been most readily complied with: And the Execution of the Powers committed to me for raising the Provincial Troops hath been as full and compleat as the Grant of them was. Never before were the Regiments so easily levied, so well composed, and so early in the Field as they have been this year. The common People seemed to be animated with the Spirit of the General Court, and to vie with them in their Readiness to serve their King (Bernard to the General Court, 27 May 1762, JHRM, vol. 39 1762–63 [Boston, 1969], 10 May 1762).

Thomas Hutchinson observed that by the final years of the conflict the people of the Bay Colony had grown habituated to the demands of imperial warfare. (See History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, vol. 3 [Cambridge, Mass., 1936], 70.)

Georgia did not appear in Amherst’s calculations of colonial participation because it was too poor to raise and pay for provincials on its own; yet it contributed men to the war effort in proportions that may have approximated those of Massachusetts and Connecticut in the last years of the war, by raising several companies of “Georgia Rangers.” These dragoons, or mounted infantry, patrolled the frontier against French (from Fort Toulouse), Spanish (from St. Augustine), and Indian enemies, and were American colonists. They were not provincials, however, because they received their pay and rations on the regular establishment, as did the rangers who served with the northern armies after 1756. On the Georgia Rangers, see Shy, Toward Lexington, 214–15; W. W. Abbot, The Royal Governors of Georgia, 1754–1775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 103–25; and esp. James M. Johnson, Militiamen, Rangers, and Redcoats: The Military in Georgia, 1754–1776 (Macon, Ga., 1992).

3. For Amherst’s views on the colonists, see id., Journal, 267 (8 June 1761), 279–80 (19 Feb. 1762), 286 (29 June 1762); Pitt to Amherst, 13 Aug. 1761, in Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt when Secretary of State with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commissioners in America (1906; reprint, New York, 1969), 2:462–3; and (on fraudulent practices of various sorts) J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst (New York, 1933), 151–2. Quotation: Egremont to Deputy Gov. James Hamilton, 27 Nov. 1762, in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 261 n. 23.

4. Quotation: Pitt to Governors in North America and the West Indies, 23 Aug. 1760, Pitt Corr., 2:320. On Hutchinson and the politics of Massachusetts during this crucial period, see Malcolm Freiberg, Prelude to Purgatory: Thomas Hutchinson in Provincial Politics, 1760–1770 (New York, 1990), 1–54; Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 1–69; Clifford K. Shipton’s sketch in id., ed., Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 6 (Boston, 1949), 149–217; John Waters, The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 76–161. The following account of the writs of assistance controversy is drawn principally from M. H. Smith, The Writs of Assistance Case (Berkeley, Calif., 1978); John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 25–63; and Gipson, The British Empire before the AmericanRevolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1967), 111–31. For general political context, see William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, 1981), 163–75. (Thomas Pownall appointed Hutchinson lieutenant governor in 1758, hoping to utilize his administrative and organizational talents in managing the Massachusetts war effort. Hutchinson served with distinction; but he fell out with Pownall, whose populist politics he abhorred. Bernard, recognizing Hutchinson’s experience, capacity, and alienation from Pownall’s political supporters, appointed him chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature on 13 Nov. 1760. Two previous governors, Shirley and Pownall, had promised this post to James Otis Sr. This so alienated James Otis Jr. that he “swore revenge” on his father’s behalf against both the governor and Hutchinson, and soon made himself a leading figure in the opposition, or country party, in the assembly [Waters, Otis Family, 119].)

5. “Carnival”: Marcus Hansen, from The Mingling of Canadian and American Peoples, quoted in Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986), 364. On this phase in Nova Scotia history, see esp. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: NewResponsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 129–42; George Rawlyk, Nova Scotia’s Massachusetts: A Study of Massachusetts–Nova Scotia Relations, 1630 to 1784 (Montréal, 1973), 218–22; John Bartlett Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony during the Revolutionary Years (New York, 1937), 3–121; R. S. Longley, “The Coming of the New England Planters to the Annapolis Valley,” in Margaret Conrad, ed., They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada (Fredericton, N.B., 1988), 14–28; and Elizabeth Mancke, “Corporate Structure and Private Interest: The Mid-Eighteenth Century Expansion of New England,” ibid., 161–77.

6. On the progress of Skene’s settlement, see Doris Begor Morton, Philip Skene of Skenesborough (Glanville, N.Y., 1959), 31; on the rush to the Mohawk (presumably around Fort Stanwix), see Jack Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1961), 47–8.

7. Michael Bellesiles, Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 28–32, 41–6; see also Matt Bushnell Jones, Vermont in the Making, 1750–1777 (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), 22–3, 42–5, 76–7, 430–2.

8. Robert W. Ramsey, Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747–1762 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964), especially 95–105, 152–70; 193–9; Rachel N. Klein, Unificationof a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), 14, 54.

9. “Over run”: Bouquet to Fauquier, n.d., quoted in Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1939), 141. On Bouquet’s attempts to expel squatters, see Gipson, New Responsibilities, 89–90.

10. Buck and Buck, Planting of Civilization, 141.

11. Alfred P. James, The Ohio Company: Its Inner History (Pittsburgh, 1959), 113–26; Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (1937; reprint, New York, 1959), 10–11; Sosin, Whitehall, 42–6.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE: Yankees Invade Wyoming—and Pay the Price

1. On Susquehannah Company operations and popularity in Connecticut, see Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Susquehannah Company Papers, vol. 2, 1756–1767 (Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 1930), xvii–xix; Thomas Penn to Lord Halifax, 10 Dec. 1760, ibid., 35; “Minutes of a Meeting of the Susquehannah Company,” 9 Apr. 1761, ibid., 72–6; and Ezra Stiles to Pelatiah Webster, 21 May 1763, ibid., 221–33, 230–1. See also Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 387–8.

2. Quotation from the Opinion of Charles Yorke, Solicitor General, 30 Mar. 1761, SusquehannahPapers, 2:68; cf. Opinion of Charles Pratt [attorney general], 7 Mar. 1761, ibid., 64–6. On progress of settlements at Cushitunk, see Deposition of James Hyndshaw Regarding the Settlers at Cushietunk, 29 Apr. 1761, ibid., 81–4.

3. Narrative of Daniel Brodhead’s Journey to Wyoming, 27 Sept. 1762, ibid., 166–9; conference with Teedyuscung, 19 Nov. 1762, ibid., 180.

4. Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Philadelphia, 1949), 253–4.

5. Quotation: Teedyuscung’s speech, 28 June 1762, in Wallace, Teedyuscung, 249. On the conference generally, see ibid., 245–50; Stephen F. Auth, The Ten Years’ War: Indian-White Relationsin Pennsylvania, 1755–1765 (New York, 1989), 163–72; and Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 434–6.

6. Auth, Ten Years’ War, 183, 236–7 n. 59; Wallace, Teedyuscung, 252–4; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 179–80.

7. Wallace, Teedyuscung, 255–6.

8. Conference with Teedyuscung, 19 Nov. 1762, Susquehannah Papers, 2:180–1.

9. On the alienation of the Ohio delegation at Lancaster, see McConnell, A Country Between, 179–81; and Auth, Ten Years’ War, 183–4. Croghan to Bouquet, 10 Dec. 1762: “Itt is Cartain that ye Dallaways [Delawares] have Received a Belt from ye Indians on Susquehanna and Sence that has ordered all thire Warrers to Stay Near there Towns to hunt this Winter and appears More Sulky than usual to the Treaders Residing Amungst them” (ibid., 237 n. 70).

10. Size of migrating population: Stiles to Webster, 21 May 1763, Susquehannah Papers, 2:230. Quotation: extract of a letter from Paxton, in Lancaster County, 23 Oct. 1763, ibid., 277. Battle and aftermath: Wallace, Teedyuscung, 264 et passim.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX: Amherst’s Reforms and Pontiac’s War

1. On Neolin and the other Delaware prophets, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, 1992), 27–34; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 279–83; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 179, 220–1; and Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), 116–17. For the best contemporary description of Neolin’s ritual program, see John W. Jordan, ed., “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1913): 188 (entry of 1 Mar. 1763).

2. On the epidemics, crop failure, and famine, all of which were prevalent in the Ohio Valley, see McConnell, A Country Between, 177–8, 181; and White, Middle Ground, 275.

3. War belts: ibid., 276–7. New leadership: McConnell, A Country Between, 183.

4. Apprehensiveness: Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 194–5. “Pretended conspiracy”: Bouquet [to Amherst?], Nov. 1762, quoted in McConnell, A Country Between, 181. “Meer Bugbears”: Amherst to Sir William Johnson, 3 Apr. 1763, quoted in White, Middle Ground, 286. “This alarm”: Amherst to Bouquet, 6 June 1763, quoted in Howard H. Peckham, Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (Princeton, N.J., 1947), 172.

5. Pontiac’s council at the Ecorse River encampment and Indian strength: [Robert Navarre,] “Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy,” in Milton Milo Quaife, ed., The Siege of Detroit in 1763 (Chicago, 1958), 5–18; strength of the Detroit garrison and early Indian successes: Peckham, Pontiac, 127–8 n. 12, 144, 156–8, 190, 200, 182–4.

6. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 99–101; Peckham, Pontiac, 159–65; McConnell, A Country Between, 182.

7. Ecuyer to Bouquet, 31 May 1763, quoted in Gipson, New Responsibilities, 107.

8. On the Seneca, Delaware, and Shawnee operations between Lake Erie and the Ohio, see Peckham, Pontiac, 167–70; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 105–9; McConnell, A Country Between, 181–90 passim; and Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1939), 104–5.

9. McConnell, A Country Between, 190.

10. Lack of troops: J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst (New York, 1933), 182, 188–9; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 8, The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (New York, 1970), 261–2, 275. Response and quotations: Amherst to Egremont, 27 June 1763, quoted in Peckham, Pontiac, 177. Amherst responded to the reports about as quickly as anyone could have, given the limited information he had at hand; see the discussion in John W. Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 113–16.

