Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England

5: "Who will be Masters of America The French or the English?" Manhood and Imperial Warfare in the Eighteenth Century

Chapter 5 "Who will be Masters ofAmerica The French or the English?" Manhood and Imperial Warfare in the Eighteenth Century Who will be Masters of America The French or the English; and grief if it is not desided by a united vigorous blow at the Root. The French will run away with what the English call theirs, if the French have a No. ofyears to plan & Contrive & Effect, having got the Indians they without a spirit of prophesey will Effect their ambitious designs. -William Williams to Israel Williams (1756) As we have seen, English and Indian men saw war and politics as important fields for proving manhood and establishing mastery over the enemy. Similarly, when the imperial struggle between Britain and France moved to the center of wars in the northeastern borderlands, English and French men experienced their struggle in part as a contest of masculinities. After decades of losing English captives to French Catholic Canada, New Englanders were especially eager for a decisive victory over the French. With the outbreak of the last two imperial wars in the 1740s and 1750s, which raged almost without interruption in North America, English and New England soldiers, war captives, and intellectuals wrote with more hostility about their French captors and foes than ever before. Because New England's focus turned away from their former Algonquian enemies to fix almost exclusively on the French, religion came to the fore in conceptualizations of the enemy. These imperial wars gave new force and vitality to the rivalry among Canadian Catholics and New England Protestants, inspiring a particularly fierce New England anti-Catholicism. Drawing on both the political and religious hostilities that had marked Anglo-French "Who will be Masters ofAmerica?" 167 relations for hundreds of years, New England's private letters and journals as well as its print culture portrayed King George's War (1744-48) and the Seven Years' War (1756-63), also known in North America as the French and Indian War, as an apocalyptic confrontation between English Protestant virtue and liberty on the one hand, and French Catholic depravity and despotism on the other. The French Canadian viewpoint is more difficult to discern, as Canada had no native presses, nor was literacy as widespread as it was in New England.1 However, the correspondence and papers of French colonial officials, and chance encounters between French and English men, give some insight into the French perspective on these last two imperial wars. In French eyes, New Englanders found themselves cast in the very same role they themselves had cast the Indians: Canadian officials complained frequently of the near-anarchy of New England and its hodgepodge of polities who asserted their own sovereignty, much like Indian tribes. French colonial officials saw English liberty therefore as libertinage, founded on Protestant "errors" established by an adulterous king. Yet again, New England and English men evoked ideals of manhood to illustrate the political conflicts and religious differences between England and France, and by extension between New England and Canada. As in earlier Anglo-Indian conflict, ideas about gender and gendered language were used to describe the imperial wars in both English and New England print culture and private letters and diaries. Although the landscape and peoples of the northeastern borderlands had changed dramatically in the previous century, the ways in which New Englanders understood warfare did not, and to a remarkable degree New England civil and religious leaders used the same sacred language and ideas about gender to call its men to war once again.2 Despite these similarities, these wars changed not just the political and cultural landscape of the northeastern borderlands but also the ideals ofmanhood that originally motivated New England men to fight Indians in the seventeenth century and both Indians and French men in the eighteenth century. What had once been a masculinity based on household headship, Christian piety, and the duty to protect both family and faith by force of arms became a masculinity built around the more abstract notions of Anglo-American nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for the empire . By examining English and New England men's diaries, letters, and published works during the last two imperial wars, we will explore the emergence of this new masculinity and its close connections to eighteenthcentury Anglo-American nationalism and anti-Catholicism. 168 Chapter 5 While the mid-eighteenth century imperial wars were in fact different from the border wars ofthe...