42. Administering the Conquests

With peace finally concluded and the French ousted from North America, the poor, hapless Acadian refugees in Massachusetts, totaling some nine hundred, began the dangerous and difficult trek back to their beloved Acadia. Many died along the way, but the rest settled again in Acadia. Of course, there was no thought of returning to them their old lands and property. In the final irony, the Acadians who had been sent to France remained as unwanted refugees, pushed from pillar to post for twenty years by the government.

On taking control of Florida from Spain, Britain divided it into two provinces: East Florida, centering in St. Augustine; and West Florida, with headquarters at Pensacola. To East Florida, the British sent as governor Major Francis Ogilvie, who made no attempt to conceal his complete contempt for Spaniards and Roman Catholics.

So grim was the impact of Ogilvie that of the three thousand Spanish inhabitants of St. Augustine, all but five persons decided to emigrate to Cuba. One of the notable events of British East Florida was the founding of the colony of New Smyrna, thirty miles north of Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic Coast. The promoter, Dr. Andrew Turnbull, wangled a grant of sixty thousand acres as well as a ship and a cash bounty from the Crown. In return, he transported over fourteen hundred emigrants from Greece, Italy, and English-occupied Minorca to the new homeland. The immigrants, expecting freedom and abundance, reaped the opposite: seven years of cruel and dispiriting indentured service, giving their forced labor to producing such goods as hemp, cotton, and indigo subsidized by England.

The immigrants arrived in midsummer 1768. In a few weeks they were ready to revolt. The August revolt was led by Carlo Forni and Clotha Corona. A brutal overseer who tried to stop the revolt was killed. The rebels, acting the part of their masters, plundered the property of the Minorcans of the colony, whose only crime was not joining the revolt. Governor James Grant’s forces soon seized the rebels, but took four months to capture Forni and a band of his men. The governor decided to be relatively lenient with the mutineers, killing only the two leaders, Forni and Corona.

Another forced labor settlement in East Florida was established at Rollston, on the St. John’s River, and organized by the wealthy English landowner Denys Roll. Roll secured a twenty-thousand-acre grant from the government. When the vagrants, beggars, and debtors he had shipped to Rollston balked at the forced labor, Roll cut off their food supply. The workers then ran off to St. Augustine, where the government forcibly shipped them back to suffer Roll’s dictates. They succeeded, however, in running away again. In addition, eighty-nine more immigrants fled from Roll. Finally Roll found the open sesame to success; he purchased openly enslaved Negroes, whom he was able to whip into a passable degree of productivity.

What of former French Canada? After 1763, conquered Quebec was, to be sure, theoretically extended the blessings of English legal and representative institutions. But there was one very important catch: Roman Catholics would not be permitted to vote or to hold public office, and were even denied many protections of the law. Thus, the overwhelming majority of the French Quebeçois were condemned to permanent subjection in their own land. The established French legal and judicial procedures were swiftly destroyed, and English procedures installed in their place. As Catholics, French lawyers were even prohibited from trying cases and French citizens from serving on juries. Moreover, a nascent French Canadian bourgeoisie was crushed by the English conquest. A few hundred English merchants (who came as suppliers and contractors for the British army of occupation) and royal bureaucrats in Canada—almost all new inhabitants—were able to monopolize the courts and juries, and to carry on a systematic campaign of governmental exploitation of the people of Quebec. As in the case of conquered and battered Ireland, the Roman Catholic church in Quebec was forced to become the fortress church of a suppressed ethnic as well as religious people. The church—and the country—turned in upon itself, both stagnating under siege.*

The discrimination against Catholic voting was, in a sense, rendered harmless by the English failure to allow any representative assembly in Quebec. The first royal governor of Quebec, James Murray, and his successor, Guy Carleton, blocked the institution of any assembly.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Spain was in no particular hurry to take over from France. The first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, finally arrived in Louisiana in 1766, and without difficulty managed quickly to alienate almost all groups in the population. Open rebellion and general disgust with government ensued. Things came to a head in 1768, when Spain imposed a thoroughly mercantilist decree excluding all but Spanish ships in Louisiana commerce, and all trade but those to Spanish ports. Five hundred protesters signed a petition demanding the removal of Ulloa and the restoration of freedom of trade. At the end of October, New Orleans was captured by the French rebels. When Ulloa was finally sacrificed to the massive demands for his removal, the citizens of New Orleans poured into the streets to laud the French and attack the Spaniards.

The French government, in politic fashion, rejected a petition from the rebels pledging allegiance to France. Spain decided to crack down on the revolt, and sent as the new governor General Alejandro O’Reilly. Bringing two thousand crack troops, O’Reilly characteristically invited the twelve leaders of the rebellion to meet him at his quarters, only to arrest them there and charge them with treason for rebelling against Spain. Five of the rebel leaders were promptly executed.

At the end of two decades of aggressive war against France, the triumphant British government had succeeded in driving the French empire completely off the North American continent, and in replacing France largely by its own hegemony. By the early 1760s, the British rulers felt themselves to be masters of all they surveyed. Furthermore, the king and the various Tory factions had succeeded in using the war to achieve one of their long-cherished aims: the removal of the liberal, quasi-libertarian Whigs from the seats of ministerial power at home. With that, the major check upon the expansion of the power of the Crown and its allies, at home and throughout the empire, was at last extinct. Since the death of Queen Anne and the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty in the early part of the eighteenth century, the Whigs, headed by Robert Walpole and the Pelham brothers, had succeeded, by crafty manipulation of Parliament, in imposing a lengthy rule that had kept the Tory centralizers and imperialist expansionists under severe and unwelcome fetters. Now, in the early 1760s, the Tories and imperialists had at last succeeded in rooting out the Whig-Pelhamite checkrein on their goals and designs.

In particular, in the colonies, the impatient king and the Tory factions were now free to scrap the policy of “salutary neglect,” which Walpole and Newcastle had managed to impose on the reluctant Crown and Parliament. Enjoying the blessings of salutary neglect, the American colonies had been able, in the first half of the eighteenth century, to ignore the de jure mercantilist restrictions and edicts of Great Britain and to flourish in virtual de facto independence from the mother country. It was high time, the British imperialists felt, to cast off the restrictions of salutary neglect and to bring the American colonies to heel. It was that grand design that was to precipitate the great conflagration of the American Revolution, and to bring a new kind of nation into being.

*See John C. Rule, “The Old Regime in America: A Review of Recent Interpretations of France in America,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 1962): 590–91.