11. “To extirpate that Vermine”: Bouquet to Amherst, 25 June 1763; “We must Use Every Stratagem”: Amherst to Bouquet, n.d. [probably 29 June 1763]; both quoted in Gipson, New Responsibilities, 108. “Immediately be put to death”: Amherst to Gladwin, n.d., quoted in Peckham, Pontiac, 226. Amherst to Bouquet, 16 July 1763: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race” (ibid., 227). In reply Bouquet wrote that he would “try to inoculate the bastards with some blankets that may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself. As it is a pity to expose good men against them [the Indians], I wish we could make use of the Spanish methods, to hunt them with English dogs” (Bouquet to Amherst, 13 July 1763, quoted in Long, Amherst, 187).

12. Ibid., 188–9.

13. Amherst to Johnson, 30 Sept. 1763, in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, vol. 7 (Albany, 1856), 568–9.

14. Shy, Toward Lexington, 116–17; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 115–17.

15. Gregory Evans Dowd, “The French King Wakes Up in Detroit: ‘Pontiac’s War’ in Rumor and History,” Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 254–78; White, Middle Ground, 277–88.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN: Amherst’s Recall

1. Casualties: see Milton Milo Quaife, ed., The Siege of Detroit in 1763 (Chicago, 1958), 211. Prisoners: Amherst to Maj. John Wilkins, 29 Oct. 1763, quoted in Howard H. Peckham, Pontiacand the Indian Uprising (Princeton, N.J., 1947), 239 n. 5.

2. Ibid., 201–10; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 102–3. The Michigan ran aground and was wrecked near Niagara in August. The Huron, the only remaining link between Niagara and Detroit, was very nearly lost to Indian attack on 1 Sept. When the little ship arrived the following day at Detroit, its barrels of flour and pork intact, only six men of its crew had escaped being killed or wounded. The weapons they had used to repel boarders reminded one witness of “axes in a slaughter house.” “In short,” wrote the trader James Sterling, “the attack was the bravest ever known to be made by Inds., and the Defense such as British subjects alone are capable of” (quoted in Quaife, Siege of Detroit, xx). Even after the Huron made a less eventful voyage in early October, the supply situation remained critical; on 3 Oct. Gladwin had only three weeks’ supply of flour left. Four days later, nearly in despair, he wrote to Sir William Johnson, “I am brought into a scrape, and left in it; things are expected of me that cant be performed; I could wish I had quitted the service seven years ago, and that somebody else commanded here” (quoted in Peckham, Pontiac, 233). Even after Pontiac declared a truce, it was not the arrival of supplies from Niagara that enabled the fort’s garrison to survive, but rather the belated willingness of the French community—hitherto neutral—to sell its surplus food to the British; within four days of the truce, they had sold Gladwin four tons of desperately needed flour (ibid., 237). It was well for Detroit that they did, for Seneca attacks at Niagara kept the Huron from adequately resupplying the fort before winter (ibid., 240–2). On the general state of Detroit and Gladwin’s “want of flour, [so great] that he must either have abandoned his post, or listened to” Pontiac’s proposals, see Gage to Halifax, 23 Dec. 1763, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn., 1931), 5.

3. “I feel myself uterly abandoned”: Bouquet to James Robertson, 26 July 1763, quoted in Gipson, New Responsibilities, 110.

4. On Bouquet’s expedition to relieve Fort Pitt, the Battle of Edge Hill (or Bushy Run), and the end of the siege, see Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 191–4; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 109–13 and “Plan of the Battle near Bushy-Run,” facing 124; Peckham, Pontiac, 211–13; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 288–9; and John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 119. Unlike the principally Scottish 42nd and 77th Regiments, the 60th Regiment included large numbers of colonists, especially Germans from Pennsylvania, who (after 1759) had been permitted to enlist for three years or the duration of the war. It was presumably these who demanded their discharges from Bouquet, and who threatened to mutiny when he refused.

5. Peckham, Pontiac, 224–5, 241–2.

6. Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 438, 451–2; James Thomas Flexner, Lord of the Mohawks: A Biography of Sir William Johnson (Boston, 1979), 258–60; Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 201–2.

7. Reactions of ministers: Shy, Toward Lexington, 121–5. Mutinies in regular units: ibid., 118–20; Paul E. Kopperman, “The Stoppages Mutiny of 1763,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 69 (1986): 241–54. Reluctance of provincial legislatures to cooperate, Gipson, New Responsibilities, 115–17.

8. On Ligonier’s demotion, see Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army, 1702–1770 (Oxford, 1958), 376–8; on Cumberland’s physical decline, Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland”; on Gage’s assumption of command, J. R. Alden, General Gage in America: Being Principally a History of His Role in the American Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1948), 61; on Amherst’s belated understanding of the character of his recall, J. C. Long, Lord Jeffery Amherst (New York, 1933), 189–92.

PART VIII: CRISIS AND REFORM, 1764 CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT: Death Reshuffles a Ministry

1. William James Smith, ed., The Grenville Papers, vol. 2 (1852; reprint, New York, 1970), 193–4.

2. On the arrival of news from America and the ministry’s initial reactions, see John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 121–4; on the death of Egremont and its impact on politics, see Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), 160–3; and Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 12–13; on Pitt, see Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (London, 1976), 315; on the king, see John Brooke, King George III (New York, 1972), 104–5.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE: An Urgent Search for Order: Grenville and Halifax Confront the Need for Revenue and Control

1. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1989), 30; Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire (London, 1981), 586–7.

2. John L. Bullion, “ ‘The Ten Thousand in America’: More Light on the Decision on the American Army, 1762–1763,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43 (1986): 646–57; id., “Security and Economy: The Bute Administration’s Plans for the American Army and Revenue, 1762–1763,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (1988): 499–509; John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 69–83.

3. George III to Bute, 13 Sept. 1762, in Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766 (London, 1939), 135. The king meant that the expense to the British taxpayer for maintaining the army would be “some hundred pounds cheaper,” not that the total expenditure on the army would be less than in 1749. See below.

4. Bullion, “Security and Economy,” 502–4; Shy, Toward Lexington, 73–4.

5. The national debt: Brewer, Sinews, 32. (Brewer’s figure of £132,000,000 represents the most conservative estimate of the funded portion of the debt at war’s end. Grenville himself believed that the funded portion of the debt amounted to £137,000,000, and the debt as a whole to £146,000,000; see Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 [New York, 1967], 182.) For the winter session and its politics, see Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 17–20; and Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), 171–80. Annual expenses of twenty battalions: Peter D. G. Thomas, “The Cost of the British Army in North America, 1763–1775,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (1988): 510–16. (The sum with which Parliament was working, £224,906, excluded “extraordinaries”—operating expenses. The actual annual expense averaged £384,174 in 1763–73.) Budget inflexibility: John L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1765 (Columbia, Mo., 1982), 18; Brewer, Sinews, 117. (Grenville anticipated revenues of about £9,800,000 sterling annually, of which about 48 percent would be needed to pay interest on the funded debt. Virtually every farthing of its £5,000,000 in discretionary revenue was already committed to pay the costs of government administration and defense.)

6. Expenditures in the colonies: Julian Gwyn, “British Government Spending and the North American Colonies, 1740–1775,” in Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams, ed., The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (London, 1980), 77. Reimbursements: Jack P. Greene, “The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution: The Causal Relationship Reconsidered,” ibid., 98. Contemporary understandings of British government spending and colonial prosperity: Bullion, Measure, 23–5. Rising colonial consumption: T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 467–99; id., “ ‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (1988): 73–87; and id., “Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 50 (1993): 471–501. Impact of war on political economy: Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994).

7. Bullion, Measure, 62–4; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 203, 206–7.

8. Bullion, Measure, 73.

9. Ibid., 80–2; 106–8; Lawson, Grenville, 166–80, 187–94; Thomas, Politics, 45–7; Koehn, Power, 125–7.

10. Thomas, Politics, 41–3; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 41–6; Jack Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1961), 52–65.

11. The proclamation also erected a fourth government, from the West Indian islands ceded to Britain in the Peace of Paris, in the colony of Grenada, or the British Windward Islands. See Gipson, New Responsibilities, 232–47. For the quotations in the following paragraphs, see David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (New York, 1955), 640–3.

12. The same provisions for grants also extended to “such reduced officers of our navy . . . as served on board our ships of war in North America at the times of the reduction of Louisbourg and Quebec” (ibid., 641; sailors and petty officers were excluded, perhaps by oversight).

13. Indian plan draft: Halifax to Amherst, 19 Oct. 1763, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, and with the War Office and the Treasury, 1763–1775, vol. 2 (New Haven, Conn., 1933), 4–5. (Cf. the complete proposal, reprinted as “Plan for the Future Management of Indian Affairs,” 10 July 1764, in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, vol. 7 [Albany, 1856], 637–41.) Also see John Richard Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier (1944; reprint, New York, 1966), 242–4; J. Russell Snapp, John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier (Baton Rouge, 1996), 58–64; Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 207–8; and Gipson, New Responsibilities, 431–2. Parliament never implemented the plan formally (it was too expensive), but the superintendents organized the Indian trade after 1764 along the lines it laid down.

14. Sosin, Whitehall, 52–78.

CHAPTER SIXTY: The American Duties Act (The Sugar Act)

1. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1967), 180–1; Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), 171.

2. This account of the session follows Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 17–20; and Lawson, Grenville, 171–80. “Beyond all example”: Grenville to Northumberland, 26 Feb. 1764, quoted in John L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1765 (Columbia, Mo., 1982), 90. King’s support: William James Smith, ed., The Grenville Papers, vol. 2 (1852; reprint, New York, 1970), 491.

3. “Brevity”: Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker (New York, 1894), 1:309. “This hour”: Grenville’s speech to the Commons, 9 Mar. 1764, in Lawson, Grenville, 195.

4. Pitt and Townshend: Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 321; Cornelius P. Forster, The Uncontrolled Chancellor: Charles Townshend and His American Policy (Providence, 1978), 49–54. “There did not seem”: Mauduit to the secretary of Massachusetts Bay, 7 Apr. 1764, in Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 231.

5. For the American Duties Act, see David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (New York, 1955), 644–8. On the provisions relating to customs enforcement, see Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (1953; rev. ed., New York, 1963), 40; Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 4–8; Thomas, Politics, 45–8; and Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 227–31. On the operation of the more complex British system, see Elizabeth E. Hoon, The Organization of the English Customs System, 1696–1786 (New York, 1938), esp. 143–8, 256–64; on the American customs, Thomas Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial North America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 182–4 (on the provisions of the American Duties Act) and passim. For a discussion of the act that differs in emphasis from my own, by stressing the antismuggling intent of the Grenville administration as evidence of orthodox mercantilism, see John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 75–83.

