French and Indian War

American Studies in Scandinavia

The year 1754 saw the outbreak of a struggle in North America which is known to modern Americans as the French and Indian War; to its contemporaries in America it was merely the French War. As official sanction by the great powers was not granted until 1756 and because the war dragged on until 1763, Europeans call the conflict the Seven Years War. The American phase of the war erupted as a result of long standing Anglo-French-Indian rivalries and tensions. These came to a head in the French occupation of the Ohio Valley to prevent claims by American land speculators such as the Ohio Company. Virginian militia were sent to the disputed area under one George Washington, but were quickly humbled. The French, of course, blamed England for the hostilities: Royal Decree containing a Declaration of War Against England All Europe knows that in 1754 the King of England was the aggressor against the possessions of the King in North America and that in June of last year the English navy, regardless of international law and the sanctity of treaties, commenced the most violent hostilities against the vassals of His Majesty and against his subjects' shipping and trade.l Naturally, England considered France the guilty party. King George I1 stated: The injuries and hostilities which have been for some time committed by the French against my domains and subjects, are now followed by the

ongoing power battles between each of these three cultures and communities. Serving as a precursor in many ways to the American Revolution, the war was a culmination of decades of ongoing smaller wars over territory, specifically settlements and control of trading routes, and by extension, a war over control of wealth in North America. Imperialism and the battle over control over North America actually depended quite heavily on the support of the Native American population, and specifically the Iroquois Nation, who ironically, lost much of their power, wealth and land as a result of the war they had once held so much sway over.

2014

This paper is a work in progress, and part of a larger study of British military reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Please do not cite without permission.

At the time of their foundation, relationships between English and French colonies were rather good. However, this changed with the extension of these colonies in vast expanses of North America and with increasing trade between the colonies and the indigenous people. This led the English and French colonies to a conflict of economic interests with the resulting rivalry and conflict between them, whether for expansion and control of new land or in attempts to dominate the local trade, especially the fur trade which was of great economic returns. It is no secret that commercial, political and colonial conflicts between Great Britain and France in other countries had an influence in the intensification of competition in North America as well, and European wars opposing the two countries often led to outbreak of corresponding colonial wars in North America. Indeed these border wars between colonies, had defined the limits of the British colonies with a series of small towns. A first group extending along the coast of Maine and New Hampshire; a second stretching from the valley of the Connecticut River to central Massachusetts; and a third following the Hudson Valley up to the north of the Mohawk River and New York. Most of these territories consisted of large expanses of land interspersed with rivers which provided easy ways for the French to get to the British colonies.

The George Washington University Undergraduate Review, 2018

Any scholar and student of early American history is well aware that there is no shortage of literature on George Washington. In recent years, scholars have done well to point out that Washington, despite generations of academic and public deification, was just as human as his more easily forgotten contemporaries, a reality evidenced by his (in)famous military mishap in the inter-imperial hinterlands of eastern North America that started the first world war in 1754. Yet Washingtonian literature remains void of a key element of Washington's experience in Indian country: his experience with Indians. In a biographical history spanning four centuries, there is still yet to be seen a Washington biography detailing his experiences with his nearest foreign foes and allies. This research paper attempts to fill that void. This is not another study of young Washington's experience in the British colonial militia, but rather a breakdown of the lessons he learned in warfare and diplomacy as a visitor in Native lodges, villages, and territories and how he applied these experiences to British colonial warfare and wartime politics. These lessons are best understood only when Native players are recast in their proper roles, as the kings, half kings, and queens of Indian country. This redistribution of political and historical agency and reconceptualization of monolithic narratives allows us to better understand the inseparability of colonial, early American, and Native American histories. In late April 1754, a pair of couriers trekked through the eastern Ohio country to a Mingo trading village just east of where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio River. One Mr. Wart, a young ensign of British Captain Trent's company, toted in his saddlebag a string of wampum. His escort, an unnamed Mingo man, carried a speech addressed to Tanacharison, or as his British contemporaries fondly referred to the influential Mingo leader, "the Half King." 1 "I desire, with the greatest Earnestness," it read, "that you, or at least one of you, would come as soon as possible to meet us on the Road, and to assist us in Council." As the 1 Tanacharison (also spelled "Tanagharisson") was originally adopted from a Catawba band into the Seneca tribe, one of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, nations of northeastern North America. Sometime around 1747, when his name first appears in the historical record, several bands of Iroquois had migrated to where Seneca territory meets disputed land known general as the eastern Ohio Country. The result was a sub-Haudenosaunee nation known as "Mingo," one considered culturally and socially (although not always politically) exclusive from the core Six Nations.

Saber and Scroll, A Publication of the APUS Historical Studies Honor Society Journal

On January 6, 1783, three senior officers, then stationed at Newburgh, New York, arrived in Philadelphia with a dire warning for the Continental Congress. The officers were General Alexander McDougal from New York, Colonel Matthias Ogden from New Jersey, and Colonel John Brooks from Massachusetts. Their warning to the members of Congress was that the Continental Army at Newburgh was on the verge of mutiny. Congress did not immediately understand how this could have happened, but America’s newfound independence was in danger of being lost after eight long years of warfare. In dealing with this event, General George Washington faced the greatest threat to the American Revolution: a disgruntled army and some of the senior officers plotting against the Continental Congress.

