The Handy Boston Answer Book. Samuel Willard Crompton

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СКАЧАТЬ of all colonial Americans to propose a colonial congress. Franklin’s proposal, known as the Albany Plan of Union, was debated at Albany in the summer of 1754, but was not brought to a vote.

      How did Bostonians feel about some type of intercolonial government by the 1750s?

      Two generations earlier, they would almost certainly have welcomed one. But by 1754, Boston was the third-largest town on the East Coast, behind New York and Philadelphia, and it no longer seemed certain that Boston would be the number-one political leader in such a union. Bostonians, therefore, were less keen on the idea of an intercolonial government at this time than in the past. Then too, the crisis that brought such considerations to the fore soon resulted in the French and Indian War, the fourth and last of these colonial conflicts.

      How and why did Boston change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar?

      By 1750, the various English towns up and down the East Coast were in closer touch than ever before. England wished to standardize its relations with the American colonies and to ensure better regulation of what happened in America. One measure adopted as a means towards that end was the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

      The Gregorian calendar had been used in France, Spain, and other European nations since 1582, but the Protestant nations, and their colonies, rejected it as a Popish innovation. In September 1752, Great Britain and her American colonies finally moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. The difference between the two calendars was only eleven minutes per year, but when this was multiplied by the thousand-odd years since the Julian calendar was adopted, it was found necessary to “drop” eleven days from the Protestant calendar. September 3, 1752, was followed by September 14, and many people—on both sides of the Atlantic—protested, saying that they wanted their eleven days back.

THE GREAT WAR FOR EMPIRE

      How many names are there for these various colonial wars?

      There are a great many. King William’s War (1689–1697) was known in Europe as the War of the League of Augsburg. Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713) was called the War of the Spanish Succession. And the French and Indian War (1754–1763; the Great War for Empire is, perhaps, a better name) was called the Seven Years’ War by Europeans.

      How did the French and Indian War—the fourth and final colonial war—begin?

      The French had repeatedly entered the Ohio River valley, showing a desire to dominate what was then the heartland of the colonized areas of North America. In 1754 George Washington—then all of twenty-two years—led a group of Virginia militia into western Pennsylvania to eject the French. The Pennsylvania Quakers were pacifists, and Virginia claimed the right to dispute the area with the French. In May 1754, Washington fought and won the first skirmish of the French and Indian War; but in July of that year he was cut off and forced to surrender to the French. Washington was soon paroled, and his deeds had the effect of bringing on the final stage of the great colonial conflict.

      Did Bostonians know the name of Washington?

      In 1753 almost no one outside George Washington’s family circle knew the name. By the end of 1754, most newspaper readers throughout the Atlantic world knew the name of Washington. Not only was the skirmish and Washington’s surrender reported, but the text of his surrender, at Fort Necessity, was reprinted in many newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. Bostonians did not realize that this was but the first time they would hear of this man, whose actions would play so large a part in their efforts in the winning of independence and the building of the nation.

      In 1755 King George II’s government sent two British regiments under General Edward Braddock. The troops landed in Maryland and proceeded by slow stages to western Pennsylvania. Braddock took on George Washington as an aide-de-camp, but did not listen to the young man’s advice where wilderness warfare was concerned. On July 8, 1755, the French and their Indian allies ambushed Braddock and his men on the banks of the Monongahela River, just shy of present-day Pittsburgh. Braddock’s defeat was a colossal failure for the British military in North America; for the next three years, many frontier towns, from New England to the Carolinas, were endangered.

How were Bostonians involved in General Edward Braddock’s defeat by the French in 1755?

      In the summer of 1755, even before Braddock’s defeat became common knowledge, a New England force helped capture French Fort Beauséjour in present-day Nova Scotia. The Anglo-American conquest led to the expulsion of many Acadian settlers of Nova Scotia, some of whom ended up in Louisiana and became known as “Cajuns.” Boston was also involved in the sending of troops to attack Fort Crown Point in upstate New York and Fort Niagara, hard by the falls of that name. The really big event of that year was the earthquake, however.

      An illustration depicts the British preparing to bury General Edward Braddock, who died fighting the French in the Ohio Valley.

      Was there an earthquake in Boston in the 1700s?

      At 4:15 A.M. on November 18, 1755, Bostonians were awakened first by a rumbling and then by a series of terrific shakes. Centered off Cape Ann, the quake of 1755 lasted only four minutes, but during that time roughly 1,500 chimneys in Boston collapsed. Almost no one was killed because the good Yankees of Boston were just beginning to stir when the quake occurred. The following two months were a time of accusation investigation, and popular discourse, as everyone who was anyone attempted to put his spin on the matter.

      Several old-time Puritan ministers claimed that God was angry at New England. A handful of others asserted that the quake stemmed from a combination of divine and natural causes. And a small number of leading men—including Professor John Winthrop IV—declared it a truly natural event. To them it was obvious that God could bring about an earthquake any time he desired, but that the rules of the natural world made sense on a logical level. The really big surprise came when Bostonians learned that Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, had been swamped by a terrible earthquake, followed by a tsunami, on November 1, 1755.

      How was Voltaire connected to the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal?

      Nearly 40,000 Portuguese died on November 1, 1755, leading many European scientists and philosophers to question previously held beliefs. Voltaire, for example, abandoned the “feel-good” philosophy of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who claimed that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire felt strongly enough about the tragedy that he wrote Candide, a novel, to demonstrate his displeasure with those that asserted all was well.

      For Americans in general, and Bostonians in particular, the Lisbon quake appeared to be validation of what Leibniz had proposed. Boston had seen a great quake, but no one was killed. Lisbon saw an even greater one in which many thousands lost their lives. Surely, it meant that the Almighty had a special interest in the preservation of Boston and, indeed, America.

      How did the French and Indian War proceed?

      The defeat in western Pennsylvania was balanced by an Anglo-American victory at the Battle of Lake George in September 1755. Anyone who examined the map of North America could see that the French held a major advantage in terms of holding “interior lines.” It was, and is, much easier to traverse the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes than to concentrate troops from the original Thirteen Colonies. At the same time, however, the Anglo-American colonists possessed an enormous advantage in terms of population and the size of their military. There were perhaps two million people in the thirteen colonies, compared to less than 80,000 in Canada and Nova Scotia.

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