Seven Years' War

Seven Years' War (1756–1763). Whereas all previous imperial wars had erupted in Europe, Anglo‐French contention over the North American Ohio Country triggered the Seven Years' War. In 1754, Virginia dispatched an army under Lieutenant Colonel George Washington to construct a fort at the head of the Ohio River (present‐day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Simultaneously, a larger French force marched south on a similar mission. Hostilities commenced when the Virginians encountered a small party of French troops about forty miles south of the river. Washington ordered an attack that resulted in the death of ten French soldiers.

Great Britain quickly committed two regiments to America. Its initial object was to compel France to withdraw from frontier territories that London claimed. Several southern colonies raised armies to assist the regulars west of the Appalachians, while some northern colonies recruited armies to strike at French installations in the Champlain Valley and along the boundary separating New France and Anglo‐America.

In 1755 the British succeeded only in Nova Scotia, after which they loaded more than six thousand Acadian, or French, inhabitants onto ships, confiscated their property, and removed them to scattered locations elsewhere in the thirteen colonies. (Some later moved to French Louisiana, where their descendants were called Cajuns.) Otherwise, Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts failed to take Fort Niagara, the gateway to the St. Lawrence River, and Colonel William Johnson's army of colonists and Indians suffered heavy losses attempting to reach Fort St. Frédéric at Crown Point, New York. First ambushed south of Lake George, in an engagement known as Bloody Morning Scout, then attacked by the French at the partially constructed Fort William Henry, Johnson retreated after losing about 20 percent of his men.

Meanwhile, the regulars under General Edward Braddock, joined by nearly six hundred men from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, lumbered west. The Anglo‐American force had penetrated to within ten miles of the Ohio when, on 9 July 1755, it was attacked. Braddock perished and two‐thirds of his soldiers—about nine hundred men—were killed or wounded.

Early in 1756, Britain and France finally declared war. The English colonists called the conflict the French War, but historians have known it as the Seven Years' War, the French and Indian War, and the Great War for the Empire. Involving hostilities in Europe as well as in America, the war took on religious overtones, with Protestant England and its allies pitted against Catholic France and its allies.

As never before, both France and Great Britain devoted considerable energy to the American theater. Each now understood that this was a war for supremacy, perhaps even survival, as an imperial power. London appointed the earl of Loudoun to command its armies; France dispatched the marquis de Montcalm to lead its forces.

Britain's military fortunes remained at low ebb for two years. The French and their Indian allies seized Forts Oswego and William Henry. Following the surrender of the latter installation, some 270 Anglo‐American soldiers, 11 percent of the garrison, were killed or carried into captivity. Loudoun was recalled in 1757 after the failure of his principal offensive, an attempted siege of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island.

The emergence of William Pitt as prime minister in 1756 changed the course of the war. He expanded the Royal Navy, which by 1759 had so decimated the French fleet that France was unable to supply its army across the Atlantic. Pitt's skillful diplomacy secured new European allies, enabling him to transfer approximately twenty thousand British regulars to America. He assigned quotas to each colony, and in both 1758 and 1759 the provinces raised twenty thousand volunteers. However, the colonies seldom coordinated their efforts. Indeed, every colony rejected Benjamin Franklin's Albany Plan of Union, (1754), which had urged an intercolonial union for military purposes.

British successes came slowly. Pitt's strategy in 1758 called for General James Abercrombie to clear the Champlain Valley, while General Jeffrey Amherst took Louisbourg and an army under General John Forbes wrested the Ohio from France. Abercrombie failed egregiously. His assault on Fort Ticonderoga was repulsed with even heavier losses than Braddock had sustained. However, Louisbourg fell after a brief siege, and the French relinquished Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) as Forbes's regulars and colonials approached the forks of the Ohio.

The decisive engagement occurred in 1759 when an Anglo‐American force of nine thousand men under General James Wolfe attacked Quebec, New France. Victory eluded the British for three months, until Wolfe successfully landed men on the Plains of Abraham above the citadel. Both Montcalm and Wolfe perished in the ensuing battle; French losses exceeded 15 percent. Six days later the garrison inside Quebec capitulated. Mopping‐up operations concluded a year later when Montreal was taken.

Although American hostilities in the North had ended, the conflict raged against the Cherokees in the South until 1761 and continued elsewhere until the Treaty of Paris brought peace in 1763. France surrendered its claims to Canada and all territory east of the Mississippi River. Spain, which entered the war after the fall of Montreal only to lose both Havana and Manila to British forces, ceded Florida to Great Britain. Western Indians rejected the treaty, denying that France had authority to cede their lands.

Although the Treaty of Paris was celebrated as a great victory for the British empire, in just twelve years the first shots for American independence would be fired. Tensions between Britain and its American colonies increased after 1763, partly because the war removed the French threat and also because its aftermath highlighted differences between London and its American colonies over policies relating to westward expansion, Indian relations, taxation, and defense.
See also Albany Congress; Colonial Era; French Settlements in North America; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800: Indian Wars.

Bibliography

Francis Parkman , Montcalm and Wolfe, 2 vols., 1884.
Lawrence H. Gipson , The British Empire before the American Revolution, 15 vols., 1935–1970.
Charles P. Stacey , Quebec, 1759: The Siege and the Battle, 1959.
Fred Anderson , A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War, 1984.
James G. Lydon, ed., Struggle for Empire: A Bibliography of the French and Indian War, 1986.
James Titus , The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia, 1991.
Fred Anderson , Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 2000.

John Ferling