Hinge of war
Empires at War: The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North America, 1754-1763
By William M. Fowler Jr.
Walker, 332 pp., illustrated, $27
A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians From Their American Homeland
By John Mack Faragher
Norton, 562 pp., illustrated, $28.95
White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America
By Stephen Brumwell
Da Capo, 335 pp., illustrated, $27.50
It was, by all measures, the first of the world wars, fought between the superpowers of the time, on the high seas and four continents, over seven years. But as William M. Fowler Jr., director of the Massachusetts Historical Society, puts it in the spirited ''Empires at War," the ''most decisive battles" of the Seven Years War took place in North America, where what we know as the French and Indian War ''was the hinge upon which the outcome of the [larger] war swung."
The events chronicled in the other books reviewed here -- the expulsion of the French settlers from Acadia, now Nova Scotia, in 1755 and the attack on French-allied Indians by the elite Rogers Rangers in 1759 -- provide context and drama to an understanding of the conflict.
The British and the French and their colonists had already fought three formal wars and numerous frontier skirmishes during the preceding half-century when, in May 1754, a Virginian force commanded by George Washington, along with Indian allies, attacked and massacred a French patrol near present-day Pittsburgh. But the French retaliated and the following year saw the rout of General Braddock's British Army as it moved to attack a French frontier fort.
Over the next few years, the fortunes of war seesawed, but in the summer of 1758 the British captured the French fortress of Louisbourg after a two-month siege. Then, in September 1759 after a battle in which both the French and British commanders -- Montcalm and Wolfe -- were killed, the French citadel of Quebec fell to the British, effectively ending French control in Canada.
In the peace treaty signed in Paris in 1763, France gave up virtually all of its North American possessions. That, in the view of many historians, created the conditions that led to the American Revolution by freeing the English-speaking colonists from dependence on Britain for military security and fueling pent-up expansionist pressures.
And as Fowler notes, it ''marked the beginning of a long decline for the native peoples" in North America, despite ''their decisive role" in the conflict.
In ''A Great and Noble Scheme" John Mack Faragher, a professor of history at Yale, finds the Acadian settlements on the shores of the Bay of Fundy an idyllic culture -- which this reviewer, a descendant of those settlers, happily notes.
French settlers arrived in the early 1600s and forged ''an alliance of mutual interest" with the Mikmaq Indians that lasted until the expulsion a century and a half later. Even with little additional immigration from France, the Acadian population flourished with a high birth rate and low mortality.
The defining factor in the ''golden age" of the mid-18th century was a firm Acadian commitment to neutrality against pressure from rival British and French authority.
''Neutrality," writes Faragher, ''stood for their intimate and cooperative connection to the Mikmaq [and] for their [French] cultural identity." It also stood, he adds, for ''something new, something American in its attachment to place, local practice, and newly developed traditions."
But that same neutrality, he writes, ''would eventually lead . . . to catastrophe." As the threat of war loomed in the early 1750s, the British, who had won control of Acadia, never fully trusted the neutral position and suspected Acadian complicity in Mikmaq attacks, becoming increasingly insistent that the Acadians take an oath of allegiance.
As those pressures mounted, the British devised the ''great and noble Scheme," as a contemporary account put it, to expel the Acadians. And -- in a political construct that would serve well for future programs of ethnic clearing -- claimed it would be ''one of the greatest Things that ever the English did in America; for by all Accounts, that part of the Country they possess, is as good Land as any in the World."
The expulsion during the summer and fall of 1755 dispersed some 7,000 Acadians to Louisiana (where they became today's Cajuns), New England, Virginia, and England. An additional 5,000 refugees on Prince Edward Island and the adjacent mainland were deported over the next few years -- all told, roughly two-thirds of the pre-expulsion population.
But others fled into the wilderness and carried out guerrilla warfare against the British, or escaped to found the ''nouveau Acadien" communities along the northern shore of New Brunswick.
It was the military alliance between the French in Quebec and the Abenakis that gives meaning to the name French and Indian War. And it triggered the storied raid in October 1759 by Robert Rogers's elite corps of Rangers against the Abenaki village of St. Francis south of the St. Lawrence River.
''Violence," writes Stephen Brumwell, a British military historian, in ''White Devil," ''was the mainspring of North America's colonial frontier." And Rogers, the white devil of the title, had a ''flair for waging the brutal war of the backwoods."
Brumwell gives a vivid account of the raid that gained Rogers fame, the cross-country advance to surround the sleeping village ''like a clenching fist" and the raiders' retreat through an unforgiving wilderness and ambush by vengeful French and Indians.
Other than the geopolitical consequences of the French and Indian War, it inspired enduring works of art. Benjamin West's ''The Death of General Wolfe" at the Battle of Quebec is a masterpiece of historical painting. The war figures in James Fenimore Cooper's ''The Last of the Mohicans," and the expulsion of the Acadians is the subject of Longfellow's ''Evangeline." Rogers's raid was memorably re-created in Kenneth Roberts's ''Northwest Passage." And not least are Francis Parkman's epic accounts of the conflict.
Michael Kenney regularly reviews for the Globe. 