Neutrality in wartime carries with it the implication of aloofness, and thus it has been viewed historically as an exclusively reactive policy, rooted in isolationism or weakness, and lacking in imagination or initiative. The Iroquois and Acadians alike crafted policies of neutrality during the first half of the eighteenth century, allowing each group to prosper during the three decades of peace between 1713 Treaty of Utrecht and the renewal of open military conflict in 1744. King George’s War (1744-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1754-63) severely tested the viability of remaining neutral in the borderlands regions of Iroquoia and Acadia. But rather than simply reacting to the pressures of intensifying imperial conflict after 1744, both the Iroquois and the Acadians creatively advanced their status as neutral entities to preserve what they each regarded as their own best interests. While neither British nor French imperial authorities accepted unqualifiedly the notion of non-aligned peoples and nations excusing themselves from King George's War and the Seven Years' War, comparative analysis of the ways in which the Iroquois Confederacy and the Acadian settler population structured their respective approaches to neutrality sheds new light on the ability of these groups—traditionally viewed as outside the colonial and imperial systems of power—to maintain internal group cohesion, to influence the course of events, and to determine their own fates.

Native South, 2014

South Carolina governor James Glen was alarmed in the summer of 1754. In July he received news from Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie that a confrontation had occurred between George Washington's Virginia militia and French forces near the forks of the Ohio River. He was appalled that Dinwiddie had had to employ "these remarkable Words 'Th e French have got the Advantage by Capitulation. '" 1 Such a defeat, he feared, could have wide-ranging consequences for the British Empire in North America. At the least, he warned Sir Th omas Robinson, secretary of state for the Southern Department, this "small Spark may kindle a great Fire, and. .. if the Flame bursts out all the Water in the Ohio will not be able to extinguish it. " 2 It would soon become clear that Glen's fears were accurate-Washington's capitulation at the hastily built Fort Necessity was the catalyst for the French and Indian War, the North American theater of what would become known in Europe as the Seven Years' War. 3 A year later the war seemed only to become more problematic for South Carolinians. In July 1755 General Edward Braddock, commanderin-chief of British forces, was killed along with half his army when they attempted once again to march on the forks of the Ohio. Th ereafter, Cherokee trader Ludovic Grant noted that France's "endeavours to the Northward is a plain proof of their Intentions, and ought to put the Southward upon their guard. " 4 Believing that nothing remained to check French control of the upper portion of the Ohio, he speculated that they would move down the valley and challenge South Carolina on two critical issues: its ability to project British interests beyond the Appalachians, and its long-standing eff ort to maintain a relationship with Cherokees. native south volume 7 2014 34 Th ese two issues were carefully interwoven. Since the early eighteenth century Carolinians had seen themselves as the standard bearers of British-Indian diplomacy in the trans-Appalachian south, a position to which royal governors in Virginia, North Carolina, and eventually Georgia generally acceded. In this capacity they quickly came to understand the importance of a Cherokee alliance, and in the aft ermath of the Yamasee War actively encouraged the development of a "Chain of Friendship" with them. 5 As described in a 1730 treaty, Carolinians-and Britain's imperial leadership-felt that the Chain would establish exclusive commercial networks and access to Cherokee territory. Th rough it Carolina could extend British sovereignty across the trans-Appalachian south and into the lower Ohio valley. A central geographic element of this projection was the Tennessee River-it could be used by Cherokees to challenge France and French-allied Indians along the Mississippi, Ohio, and Wabash Rivers. In the British mind the Tennessee River and Cherokees were an essential combination contributing to their imagined empire in North America. More specifi cally, Overhill Cherokees were critical. In the mid-eighteenth century Cherokees divided into fi ve locations: Lower towns, Middle towns, Out towns, Valley towns, and Overhill towns. Because Overhill towns were on the Little Tennessee River, nearest both the Tennessee River and the French presence at Fort Toulouse, they were in a position of tremendous geopolitical importance. 6 Th roughout the 1730s and 1740s Overhill residents used the Tennessee as an avenue to assert their presence in the trans-Appalachian south and lower Ohio valley, in the process acquiring intelligence, harassing French trade, and generally convincing French offi cials that an Anglo-Cherokee connection existed. By 1754 their extended presence was so common that, as Governor Glen put it, "Th ere never passes one year that the Cherokees do not take a Boat or two belonging to the French on the Mississippi and destroy most of the Crew. " Earlier that year, he noted, Cherokees had "killed eight People belonging to one Boat, and brought two People alive into their Nation, and this Year they killed most of the Crew of another Vessel upon that River, and brought in three Prisoners. " 7 Carolinians considered French Illinois within their conception of British North America because of the region's connection to the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash Rivers. However weak and disorganized,

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 2006

With the 250th anniversary of the Seven Years' War now arrived, the University of Pittsburgh Press has taken the opportunity to republish the original 1985 edition of Charles Morse Stotz's