volume 2 chapter 42 administering the conquests with peace finally concluded in the french
ousted from north america the poor hapless akkadian refugees in massachusetts totaling some 900
began the dangerous and difficult trek back to their beloved akkadia many died along the way
But the rest settled again in Acadia. Of course, there was no thought of returning
to them their old lands and property. In the final irony, the Acadians, who had been sent
to France, remained as unwanted refugees, pushed from pillar to post for twenty years
by the government. On taking control of Florida from Spain, Britain divided it into two provinces,
Provinces, East Florida centering in St. Augustine and West Florida with headquarters at Pensacola.
To East Florida the British sent as governor Major Francis Ogilvie, who made no attempt
to conceal his complete contempt for Spaniards and Roman Catholics. So grim was the impact
of Ogilvie that of the 3,000 Spanish inhabitants of St. Augustine all but five persons decided
One of the notable events of British East Florida was the founding of the colony of New Smyrna, 30 miles north of Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic coast.
The promoter, Dr. Andrew Turnbull, wangled a grant of 60,000 acres as well as a ship and a cash bounty from the Crown.
In return, he transported over 1,400 emigrants from Greece, Italy and English-occupied Menorca
to the new homeland.
The emigrants, expecting freedom and abundance, reaped the opposite—seven years of cruel
and dispiriting indentured servants, giving their forced labor to producing such goods
as hemp, cotton and indigo, subsidized by England.
The immigrants arrived in mid-summer 1768. In a few weeks they were ready to revolt.
The August Revolt was led by Carlo Forni and Clotha Corona. A brutal overseer who tried
to stop the revolt was killed. The rebels, acting the part of their masters, plundered
the property of the Menorchans of the colony, whose only crime was not joining the revolt.
Governor James Grant's forces soon seized the rebels, but took four months to capture
Forney and a band of his men. The governor decided to be relatively lenient with the
mutineers, killing only the two leaders, Forney and Corona.
Another forced labor settlement in East Florida was established at Ralston on the St. John's
In addition, 89 more immigrants fled from Roll. Finally, Roll found the open sesame to success.
He purchased openly enslaved Negroes, whom he was able to whip into a passable degree
of productivity.
What a former French Canada! After 1763, conquered Quebec was, to be sure, theoretically extended
the blessings of English legal and representative institutions, but there was one very important
catch. Roman Catholics would not be permitted to vote or to hold public office, and were
even denied many protections of the law. Thus, the overwhelming majority of the French Quebecois
were condemned to permanent subjection in their own land. The established French legal
French law and judicial procedures were swiftly destroyed, and English procedures installed
in their place. As Catholics, French lawyers were even prohibited from trying cases and
French citizens from serving on juries. Moreover, a nascent French-Canadian bourgeoisie was
crushed by the English conquest. A few hundred English merchants, who came as suppliers and
and Contractors for the British Army of Occupation and Royal Bureaucrats in Canada, almost all
new inhabitants, were able to monopolize the courts and juries and to carry on a systematic
campaign of governmental exploitation of the people of Quebec. As in the case of conquered
and battered Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec was forced to become the fortress
Church of a Suppressed Ethnic as Well as Religious People. The Church and the country turned
in upon itself, both stagnating under siege. Discrimination against Catholic voting was,
in a sense, rendered harmless by the English failure to allow any representative assembly
in Quebec. The first royal governor of Quebec, James Murray, and his successor, Guy Carlton,
The first Spanish governor, Antonio da Ulloa, finally arrived in Louisiana in 1766 and without
difficulty managed quickly to alienate almost all groups in the population. Open rebellion
and General Disgust with Government ensued. Things came to a head in 1768, when Spain
imposed a thoroughly mercantilist decree excluding all but Spanish ships in Louisiana commerce
and all trade but those to Spanish ports. 500 protesters signed a petition demanding the
removal of Ulloa and the restoration of freedom of trade. At the end of October, New Orleans
was captured by the French rebels. When Ulloa was finally sacrificed to the massive demands
for his removal, the citizens of New Orleans poured into the street to laud the French
and attack the Spaniards. The French government, in politic fashion, rejected a petition from
the rebels pledging allegiance to France. Spain decided to crack down on the revolt
and sent as the new governor, General Alejandro O'Reilly.
Bringing 2,000 crack troops, O'Reilly characteristically invited the 12 leaders of the rebellion to
meet him at his quarters, only to arrest them there and charge them with treason for rebelling
against Spain.
Five of the rebel leaders were promptly executed.
At the end of two decades of aggressive war against France, the triumphant British government
had succeeded in driving the French Empire completely off the North American continent
and in replacing France largely by its own hegemony. By the early 1760s, the British
rulers felt themselves to be masters of all they surveyed. Furthermore, the king and the
various Tory factions had succeeded in using the war to achieve one of their long-cherished
Aims, the removal of the liberal, quasi-libertarian Whigs from the seats of ministerial power
at home. With that, the major check upon the expansion of the power of the Crown and its
allies at home and throughout the Empire was at last extinct. Since the death of Queen
Anne and the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty in the early part of the eighteenth century,
The Whigs, headed by Robert Walpole and the Pelham brothers, had succeeded, by crafty
manipulation of Parliament, in imposing a lengthy rule that had kept the Tory centralizers
and imperialist expansionists under severe and unwelcome fetters. Now, in the early 1760s,
the Tories and imperialists had at last succeeded in rooting out the Whig-Pelhamite check grain
on their goals and designs. In particular, in the colonies, the impatient king and the
Tory factions were now free to scrap the policy of salutary neglect, which Walpole and Newcastle
had managed to impose on the reluctant Crown and Parliament. Enjoying the blessings of
salutary neglect, the American colonies had been able, in the first half of the 18th century,
To ignore the de jure mercantilist restrictions and edicts of Great Britain and to flourish
in virtual de facto independence from the mother country.
It was high time, the British imperialist felt, to cast off the restrictions of salutary
neglect and to bring the American colonies to heel.
It was that grand design that was to precipitate the great conflagration of the American Revolution
and to bring a new kind of nation into being.