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French & Indian War

Defeat of General Braddock, in the French and Indian War, in Virginia, in 1755

Americans know it as the French and Indian War. Some Canadians, particularly those of French descent, refer to the conflict as the War of the Conquest. In Europe it is called the Seven Years War. None of these titles is fully accurate, for in fact the struggle that raged between 1754 and 1763 (hostilities preceded the formal declarations of war by two years) was the first world war.

The war pitted the world's two superpowers, France and England, against each other in a titanic struggle for imperial domination. This was hardly the first time the French and English had grappled. Ancient enmities going back at least to 1066 had often driven these two nations to conflict, but this time the struggle was not about the usual familial claims to thrones or who should control some petty duchy or principality or even who would dominate the continent of Europe. It was a competition to determine who would dominate the other continents of the world.

At sea, and on battlefields in Europe, North America, the West Indies, Asia, India, and Africa, fleets and armies fought. Every major power in Europe joined the fray. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and civilians died. At the final peace, weary combatants traded territories vaster than all of Europe. England emerged victorious, and its triumph laid the foundation for a global empire from which it would draw the wealth and resources to fuel the industrial revolution and transform the world.

Although the war was fought all over the world, its most decisive battles were in North America. The struggle for this continent among Indians, French, Canadians, British, and British colonials was the hinge upon which the outcome of the war swung. Americans studying their own history commonly describe this war as the prelude to the American Revolution. Aside from being provincial, that interpretation both exaggerates and understates its real significance. The ideological split between England and its colonies began in earlier generations. Furthermore, the political, economic, and social forces that drove the colonies toward revolution were in operation long before the war began. The American habit of viewing the French and Indian War backward through the lens of the Revolution masks its true importance as a world-shaping event.

From the very first days of permanent settlement in North America the French and English had been at each other's throats. Competition for trade, uncertain boundaries, and a rambunctious population of frontiersmen kindled violence on both sides. Men in Paris and London knew full well that there was an absence of peace in North America, but minor skirmishes, a raid here and there, a few homes burned, were petty events hardly worthy of notice when compared to the pageants of Europe. Indeed, on those several occasions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when wars between the great powers came to North America, they arrived as imports from Europe.

In 1689 the War of the League of Augsburg began in Europe. By the time it reached America it was known as King William's War. In 1702 the War of Spanish Succession erupted, to be titled Queen Anne's War when the shooting began in America. The War of the Austrian Succession swept Europe in 1744 and crossed the Atlantic the next year as King George's War. The last and greatest of these struggles, however, followed a very different pattern. The French and Indian War reversed the traditional course of events; beginning in America, it was exported to Europe.

Both England and France had firm footholds in North America by the early eighteenth century. English settlement was ensconced along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia. Tendrils of settlement, particularly in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, were beginning to creep farther west. The white population of these colonies numbered nearly one million, mostly farmers, nearly all English-speaking Protestants.

Canada was colonized differently. Although the French king claimed a vast territory stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Appalachians across the Mississippi, in fact French settlement was confined to the valley of the St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal and to the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans. Altogether not more than sixty thousand French lived in all this territory. From New Orleans and the St. Lawrence Valley a fragile web of control maintained by peripatetic priests, soldiers, and fur traders extended deep into the interior of North America. Linked by rivers and lakes, and anchored by a series of forts and trading posts in the west (at places like Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimackinac); in the Ohio region (at Presque Isle, Le Boeuf, and Venango); and in the south (Fort Toulousse), French dominion was strong at its center in the St. Lawrence Valley but weak on the edges. It was precisely along these rough edges - in Acadia, along Lake Ontario, and in the Ohio Valley - where trouble brewed. Everywhere along this jagged edge Indian nations stood between two poles: French and English. Depending upon shifting circumstances, particularly their own self-interest, native peoples allied with one or the other European rivals. In time of declared war such alliances were open as regular soldiers and colonial militia accompanied their native allies on marches into the enemy homeland. But once the declared war ended - an event marked usually by diplomatic folderol in European capitals, an exchange of territory, regulars sailing home, and the return of French and English settlers to their towns and villages - native allies, parties to the war but not to the peace, continued to be used by the colonial powers as surrogates to bring instability and violence to the frontier.

