General Summary
The French and Indian War, a colonial extension of the Seven Years War that
ravaged Europe from 1756 to 1763, was the bloodiest American war in the 18th
century. It took more lives than the American
Revolution, involved people on three
continents, including the Caribbean. The war was the product of an imperial
struggle, a clash between the French and English over colonial territory and
wealth. Within these global forces, the war can also be seen as a product of
the localized rivalry between British and French colonists.
Tensions between the British and French in America had been rising for some
time, as each side wanted to increase its land holdings. What is now considered
the French and Indian War (though at the time the war was undeclared), began in
November 1753, when the young Virginian major George Washington and a number
of men headed out into the Ohio region with the mission to deliver a message to
a French captain demanding that French troops withdraw from the territory. The
demand was rejected. In 1754, Washington received authorization to build a fort
near the present site of Pittsburgh. He was unsuccessful because of the strong
French presence in the area. In May, Washington's troops clashed with local
French forces, a skirmish that ultimately resulted in Washington having to
surrender the meager fort he had managed to build just one month later. The
incident set off a string of small battles. In 1755, The British sent General
Edward Braddock to oversee the British Colonial forces, but on his way to oust
the French from Fort Duquesne he was surprised by the French and badly
routed, losing his life in the process.
After a year and a half of undeclared war, the French and the English
formally declared war in May 1756. For the first three years of the war, the
outnumbered French dominated the battlefield, soundly defeating the English in
battles at Fort Oswego and Ticonderoga. Perhaps the most notorious battle of
the war was the French victory at Fort William Henry, which ended in a
massacre of British soldiers by Indians allied with the French. The battle and
ensuing massacre was captured for history--though not accurately--by James
Fenimore Cooper in his classic The Last of the Mohicans
.
The tide turned for the British in 1758, as they began to make peace with
important Indian allies and, under the direction of Lord William Pitt began
adapting their war strategies to fit the territory and landscape of
the American frontier. The British had a further stroke of good fortune when
the French were abandoned by many of their Indian allies. Exhausted by years of
battle, outnumbered and outgunned by the British, the French collapsed during
the years 1758-59, climaxing with a massive defeat at Quebec in September 1759.
By September 1760, the British controlled all of the North American
frontier; the war between the two countries was effectively over. The 1763
Treaty of Paris, which also ended the European Seven Years War, set the terms by
which France would capitulate. Under the treaty, France was forced to surrender
all of her American possessions to the British and the Spanish.
Although the war with the French ended in 1763, the British continued to fight
with the Indians over the issue of land claims. "Pontiac's War" flared shortly
after the Treaty of Paris was signed, and many of the battlefields--including
Detroit, Fort Pitt, and Niagara--were the same. The Indians, however,
already exhausted by many years of war, quickly capitulated under the ferocious
British retaliation; still, the issue remained a problem for many years to come.
The results of the war effectively ended French political and cultural influence
in North America. England gained massive amounts of land and vastly strengthened
its hold on the continent. The war, however, also had subtler results. It badly
eroded the relationship between England and Native Americans; and, though the
war seemed to strengthen England's hold on the colonies, the effects of the
French and Indian War played a major role in the worsening relationship between
England and its colonies that eventually led into the Revolutionary War.