6. The tun was the unit from which most other English standard measures descended (the pipe, or butt, was a half tun; the puncheon, a third; the hogshead, a quarter; the tierce, a sixth; the barrel, an eighth); in 1700 Parliament defined a tun as holding 252 “wine gallons.” The wine gallon, one of two official English gallons, measured 231 cu. in., eventually became the standard U.S. gallon. Cask volumes, of course, varied according to the bulge and height, the depth at which the head was set, and so on. For the most complete conceivable discussion of British measures and variations in usages from the late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, see John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies, vol. 2 (New York, 1989), 768–878.

7. On the new duties, see Thomas, Politics, 47–8; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 226; and Bullion, Measure, 100–4.

8. Molasses and rum prices are those at Boston in 1762, from McCusker, Rum and Revolution,2:1078, 1080; adjusted to sterling according to the rates in id., Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 142. On the openness of the trade, Thomas Hutchinson observed: “Such indulgence has been shewn . . . to that branch of illicit trade [in French molasses], that nobody considered it as such.” As he went on to explain, the real cause of the smuggling was the poor compensation of customsmen, who were, generally speaking, the deputies of nonresident officials: “they are quartered upon for more than their legal fees [i.e., their employers charged them more than they could collect], & . . . without bribery & corruption, they must starve” (Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, 17 Sept. 1763, quoted in Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 208).

9. Quotation: Nathaniel Ware to Grenville, 22 Aug. 1763; reprinted in Bullion, Measure, 221. Ware noted that the Molasses Act’s sixpence sterling duty could theoretically be collected, if provincial excise taxes levied on rum—wartime measures to finance the costs of raising provincial troops—could be eliminated. In Massachusetts, the leading rum distiller in the colonies, the provincial tax on rum was approximately sixpence per gallon and was indispensable to discharging the colony’s war debt. Were rum to be subjected to an additional tax by the exaction of the full Molasses Act levy, Ware warned, “that Trade must Totally fail.”

10. Morgan, Crisis, 41–2; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 208–22; Bullion, Measure, 78–98, 220–3; Thomas, Politics, 47–50.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE: The Currency Act

1. Except where noted, the following discussion derives from Joseph Ernst, Money and Politicsin America, 1755–1775: A Study in the Currency Act of 1764 and the Political Economy of Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973), 43–88, 376; and Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 62–6. For information on exchange rates to supplement Ernst’s graphs, see John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 211.

2. Julian Hoppit, “Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39 (1986): 49–50.

3. The Currency Act appears in David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (New York, 1955), 649–50; quotation from 649.

4. On reimbursements in proportion to wartime expenditures, see Jack Greene, “The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution: The Causal Relationship Reconsidered,” in Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams, eds., The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (London, 1980), 98. The continental colonies as a whole expended £2,568,248 on the war and received £1,086,769 from Parliament as “free gifts”—42.3 percent of the total. The six colonies most heavily engaged in prosecuting the war—Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—bore 88.5 percent of the expense, expending a total of £2,271,804. Parliament eventually reimbursed these provinces £949,023, or 41.8 percent. Connecticut, for reasons that probably had to do with its assembly’s compliant attitude and its agent’s speed in submitting accounts, received a disproportionate share of the reimbursement funds: £231,752, or 89.2 percent of its expenditures. If it is excluded from the calculation as an anomaly, parliamentary reimbursements to the remaining five colonies totaled £717,271, covering 35.7 percent of expenditures.

My point in arguing counterfactually that an alternative scheme of colonial defense might have averted problems that later arose is not to maintain that such a measure would have worked easily had it been proposed—there would inevitably have been problems with an army in which all officers were British and all enlisted men American—but merely to emphasize that nothing like it ever was proposed; and hence to point up the limitations in British thinking about the colonies’ capacity to defend themselves.

5. On the backward-looking character of British policy, see esp. John Murrin, “The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy,” Reviews in American History 1 (1973): 307–18.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO: Postwar Conditions and the Context of Colonial Response

1. On the character and timing of the downturn, see William S. Sachs, “The Business Outlook in the Northern Colonies, 1750–1775” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1957), 107–13; Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 126–33; and Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 95–7, 168–80. On its British and macroeconomic context, see Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 52–3. Except as specified, the ensuing discussion follows these accounts.

2. In New York, the rate of exchange of province currency against sterling began to climb in late 1760. Starting in the mid-160s, it passed 180 in the spring of 1761, then hovered in the 182–190 range until late 1765. In Philadelphia, the rate rose from the mid-150s to 170 at the end of 1760, briefly touched 180 in mid-1762, and then oscillated between 178 and 170 until the fall of 1765. In Boston the rate jumped from 127 in May 1760 to 135 by the end of the year, bounced up to 145 in April 1761, and then gradually fell to 133 by late 1764—a level it maintained for the next five years. See the tables in John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and Amer ica, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 186, 165, 142.

3. Sachs, “Business Outlook,” 113–26.

4. Ibid., 126–30; Koehn, Power, 52–3.

5. Philadelphia and New York bankruptcies: Sachs, “Business Outlook,” 131–3; Egnal, Mighty Empire, 131–2; Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit, 56–7. The case of Thomas Riche: ibid., 49, 82, 133, 146–8.

6. Like all generalizations about the colonies, this one needs to be qualified. Not all regions suffered alike, or in precise synchrony. The recession barely touched the South Carolina low country in the 1760s. Virginia’s tobacco economy would bottom out in 1764, begin to recover in 1765, and improve significantly until suffering more reversals at the end of the decade. As we will see below, the Philadelphia dry goods sector would remain in serious trouble throughout the decade, but provision traders would suffer most severely only in 1764–68, thus providing some respite for Philadelphia business as other northern merchants were slipping into trouble, and brightening its outlook in 1769, when Philadelphia would lead the northern port towns in the recovery. Despite local exceptions and countertrends, however, most colonies and colonists (and particularly the northern ports and the most commercialized agricultural regions) experienced the 1760s as a decade of real and persistent economic dislocation. The resulting social strain carried significant consequences for colonial political life and helped impart an antagonistic character to colonial-metropolitan relations.

7. Boston: John Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 65–75, 285 n. 17; Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 254. New York: Sachs, “Outlook,” 132–7 passim (quotation from John Watts to Scott, Pringle, Cheape and Co., 5 Feb. 1764, at 136); Nash, Crucible, 250, 497 n. 83. Philadelphia: Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit, 173–7; Nash, Crucible, 255; Egnal, Mighty Empire, 132.

8. Winifed Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, 1992), 109 (table 8, “Weighted Index of on-the-Farm Prices Received by Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855”); id., “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” Journal of Economic History 39 (1979): 975–1001.

9. Disruptions in tobacco markets: Jacob Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973), 588–677; T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985), esp. 125–32. Quotation: George Washington to James Gildart, 26 Apr. 1763, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 7, January 1761–June 1767 (Charlottesville, Va., 1990), 201. Most of the ordinary-quality tobacco grown by small and middling planters in the Chesapeake, unlike the sweet-scented premium leaf that the gentry grew for the London market, was bought by resident Scottish factors, or storekeepers, and shipped to correspondents in Glasgow, Whitehaven, and on the Clyde, who reexported it to France under contract with the state monopoly. The French crown needed the revenues it derived from the tobacco monopoly so badly that it allowed this trade to continue during the war; wartime conditions and restrictions, however—British tobacco ships had to return in ballast, insurance rates were extremely high, and so on—radically diminished the profits to be made by tobacco planters themselves.

10. On Washington as a representative planter responding to the recession of the 1760s, see Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 3, Planter and Patriot (New York, 1951), 71–118; and Breen, Tobacco Culture, 147–50, 208–9.

11. The returns planter speculators realized on land sales to yeomen farmers have not yet been quantified, but the great planters clearly used their position as burgesses to make grants of land to syndicates that they themselves comprised (e.g., the Loyal Company and the Ohio Company), and from which they made speculative profits. Gentry surveyors like Peter Jefferson and George Washington aggressively pursued land acquisitions as individuals, while gentleman landholders sought to dominate the real-estate and rental markets wherever they could. The ability to control access to freehold land reinforced gentry social dominance, even in frontier counties where access to land was comparatively easier than in the tidewater. Thus any contraction in speculation carried social and cultural as well as economic consequences for the planter elite. See Turk McClesky, “Rich Land, Poor Prospects: Real Estate and the Formation of a Social Elite in Augusta County, Virginia, 1738–1770,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 48 (1990): 449–86.

12. Distilling and the Great Dismal Swamp venture: Freeman, Planter and Patriot, 116–17, 100–3. Mississippi Company: Articles of Agreement, 3 June 1763, Papers of Washington, 7:219–25.

13. Croghan’s mission: Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 203; Yoko Shirai, “The Indian Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1730–1768: Traders and Land Speculation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985), 151–98. Croghan, Franklin, and the Illinois Company: Samuel Wharton to Franklin, 23 Nov. 1764, in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 9, January 1 through December 31, 1764 (New Haven, Conn., 1967), 476–7. Croghan’s persistence: Wainwright, 253–5, 305–10.

14. On Lyman and the Military Adventurers, see Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 204–5, 210–11; Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986), 484–8; and esp. [Albert C. Bates, ed.], The Two Putnams: Israel and Rufus in the Havana Expedition of 1762 and in the Mississippi River Exploration of 1772–73 with Some Account of the Company of Military Adventurers (Hartford, 1931), 1–20.

15. Bailyn, Voyagers; id., The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986), 7–66.

16. A. Roger Ekirch, “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), esp. 168–83.

17. Quotation: Laurens to Richard Oswald and Co., 15 Feb. 1763, quoted in Egnal, Mighty Empire, 147–8. On the character of South Carolina’s prosperity and the mild effects of the recession, see ibid., 147–9. In yet another instance of the smallness of the Anglo-American trading world and the powerful effects on it of the war, it is worth noting that Laurens’s correspondent, Oswald, was part of a group of once-marginal, once-provincial British merchants that parlayed military contracts and government contacts into great wealth and postwar political clout. They had acquired formerly French slave-trading stations at bargain-basement rates, and at the end of the war they supplied Africans to the West Indies and the mainland. For a keen appreciation of how war and slavery offered matchless opportunities to those able to seize them, see David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York, 1995).

