Colonial American military history
Rangers were full-time soldiers employed by colonial governments to patrol between fixed frontier fortifications in reconnaissance, providing early warning of raids.
In offensive operations, they were scouts and guides, locating villages and other targets for task forces drawn from the militia or other colonial troops.
During the eighteenth century militia service was increasingly seen as a prerogative of the social and economic well-established, while provincial troops came to be recruited from different and less deep-rooted members of the community.
[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] The first provincial forces in British North America were organized in the 1670s, when several colonial governments raised ranger companies for one year's paid service to protect their borders (see above).
During Queen Anne's War, provincial troops from Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Hampshire made up the bulk of the English forces.
[21] The militia system was revived at the end of the colonial era, as the American Revolution approached; weapons were accumulated and intensive training began.
[26] Sir William Phips moved with his New England militia in 1690 to take the French strongholds at Port Royal and at Quebec, the latter commanded by Comte de Frontenac, the governor of New France.
Phips's written ultimatum demanding Fontenac's surrender at Quebec prompted Frontenac to say that his reply would come only "from the mouths of my cannon and muskets."
The New England militia had to reckon with Quebec's formidable natural defenses, its superior number of soldiers, and the coming of winter, and Phips finally sailed back to Boston with his hungry, smallpox-ridden, and demoralized force.
His failure shows a growing recognition of the need to replicate European combat techniques and to move closer to the war policy in London in order to achieve military success.
It retained significant power relative to the colonists, unlike tribes in southern New England, and rejected attempts to exert authority over them.
[citation needed] Expanding settlements fueled tensions and led to Indian threats of a repeat of the violence of King Philip's War and offered an opportunity to the French, who formed several new alliances.
These warriors proved their effectiveness in combining native tactics and European arms, but the colonists failed to compensate them adequately and seriously underestimated their importance as the key to the balance of power in the southeastern interior.
[30] The French and Wabanaki Confederacy sought to thwart the expansion of New England into Acadia, whose border New France defined as the Kennebec River in southern Maine.
Maine fell to the New Englanders with the defeat of Father Sébastien Rale at Norridgewock and the subsequent retreat of the Indians from the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers to St. Francis and Becancour, Quebec.
The French led Indian allies in numerous raids, such as the one on Nov. 28, 1745 which destroyed the village of Saratoga, New York, killing and capturing more than one hundred of its inhabitants.
During Father Le Loutre's War, New France established three forts along the border of present-day New Brunswick to protect it from a New England attack from Nova Scotia.
The war continued until British victory at Fort Beausejour, which dislodged Father Le Loutre from the region, thereby ending his alliance with the Maliseet, Acadians, and Mi'kmaq.
[36] Provincial troops, as distinct from the militias, were raised by the thirteen colonial governments in response to annual quotas established by the British commanders-in-chief.
The British did not make a concerted military effort to control the region until 1749 when they founded Halifax, which sparked Father Le Loutre's War.
Immediately after this battle the New England and British forces engaged in numerous military campaigns aimed at securing their control of the region.
British defenders at Fort William Henry (at the southern end of Lake George) were surrounded by an overwhelming French force and their Indian allies from many tribes in August 1757.
Nonetheless, the Indian warriors' customs permitted the enslavement of some captured enemy soldiers and the scalping of others, and they ignored French efforts to prevent the massacre.
[citation needed] Meanwhile, Lord Jeffery Amherst captured the great French stronghold of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island (now part of Nova Scotia).
[40] The victory of Wolfe over Montcalm was a decisive moment in shaping the self-image of English-Canadians, while Francophone Canada has refused to allow commemorations.
[42] By ejecting the French from North America, the British victory made it impossible for the Iroquois and other native groups to play off rival European powers against one another.
They reacted quickly to Britain's abrupt changes in the terms of trade and suspension of diplomatic gift giving, launching an offensive aimed at driving British troops from their forts and sending raiding parties that caused panic as American refugees fled east.
[43] The Proclamation of 1763 angered American settlers eager to move west; they largely ignored it, and saw the British government as an ally of the Indians and an obstacle to their goals.
As Dixon (2007) argues, "Frustrated by their government's inability to contend with the Indians, back country settlers concluded that the best way to insure security was to rely on their own devices".
Such actions eventually pushed them into direct conflict with the British government and ultimately proved one of the main forces leading to backcountry support for the American Revolution.
