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CHAPTER 4

The Seven Years’ War in the West Indies

The Seven Years’ War in the West Indies was important in two ways, besides including the Caribbean in what is sometimes called the first global war. First, Britain’s capture of Canada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Havana threatened the cohesiveness of France’s New World empire. Although British negotiators refrained from a peace treaty that would allow George III to dominate the Caribbean, the war showed that London’s power in the region was as much commercial as military. French planters in Guadeloupe and Martinique, like their counterparts in Cuba, profited from the British occupation, while colonists in Saint-Domingue chafed under what they saw as an overly harsh wartime regime. The postwar history of Saint-Domingue was devoted to government reforms designed to strengthen colonists’ loyalty to the French Empire. Second, the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War marked the beginning of a period of prolonged economic prosperity in the plantation economies of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Planters were never more powerful than in the three decades following the Peace of Paris in 1763.

Nevertheless, colonists faced challenges from metropolitan authorities. London and Versailles recognized the importance of each colony to imperial prosperity and insisted that they could control sometimes recalcitrant colonists. In Jamaica, moreover, planters faced the most violent slave uprising that had ever occurred in the Caribbean to that date. Their reaction to that challenge was to establish a new racial regime on the island, as Chapter 5 explains.

After establishing their first Antillean colonies on the smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean in the 1620s and 1630s, Britain and France found footholds in the Spanish-dominated Greater Antilles several decades later. For the next century, the two nations tangled with each other in the western Caribbean in a series of intense but short-lived local conflicts, while building up their plantations and transforming their colonies into profitable but brutal slave societies. Conflict heated up in the 1740s, starting in 1744 when France entered an Anglo-Spanish conflict that had begun in 1739 (the War of Jenkins’s Ear), thereby joining it to the ongoing European War of the Austrian Succession. It is instructive to dwell a little on this conflict because it highlights, in its limited aims, how different the Seven Years’ War was from previous Caribbean wars. France began the war in 1744 with only twenty-seven ships of the line, compared to the British navy, which had seventy-seven ships of the line.¹ This naval imbalance allowed England to attack Spanish ports in Peru and Chile and capture a Spanish treasure galleon in the Philippines.² Despite its naval superiority, Britain gained no new Caribbean territory in this conflict, thus preserving the balance of power it had established with France and Spain in the 1650s. It captured Spanish Porto Bello in 1739 and made an abortive attack on Cartagena in 1741.³ But these conquests were relinquished at the peace, for the primary aim of these assaults had been to harass the Spanish, not to gain new territory. Significantly, in the War of Austrian Succession (1744–48) Britain did not attack France’s Caribbean colonies. This war’s major theaters were in North America, India, and Europe as British colonists did not want to gain new sugar lands, since expanding sugar production might reduce its overall price. Perhaps more important, Caribbean warfare was amazingly destructive of manpower. Even a short occupation, as in Cartagena in 1741, resulted in thousands of deaths of British regular and colonial troops, mostly from disease.⁴

Consequently, the only clamor for annexation of French and Spanish West Indian islands came from a couple of British newspapers unaware of the dread demography of the region. A correspondent in the Newcastle Courant wondered “whether Quebec, St. Augustine, the Havannah, St. Domingo, or the fortress of Martinico, be not of more importance to us” than land in Flanders.⁵ In any event, British statesmen were impervious to such calls for action. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748, which ended the war, left Caribbean territory unchanged. Britain returned the fortress at Louisburg, in modern Nova Scotia, to France, which saw this installation as essential to its status as a maritime power.⁶ In return France withdrew from the Austrian Netherlands, an ideal staging ground for an invasion of Britain.⁷

The War of Austrian Succession illustrates how commercial shipping, more than naval combat, was at the heart of British/French rivalry in the Caribbean. During the conflict, in the years 1745–48, only seven French slave ships went to Saint-Domingue, unloading 1,741 Africans.⁸ Meanwhile, 109 British slave ships docked at Jamaica, carrying 29,786 slaves.⁹ In the 1740s conflict, unlike the Seven Years’ War, the French navy mounted an effective system of convoys between France and the Caribbean. But in 1747 the British learned how to intercept these expeditions, cutting Bordeaux colonial sugar imports in half in 1748.¹⁰ British naval superiority ensured that Jamaica’s average annual exports to Britain were more affected by drought than by the war, falling only 5 percent in value during the conflict. The island’s sugar exports actually increased slightly, from £311,680 per annum to £317,390 in the same period.¹¹

