Of critical importance to the start of the Seven Years' War was the diminution of Iroquois power in the borderlands between the French and English. This covered the Ohio Territory (west of the Appalachians) and the Pays d'en haut, surrounding the Great Lakes in modern day Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc. While the Iroquois maintained independence of action, they could balance the two empires against one another. But by the mid 18th century, the English had grown far more powerful than either the Iroquois or the French and were beginning to exert pressure on their borders. The Iroquois had come to power by the mid-seventeenth century, and their access to Dutch firearms made them a force to be reckoned with. The Five Nations, originally the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca (with the Tuscarora added in the 18th century), formed at some point before European contact in order to end the Mourning Wars, which referred to the constant wars to gain captives as compensation for those lost in raids. So war begot war, and it was useful to come together to agree not to raid one another. That said, they still raided non-joiners, and those outside the Confederacy, like the Eries and the Hurons, suffered for it. Iroquois power peaked in the 1660s, when the Dutch, their main supplier of weapons, were forced out of New Amsterdam, which was renamed New York, and the Iroquois exhausted themselves out of constant war.
The Iroquois supported "half-kings," sort of viceroys or smaller leaders who could govern allied tribes. One half-king of Mingoes (Iroquois allies living in the Ohio Valley) was known as Tanaghrisson. His crossing of paths with a twenty-one-year-old George Washington and French Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville would change history. In short, Washington led two expeditions on behalf of the Governor of Virginia into the Ohio Territory. In the first, he led his freezing men to a French fort in December 1753 in order to deliver a letter ordering the French to vacate a fort they had built in modern-day Pennsylvania. In May of the following year, Washington returned to the Ohio Country with Tanaghrisson, and fought a battle with the French at Jumonville Glen, modern-day southwestern Pennsylvania, which resulted in a slaughter of Ensign de Jumonville and many of his men who had surrendered. But how? Anderson does a good analysis. First, he points out that a massacre certainly happened, despite those who claim that the French casualties were actually the result of battle. While shots fired in battle at that time "almost invariably" result in 2-4 times as many wounds as deaths (and indeed there is a three-to-one wounded to dead ratio among the Virginia men), the French suffered thirteen dead and only one wounded. I didn't take good enough notes on this, but my recollection of what happened is that England wanted the colonials to take a harder line on French fort-building west of the Appalachians, but not necessarily to start a war. Dinwiddie, the Virginia governor sent Washington to deliver that message to the French, but to strike at them if they were taking offensive measures. The French actually planned on having a diplomatic meeting with the Virginians they knew were coming their way. But Tanaghrisson, sick of the French for his own reasons, manipulated events to cause a battle, and after Tanaghrisson and Washington had won by surprising the French, he scalped and killed those who surrendered to cause embarrassment to the French.
As the war progressed, it required greater English investment in the colonies and greater interference with the English colonists, who were unable to successfully coordinate the war effort amongst themselves. The confrontations that resulted from this are especially interesting for how they foreshadowed issues in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, especially with regards to military justice and contracts. Whereas English officers, coming from a world of immense class differences, were used to instant obedience by their enlisted soldiers, Americans were more contractually minded. Americans weren't desperate to fight the war. They signed contracts to do so, and if not landowners in their own right, they had greater social mobility than was available in England at the time. When the contracts they signed weren't respected, English soldiers tended to acquiesce, while American soldiers would eventually mutiny or desert. Similarly, the English were confronted, in the summer of 1756, with colonial governments that refused to provide adequate housing for their troops. To the English, it was hard to understand why Americans would not house the soldiers sent to protect them, but to the Americans, who had lived under "salutary neglect" for so long, the idea of supporting soldiers at their personal expense was shocking, and after all, it wasn't like the individual housing the soldiers would see the benefits of victories in Canada and Ohio. The French and English were ultimately both dealing with similar issues: convincing their colonists and the nearby Indians to fight for them. Initially, the French were more successful, but the Marquis de Montcalm alienated Indian allies later on, and the English would eventually overwhelm the French not only with Indian allies but way larger armies made of colonials (the English colonial population was far larger than the French).
