LITMIR.BIZ

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the harvest, houses and cattle, both above and below, to send off as many Canadians as possible to Europe and to leave famine and desolation behind me; but we must teach these scoundrels to make war in a more gentleman like manner’. Wolfe’s asperity was rooted in his shock at the murder of prisoners and civilians by the local tribes allied to the French, for whose behaviour he held the French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, responsible.

      After pounding the city remorselessly but unsuccessfully, Wolfe then decided on a risky landing by river (among the mariners negotiating the difficult passage was a young man called James Cook, who had been busy mapping the mouth of the St Lawrence) at the foot of some cliffs to the west of Quebec – the Heights of Abraham. His army, dragging two small cannon with them, climbed up at dawn on 13 September 1759, surprising the French, who were unprepared for an attack from that quarter, believing the cliffs to be impregnable. Battle was joined on the Plains of Abraham, and the French were defeated, but both Wolfe (aged thirty-two) and Montcalm (aged forty-seven) were fatally injured. With the fall of Quebec, French rule in North America came to an end, for the victory paved the way for a successful attack on Montreal the following year. The French were left with two possessions: Louisiana, and the island group of St Pierre and Miquelon, off the eastern coast of Newfoundland – important bases for fisheries. Elsewhere, especially in the Caribbean, they got off relatively lightly, though this did nothing to mollify their resentment.

      The Treaty of Paris, drawn up in 1763, saw Britain gain territories worldwide from France and Spain, though she did not keep as much as she had gained by force of arms, which led to some criticism of the government at home, which, however, felt its leniency to be in the interests of the balance of world power. The French slaving posts on the Senegal coast went to the British. The British also took Grenada, St Vincent and Tobago, as well as Havana. Britain gained Canada and tracts of land west of the Mississippi River, as well as Florida. However, these gains belied the fact that Britain was nearing the end of what historians often refer to as ‘the first British Empire’, by which is principally meant the thirteen North American colonies, which would gain their independence as the fledgling USA a little more than ten years later.

      BRITAIN WAS NEARING THE END OF WHAT HISTORIANS OFTEN REFER TO AS ‘THE FIRST BRITISH EMPIRE’.

      Just over a decade after the Treaty of Paris was signed, the Quebec Act of 1774 restored some aspects of French jurisprudence to Canada and allowed Catholics to worship freely, at the same time permitting French Canadians to participate in government, as well as annexing the area east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio rivers (roughly, modern Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana). This bit of legislation was timely, since it secured the loyalty to Britain of the Canadian colonists. Along the coast, to the south and east, things in the American colonies were beginning to stir.

      By the middle of the eighteenth century Britain’s territories had spread along the east coast of North America, and were divided into thirteen colonies, from Maine in the north, through Pennsylvania and Virginia, to the Carolinas in the south. They were profitable but expensive to run. However, land speculation was booming, and interest in expansion westwards fired the imaginations both of the colonists, large numbers of whom were born Americans by now (Washington and Jefferson were born in Virginia, Franklin in Massachusetts), and developers at home. At the same time, immigration to the New World had rocketed: between 1760 and 1775, 125,000 English, Irish and Scots left home to seek a new life, escaping poor working conditions and a falling-off of employment in Britain.

      However, all these prosperous new lands and this emergent new (and generally staunchly Protestant) people – who still saw themselves as British first and foremost – were governed from Westminster and had to accept whatever London told them to do. But they were beginning to think for themselves. As early as the 1750s, Anglo-French skirmishing had stimulated the British colonies to convene an assembly of representatives at Albany to agree the formation of a common front against the Catholic French and their Native American allies. Now, with the French threat removed, it was pressure from the mother country that induced them to assemble again.

      The pressure came in the form of a Stamp Act, introduced in 1765, designed to impose a tax on all documents, including newspapers and even playing cards, throughout the Empire. The Congress convened in reaction to it placed an embargo on British goods. The demonstrations and riots which attended the introduction of the Act took London by surprise, but George III, together with his advisers, refused to bend with the wind, taking the view that the American colonies were junior members who had no right to question their authority.

      Though there was plenty of support in Britain for the Americans’ point of view, the approaching rift was probably inevitable. The Americans, while still seeing themselves as British, were growing away from the mother country. There was no aristocracy in the colonies; men lived and worked together in a more egalitarian society, which was simpler and less sophisticated than that of England, certainly, but had its own integrity and pride, and its intellectuals were feeling their way towards a quasi-socialist modus vivendi. Chary of the French they may have been, but they were quite willing to absorb what such writers as Rousseau and Voltaire had to say. A sense of independence was in the air, for sure, and there was enough unity for the Americans successfully to apply pressure on Westminster to repeal the unpopular Act in the following year, 1766.

      The repeal of the Act, however, did nothing to lessen tension, as the British promptly passed another law which emphasized London’s right to make unchallengeable legislation for Britain’s colonies. The Americans simply ignored it, and continued to refuse to pay taxes they deemed unfair. New taxes imposed on tea and imported finished goods were withdrawn after two years because no one paid them. Clearly military force could not be used – these were, after all, our own people – but something had to be done to break the deadlock. By 1770 there was still a stalemate. By ill-fortune, Britain had an increasingly intractable king and a series of vapid prime ministers at the time. In the American colonies, the British government’s executives found themselves powerless to enforce any of the measures demanded of them by London. The foolish decision was made to use limited but selective force after all. It was also decided to apply it in Boston, the largest and wealthiest city in the American colonies, and an intellectual hub. It was like lighting a match next to gunpowder.

      The tipping point was passed in the wintry March of 1770, and it was triggered by what on the face of it was a petty incident. A young wigmaker’s apprentice, backed up by some cronies, brusquely told a British officer that he was late paying his barber’s bill. The officer had actually paid it earlier the same day, but ignored the boy, who became more vociferous. When he would not go away, a British sentry hit him over the head with his rifle butt. This quickly led to a confrontation between a couple of redcoats and a small group of Bostonians who by now had gathered and threw snowballs and street filth at the British. The soldiers panicked and called reinforcements, who duly arrived, but meanwhile the crowd had grown, its mood turned uglier, and the people started to throw sticks and stones and lumps of ice. Then one of the soldiers was struck to the ground by one of the missiles. His gun went off as he fell, and in the confusion his comrades opened fire at the mob. Five men were killed and six more injured.

      The British were not the brutal thugs depicted in the sillier Hollywood retellings of the War of Independence – arrogant officers with Eton accents leading troglodytic foot soldiers with bad Cockney accents. There was far less distinction between Britons and Americans than there is now, and one of the redcoats involved in what became known as the Boston Massacre fired his gun into the air rather than at what he and many like him regarded as fellow citizens. But the damage was done, and what was quickly to become the independence movement had its first martyrs. The next three years saw the burning of a revenue cutter at Rhode Island and, in 1773, the Boston Tea Party, when a group of Americans disguised as Indians tipped the cargo of tea – worth £10,000 – from an East India Company ship into the harbour in protest at new levies designed to protect the Company’s monopoly.

      However, the Stamp Act had not imposed huge duties, nor did the Tea Act, to which the Boston Tea Party had been a reaction. Tea, in fact, had become very cheap, and it has been suggested that the men who dumped it over the side of the East Indiaman were not aggrieved citizens but smugglers who objected to what amounted to a rebate on its cost, since the new tax imposed on the Americans was less than what

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