1690-1697


King James II of England, unlike his profligate brother, Charles II, was
extremely religious, and his religion was that of Rome. The large majority
of the people of England were Protestants; but they would have submitted
to a Catholic king had he not used his official power to convert the
nation to Catholicism. From the time of James's accession, in 1685, the
unrest increased, until, three years later, the opposition was so
formidable that the monarch fled from his kingdom and took refuge in
France. The daughter of James and her husband, the Prince of Orange,
became the joint sovereigns of England as William and Mary. This movement
is known in history as the English Revolution.

Louis XIV, the king of France, was a Catholic and in full sympathy with
James. Moreover, he denied the right of a people to change sovereigns, and
espoused the cause of James; and war between the two nations followed.
This war was reflected in America, as King William rejected an offer of
colonial neutrality, and it is known as "King William's War." The English
colonies had long watched the French encroachments on the north; the
French determined to hold the St. Lawrence country, and to extend their
power over the vast basin of the Mississippi; and each was jealoous of the
other concerning the fisheries and the fur trade. To these differences
must be added an intense religious feeling. The English colonies were
almost wholly Protestant except Maryland, and even in Maryland the
Protestants were in a large majority. New France was purely Catholic, and
the two forms of Christianity had not yet learned to dwell together, or
near together, in harmony. King James had not confined his designs to the
home country; he had not only revoked some of the colonial charters and
sent the tyrant Andros to domineer New England, but he had instructed his
Catholic governor of New York, Dongan, to influence the Iroquois to admit
Jesuit teachers among them, and to introduce the Catholic religion into
the colony. It was at this time that Leisler seized the government of New
York, and called the first colonial congress. Exasperated by these things,
the English colonists were eager for the conflict, while the French
Canadians were equally ready to grapple with them. King William's War was
very different in aim and meaning in the colonies from what it was beyond
the Atlantic. In America it was the first of several fierce contests,
covering seventy years; or, it may be said, it was the beginning of a
seventy years' war with intervals of peace, for the supremacy in North
America.

The war began by a series of Indian massacres instigated by Frontenac, the
governor of Canada. The first of these was the destruction of Dover, New
Hampshire, a town of fifty inhabitants. One night in July, 1689, two
squaws came to the home of the aged Major Waldron and begged a night's
lodging. Being admitted, they rose in the night and let in a large number
of Indians who lay in ambush. Waldron was put to death with frightful
tortures, the town was burned to the ground, about half the people were
massacred, and the remainder were carried away and sold into slavery. In
the following month Pemaquid, Maine, met a similar fate. In February,
1690, a body of French and Indians, sent by Frontenac, came to the town of
Schenectady on the Mohawk. For nearly a month they had faced the wintry
blasts, plowing their way through the deep snow on their mission of
destruction. At midnight they fell with dreadful yells upon the sleeping
village. In a few hours all was over; the town was laid in ashes. More
than sixty were massacred, many were taken captive, a few escaped into the
night and reached Albany. The towns of Casco and Salmon Falls soon after
met a similar fate.

The war spirit was now aroused throughout the colonies. It was determined,
through Leisler's congress,1 to send a land force against Montreal by way
of Lake Champlain, and a naval expedition against Quebec. The expenses of
the former were borne by Connecticut and New York, and of the latter by
Massachusetts. Sir William Phipps of Maine, who had this same year, 1690,
captured Port Royal in Nova Scotia, commanded the naval force. He had
thirty or more vessels and two thousand men. But the vigilant Frontenac,
in spite of his fourscore years, was on the alert. He successfully
repelled the land force, which turned back disheartened, and then hastened
to the defense of Quebec. But here he had little to do. Phipps was a weak
commander, and the fleet, after reaching Quebec and finding it well
fortified, returned to Boston without striking an effective blow. The
people of Massachusetts were greatly disappointed at the failure of the
expedition. The debt of the colony had reached an enormous figure, and to
meet it bills of credit, or paper money, were issued to the amount of
40,000. Phipps was soon afterward sent to England to seek aid of the king
and a renewal of the old charter that Andros had destroyed. King William
was hard pressed at home, and he left the colonies to fight their own
battles; he also refused to restore the old charter, but he granted a new
one, as we have noticed, and made Phipps the first royal governor of
Massachusetts.

The war dragged on for several years longer, but it consisted only in
desultory sallies and frontier massacres. The towns of York, Maine,
Durham, New Hampshire, and Groton, Massachusetts, were the scenes of
bloody massacres, and hundreds of people were slain.2

In 1697 a treaty of peace was signed at Ryswick, a village near The Hague,
and the cruel war was temporarily over. Acadia, which had been prematurely
incorporated with Massachusetts, was restored to France. But this treaty
was only a truce. The English and French nations had not learned to love
each other, and the questions in dispute had made no progress toward
settlement.

After the death of William and Mary the crown of England was settled
(1702) on Anne, the sister of Mary. James, the exiled king, died in 1701,
and his son, known as James the Pretender, was proclaimed king of England
by the French sovereign. This act alone would have brought another war,
but there was another provocation. King Louis of France placed his
grandson, Philip of Anjon, on the throne of Spain, and thus greatly
increased his power among the dynasties of Europe. This was very
distasteful to the English, and the war that followed was known as the War
of the Spanish Succession. In America, however, it was styled Queen Anne's
War (1702).

Footnotes

1See supra, p.141. [return]
2Many were the heroic deeds of those days of savage warfare. One of the
most notable was that of Hannah Dostin, the wife of a farmer near
Haverhill, Massachusetts. She saw her home burned by the savages and her
infant child dashed to death against a tree, while she and a neighbor
named Mary Neff were carried away captive. It was not long till she
planned her escape. To prevent being followed, and to avenge the murder of
her babe, she reached a desperate resolve. Twelve Indians, nine of whom
were men, lay asleep about them when she and her companion and a boy, who
was also a captive, rose at midnight, and with well-directed blows killed
ten of them, sparing only a squaw and a boy, made their escape, and
returned to their homes. Mrs. Dustin had scalped the dead Indians, and she
received a bounty of 50 for the scalps.

Source: "History of the United States of America," by Henry William Elson,
The MacMillan Company, New York, 1904. Chapter VIII p. 162-165.
Transcribed by Kathy Leigh.