Different states had different reasons for not supporting the war effort. Maryland did not support the effort at all due to a small western border that gave them little reason to support. Virginia supported more due to a theoretical state western boundary all the way on the Pacific Ocean. Pennsylvania is an interesting case. Pennsylvanian politics had been deadlocked since 1740 over how to tax "proprietary" lands, that is, lands owned by the Penn family. Pennsylvania's governors had long refused requests from the legislature to raise funds by taxing Penn family lands, which provided most of the incomes for the Penn family, and in response, the legislature would not levy any tax on the population without also taxing the Penns. Meanwhile, the Quakers in the assembly, being pacifists, refused to appropriate any funds for war. There was no breakthrough until German settlers who had been attacked by Mingoes came through the streets of Philadelphia carrying the mangled corpses of their relatives and Scots-Irish settlers threatened to take up arms against the assembly itself. This actually caused the end of Quaker participation in politics in protest of the war funding, and the few Quakers who remained were excommunicated.
I had planned to write a lot more about the actual specifics of the war itself--battles, tactics, etc.--but looking at that now is a lot of work. In short, the war was basically a war of attrition in the end. The decisive English victory began with several losses, since the French used maneuver warfare and irregular warfare with Indian allies to exact significant losses on British columns and fortresses. However, because the English had far more colonists in the area by an order of magnitude, and because the English were able to recruit Indian allies (or at least keep them from fighting for the French), the English won. As an illustration, the campaigns of 1758 featured 50,000 Anglo-American troops, which was a number that would be two-thirds of the entire population of Canada. The French had 6,800 regular troops, and 16,000 total if you count the untrained militia. A difficulty for the French was how to use their Indian allies. They were most useful to the French at the beginning of the war. But they were unreliable allies since (1) they didn't care about French territorial gains, and (2) were more interested in war prizes, so they would leave a campaign after just one battle when they took a captive, or a scalp, or some treasure. I definitely can't blame them. The whole war was just to decide which colonial power would dominate them, so it didn't make sense for them to tie themselves to any one power. The knockout blow of the war, according to Anderson, was not the Battle of Quebec, when the English took the French capital, but the Battle of Quiberon Bay, when the English gained the naval supremacy in the Atlantic and cut off any French resupply.
The parts about military justice were especially interesting to me. The culture shock between the Englishmen in the English Army and New Englanders who had served in provincial militias and armies were huge. The New Englanders were used to serving as civilians in arms. Anderson writes of the New Englanders, "A soldier who insulted his captain could expect to bear the consequences, which--depending upon the officer--might range from being knocked down on the spot to being placed under arrest, being court-martialed, and receiving ten or twenty lashes with a cat-o'-nine-tails. But under regular military discipline, insolence to an officer was a crime that carried a penalty of five hundred lashes; the theft of a shirt could earn a man a thousand; and desertion (no uncommon act among New England troops) was punishable by hanging or a firing-squad execution." New Englanders also had a superiority complex about being sons of freeholders and descendants of religious dissenters, and they certainly didn't have the inferiority complex that was found among the lower classes that made up the English Army.
Part of what made the English so dominant in this period was sort of an economy of scale that came from rolling up all of North America into one market. Since France, England, and Spain were only permitting their colonies to trade with the mother country's network, there was a snowballing effect from building a bigger network. The result was that, instead of being made poorer by being conquered, the people conquered by the English in the Seven Years' War all across the world would have seen more economic activity after the conquest than before. This secured cooperation from the conquered, instead of resistance. But while this was true for the conquered, the conquerors (the Americans) were then asked to pay the price of that conquest with The Sugar Act, The Stamp Act, and so on. These acts that imposed greater taxes on Americans are described in detail in the book, but I won't get into them here, since I think they will be covered in my other books on the Revolution. All in all, I think that distinction between the conquered and the conquerors sort of reversing roles is important in understanding why the Revolution would happen among those who felt like they should have reaped more rewards for defeating the French.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- In 1756, it cost nearly sixpence a milt to move a two-hundred-weight barrel of beef from Albany to Lake George, but by the end of 1757, the same barrel only cost less than twopence a mile on the same route. This illustrates the massive development efforts on roads into the frontier during the war.
- I'm pretty sure "habanero" like the pepper also means it comes from Havana a.k.a. Habana.
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