The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 did not change French and British fears about each other’s intentions. British West Indians were especially concerned about Saint-Domingue’s growing prosperity. Admiral Edward Vernon proclaimed in Parliament that this expansion would soon lead to the French being in control of all the sugar islands.¹² Governor Edward Trelawny of Jamaica was especially fierce on the matter, declaring “unless French Hispaniola is ruined during the war, they will, upon a peace, ruin our sugar colonies by the quantity they will make and the low price they afford to sell it at.”¹³ Such thinking led to the last act of the war, a daring raid by Admiral Charles Knowles, supported by Trelawny, on the French fort of St. Louis, on Saint-Domingue’s southern coast.¹⁴ This was one of Saint-Domingue’s best defended harbors, but militia forces there laid down their arms after only eighty-five minutes of British cannon fire. Local indigo planters then concluded a massive sale to the attackers, transferring the dye onto British warships. Later, in Europe, Admiral Knowles signed and remitted a bill of exchange from St. Louis planters. To top it off, down the coast at Tiburon, the Jamaica governor, Trelawny, accepted planters’ invitation to come ashore for tea.¹⁵ As this anecdote suggests, French planters were more interested in trade than in war. That attitude would be a major theme in the Seven Years’ War, to the dismay of Versailles.

The Seven Years’ War began deep in the North American interior. In the 1750s, financial exigencies and a lack of stable leadership in the Naval Ministry weakened France’s Indian alliances and claims over the territories south and west of the Saint Lawrence River.¹⁶ At the same time, the rapid population growth of British colonies like Pennsylvania and Virginia put new pressure on those claims. After Versailles began to build forts in the Ohio valley to strengthen its position, conflict broke out in July 1754 when a troop of French soldiers and Canadian militia defeated a militia unit commanded by Colonel George Washington in modern-day Pennsylvania. A more serious incident occurred a year later when French, Canadian, and Indian troops defeated General Edward Braddock on the Monongahela River.¹⁷

These imperial disputes fed into a balance-of-power struggle in Europe, as Austria, with French and Russian backing, sought to defend itself from the growing power of Frederick II’s Prussia, allied with Britain. By the time war was formally declared on 15 May 1756, British and French navies had already clashed off the North American coast. In the autumn of 1755, the British captured hundreds of ships and thousands of French sailors.¹⁸ In spite of the fact that France had built 34 new ships of the line between 1749 and 1754, its navy was still far behind the British. In 1755 they had just 57 battleships and 31 cruisers compared to 117 and 74 respectively for the British. By 1760, the gap was even larger, with the British having 135 battleships and 115 cruisers compared to France’s 54 and 27.¹⁹ Moreover, France’s new ships, designed to accompany convoys, were lighter and with fewer guns than their counterparts.²⁰

France survived the first half of the Seven Years’ War without disastrous losses in North America, largely because Britain did not devote enough troops or ships to the area. Versailles’s strategy was to use the overwhelming size of its European armies, now allied with Austria, to exert pressure on the British either through victories in the Austrian Netherlands, or in George II’s native Hanover. The West Indies became important only after William Pitt became Britain’s leading minister in late 1757. Of course, Britain had long noted with concern the growing wealth of the French sugar islands, especially Saint-Domingue. One correspondent of the Duke of Newcastle believed that “France was pushing for Universal Commerce” and that this push made him “more afraid … of French commerce than of French fleets and French armies.”²¹ The British were also concerned that the French colonists, in violation of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, had established themselves on St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago, and “neutral” islands in the Lesser Antilles,²²

As imperial tensions rose in North America in 1755, British and French Caribbean colonists had every reason to assume that they would be attacked. Jeremiah Meyler, a merchant in Savanna-la-Mar in western Jamaica, described how the threat of war “certainly has thrown things into confusion for the present & occasions people to desist from purchasing any quantity of sugar, rum &tc. the market being so uncertain.” Meyler’s partner, Robert Whatley, moved Meyler’s account books from Savanna la Mar to Kingston. He made copies of all the entries in case there was an invasion. Jamaican fears about invasion persisted during the war. When the French sent fleets into the Caribbean in 1756, 1757, 1759, and 1762, white Jamaicans were sure they were about to be invaded.²³ French colonists in Saint-Domingue experienced similar fears about possible British invasions. Their awareness of British naval superiority deepened their hostility and cynicism regarding the naval officers who governed their colony. After French ships lost a naval skirmish off Saint-Domingue’s northern coast in 1760, a critic of Saint-Domingue’s government wrote that “the poor navy, which furnishes us with officers who govern the colonies so well, is, they say, reduced to a very bad state. Happily … according to the accounts we have heard, there were few casualties. Thus, though we lack ships we still have officers and governors from this illustrious corps.”²⁴

