28 a short history of the united states
Great Britain. In all these wars both the French and the English allied
themselves to Indian tribes, the French arming the Algonquin and the
English the Iroquois.
In the final war of this struggle for empire, the Seven Years’ War, or
French and Indian War, actually started in America. In 1754 , Governor
Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia dispatched his militia, led by a
twenty-two-year-old colonel, George Washington, to construct a fort at
the juncture of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers that forms the
Ohio River. Driven off the site of the junction, the Virginians built a
stockade fi fty miles away, called Fort Necessity. The frontier became a
living hell for colonists in the west as the French and their Indian allies
ravaged the American settlements in one military defeat after another.
Then the situation made a complete about- face. When William Pitt
became prime minister, he completely altered British policy in fighting
this war. He left the conflict on the European continent to his Prussian
ally, Frederick the Great, and concentrated on the war in the colonies.
He sent crack troops and his best generals to America, including gen-
erals James Wolfe and Jeffrey Amherst. Amherst had a reputation for
gifting the Indians with smallpox-infected blankets. After a series of
engagements the French abandoned Fort Duquesne in what is now
Pittsburgh. Louisbourg, Ticonderoga, Quebec, and Montreal were
captured by the British. In the siege of Quebec both General Wolfe
and the French general, Marquis de Montcalm, were killed.
At the peace treaty signed in Paris in 1763 , France surrendered
Canada to Great Britain. To compensate its ally, Spain, for losing
Florida to Great Britain, France ceded Louisiana to her. The acquisi-
tion of Canada pleased fur traders because it provided an enormous
territory in which to hunt animals, and it pleased the colonists, who
no longer feared the presence of the French and their incitement of
Indians on the frontier. The French minister, Étienne-François de
Choiseul, sagaciously predicted that the colonies would break free of
Great Britain once Canada was ceded.
At the outset of the conflict between American colonists and their
French opponents on the frontier, particularly at Fort Duquesne, there
was an attempt at unified action. Representatives from seven colonies—
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New
York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland—met in Albany in June 1754 , along