18. On New Jersey, see Thomas L. Purvis, Proprietors, Patronage, and Paper Money: Legislative Politics in New Jersey, 1703–1776 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986), esp. 168–71, 229–45. On Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York: Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties before the Constitution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973) 3–17; Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971), 140–278; John M. Murrin, “Political Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British North America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), esp. 432–47.

19. Egnal, Mighty Empire, 191–8; Main, Political Parties, 8–9.

20. Virginia: Egnal, Mighty Empire, 217; Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), 95–7; Main, Political Parties, 11. Massachusetts: William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, 1981), 158–75.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE: An Ambiguous Response to Imperial Initiatives

1. Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York, 1963), 43 (quotation from Francis Bernard, Select Letters on the Trade and Government of America [1774]).

2. John Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 83–4. Quotations: “Boston instructions to its delegates in the Massachusetts Legislature,” David C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 9, American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (New York, 1955), 663–4 (hereafter cited as Am. Col. Docs.).

3. Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), 82–4; Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York, 1980), 3–50. See also William M. Fowler, Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (New York, 1997).

4. Jensen, Founding, 85–7; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 51–3. The Rights of the Colonies Asserted and Proved is reprinted with commentary in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1775, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 419–82, quotation at 454. For commentary on the pamphlet, see esp. Bailyn’s introduction, ibid., 409–17; and id., Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 176–81; also Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), 262–5.

5. Hutchinson objects, privately: Malcolm Freiberg, Prelude to Purgatory: Thomas Hutchinson in Provincial Massachusetts Politics, 1760–1770 (New York, 1990), 71–7; Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 62–4. Quotation: Bernard to Halifax, 10 Nov. 1764, in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1967), 235 n. 30.

6. The North Carolina Assembly also registered a protest against the American Duties Act as a violation of colonial rights, but it did so only locally, in the form of a message to Governor Arthur Dobbs. It could have been known in Britain only if the governor transmitted it, which he seems not to have done. See Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 57; A. Roger Ekirch, “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 148–60; Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963), 364.

7. On James De Lancey’s political power, see Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971), 171–8. On Colden, see ibid., 152–5; and Milton M. Klein, “Prelude to Revolution in New York: Jury Trials and Judicial Tenure,” in id., ed., The Politics of Diversity: Essays in the History of Colonial New York (Port Washington, N.Y., 1974), 154–77. Quotations are from John Watts to Monckton, 10 Nov. 1764, Watts to Isaac Barré, 19 Jan. 1765, and Robert R. Livingston to Monckton, 23 Feb. 1765, ibid., 168.

8. Petition to the House of Commons, 18 Oct. 1764; in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 8–14.

9. “Colonists may not be taxed”: Rhode Island petition, 29 Nov. 1764, quoted in Jensen, Founding, 87. Connecticut Assembly and Ingersoll: Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 236–7.

10. Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 114; Jensen, Founding, 27–8; “Remonstrance of the Pennsylvania frontiersmen,” 13 Feb. 1764, Am. Col. Docs., 614–17; Alden Vaughan, “Frontier Banditti and the Indians: The Paxton Boys’ Legacy, 1763–1775,” Pennsylvania History 51 (1984): 1–5.

11. Jensen, Founding, 88–90; Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 138–54.

12. Petition to the King, and Memorial to the House of Lords, both 18 Dec. 1764, in Morgan, Prologue, 14–15.

13. Remonstrance to the House of Commons, 18 Dec. 1764, ibid., 16–17.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR: Pontiac’s Progress

1. John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 125–34; see also John Richard Alden, General Gage in America(Baton Rouge, 1948), 65–88.

2. Shy, Toward Lexington, 135–6; Alden, Gage, 93–4; Gage to Egremont, 17 Nov. 1763, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn., 1931), 1–2; Gage to Halifax, 9 Dec. 1763, 2–4; Amherst to Gage, 17 Nov. 1763, The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, vol. 2 (New Haven, Conn., 1933), 209–14.

3. Alden, Gage, 94–5; id., John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier (1944; reprint, New York, 1966), 196; William Smith, Historical Account of Henry Bouquet’s Expedition against the Ohio Indians, in 1764 (Cincinnati, 1868), 29–44; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 123–4. Pennsylvania’s contribution was, as usual, delayed by the intractable dispute between the antiproprietary and proprietary factions in the assembly.

4. Gipson, New Responsibilities, 117–18; William G. Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit and Preferment in Colonial North America: John Bradstreet’s Quest (Waterloo, Ont., 1982), 192–5, 197–8.

5. “When the Indians”: Amherst to Gage, 17 Nov. 1763, Gage Corr., 2:212. “Fill their canoes”: James Thomas Flexner, Lord of the Mohawks: A Biography of Sir William Johnson (Boston, 1979), 268.

6. “The largest Number”: Johnson to Cadwallader Colden, 23 Aug. 1764, quoted in Gipson, New Responsibilities, 118–19. Johnson negotiated treaties with each group present, evidently all on similar lines; see E. B. O’Callaghan et al., eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 4 (Albany, 1924), 511–14. Conference expenses: “Journals of Capt. John Montresor,” ed. G. D. Scull, New-York Historical Society Collections, 14 (1881): 275.

The end of the alcohol ban has never been properly appreciated as a strategic move. On 1 Nov. 1763 Gladwin suggested to Amherst that “if your Excellency still intends to punish them [the Indians] further for their barbarities, it may be easily done without any expense to the Crown by permitting a free sale of rum, which will destroy them more effectually than fire and sword” (quoted in Howard H. Peckham, Pontiac and the Indian Uprising [Princeton, N.J., 1947], 238). Amherst ignored the suggestion, but Johnson embraced it. Like Gladwin, he knew that among the heaviest consumers of alcohol would be exactly those young men who, sober, had been such formidable opponents in 1763. With liquor to turn their aggressiveness against one another, disorder, murders, and suffering within Indian communities would doubtless increase, but with a few precautions (such as allowing the trade only at major posts and prohibiting consumption on the site) Britain’s reestablished garrisons would have little to fear, and much to gain, by reopening the traffic in alcohol. In October 1764 he argued to the Board of Trade that the Indian trade “will never be so extensive without” the sale of rum, for four reasons:

First, the extreme desire the Indians have for it, and the strong requests the several Nations made for the sale thereof, when lately at Niagara, which I was obliged to promise, should be complied with, and the same is approved by Genl Gage. Secondly, that as the Indians value it above any thing else, they will not stick at giving such price for it, as will make good addition to the fund for the purposes of the [Indian] Departm[en]t. Thirdly, that without it, the Indians can purchase their cloathing with half the quantity of Skins, which will make them indolent, and lessen the Fur Trade. And lastly, that from what I find, the Indians will be universally discontented without it (Johnson to the Lords of Trade, n.d. [8 Oct. 1764], in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, vol. 7 [Albany, 1856], 665 [hereafter, DRCHSNY]).

In short, Johnson argued that since the demand for rum was virtually unlimited, it might as well be taxed to support his department. This cynical view made enough sense to the Board of Trade that it sanctioned a resumption in the rum trade. In 1764, responding to what was presumably pent-up demand, Johnson’s northern department sold approximately 50,000 gallons of rum to the Indians. This was high, but not too far from the amount ordinarily supplied in later years. By 1767, traders at Fort Pitt brought in an estimated 13,000 gallons of rum; in that same year at Detroit the quantity was approximately 24,000 gallons. Annual consumption among western Indians as a whole during the 1760s, exclusive of amounts obtained from Canadian traders, seems to have run between 80,000 and 170,000 gallons (Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America [Ithaca, N.Y., 1995], 53–4, 163). Another work, published too late to inform the narrative here, generally supports this conclusion and suggests that with the Canadian trade reckoned in, the quantity may have been substantially larger—as much as 240,000 gallons annually, or a per capita consumption rate for adult males of 12 gallons annually. See Walter S. Dunn Jr., FrontierProfit and Loss: The British Army and the Fur Traders, 1760–1764 (Westport, Conn., 1998), 178–9.

7. Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit, 193–5. Bradstreet’s health never fully recovered after this episode, which may have marked the onset of the cirrhosis that would finally kill him, a decade later (ibid., 262–3).

8. Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit, 196–205; Gipson, New Responsibilities, 118–21; Peckham, Pontiac, 255–60; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 291–6.

9. “Congress With The Western Nations,” 7–10 Sept. 1764, quoted in Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit, 205.

10. “His Majesty”: “A Short Abstract of the Proceedings at a Congress held at Detroit the 7th Septr. 1764 . . . ,” quoted ibid., 206. Subsequent quotations: Bradstreet to Charles Gould, 4 Dec. 1764, and “Colonel Bradstreets opinion of Indians and their affairs,” 4 Dec. 1764, ibid., 234–5. “Colonel Bradstreet’s thoughts on Indian Affairs,” 4 Dec. 1764, DRCHSNY, 7:690–4, makes clear the links between Indian culture, trade, military force, geography, and strategy central to his thinking:

To insure a lasting peace, gain their affections, and wean them from the French, strict justice, moderation, fair Trade, with keeping them from frequent intercourse with each other, and a respectable force at Detroit, is the way to obtain it, unless their whole dependence for the necessaries of life depended upon the English, which will never be the case, as long as the French can come up the Mississippi in safety, land, and extend their Trade on our side with impunity. . . .

It is absolutely necessary to make choice for the establishing posts, for . . . the Savages of each Lake to carry on their Trade with ease to themselves; . . . without this indulgence, they will never be contented, nor conspiracies warded off.

Thus a vigorous trade would have to be sustained at Detroit, along with enough force (two battalions) that the commandant would “have it in his power to detach from his Garrison Three Hundred good Men, besides Militia, to chastize any Nation or Band of Savages, the instant they deserve it; for, by taking immediate satisfaction, they will respect, and fear us, and thereby prevent a General War.” Finally, Bradstreet stressed that establishing an emporium at Detroit was the only way to eliminate the Six Nations’ malign influence over the interior Indian peoples. (That this would coincidentally cripple Sir William Johnson may also have crossed his mind.)

11. Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit, 228–9; Sir William Johnson, “Remarks on the Conduct of Colonel Bradstreet,” 24 Nov. 1764, Johnson Papers, 4:601; “Journals of Montresor,” 287 (entry of 31 Aug. 1764). “Roughly equivalent”: White, Middle Ground, 297.

12. Gage to Bradstreet, 16 Aug. 1764, in Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit, 211.

13. Morris to Bradstreet, 18 Sept. 1764, ibid., 212. Also see “The Journal of Captain Thomas Morris of His Majesty’s XVII Regiment of Infantry,” in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, vol. 1 (Cleveland, 1904), 301–28; and Peckham, Pontiac, 256–60. The failure of the chiefs to return with prisoners was probably not evidence that Bradstreet had been deceived, as his enemies argued, but an indication that the delegation had come to Presque Isle only on behalf of peace factions in their villages, hoping that news of British willingness to make peace would sway local majorities upon their return. Their nonappearance, in that case, would prove only that they had not convinced their communities that peace was at hand (something that news of Bradstreet’s behavior at Detroit would surely have argued against).

14. Godfrey, Pursuit of Profit, 218–21; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 206. Capt. Montrésor described the journey from Sandusky to Niagara (three hundred miles) in harrowing detail: “Journals of Montresor,” 311–18.

15. Smith, ed., Bouquet’s Expedition, 51.

16. Quotations: ibid., 60. Expedition: Gipson, New Responsibilities, 124–6.

17. Gage to Halifax, 13 Dec. 1764, Gage Corr., 1:46.

18. Manpower and financial restraints: “Colonel Bradstreet’s thoughts on Indian Affairs,” DRCHSNY, 7:693; cf. Bouquet to Gage, 30 Nov. 1764, cited in Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 213. Gage’s annual expenses were running between £335,000 and £411,000 as opposed to the £225,000 contemplated in 1763; see Peter D. G. Thomas, “The Cost of the British Army in North America, 1763–1775,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (1988): 514. (The Treasury restricted Gage’s spending to funds appropriated by Parliament, allowing him to borrow only in emergencies, under stringent restraints. [Treasury Minutes, 28 Nov. 1764, Gage Corr., 2:269.]) Diplomatic initiatives: White, Middle Ground, 304. Ross and Crawford: Gipson, New Responsibilities, 419–20; Gage to Halifax, 1 June and 10 Aug. 1765, Gage Corr., 1:58–65; John Richard Alden, Stuart, 197, 204.

19. Wainwright, Croghan, 211–17; Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 148–9; Gage to Halifax, 23 Jan. and 27 Apr. 1765, Gage Corr., 1:47–9, 55–8.

20. Wainwright, Croghan, 218–19; McConnell, A Country Between, 204–5; Peckham, Pontiac,270.

21. Peckham, Pontiac, 270–7; White, Middle Ground, 301–3.

22. Alden, Stuart, 202–4; quotation is from Capt. James Campbell to Maj. Robert Farmar, 26 Mar. 1765, quoted at 203 n. 53.

23. Wainwright, Croghan, 220–1; Peckham, Pontiac, 280–1; White, Middle Ground, 302–5; quotation is from Croghan to William Murray, 12 July 1765, in C. W. Alvord and C. E. Carter, “The New Regime, 1765–1767,” Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library 11 (1916): 58.

24. Peckham, Pontiac, 281–5; Gage to Henry Seymour Conway, 23 Sept. 1765, Gage Corr., 1:66; White, Middle Ground, 303–5.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE: The Lessons of Pontiac’s War

1. Howard H. Peckham, Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (Princeton, N.J., 1947), 306–16; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 312–13.

2. Ibid., 313–14. Walter S. Dunn Jr., Frontier Profit and Loss: The British Army and the Fur Traders, 1760–1764 (Westport, Conn., 1988), 182–3, also treats the Indian rebellion as a success for the insurgents.

3. Barrington to Gage, 10 Oct. 1765, in John Shy, ed., “Confronting Rebellion: Private Correspondence of Lord Barrington with General Gage, 1765–1775,” Sources of American Independence: Selected Manuscripts from the Collections of the William L. Clements Library, ed. Howard H. Peckham, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1978), 9–10.

4. All quotations are from Gage to Barrington, 18 Dec. 1765, ibid., 13–16.

5. Gage to Barrington, 8 Jan. 1766, ibid., 18–19.

6. John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 229.

PART IX: CRISIS COMPOUNDED, 1765-1766 CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX: Stamp Act and Quartering Act

1. Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 322–4.

2. Quotations: Rose Fuller and Charles Townshend, in the diary of Nathaniel Ryder, in R. C. Simmons and Peter D. G. Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, vol. 2, 1765–1768 (Millwood, N.Y., 1983), 13 (punctuation altered to bring out sense of Townshend’s speech).

3. “Disgust”: Barré, in Ryder’s diary, ibid (punctuation altered to bring out sense of passage). “They planted” to “a word”: Jared Ingersoll’s summary, id. to Thomas Fitch, 11 Feb. 1765, ibid., 16–17. (Barré’s vehemence doubtless reflected his reverence for Wolfe’s memory and his distaste for Townshend’s older brother, Robert—the brigadier most bitterly antagonistic to Wolfe at Québec.)

4. Quotation: Ryder diary summary, ibid., 12. Defeat of adjournment motion and subsequent passage: Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 93–8.

5. John Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act (Columbia, Mo., 1982), 147–9, 181–91.

6. Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 35–43. The stamps were not, like modern postage stamps, gummed paper, but rather inch-tall impressions made on paper by a die, like a modern notary’s seal. Newspapers and most legal documents would be printed on prestamped paper, which could be legally purchased only from stamp distributors or their designated agents. Because parchment (scraped animal skin) would not hold a stamped impression, legal documents customarily inscribed on parchment (diplomas and the like) would have a small piece of stamped paper affixed by glue and a staplelike metal fastener. Stamped paper would similarly be glued as seals on packs of playing cards or boxes of dice. For a description of the stamps and examples of the impressions, see C. A. Weslager, The Stamp Act Congress (Newark, Del., 1976), 35–9.

7. Lawrence Henry Gipson, American Loyalist: Jared Ingersoll (New Haven, Conn., 1971), 145–7; Edmund Morgan and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York, 1963), 301–11; Bullion, Great and Necessary Measure, 169–70, 173.

8. Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), 211–14; Thomas, British Politics, 115–16.

9. Gage and previous quartering difficulties: John R. Alden, General Gage in America: Being Principally a History of His Role in the American Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1948), 32, 34–5; Stanley Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (1933, reprint, New York, 1968), 195–6; Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755–1763 (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), 82–4. Postwar circumstances and quartering: John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 169–71, 174–5.

10. Legal complexity of quartering: ibid., 163–76. Gage acts: Gage to Welbore Ellis, 22 Jan. 1765, with enclosures, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, vol. 2 (New Haven, Conn., 1931), 262–6.

11. Thomas, British Politics, 102–3; for an assessment of Ellis as a “genuinely incompetent” secretary at war, see Shy, Toward Lexington, 182.

12. “In such manner”: draft bill, in Thomas, British Politics, 103. Opposition, and withdrawal of bill: Simmons and Thomas, Proceedings and Debates, 2:42.

13. Shy, Toward Lexington, 187; Thomas, British Politics, 108. The bill was approved as a separate act rather than an amendment to the Mutiny Act because the Mutiny Act of 1765 had expired and been reenacted before the Quartering Act debates concluded; thus the Quartering Act had to be reenacted annually as a kind of supplement directed specifically at America.

14. Quotation: Loudoun to the duke of Cumberland, 29 Aug. 1756, in Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 82.

15. John Watts to Gov. Robert Monckton, 1 June 1765, quoted in Shy, Toward Lexington, 188. Watts was no radical, Shy notes, but “an army contractor and future Tory.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN: Grenville’s End

1. On the American Trade Act, which eased restrictions on small-scale coasting vessels, permitted colonial iron and lumber to be exported once more to Ireland, established bounties on colonial iron and lumber exported to Britain, relaxed restrictions on American trade to the Azores and southern Europe, and limited the fees customs collectors could charge, see Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution,1763–1767 (Oxford, 1975), 108–12; and Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1967), 280–1. On the king’s illness, see John Brooke, King George III (New York, 1972), 109–10, 318–43; and esp. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business (London, 1969).

2. Thomas, British Politics, 116–18; Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), 214–16; Brooke, King George III, 110–13; Stanley Ayling, George the Third (New York, 1972), 125–7.

3. Unemployment was symptomatic of the rapid shifts in technology and the relations of production then besetting silk weaving, the first branch of British textile manufacture to undergo industrialization. The London weavers, who possessed a long-standing intellectual tradition, achieved an early consciousness of class, understood the efficacy of collective action, and took the first steps in Britain toward industrial organization. By permitting combinations of masters and journeymen to set wages, the Spitalfields Acts of 1765 and 1773 in effect recognized trade-unionism among the weavers. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966), passim; Charles Wilson, England ’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (London, 1965), 195, 351; and Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969), 32–3. On the king’s reaction to the riots, see Brooke, King George III, 113–16; and Ayling, George the Third, 127–9.

4. Lawson, Grenville, 217–18.

5. Brooke, King George III, 121–2.

6. William James Smith, ed., The Grenville Papers, vol. 3 (1853; reprint, New York, 1970), 215–16 (10 July 1765).

7. Ibid., 215.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT: The Assemblies Vacillate

1. On the responses of the various colonial assemblies, see Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), 111–19; also, esp., Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York, 1963): 132–4 (R.I.), 294–5 (Conn.), 121, 196 ff. (N.Y.). Similar inaction characterized N.H. (139), N.J. (139, 147, 198), Md. (100–8), N.C. (139), S.C. (201–2), and Ga. (202–3). On Pa., see ibid., 311–12; and Benjamin Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway: A Political Partnership (New Haven, Conn., 1972), 113–18; quotation from Galloway to Franklin, 18 July 1765, ibid., 116.

