The French and the English had coexisted relatively peacefully in
North America for nearly a century. But by the 1750’s, as both
English and French settlements expanded, religious and commercial
tensions began to produce new frictions and new conflicts. The French
had explored and claimed a vast region of the continental interior,
ranging from Louisiana in the South to the Great Lakes in the North.
To secure their hold on these enourmous claims, they founded a whole
string of communities, missions, trading posts, and fortresses. The
region was enclosed by the four major cities: Montreal, Detroit, New
Orleans, and Quebec, the center of the French empire in North
America.
The English, meanwhile, were preparing for the great population leap
accross the Appalachians into Ohio and beyond. In 1749 a group of
Virginian businessmen secured a grant of 500,000 acres of Ohio valley
land for settlement purposes. They were not impressed by Joseph
Celeron who in the same year had claimed that region for France. This
prompted the French, in an effort to keep the English from expansion
into French lands, to construct new fortresses in the Ohio valley.
This, in turn, caused the English, interpreting the French activity
as a threat to their western settlements, to begin making military
preparations and building fortresses of their own.
For the next five years, tensions between the English and the French
increased, until in the summer of 1754 the governor of Virginia sent
a militia force (under the command of an inexperienced young colonel
named George Washington) into the Ohio valley to challenge French
expansion. Washington built a crude stockade (Fort Necessity) and
staged an unsuccessful attack on a French detachment. The French
countered with an assault on Fort Necessity, trapping Washington and
his soldiers inside. After a third of them died in the fighting,
Washington surrendered. This clash marked the beginning of the French
and Indian War.
The French and Indian War, unlike other wars, began on North American
soil and then spread to Europe, where Britain and France continued
battling. Britain officially declared war on France in 1756, marking
the beginnings of the Seven Years’ War in Europe. Native Americans
fought for both sides, but primarily alongside the French. The major
battles include French victories at Fort William Henry, Fort
Ticonderoga, and against the Braddock Expedition and British
victories at Louisburg, Fort Niagara, Fort Duquesne, and – most
significantly of all– at the Plains of Abraham outside of Quebec
City, in which James Wolfe defeated a French garrison led by
Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and then captured New France’s capital.
The war resulted in France’s loss of all its possessions in North
America except for some Caribbean islands and Saint Pierre and
Miquelon, two small islands off Newfoundland. The British acquired
Canada while Spain gained Louisiana in compensation for its loss of
Florida to the British. One result of the war was that Britain gained
control of a large French-speaking, Roman Catholic population in
Lower Canada. Near the beginning of the war, in 1755, the British had
expelled French speaking populations in Acadia to Louisiana –
creating the Cajun population – but this would not be possible
in Canada.
The war officially ended with the signing of the 1763 Treaty of Paris
on February 10, 1763. France agreed to cede Canada to Britain,
preferring to keep the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe because of its
rich sugar crops and the ease with which it could be controlled.
The decisive result of the war meant that it was the last of the
French and Indian Wars and helped create conditions that led to the
American Revolutionary War. The British colonists no longer needed
British protection from the French and resented the taxes imposed by
Britain to pay for its military commitments as well as limitation on
colonial settlements imposed by the British Royal Proclamation of
1763 in the newly acquired French territories in the Ohio Country and
Illinois Country in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys.
