36. King George's War

The emergence of French colonial trade in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, spurred by liberal economic policies instituted by the French premier, Cardinal Fleury, provoked desires by its less-efficient competitors to crush the trade by force. This was true not only of French West Indian sugar but also of the New France fur trade, which by the late 1720s was outcompeting the English colonies in the supply of beaver. It was true also of French fishing in the North, which was more efficient than English fishing, even after France had lost Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to England at the Peace of Utrecht. A typical reaction was that of Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, who repeatedly proposed to end the competition by seizing French Canada by force. But standing athwart all rising pressures for renewed aggression against France was the great Walpole, who brought to his long rule an overriding love of peace and opposition to foreign meddling and aggression.

Robert Walpole indeed brought to the Whig party a policy of consistent liberalism: of quiet minimal government, of low budgets and taxes, of little intervention at home coupled with peace, quiet, and minimal government meddling abroad. He thus not only kept Britain at peace for a generation, but also brought to the Whig party an internally consistent liberal program. From that time on, the Whig tradition remained one of liberalism and included such leaders of peace and neutrality as Walpole, the Pelhams, the Rockingham Whigs, and Charles James Fox. It was fortunate for Walpole that in the same way that he was able to resist opposition charges of dishonor, appeasement, and sellout to France, so his French ally and counterpart, Cardinal Fleury, was able to pursue a steadfast policy of peace despite opposition charges of appeasement and sellout to Great Britain.

England had attacked France in two costly wars: in King William’s War and Queen Anne’s War, which had ended with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Now Walpole resolved that the peace would remain unbroken. The French, despite their losses in Canada at the Peace of Utrecht, were able to construct a mighty defensive fort at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, to guard against further English aggression against Quebec. In a far greater feat, they explored and began to develop the Mississippi and the Ohio valleys. New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718, and the fur trade developed in the Ohio Valley and defensive forts built there. France not only had survived the English attempt to throw her out of the New World, but was able to expand its settlements and outcompete its rivals.

The professional patriots, the warmongers, and Francophobes were looking for any excuse for aggression, and they thought they had found their opportunity in the War of the Polish Succession, which broke out in Europe in the 1730s. Walpole, seeing no English interest involved, stood out alone for peace—even against King George II, John Carteret, and other opposition leaders in the House of Commons. Resisting the war pressure successfully, Walpole proudly told Queen Caroline in 1734: “Madame, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe and not one Englishman.”

The war party was unable to prevail in the War of the Polish Succession, though it did drag Britain into war with Spain amidst whipped-up hysteria over Captain Jenkins’ ear. For the war party, such an opportunity to grab Spanish territory was even as welcome as a war with France. Effective in leading the war hawks in the Commons was the fiery and maniacal orator, William Pitt.

The War of Jenkins’ Ear was a classic example of the use of patriotic myth to whip up popular hysteria fomented for other goals. In 1731, Captain Robert Jenkins returned from the Caribbean with a harrowing tale that Spanish officers in searching his ship had cut off his ear. This tale was taken up by the war crowd seven years later, even though Jenkins’ ear was apparently intact, and used by the prowar press to foment aggression against Spain.

The actual mainspring of the aggressive war against Spain had nothing to do with national honor or Captain Jenkins. It stemmed instead from longstanding maneuvers by leading London merchants to acquire a monopoly of the West Indian slave trade. In 1663, Charles II had granted the Royal African Company the exclusive monopoly of carrying slaves from Africa to the English colonies, as well as the exclusive right to own land in Africa. After waging a successful war against a competing Dutch company to gain a monopoly of the slave trade, the Royal African Company after 1680 specialized in slave exports to New Spain. The Spanish government sold to private firms the coveted privilege of the assiento—the exclusive monopoly of supplying Spanish colonies with slaves. And the Royal African Company was able to become a favorite subcontractor of the Spanish assientists. Its main trade was with the New Spanish ports: Cartagena on the mainland, Havana, and Porto Bello on the Isthmus of Panama. In 1698, the complaints of the English planters over a shortage of slaves led the British government to cancel Royal African’s monopoly and to throw open the English slave trade to other groups.

