The Least You Need to Know
The French and Indian War was the American phase of the Seven Years War, which historians consider the first “world” war.
Although the English had more colonists, the French had more Indian allies and were far better at wilderness combat tactics than the inflexible British regulars.
Pontiac attempted to unite several tribes in a campaign to stem the tide of English immigration into the Ohio Valley.
Word for the Day
Most of the colonial-Indian conflicts of the 17th and early 18th century (King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, and King George’s War) are collectively called the French and Indian Wars. The cataclysmic North American war of 1754-63 is the French and Indian War.
Main Event
One of the best-loved poems in American literature is Evangeline published in 1849 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem takes as its subject the separation of lovers brought about by an incident of the French and Indian War. In July 1755, the Acadians of Nova Scotia refused to submit to the loyalty oath the victorious British demanded. On July 28, 1755, Governor Charles Lawrence ordered the Acadians’ deportation, and on October 13, 1,100 Acadians were sent into exile. Many others followed—6,000 to 7,000 in all—resettling throughout the colonies, but especially in Louisiana, where, through a contraction of the word Acadians, they became Cajuns.
Main Event
The British so hated and feared the Indians that, on April 10, 1756, the colonial council of Pennsylvania began to offer a “scalp bounty” on Delawares: $50 for a woman’s scalp; $130 for the scalp of each man above ten years of age. How officials were supposed to determine sex and age, let alone tribe, based on the appearance of the scalps was not specified.
Invitation to a Tea Party
(1763-1775)
In This Chapter
Proclamation Line of 1763
Taxation without representation
The Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party
First Continental Congress
Battles of Lexington and Concord
The misnamed “Battle of Bunker Hill”
Common Sense and The Declaration of Independence
Britain finally won the French and Indian War, but in the process, started losing its North American colonies. For most of the war, colonial leaders were the brunt of royal contempt, and provincial military men saw how ineffectual the British regulars were in fighting wilderness wars. The “Mother Country” began to seem unresponsive, uncaring, arrogant, and even incompetent. The colonies, traditionally competitive with one another, emerged from the crucible of war feeling stronger bonds among themselves than with an aloof and unfeeling government across the sea.
King George Draws a Line
The Treaty of Easton, concluded in 1758, had helped turn the tide toward the British in the French and Indian War. By formally agreeing to prohibit white settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains, British authorities persuaded the war-weary Indian allies of the French that they no longer needed to fear invasion by the English. But another product of the French and Indian War, the road that General John Forbes had hacked through the Pennsylvania wilderness to deliver his unwieldy army to do battle at Fort Duquesne, ensured that the treaty would be violated almost immediately. The Forbes Road was the first great avenue into the North American interior. It led to the confluence of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers—the site of present-day Pittsburgh and the gateway to the trans-Allegheny West. Even before the war was over, settlers began to use the road, and the Easton agreement was breached.
With the French neutralized in North America, the British crown saw the next and continuing threat of war to be conflict with the Indians. But as long as a buffer zone existed between the Indians and the colonists, peace could be maintained. Accordingly, on October 7, 1763, King George III issued a new proclamation redrawing the limit of western settlement at the Appalachian Mountains.
At first, the Proclamation of 1763 worked like magic to calm the Indians and to bring to an end the bloody coda to the French and Indian War known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. What the British government hadn’t reckoned on was that, while pacifying the Indians, the Proclamation line enraged the settlers, who went ahead and pushed settlement across the forbidden mountains. When resentful Indians responded with raids, the illegal settlers appealed to royal authorities for aid. They were rebuffed. The gulf that had been created between the colonies and England during the French and Indian War widened. As the frontier regions became more populous and powerful, the allegiance of many authorities in the Tidewater (the more established coastal settlements) leaned westward rather than back toward Europe.
Taxation Without Representation
Fighting any war is expensive, and no war is more costly than one fought across an ocean. During the French and Indian War, the English treasury had amassed a huge debt. The English government, led by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Grenville, decided that it was fitting and proper for the colonies to pay their fair share. Grenville pushed through Parliament heavy duties on numerous commodities imported into the colonies, most notably molasses and sugar, and the laws became known collectively as the Sugar Act. Passed in 1764, this was the first act the English Parliament passed for the specific purpose of raising tax revenues in the colonies.
At the same time, Parliament passed the Currency Act, which forbade the colonies from issuing paper money and required the use of gold in all business transactions. This act thereby guaranteed that the colonies would be economically dependent on England. Parliament also decided to enforce the Acts of Trade and Navigation, which had been passed during the 1650s but never really put into effect. England used these acts to raise additional duty revenue.
The colonists, reeling from a business recession caused by the French and Indian War, and the frontier regions, resentful of the Proclamation Line, were stunned and outraged at being taxed without the benefit of parliamentary representation. After a Boston town meeting denounced “taxation without representation,” the phrase evolved into a battle cry that spread from that city to the other colonies.
The action Boston proposed was nonviolent. The colonies made a Non-Importation Agreement, pledging to boycott a wide variety of English goods. Parliament, taking little heed of this protest, passed the Quartering Act in 1765, requiring colonial governments to furnish barracks and provisions for royal troops. The next year, the act was extended to require the billeting of soldiers in taverns and inns at the expense of the colonists. Not only were these measures a further financial hardship on the colonies, they rankled in a way that reached beyond economics. The Quartering Act was seen as an invasion of privacy and an affront to personal liberty. Even colonists who were not directly affected by the revenue acts were enraged by the Quartering Act.