---

Historical Background

Expansion and Conflict

The population growth and territorial expansion of the English colonies produced collisions. The French, the Spanish, and the Indians all contested English pretensions in the 18th century.

The French proved most formidable. Numerically inferior to the English and scattered in tiny islands throughout the wilderness, they nevertheless possessed important advantages. They had an authoritarian rather than a representative government. While the English depended mainly on poorly trained militia led by inexperienced officers, the French fielded disciplined regulars commanded by the best officers of France. While the colonial legislatures haggled and denied money and troops, the French could manipulate efficiently their money, men, and supplies. And whereas the Colonies treated individually with the Indians, and for the most part tactlessly, the French executed a uniform Indian policy with some skill.

The earliest clash of the 18th-century was Queen Anne's War, which broke out in 1702. In this New World counterpart of the War of the Spanish Succession, the French and Spanish joined in an 11-year struggle with the English. On the southern borders of the English Colonies, South Carolinians in 1702 destroyed the Spanish town of St. Augustine and in 1704 wrecked the Spanish mission system in western Florida. Two years later they repulsed a joint French-Spanish attack on Charleston. On the northern borders, a series of barbarous French attacks on New England settlements, notably on Deerfield, Mass., in 1704 (see p. 178), led ultimately to a series of retaliatory expeditions against Port Royal, which was captured in 1710. The war finally ended with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

The older section of the Frary House, in the foreground, is the major surviving landmark of 17th-century Deerfield. (National Park Service)

The Treaty of Utrecht was designed to insure peace through the maintenance of a balance of power, but it soon became evident that a piece of paper could not restrain the English colonists. In 1716, Virginia's bold Lieutenant Governor, Alexander Spotswood, dramatized the possibilities of westward expansion by leading the "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe" across the Blue Ridge. Ten years later, New Yorkers ignored French claims and planted Fort Oswego on the shores of Lake Ontario. (See pp. 212-213.) To the south, on lands claimed by Spain, James Oglethorpe founded a new English colony in 1733.

To Oglethorpe and his associates, Georgia was a humanitarian project designed to provide new lives for English debtors. To the English Government, it was a military outpost from which attacks could be launched against Spanish Florida. To the Carolinians, even though they lost valuable western lands as a result, it was a welcome buffer against the Indian attacks from which they periodically suffered. Almost immediately, the Georgians and the Spanish Floridians began trying by force of arms to dislodge each other. Neither succeeded. In the last of a series of expeditions against St. Augustine, in 1739-40, Georgians came within sight of their goal but failed to reach it. Spaniards fared no better. After an unsuccessful attempt to take the Georgia outpost of Fort Frederica in 1742 (see pp. 54-55), they gave up the effort to expel the intruders.

Rusted old artillery pieces and sturdy tabby walls of the King's Magazine are among the striking remains of Fort Frederica, Ga. The fort was established in 1736 by James Oglethorpe. (National Park Service)

Relations with the French along the western and northern frontiers of the English Colonies, if less bloody, were equally explosive. France claimed everything west of the Appalachians by right of a tenuous occupancy of the Mississippi Valley, a claim that England, because of the interests of her fur traders and land speculators, refused to acknowledge. England finally moved in 1754 to strengthen the Colonies for the approaching conflict. Two imperial Indian agents were appointed to coordinate and improve Indian policy. (See sites associated with Sir William Johnson and John Stuart, pp. 128-130, 212, 213, 224.) An overall commander, Maj. Gen. Edward Braddock, took charge of the American military forces and, to counteract the advantage of the professional French Army, British regulars began to arrive in America.

The French and Indian War broke out early in 1754 when the French seized and fortified the forks of the Ohio River. (See pp. 145-148.) Lt. Col. George Washington marched west with a force of Virginia militia to contest the action but was besieged in Fort Necessity, southeast of the forks of the Ohio, and compelled to surrender. (See pp. 65-66.) The following summer, General Braddock's expedition against the French stronghold ended even more disastrously when the French and their Indian allies ambushed his command and all but annihilated it.

The Forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet, was a Gateway to the West held successively by France, Britain, and the United States. The sites of French Fort Duquesne and British Fort Pitt are preserved in Point State Park, at the apex of modern Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle." (Courtesy, Samuel A. Musgrave.)

For 3 years the English tried in vain to drive back the French. Then William Pitt rose to power in England in 1757. He named young and vigorous men to commands in America, and the tide turned. In rapid succession the French strongholds fell to the English armies: Louisbourg, Fort Duquesne, Fort Frontenac, Fort Niagara, Fort Ticonderoga, Crown Point, Quebec, and finally Montreal itself. With the surrender of Montreal on September 8, 1760, the French gave up their claims to Canada and all its dependencies in North America. The war flared again, briefly, in 1761 when Spain came to the aid of France. The British, however, effortlessly seized Cuba and other Spanish possessions, and France and Spain had no choice but to sue for peace.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, ended the French and Indian War (in Europe, the Seven Years' War). Besides losing Canada, France surrendered the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley to England. For the return of Cuba, Spain had to relinquish Florida. To compensate her ally, France gave to Spain western Louisiana and the city of New Orleans. England thus emerged as the possessor of all North America east of the Mississippi River, and in the long run her mainland colonies profited very signally. No longer menaced by the French, they were free to expand westward in comparative security. They had gained from the war valuable military experience and a new sense of solidarity. Their ties with the mother country were weakened still further.

Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, was the key post on the traditional path of invasion between Canada and the Hudson Valley, both in the French and Indian War and in the War for Independence. (Courtesy, Fort Ticonderoga Association.)