Empires at War Read online

  Mordaunt, Charles (1697—1780), was the general in command of the unsuccessful attack against Rochefort in 1757.

  Mouet de Langlade, Charles-Michel (1729-1801), was born in Michili-mackinac (Mackinaw City). He was an officer in the Troupes de la Marine and led the attack against Pickawillany.

  Murray, James (1722—94), was a British officer who served with Wolfe at Quebec and later commanded the city.

  Neolin, known as The Delaware Prophet (?—1763), was a religious leader among the Delaware who preached a return to traditional native ways. His message helped inspire Pontiac's rebellion.

  Newcastle, Thomas Pelham Hollis, Duke (1693—1768), served almost continuously in high office and as prime minister until his death in 1768.

  Oconostota (1712-83), was war leader of the "Overhill" Cherokee. He allied himself with the British and led his people in union with Attakullakulla.

  Payen de Noyan et de Chavoy, Pierre-Jacques (1695—1771), was born in Trois-Rivieres. He was an officer in the Troupes de la Marine who commanded at both Detroit and Crown Point. On August 27, 1758, he surrendered Fort Frontenac to John Bradstreet.

  Pecaudy de Contrecoeur, Claude-Pierre (1705—75), was born in Montreal. He was an officer in the Troupes de la Marine who commanded the force that occupied the forks of the Ohio in April 1755.

  Pelham, Henry (1695—1754), served as prime minister until his death and was succeeded by his brother the duke of Newcastle.

  Peter III (1728-62), the Czar of Russia, allied himself with Frederick II. His sudden death brought Catherine II, "The Great," to the throne.

  Pocock, George (1706-92), commanded the fleet that captured Havana in 1762.

  Pompadour, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson le Normant D'Etoiles (1721—64), was mistress to Louis XV and influenced him to oppose Frederick the Great.

  Pontiac (1712(?)-69), was the Ottawa chief who led a rebellion that began near Detroit in 1763. As the rebellion spread it took on his name.

  Pouchot, Pierre (1712—69), was the French officer who surrendered Fort Niagara in 1759 and delayed Amherst's advance at Fort Lévis in 1760.

  Rigaud de Vaudreuil, François-Pierre de (1703—79), was born in Montreal. The son of a governor of New France and brother to governor Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, he was also a soldier in the Troupes de la Marine.

  Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Pierre de, Marquis de Vaudreuil (1698—1778), was born in Quebec. He was the son of the governor of New France and served as governor of Louisiana and New France.

  Rodney, George (1719-92), was a British admiral who served in the West Indies and captured Martinique.

  Rogers, Robert (1781-95), born in New Hampshire, organized a group of colonials and trained them in wilderness warfare. The organization became known as Rogers Rangers.

  Russell, John, fourth Duke of Bedford (1710-71), was a diplomat and ally of Lord Bute. He negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

  Saunders, Charles (1718—75), commanded the fleet that supported Wolfe at Quebec.

  Scarouady (?—1758), was the Oneida chief who succeeded Tanaghrisson as Half King.

  Shirley, William (1694-1771), served as governor of Massachusetts and succeeded Braddock as commander in chief in North America.

  Stobo, Robert (1727—70?), was an officer in the Virginia militia. He was with Washington at Fort Necessity and stayed with the French as a hostage for the safe return of French prisoners.

  Suraj-Ud-Dowlah (?—1757), the nawab of Bengal, was responsible for the "Black Hole of Calcutta."

  Taffanel de La Jonquière, Jacques-Pierre de, Marquis de la Jonquiere (1685-1752), was the governor of New France from 1749 to 1752.

  Tanaghrisson, The Half King (?—1754), was a Seneca chief who led the Iroquois, often referred to as Mingo, in the Ohio Valley. He was with Washington at Fort Necessity.

  Teedyuscung (1700-63), was a Delaware leader best known as an orator. A friend to both the English and the French, he was deeply involved in a number of controversial land deals.

