French and Indian War (1754–1763): Struggle for North America

The French and Indian War was the struggle between Britain and France, and their colonists and Native American allies, for control of eastern North America between 1754 and 1763. Starting with skirmishes in the Ohio Valley, it became the North American theatre of the global Seven Years’ War. Britain’s victory, sealed by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, removed France as a power on the continent and set the stage for the American Revolution.

Background: two empires and many nations

By the 1750s British and French North America were very different. Britain’s thirteen mainland colonies along the Atlantic coast had a population of roughly 1.2 to 1.5 million settlers and enslaved people. New France, stretching from the St. Lawrence valley through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to Louisiana, had only about 60,000 to 80,000 colonists. France held its vast territory through a chain of forts, fur-trade networks and alliances with Native nations.

Between them lay lands that belonged to neither empire. The Ohio Valley was home to Shawnee, Delaware (Lenape), Mingo and other peoples, and the powerful Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) claimed influence over it. Virginian land speculators, organised in the Ohio Company, wanted to settle the region, while France saw it as a vital link between Canada and Louisiana.

Britain and France had already fought three wars in North America since 1689, most recently the War of the Austrian Succession, which ended in 1748 without settling the colonial borders.

Causes: the forks of the Ohio

In 1753 the French built a series of forts from Lake Erie toward the Ohio River. Robert Dinwiddie, lieutenant governor of Virginia, sent a 21-year-old militia officer, George Washington, to deliver a letter demanding that they leave. The French refused.

In April 1754 French troops seized an unfinished Virginian fort at the forks of the Ohio, where Pittsburgh now stands, and built Fort Duquesne. Washington, now a lieutenant colonel, was already marching west. On 28 May 1754 his men and allied Mingo warriors attacked a French party at Jumonville Glen, killing its commander, Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. On 3 July a larger French force compelled Washington to surrender at Fort Necessity.

The same summer, delegates from seven colonies met at the Albany Congress, where Benjamin Franklin proposed a plan of colonial union. It was rejected by the colonial assemblies, but it was an early sign of cooperation between the colonies.

The war goes badly for Britain (1755–1757)

London sent two regiments under General Edward Braddock to take Fort Duquesne. On 9 July 1755 his column was ambushed near the Monongahela River by a smaller force of French, Canadians and Native warriors, and Braddock was killed. That same year, British forces captured Fort Beauséjour on the border of Nova Scotia and began the deportation of the Acadians, while a colonial army under William Johnson defeated a French force at the Battle of Lake George in September.

War was formally declared in Europe in May 1756, and France sent a capable new commander, the Marquis de Montcalm. He captured Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario in August 1756 and the British post of Fort William Henry on Lake George in August 1757. After the second surrender, Native warriors allied with the French attacked the departing British column, an event later made famous by the novel The Last of the Mohicans.

Raids by French and Native war parties devastated frontier settlements in Pennsylvania, Virginia and New York. For the British colonies these were the darkest years of the war.

The turning point (1758)

The tide turned when William Pitt the Elder took charge of Britain’s war effort in 1757. Pitt concentrated money, ships and soldiers on America while subsidising Prussia to fight France in Europe. The Royal Navy also blockaded France and made it hard to send reinforcements across the Atlantic.

In 1758 Britain attacked on several fronts:

• Louisbourg, the French fortress on Cape Breton Island, surrendered on 26 July 1758 to Jeffery Amherst and James Wolfe, opening the St. Lawrence River to attack.
• Ticonderoga (Fort Carillon): on 8 July 1758 Montcalm’s outnumbered army repulsed a frontal assault by General James Abercromby, inflicting heavy losses. It was the French army’s greatest victory of the war.
• Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario was captured in August, cutting French supply lines to the west.
• Fort Duquesne: General John Forbes’s slow advance, combined with the Treaty of Easton, which persuaded the Ohio nations to withdraw from the French alliance, forced the French to blow up and abandon the fort in November 1758. The British rebuilt it as Fort Pitt.

