page_title: Fort Beauséjour
section_title: Historical context
hierarchical_section_title: Fort Beauséjour / Historical context
caption_attribution_description: English: Fort Beausejour in 1755 by Winckworth Tonge
context_page_description: Fort Beauséjour is a large, five-bastioned star fort on the Isthmus of Chignecto in eastern Canada, a neck of land connecting the present-day province of New Brunswick with that of Nova Scotia. The site was strategically important in Acadia, a French colony that included primarily the Maritimes, the eastern part of Quebec, and northern Maine of the later United States. The fort was built by the French from 1751 to 1752. They surrendered it to the British in 1755 after their defeat in the Battle of Fort Beauséjour, during the Seven Years' War. The British renamed the structure as Fort Cumberland. The fort was strategically important throughout the Anglo-French rivalry of 1749–63, known as the French and Indian Wars by British colonists. Less than a generation later, it was the site of the 1776 Battle of Fort Cumberland, when the British forces repulsed sympathisers of the American Revolution.
  Since 1920 the site has been designated as a National Historic Site of Canada, named the Fort Beauséjour – Fort Cumberland National Historic Site. Portions of the fort have been restored, and a museum and visitor facilities were added to the site. It attracts about 6000 visitors annually.
context_section_description: During the 1600s and 1700s, European monarchies were nearly continuously at war with each other. The threat of Anglo-American invasion of New France was constant, as England tried to establish power in North America, and Acadia was particularly vulnerable to attacks by water. Its capital, Port-Royal, was founded in 1605, destroyed by the British in 1613, moved upstream in 1632, besieged by the British in 1707, and finally taken in the Siege of Port Royal (1710).
  Under the terms of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the Kingdom of France had ceded to the Kingdom of Great Britain the territory known today as mainland Nova Scotia. The treaty stated that France retained control of Île Royale (now Cape Breton Island) and Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island). France's colony Canada, or New France, extended from the Gaspé Peninsula in the east to Quebec in the west. The treaty of Utrecht defined neither which nation had sovereignty over the land between Gaspesie and Nova Scotia, now New Brunswick, nor the western border of Nova Scotia. The de facto border became the Isthmus of Chignecto at the Missiguash River, site of the prosperous Acadian settlement Beaubassin.
  In the mid-1700s France and Britain were about to clash worldwide and in North America in the Seven Years' War. By the middle of the 1700s, over one million British colonists occupied a limited area along the Atlantic coast, but the primarily ethnic French population of what is now The Maritimes was 18,544, part of a total New France population of 70,000.
caption: Fort Beauséeour in 1755 by Winckworth Tonge
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