The assiento was one of the main reasons for England’s precipitation of the War of the Spanish Succession (known in America as Queen Anne’s War) against France and Spain in 1701. For Philip V, the new king of Spain in 1700, was a grandson of the French king Louis XIV, and he promptly awarded the coveted assiento to the French Guinea Company—an act that led powerful English merchants interested in the slave trade to support an English war upon the two countries.

At the Peace of Utrecht the British financiers achieved what they wanted: for Spain was forced to grant Britain a thirty-year assiento for the slave trade to the Spanish colonies. The British government granted the assiento monopoly to the newly formed South Sea Company, which promptly used its privilege as a base for general trade with the Spanish West Indies—indeed as a base for a vast amount of illegal trade as well. The South Sea Company was an organization dominated by the leading West Indian merchants and planters. They were led by Alderman William Beckford, the wealthiest planter and an absentee landlord in London, and they supported the imperialist opposition to the pacific Walpole.

Now the Spanish government no more welcomed evasion of its mercantilist regulations than did any other government. It was the attempt of the Spanish colonial coast guard to stop and search British ships in Spanish territorial waters that precipitated England’s going to war, despite England’s previous recognition of Spain’s exclusive right of trade with its own colony. The Jenkins’ ear hoax was fostered by British merchants to gull the country into going to war in order to swell their profits in the illegal trade with the Spanish colonies. The interested merchants, allied to the jingoists, were led in Commons by William Pitt (the main political protégé of Beckford) and his “Boy Patriots.” These war hawks could not this time be denied, even though Walpole was able to negotiate a compromise agreement with Spain in the Convention of El Pardo in 1739.

Walpole’s lone resistance to the war drive was eloquent. Noting the Spanish treaty right of search in its own waters against illegal trade, he warned that the warmongers “insist that our ships ought never to be searched wherever they are to be found, and let them be ever so near to the Spanish coasts. Pray sir, what is the plain English of this but that the trade to the Spanish West Indies ought to be open to every interloper of ours....” Yet the facts of the case, the Convention of El Pardo, and Walpole’s stubborn eloquence could not this time prevail, and George II declared war against Spain in October 1739. A new wave of deadly European wars had thus begun. Walpole, hearing the bells ring in celebration, prophetically warned: “They are ringing their bells; they will be wringing their hands soon.”

As we have seen, Georgia quickly used the war as an excuse for an attack on St. Augustine. But the most fateful result was the widening of the conflict to France as well. Even though forced to go to war, Walpole tried to keep the fighting as limited as possible. In this effort, he was joined by the powerful British West Indian sugar planters. The planters only wanted to cripple Spanish trade; they emphatically did not want a conquest of French or Spanish colonial territory that would open up the latter’s products to English colonial markets. Prospects for limiting the war, however, were ruined in 1740 by the outbreak of the entirely separate War of the Austrian Succession.

The pacific Walpole was finally ousted in 1742, and the king forced the Duke of Newcastle to bring into the cabinet the war hawk Lord Carteret, who rushed in to try to mount an all-out war against France, which erupted in 1744, and which became known in America as King George’s War. The war dragged on in costly and inconclusive fashion until peace was made at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, restoring the state of affairs of the status quo ante bellum, including reconfirmation of the Spanish assiento to the South Sea Company.

