French and Indian War (1754–63).Three long‐standing contests came together again in the Seven Years' War, which British colonial Americans called the French and Indian War. The ancient Anglo‐French rivalry, which predated their colonization of America, became truly global, including unprecedented martial commitments to North America. Secondly, the war continued an equally epic battle between Indians and Europeans, a struggle that Indians could sustain best as allies of one European supplier and enemies of another. The third enduring contest pitted the North American colonists of Britain against those of France in a frequently brutal 150‐year‐old struggle for trade and land.
An intercolonial boundary dispute between British and French colonies sparked a war that became imperial as well as Indian. The Upper Ohio Valley had been an underpopulated borderland that, by 1748, had become home to Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo migrants from east of the Appalachians. Although long since denuded of valuable furs and peripheral to Canadian trade routes, this area gained strategic value with the arrival of Pennsylvania traders and Virginia land speculators. The government of New France responded with diplomacy; raids against British American traders and their protectors; and the building (1753) of three forts between Lake Erie and the forks of the Ohio River. Virginia's governor sent Col.
George Washington on a futile mission to order the French out, and obtained formal British permission to use force to expel the French Canadians.
Fighting began when, on 28 May 1754, Washington's Virginia troops ambushed a Canadian reconnaissance party, killing ten and taking twenty‐one prisoners. Retaliation led to Washington's surrender of hastily fortified and aptly named Fort Necessity on 3 July. The French marked their victory by turning another unfinished Virginian fort into Fort Duquesne.
British government response to Washington's defeat proved uncharacteristically strong. While claiming to preserve the peace, the ministry sent two regular regiments to America under Gen.
Edward Braddock with instructions to remove French “encroachments” from British‐claimed territory. What was to have been a series of attacks by a single army became, because of enthusiastic New England preparations, four simultaneous British and colonial expeditions against Forts Duquesne, Niagara, Ste. Frédéric, and Beauséjour in 1755. The British attack on Fort Duquesne ended in
Braddock's defeat at the Monongahela River, nine miles from his destination, when Indians and Canadian irregulars exploited flanking woods and poor British scouting to surprise and slaughter much of his column. Another army under Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts failed to reach Fort Niagara. William Johnson led the British colonial army that failed to reach Fort Ste. Frédéric, but won a defensive victory at the Battle of Lake George. The only clear British success was by New Englanders, led by British colonel Robert Monckton, who easily took Forts Beauséjour and Gaspereau in Canada, and then expelled 6,000 French Acadian neutrals. The British sent more regulars to avenge Braddock and gave Commanders in Chief Shirley (1756) and John Campbell, earl of Loudoun (1756–58), powers that centralized the war effort and antagonized the colonies.
New France, United under Governor Pierre‐François de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil (1755–60), seized the military initiative. Indian raids launched from Fort Duquesne terrorized the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers, while other raiders destroyed New York outposts. General Louis‐Joseph, marquis de Montcalm, led well‐coordinated forces of French regulars, Canadians, and Indians to conquer Fort Oswego in August 1756 and Fort William Henry a year later.
The British recovered the offensive in 1758, as the eloquent and efficient secretary of state, William Pitt, took control of the war effort. Pitt reassured British voters and creditors while spending massively on war in both Europe and America. He cut the power of his new commander in chief and negotiated a “subsidy plan” with colonial governments that was generous enough to promote unprecedented levels of imperial cooperation in supply, transport, and recruitment. British regulars, recruited in Europe and America, now constituted a majority of the much larger forces available. Britain's North American initiatives for 1758, against fortress Louisbourg and Forts Carillon, Frontenac, and Duquesne, paralleled the strategy of 1755, but met with more success. In July, 13,000 British regulars under Maj. Gen.
Jeffrey Amherst besieged and captured Louisbourg. Gen. James Abercromby's hurried assault against Montcalm's entrenched defenders at Ticonderoga (Carillon) failed disastrously, increasing Montcalm's influence over military strategy for New France. Abercromby then authorized an expedition by 3,600 colonial volunteers that took Fort Frontenac. Seven thousand men under Brig. Gen. John Forbes constructed a military road across Pennsylvania to Fort Duquesne, which the French destroyed and evacuated on 25 November 1758.
British intent to capture the core of New France in 1759 met such determined French and Canadian resistance that Amherst countered cautiously, and met shifts in Indian diplomacy that proved diversionary. By early 1759, the Delaware and Shawnee had made peace overtures, and the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederation were reconsidering their uneasy neutrality. The siege of increasingly isolated Fort Niagara in July 1759 reflected Amherst's caution, impressed the Six Nations by clearing the French from their territory, and afforded some Ohio Indians an opportunity to change sides decisively. While these Indians strengthened the British side, the Cherokee in the South moved from their traditional alliance to open war with the British colonies between 1759 and 1761. Annual punitive expeditions, the first by South Carolina volunteers and the other two by British regulars, burned abandoned Cherokee towns, provoked retaliation, and may have helped bring a negotiated peace by the end of 1761.
Conquest of New France was not completed in 1759, but the capture of Fort Niagara and the French evacuation of Fort Ste. Frédéric and reoccupied Fort Frontenac represented British success on two of the three prongs of that attack. The third prong, a nearly three‐month amphibious campaign led by Brig. Gen. James Wolfe against the walled city of Québec, stalled until a well‐exploited gamble in the
Battle of Québec gave the British victory on 13 September 1759, and control of the city four days later. Control of these areas remained precarious during a successful French counteroffensive that ended only with the arrival of British warships in May 1760. On 8 September, with 17,000 British and American soldiers surrounding Montréal, which was defended by some 3,000 French, Governor Vaudreuil surrendered New France. British and American colonial troops reported the conquest to the interior posts without meeting resistance and mounted major campaigns in the French West Indies that captured Guadeloupe (1759) and Martinique (1762). The Peace of Paris ended the war 10 February 1763, confirmed the conquest of New France, and ceded to the British all lands east of the Mississippi.
The war decided only one of the three long‐standing contests. The Anglo‐French duel would resume regularly for another half century, and the equally long‐lived military struggle between Indians and Europeans reopened immediately with
Pontiac's Rebellion. However, the struggle between the British and French North American colonies had been decided. Some Americans opposed the way Britain integrated both New France and “Indian country” into its empire; many more resisted imperial taxation imposed to help pay for the war and for the regular army garrisons of the peace. The war that had unified the British Atlantic empire to an unprecendented degree thus, not surprisingly, helped produce the American
Revolutionary War for Independence a decade later.
[See also
Native American Wars: Wars Between Native Americans and Europeans and Euro‐Americans;
Québec, Battle of;
Revolutionary War: Causes.]
Bibliography
Lawrence H. Gipson , The British Empire Before the American Revolution, 15 vols., 1936–70, Vols. 2–9.
Fred Anderson , A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War, 1984.
Richard Middleton , The Bells of Victory: The Pitt‐Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years' War, 1757–1762, 1985.
W. J. Eccles , Essays on New France, 1987.
Francis Jennings , Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years' War in America, 1988.
Ian K. Steele , Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre,” 1990.
Ian K. Steele
