Queen Anne's War

Background

In 1701, the death of Spain’s last Habsburg king, Charles II, sparked a European dispute over who would inherit his throne. What began as a limited conflict among a few powers escalated in May 1702 when England declared war on both Spain and France. Although the English and French hoped to keep their American colonies out of the fight, they failed to agree on neutrality. Meanwhile, colonists in North America had their own festering disputes along the borders between English and French territories, especially over boundaries and control in the northern and southwestern frontiers.

The English colonies ranged from Carolina in the south to Massachusetts Bay in the north, plus settlements on Newfoundland and Hudson Bay. Their total population was roughly 250,000, with Virginia and New England the most populous. Most colonists lived near the coast, with a few small inland settlements reaching as far as the Appalachian Mountains. Beyond those mountains and south of the Great Lakes lay a vast interior largely unknown to colonists, though French and English traders had ventured into it.

This region was home to many long-established Indigenous communities. In La Florida, Spanish missionaries had built a chain of missions to convert local Native peoples to Roman Catholicism and put them to work. The Spanish presence there was small—about 1,500 people—while the Indigenous population under their care numbered around 20,000.

French explorers had found the mouth of the Mississippi River and, in 1699, set up a small outpost called Fort Maurepas near present-day Biloxi, Mississippi. From there, they developed trade routes into the interior and formed friendly ties with the Choctaw, a large community whose enemies included the English-allied Chickasaw. All these groups had been affected by infectious diseases like smallpox, which early explorers and traders brought. Native Americans, lacking immunity, died in great numbers.

Outline of the war

Just four years after King William's War ended, another conflict erupted in 1701. This one, Queen Anne's War, pitted French, Spanish, and English colonists against each other for dominance in North America, all while the War of the Spanish Succession was being fought back in Europe. Both sides had Indigenous communities as allies. The fighting spread across four main areas.

Background

Down south, Spanish Florida and the English Province of Carolina traded attacks, and English colonists also clashed with French colonists at Fort Louis de la Louisiane, with Indigenous groups backing each side. While the southern front didn't shift any borders much, it wiped out a huge number of Indigenous people in Spanish Florida and southern Georgia, and it wrecked the Spanish mission system there. In New England, English colonists and their Indigenous partners fought French colonists and their Indigenous allies, mostly in Acadia and along the wild border with Canada.

Acadia and New England

British colonial forces went after Quebec City more than once, and in 1710 they took Port Royal, Acadia's capital. The French and the Wabanaki Confederacy tried to stop the English from pushing into Acadia, which New France claimed went as far south as the Kennebec River in what is now southern Maine. They hit the Province of Massachusetts Bay with raids, the most famous being at Deerfield in 1704 and Groton in 1707, dragging many captives back to Montreal and Kahnawake.

Over in Newfoundland, English colonists in St. John's fought with French colonists in Plaisance for control of the island. The French grabbed St. John's in 1709, but the English moved right back in once the French left. French privateers sailing out of Acadia and Plaisance did a lot of damage to New England's fishing and shipping, hauling 102 captured ships into Plaisance alone. The whole naval fight ended when the British took Acadia.

Course of the war

By the early 1700s, leading French and English colonists saw that whoever controlled the Mississippi River would dominate future trade and growth, so each side drew up plans to block the other. After the last war, French Canadian explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville came up with a scheme called "Project sur la Caroline." It aimed to build alliances with Native groups in the Mississippi basin and use those ties to shove English settlers off the continent, or at least pin them to the coast. To start, he found the Mississippi’s mouth again—La Salle had first spotted it in 1670—and set up Fort Maurepas in 1699. From there and from Fort Louis de la Mobile, founded in 1702, he made friends with the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, and other local peoples.

Meanwhile, English traders and explorers from Carolina had already woven a huge trade web across the Southeast that stretched all the way to the Mississippi. Carolina’s leaders, Governor Joseph Blake and then James Moore, didn’t think much of the Spanish in Florida, but they saw the new French presence as a real danger and talked about pushing south and west at the expense of both France and Spain. In January 1702, before war broke out in Europe, Iberville urged the Spanish to arm Apalachee fighters and send them against the English and their Native allies. The Spanish listened, and Francisco Romo de Uriza led an expedition out of Pensacola, Florida that August toward the Carolina backcountry trading posts.

But the English got wind of it, gathered a defense at the head of the Flint River, and smashed the Spanish-led force, killing or capturing about 500 of the Indigenous fighters with them. When word of the fighting reached Carolina, Governor Moore put together 500 English soldiers and militia plus 300 Native allies, marched on Spanish Florida, and burned the town of St. Augustine in the 1702 siege. They couldn’t take the main fort, though, and pulled out when a Spanish fleet sailed up from Havana. Later, in 1706, Carolina beat back a joint Spanish-French attack on Charles Town that had come from Havana by sea.

Consequences

After the war, France lost Newfoundland and Acadia, leaving them with only Île-Saint-Jean and Île-Royale on the Atlantic. They moved people from Newfoundland to these islands and soon built the Fortress of Louisbourg.

This foothold, combined with fishing rights along the Newfoundland coast, kept tensions simmering between French and British fishermen, a dispute that dragged on into the late 1700s. Newfoundland’s economy took a heavy hit, with its fishing fleets greatly diminished. The British fleet bounced back quickly once peace was signed and tried to keep Spanish ships out of Newfoundland waters, though many Spanish vessels got around this by registering under English names.

Taking Acadia had deep effects on the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq. Britain’s grip on Nova Scotia was shaky at first, and French and Mi’kmaq resistance leaders took advantage.

After the war, British relations with the Mi’kmaq soured as settlers pushed into Nova Scotia and along the Maine coast, where New Englanders moved onto Abenaki land, often breaking earlier treaties. Neither the Abenaki nor the Mi’kmaq were mentioned in the Peace of Utrecht, and the 1713 Portsmouth treaty meant different things to them than to the New Englanders, so both groups fought back against the encroachment. French agents like Sébastien Rale stirred the pot, and this unrest eventually boiled over into Father Rale’s War from 1722 to 1727.

The British also struggled with the Acadians, who were technically conquered but refused to swear loyalty oaths to the crown. This defiance led many Acadians to flee to Île-Royale and Île-Saint-Jean. By the 1740s, French figures like Father Jean-Louis Le Loutre were leading a guerrilla campaign with their Mi’kmaq allies, targeting British efforts to settle Protestants in peninsular Nova Scotia.

Did You Know?

• Europeans and colonists were typically armed with smooth-bore muskets with a maximum range of about 100 yards, inaccurate beyond half that distance.
• Under the Peace of Utrecht, France retained all islands in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, including Cape Breton Island, and fishing rights including drying fish on the northern shore of Newfoundland.