  Testard de Montigny, Jean-Baptiste-Philippe (1724—86), was born in Montreal. He was an officer in the Troupes de la Marine and was present at Braddock's defeat. He served as second in command during the attack on Fort Bull.

  Theyanoguin, Hendrick (1680—1755), was a Christian Mohawk and close friend to William Johnson. Often critical of the English, he worked to keep the Mohawks allied with them. He died at the Battle of Lake George on September 8, 1755.

  Townshend, George (1724—1807), was an army officer and politician who served with Wolfe at Quebec.

  Vauban, Sebastian le Prestre de (1633—1707), was the masterful architect of fortifications throughout Europe. His style was imitated in North America.

  Wall, Richard (1694—1778), was an Irish expatriate who served as foreign minister to King Ferdinand VI of Spain. Wall favored a pro-English policy.

  Walpole, Horace (1717—97), was a British author and gadfly whose memoirs and letters are important in understanding eighteenth-century English society and politics.

  Webb, Daniel (1700—73), British commander, refused to send assistance to Fort William Henry when it was under attack.

  William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721-65), was the son of George II and commander in chief until summarily relieved by his father in 1757.

  Winslow, John (1708—74), major general in the Massachusetts militia, was principally responsible for deporting Acadians.

  Yorke, Philip, Earl of Hardwicke (1690—1764), was an ally of Newcastle and a noted jurist who rose to become lord chancellor of England.

  Chronology

  1689—97 War of the League of Augsburg; known in North America as King William's War

  1702—13 War of the Spanish Succession; known in North America as Queen Anne's War

  1713 April 11—Treaty of Utrecht

  September 2—Louisbourg founded

  1784 French establish fort at Crown Point on Lake Champlain

  1789 Anglo-Spanish War

  1744—48 War of the Austrian Succession; known in North America as King George's War

  1748 October 18—Treaty of Aix la Chapelle

  1749 March 16—Ohio Company formed

  June—Halifax founded

  Summer—Céloron's expedition into the Ohio Valley

  1750 August 31—Boundary commissioners meet in Paris

  1752 June 21—French and Indians attack Pickawillany

  July 1—Duquesne arrives as governor of New France

  1753 Spring—Marin enters Ohio Valley with large French force

  Fall—Washington warns French to leave Ohio Valley

  1754 April 16—French seize forks of Ohio River and build Fort Duquesne

  May 28—Washington attacks French at Jumonville Glen

  June—July—Albany Congress

  July 4—Washington surrenders at Fort Necessity

  1755 June 9—Boscawen intercepts French ships

  June 16—Fort Beausejour surrenders to English

  June—Vaudreuil arrives as governor of New France

  July 9—Braddock is defeated at Monongahela

  Summer-Fall—Acadian expulsion

  September 8—Battles at Lake George

  1756 March 27—Fort Bull falls to French

  May 12—Montcalm arrives in Quebec

  May 18—England declares war on France

  May 20—French defeat Admiral Byng off Minorca

  June 20—Suraj ud Dowla captures Calcutta and allegedly confines British prisoners in "Black Hole"

  July 23—Lord Loudoun arrives in New York as new commander in chief

  August 14—Oswego surrenders to French

  August 29—Prussia invades Saxony

  November—Pitt enters government

  1757 March 17—French attack Fort William Henry but fail to capture it

  March 23—Clive captures Chandernagor

  April 6—Pitt leaves government

  April 9—Cumberland leaves to take command in Germany

 
June—Anson appointed first lord

  June 18—Prussia defeated at Battle of Kolin

  June 23—Battle of Plassey Grove, British defeat Suraj ud Dowla

  June 29—Pitt returns to office

  July 26—Battle of Hastenbeck, Cumberland is defeated

  August—Loudoun abandons Louisbourg campaign

  August 9—Fort William Henry surrenders to French

  September 8—Cumberland and Richelieu sign agreement at convention of Klostersevern

  October—British attempt against Rochefort fails

  December 1—James Abercromby succeeds Loudoun as commander in chief in North America

