The Spanish were the first to settle North America, and St. Augustine was founded in 1765, but it was the French who challenged English authority most often in North America.
The Spanish missed their opportunity to conquer England when the Armada was defeated in 1588. By the time the English concluded their major Civil War in 1660, rejecting Puritan rule and restoring Charles II to the throne, the Spanish had lost their claims to the Netherlands and Portugal, and their potential to expand into North America was lost.
At the same time, the French under Louis XIV finally established a solid financial foundation for funding national expansion and paying for the strongest army in Europe. Had he chosen to send more than just a token number of troops to Canada, and treated his colonies there as more than collection warehouses for the fur trade, France might have ended up the dominant military power in North America.
It did not help that French government in Canada was divided between a governor, a Catholic bishop, and an "intendant" responsible for finances and legal activities. Franch exported its feudal society to Canada. France tried to settle the colony by issuing land grants (seignories), and the king's friends tried to make them profitable by requiriung settlers to pay high fees for renting the land.
One way to spur settlement was to offer soldiers stationed in Canada a land grant rather than ship them home after their tour of enlistment had ended. In the end, the French were able to explore the continent and exploit the fur trade through trade with Native American allies, but they never "adventured" enough capital or people to dominate the continent.
The French colonies also pre-dated the arrival of the English at Jamestown. Samuel de Champlain started Port Royal, Acadia in 1605. It was a failure (in part because Virginian's under Samuel Argall destroyed this rival settlement in 1613), but Quebec became a French colonial capital after Champlain founded it in 1608.
The first three times, the colonial warfare was a reflection of the rivalries for power in Europe and most fighting was on the new England/Canadian frontier. The last time, it was Virginia's expansion into French-claimed lands along the Ohio River that triggered the fighting, and the war then spread to Europe (and even India).
Warfare in colonial Virginia was substantially different from warfare in Europe. It was far harder to raise an army and to supply it on the edge of European civilization. There were surpluses of tobacco and timber in the English colonies, but not of men, clothing, weapons or food. Capture of fortified houses west of the Blure Ridge required little expertise or equipment for siege warfare, but also provided far less plunder than the capture of cities in the dukedoms of Europe.
The Virginians were not prepared to fight a sustained battle against an army, and no towns were fortified against attack by naval bombardment. The European colonies on Caribbean islands were prepared to repel such attacks, but Virginia's General Assembly was unwilling to finance forts or a standing army. The main security against foreign attack was the strength of the British navy, financed by residents in Great Britain rather than by direct taxes on the colonies.
Even in England, the size of the military authorized by Parliament exceeded 50,000 soldiers and sailors, combined, only once before 1740. There was little need of a European-style army in Tidewater Virginia, and the primary role of the navy was to protect the tobacco fleet sailing annually to England.
The Spanish in Florida were few and far away, as were the French in Canada. The Native Americans did not line up in ranks and fire in unison - so why should the Virginians organize according the the European model and fight according to European tactics, when the main threat on the frontier were American Indians?
Recommended Reading:
- Peckham, Howard H., The Colonial Wars: 1689-1762, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964