The most important event of King George’s War in the colonies, and the most fateful of future consequences, was the expedition that conquered the fortress of Louisbourg from the French. From his appointment to the governorship of Massachusetts in 1741, William Shirley had been zealous in preparation and expenditures for a war. On assuming his post, Shirley quickly and happily built up a patronage machine and the buildup was created out of increasing war and military expenditures. Provision contracts for favored merchants, recruiting fees, and naval expenditures lined the coffers of Shirley and his friends; and, as governments have eternally found before and since, the cry of “defense” proved to be a superb patriotic cloak for these nest-feathering operations. Previous conflicts were forgotten as contractors and subcontractors scrambled to win places on the war gravy train. As Professor Schutz, a most favorable biographer of Shirley, writes:

Defense activities raised a political tide in Shirley’s favor. Speculators, contractors and merchants prospered, and their profits attached them to the new administration. The new defense policy won the support of many of Belcher’s allies.... Lesser men, in turn, looked to the contractors; a chain of favors spread war business to a large number of people.*

The powerful merchant Thomas Hancock, a former opponent of Shirley’s, had been bought out by being tied into a firm receiving virtually half of the war contract business in Massachusetts. The old alliance with the merchant Samuel Waldo was further cemented by Governor Shirley himself being made a junior partner in Waldo’s enterprises. After France and England went to war in Europe in earnest in 1744, Shirley determined to escalate the war to the colonies and to capture the great fortress of Louisbourg. In this plan Shirley was backed enthusiastically by the Duke of Bedford, the new first lord of the admiralty and a leading imperialist and expansionist. Driven by patriotism, the desire to crush efficient French fur and fishing competition, and the lure of greater war contracts, Shirley pressed his plan, but the General Court balked at the difficulty and the great expense. Soon, however, in early 1745, the legislature, steered by William Pepperrell, the great timber merchant, lent its approval. Pepperrell was promptly appointed commander-in-chief of the expedition, and the choice colonelcies and contracts were handed out to Shirley’s key friends. Shirley’s sons-in-law, Eliakim Hutchinson and William Bollan, were put in charge of recruiting and provisioning, Waldo was made a brigadier general and his son a commissary, and Pepperrell’s son-in-law was appointed a contractor. A large issue of paper currency was voted to provide the necessary funds.

If Shirley and his friends had never had it so good, the same was scarcely true for the people of Massachusetts. Shirley hoped to raise three thousand men for the expedition, but when enough seamen did not volunteer, the kidnapping policy of impressment was used to fill the quotas. The impressments caused riots in several towns and protests at town meetings. Here indeed was a harbinger of ominous things to come for the Crown and its relations with the people of Massachusetts.

The expedition finally got under way at the end of March 1745. Impressments continued, as one thousand more men were sought, and bitterness increased among the public. All qualms were stilled, however, by the burst of popular enthusiasm for the capture of Louisbourg in mid-June. Dreaming of—and asking for—more favors and a baronetcy, as well his grandiose projects for the conquest of Canada, Shirley ladled out huge contracts to Hancock and his other friends for the maintenance and reconstruction of Louisbourg.

Victory, however, soon proved to have troubles of its own in store for the conquerors. Newcastle and the prime minister, his brother Henry Pelham, were instinctive liberals and had always been reluctant to pursue the war with France. They were now increasingly appalled at the high cost and length of the war; their major aim was to conclude peace as quickly and as gracefully as possible. Their main task was subtly to scuttle their own war effort, and in particular to stem the rise of patrioteering hysteria in England over the unexpected capture of Louisbourg—the kind of hysteria that called for all-out conquest of Canada, and that led the first lord of the admiralty to swear that he would hang the man who dared to surrender Louisbourg. Pelham and Newcastle were now afraid more of the English war crowd than of the French. Another such “victory” as Louisbourg would be disaster indeed! Hence they began a subtle process of disengagement from the war and therefore from further conquest.

As a part of this process of pacification, William Shirley received slight reward for his victorious campaign, obtaining a colonelcy but not the coveted title of baronet. The post of colonel, however, with its correlative patronage was lucrative enough, and Shirley and Pepperrell spent a happy time in Louisbourg parceling out all the new patronage and war contracts—including captaincies to two of Shirley’s sons. Such friends, relatives, and fellow booty-sharers as Robert Hale, Bollan, Hutchinson, Robert Auchmuty, Benjamin Colman, Hancock, and Paul Dudley were cut in for their share. As always, Samuel Waldo profited handsomely: his son becoming captain and in charge of supply for his regiment, and his stepbrother and Pepperrell’s son-in-law Nathaniel Sparhawk placed in charge of selling French war loot in Boston.

