Alan Axelrod - Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

While the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia frontiers were convulsed by Indian raids, William Johnson was victorious at the Battle of Lake George and built the strategically important Fort William Henry on the south end of the lake. Washington, returned from the Battle of the Wilderness, persuaded authorities to build more forts, extending from the Potomac and James and Roanoke rivers, down into South Carolina. These forts, Washington said, were the only effective means of combating the widespread Indian raids unleashed by the French.

By June 1756, British settlers in Virginia had withdrawn ISO miles from the prewar frontier. George Washington complained to Governor Dinwiddie: “the Bleu-Ridge is now our Frontier … there will not be a living creature left in Frederick-County: and how soon Fairfax, and Prince William may share its fate, is easily conceived.”

For its first three years, the French and Indian War had been strictly a North American conflict. In 1756, it became a world war as Prussia invaded Saxony. The following year, the Holy Roman Empire (in effect, Austria) declared war on Prussia, which then invaded Bohemia. Through a complex of interests, intrigues, and alliances, the French, the British, the Spanish, and the Russians also joined the war, which eventually encompassed more than 30 major battles in Europe, India, Cuba, the Philippines, and North America. The world conflict was given the generic title of the Seven Years War.

As part of its commitment to an expanded war, France sent the dashing and highly capable Louis Joseph, marquis de Montcalm to take charge of Canadian forces on May 11, 1756. For their part, the British forces suffered defeat after defeat. At last, in December 1756, William Pitt became British secretary of state for the southern department, a post that put him in charge of American colonial affairs. He took command away from inept, politically chosen officers and gave it to those with genuine military skill-colonial commanders included. The result was a gradual reversal of Britain’s ill fortune.

Pitt chose Brigadier General John Forbes, one of his best commanders, to assault-for the third time in the war—Fort Duquesne. Despite many delays, mainly caused by the incompetence and corruption of the British quartermaster (supply) corps, an army of 5,000 provincials, 1,400 Highlanders, and an ever-diminishing number of Indian allies lumbered toward the stubborn objective at the forks of the Ohio. When the main force became bogged down in the mud not far from the fort, one of Forbes’s subordinates, Colonel Henry Bouquet, became impatient and, on September 11, hastily ordered 800 Highlanders to attack. They were cut down by French and Indians, who killed a third of their number.

This triumph, however, proved a Pyrrhic victory for the French. Losses among their Indian allies were so heavy that most of the Indians, after seizing plunder, deserted the cause. In the meantime, a treaty concluded at Easton, Pennsylvania, in October 1758 brought peace between the French-allied Delaware and the English. Colonel Bouquet, still reeling from defeat, proclaimed with relief that the Treaty of Easton had “knocked the French on the head.”

On November 24, Forbes was at last ready to make his advance on Fort Duquesne. Suddenly, a distant explosion was heard. Rather than allow the English to capture the fort, the French had blown it up. The heads of Bouquet’s Highlanders, captured earlier, had been skewered on upright stakes, the soldiers’ kilts tied below them. It was a grisly greeting, yet Forbes knew that the nation in control of the forks of the Ohio—the confluence of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers—held the gateway to the West. And that gateway was now in British hands.

If the year 1758 marked the turning of the tide in favor of the British, 1759 was the year of French disaster, culminating in the siege, battle, and loss of Quebec on September 18, 1759. This loss effectively brought to an end French power in North America.

Although the war had been decided with the surrender of Quebec, the fighting did not stop. Montreal remained in French hands, and Quebec had to be held. For the next two years, however, the British steadily contracted the circle around French Canada. At last into the fray, during its waning months, came Spain, which sided with France. England declared war on the new combatant on January 2, 1762, and crushed the adversary with sea power alone. As it became clear to everyone involved that the war in America and in Europe was about to end, France rushed to conclude in secret the Treaty of San Ildefonso with Spain (November 3, 1762), in which it ceded to that country all of its territory west of the Mississippi and the Isle of Orleans in Louisiana. This offering was intended as compensation for the loss of Spain’s Caribbean holdings to the British. On February 10, 1763, the great Treaty of Paris followed, which officially ended hostilities in America and abroad.

The score? France ceded all of Louisiana to Spain and the rest of its North American holdings to Great Britain. Spain recovered Cuba (in compensation for the loss of territories in Florida and in the Caribbean), and France retained the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St. Lucia.

In far-off Paris, pens had been put to paper. Within a few days of the Treaty of Paris, on April 27, 1.763, Pontiac (ca. 1720-69), war chief of the Ottawa Indians, called a grand council of Ottawa and other tribes-most notably the Delaware, Seneca (as well as elements of other Iroquois tribes), and the Shawnee. The chief pushed for an attack on Detroit. This decision ignited a series of bloody assaults on the western outposts that the French had just officially surrendered to the English. Although many Indian war leaders participated, this coda to the French and Indian War would be called Pontiac’s Rebellion.

Pontiac had been moved to war by British general Jeffrey Amherst’s refusal to continue the French custom of giving presents to the Indians, especially gifts of ammunition, on which the tribes had come to depend for hunting. This outrage, combined with the bellicose pronouncements of an Indian mystic named Neolin—better known to the whites as the Delaware Prophet-fanned the flames. Neolin, Pontiac, and others urged action against the English now, before they became too numerous to drive from the land.

Pontiac’s Rebellion tore the white frontier apart, as Indian warriors tortured, mutilated, and killed with exuberance. Amherst, in desperation, decided to wage total war, giving orders to take no prisoners, but to kill all belligerents. He even instituted biological warfare, directing one of his officers deliberately to infect the tribes with smallpox. Although this plan was officially abandoned for fear of spreading the infection among the white settlements, Simon Ecuyer, a Swiss mercenary temporarily acting as commander of the besieged Fort Pitt (the former French Fort Duquesne), called a peace conference with his Delaware attackers. As a token of esteem, he presented them with two blankets and a handkerchief. They had been provided by Captain William Trent from the fort’s smallpox hospital. “I hope they will have the desired effect,” Trent remarked to Ecuyer.

They did. An epidemic swept through the Delaware, and this misfortune, along with the Indians’ realization that the supply of English settlers was apparently inexhaustible, brought Pontiac to the peace table at the end of 1763. By the following year, other disaffected tribal leaders had also surrendered—but not before a band of renegade white settlers had gone on their own rampage.

On December 14, 1763, a mob of 57 Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from Paxton and Donegal, settlements in the heart of the raid-racked Pennsylvania frontier, butchered a party of six Conestoga Indians, notwithstanding the fact that the Conestogas were and had always been peaceful. Despite Governor John Penn’s call for the arrest of the “Paxton Boys,” frontier Pennsylvania approved of their action and encouraged more. The magistrates of Lancaster County gathered the remaining Conestogas into a public workhouse for their protection. The Paxton Boys raided the building on December 27, killing 14 Indians as they knelt in prayer. The survivors—again, for their “protection”—were once more removed, this time to a barren island in the middle of the windswept Delaware River. Safe from the Paxton Boys, the Indians were ravaged by the elements of a brutal winter. Fiftysix Indians sickened and died.