The fall of New France (1759–1760)

1759 was Britain’s “year of victories”. Fort Niagara fell in July, and the French abandoned Ticonderoga and Crown Point to Amherst.

The decisive campaign was against Quebec. Wolfe brought an army up the St. Lawrence and besieged the city through the summer. Before dawn on 13 September 1759 his troops climbed the cliffs at Anse-au-Foulon and formed up on the Plains of Abraham. Montcalm attacked, and in a battle lasting less than an hour the French were defeated. Wolfe was killed on the field and Montcalm died of his wounds the next morning. Quebec surrendered on 18 September. The battle is described in detail in the article on the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

In April 1760 the French commander, the Chevalier de Lévis, defeated the British at Sainte-Foy and besieged Quebec, but British ships arrived first in the spring and he had to retreat. Three British armies then converged on Montreal, and on 8 September 1760 Governor Vaudreuil surrendered New France.

Fighting continued elsewhere: Britain captured Martinique and Havana in 1762, and the global war ended only in 1763.

Key people

• George Washington, whose actions in 1754 helped start the war and who served under Braddock and Forbes.
• Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, the French commander who won at Oswego, Fort William Henry and Ticonderoga before dying at Quebec.
• James Wolfe, the young British general who captured Quebec at the cost of his life.
• William Pitt the Elder, the British statesman who directed the winning strategy.
• Jeffery Amherst, British commander-in-chief who took Louisbourg and Montreal.

Native leaders such as the Seneca Tanacharison, the Mohawk Hendrick Theyanoguin (killed at Lake George in 1755) and many others shaped the war, often pursuing the interests of their own nations rather than those of either empire.

The Treaty of Paris (1763)

The war ended with the Treaty of Paris, signed on 10 February 1763. France ceded Canada and all its lands east of the Mississippi, except New Orleans, to Britain. Spain, which had joined the war late, gave Florida to Britain in exchange for the return of Havana. In a separate secret agreement of 1762, France gave New Orleans and Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain.

France kept only the small islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, fishing rights off Newfoundland and its valuable sugar islands in the Caribbean, including Guadeloupe and Martinique.

By the numbers

Consequences and legacy

For Native nations, the removal of France was a disaster. They lost the ability to play the two empires against each other, and British traders and settlers began pressing west. In 1763 a broad coalition of nations rose in Pontiac’s War, and Britain issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which tried to limit colonial settlement west of the Appalachians.

For Britain, victory brought a huge empire and huge debts. Parliament decided that the colonies should help pay for their own defence, leading to the Sugar Act (1764) and Stamp Act (1765). Colonists who had fought alongside British regulars, and no longer feared France, resisted these measures, and within twelve years the dispute had become the American Revolution. France, eager for revenge, would support the American rebels from 1778.

For French Canadians, the British conquest began a new era. The Quebec Act of 1774 later allowed them to keep their Catholic faith, French civil law and the seigneurial system, foundations of modern Quebec’s distinct identity.

Timeline

• 1753: France builds forts toward the Ohio; Washington delivers Virginia’s warning.
• 1754, 28 May: Skirmish at Jumonville Glen.
• 1754, 3 July: Washington surrenders at Fort Necessity.
• 1755, 9 July: Braddock is defeated and killed near the Monongahela.
• 1756, May: Britain and France formally declare war.
• 1757, 9 August: Fort William Henry surrenders to Montcalm.
• 1758, 26 July: Louisbourg falls to the British.
• 1759, 13 September: Battle of the Plains of Abraham; Quebec surrenders on 18 September.
• 1760, 8 September: Montreal surrenders; New France capitulates.
• 1763, 10 February: Treaty of Paris ends the war.

Why it matters

The French and Indian War decided that most of North America would be shaped by Britain rather than France. It ended the balance of power on which many Native nations had relied, and the debts and tensions it created led directly to the American Revolution.