But in the meanwhile, the loot of the lower-ranking heroes was not as abundant. At Louisbourg supplies were low, sickness high, and the troops restive. And through the stormy winter, Shirley found it difficult to supply the unfortunate garrison. Furthermore, the American volunteers found themselves after the victory under the command of British naval officers who had played a decidedly minor role in the triumph. The colonial soldiers had enlisted only for the length of a summer campaign, but now found, to their outrage, that British officers forced them to remain in Louisbourg for the entire miserable winter. The troops threatened to mutiny, and only the personal visit of Shirley in the fall, promising speedier payment and discharges in the spring, quieted the incipient rebellion.

By the sobering spring of 1746, the people of Massachusetts began to learn some of the costs of their famous victory. By the end of the winter fully nine hundred men, one-third of the victorious New England soldiery, had died at Louisbourg. This bitter pill was aggravated by the conduct of the returning British fleet. Many maltreated British seamen took the opportunity of being in Boston to jump ship, and the British officers aroused hostility by rounding up and killing two of their sailors, as well as press-ganging American seamen to replace the deserters. Assemblymen from Boston and other seaport towns reflected popular wrath against Eliakim Hutchinson, one of Shirley’s favorites who had been a leading contractor of supplies to Louisbourg, and was in charge of procuring seamen in the colony. In the 1747 election, the Massachusetts Assembly removed Hutchinson from the Council, and tried its best to have him dismissed from his judicial and military posts.

Shirley, however, remained undaunted and pressed on the plan for a massive attack on Quebec, the key to Canada. Pelham at first used a French offer of peace to veto such aggression, but Newcastle and Pelham were soon forced to agree, in order to appease the war-minded at home. However, resistance to the heavy taxes needed for the campaign grew rapidly in the Massachusetts legislature. Again, a heavily inflationary issue of paper money was put through. Voluntary enlistment dried up from the dread example of Louisbourg, but Shirley quickly drafted a frontier garrison, and other colonies supplied men: New York furnished 1,600 and Connecticut 1,000. The promised British troops never arrived, thus ending the prospective expedition, and unhappy soldiers and sailors began to desert en masse in the summer of 1746. When constables tried to arrest the deserters, they were assaulted by the local populace. And frontier posts, stripped by Shirley for the epic expedition, were overrun by the French and their Indian allies.

Shirley was still fanatically eager to press the attack in December, even without British aid, but was overruled by the good prudence of his associates and the other New England governors. Finally, Shirley’s dream of a great 1747 expedition was destroyed by Newcastle’s firm canceling of all British plans for the attack. Shirley would have pressed on regardless, but neither the other colonies nor Massachusetts would go along.

There was method in the madness of Shirley’s persistent and almost frenzied zeal for more and bigger wars. His ties of friendship and political alliance were held together only by the tenuous band of continuing mutual profit. The end or even the slackening of war meant lower government spending, diminished war contracts, lower patronage, slackened inflation, and tighter credit. And almost immediately, Shirley’s plundering friends—the Waldos, Hancocks and Kilbys—grew sullen and restive.

By November 17, 1747, the British fleet was ready to sail out of Boston for Jamaica; it still faced the problem of replacing its numerous deserters. A massive British press-gang swooped down upon the Boston docks, seized almost fifty laborers, and dragged them to the ships. An angry Boston crowd of several hundred quickly gathered and began looking for British officers. The sheriff and his deputies were severely beaten. The mob captured several British officers as hostages for the impressed Americans and then marched on Governor Shirley himself, who was harboring several other officers. The mob denounced Shirley for supporting the impressment. For a while, Shirley was able to cow the crowd into releasing a few officers but then the mob regained its courage and began to attack the governor’s house. A deputy sheriff was beaten and put into the stocks. The mob shifted their attack to the Council room and Shirley was particularly disturbed to find that the local militia refused to obey orders to assemble and put down the riot. The mob’s courage finally faltered, however, in attacking the Council and governor himself, but they did burn an oil barge and they still held several British officers. Shirley finally found it best to flee to the safety of the island fortress of Castle William. The British naval commander Charles Knowles reacted as a true military man, threatening to shell Boston until his men were released, but the wiser Shirley finally prevailed upon him to agree to the mob’s demands and release the impressed colonists. The rioting was over, and the rebellious citizens of Boston had won their vital point.

Governor Shirley, considerably shaken, termed the riots an “insurrection.” The Assembly had given him no trouble, but he railed against various democratic town meetings and especially against the “mobbish factious spirit of Boston.” Shirley complained that Boston was being run by the “lower orders”—poverty and a low status in life being common charges to hurl against one’s political enemies.

The successful riot had brought home their power to the people of Boston, and brought to a head the mounting opposition to the Shirley regime. After the riot, the opposition became far more vocal than before. The Boston Independent Advertiser led a determined attack on Knowles and on Shirley’s war policies, including the inflation. Dr. William Douglass, the great hard-money economic theorist, denounced Knowles as a tyrant and a “monster of wickedness.” Shirley, smarting under the criticism of the Independent Advertiser, asked the General Court to censure the paper. The subservient Council agreed, but the Assembly rejected the proposal overwhelmingly.

Governor Shirley, longing for the good old days of all-out war, again projected a great intercolonial expedition for 1748, this time against the French fort of Crown Point at Lake Champlain. But Massachusetts had issued an enormous amount of paper money in the three years of war and the money was already depreciating rapidly. Tax monies were pledged far in advance for redemption of the paper. Shirley realized that the neighboring colonies would have to join the expedition, and he proposed quotas of aid from each colony. But the other governors—even in New York, which bordered on Crown Point—summoned no enthusiasm for the scheme. Furthermore, peace was nearing, at last, in Europe under the clever guidance of the Pelhams, and once more Shirley’s grandiose vision of aggression and conquest had to be abandoned.

In the meanwhile, sensing the approaching end of their joint bonanza, the faithful Waldo began to loot with might and main, deducting perquisites from the soldiers’ meager pay for deigning to supply them with arms and clothing. Waldo also pocketed the assets of dead soldiers and sold their muskets. At Shirley’s request for an accounting, Waldo flatly and indignantly refused. Shirley, fearful of breaking with the machine of Waldo’s friends and relatives that had been his political support, did nothing. But Waldo broke with Shirley for his slackening of enthusiasm for the former’s speculations.

At the same time, another disappointed contractor, James Allen, made himself a leading spokesman in the lower house on the impressment issue. Feeling in Boston and the seaport towns was continuing high. To all of this a special bitterness was added in Massachusetts when England handed Louisbourg back to France in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. To the colonists this seemed the final betrayal of American blood and tears by the mother country.

The people of Boston and Massachusetts had still more important grievances against the government. The threat of impressment especially affected New England seamen because their terms at sea were far shorter than those of the English sailors, who were used to very long voyages. The threat of impressment induced a considerable emigration of sailors from Boston to Newport. Even more damaging were the extremely heavy losses suffered by the cream of Massachusetts’ labor force in King George’s War. Boston’s and Massachusetts’ manpower suffered very heavy losses during the war: at sea, in Louisbourg, on numerous expeditions in the West Indies. One estimate holds that twenty percent of Boston’s manpower was killed in three years of King George’s War! This monstrous decimation, coupled with high taxes levied for public relief to widows, emigration, and the aftereffects of inflation, greatly depressed the economy of Boston—the only American city failing to expand in the years following until 1760.