Neither the British nor the French could properly define the boundaries of Acadia. Lying north of New England, it stretched between present-day eastern New Brunswick and across the Bay of Fundy to the western shore of Nova Scotia. The region was home to the Micmac and Abenaki, Algonquin-speaking Indians. Early in the seventeenth century the French began to settle there. Within a few generations several thousand Acadians were farming along the shores and tidal estuaries of the Bay of Fundy and the Northumberland Strait. But at the conclusion of Queen Anne's War in 1713, France surrendered Acadia to England. As a result, the Acadians found themselves suddenly living in a land called Nova Scotia, subject to an alien culture whose laws, religion, and language were thoroughly unfamiliar to them. Sullenly and silently, the Acadians assented to their fate, while their new British masters looked upon them with disdain and suspicion.

Although the French had ceded Nova Scotia, they still held an important post on the Atlantic coast: the imposing fortress at Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island. The port flourished as a fishing and trading station as well as a key military post.

To counter French power on Cape Breton Island, in 1748 the British Board of Trade ordered Colonel Edward Cornwallis to lay out a settlement and naval base at Chebucto on the Atlantic shore of Nova Scotia. Christened Halifax in honor of the board's president, it commanded one of the most impressive harbors in North America - spacious enough, according to some local boosters, to accommodate the entire Royal Navy. Barely a two-day sail from Cape Breton Island, Halifax provided the Royal Navy with a powerful base from which it could monitor French activities and prowl the approaches to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Many Acadians lived on the western side of Nova Scotia, near the Bay of Fundy, one of the most unusual bodies of water in the world. It is shaped like a huge funnel with its wide mouth facing south, and twice a day its enormous tides, in some places more than forty feet, inundate vast expanses of estuaries and salt marshes. As they ebb, these tides leave a rich and luxuriant soil in their wake. By enclosing these tidal lands with a complex system of dikes and gates, Acadian farmers were able to reclaim and protect large areas of tillable land, among the most fertile in North America. (Acadie means "fertile lands" in the native Micmac language.) But these lands were in dispute.

Relations between the English and French were particularly tense along Fundy's north shore approaching the Chignecto Isthmus. Across the isthmus, tying Nova Scotia to the mainland, ran the paths linking Quebec, Cape Breton, Isle St. Jean (Prince Edward Island), and Acadia. The British claimed their sovereignty extended through this area and 150 miles west, as far as Baie des Chaleur. The French set the boundary 150 miles in the opposite direction at the Missaguash River. Within this disputed nether-world roamed Abbe Jean Louis Le Loutre, missionary, agitator, and alleged butcher.

Ordained in Paris in 1737, Le Loutre left almost immediately for missionary work in Acadia, where he took up residence at Shubenacadie near modern-day Truro, Nova Scotia. Driven by a devotion to church and nation that his enemies condemned as fanatical, Abbe Le Loutre preached to the Micmac and Acadians. His gospel text was a long way from the Sermon on the Mount; his objective, to save both the Acadians and his Native American converts from the heresy of English Protestantism. He urged the Acadians who lived under British authority to uproot themselves from their ancient homes and move to the soil of the French king. With the Indians, however, he took a different tack. He saw them as pawns to be used to harass the English and prevent the Anglais from settling west of the Missaguash. Le Loutre informed his superiors, "As we cannot openly oppose the English venture, I think that we cannot do better than to incite the Indians to continue warring on the English." His superiors in Paris were in complete agreement.

To the English, Abbe Le Loutre was the devil incarnate. Cornwallis described him as "a good for nothing scoundrel as ever lived.” He was accused of taking up the hatchet into his own hands and leading raids against defenseless farmers, burning homes, and offering a bounty of one hundred livres for each British scalp, women and children included. The British were not the only ones to feel Le Loutre's wrath. He terrified the neutral Acadians, too, warning them that if they swore allegiance to the British heretics, they would forfeit their souls, and that he would personally order the Indians to lay waste to their homes.

