American Colonies: The Settling of North America

There was a 30-year period of peace between the imperial powers after the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) before war brewed again. There were various intermediary conflicts, among them the War of Jenkin’s Ear (Britain versus Spain) and its expanded form, the War of the Austrian Succession, which drew France into the fray. But the climatic war between the imperial powers for the North American continent arrived in 1754: the Seven Years’ War.

Hostilities were stoked in 1753 by a young and inexperienced officer, George Washington, who ambushed a French patrol. The episode allowed the British government to escalate the conflict. Luckily for Washington, the veteran British general Edward Braddock was unwilling to adapt to warfare in the Americas and walked straight into a French and Indian ambush. His death allowed Washington to take command, but Braddock’s defeat encouraged the Indians and their French allies to take the offensive. The French generals Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil and Louis-Joseph de Montcalm were competent but had a falling out over the treatment of Indians, leaving the French open. In 1757 William Pitt took over British command and started paying the colonists to provide troops instead of ordering them, which greatly increased colonial participation in the war (as well as British debt). Meanwhile, the British navy ruthlessly harassed French vessels, hampering their war efforts. In 1758 the British captured the French Fort Louisbourg, which allowed General James Wolfe to capture Quebec in 1759, the key action of the war. In 1763 the French signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the war and ceding all of Canada and most of Louisiana to the British. The Spanish ceded Florida as well.

The French’s withdrawal devastated their Indian allies. The British commander Jeffrey Amherst quickly cut off the British supply of presents for gift-giving to settle disputes between warring factions, and the colonists generally began to press their new advantage. A pan-Indian sentiment began to develop from religious prophets encouraging commonality as Indians (435). In 1763 a coalition of northern tribes launched an uprising known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, capturing several British forts in the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley. The ensuing conflict was brutal, with violence rippling outward (e.g., the Paxton Boys massacring the peaceful Conestoga in 1763-64) (435-36). In 1764 Amherst’s replacement, Thomas Gage, realized it was cheaper to use the same “middle ground” strategy the French had employed in the upper country than continue the fighting, and he reinstated gift-giving to the Indians (436). Things reverted to how they were before Pontiac’s Rebellion—at the cost of many colonist and Indian lives.

Ironically, in securing Britain and its colonies’ futures in the Americas, the Seven Years’ War also sowed the seeds of the American Revolution. The French and Spanish lost little of real value; the colonies they lost had long been money sinks, and with their withdrawal, the British and their colonists lacked a common enemy to unite them. British authorities were also shocked to find that the colonists had been ignoring certain economic regulations (e.g., the 1733 Molasses Act) (438). Defense of the colonies had almost doubled Britain’s debt, and British authorities believe the colonists could shoulder higher taxes, which they soon enacted on sugar (1764) and stamps (1765) (438). The principle of the action was intolerable to the colonists, who “allied behind the most cherished proposition of their shared political culture: that a free man paid no tax unless levied by his own representatives” (439). Colonists equated such treatment with slavery—and they knew they did not want to be slaves.