How did an ambitious British army officer advance his career in mid–eighteenth–century North America? What was the nature of political opportunism in an imperial system encompassing an old world and a new? This study examines the career of an Anglo–Irish–Acadian army officer, treating in considerable detail the network of old-world connections and patrons which at times facilitated his advancement. John Bradstreet was born in Nova Scotia and died in New York. He was a major participant in colonial North American military events ranging from the capture of Louisbourg in 1745 to the British campaign against Pontiac in 1764. Early in his career he became lieutenant–governor of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and eventually rose to the rank of major–general in the British army, while linking his military performance to a relentless pursuit of profit and preferment. He was a man consistently on the periphery of both English and American societies; yet his career reveals a great deal about the mid–eighteenth–century trans–Atlantic world and about the dilemma of proponents of Empire who were viewed with increasing suspicion in both mother country and colonies. The author draws upon British, American, and Canadian archival sources, taking advantage of Bradstreet’s prolific correspondence to support and develop his narrative.

This lively book recounts the story of the antagonism between the American colonists and the British armed forces prior to the Revolution. Douglas Leach reveals certain Anglo-American attitudes and stereotypes that evolved before 1763 and became an important factor leading to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Using research from both England and the United States, Leach provides a comprehensive study of this complex historical relationship. British professional armed forces first were stationed in significant numbers in the colonies during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. During early clashes in Virginia in the 1670s and in Boston and New York in the late 1680s, the colonists began to perceive the British standing army as a repressive force. The colonists rarely identified with the British military and naval personnel and often came to dislike them as individuals and groups. Not suprisingly, these hostile feelings were reciprocated by the British soldiers, who viewed the colonists as people who had failed to succeed at home and had chosen a crude existence in the wilderness. These attitudes hardened, and by the mid-eighteenth century an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion prevailed on both sides. With the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754, greater numbers of British regulars came to America. Reaching uprecedented levels, the increased contact intensified the British military's difficulty in finding shelter and acquiring needed supplies and troops from the colonists. Aristocratic British officers considered the provincial officers crude amateurs -- incompetent, ineffective, and undisciplined -- leading slovenly, unreliable troops. Colonists, in general, hindered the British military by profiteering whenever possible, denouncing taxation for military purposes, and undermining recruiting efforts. Leach shows that these attitudes, formed over decades of tension-breeding contact, are an important development leading up to the American Revolution.

His Majesty's Indian Allies is a study of British-Indian policy in North America from the time of the American Revolution to the end of the War of 1812, with particular focus on Canada.

In the wake of Braddock’s defeat at Fort Duquesne in 1755, the British army raised the 60th, or Royal American, Regiment of Foot to fight the French and Indian War. Each of the regiment’s four battalions saw action in pivotal battles throughout the conflict. And as Alexander Campbell shows, the inclusion of foreign mercenaries and immigrant colonists alongside British volunteers made the RAR a microcosm of the Atlantic world. Not just a potent, combat-ready force, it played a key role in trade, migration, Indian diplomacy, and settlement. This book moves beyond the campaign orientation of most regimental histories to explore how the Royal Americans helped forge new Atlantic connections. Campbell draws on the regiment’s rich archival legacy—including the private papers of its first three colonels-in-chief and of mercenary field officers—to describe more fully than previous accounts the lives these soldiers led in the context of their times. Campbell takes a closer look at the motivations of regimental founder James Prevost, a Swiss mercenary in the courts of Kings George II and George III, and explores how migration to America attracted rank-and-file soldiers. He examines the unit’s training, deployment, and operational conduct to reveal the use of new tactics, and also chronicles a year in the soldiers’ lives as they attended to hard labor in preparation for the summer’s campaigns. He also traces the postwar activities of these veterans, showing how many of them, by taking up land grants they had been promised upon enlistment, helped settle the frontier and expand commerce. Rather than focus on previously documented animosity between British regulars and provincials, Campbell reveals how soldiers from different backgrounds formed a multiracial, multilingual society that reflected a truly cosmopolitan transatlantic identity

A year after John Bradstreet’s raid of 1758—the first and largest British-American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War)—Benjamin Franklin hailed it as one of the great “American” victories of the war. Bradstreet heartily agreed, and soon enough, his own official account was adopted by Francis Parkman and other early historians. In this first comprehensive analysis of Bradstreet’s raid, Ian Macpherson McCulloch uses never-before-seen materials and a new interpretive approach to dispel many of the myths that have grown up around the operation. The result is a closely observed, deeply researched revisionist microhistory—the first unvarnished, balanced account of a critical moment in early American military history. Examined within the context of campaign planning and the friction among commanders in the war’s first three years, the raid looks markedly different than Bradstreet’s heroic portrayal. The operation was carried out principally by American colonial soldiers, and McCulloch lets many of the provincial participants give voice to their own experiences. He consults little-known French documents that give Bradstreet’s opponents’ side of the story, as well as supporting material such as orders of battle, meteorological data, and overviews of captured ships. McCulloch also examines the riverine operational capability that Bradstreet put in place, a new water-borne style of combat that the British-American army would soon successfully deploy in the campaigns of Niagara (1759) and Montreal (1760). McCulloch’s history is the most detailed, thoroughgoing view of Bradstreet’s raid ever produced.

This 2005 book explores the evolution of Americans' first way of war, to show how war waged against Indian noncombatant population and agricultural resources became the method early Americans employed and, ultimately, defined their military heritage. The sanguinary story of the American conquest of the Indian peoples east of the Mississippi River helps demonstrate how early Americans embraced warfare shaped by extravagant violence and focused on conquest. Grenier provides a major revision in understanding the place of warfare directed on noncombatants in the American military tradition, and his conclusions are relevant to understand US 'special operations' in the War on Terror.

In this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the Seven Years' War, Great Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean — and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role — permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North America. Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. We see colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering British officers who regarded them as subordinates and who treated them accordingly. This laid the groundwork in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of the men who had once been their masters. Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George Washington and other provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be soldiers. Depicting the subsequent British efforts to reform the empire and American resistance — the riots of the Stamp Act crisis and the nearly simultaneous pan-Indian insurrection called Pontiac's Rebellion — as postwar developments rather than as an anticipation of the national independence that no one knew lay ahead (or even desired), Anderson re-creates the perspectives through which contemporaries saw events unfold while they tried to preserve imperial relationships. Interweaving stories of kings and imperial officers with those of Indians, traders, and the diverse colonial peoples, Anderson brings alive a chapter of our history that was shaped as much by individual choices and actions as by social, economic, and political forces.