Canadian History with Clarence McPhee: the French and Indian War

If it takes years for me to inadvertently restore my earlier copyrighted web posts, then years of daily fraud have been committed by the TV stars who have been stealing from me since at least 2004. Good day, and welcome to Canadian History, the ancient history of the distant future. I'm your host, Clarence McPhee. The publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin, was still an Englishman in the 1750's. At that time, the North American colony of New France extended from Quebec to Louisiana, along a north/south trade route that confined the over one million inhabitants of the thriving British United Colonies of America to a comparatively small region of the Atlantic Seaboard. The British settlers needed living space and the French were in the way. Using his newspaper for propaganda, Franklin aroused the blood lust of his fellow colonists. His war fever spread all the way to Europe, where the Prussians were feeling equally hemmed in by the Austrians, sparking the Seven Years' War (1756-63) in which the British and the French stood on opposing sides. In North America, the Indians sided with the French. Under the supreme command of the Marquis Louis D'Montcalm, Quebec's defenders numbered fifteen thousand and drew upon everyone from old men to boys as young as twelve, the latter of whom were eager to pass themselves off as thirteen, the legal marrying age in Quebec since the arrival of the good ship Ooo-la-la and her precious cargo of young French maidens a century earlier. Sailing from Great Britain was a fleet of two hundred ships with a compliment of nine thousand soldiers and eighteen thousand sailors. They would be led on land by General James Wolfe. The British fleet blasted through the stubborn fort of Louisbourg and headed down the Saint Lawrence River to Quebec City, anchoring offshore at Ile D'Orleans. They were greeted by a surfing flotilla of unmanned canoes packed with explosives. Were it not for a school of mackerels skimming the surface for floating British table scraps, the wooden torpedoes would have reached their target. Incensed by such a dastardly attack, the British fired on Quebec for the next nine weeks. On July 31, Wolfe landed four thousand men at Beauport, where Montcalm was well entrenched. The invasion force ended up pinned down on the beach until the onset of winter and the arrival of French reinforcements in the formidable person of Bonhomme the Snowman. The following year, on September 13, 1759, the British marched on the fateful Plains of Abraham just outside Quebec City and formed a mile long line of muskets and cannons. Against them the French advanced, knelt, fired, and missed - a grave tactical error. The British responded with a devastating volley of concentrated fire and unleashed the Scottish Highlanders in a furious charge. In their kilts, the only protection the Highlanders had against insect bites was to sprint, frantically waving their swords, howling like madmen and playing a cacophony on their bagpipes. The aggravated assault demoralized the French and collapsed Quebec's defensive line, winning the most pivotal battle of the war for the redcoats. Both Wolfe and Montcalm were killed in action, but Wolfe died more peacefully, having just received a note informing him that Montcalm had died first. Meanwhile, faraway in Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin remained entirely unscathed. At war's end in 1763 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain tried to give Quebec back to the French in exchange for the more lucrative sugar plantation of Guadalupe. The mass production of maple syrup had not yet been envisioned. France declined the British offer, complaining that Canada was too cold and that the last shipment of beaver pelts had cooties because all the tanners had been killed in the war. Just in case the French changed their minds, the British kept Quebec as French and as Catholic as possible, doing away only with the French seigniorial system of landholding for being far too fair. However, the Indians had not been invited to Paris for the peace negotiations and still considered themselves to be at war. The British had to subdue them with the kind gesture of giving them wool blankets to keep their babies warm. The blankets turned out to be infected with smallpox, decimating the Indian population and clearing out large patches of the interior for the British colonists. So it was that Franklin's dream of 'living space' for his people would come to its cold, logical, and ultimately genocidal conclusion.
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