2. On the Hopkins-Howard-Otis controversy, see Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1775, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 500–5, 524–30, 546–52; quotation from Defence of the Halifax Libel at 550 (original italics deleted here). On representation and the differing American and British understandings of this critical doctrine, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), 25–8, 173–85, et passim.

3. Quotation: Bernard to John Pownall, May 1765, in Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 140.

4. “To consider”: Massachusetts circular letter, quoted in Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 139. Delegation: ibid., 139–41. “Never consent”: Bernard to the Board of Trade, 8 July 1765, quoted ibid., 140.

5. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 3, Planter and Patriot (New York, 1951), 129–30; Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry: A Biography (New York, 1974), 22–34.

6. Resolutions: Freeman, Planter and Patriot, 133; Beeman, Henry, 33–5 (“steps necessary” and “alone, unadvised”: quoted from Henry’s memoir on the resolves, at 35). The Virginia Resolves are reprinted in their variant forms in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 47–50; these quotations follow Henry’s manuscript, 47.

7. On 8 May, a party of between twenty and thirty young men attacked ten Overhill Cherokee warriors passing through the Shenandoah Valley on their way to the Ohio Country, killing five. Fauquier issued a proclamation offering rewards for the perpetrators and tried urgently to reassure the Cherokee headmen that the killers would be brought to justice. He was clearly paying more attention to this affair than to the Burgesses until debates on Henry’s resolves. See the series of letters from this period in George Reese, ed., The Official Papers of Francis Fauquier, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, 1758–1768, vol. 3, 1764–1768 (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 1235–48.

8. All quotations in this and the previous paragraph are from Fauquier to the Board of Trade, 5 June 1765, ibid., 1250–1.

9. Jefferson’s reactions: Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. 1, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston, 1948), 88–94 (quotation is from Jefferson to William Wirt, 5 Aug. 1815, at 93). On Henry’s rhetorical style, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 266–9; and T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great TidewaterPlanters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 188–90.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE: Mobs Respond

1. On the resolves, see the variant versions in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 49–50; and the discussion in id. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York, 1963), 127–30. The sixth and seventh resolves were probably written by John Fleming, who represented Cumberland County, and/or George Johnston, member for Fairfax; they were the only colleagues to whom Henry had shown his own five resolves (Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry, A Biography [New York, 1974], 39–40). The resolutions quoted here follow the version in the Newport Mercury.

2. On the composition of the Loyal Nine, see Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 160–1; G. B. Warden, Boston, 1689–1776 (Boston, 1970), 163; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: ColonialRadicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972), 58, 85–6, 307; and the description of a meeting on 15 Jan. 1765 by John Adams, in Lyman H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 1, Diary, 1755–1770 (New York, 1964), 294. “The People of Virginia have spoke”: Edes, quoted in Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 135. (The “insipid Thing” was the polite protest against parliamentary taxation that Thomas Hutchinson had stage-managed through the Council and House of Representatives in late 1764.)

3. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 53–8, 69–70; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 161 ff; Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 16–18, 180–97 passim; Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York, 1977), 91–7; George P. Anderson, “Ebenezer Mackintosh: Stamp Act Rioter and Patriot,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications 26 (1927): 15–64.

4. There are many accounts of the events on August 14. This one follows Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 161–5; Hoerder, Crowd Action, 97–101; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1967), 292–4; Bernard to Halifax, 15 Aug. 1765, in Morgan, Prologue,106–8; and Diary of John Rowe, entry of 14 Aug. 1765, in Anne Rowe Cunningham, ed., The Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant, 1759–1762, 1764–1779 (Boston, 1903; reprint, 1969), 88–9. Boston’s High Street ran the length of the neck, connecting the town peninsula to the mainland; it was thus as close to a thoroughfare as the town could be said to possess in 1765. Later renamed Washington Street, in 1765 it had four separately named stretches from the neck to the Province House: Orange Street, Newbury Street, Marlborough Street, and Cornhill. Deacon Elliot’s Corner was a small square where Frog Lane (today’s Boylston Street) entered from the west, dividing Orange from Newbury. See Lester Cappon et al., eds., Atlas of Early American History: The Revolutionary Period, 1760–1790 (Princeton, N.J., 1976), 9.

5. Bernard to Halifax, 15 Aug. 1765, in Morgan, Prologue, 108.

6. On the Wheelwright bankruptcy, see John Cary, Joseph Warren: Physician, Politician, Patriot (Urbana, Ill., 1961), 45–7, 120–1. Quotation and comparison of the panic and the Lisbon earthquake: James Otis to George Johnstone et al., 25 Jan. 1765, Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 43 (1909–10): 204–7 (quotation at 205). See also the account in Letters and Diary of Rowe, 74–5 (diary entries of 15–21 Jan. 1765). Wheelwright complicated Boston’s problems by making over his assets to a relative before he left, and then dying—intestate— soon after he arrived in the French West Indies; the probate proceedings on his estate lasted more than twenty-five years (Nathaniel Wheelwright Probate Records, docket 14148, Suffolk County Courthouse, Boston).

7. Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 29–32.

8. The following account derives from Hoerder, Crowd Action, 104–10; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 166–9; Bailyn, Ordeal, 70–155 passim; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 295–7.

9. Bernard to the Board of Trade, 31 Aug. 1765, quoted in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Coming of the Revolution, 1763–1775 (New York, 1962), 93.

10. Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, 30 Aug. 1765, in Morgan, Prologue, 108–9.

11. Ibid., 109.

12. The following account is based on Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 191–4; Thomas Moffat to Joseph Harrison, 16 Oct. 1765, in Morgan, Prologue, 109–13; and Jensen, Founding, 111–12.

13. Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 303–4 (McEvers), 306–7 (Coxe), 302–3 (Meserve), 316 (Mercer; quotation is from Mercer to Rockingham, 11 Apr. 1766, ibid.), 319–20 (South Carolina), 317–18 (North Carolina).

14. Ibid., 312–14.

15. Lawrence Henry Gipson, American Loyalist: Jared Ingersoll (New Haven, Conn., 1971), 177–85. On the participation of former provincials in the mob that compelled the resignation and on Fitch’s loss of office, see Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 214–15, 222–4. On Fitch’s effort to justify himself publicly by pamphlet, and on his later career, see Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. “Fitch, Thomas”; and Gipson, Ingersoll, 252–313, esp. 290–3, 296 n. On the transfer of assembly dominance from the Old Light, western, and conservative party to the New Light eastern insurgents, see Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 261–6; on the cultural significance of Ingersoll’s resignation, ibid., 284–8. See also Oscar Zeichner, Connecticut’s Years of Controversy, 1750–1776 (Williamsburg, Va., 1949), 44–77.

16. The following account derives from Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 312–24; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 307–11; and Benjamin Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway: A Political Partnership (New Haven, Conn., 1972), 115–25.

17. Morgan, Prologue, 51–2, reprints the resolves.

CHAPTER SEVENTY: Nullification by Violence, and an Elite Effort to Reassert Control

1. James M. Johnson, Militiamen, Rangers, and Redcoats: The Military in Georgia, 1754–1776 (Macon, Ga., 1992), 55–66. See also John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 214–15; and W. W. Abbott, The Royal Governors of Georgia, 1754–1775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 105–16. Ironically, the British government disbanded the rangers in March 1767 as an economy measure ( Johnson, Militiamen, 67).

2. “Journals of Capt. John Montresor,” ed. G. D. Scull, New-York Historical Society, Collections14 (1881): 336–9 (entries for 23 Oct.–5 Nov. 1765; quotations at 337); Shy, Toward Lexington, 211–14; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1967), 304–6. An excellent account of New York in the immediate postwar period and the Stamp Act crisis unfortunately came to hand too late to influence this narrative and the preceding account of the effects of the postwar depression on the northeastern port towns. It is, however, generally consistent with my own understanding, in that it stresses the significance of both the Seven Years’ War and Cadwallader Colden as influences on New Yorkers’ behavior in the years 1763–66. See Joseph S. Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763–1776 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), 43–6 (impact of postwar depression), 49–55 (character of Colden), 55–61 (significance of the war), and 62–82 (riot and aftermath).

3. Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972), 68–9.

4. The nine colonial assemblies that passed resolves were Va. (31 May), R.I. (Sept.), Pa. (21 Sept.), Md. (28 Sept.), Conn. (25 Oct.), Mass. (29 Oct.), S.C. (29 Nov.), N.J. (30 Nov.), and N.Y. (18 Dec.); see Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 47–62. Mass., R.I., Conn., N.Y., N.J., Pa., Del., Md., and S.C. sent delegations to the Stamp Act Congress. N.H.’s assembly, in the pocket of Gov. Benning Wentworth, declined to send a delegation, while the governors of Va., N.C., and Ga. refused to convene their assemblies and thus prevented the election of delegates (Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution [New York, 1963], 139). Except where otherwise noted, the following account of the congress’s proceedings derives from C. A. Weslager, The Stamp Act Congress (Newark, Del., 1976), 107–68.

5. Only Christopher Gadsden, delegate from South Carolina, protested against petitioning the House of Commons, on the grounds that the colonies derived none of their rights from it; he withdrew the motion when more conservative delegates objected (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 147–8).

6. Morgan, Prologue, 68.

7. Mob restraint: Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 69–71. Quotation: Francis Bernard to John Pownall, 1 and 5 Nov. 1765, ibid. Boston’s merchants made a large donation to the mobs and provided Ebenezer Mackintosh with a splendid uniform, a gold-laced hat, a cane, and a speaking trumpet. He marched, as “Captain-General of the Liberty Tree,” at the head of the parade, arm-in-arm with a member of the Council. Later the merchants footed the bill for a magnificent “union” dinner at which two hundred men from the mobs and other antistamp constituencies celebrated the victory of liberty—and order (Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution [Cambridge, Mass., 1981], 180, 188–90).

8. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 72–4.

9. Origins and spread of nonimportation: ibid., 74; Bernhard Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution, 1759–1766 (New York, 1960), 192–3, cites articles from the Providence Gazette and the Connecticut Courant from Oct. 1764. Boston’s association: Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (1918; reprint, New York, 1966), 78, 80. “Upwards of Two Hundred”: “The New York Agreement, October 31, 1765,” in Morgan, Prologue, 106. Philadelphia: Schlesinger, Colonial Merchants, 79. Thomas M. Doerflinger, in A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 189, notes that the Philadelphia merchants had been divided, generally, between antiproprietary Quakers who favored submission and proprietary Anglicans and Presbyterians who opposed it. Their evident unity on nonimportation may have reflected fears of violence, if they did not comply.

