THE FALL:OF NEW FRANCE 105 
raised by Massachusetts, three hundred by New 
Hampshire, three hundred by Rhode Island, and five 
hundred by Connecticut. The whole force was com- 
manded by William Pepperell, a merchant of Maine. 
With the assistance of four English ships of the line, 
they laid siege to Louisburg on May-day, 1745, and 
pressed the matter so vigorously that on the 17th of 
June —just thirty years before the battle of Bunker 
Hill—the French commander was browbeaten into 
surrendering his almost impregnable fortress. The 
gilded iron cross over the new entrance to Harvard 
College Library is a trophy of this memorable exploit, 
which not only astonished the world, but saved 
New England from a contemplated French invasion. 
Greatly to the chagrin of the American colonies, the 
treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored Louisburg to the 
French, in exchange for Madras, in Hindustan, which 
France had taken from England. The men of New 
England felt that their services were held cheap, and 
were much irritated at the preference accorded by the 
British government to its general imperial interests at 
the expense of its American colonies. 
A great war had now become inevitable. By the 
treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, Acadia had been ceded to 
England, but neither this treaty nor that of Aix-la- 
Chapelle, in 1748, defined the boundary between 
Acadia and Maine, nor did either treaty do anything 
toward settling the eastern limits of Louisiana. The 
Penobscot Valley furnished one ever burning ques- 
tion, and the New York frontier another. The dis- 
pute over the Ohio Valley was the fiercest of all, and 
from this quarter at last arose the conflagration which 
swept away all the hopes of French colonial empire in 
