The Edge of Empire - New England’s Conquest

American Political History · Dec 25, 2022 · 32m

In 1745, an army of New England farmers, fishermen, and shopkeepers — not one of them a trained soldier — sailed six hundred miles north to do the impossible: take Louisbourg, the strongest fortress in North America, the Gibraltar of the North. They had no horses, almost no siege guns, and no idea what they were doing. What they had was a merchant for a general, a fortress rotting from a mutiny within, and a willingness to harness themselves two hundred to a cannon and drag it through a bottomless bog. This is the story of the most astonishing colonial victory of the age — told from inside…