Queen Anne's War (1702–1713) was the second in a series of French and Indian Wars fought in North America involving the colonial empires of Great Britain, France, and Spain. In the United States, it is regarded as a standalone conflict. Elsewhere it is viewed as the American theater of the War of the Spanish Succession. It is also known as the Third Indian War. In France it was known as the Second Intercolonial War.
Outline of the war
The war broke out in 1701, a mere four years after King William's War, and was primarily a conflict between French, Spanish and English colonists for control of the North American continent while the War of the Spanish Succession was being fought in Europe. Each side was allied with various Indigenous communities. It was fought on four fronts:
- In the south, Spanish Florida and the English Province of Carolina attacked one another, and English colonists engaged French colonists based at Fort Louis de la Louisiane (near present-day Mobile, Alabama), with Indigenous bands allied on each side. The southern war did not result in significant territorial changes, but it resulted in seriously decimating the Indigenous population of Spanish Florida and parts of southern Georgia, with destruction of the network of Spanish missions in Florida.
- In New England, English colonists and Indigenous allies fought against French colonists and their Indigenous forces, especially in Acadia and unsettled border frontier with Canada. Quebec City was repeatedly targeted by British colonial expeditions, and the British captured in 1710 the Acadian capital Port Royal (modern Annapolis Royal). French colonists and the Wabanaki Confederacy sought to thwart British expansion into Acadia, whose border New France defined as the Kennebec River in what is now southern Maine. They executed raids in the Province of Massachusetts Bay (including Maine), most famously the Raid on Deerfield in 1704 and one on Groton in 1707, in both cases taking numerous captives to Montreal and Kahnawake (a Mohawk mission village) for ransom or adoption by Mohawk families.
- In Newfoundland, English colonists based at St. John's disputed control of the island with the French colonists of Plaisance, present-day Placentia. Most of the conflict consisted of economically destructive raids on settlements. The French colonists successfully captured St. John's in 1709, but the British colonists quickly reoccupied it after the French abandoned it.
- French privateers based in Acadia and Plaisance captured many ships from New England's fishing and shipping industries. Privateers took 102 prizes into Plaisance, second only to Martinique in France's American colonies. The naval conflict ended with the British capture of Acadia (Nova Scotia).
The Peace of Utrecht ended the war in 1713, following a preliminary peace in 1712. France ceded the territories of Hudson Bay, Acadia, and Newfoundland to Britain while retaining Cape Breton Island and other islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Some terms were ambiguous in the treaty, and the concerns of various Indigenous communities were not included, thereby setting the stage for future conflicts.
Background
When war broke out in Europe in 1701 following the death of the last Habsburg monarch, Charles II, European powers disputed the succession. The zone of conflict was initially restricted to a few powers in Europe, but it widened in May 1702 when England declared war on Spain and France. Both the English and French wanted to keep their American colonies neutral, but they did not reach an agreement. The American colonists had their own tensions which had been growing along the borders separating the French and English colonies. They were concerned about boundaries and governing authority in the northern and southwestern frontiers of the English colonies, which stretched from the Province of Carolina in the south to the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the north, with additional colonial settlements or trading outposts on Newfoundland and at Hudson Bay.
The total population of the English colonies was about 250,000, with Virginia and New England dominating. The colonists were concentrated along the coast, with small settlements inland, sometimes reaching as far as the Appalachian Mountains. Colonists knew little of the interior of the continent to the west of the Appalachians and south of the Great Lakes. This area was dominated by numerous historic Indigenous communities, although French and English traders had penetrated it. Spanish missionaries in La Florida had established a network of missions in an effort to convert the Indigenous to Roman Catholicism and focus their labor. The Spanish population was relatively small (about 1,500), and the Indigenous population to whom they ministered has been estimated at 20,000.
French explorers had located the mouth of the Mississippi River, and they established a small colonial presence at Fort Maurepas near Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1699. From there, they began to build trade routes into the interior, establishing friendly relations with the Choctaw, a large community whose enemies included the English-allied Chickasaw. All of these populations had suffered to some degree from the introduction of infectious diseases such as smallpox, endemic among early explorers and traders. The Native Americans had no immunity and suffered high mortality.
The arrival of French colonists in the south threatened existing trade links that Carolina colonists had established into the interior, creating tension among all three powers. France and Spain, allies in this conflict, had been on opposite sides of the recently ended Nine Years' War. Conflicting territorial claims between Carolina and Florida south of the Savannah River were overlaid by animosity over religious divisions between the Roman Catholic colonists of New Spain and the Protestant English colonists along the coast.
