Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713) was the second major colonial conflict in North America, fought between the colonies of England – Great Britain after 1707 – and those of France and Spain, each side aided by their respective Native American allies. An extension of a larger European conflict, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), Queen Anne’s War had its own unique origins, stemming from the tempestuous politics of Colonial America.
The war officially began when Anne, Queen of Great Britain (reign 1702-1714) – after whom the North American conflict was named – declared war on France and Spain, in response to a dispute over who would inherit the Spanish throne. This dynastic war, though of little significance to the colonists on the North American frontier, would nevertheless reignite tensions that had been simmering since the last colonial war. New France, for instance, was quarreling with its English rivals over control of the lucrative fur trade as well as over a border dispute between its colony of Acadia and the New England territory of Maine. The indigenous Wabanaki Confederacy had a generations-long feud with the New England colonies as well, stretching back to the violence of King Philip’s War (1675-1678). And, in the south, the English Province of Carolina contended with its own rival, Spanish Florida, which sometimes authorized Native American raids into Carolinian territory. So, when word of Queen Anne’s declaration of war reached American shores, the colonies and Native American nations readily engaged in a ferocious war of their own characterized by bloody cycles of retaliatory raids and deadly frontier skirmishes.
Background
At the turn of the 18th century, Colonial America was a tinderbox. Decades of tensions, arising from issues such as border disputes, dishonored treaties, and the struggle over resources, had already led to the bloodletting of King William’s War (1688-1697). However, this conflict, quite limited in scope, had achieved little besides the burning of frontier villages and the killing or kidnapping of their inhabitants, serving to heighten the animosity between the English colonies on one side, and New France on the other. One major point of contention was in the northeast, in modern-day Maine, which was claimed both by the French colony of Acadia (modern-day Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) and the New England colonies. Maine had been the site of the most brutal fighting of the previous war, its settlements still scarred by the flames, the graves of the slain still fresh in its soil. New France had also long been struggling with its English rivals over control of the lucrative beaver pelt trade in the Great Lakes region. While the English enjoyed a numerical advantage over their French rivals – the population of the English colonies was approaching 200,000 by 1700, while New France had less than 20,000 – the French had better leadership and more settlers with military experience, helping to even the odds.
Though the rivalry between these two European powers lay at the center of the political tensions, a few powerful Indigenous polities could not be ignored. One of these, the Wabanaki Confederacy, had been fighting against the New Englanders for decades; several times, the Wabanakis and the English had signed peace treaties, only for the English to later trample over these agreements and encroach further onto Wabanaki land. In response, the Wabanakis had aligned themselves closer with the French, intermarrying with French settlers and allowing Jesuit missionaries in their midst. During King William’s War, it had been the Wabanakis who had conducted most of the raids on New England towns, striking terror and fear into the hearts of the English settlers. Another Native American polity was the Iroquois Confederacy, which had been allied with the English during King William’s War only to find themselves abandoned at the end of it. When the English made peace with the French in 1697, they neglected to provide for their Iroquois allies. Thus, the Iroquois were left to keep fighting the French by themselves. Many of their villages were burned and people killed by the vengeful French, before the Iroquois were able to finalize their own peace treaty in 1701. The Iroquois, understandably, accused the English of abandoning them, and were unlikely to want to help should a second colonial war break out.
Such a war, it would turn out, was not long in coming. But the spark that would ignite this North American tinderbox would come from thousands of miles away, over in Europe. In November 1700, King Charles II of Spain died without children. The vacant Spanish throne was duly claimed by a member of the French Bourbon dynasty, a grandson of King Louis XIV, a move that alarmed some of the other European nations who feared that a union between France and Spain would upset the delicate balance of power. These nations, a powerful coalition including England, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch Republic, instead favored a candidate from the Habsburg dynasty to succeed to the throne of Spain. This dispute ultimately led to the War of the Spanish Succession, as the pro-Bourbon and pro-Habsburg alliances vied for control of the Spanish Empire. At first, England and France tried to make a deal to keep their overseas colonies neutral in the struggle. But, by the time word reached Colonial America that war had broken out in Europe in 1702, there was nothing that could put the genie back in the bottle. A new colonial war had begun.
War in the South
Unlike King William’s War, which had been mostly confined to New England and Canada, this new conflict would be fought on a wider scale, with the first salvoes of fighting fired off in the South. By this point, both the English and French colonists were racing to secure trade access to the Mississippi River; the Province of Carolina, then the southernmost of the English colonies, was so far winning this race, having established a lucrative trade network touching the banks of the Mississippi. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, a French explorer and trader, was eager to break up this Carolinian trade network. At the start of the war, he went to Spanish Florida and urged the pro-Bourbon commander of Pensacola to arm the local Apalachee natives and send them into Carolina to wreak havoc. This was done and, in August 1702, a Spanish-led Apalachee war party began raiding the trading posts of the Carolina backcountry. The English quickly put together an army of their own to meet this threat and fought the Spanish and Apalachee at the Battle of Flint River in October 1702. The battle was a resounding English victory; 500 Apalachee warriors were killed or wounded, the rest forced back into Spanish Florida.
