The Seven Years' War (The French and Indian War)

On May 28, 1754, a 22-year-old Virginia militia officer named George Washington, guided by the Seneca leader Tanaghrisson and a few Mingo warriors (Mingo was the name for Haudenosaunee people, mostly Seneca, who had moved into the Ohio country), surprised a small French party camped in a ravine in western Pennsylvania. Within minutes ten Frenchmen were dead, including their commander, Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. The skirmish at Jumonville Glen started a war that spread to Europe, India, West Africa and the Caribbean. When it ended in 1763, France had lost its North American empire, and Britain had won so much land, and run up so much debt, that it began to govern its colonies in a new way. That new way led to the Revolution.

Why the Ohio Valley became a battleground

Three groups wanted the same country: the land drained by the Ohio River, west of the Appalachian Mountains.

British colonists wanted it to settle and to sell. The population of the British colonies was doubling about every 25 years, and good land near the coast was taken. Virginia planters formed the Ohio Company in 1748, and the Crown granted it 200,000 acres near the forks of the Ohio, with more promised if it settled families there. Washington's older half-brothers were investors. Pennsylvania traders were already working the valley, exchanging cloth, guns and kettles for furs.

The French wanted it as a corridor. New France had only about 70,000 settlers, but its forts and trading posts stretched along the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, linking Canada to Louisiana. French power rested on the fur trade and on alliances with Native nations, kept alive by annual gifts and by French willingness to live among Native peoples rather than replace them. British settlers pouring over the mountains threatened both the trade and the alliances. In 1753 and 1754 the French built a chain of forts south from Lake Erie, ending with Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio (present-day Pittsburgh).

Native nations wanted to keep it. Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo towns filled the valley, and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy claimed authority over it. For decades these nations had protected their independence by playing the two empires against each other: trading with both, accepting gifts from both, and allying with whichever served them. A total victory by either empire would end that balance, though few could yet see how completely.

After Jumonville Glen, a larger French force trapped Washington at a hastily built stockade he called Fort Necessity, and he surrendered on July 3, 1754. That same summer, delegates from seven colonies met at the Albany Congress to secure Iroquois support and plan a common defense. Benjamin Franklin proposed a Plan of Union, with a grand council of colonial delegates and a president general appointed by the Crown, able to raise troops and levy taxes for defense. Every colonial assembly rejected it, unwilling to give up control of its own taxes, and London ignored it. The colonies went to war as separate colonies.

How Britain won

The war went badly for Britain at first. In July 1755, General Edward Braddock marched about 1,500 British regulars and colonial militia toward Fort Duquesne, and a much smaller force of French and Native fighters destroyed his column near the Monongahela River. Braddock was killed; Washington, serving as his aide, had two horses shot from under him. Britain and France formally declared war in 1756, and the French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, took Fort Oswego (1756) and Fort William Henry (1757). Most of the Ohio Valley nations sided with France or stayed neutral.

The turn came under William Pitt, who took charge of the war effort in 1757. Pitt decided to win in North America while paying Prussia to fight France in Europe. He sent tens of thousands of British regulars across the Atlantic and promised to reimburse colonial assemblies for the troops they raised, which ended their reluctance: colonial enlistments surged once London was paying. Just as important was diplomacy. At the Treaty of Easton in October 1758, Pennsylvania and the Iroquois promised the Ohio Delawares and Shawnees that no settlement would be made west of the mountains, and those nations stopped fighting for France. Without its allies, the French garrison blew up Fort Duquesne and retreated in November 1758.

Victories followed: Louisbourg (1758), Fort Niagara and Ticonderoga (1759), and on September 13, 1759, General James Wolfe's army defeated Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec. Both commanders died. Montreal surrendered in 1760, ending the war in North America, though the global war went on until the Treaty of Paris of February 1763.

The war also strained relations inside the British side. British officers often treated colonial troops as undisciplined and colonial officers as inferiors, and colonial soldiers were shocked by the floggings and executions British regulars endured. Colonial assemblies argued with British commanders over quartering troops and paying for supplies, and some colonial merchants kept trading with the French West Indies during the war. Each side came out of the war believing the other had not done its part.