The war also disrupted trade. As Robert Stanton, a Kingston merchant, wrote to Henry Bright, in June 1757, “This damned wicked French war as it ’tis carried on will be the ruin of many, both planters and merchants, because no goods shipt from hence.” Stanton believed that no one could “bear the heavy charges of freight and insurance at the extravagant rate they now are.” The war also meant that trade with Spanish America, “by which means there was introduced a great deal of money, and large quantities of European goods taken off,” had virtually halted. At the same time it hindered the delivery of slaves to the island as ships that might have been sent from Bristol to Africa were instead turned into privateering vessels. Such complaints were carping, however, given what British American colonists in North America were being forced to deal with in the first two years of war, when the war went very badly for them.²⁵ Indeed, once the war turned in favor of the British, Jamaican merchants began to profit from the disruption of trade in the Caribbean. As British and Anglo-American privateers seized enemy ships, they brought them to West Indian ports, especially to Jamaica. By 1763–64, 123 former prize ships were noted as entering Jamaican ports and clearing customs. Of these, seventy-seven were registered in Jamaica. Thus, the war expanded the island’s commercial fleet, providing ships for Kingston merchants to use in regional trade.²⁶

Before Pitt’s ascension to power in 1757, the British experience of the war was one dismal event after another, culminating in the capitulation of the Duke of Cumberland to the French at Klosterzeven on 8 September 1757. This defeat allowed Pitt to take control of the navy, army, and diplomatic corps, giving him close to total direction of the war. He immediately initiated what he called his “system,” a pragmatic, fluid mixture of strategies that allowed Britain to attack France where it was weakest—in North America, India, West Africa, and the West Indies—rather than where France was strongest—in Europe. Leaving the European war mainly to his Prussian ally, Frederick, he turned his attention to the imperial periphery, where for the rest of the war Britain fought most of its battles. It was a bold and original strategy, for no one prior to Pitt had seen the war as a means of attacking the sources of French wealth.²⁷ Neither were the French able to take advantage of Britain’s lack of focus before Pitt’s ascension. Until late 1758, when the Duc de Choiseul rose to power, the French war effort was bogged down by a Council of State whose ministers were divided over war aims, by generals who were unable to take advantage of their victories in Germany, and by financial problems that prevented the navy from building a fleet as large as that of the British.²⁸

Pitt’s first overseas victories came in West Africa in 1758 when expeditions seized French trade counters at Senegal and Gorée and on the River Gambia.²⁹ Encouraged by this success, Pitt turned to the West Indies, where he hoped to knock out French power and destroy French colonial wealth. William Beckford, the London-based head of Jamaica’s most politically important family, urged him to take an ill-guarded Martinique. This easy conquest, Beckford argued, would acquire for Britain an island with slaves and property worth more than £4 million or 92.1 million livres. He exhorted Pitt: “For God’s sake, attempt it without delay.”³⁰

The minister was well aware of other strategic reasons for such a campaign. Not only did France produce more sugar at cheaper prices than Britain, but in the struggle between the two empires geography and wind patterns favored the French. Privateers sailing out of Martinique posed a serious threat to Barbados, which had no capacity for a naval harbor. Antigua, which did have a British naval station, was downwind from both Martinique and Barbados, so its ships found it impossible to shut down French privateers.³¹ Attacking Martinique would strike a major blow at the privateers and at the French sugar industry. Pitt did not, however, intend to keep his West Indian conquests. As he saw it, Martinique would be an ideal chip with which to gain back the Mediterranean island of Minorca, which the French had taken from Britain in 1756.³²

The French were keenly aware of their naval inferiority, but Britain’s 1759 campaign in the eastern Caribbean drove home a more unsettling realization: French planters would not sacrifice themselves or their property in order to repel a British attack. In the years following the Seven Years’ War, this insight had a profound effect on politics in Saint-Domingue, as Versailles sought to build imperial patriotism in its most valuable colony. It was the example of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1759 and 1762 that created this reaction. On 12 November 1758, Pitt sent off a large force of nine thousand men in seventy-three ships to the West Indies. The expedition was hindered by the medical complications that European troops always faced in the Caribbean. Within a month of arrival in Barbados, disease had reduced the number of men fit for service to five thousand. Within another month this force had nearly halved again to just fewer than three thousand. The primary killer was, as always, yellow fever.³³