10. 14 Oct. 1765; reprinted in Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., Papers of John Adams, vol. 1, September 1755–October 1773 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 147.

11. Ploughjogger to the Boston Evening-Post, 20 June 1763, in Papers of Adams, 1:63. (Adams wrote three Ploughjogger letters in 1763, then no more until October 1765.)

12. Quotation: diary entry, 18 Dec. 1765, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 1, Diary 1755–1770 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 263; weather: entry of 19 Dec., ibid., 265 (“A fair Morning after a severe Storm of 3 days and 4 Nights. A vast Quantity of rain fell”).

13. Diary and Autobiography, 1:285 (entry of 2 Jan. 1766).

14. On the significance of women in resistance, see esp. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980), 155–94; and Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), 35–42.

15. Diary and Autobiography, 1:282–4.

PART X: EMPIRE PRESERVED? 1766 CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE: The Repeal of the Stamp Act

1. Paul Langford, The First Rockingham Administration, 1765–1766 (Oxford, 1973), 77–83, and Peter D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis (Oxford, 1975), 132–8.

2. For an assessment of Rockingham’s character, personality, and habits, see Langford, Rockingham Administration, esp. 16–21 and 244–8; also (less critically) Ross J. S. Hoffman, The Marquis: A Study of Lord Rockingham, 1730–82 (New York, 1973), esp. ix–xii, 1–21, 79–80, 94, 333–4.

3. Since late May 1765, Temple had been reconciled with his younger brother, George Grenville, which meant that he had been estranged from his brother-in-law, William Pitt; thus Pitt’s demand that Temple be offered the Treasury was either a ploy to detach him from Grenville (for Temple was notoriously covetous of both honors and office), or a nonnegotiable demand intended to make it clear that Pitt had assumed office on his own terms. Temple, it seems, hoped to restore the old family alliance, with himself as first lord of the Treasury and Pitt and Grenville as secretaries of state for the Southern and Northern Departments. See Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (New York, 1976), 330–1, 339–40.

4. Langford, First Rockingham Administration, 104–5, 135–8; Ayling, Elder Pitt, 335–7, 343–4; Thomas, British Politics, 175–6.

5. On the massacre, see Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930; reprint, New York, 1961), 403–15. The voting strength of the King’s Friends was reckoned in Jan. 1766 at about 148; see Langford, Rockingham Administration, 156–8.

6. Edmund Burke would later make the alienation of the Rockinghams from the King’s Friends a major theme of Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), alleging that Bute’s allies had deliberately undermined the Rockingham ministry. Paul Langford, in A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), 527–8, dismisses this view as “a sublime and beautiful form of sour grapes”; but cf. Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago, 1992), esp. i–lii.

7. “Plan of Business,” 28 Nov. 1765 [misdated 27 Nov.], in Langford, Rockingham Administration,111. I have reordered Rockingham’s phrases for syntactical clarity.

8. Rockingham’s analysis—which is to say, the analysis of the merchants whom he consulted—did not extend to the functioning of the Proclamation of 1763. This measure was failing to stabilize the backcountry and malfunctioning badly in Canada, where Yankee traders who had arrived after the war were in a state of virtual rebellion against a governor who, they claimed, favored Canadian papists in violation of the proclamation’s terms (Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760–1791 [Toronto, 1966], 36–55; and Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 [New York, 1968], 172–6).

9. Langford, Rockingham Administration, 111–18, 200–12.

10. Thomas, British Politics, 168–70; Langford, Rockingham Administration, 135–6, 141–3.

11. “Authority” and “welfare”: speech from the Throne, 14 Jan. 1765, in Thomas, British Politics, 170. “A pepper-corn”: speech of Robert Nugent, Lord Clare, M.P. for Bristol, summarized in William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle, eds., Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, vol. 2 (London, 1838), 364. See also Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York, 1963), 267.

12. Quotations from “Confidence is a plant of slow growth” to “the head of man”: Chatham Corr., 2:365–7. “Ought to be . . . erroneous policy”: summary of Pitt’s position by James West, quoted in Thomas, British Politics, 172.

13. Quoted in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (New York, 1961), 378.

14. Pitt’s reply to Grenville, 14 Jan. 1766, in Chatham Corr., 2:369–73.

15. Yorke and the Declaratory Act: Langford, Rockingham Administration, 151. Trecothick’s petition drive: ibid., 119–24; and Thomas, British Politics, 187–8.

16. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 366; id., Rockingham Administration, 153–4; Thomas, British Politics, 189–90.

17. Ibid., 191–5; Langford, Rockingham Administration, 154–6. Rockingham’s meeting with the king was only minimally reassuring. George preferred a modification of the Stamp Act to repeal and offered his support only if Rockingham refrained from making it public. He refused to countenance the dismissal of any minister—he was thinking of his friend Lord Northington, the lord chancellor—who broke with the administration’s policy. He then sent an account of the meeting to Northington, implying that he expected the ministry to fall. See the king to the lord chancellor, 3 Feb. 1766, in John Fortescue, ed., The Correspondence of King George the Third, from 1760 to December 1783, vol. 1, 1760 to 1767 (1927; reprint, London, 1967), 252.

18. Thomas, British Politics, 195–9.

19. Resolutions: quoted in Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 390–1. Grenville’s motion: Grenville to Hans Stanley, 6 Feb. 1766, in Thomas, British Politics, 206.

20. Langford, Rockingham Administration, 175–8; Gipson, Thunder-Clouds Gather, 392–3; Thomas, British Politics, 206–17 (quotation: Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Fox, 24 Feb. 1766, at 213).

21. Summary of Trecothick’s testimony, ibid., 217–19.

22. On the risk of social disturbance arising from unemployment, see Langford, Rockingham Administration, 182–5. The following summary of Franklin’s testimony derives from the version reprinted in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 13, January 1 through December 31, 1766 (New Haven, Conn., 1969), 129–59.

23. The Examination of Doctor Benjamin Franklin, before an August Assembly, relating to the Repeal of the Stamp Act, &c. (Philadelphia, 1766).

24. Nugent quotation: Franklin’s notes on the examination, quoted ibid., 159 n. 1. Vote: Thomas, British Politics, 233.

25. Ibid., 240–1, 246–7; Langford, Rockingham Administration, 190–5; Gipson, Thunder-CloudsGather, 398–407. The House of Lords actually had a small majority in favor of using troops to enforce the Stamp Act, and its approval of the repeal bill looked doubtful because several powerful peers—notably the duke of Bedford and the earl of Sandwich—thought Rockingham too soft on the colonists. In the end a procedural issue determined the outcome. The Stamp Act had been a “supply bill”—a tax measure—which constitutionally could only be granted by the Commons; thus authority to repeal also lay solely with the Commons, and the Lords had only the duty of offering their advice (which they had done in debate) and consent (Langford, Rockingham Administration, 192–4).

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO: The Hollowness of Empire

1. “Houses at night”: Annual Register, 1766, quoted in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 11, The Triumphant Empire: The Rumbling of the Coming Storm, 1766–1770 (New York, 1967), 3. “Many Barrels”: Pennsylvania Gazette, 22 May 1766. The Commons House of Assembly stipulated that Pitt should be depicted “in the Ciceronian character and habiliment” (Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham [New York, 1976], 345).

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE: Acrimonious Postlude: The Colonies after Repeal

1. “Open your Courts”: Placard posted before the Massachusetts Province House, Dec. 1765[?], quoted in John J. Waters Jr., The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 157. Hopeful letters, dismal prospects: Conway to Francis Bernard, 31 Mar. 1766, quoted in John Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986), 94. Business went on as usual in all the major ports by the clearing of ships on unstamped paper, since it very soon became clear that without trade the economy would totally collapse. Virginia’s surveyor general of customs was the first to allow coastal shipping to clear port without stamps, on 2 Nov. 1765; followed by Newport on 22 Nov.; Philadelphia, 2 Dec.; Boston, 17 Dec.; Annapolis (Maryland), 30 Jan. 1766; Savannah, sometime in Feb.; and Charleston, 4 Feb. Judges were more reluctant than customs officials to operate without stamps, and most merely granted continuances (which did not require stamps) from session to session through the spring term of 1766. Nonetheless, at least two court systems opened before news of the repeal reached the colonies, and operated with unstamped documents: the inferior courts in Massachusetts, on 13 Jan. 1766; and the entire court system of Maryland, on 8 Apr. 1766 (Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 10, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 [New York, 1967], lxxiv–lxxv).

2. “Contrivers”: quoted in Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), 193. “Thus the Triumph”: entry of 28 May 1766, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 1, Diary 1755–1770 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 313. This account follows Jensen, Founding, 193–8; William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, 1981), 172–5; and Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 11, The Triumphant Empire: The Rumbling of the Coming Storm, 1766–1770 (New York, 1967), 13–38. The twenty-eight-member Governor’s Council, which functioned as the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature, was elected by joint vote of the incoming representatives and the outgoing council members, with the consent of the governor. The governor could veto obnoxious appointments (and occasionally did), but the composition of the Council always remained in the control of the House of Representatives. Purges of the Council by the House were all but unknown: the election process (by secret ballot) was difficult to control, and coordination among the representatives highly uncommon. See Robert Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods: An Essay on Eighteenth-Century Politics (Boston, 1971), 221–9.

3. Quotation: John Adams Diary, 29 May 1766, 313. Bernard’s power to affect appointments to leadership posts in the House was closely confined by the terms of the Massachusetts charter. Such executive weakness impressed contemporaries as one of the leading defects of the Bay Colony’s constitution. See Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods, 221–9; and Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1967), 131–3.

4. Gipson, Coming Storm, 17–25; Jensen, Founding, 196–7. The grant of amnesty blatantly trespassed on the prerogative powers of the governor—and the Crown. Bernard understood the unconstitutional character of the act but assented to it on 9 Dec., because he knew the House would not otherwise make the grant. It was a shrewd move: the Privy Council later disallowed the act, thus solving the constitutional problem—after the “sufferers” had been compensated.

