A History of the American People

company to fire,' Washington reported. His Iroquois Indians attacked with their tomahawks.
Before Washington could stop the killing and accept the surrender of the French, ten of them
were dead, including their commander.' This incident, l'affaire Jumonville, led to massive French
retaliation and the outbreak of what was soon a world war. It raged in North America for six
years, 1754-60, in Central and South America, in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, in India and the
East, and not least in Europe, where it was known as the Seven Years War (1756-63). Detonating
such a conflict made Washington famous, even notorious. Artlessly, he wrote to his brother Jack
that he had not been daunted by his first experience of action: I heard the bullets whistle and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.' This, together with material from Washington's reports and diaries, was published in the London Magazine, where King George II read it. The King was rather proud of his battlefield experience and snorted:By God, he would
not think bullets charming if he had been used to hear many.' Voltaire summed it up: A cannon shot fired in America would give the signal that set Europe in a blaze.' In fact there was no cannon shot. Horace Walpole, in his History of the Reign of George II, was more accurate:The
volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.'
This global conflict finally brought to a head the competition between France and Britain to be
the dominant power in North America. It was a conflict Britain was bound to win in the end
because its American colonies, with their intensive immigration over many decades, their high
birth-rate and natural population increase, their booming economy and high living-standards, had
already passed the take-off point and were rapidly becoming, considered together, one of the
fastest-growing and richest nations in the world. By comparison, the French presence was thinly
spread and sustained only by continued military and economic effort from the French state. But it
did not quite look like that at the time. The British colonists thought of themselves as encircled
by French military power. It stretched from the mouth of the St Lawrence into Canada, down
through the region of the Great Lakes and then along the whole course of the Mississippi to New
Orleans which the French, with much effort, were developing as a major port. There were
conflicting claims everywhere. Under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, concluding an earlier
contest that Britain had won, the French renounced their claim to Hudson's Bay in Canada, but in
fact had continued to trade in the region and build forts. Again, Utrecht had given the British
`Nova Scotia or Arcadie with its ancient boundaries,' and to them it meant all territory east of St
Croix and north up to the St. Lawrence. But the French contested this and in 1750 built more
forts to back up their point. Most important of all, from the viewpoint of the British colonies, the
French claim to the whole of the Mississippi Basin was in flat contradiction to the claims of the
colonies to extend their boundaries along the latitudes indefinitely in a western direction. In the
south there were endless conflicting claims too, and a genuine fear that the French would gang
up with the Spanish in Florida to attack Georgia.
Fear of France was the great factor which bound the American colonies to Britain in the mid-
18th century. They regarded falling under the French flag as the worst possibility that could
befall theim. On the Atlantic coast, people from numerous nations had found themselves coming
under British suzerainty-Spanish, French, Swedes, Dutch, Germans, Swiss-partly by conquest,
partly by immigration, and none had found any difficulty in adjusting. By Continental standards
Britain was a liberal state with a minimalist government and tradition of freedom of speech,
assembly, the press, and (to some extent) worship. These advantages applied a fortiori in the
colonies, where settlers often had little or no contact with government from on year's end to
another. But for a British subject to shift from the Union Jack to the fleur-de-lys was a different
matter. France still had a divine right absolutist monarchy. Its state was formidable, penetrative,