  1758 February 28—Admiral Henry Osbourne defeats French fleet off Cartagena

  April 24—French surrender Fort St. Louis on Senegal River to British

  April 29—British (Admiral Pocock) and French (Admiral d'Ache) fleets fight indecisive battle off Pondicherry

  June 1—General Forbes meets with Cherokee in Philadelphia

  June 2—French capture Fort St. David

  July 8—British fail to capture Fort Ticonderoga

  July 27—British capture Louisbourg

  August 3—British (Pocock) and French (d'Ache) fleets engage in second indecisive battle off Pondicherry

  August 3—First British contingents arrive in Germany

  August 27—British capture Fort Frontenac

  September 14—British force under James Grant is defeated near Fort Duquesne

  October 7—26—Easton Conference

  October 12—Lignery attacks British at Loyal Hannon

  November 25—British capture Fort Duquesne

  December 13—French besiege Madras

  1759 January 19—British fail to capture Martinique

  January 23—British land on Guadeloupe

  February 17—Siege of Madras is lifted

  May 1—Guadeloupe surrenders to British

  June 26—British open siege of Quebec

  July 26—British capture Fort Niagara

  July 31—British are repulsed at Montmorency

  August 1—Battle of Minden

  August 12—Battle of Kunersdorf

  August 18—Boscawen defeats French off Lagos

  September 13—British victory at Quebec

  September 18—Quebec surrenders

  October 4—Rogers Rangers attack St. Francis

  November 20—Battle of Quiberon Bay

  1760 February 16—Cherokee attack Fort Prince George April 28—Battle of Sillery Woods (St. Foy), French fail to retake Quebec

  August 7—Cherokee capture Fort Loudoun

  September 8—Montreal surrenders to Amherst

  September 16—Canadian Iroquois meet with William Johnson at Montreal

  October 16—Battle of Kloster Kamp

  October 25—Death of George II

  1761 June 7—British capture Dominica

  August 15—Spain and France sign the Family Compact

  September 23—Cherokee sign peace treaty

  October 5—Pitt resigns from cabinet

  November—Spain enters war on side of France

  1762 January 5—Death of Czarina Elizabeth of Russia

  February 13—British capture Martinique

  June 18—Conference at Easton with Delaware and Iroquois

  June 24—French capture St. John's, Newfoundland

  August 11—British capture Havana

  September 18—British retake St. John's, Newfoundland

  October 6—British capture Manila

  1763 February 10—Treaty of Paris

  April 19—Teedyuscung and his wife die in a mysterious fire

  1763—64—Pontiac's rebellion

  May 7, 1763—Pontiac fails to retake Detroit by deception

  May 16—Indians capture Fort Sandusky

  May 25—Indians capture Fort St. Joseph

  May 28—Indians capture Fort Miamis

  June 2—Indians capture Fort Michilimackinac

  August 6—Indians are defeated at Edge Hill

  October 7—King George III issues proclamation setting boundaries for new territory in North America

  November 17—General Thomas Gage succeeds Amherst as commander in chief in North America; Amherst returns to England

  1766 July 23—Pontiac meets with William Johnson at Oswego

  1769 April 20—Pontiac assassinated

  Prologue

  Americans know it as the French and Indian War. Some Canadians, particularly those of French descent, refer to the conflict as the War of the Conquest. In Europe it is called the Seven Years War. None of these titles is fully accurate, for in fact the struggle that raged between 1754 and 1763 (hostilities preceded the formal declarations of war by two years) was the first world war.

  The war pitted the world's two superpowers, France and England, against each other in a titanic struggle for imperial domination. This was hardly the first time the French and English had grappled. Ancient enmities going back at least to 1066 had often driven these two nations to conflict, but this time the struggle was not about the usual familial claims to thrones or who should control some petty duchy or principality or even who would dominate the continent of Europe. It was a competition to determine who would dominate the other continents of the world.

  At sea, and on battlefields in Europe, North America, the West Indies, Asia, India, and Africa, fleets and armies fought. Every major power in Europe joined the fray. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and civilians died. At the final peace, weary combatants traded territories vaster than all of Europe. England emerged victorious, and its triumph laid the foundation for a global empire from which it would draw the wealth and resources to fuel the industrial revolution and transform the world.

