ECFC Parts 11-15

 Part 11: Early 18th Century​

With the War of Spanish Succession over, we now resume peacetime in the Early 18th Century. By the war’s end in 1715, the population of the Colony of Canada had grown to 81,550 with settlement dipping slightly due to the war, but the birth rate remaining high as ever. Settlers continued to spread out around the Saint Lawrence River Valley, migrating up the Williams River towards Lake Pibago, founding the town of Falton at a set of rapids along the river. Falton grew quickly, due to it’s strategic location at the furthest navigable location upstream along the Williams River, while also being near Mount Royal. Other towns founded during the Early 18th century included Rockford, Arabasca, Shecootimee and Moose Point. The fur trade on the frontier was the main source of wealth for the Canada colony, with fur traders, mainly of Gaelic origin, exploring as far as the confluence of the Red and Asiniboyan rivers. The other prevalent economic sectors of Colonial Canada were agriculture (wheat, barley, corn etc.), forestry and shipbuilding, with the shipyards of Kirkeston being among the largest in the British Empire.

Meanwhile, in La Floride, the French population grew to just under 38,000 by the end of Queen Anne’s War, with a major colonial push occuring after the war. Between 1715 and 1730, over 5,000 Frenchmen settled in La Floride, the largest amount settling to farm on the frontier, as well as the largest settlement push in the history of the colony up to that point, as the colonial authorities began to encourage more immigration after Queen Anne’s War. This was in part to increase defenses against the English and lessen the population disparity, but a more cynical motivation: to keep the slave population a minority. Nonetheless, after the main settlement boom, immigration still remained in the hundreds per year. Settlers came from not just French-speaking regions, but also from French-controlled Alsace and the French Basque Country. With this increase in settlement, the White population of La Floride increased to 85,000 by 1740.

Part 12: Man, I Really Suck At Coming Up With Titles​

By the Year of Our Lord 1740, it has been a quarter century since the end of Queen Anne’s War, and tensions between the British and the French in North America are building up again. The British continue to gain influence throughout the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley, while the French expand along the Gulf Coast and the Lower Mississippi Basin. Settlers continue to pour down the Saint Lawrence and Kichisipi Rivers, including a significant amount of German and Scottish settlers, with towns such as Pine Falls and Petawawa being established by. Speaking of Scotland, the colony of Nova Scotia has spread far enough to come into contact with the New England colony to the South, with the border being set along the Penobscot River. The Scots expanded onto the nearby island of Epegwed, with the two main settlements on the island being St. Andrews and Annestown. There were also settlements along the Saint John’s River such as Welamuco and along the coast such as Machias and Conasamuc.

The Scots also expanded along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to New Inverness and Nipisigy. By 1740, the Nova Scotian population had expanded to just under 130,000, with the largest city being Saint John at 6,700 inhabitants. Canada’s population in 1740 was just above 170,000, with Kirkeston being the largest city in North America with 12,500 residents.

Part 12.5: La Louisiane​

Now, to La Floride. As mentioned in the previous update, France continued to expand its influence and reach along the Gulf of Mexico and Lower Mississippi valley, establishing the colonies of Zarazote, Fort Crevecoeur, Fort Saint-Pierre, Fort Sabine, Port Saint-Hyacinthe and Port Des Bras. While there’d been a brief attempt to settle the Lower Mississippi between La Nouvelle-Orléans and Bâton Rouge in the Late 1710s, the company that had organized the colonization went broke in 1721, and The Mississippi was put on the backburner. In the 1740s and 50s, though, the Mississippi was back in the spotlight, as between 1740 and 1755, thousands of settlers went La Louisiane (as well as several thousand African slaves... what you thought I was just gonna gloss over the dark side of history). While the plantation economy of Louisiane paled in comparison to the French money bucket of Saint-Domingue, many still got rich off of plantations in the Mississippi valley (and many, many more unfortunate souls were enslaved doing so). Despite that, most settlers in La Louisiane were simple farmers growing crops for their family (and many died of disease early on, as with colonists in La Floride a century prior).

