The French and Indian War was the last of four North

American wars. They lasted from 1689 to 1763 between the British and

the French, with Native American allies, for domination of the New

World. Britain eventually stripped France of the New World. It ended

in a series of conflicts which were known as the French and Indian

wars. Although it began in North America, they expanded into Europe

as the Seven Years' war, and into Asia as the Third Carnatic War.

The war originated in the breakdown of a three way balance of

power. The Iroquois Confederacy had occupied in the middle grounds

between French and British Colonies and had successfully excluded

both from the Ohio River Valley. The Iroquois had rendered all

previous conflicts indecisive by playing off French against British

interests and maintaining their own freedom of action. During the last

years of King George's War from 1744 to 1748, however, English

traders had penetrated deeply into the Ohio country and established

relations with tribes that had previously traded only with the French.

Also in the late 1740's, the Ohio Company, a land-speculating syndicate

based in Virginia, began making efforts to found a settlement at the

forks of the Ohio and Manongahela and Allegheny rivers. These

developments convinced the governors-general of Canada that in order

to protect their own strategic interests in the American interior they

would have to dominate the Ohio Valley military. Thus, in 1753 the

French began building a chain of forts from Lake Erie to the Ohio to

the forks of Ohio, where in 1754 they build fort Duquesne.

This created a situation that governor Robert Dinwiddle of

Virginia could not ignore. In 1753 he tried unsuccessfully to warn them

of their intrusion into English Territory; the next year he sent an

armed force under the command of George Washington to expel

them. The French defeated Washington's troops horribly at the Battle

of Fort Necessity ( July 3-4, 1754 ) and sent them back to Virginia.

The French and Indian War had begun....

The Course Of The War

In 1755 the British general Edward Braddok was sent to America

to take Fort Duquesne. In July, however, near the fort, A French and

Native American force badly defeated Braddok's British regulars and

colonial troops. The British won a small victory in Nova Scotia and

repulsed attack by French and Native American forces in New York at

the Battle of Lake George In 1755. These were their last victories until

1758. Meanwhile, the British government sought to impose central

control on the war effort to pay for the campaigns against Canada;

these measures only alienated the Americans. For the Anglo-

Americans the years, 1755-1757, therefore, were distinguished by

defeats and friction between British and colonial soldiers, while the

French and their Native American allies won battle after battle.

England's dismal performance ended when William Pitt rose to

political power in 1757. Pitt, who made victory in America his top

priority, initiated a series of well coordinated campaigns and

appointed able commanders to lead them. More importantly, he

began treating the Americans as allies instead of subordinates. The

result was a major reversal. In 1758 Anglo-American forces seized the

fortress of Louisburg, the key to Saint Lawrence River; destroyed Fort

Fronterac on Lake Ontario serving the supply lines of the Ohio Forts;

and captures Fort Duquesne. A force under General James Wolfe

defeated the French main army at Quebec in 1759, and the following

year General Jeffery Amherst completes the conquest by forcing the

surrender of the last defenders of Canada at Montreal.

End Results of the war

The treaty of Paris in 1763 ended the French control in Canada,

which went to Great Britain. France also ceded all it's territories

east of the Mississippi to the British. The compensation for the

territory west of the Mississippi given by France to Spain a year

earlier in a secret treaty, Spain had to give Florida to the British. The

war determined whether the English rather than the French ideas and

institutions would dominate North America. Thus, in terms of

importance, the French and Indian War rivals the American Revolution

and the American Civil War.

In winning the war, however, the British government had virtually

doubled its national debt and acquired more territory than it could

control. Attempts by the British politicians to reform the

administration of the empire and to raise the revenue by taxing the

colonies soon antagonized the colonists and eventually precipitated the

American Revolution. France's desire to avenge its humiliating defeat

launched a policy of support for the American rebels that the

monarchy could ill afford, and ultimately helped bring on the fiscal

crisis that climaxed, in 1789, with the French Revolution.