James Moore, the governor of Carolina, was not about to let them get away so easily. That autumn, he raised a force of 500 English militia and 300 Indigenous allies – mostly Muscogee – and personally led them in an invasion of Spanish Florida. On 10 November 1702, Moore laid siege to St. Augustine, burning the outlying Spanish communities. For over a month, the English continued to lay siege, but their guns had little impact on the strong walls of St. Augustine. When a Spanish relief force arrived from Havana on 29 December, Moore lifted the siege and pulled his forces back to Charles Town (Charleston). The following year, he led 50 English militia and over 1,000 allied Muscogee warriors back into Florida, burning the Spanish missions to the west of St. Augustine. This campaign of retribution climaxed in January 1704, when Moore’s men conducted a series of raids against the Apalachee villages. Moore himself would later claim to have killed over 1,100 Apalachee men, women, and children, and to have forced another 4,300 into slavery. Many of the survivors were forced onto reservations along the Savannah River. In 1706, the French and Spanish retaliated with a joint attack on Charles Town, although this ultimately failed. The next several years saw this cycle of retaliatory raids continue between the Spanish in Florida and the English in Carolina.
War in New England
To the north, the series of bloody border raids that had characterized King William’s War resumed with a new fury. In early 1703, a French-led force of 500 Wabanaki warriors moved down from Acadia and burned several English settlements in Maine including Wells and Falmouth (present-day Portland). English settlers who had survived the bloodshed of the previous decade must have looked on in horror as their rebuilt settlements went up in flames, their family members slaughtered or carried off to Canada as captives. Indeed, during the French and Wabanaki raids of 1703, over 300 English settlers were either killed or taken captive. But the most infamous raid of the war would occur the following year, when a French military officer, Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, led a band of 250 Abenaki and Caughnawaga warriors to the sleepy town of Deerfield, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At 4 am on 29 February 1704, they silently crept across the outlying snow-covered fields, entered the undefended town, and proceeded to rip the English colonists from their beds. 47 men, women, and children were killed outright, while 112 others were rounded up and taken as captives. These captives were dragged over 300 miles to the French settlement of Montreal, some of them dying enroute. The survivors were either assimilated into the Abenaki tribe – a custom practiced by some Native American nations to replace losses to their communities – or ransomed back to Massachusetts.
In 1704, the English retaliated to these raids by sending an expedition of their own into Acadia. This was led by Colonel Benjamin Church, a renowned Indigenous fighter who had won fame in the bloody battles of both King Philip’s War and King William’s War. Church raided several Acadian settlements, repaying the French and Wabanakis with fire and blood. Some accounts claim that Church made an attempt to attack Port Royal, the capital of Acadia, but found it too well defended and gave up, returning to New Hampshire. In 1705, the French and their Wabanaki allies made new raids into northern Massachusetts. They were quick with their bloody business and were oftentimes long gone before the local militia could mount any kind of defense. Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley soon realized that the best way to defend his colony was to launch an offensive into New France. In May 1707, he organized a 1,600-man expedition to seize Port Royal. Like Church before them, these New England troops found Port Royal’s defenses too strong and were repulsed after a brief siege. By now, it had become clear that the New Englanders needed help if they were to turn the tide against the French and Wabanaki raids. Such help would have to come from the dormant Iroquois Confederacy, still neutral and licking its wounds from the last war.
But indeed, most of the Iroquois were in no mood to help. Except for the Mohawks, the most Anglophile of the confederacy’s Five Nations, the Iroquois were mistrustful of the English, remembering how they had betrayed them at the end of the last war. In fact, some of the Iroquois, particularly the Onondaga and upper Seneca nations, were beginning to favor forging stronger ties with the French, and had allowed French Jesuit missionaries amongst their communities. Alarmed, the Province of New York sent its Indian commissioner, Peter Schuyler, to remind the Iroquois of their old alliance with the English, known as the Covenant Chain, and to draw them back into the fold. After multiple meetings, the Iroquois still refused to offer full military support, though they soothed Schuyler with vague promises of help. In the meantime, some Iroquois provided the French with word of Schuyler’s attempts to invoke the Covenant Chain as well as the English military plans he had shown them – by playing both sides, the Iroquois proved once again that they were shrewd political operators, ensuring their own survival by making sure that both of the European powers relied on them. But while Schuyler attempted to get help from the Iroquois, other colonials were looking for support from across the ocean, in the person of Queen Anne herself.