Speaking of La Floride, there was a military conflict between the British and French from 1744-48, with the results being inconclusive. Nearly a thousand Floridians died in the war, mainly in the border regions near British Virginia, while immigration during the war slowed down significantly. After the war was over, immigration to the New World resumed, with the White population of the French North American colonies growing to slightly under 134,000 by 1755. By 1755, however, a new conflict was brewing between the Great Powers of Europe, and this conflict was sure to erupt in North America as well...

Part 13: Seven Years War​

Note: This post on this alternate Seven Years War will focus mainly on North America, as butterflies have not hit Europe to a significant enough extent to change the war over there. Anyway, here’s to the update.

After the War of Austrian Succession in Europe, European politics and diplomacy underwent a huge reversal. France and Austria, traditionally rivals, entered an alliance, while Britain and Prussia did the same. However, this TL is not primarily European-focused, and the war’s result in Europe was quite similar to OTL, so let’s get back to North America.

Both the British and the French had their own advantages in the North American theater of the war. On the one hand, the Brits had a vast, vast population advantage of 10:1, but the French on the other hand had more native allies and had held off the British in other colonial conflicts.

There were two main fronts in the North American Theater of the Seven Years War: The Coastal and Frontier Theaters. The Coastal Theatre was fought East of the Appalachians, while the Frontier theatre was fought west of the mountains.

In the coastal theatre, the British militias had a numerical advantage, and the British Royal Navy was superior to the French Navy, so the British made advances on the coastal plains, both with victories on the land as well as the Royal Navy bombarding coastal settlements into surrender, culminating with the capture of the capital of La Floride, Ville-Marie in 1758.

On the frontier, though, it was a more even fight. Here, the British did not have the vast numerical advantage that they did in settled areas, and the French had more native allies, notably the Salaguis and Mascoquis. The British militia made an offensive down through the Great Valley/Grande Vallée, capturing the French trading post of Mûreposte along the way, towards the French fort and outpost of Rocheville. However, the militia was held back by a combined force of Frenchmen and Natives. An attempted British invasion of the Mouth of the Mississippi also failed, so the scores were rather close to even in this game of war.

During the peace negotiations, the British offered to let the French keep the Atlantic coast, while giving the Brits the Mississippi Valley (even though the British seized the Atlantic Coast, while they failed to take the Mississippi Valley during the war). However, the French for some reason decided to cede the incredibly profitable Caribbean Sugar Islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique to the British, who had taken it during the war, in exchange for keeping both the Atlantic Coast and Mississippi Valley (yes, this wouldn’t have happened in reality, but it’s my TL and I want a large French North America ITTL), while also keeping the even more profitable sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. 

Part 14: The Flames of Rebellion​

It’s now the end of the Seven Years War, and discontent was brewing in the British American colonies. The American colonies up to this point had been mainly autonomous, so the Crown introducing taxes on the colonists (even if it was to pay back debts from the Seven Years War) was quite upsetting. In order to maintain good relations with the natives, the British Government put restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians (or west of the headwaters of the St. Lawrence at Lake Ontario in the case of Canada), which also stirred up discontent among the American colonists. With the population of British America soaring from 325,000 in 1700 to 1.29 Million in 1750, and continuing to soar due to a high birth rate and large waves of immigration, land east of the Appalachians and along the St. Lawrence was filling up fast, and with the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley beckoning, it was only inevitable that Anglo-Americans would spread across the mountains, whether the Crown approved of it or not.


