Northeast Coast campaign (1703)

Background

In the opening decades of the eighteenth century, the frontier separating Acadia from New England had never truly settled, since the fighting among French and English colonists and their Native American allies during King William's War in the 1690s left the underlying land disputes unresolved. From the French perspective in New France, Acadia's western boundary sat at the Kennebec River, in what would later become southern Maine, yet Massachusetts Bay insisted its territory stretched across the whole expanse between the Piscataqua and St. Croix rivers, encompassing the entirety of present-day Maine. English colonists had pushed settlements into the zone lying between the Kennebec and Penobscot Bay back in the 1670s, a move that put them at odds with both French claims and those of the resident Abenaki.

Catholic mission outposts founded by the French stood at Norridgewock and at Penobscot, and a longstanding French settlement occupied Penobscot Bay close to where Castine, Maine, exists today. Each of these locations had served as a launching point for strikes against English colonists throughout King William's War. Native peoples, chiefly the Abenaki toward the east and the Iroquois within New York, still held sway over the wilderness stretching from the Saint Lawrence River down to the mostly coastal towns of Massachusetts and New York, and armies from both sides had previously used the passage linking the Hudson River and Lake Champlain to stage incursions into enemy territory. Disease and the toll of the prior war had thinned native populations somewhat, easing the danger they posed, but settlements on the fringes of the colonies still regarded them as a genuine menace.

England and France went to war in 1702, though the boundary between New France and New England stayed calm until that December, when Governor-General Louis-Hector de Callière gave the Abenaki his blessing to reignite hostilities along the border. Beyond whatever spoils they might gather raiding English territory, Callière pledged them further rewards. His death came in May 1703, and Philippe de Rigaud Vaudreuil took his place, pushing hard for continued raids as a way of keeping the Abenaki loyal to French interests. Vaudreuil placed Alexandre Leneuf de La Vallière de Beaubassin, an officer whose own family's estate at Beaubassin had suffered a New England assault back in 1696, in charge of a modest French force with orders to mount attacks on English settlements.

Joseph Dudley, governing Massachusetts Bay, doubted the Abenaki would actually take up arms. Newspapers in Boston noted in June 1703 that Abenaki sentiment ran roughly two to one in favor of peace over war, and Dudley's efforts to draw them into the fight on England's behalf had gone nowhere. Even when the Abenaki chief Moxus tried alerting Dudley to Vaudreuil's belligerent intentions, the governor dismissed the warning outright.