To protect themselves in an atmosphere of mounting threats, both the British and French built forts at key locations. Of these posts, none were more critical than a pair that stood barely two miles apart, separated by the Missaquash River: Fort Lawrence and Fort Beausejour. Peace was brittle in the space between them. On an October evening in 1750 Edward How, an officer at Fort Lawrence, was returning alone from a parley with the French. As he walked the short distance between the two forts, unknown assailants ambushed and murdered him. As usual, the English blamed Le Loutre.

To the west of Acadia lay the vast territory of Canada. Taken together with Louisiana, it represented a huge chunk of North America, dwarfing in size the British colonies hugging the Atlantic coast. Despite its expanse, this territory had only two doors by which to enter and exit: the mouth of the Mississippi and the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Communication within Canada and between Canada and Louisiana was almost wholly dependent upon movement along lakes and rivers. Feeling the heat of British ambitions on the fringes of Acadia, the French grew deeply suspicious when the English began to threaten these vital interior lines. Lake Ontario and the Ohio Valley drew special concern.

Lake Ontario was a key link between the St. Lawrence and all the water routes to the west and south. The French claimed the western shore of the lake and asserted their rights by building a fort at the source of the St. Lawrence (Fort Frontenac) and another to guard the Niagara portage (Fort Niagara). Ontario's opposite shore was home to the Iroquois Confederation. Since the Iroquois's presence worked to block British occupation, the French supported their claim to the land. Neither the French nor the Iroquois were pleased when British traders built a post at the mouth of the Oswego River in 1727. Much to the anger of the French, English traders at Oswego often diverted Montreal-bound trade, siphoning off large quantities of furs intended for French markets, sending them instead to Albany via the Oswego and Mohawk rivers. The Iroquois were more accommodating, since the English often had better goods for sale than the French and offered them at more reasonable prices. Although the Iroquois Confederation tolerated the British presence, they never regarded these traders as anything more than their guests. The land had been theirs since the days of their legendary founder.

According to Iroquois history, sometime long before Europeans arrived, a virgin Huron living near the Bay of Quinte, was visited by a heavenly messenger who announced that she would be the mother of a son to be named Dekanahwideh, whose mission would be to bring peace to the warring Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Oneida nations who lived in the Mohawk Valley between Lake Ontario and the Hudson River. He would do this by planting the "Tree of Peace" at Onondaga. Under this tree the chiefs of the five nations would meet around a "council fire that never dies."

Upon reaching maturity, Dekanahwideh left his mother and paddled across Lake Ontario in a stone canoe. Following the Great Spirit's vision, he found the place where an Onondaga warrior known for his cruel and evil ways lived. His first test was to bring this violent man to the ways of peace which he did. Once converted, the warrior changed his name to Hiawatha. The two then separated and went about the five nations to preach the message of peace: "The land shall be beautiful, the river shall have no more waves, one may go everywhere without fear." The first tribe to convert were the Mohawk, who resided in the east nearest the Hudson. Soon the other four followed. The Onondaga, who lived midway between the lake and the river, were named as the keepers of the perpetua council fire, around which the chiefs held their meetings. At the western end, nearest the lake, the Seneca, largest of the five nations, stood paramount. The Oneida and hayuga dwelled betweem.

Like all creation stories, the story of Dekanahwideh is a concoction of fact and fiction. What is indisputable is that the Iroquois Confederation, known officially as Kayanerenhkowa (the Great Peace), was the strongest pre-European military alliance in North America. Its strategic position astride the east-west water routes placed it in control of a good part of the fur trade. And its role was strengthened by the arrival of the Europeans, particularly the Dutch in the Hudson River valley, who traded firearms for furs. Armed with such weapons, in the mid-seventeenth century the Iroquois launched a series of wars against their neighbors, especially the Huron, aimed at seizing control of the fur trade.