  Although the war was fought all over the world, its most decisive battles were in North America. The struggle for this continent among Indians, French, Canadians, British, and British colonials was the hinge upon which the outcome of the war swung. Americans studying their own history commonly describe this war as the prelude to the American Revolution. Aside from being provincial, that interpretation both exaggerates and understates its real significance. The ideological split between England and its colonies began in earlier generations. Furthermore, the political, economic, and social forces that drove the colonies toward revolution were in operation long before the war began. The American habit of viewing the French and Indian War backward through the lens of the Revolution masks its true importance as a world-shaping event.

  From the very first days of permanent settlement in North America the French and English had been at each others throats. Competition for trade, uncertain boundaries, and a rambunctious population of frontiersmen kindled violence on both sides. Men in Paris and London knew full well that there was an absence of peace in North America, but minor skirmishes, a raid here and there, a few homes burned, were petty events hardly worthy of notice when compared to the pageants of Europe. Indeed, on those several occasions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when wars between the great powers came to North America, they arrived as imports from Europe.

  In 1689 the War of the League of Augsburg began in Europe. By the time it reached America it was known as King Williams War. In 1702 the War of Spanish Succession erupted, to be titled Queen Anne's War when the shooting began in America. The War of the Austrian Succession swept Europe in 1744 and crossed the Atlantic the next year as King George's War. The last and greatest of these struggles, however, followed a very different pattern. The French and Indian War reversed the traditional course of events; beginning in America, it was exported to Europe.

  Both England and France had firm footholds in North America by the early eighteenth century. English settlement was ensconced along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia. Tendrils of settlement, particularly in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, were beginning to creep farther west. The white population of these colonies numbered nearly one million, mostly farmers, nearly all En
glish-speaking Protestants.

  Canada was colonized differently. Although the French king claimed a vast territory stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Appalachians across the Mississippi, in fact French settlement was confined to the valley of the St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal and to the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans. Altogether not more than sixty thousand French lived in all this territory. From New Orleans and the St. Lawrence Valley a fragile web of control maintained by peripatetic priests, soldiers, and fur traders extended deep into the interior of North America. Linked by rivers and lakes, and anchored by a series of forts and trading posts in the west (at places like Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimackinac); in the Ohio region (at Presque Isle, Le Boeuf, and Venango); and in the south (Fort Toulousse), French dominion was strong at its center in the St. Lawrence Valley but weak on the edges. It was precisely along these rough edges—in Acadia, along Lake Ontario, and in the Ohio Valley—where trouble brewed. Everywhere along this jagged edge Indian nations stood between two poles: French and English. Depending upon shifting circumstances, particularly their own self-interest, native peoples allied with one or the other European rivals. In time of declared war such alliances were open as regular soldiers and colonial militia accompanied their native allies on marches into the enemy homeland. But once the declared war ended—an event marked usually by diplomatic folderol in European capitals, an exchange of territory, regulars sailing home, and the return of French and English settlers to their towns and villages—native allies, parties to the war but not to the peace, continued to be used by the colonial powers as surrogates to bring instability and violence to the frontier.

  Louis XV, king of France

  Neither the British nor the French could properly define the boundaries of Acadia. Lying north of New England, it stretched between present-day eastern New Brunswick and across the Bay of Fundy to the western shore of Nova Scotia. The region was home to the Micmac and Abenaki, Algonquin-speaking Indians. Early in the seventeenth century the French began to settle there. Within a few generations several thousand Acadians were farming along the shores and tidal estuaries of the Bay of Fundy and the Northumberland Strait. But at the conclusion of Queen Anne's War in 1713, France surrendered Acadia to England. As a result, the Acadians found themselves suddenly living in a land called Nova Scotia, subject to an alien culture whose laws, religion, and language were thoroughly unfamiliar to them. Sullenly and silently, the Acadians assented to their fate, while their new British masters looked upon them with disdain and suspicion.1