Essay, Research Paper: The French And Indian War

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.