To most Americans today, even well-educated Americans, colonial American history is a tabula rasa. That is unfortunate. Outside of its intrinsic interest, colonial American history allows us to examine the first stirrings of themes that would be of vital importance in later American history.
In 1745, Great Britain and France were at war, part of the European conflict initiated by Frederick the Great when he seized Silesia from Austria. A state of war involving Great Britain against France was certainly not unusual in that period. Between 1689 and 1815 France and Britain were almost always at war, with the periods of peace actually only truces between bouts of what some historians have deemed the Second Hundred Years War.
New Englanders were alarmed that New England fishing fleets off the Grand Banks would suffer from French raiders based out of the fortress of Louisbourg on Ile-Royale (Cape Breton Island).
The British did not have troops in New England to do anything about Louisbourg, but that did not stop William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts. By a narrow margin the Massachusetts legislature voted to attack the Fortress. 3200 Massachusetts militia were mustered for the task, joined by 450 militia from New Hampshire and 500 from Connecticut. Rhode Island supplied a ship, and New York chipped in ten cannon. Pennsylvania and New Jersey supplied funds.
Sailing from Boston in March 1745, the New England army landed at the British fishing port of Canso on Grassy Island near Ile-Royale to reprovision. There they were joined by a British fleet of 16 ships under Commodore Peter Warren.
The New Englanders landed on Ile-Royale on April 30, 1745 and began the siege. On June 17, 1745 the French capitulated and all New England went mad with joy. To universal anger in New England, the British handed the fortress back to the French and the siege had to be repeated in 1758. Nonetheless, the siege of Louisbourg was a major undertaking and victory by the colonists. It taught them what they could accomplish when colonies worked together, something they would remember.
I hadn’t known that. I had read about the second siege in a book covering Wolf’s conquest of Quebec. .
Truth. One of Georg III and Lord North’s many missteps was not understanding that there were numbers of colonists with active military experience from the French and Indians War, e.g., George Washington.,
Don,
Any great book recommendations regarding Colonial America? From Jamestown to even the present day would be good or at least to the founding of America.
An old series but a good one Tito:
The ten volumes of Francis Parkman that detail the struggle of the British colonies and New France over 150 years, The whole set can now be obtained for the reasonable sum of $2.99 on Kindle:
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Works-Francis-Parkman-Illustrated-ebook/dp/B017UOL0QQ/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=francis+parkman&qid=1616751005&sr=8-2
I have the series in hard back. The research is quite dated but it holds up well all in all.
A good modern look in one volume is the late Robert Leckie’s, an historian and Marine machine gunner on Guadalcanal, A Few Acres of Snow.
https://www.amazon.com/Few-Acres-Snow-French-Indian/dp/0785821007/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=robert+leckie+french+and+indian+war&qid=1616751246&sr=8-1
Everything he wrote is worth reading:
https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B001IZREGO?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader