American History - Queen Anne's War

By the start of the eighteenth century, though no longer the political power it had once been, the Spanish Empire was still the largest empire in the world, a matter complicated by the condition of its king, Charles II, who thanks to years of inbreeding, was a physiological mess of a human being with no hope of ever creating an heir.  As a result, when Charles II died in 1700, the marriages of his sisters led to two competing claims to the Spanish throne, one by a member of the French royal family, which the French of course supported, and one by the Austrian royal family, which was supported by pretty much everyone else, including Austria, England, the Dutch, Prussia, and Portugal.  The resulting War of the Spanish Succession lasted from 1701 to 1714, resulting in a massive investment and professionalization of European armies and navies, and conflict spilling over from Europe to colonies in the Americas, India, and Asia.

In the Americas, the conflict was known as Queen Anne’s War, whom was the reigning monarch of England at the time, and nothing is quite as flattering as having a war named after you.  Now the fact that the war spilled over to the colonies should come as no surprise, given that all of the major colonial players were involved, and all sides were looking for some reason to beat the shit out of each other in order to gain better control over the fur trade in North America and the sugar trade in the Caribbean.  Within what is today the United States, there were two main theaters, one in north focused between New England and Quebec, and a second in the south, focused between the English Carolina colony and Spanish Florida. 

In the north, New England was still recovering from King William’s War just five years prior, especially given the fact that their former allies, the Iroquois Confederacy, had decided both England and France could just go fuck themselves and wanted no part of the conflict.  However, the French and their allies, the Wabanaki Confederacy, not feeling the same way, started raiding New England and Newfoundland pretty much right from the start, wrecking all sorts of shit and wreaking all sorts of havoc.  The English navy and colonial navies retaliated, attacking Nova Scotia and Quebec multiple times, but other than capturing Nova Scotia in 1710, their attempts were largely ineffectual and the raids continued throughout the war. 

In the south, Florida had long been a Spanish possession, though one which was largely only kept around as a deterrent to using the territory as a base for attacking Spanish treasure fleets.  To the north, Carolina had been an English possession since 1670, an area of growing prosperity thanks to some cash crops and the native slave trade.  To the west, the French had only recently established Louisiana in 1699, but were already making deep trade inroads in the surrounding area, mostly with tribes who were trying to avoid enslavement by the English allied tribes, which greatly concerned the Carolina colonists who profited from said native slaves.  All three sides had their native allies in the war.  The Spanish had various tribes in Florida; the English had the Creek Confederacy, Chickasaw, and Yamasee; and the French had the Choctaw.  However, unlike the Spanish and the French, the English were more than happy to arm their allies with firearms, which gave them a decided advantage.  Over the course of the war, the Carolina militia and its native allies dominated their opponents, nearly completely wiping out the entire native population of Florida in a series of raids and masscares.

Queen Anne’s War and the related European conflict ended in 1714, with the French supported new king of Spain firmly in control, but otherwise pretty much everyone but England getting the short end of the stick.  While the war nearly bankrupted the French, Spanish, and Dutch, the English had established a large professional navy, which allowed them to become the dominant maritime power in the world.  They as well formally combined the crowns of England and Scotland into the United Kingdom, forging a new identity of being British rather than English and Scottish.  In North America, their success in the south allowed them firmly take hold of territory south of Carolina, and in the north, they managed to take full control of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Hudson’s Bay, and what is today Maine.  As well, some of the member tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy had chosen to make a separate peace with the English, weakening French control over a once key ally.  However, as you can probably imagine, the conflict for dominance in North America was far from over.    

American History - The Age of Reason

  The schism between the Catholic Church and the various new Protestant faiths started by Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century led to nearly a century of conflict, culminating in the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648.  Centered in the German states, with their mish-mash of different dominant sects and complex political alliances, the region became the center of expansionist endeavors by the great powers of the day.  The war bankrupted Spain, elevated to France as the pre-eminent great power in Europe, and killed over five percent of the population of Europe.  The German states were the most devastated, with some losing more than half of their people.  It was one of the most destructive wars in European history, and one which created the impetus to begin seeing the world in a different way.    

To understand the changes manifesting themselves in Europe, one has to understand the structure of the past system.  Throughout the Middle Ages, lands were ruled by nobles who swore fealty to kings who were given the right to rule by the divine will of God.  If some other land and king believed in God in a different way, than they did not have a divine right to rule, which meant it was totally okay to go punch their teeth in.  However, the Protestant reformation created a situation where those believing different things were no longer living in some distant land reached by Crusades, but instead were just the next fiefdom over, or possibly one’s own neighbor in the same village.  The result were countless conflicts and atrocities, culminating in shitfest that was the Thirty Years War.  Not wanting to see another such clusterfuck, a movement spread across Europe for greater religious toleration, at least amongst the various Christian faiths, which began to bring up all sorts of other questions, such as if it was okay for the person next door to have a different way of praying then you, than who in the hell was giving the schlub at the top of the pile wearing the crown the divine right to rule?   

Now, throughout the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, Europe was changing rapidly in a lot of different ways beyond religion.  Populations were growing rapidly, global trade networks were bringing in a vast amount of wealth and resources, not to mention new ideas from far off lands, scientific advancement was leading to significant industrialization, people were moving into cities, the printing press made books and pamphlets more available which in turn led to a sharp increase in literacy rates, and all of this together was combining into the creation of a new and expanding merchant and middle class which began to see the world in a very different way than their predecessors.  The end result was a period of time from roughly 1650 to 1800 which later history nerds termed the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason.

Now much like most political and social movements, it’s really hard to discern exactly how things changed over time but change they did.  Starting with the idea that maybe the church wasn’t the center of the world and that it was okay for different people to pray different ways, the philosophers and free thinkers of the day, branched off from there, beginning to question all sorts of thinks that were just considered normal at the time.  Instead of absolute monarchies and fixed religious dogmas, people began to explore ideas like individual liberty and religious tolerance.  Rather than kings ruling because of some divine right, the idea that kings ruled because the people chose not to revolt and behead their sorry asses became more mainstream, creating the idea that the purpose of nobles was to serve the people rather than the other way around.  Rather than emotion and scripture, the world was to be ruled by logic and reason. 

All sorts of ideas grew out of this way of thinking; including democratic principles, universal rights, abolition, the separation of church and state, equality and equity, capitalism, the end of capital punishment, atheism, and feminism; ideas that would take a greater hold Europe and its colonies as time progressed.  Of course, not everyone was down with these new ideas, especially those who were already at the top of the heap, while others subverted them to their own uses, riding the wave while keeping themselves at the top of said heap, but overall, it was the start of something new, which would grow into the world we live in today.    

American History - Horse Empires

In 1680, the Pueblo successfully revolted against the Spanish, who soon afterward left New Mexico, leaving behind thousands of horses.  Recognizing a valuable commodity when they had one, the Pueblo traded the horses to the Utes, who in turn traded them to the Shoshone, effectively flooding the Great Basin horse market.  The Shoshone, having already established that as a newly minted warrior culture they didn’t give two shits about anything, swept out of their ancestral homelands in the northern Great Basin and seized control over a vast swath of territory across Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, which they would hold for the next seventy years.  The Shoshone in these early years proved to be an unstoppable force, taking on larger and formerly more powerful tribes and nations.  Though unwilling to take slaves, they were more than willing to take captives, which they assimilated into their tribes to swell their numbers.  By the end of the seventeenth century, they had developed a culture centered around the horse, fighting, and rapid mobility, annually migrating across their territories, hunting buffalo on the Great Plains, gathering roots and berries in the mountains, and hunting deer and other game in the desert. 