To the north, the conflict held a strong economic component in addition to territorial disputes. Newfoundland was the site of a British colony at St. John's and a French colony at Plaisance, with both sides also holding a number of smaller permanent settlements. The island also had many seasonal settlements used by fishermen from Europe. These colonists numbered fewer than 2,000 English and 1,000 French permanent settlers (and many more seasonal visitors), who competed with one another for the fisheries of the Grand Banks, which were also harvested by fishermen from Acadia (then encompassing all of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) and Massachusetts.
The borders and boundaries remained uncertain between Acadia and New England despite battles along the border throughout King William's War. New France defined the border of Acadia as the Kennebec River in southern Maine. There were Catholic missions at Norridgewock and Penobscot and a French settlement in Penobscot Bay near Castine, Maine, which had all been bases for attacks on New England settlers migrating toward Acadia during King William's War. The frontier areas between the Saint Lawrence River and the primarily coastal settlements of Massachusetts and New York were still dominated by Indigenous peoples, primarily Abenaki in the east and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) west of the Hudson River. The Hudson River–Lake Champlain corridor had also been used for raiding expeditions in both directions in earlier conflicts. The threat of Indigenous peoples had receded somewhat because of reductions in the population as a result of disease and the last war, but they still posed a potent threat to outlying settlements.
The Hudson Bay territories (also known as Prince Rupert's Land) were not significantly fought over in this war. They had been a scene of much dispute by competing French and English companies starting in the 1680s, but the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick left France in control of all but one outpost on the bay. The only incident of note was a French attack on the outpost of Fort Albany in 1709. The Hudson's Bay Company was unhappy that Ryswick had not returned its territories, and it successfully lobbied for their return in the negotiations that ended this war.
Technology and organization
The colonial military technology used in North America was not as developed as in Europe. Only a few colonial settlements had strong fortifications at the start of the war, such as St. Augustine, Florida, Boston, Quebec City, and St. John's, Newfoundland, although Port Royal's fortifications were completed early in the war. Some villages and settlements were protected by wooden palisades, but many had little more than fortified wooden houses with gun ports through which defenders could fire, and overhanging second floors from which they might fire down on attackers trying to break in below.
Europeans and colonists were typically armed with smooth-bore muskets that had a maximum range of about 100 yards (91 m) but were inaccurate at ranges beyond half that distance. Some colonists also carried pikes, while Indigenous warriors either carried arms supplied by the colonists or were armed with weapons such as primitive tomahawks and bows. A small number of colonists had training in the operation of cannon and other types of artillery, which were the only effective weapons for attacking significant stone or wooden defenses.
English colonists were generally organized into militia companies, and their colonies had no regular military presence beyond a small number in some of the communities of Newfoundland. The French colonists were also organized into militias, but they also had a standing defense force called the troupes de la marine. This force consisted of some experienced officers and was manned by recruits sent over from France, numbering between 500 and 1,200. They were spread throughout the territories of New France, with concentrations in the major population centers. Spanish Florida was defended by a few hundred regular troops; Spanish policy was to pacify the Indigenous peoples in their territory and not to provide them with weapons. Florida held an estimated 8,000 Indigenous peoples before the war, but this was reduced to 200 after English colonist raids made early in the war.
Course of the war
Carolina and Florida
Prominent French and English colonists understood at the turn of the 18th century that control of the Mississippi River would have a significant role in future development and trade, and each developed visionary plans to thwart the other's activities. French Canadian explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville had developed a "Project sur la Caroline" in the aftermath of the previous war which called for establishing relationships with Indigenous peoples in the Mississippi watershed and then leveraging those relationships to push the English colonists off the continent, or at least limit them to coastal areas. In pursuit of this grand strategy, he rediscovered the mouth of the Mississippi (which had first been found by La Salle in 1670) and established Fort Maurepas in 1699. From this base and Fort Louis de la Mobile (founded in 1702), he began to establish relationships with the local Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez people, and other communities.
English colonial traders and explorers from Carolina had established a substantial trading network across the southeastern part of the continent that extended all the way to the Mississippi. Its leaders had little respect for the Spanish in Florida, but they understood the threat posed by the French arrival on the coast. Both Carolina governor Joseph Blake and his successor James Moore articulated visions of expansion to the south and west at the expense of French and Spanish interests.
Iberville had approached the Spanish in January 1702 before the war broke out in Europe, recommending that the Apalachee warriors be armed and sent against the English colonists and their allies. The Spanish organized an expedition under Francisco Romo de Uriza; it left Pensacola, Florida in August for the trading centers of the Carolina back country. The English colonists had advance warning of the expedition and organized a defense at the head of the Flint River, where they routed the Spanish-led force, and captured or killed some 500 Spanish-led Indigenous peoples.