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The French and English colonists in North America were never at peace with each other. The thirty years between the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) and the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-1748) was merely an extended breathing space between formal conflicts, and raids on each other’s territory were frequent and savage. Many settlers from Pennsylvania and Virginia traded furs with Indians in the Ohio Valley during the 1840s, which increased the possibility of conflict with the French, who claimed the area. Part of the problem was that they were more successful than French traders because their trading goods were better quality and cheaper.  

Although settlement had not yet commenced, land speculation was thriving because property was the main symbol of wealth in a society that had little industry or finance. This speculation was fueled by the richer members of Virginia society since there was no shortage of land and those who wanted more elbow room were already settling the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains where there was still plenty of space. One of the largest land companies was the Ohio Company of Virginia, which had been formed in 1747. Boasting the acting governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, and other leading politicians as members, their influence won the company a royal grant, which would allow it to develop the Ohio Valley, except that the Ohio Indians needed to be persuaded to accept the deal and the French claimed the land.

Unfortunately, the French had just decided to strengthen their control over the Ohio Valley, and in the spring of 1753 the French governor, Ange Duquesne de Menneville, sent two thousand men under Paul Marin de La Malgue to enforce French claims to the area. He built several forts at strategic points and arrested any fur traders he found, but the terrain was so harsh that Marin died of exhaustion on October 29. Pennsylvania was too small to respond, so the burden fell on Virginia, with its larger military. Since Dinwiddie feared losing his investment, he sent a young militia major named George Washington to order the French out.

The Indian leaders in the area were not impressed when Washington arrived with a few servants and neither was Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, Marin’s successor, when they met on November 12. Legardeur’s polite but firm refusal drove Dinwiddle to send fifty men to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio River, essentially drawing a line in the sand.

The French response was undoubtedly not what he expected. The Virginians immediately surrendered when a powerful force under Claude-Pierre Pecaudy de Contrecoeur arrived at the unfinished fort on April 16. To add insult to injury, the French used the Virginian’s raw materials to complete their own fort, which they called Duquesne, a few miles upstream. Dinwiddle then had Washington raise troops to fight the French but few Virginians were willing to leave their homes to fight for someone else’s land. Only the promise of land attracted recruits but few of the men had any military experience. Dinwiddle was under the illusion that Indian tribes like the Catawba, Cherokee and Chickasaw, as well as the other colonies, would send men. None of Dimwiddle’s promised reinforcements had arrived by April 23 and Washington knew that he had only 180 men against a thousand French, so he decided to call off the attack and build a rival fort thirty-seven miles from Duquesne. However, it took a month of backbreaking labor to get halfway to his goal and there was still no sign of the reinforcements.

Aware that the approaching Virginian force was too small to pose a threat, Contrecoeur sent thirty men under Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville to order the Virginians to leave French land. A Mingo chieftain alerted Washington of the approaching French and he led a combined force of roughly forty militia and Indians to attack them. The next morning, the French were caught by surprise at dawn and while it is disputed whether Washington gave warning or not, it was clearly a victory for the Virginians, since ten Frenchmen were killed and only one man evaded capture. Washington blamed the fight on the French but was unable to explain why he had attacked a group of French soldiers when France and Britain were still at peace.

Realizing that the French would not react well, Washington had his troops fortify the open area where they were camped, which he called Fort Necessity, but there was only time to build a small stockade that could hold fifty men. By mid-June, he had received 200 more reinforcements but not the food to feed them. Aside from a hundred Mingo warriors and their families, Washington failed to recruit additional Indian allies since the powerful Iroquois Confederation, England’s traditional ally, had decided to remain neutral in this particular war between white men.

The French response was six hundred French and Canadian soldiers and a hundred Indians under the command of Jumonville’s older brother, and he reached Fort Necessity on the morning of July 3. Exhausted from working to extend the road, many of the Virginians were ill, so they were outnumbered two to one and it was clear that any retreat would likely turn into a rout. Fighting from shallow trenches while the French were concealed by the surrounding forest, the English had agreed to surrender by evening in exchange for being allowed to leave with their weapons. The quick defeat of the English meant that the Indian tribes in the Ohio Valley began to back the French.

To make matters worse, the leaders of the English colonies were more interested in taking additional Iroquois land than opposing the French claims to the distant Ohio valley. However, the English government could not accept a French fort so near Virginia and Pennsylvania, so a force was sent to North America, which was the direct opposite of what the French had expected, namely that the English government would consider the faraway Ohio Valley unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately, many members of the English government, most especially the Duke of Newcastle, the prime minister, had been unsatisfied with the treaty that ended the previous war and were looking for an excuse to change the strategic situation, although it was still not considered worth declaring war over.

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Further Reading:

Empires At War: The Seven Years’ War and the Struggle for North America 1754-1763-William M. Fowler Jr., Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005.

The first chapter concisely explains the political situation in Europe and how conflict was brewing in North America despite the vast distances between the French and British colonies. The portraits of the main participants and contemporary paintings of the notable battles and forts are interesting but no replacement for actual maps. Admittedly, the footnotes give the modern locations of the places mentioned in the narrative but simply looking at modern maps does not give any sense of the scale of distance covered and just how empty the disputed areas were. Fowler also never details the specific number of casualties after each battle. As the title states, it focuses on the struggle for North America and spends little time explaining the situation in Europe. However, it is an excellent introduction to a conflict that set the stage for the American Revolution.

The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America-Walter R. Borneman, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006.

Borneman devotes more time to an aborted plan of union between the colonies than to the initial fight that started the war and Washington’s surrender at Fort Necessity. He excels at explaining the economic aspect of the war and makes Pitt’s global vision easily understood. Although specific numbers of casualties for each battle are provided, some of his explanations of battles are better than others, which I suspect reflects whether they are considered important or not. Pontiac’s rebellion is examined in good detail and shows how Pontiac’s leadership role has been overstated. The years immediately following the end of the war are covered to show how the frustration of not being able to settle the captured French lands combined with heavy taxes drove the colonists to revolt. Finally, he briefly plays the what-if game, while never forgetting that the game is both fascinating and pointless. Above all, he shows how the war transformed the kingdom of Great Britain into the British Empire. Oh, it has great maps.

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