By 1690, the Shoshone were so successful that a group of significant size split off from them in Wyoming, and began moving southward, hoping to become closer to primary source of horses in New Mexico.  Moving into Colorado, they veered westward onto the Great Plains to avoid conflict with the Utes, where they became the first group of natives to completely transform themselves into a purely mounted nomadic culture completely centered on the hunting of buffalo.  The Comanche, as they became to be called, first swept into the southern Plains of what is today Texas and Oklahoma in 1706.  Over the next twenty-five years they completely displaced the Caddoan peoples and Apache who had formerly inhabited the area, pushing them northward and westward respectfully, controlling a vast swatch of territory known as the Comancheria by 1730.  With the Spanish back in control of New Mexico, the Comanche began to both trade with them and raid deep into Mexico to secure more horses, which they in turn traded back north to the Shoshone.  The success of the Comanche encouraged other groups to follow their example. 

The Osage were a Siouan people who had been pushed westward by the Algonquian and Iroquois in the previous century.  By 1690, they largely lived in Missouri where they farmed and hunted.  Fueled by the great Puebloan horse glut, horses made their way across the southern Plains to the Osage who became early adopters, expanding westward onto the central Plains of what is today Kansas and Oklahoma to hunt buffalo.  Gaining further horses and European goods, and eventually firearms, from trading furs with the French, they began fully transitioning to a buffalo-oriented lifestyle, pushing the Caddoan peoples already living in the area to the south and north, eventually becoming the dominant force on the central Plains by 1750.

In the north, after decades of unrivaled success, the horse rich Shoshone began trading the key to their success to their rivals.  By 1730, the majority of tribes across the northern Plains and Canadian prairies had access to horses, and by1740 most of the tribes on the Columbia Plateau did as well.  As a result, the Shoshone lost their advantage and began being pushed back by 1750.  In the north, an Algonquian people known as the Blackfeet, thanks to horses and firearms obtained via trading furs with the Ojibwe, soon dominated large parts of Montana and the Canadian Prairies.  On the northern Plains, numerous Algonquian, Siouan, and Caddoan tribes who had been pushed into the area shifted completely to a nomadic buffalo hunting way of life, trading and fighting with each other to secure prime hunting grounds and horses, which were scarcer on the northern Plains then in the south.

Over time a Siouan people known as the Sioux became one of the most powerful groups on the northern Plains.  Inhabiting the western edge of the Great Lakes in the mid-sixteenth century, they increasingly came into conflict with the Cree who wished to remain the dominant trading partners of the French in the fur trade.  Unable to defend themselves against the Cree, who had access to firearms, they moved westward into Minnesota and North Dakota, where gaining access to horses, they began to take on a more nomadic buffalo hunting lifestyle.  For similar reasons as the Cree, the Ojibwe used their French traded firearms to push the Sioux further west in the 1760s, which completed the Sioux’s transition.  This put the Sioux in direct competition with Siouan and Caddoan groups who lived in large well-established farming towns along the rivers, but after their populations were reduced by some 75 percent by a smallpox epidemic between 1772 and 1780, the Sioux quickly expanded, taking control of large swaths of territory and forcing other tribes already on the Plains to shift westward and southward.

By 1770, the native horse culture of the Great Plains was mature and stretched from the Canadian Prairies in the north to the Rio Grande River to the south.  Consisting of mounted buffalo hunting nomads living on the Great Plains and also including tribes from as far away as the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau who annually came eastward each summer.  The vast horse herds required a significant amount of labor to maintain, resulting in men claiming multiple wives and taking captives in raids on rival tribes.  Horses were not just prestige, but also the means of carrying goods, meaning the more horses someone had the more they could own.  The number of horses someone had become a sign of wealth, and where once many of the tribes had been more egalitarian in nature, they shifted to more of a patriarchal and warrior culture.  The large herds of horses began to degrade the grasslands, which in turn began to negatively affect a buffalo population which was already being negatively affected by overhunting.  In the long run, it was an unsustainable situation, one which would only spiral further out of control with the arrival of Europeans in the next century.