for the future.
Benjamin Franklin
The British and Americans Defeat the French in America, 1754–1774
1. THE GREAT POWERS AND THE AMERICAS
The long, swift rise of America to absolute preeminence in the world began in the obscure skirmishing of settlers, traders, natives, adventurers, and French and British (and some Spanish) soldiers and militiamen, more or less uniformed, in what is today the western parts of eastern seaboard states of the United States. Surges of idealism and desperation had propelled Quakers, Puritans, organized groups of Roman Catholics, more exotic non-conformists, and the routinely disaffected and abnormally adventurous to strike out for the New World. There was, with most, some notion of ultimately building a better society than those from which they had decamped. There was little thought, until well into the eighteenth century, of constructing there a political society that would influence the world. And there was almost no thought, until near the end of that century, that there would arise in America a country that would in physical and demographic strength, as well as moral example, lead the whole world.
Political conditions at the approach of what became the Seven Years’ War (in America, the French and Indian Wars, in Russia and Sweden the Pomeranian War, in Austria and Prussia the Third Silesian War, and in India the Third Carnatic War) consisted of endless scrapping among the great continental powers along their borders. These were France; Austria, the polyglot Central European heir of the Holy Roman Empire; Russia; and, thrusting up to challenge Austria for leadership of the German center of Europe, Prussia. The other Great Power, Great Britain, when its Stuart Dynasty, half Protestant and half Roman Catholic, came to an end in 1714, recruited the Stuarts’ distant but reliably Protestant cousins, starting with George I to IV, 1714–1830, to succeed them. George I and George II scarcely spoke English and spent much time in their native Hanover, a placid little principality of 750,000 which they continued to rule and where they didn’t have to be bothered with an unruly parliament like that in London.
The lengthy British rule of the great Whigs, Sir Robert Walpole, Henry Pelham, and Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, 1721–1762, appeased the kings by using British money and power to secure Hanover. Apart from that, Britain cohered, before the king set up his own Church, to the policy of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1511–1529), Henry VIII’s chancellor, who devised the practice, followed to recent times, of putting England’s weight against whichever was the strongest of the continental powers (successively, roughly, Spain until the rise of Louis XIII’s great minister, Cardinal Richelieu in 1624; France until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815; Germany until the defeat of Hitler in 1945; and Russia until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991). An unprecedentedly benign Germany then resumed that position to no great consternation in Britain or elsewhere (Chapter 16).
Russia, under Peter the Great, Czar from 1689 to 1725, joined the ranks of the Great Powers at the start of the eighteenth century. For the purposes of this book, the first important Russian leader was the Empress Catherine the Great,1 who reigned from 1762 to 1796, and we are also concerned with the Prussian king Frederick II, the Great (1740–1786), and the Austrian empress Maria Theresa (reigned from 1740 to 1780). These three rulers provided strong military and diplomatic government in Central and Eastern Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
2. THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND EARLY SKIRMISHING IN AMERICA
William Pitt was the first leading British public figure to limn out a vision of a growing and flourishing British civilization on both sides of the Atlantic and in the East and West Indies, arising to give the British the status and strength of an incomparable giant straddling the great ocean. Even he pitched his vision, naturally, mainly in terms of ending, in Britain’s favor, the great contest with France because of the scale and size and wealth the British nationality would grow into, vast and rich, and relatively secure as not having to fend off the invasions of adjoining landward neighbors. In Britain, his philippics against the French went down better than his visions of the New World. But as Pitt gained force and support in Britain, the leading Americans considered that the Thirteen Colonies were coming close to self-sufficiency, if the French threat in Canada could be disposed of, and could indeed then have a splendid autonomous political future, if they could coordinate better between themselves, and agree on their collective purpose. As the formal beginning of the new Anglo-French war approached, the most astute leaders of both Britain and America were groping for a raison d’être of the American project. In London and Westminster, going it alone was unthinkable for the colonies, and so was not given any thought. In America, if France could be driven from Canada, it was an idea whose attractions were bound to grow, and, if it were not headed off by a competing imperial vision, its time would come.
From the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, European diplomacy was a minuet, with the partners constantly changing, but disputing the same adjoining areas, a horribly expensive struggle between hired and often mercenary armies. The only country that had a vision that transcended this pattern of self-inflicted destruction, through the attrition of endless conflict on the frontiers, was Britain, with its concept of manipulating the balance of power while steadily expanding its empire overseas and asserting mastery of the world’s oceans. This was the long-standing British strategy. France oscillated between trying to dominate Germany and trying to contest overseas theaters with Britain, and couldn’t do both simultaneously. Prussia and Russia were trying to expand at the expense of their neighbors, which in Russia’s case meant much of Eurasia. Austria, Turkey, and Spain were trying to hold on to what they had. Sweden and the Netherlands were second-tier opportunists and Portugal was outward-facing from Europe to an empire that was large for the size of the home country (in South America, Africa, India, and the Far East). By opposing larger Spain, Portugal gained the protection of the Royal Navy to maintain its empire, which it would not otherwise have been able to defend from larger predators.
The French, when they finally developed a plan, wanted to distract the British to the nether regions of empire and strike a mortal blow at the home island of Britain. Of these long-standing British and French strategic designs, the British generally succeeded in imposing theirs, and the French, perpetually unsure whether they wanted to make a crossing in force of the Rhine or the English Channel, never really came close to a serious invasion of the British Isles. (The Pyrenees and the Alps were less promising and tempting places of trespass, though they were occasionally traversed.)
By the 1750s there were just the first glimmerings of an American strategy, spontaneously derived but starting to receive direction to work with the British to remove the French from Canada and then favorably alter the relationship with Britain.
There was a loyalty in the colonies to the abstract entity of the Crown, and the impersonal wearer of the crown, but affections between the English and the Americans became frayed (as did relations between the Canadians and the French), and if the Crown (in the one case and the other) was seen as exclusively favoring the mother country, colonial fealty to the overseas king-protector would prove very fungible.