Meanwhile, south of the Roanoke/Roanoque River, the non-Indigenous population of French Florida was about 230,000, of which around 40% were Afro-Floridians. Despite my mentioning of frontier settlements, most of the non-Indigenous population lived in the coastal lowlands. Most of the 133,000 Europeans in La Floride or Louisiana as of 1750 had origins in Northern and Western France, with smaller amounts having Other French, Basque, German, Irish or Indigenous ancestry. At the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the European population of La Floride et La Louisiane had grown to just more than 160,000, 1/9th that of the English colonies to the North. After the war, King Louis XV, with his foreign minister Étienne François, duc de Choiseul recruited tens of thousands of new settlers to La Floride, with promises of land and a new start (IOTL the settlers were sent to Guiana, where most of them starved or caught malaria, and while disease is present in the South, it is nowhere near what it is in the Amazon Jungle). It worked, as between 1764 and 1770, around 20,000 settlers arrived in La Floride, barely offset by a minor disease outbreak. Most of the new arrivals became farmers, while others went into forestry, craftsmanship, construction or fishing. New settlers established towns and villages, as well as contributing to the growth of existing inland towns like Saint-Denis, Boischeville and Hocquart. Thousands of settlers also went to La Louisiane, further solidifying French control of the Mouth of the Mississippi.

Anyway, back to British America. By 1760, Kirkeston had grown to 17,500 inhabitants, the third most populous in North America, after Philadelphia and New York. Kirkeston was a thriving port city, exporting grain, furs, fish and timber. Most important to the city was it’s shipbuilding industry, as the docks of Kirkeston had become the Royal Navy’s unofficial shipbuilding base. Further up the Saint Lawrence, Mount Royal had also grown to population of 7,150, making it one of the ten largest cities in the British American colonies. Mount Royal was the base of the Great Lakes fur trade, and thus furs were the mainstay of Mount Royal’s economy in the Mid 18th Century. Otherwise, Canada was mainly a colony of small scale yeoman farmers inhabiting either homesteads or small villages surrounded by trees of green and fields of gold.

As for Nova Scotia, Saint John was the largest city in the colony in 1760, with a population of 6,300, with the port town of Halifax (same city as OTL) the second largest at 3,500. Along the coast were scattered numerous small fishing villages, many of them inhabited only seasonally, and many were venturing further inland to find land. Contrary to one of my earlier posts ITTL, the land in Nova Scotia was/is heavily forested, and thus not good for raising sheep or cattle, but limited ranching did take place in less forested areas. Wheat was the main crop grown by farmers in Nova Scotia, and as implied by the text above, forestry and fishing were the other main economic sectors.

Anyway, I have a poll between a Successful American Revolution and Greater Autonomy Within The British Empire, so go and vote on that if you haven’t already (poll closing within a few days of this post), and have a good day.

Part 15: The Deal​

As mentioned in the last update, there was increasing discontent with the status quo in the Thirteen British American colonies. The imposition of taxes on the Colonies without any representation in Parliament did not make the Colonists happy to say the least, nor did the restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians.

However, most American Colonists still viewed themselves as loyal subjects of the Crown, and with the French to the south, they still wanted to be under British protection. A plan had already been drafted a decade earlier detailing a separate American government that still had influence from the Crown. A delegation from the American Colonies, lead by one Benjamin Franklin was sent to the crown, making the case for America autonomy. One of the points made was that the Colonial population was growing at a much faster rate than in the Motherland, and that American separation from the British Isles was inevitable, so why not make it peaceful and keep American ties to the Crown intact?

The King somewhat reluctantly approved, and the American Commonwealth Act was approved, ratified on July 4th, 1776 (yes, that was absolutely intentional), giving the Americans their own parliament based out of Albany (which would act in tandem with the British Parliament based in London), with a President-General appointed by the Crown and the delegates to be appointed by colonial legislatures. This would give the colonies more control over their issues, notably taxation. The Colonies would still cooperate with the Homeland militarily and economically, notably against the French if need be.

As for the settlement restrictions, those were for the most part lifted, but immunity from settlement was given to tribes like the Five Nations in parts of Upper New York and tribes could request land to be off limits to settlers.

Thus, the Commonwealth of America was formed, a collection of 13 British Colonies, from Virginia in the South to Newfoundland in the North.