Attacks on Canada
In 1708, Samuel Vetch, a Scottish merchant with colonial ties, planned a two-pronged offensive to capture Quebec, the capital of New France. Time and again, Vetch had witnessed the French grant sanctuary to the Wabanakis after their destructive raids on English settlements, leading him to the conclusion that the only way to ensure New England’s security was to expel the French from North America altogether. To this end, he travelled to London and appealed to Queen Anne herself for military support from Great Britain (England was merged into Great Britain with the Acts of Union in 1707). The queen approved of Vetch’s ‘grand enterprise’ and offered to provide ships for his campaign. The next year, Vetch and his collaborator, colonial official Francis Nicholson, put together their expedition: one army of 1,500 men would march overland to capture Montreal while another 1,000-man force would sail to Quebec aboard British ships. This ambitious campaign, however, had to be called off when the promised British ships never materialized; indeed, they had been rerouted for military operations off Portugal. Frustratingly, the North American theater had proved to be nothing more than a sideshow for the generals of Europe.
The two men refused to give up. In early 1710, they returned to London, this time in the company of four Indigenous chiefs, three of whom were Iroquois from the pro-English Mohawk nation. The presence of these so-called ‘Four Mohawk Kings’ caused a great sensation in London. The chiefs were carried through the streets in royal carriages, banqueted by the Board of Trade, and even treated to a performance of William Shakespeare's Macbeth where they were allowed to sit on stage. When the Indigenous chiefs were granted an audience with the queen, they asked for military assistance against the French, as well as Anglican missionaries to go amongst their villages and offset the influence of the Jesuits. This move, calculated by Nicholson and Vetch, made it difficult for the queen to refuse. So, in July 1710, Nicholson returned to Boston with 400 marines brought over from Britain. He recruited 1,500 militiamen from the colonies and, in late September, set sail aboard a fleet consisting of 36 transports and 5 British warships. The British and colonists arrived outside Port Royal and captured it on 13 October after a week-long siege. Nicholson’s forces promptly occupied it and renamed it Annapolis Royal in honor of the queen.
Emboldened by this success, Nicholson returned to London in 1711 to ask for support for another offensive against Quebec. This was granted and, in June, a fleet of 15 ships-of-the-line arrived in Boston under Admiral Hovenden Walker, transporting 5,000 British soldiers. This was, up to that point, the largest military force that Britain had ever offered in support of its North American colonies. The expedition had to set off quickly – the then small town of Boston could barely afford to feed this influx of mouths – and sailed for Quebec at the end of July. But, as the fleet approached the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, it sailed into a thick fog. Several ships were wrecked on the rocky shores and sank, with as many as 700 soldiers drowning. After this calamity, Admiral Walker had no choice but to call off the expedition. Nicholson, meanwhile, was leading a concurrent overland expedition to capture Montreal which included some Iroquois scouts. However, once he learned of Walker’s failure, he promptly called off his expedition and turned back to Albany, New York.
Peace
In 1712, an armistice was reached between Britain and France, and a final peace treaty was signed the following year. In the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Philip V – the Bourbon candidate – was recognized as king of Spain, in return for his renunciation of all claims to the French throne. But where Britain really gained the most was in North America; France ceded control of Acadia, Newfoundland, the Hudson Bay area, and the Caribbean island of St. Kitts to Britain. In return, the French kept control of Île-Royale (modern-day Cape Breton Island) and retained the right to fish off the coast of Newfoundland. The Treaty of Utrecht did not provide for the Wabanakis, who made a separate peace with the New England colonies in July 1713. In the ensuing Treaty of Portsmouth, the Wabanakis and New Englanders established a boundary at the Kennebec River – thereby resolving the long-running border dispute in Maine – and the Wabanakis allowed the colonists to establish trading posts in their territory.
Thus, Queen Anne’s War was over. Unlike King William’s War, which had achieved nothing and restored the prewar status quo, Queen Anne’s War ended in a British victory, shoring up the British presence in modern-day Canada at the expense of the French. Indeed, the French, wary of losing their remaining Canadian territories, spent the following years building a mighty fortress on Cape Breton Island that they named Louisbourg; this would serve as a major point of contention between the French and the British, raising tensions in the region. In the former French colony of Acadia – renamed Nova Scotia by the British – many Acadians refused to swear allegiance to the British Crown and left for other French controlled colonies. The Iroquois had retained their neutrality during the course of the war. However, in the Treaty of Utrecht, they had been recognized as British subjects, aligning them further with the British colonies, whether they wanted to or not. Though the colonial map of North America had changed, animosities between all the major players remained as strong as ever, leading to the third great colonial conflict King George’s War (1744-1748).