During the wars of the 1740s, a halfhearted attempt was made by the Crown to enforce the trade regulations on the Americans, particularly prohibitions on trading with the enemy. After the war, Admiral Knowles complained to the newly energetic Board of Trade that Newcastle had ignored his complaints of colonial trading with the enemy, and that he had to proceed on his own to enforce the law. The military mind could not appreciate the mutual benefits of free exchange, even with a so-called enemy. But the colonial merchants did appreciate these benefits and happily continued the trade.

Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were important centers of this commerce, but the great emporium of trading with the enemy was Newport, where the deputy governor William Ellery allowed ships to clear the port without troublesome inspection. One method of evasion was through neutral Dutch middlemen in such West Indian territories as Surinam and St. Eustatius. Another was direct trade under cover of fake prisoner exchanges. Ships would be legally authorized, under official flags of truce, to exchange prisoners at the French West Indies. But apart from the few token prisoners, trade was happily carried on by these ships. Flags of truce were purchased from colonial governors and a market in these flags flourished in the colonies.

By 1748, then, the American colonies, prospering under the liberal Walpole-Newcastle policy of salutary neglect, stood as almost self-governing colonies, in fact though scarcely in name. In each colony, the lower house, or Assembly, took the lead in this self-government with increasing effect. Although Robert Walpole had been ousted as prime minister in 1742, his policy of salutary neglect was substantially continued by Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham, who succeeded as prime minister the following year. But, in the absence of the political might of Walpole, the shades of night were beginning to close on the relations between Britain and the American colonies. Newcastle, while still powerful in the government, was succeeded in the post of secretary of state for the South by the aggressive imperialist John Russell, the Duke of Bedford. But Bedford could do little harm in the colonies so long as the liberal Lord Monson continued as president of the Board of Trade. The death of Monson in 1748, coinciding with the end of the war in Europe, gave Bedford his chance to try to move toward an end of salutary neglect, and to end the flourishing smuggling in the American trade. Newcastle attempted to replace Monson by the latter’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Leeds, who, in Newcastle’s words, needed “some office which required little attendance and less application.” Bedford, however, managed to overrule Newcastle, and to install at the Board of Trade his follower George Dunk, the Earl of Halifax.

Halifax now set about in a determined attempt to bring the American colonies to heel. For several years, the Board of Trade pressured the higher authorities with a series of reports deploring the lack of enforcement of the mercantilist regulations in the colonies, and calling for the replacement of salutary neglect by enforcement of the laws. Failing to convince Pelham and Newcastle to change their ways, Halifax tried a power play to have himself appointed to a new post that he proposed—a separate secretary of state for the colonies. He failed to achieve this goal, but did manage to obtain, as sop, slightly enlarged powers over the colonies for the Board of Trade in 1752. Promptly the board began a persistent campaign to require the colonial governors to obey its instructions, and to try to wrest from the Assemblies a permanent revenue for the royal governors and their administration.

The Board of Trade could do little on its own, however, particularly in the face of determined opposition by the colonial Assemblies. In 1756, the outbreak of a new war with France forced Halifax to suspend his imperial activities for the duration. At that point, imperial control over the colonies was scarcely greater than eight years before, when Halifax had begun his efforts. But this very failure set the stage for a new and far greater push for restoration of control over the colonies when the war was over, a push inspired by increasing fears by the nonliberal forces in Britain that colonial independence had nearly gotten out of hand.*

One example of the failure of Halifax to crack down on smuggling in the colonies was the case of the Philadelphia firm of William Allen and Company, which had become prominent in the smuggling trade from the French West Indies, and was thus able to undersell the “legitimate” importers. By a happy arrangement, the royal collector of customs, whose task it was to enforce the laws, was Abraham Taylor, who happened to be a member of the Allen firm. Taylor’s pursuit of the policy of salutary neglect is hardly surprising.

*John A. Schutz, William Shirley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), p. 84.

*On Halifax’s efforts after 1748, see Jack P. Greene, “An Uneasy Connection,” in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 68–74.