Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.the struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the New World took a turn neither country could have anticipated: during an engagement between British and French troops on the Plains of Abraham just outside Quebece City, British commander General James Wolfe and French main battle force leader the Marquis de Montcalm were killed within seconds of each other.

The nearly simultaneous deaths of Montcalm and Wolfe seriously complicated battle planning on both sides and turned what had been a 15-minute clash into a week-long siege and meant that the conflict modern historians now call the Fifteen Years' War would drag on well into the 1760s.

Plains of AbrahamWith the two most experienced field commanders in the North American theater gone, London and Paris were obliged to sharply rewrite their respective campaign strategies. The Fifteen Years' War left both a victorious Britain and a defeated France exhausted.

It also created a power vacuum in which advocates for the independence of Britain's colonies in North America could work with relatively little opposition from the powers that be back in London; by 1775 the thirteen colonies which today comprise the original states of the USA had declared their independence from Britain and the French-Canadian citizens of Quebec had thrown out the token British garrison which had attempted to occupy their homeland after the war ended.

the Fifteen Years' War finally ended with the signing of the Treaty of Stockholm.

For both Great Britain and France the peace accord didn't come a minute too soon: the British wanted to consolidate the gains they'd achieved in the New World since the late 1750s, while the French were trying to keep their already strained armies from being bled still further white lest France's longtime Mediterranean adversary Spain be tempted to launch an invasion across the Franco-Spanish border.

The Year of BloodIndeed, the French government was ultimately compelled to sue for peace by the ongoing deterioration of France's strategic position in continental Europe. There was also the matter of trying to keep a lid on the simmering internal discontent that had been building among the French middle and lower classes ever since the siege of Quebec City.

Although the Treaty of Stockholm's terms were later criticized as unnecessarily harsh in some respects, the French negotiating party felt they had little choice but to agree to those terms given the significant casualties the French army had endured both in Europe and in North America -- particulary during 1768, a time some modern French historians now call l'Annee du Sang ("the Year of Blood").

Ironically, Britain's real problems in Quebec would start well after French troops had left the province. Resentful of their new would-be rulers, the Quebecois wasted little time organizing a widespread resistance to British control; the British were driven out of Quebce by 1773. The success of the Quebec uprising inspired American colonists to seek independence from Britain themselves two years later.

On May 18^th 1770,

Quebecois rebel militias attacked the British garrison at Sherbrooke, starting one of the most significant battles of the Quebec Rebellion.

Over the next five days rebel troops and British forces would fight tooth and nail for control of the garrison; early on the afternoon of the sixth day the British garrison commander was killed when a stray musket ball tore through his neck and severed his jugular vein. The disheartened remnants of the garrison then hastily retreated to Montreal, leaving all of Sherbrooke in rebel hands.

Battle of SherbrookeAt the time of the battle it was thought a rebel gun had fired the fatal shot at the British commander; in 2003, however, an archeological dig near the original garrison site turned up startling new evidence the garrison commander might actually have been the victim of a friendly fire accident.

The rebel victory at Sherbrooke dealt a staggering blow to Great Britain's prestige in the New World. Not only did it embolden insurgent militias elsewhere in Quebec to mount still greater attacks on British outposts there, it triggered a surge in pro-independence sentiment among the people of what is today the eastern seaboard of the United States; by 1772 the most vocal advocates of American separation from Britain had formed a coalition known as the Brotherhood of Liberty to rally public opinion in favor of armed resistance to British rule. It was the Brotherhood that would finally launch the American Revolution in the spring of 1775.