The Iroquois Confederation, organized to preserve the peace, proved even more successful at waging war. Blessed with superior organization, European technology, and an ample number of warriors, the Five Nations swept to victory, virtually annihilating the Huron. Within a few years the Iroquois dominated all the tribes and territory between the Illinois country in the west, the Hudson Valley in the east, and as far south as the Carolinas, where the powerful Cherokee blocked their expansion.

Eventually, Iroquois ambitions exceeded their power. In the early 1660s they engaged in a series of wars against the French in Canada. Despite some early successes, the French forced them to negotiate a peace in 1667. In the meantime the English had driven the Dutch out of New Netherlands and established themselves in the colony renamed New York. The arrival of the English turned out to be a boon for the Iroquois, for it allowed them to play these two European powers against each other. Oswego was a classic instance of this diplomatic strategy: By allowing the English to remain as tenants at Oswego, the Iroquois reasoned, the French were kept at bay. The British, however, had a very different view. In the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the same treaty by which the French surrendered Nova Scotia, they also surrendered their sovereignty over the Iroquois to the English. Swapping sovereignties over native people was something Europeans did easily in all parts of the world. Yet the Iroquois were never consulted; nor were they participants in the treaty. They acknowledged neither empire's rule - they regarded themselves as an independent nation.

Farther east the English and French glowered at each other along the waters of Lake Champlain. Like a giant lizard, Lake Champlain stretches 120 miles on a north-south axis. At its northern end the lake drains down the Richelieu River to the St. Lawrence. Toward the south the lake narrows near the La Chute River where a short portage connects to Lake George, which in turn connects via a twelve-mile portage to the Hudson River. The Lake Champlain/Lake George corridor was a vital waterway and a prime invasion route for armies moving in either direction. In 1731 the French seized the advantage on the lake by building Fort St. Frederic at Crown Point, a promontory standing guard at a place where the lake narrows to barely a mile across. Only ninety miles north of Albany, the fort was a constant threat to the English and, in their minds, at least, a point of trespass by the French.

By far the most menacing specter of British encroachment against the French was west of the Appalachians in the valley of the Ohio River. Here, on a scale larger and more threatening than anything they had encountered in Acadia or on the lakes, the French watched fretfully as the British expanded. From Pennsylvania and Virginia, British fur traders hiked west, tugging at the reins of packhorses heavily laden with trade goods. These Anglo traders found willing customers among Native Americans, who were eager to swap beaver skins for woolen cloth, rum, knives, hatchets, and muskets.

In the competition for trade, the British had the advantage. Bureaucratic restrictions and fees, along with less efficient production in the home country, made French goods more expensive than their British counterparts. Native consumers were well aware of the benefits of having British traders to compete with the men from Montreal and Quebec. It meant, quite simply, that they could sell high and buy low. A Wea chief complained to the French commandant at Miamis: "You know well, my father, we pay for a wool blanket of 21/2 points, 9 beavers; for one of cotton, 5 beavers; a pair of mitasses, 3 beavers; a pound of powder, 3 beavers; 2 pounds of lead, a beaver. That is what rebuffs all our young men, and we are no longer able to keep them from going to the English, who give them every thing very cheap." Given an opportunity, even the French traders dealt with the English. French and British officials railed at these scofflaws to no effect.

The competition between the English and French traders was a testy business; nonetheless, had commerce been the only point of friction between them, the rivalry might have smoldered and not exploded. However, when trading conflicts were read against the backdrop of imperial expansion, government ministers in Paris and London interpreted events in the Ohio Valley as sinister proof of the enemy's intent to attack and rob them of their rightful possessions. For generations the French, Indians, and English had been stacking the kindling. It was about to ignite.

William M. Fowler, Jr. Empires at War : The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North America, 1754-1763. Walker & Company, New York. 2005.

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The War That Made America: A Short History of the French And Indian War Examines how the French and Indian War of the mid-eighteenth century had a definitive impact on history, tracing how it served to overturn the balance of power on two continents and laid the groundwork for the American Revolution.

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