The Probert Encyclopaedia of Warfare

FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR

The French and Indian War, fought between 1754 and 1763, was the last of four North American wars waged from 1689 to 1763 between the British and the French, with their respective Indian and colonial allies, for domination in the New World. Britain's eventual victory stripped France of its North American empire, thus concluding the series of conflicts which were known collectively as the French and Indian Wars.

Although the war began in America, it expanded during 1756 to 1763 into Europe as the Seven Years War, and into Asia as the Third Carnatic War. The war originated in the breakdown of a three-way balance of power, in which the Iroquois Confederacy had occupied the middle ground between French and British colonies and had successfully excluded both from the strategically critical Ohio Valley. The Iroquois had rendered all previous conflicts indecisive by playing off French against British interests and maintaining their own freedom of action. During the last years of King George's War, however, English traders had penetrated deeply into the Ohio country and established relations with tribes that had previously traded only with the French. Also in the late 1740s, the Ohio Company, a land-speculating syndicate based in Virginia, began making efforts to found a settlement at the forks of the Ohio. These developments convinced the governors- general of Canada that in order to protect their own strategic interests in the American interior they would have to dominate the Ohio Valley militarily.

Thus, in 1753 the French began building a chain of forts from Lake Erie to the forks of the Ohio, where in 1754 they built Fort Duquesne. This created a situation that Gov. Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia could not ignore. In 1753 he tried unsuccessfully to warn them of their intrusion into English territory; the next year he sent an armed force under the command of George Washington to expel them. The French defeated Washington's troops at the Battle of Fort Necessity on the 3rd and 4th of July 1754, and sent them back to Virginia. The French and Indian War had begun. In 1755 the British general Edward Braddock was sent to America to take Fort Duquesne. In July, however, near the fort, a French and Indian force badly defeated Braddock's British regulars and colonial troops. The British won a small victory in Nova Scotia and repulsed a French and Indian attack in New York at the Battle of Lake George in 1755, but these were their last victories until 1758.

Meanwhile, the British government sought to impose central control on the war effort in America and to compel the colonists to pay for the campaigns against Canada; these measures only alienated the Americans. For the Anglo-Americans the years 1755 to 1757, therefore, were distinguished by defeats and friction between British and colonial soldiers, while the French and their Indian allies won battle after battle. England's dismal performance ended when William Pitt rose to political power in 1757. Pitt, who made victory in America his top priority, initiated a series of well-coordinated campaigns and appointed able commanders to lead them. More importantly, he began treating the Americans as allies rather than subordinates. The result was a major reversal.

In 1758 Anglo-American forces seized the fortress of Louisburg, the key to the St. Lawrence River; destroyed Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario, severing the supply lines of the Ohio forts; and captured Fort Duquesne. A force under General James Wolfe defeated the French main army at Quebec in 1759, and the following year General Jeffrey Amherst completed the conquest by forcing the surrender of the last defenders of Canada at Montreal. The Treaty of Paris signed in 1763 ended the French control in Canada, which went to Great Britain. France also ceded all its territories east of the Mississippi River to the British. In compensation for the territories west of the Mississippi given by France to Spain a year earlier in a secret treaty, Spain had to give Florida to the British. The war determined that English rather than French ideas and institutions would dominate North America. Thus, in terms of importance, the French and Indian War rivals the American Revolution and the American Civil War. In winning the war, the British government had virtually doubled its national debt and acquired more territory than it could control. Attempts by British politicians to reform the administration of the empire and to raise revenue by taxing the colonies soon antagonised the colonists and eventually precipitated the American Revolution. France's desire to avenge its humiliating defeat launched a policy of support for the American rebels that the monarchy could ill afford; it helped bring on the fiscal crisis that climaxed, in 1789, with the French Revolution.
Research French and Indian War