Victory's cost

Britain's national debt rose from about £75 million in 1756 to about £133 million in 1763, and interest on it ate more than half of the government's yearly budget. Taxpayers in Britain were already paying heavy duties on everyday goods. Meanwhile the new territory had to be defended: in 1763 the government decided to keep about 10,000 troops in North America, to guard the frontier, police the former French population of Canada, and keep peace with Native nations.

To British leaders, the conclusion was obvious. The war had been fought largely to protect the colonies, the colonists paid far lower taxes than people in Britain, and they should help pay for the troops that protected them. George Grenville, who became prime minister in 1763, set out to cut costs, enforce trade laws that had long been ignored, and raise revenue in America. Topic 3.3 follows those measures, starting with the Sugar Act of 1764.

To many colonists, the conclusion was the opposite. They had raised thousands of soldiers and spent their own money (only partly reimbursed), they had fought as loyal Britons, and the French threat that had made British protection valuable was gone. Victory made the colonies need Britain less at the very moment Britain decided they should pay more.

After the victory: Native resistance and the Proclamation

For Native nations, the French defeat was a disaster. With no rival empire to play against Britain, they lost their bargaining power. General Jeffery Amherst, the British commander, ended the customary diplomatic gifts in 1761 and restricted sales of gunpowder, which Native hunters depended on, while British forts that were supposed to come down after the war stayed manned. Settlers began moving over the mountains in defiance of the Easton promise.

A Delaware prophet named Neolin preached that Native peoples must give up European goods and alcohol and drive out the British to restore their power. The Odawa (Ottawa) leader Pontiac drew on that message to build a coalition, and in May 1763 he laid siege to Detroit. Over the following weeks, warriors from many nations captured eight British forts in the Great Lakes and Ohio country and killed or captured hundreds of settlers. At besieged Fort Pitt, officers gave Delaware envoys blankets from the smallpox hospital, and Amherst separately urged spreading the disease. Pontiac's War wound down by 1764 without a decisive winner, and Pontiac made peace in 1766. It showed that Native nations still had the power to make the frontier costly.

London's answer was the Proclamation of 1763, issued on October 7. It drew a line along the crest of the Appalachians and reserved the land west of it for Native nations, as "Hunting Grounds." Colonists could not buy or settle there, those already there were ordered to leave, and only the Crown could purchase Native land, through official treaties. The goal was to stop expensive wars and keep settlers and Native peoples apart.

Colonists resented it. Speculators like Washington saw their claims frozen, and settlers ignored the line almost at once. Violence on the frontier continued: in December 1763, a group of Pennsylvania settlers known as the Paxton Boys murdered twenty unarmed Conestoga people, most of them in a Lancaster workhouse where they had been placed for protection, then marched on Philadelphia in early 1764 until Benjamin Franklin talked them down. Britain itself soon moved the line west: in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), the Iroquois sold Britain a huge tract south of the Ohio River that Shawnee, Delaware and Cherokee people used and had never agreed to give up.

Native nations pursued two goals at once, and you should hold both in mind. They wanted to keep trading with Europeans for guns, cloth and metal tools, which had become part of daily life. And they wanted to stop colonists from taking their land. Pontiac's War, diplomacy at treaty councils, and later alliances with Britain during the Revolution were all ways of pursuing both.

Historians weigh the war heavily. Lawrence Henry Gipson called it "the Great War for the Empire," stressing what it meant for Britain. Fred Anderson's Crucible of War (2000) argues that the war, and the way victory changed Britain's view of its colonies, made the Revolution possible. Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991) and Colin Calloway's The Scratch of a Pen (2006) look at 1763 from the Native side, as the end of a world where Native nations, French traders and British colonists had negotiated as near-equals.

Worked examples

Where students lose points

On the exam

Questions on this topic test causation in both directions: what led to the war (competition for the Ohio Valley) and what followed (debt, new taxes, the Proclamation, Native resistance). Multiple-choice sets may use a map of North America in 1754 and 1763 or a document such as the Proclamation, and short-answer questions may ask you to connect 1763 to the imperial crisis that followed. In a long essay about the causes of the Revolution or the changing relationship between Britain and the colonies, the war and the peace of 1763 can serve as the turning point you argue from, as in the third example.