5. Bernard to the earl of Shelburne [secretary of state for the South], 24 Dec. 1766, ibid., 197.

6. James F. Smith, “The Rise of Artemas Ward, 1727–1777: Authority, Politics, and Military Life in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1990), 96, 120, 148–52, 166–7. “I thought I could”: Hutchinson to Thomas Pownall, 7 June 1768, quoted at 167. “Thought fit to supersede”: John Cotton, deputy province secretary, to Ward, 30 June 1766; quoted ibid., 153. The governor’s messenger presented the notice to Ward while Ward was helping his fellow parishioners construct a new meeting house at Shrewsbury. Town tradition held that Ward read the message aloud to those present; then he told the messenger to tell the governor that he considered himself “twice honored, but more in being superseded, than in being commissioned” because in taking away his office Bernard had shown “that I am, what he is not, a friend to my country.” Ward’s response (if it was in fact so eloquent) could scarcely have been better calculated to shore up his status—so abruptly threatened—as Shrewsbury’s leading citizen and public mediator. It also tied him permanently to the country party. As Smith observes of the incident, “From this moment on he would have no choice, if he hoped to maintain his local standing, but to oppose [Bernard,] the man whose peevishness had exposed him so unexpectedly on that summer’s day” (ibid., 154). On Hutchinson’s frustrations with Bernard, see esp. Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 45–7.

7. Gipson, Coming Storm, 34–5.

8. Ibid., 36–7; Jensen, Founding, 278; Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York, 1970), 51–4. Writs of assistance operated only during daylight hours. The fear of military intervention was eminently rational: a principal duty of the army in the British Isles was to arrest smugglers and to break up coastal wrecking gangs. See Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1991), 153–4; and Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (Totowa, N.J., 1978), 23, 32, 35, 62, et passim.

9. Boston Gazette, 23 Dec. 1765; quoted in Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots, 92.

10. “The distinction” and “the merchants”: Bernard to Shelburne, 22 Dec. 1766, quoted in Gipson, Coming Storm, 34.

11. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots, 25–107.

12. Thomas Doerflinger’s analysis of the divided and fundamentally apolitical character of the Philadelphia merchant community during most of the postwar era corrects the view that emphasizes radicalism among traders—a point also applicable to Boston, albeit with a few significant exceptions, especially John Hancock. See id., A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), esp. 180–96.

13. On conspiratorial thinking and its implications, see Bernard Bailyn, “A Note on Conspiracy,” in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 144–59; and Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (1982): 401–41.

14. Except as otherwise noted, the following account derives from Jensen, Founding, 211–14; Gipson, Coming Storm, 45–65; and John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 250–8.

15. “After the expense”: assembly resolve, in Gipson, Coming Storm, 46. “Set the Demand aside”: Gage to Conway, 21 Dec. 1765, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn., 1931),

77. Gage’s expectations: same to same, 6 May 1766, ibid., 89.

16. Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 298–347.

17. “The Montresor Journals,” ed. E. D. Scull, New-York Historical Society, Collections 14 (1881): 363 (entry of 1 May 1766). On the rioting of winter and spring 1766, see Kim, Landlord and Tenant, 367–89, and the contrary interpretation of Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (Baltimore, 1981), 36–71; also Dixon Ryan Fox, Yankees and Yorkers (New York, 1940), 147–51.

18. Quotations: Gage to Conway, 24 June 1766, Gage Corr., 1:95. Gage’s motives: ibid., and same to same, 15 July 1766, ibid., 99.

19. Quotations: Brown to Gage, 30 June 1766, and Clarke to Gage, 29 July 1766, in Shy, Toward Lexington, 219, 220.

20. Ibid., 219–21.

21. “Burnt and destroyed”: “Geographical, Historical Narrative, or Summary. . . .” [Lansdowne MSS.], quoted ibid., 222. “Affair has not been transacted”: earl of Shelburne to Moore, 11 Dec. 1766, quoted ibid., 223.

22. Jensen, Founding, 212–14; quotation, Moore to the secretary of state for the Southern Department, 20 June 1766, at 213.

23. Assembly to the governor, 13 Nov. 1766, ibid., 214.

24. Except as otherwise noted, the following account derives from Jensen, Founding, 198–205; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 3, Planter and Patriot (New York, 1951), 142–3, 146–50, 165–72; and Joseph Ernst, Money and Politics in America,1755–1775: A Study in the Currency Act of 1764 and the Political Economy of Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973), 175–96 (the only account that coherently estimates the scandal’s economic impact). On Lee’s character and finances, see Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York, 1980), 164–200, esp. 195–7.

25. There was one notable exception to this generalization, which illustrates another dimension of the scandal’s disordering impact on gentry lives and relationships. Robinson had sunk ten thousand pounds into lead mines his father-in-law, John Chiswell, operated on the upper New River, a tributary of the Kanawha, west of the Allegheny height of land (and hence beyond the Proclamation Line). Robinson’s death left Chiswell a de facto bankrupt; drunk and enraged, he murdered a creditor, Robert Routledge. He was arrested, but justices of the peace who were also his business partners released him—an abuse of power that disturbed many who feared for the honor of the gentry class. Chiswell died soon thereafter, a broken man. (See Carl Bridenbaugh, “Virtue and Violence in Virginia, 1766, or The Importance of the Trivial,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 76 (1964): 3–29; Ernst, Money and Politics, 187 n. 43.)

26. T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 168.

27. Virginia Gazette (Rind), 26 July 1770, quoted ibid., 170.

28. Quoted ibid., 176.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR: The Future of Empire

1. On Johnstone’s career, see Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Johnstone, George”; on the tangled history of command and precedence of civilian and military authorities, see John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 181–4; on the military dimensions of the dispute, ibid., 283–5; and on the larger context, Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 9, The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763–1766 (New York, 1968), 210–31.

2. Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760–1791 (Toronto, 1966), 30–44. See also Gipson, New Responsibilities, 163–76; Shy, Toward Lexington, 287–8; and Walter S. Dunn Jr., Frontier Profit and Loss: The British Army and the Fur Traders, 1760–1764 (Westport, Conn., 1998), 165–6. At least part of the antagonism between the American merchants and Murray was ethnic in origin. Dunn points out that Murray, a Scot, tended to treat Scots merchants most favorably, and particularly those Scottish officers who had remained in Canada and gone into the fur trade after the war.

3. “The exertion”: Gage to Capt. James Murray, 5 May 1767, in Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 319. “Double the Number”: George Croghan to Sir William Johnson, 18 Oct. 1767, ibid.

4. Shy, Toward Lexington, 229; Gage to Shelburne (Southern secretary), 13 June 1767, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn., 1931), 142–3. Gage’s reluctance to press the issue probably also reflected his reaction to being reprimanded for using regulars to kick Yankee intruders off New York estates; since Virginia and Pennsylvania both claimed the area, by expelling Virginia squatters he might be censured for putting the army at the service of the Penn family, as he had with the Hudson Valley patroons.

5. On Croghan’s diplomacy, which kept open communications between Fort Pitt and Fort de Chartres, see White, Middle Ground, 436–47; and Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 238. (Croghan evidently bought the gifts he needed for this condolence diplomacy from Baynton, Wharton and Morgan, in which he was a silent partner; suggesting yet again that the wind never blew so ill as to waft George Croghan no good.) “Cost him more trouble”: White’s summary of Croghan to Gage, 15 June 1766, in Middle Ground, 347 n. 65. “Under no Laws”: Capt. James Murray to Gage, 16 May 1767, ibid., 344. “Those who have injured them”: Gage to Murray, 28 June 1767, ibid., 320 n. 9. On the alarming rise in frontier violence and retaliation, see Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of the Revolution (New York, 1993), 183–6; and Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), 240.

6. Croghan’s itinerary: Howard H. Peckham, ed., George Croghan’s Journal of His Trip to Detroit in 1767 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1939), 31–47. Effects of diplomacy: McConnell, A Country Between, 241–2, 264–5.

7. For quantities of rum in the Ohio Country and elsewhere in the west, and for the role of Baynton, Wharton and Morgan in the trade, see Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), 52–7, 181–2; and Dunn, Frontier Profit, 178–9. (Mancall estimates the per capita consumption of alcohol among western Indians under the British regime at between approximately .5 and 1.1 gallons annually, or between 2.1 and 4.5 gallons annually for “active drinkers,” mainly young men; a notably higher rate of consumption than when the French were the principal traders in the region [211 n. 108]. Dunn makes the much higher per capita estimate of 12 gallons per annum “per warrior” [table 10.1, 178].) For Croghan’s and Gage’s anticipation of a new Indian war, see Wainwright, Croghan, 248.

8. Shy, Toward Lexington, 290: “the army, as an instrument of imperial control in time of peace, had a dull edge.”

EPILOGUE: MOUNT VERNON, JUNE 24, 1767

1. Harvest and weather: Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 2, 1766–1770 (Charlottesville, Va., 1976), 21, 23 (entries of 19–24 June and 14 July 1767). Wheat farming and plantation enterprises: Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, vol. 3, Planter and Patriot (New York, 1951), 179–80. Weaving: W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 7, January 1761– June 1767 (Charlottesville, Va., 1990), 508 n. 1. Speculative enterprises: ibid., 219–25, 268–75 et passim.

2. Washington to Capt. John Posey, 24 June 1767, in Papers of Washington, vol. 8, June 1767–December 1771 (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 1–4.

3. Washington to Capt. William Crawford, 17 Sept. 1767, ibid., 28. Washington’s mention of Indians’ consent to white occupation beyond the Proclamation Line referred to the Six Nations’ agreement, at the end of Pontiac’s War, to cede lands west of the Alleghenies and south of the Ohio, as far as the Tennessee River. The Shawnees, Delawares, Mingos, Munsees, Miamis, and Wyandots who lived in the region, of course, were determined to resist white colonization.

4. Sartorial tastes: Washington to Charles Lawrence, 26 Apr. 1763, Papers of Washington, 7:201–2. “Nine of such influence”: minutes of the Mississippi Land Company, 9 Sept. 1763, ibid., 223 n. 2.