The
Seven Years War
The year
1755 saw the outbreak in America of the fourth of the series of Anglo-French
colonial wars that had begun in 1689.
The two powers were not officially at war in Europe until the following
year, when the Seven Years' War broke out and Britain and Prussia were allied against France, Austria, Russia and, later, Spain. This alignment, the result of the celebrated "reversal of
alliances of 1756, brought the
predominant seapower, Great Britain, into alliance with the rising military
state, Prussia, whose army, commanded at this time by an able and ruthless
sovereign, Frederick the Great, was becoming a major factor in the European
power Pattern.
The long
inter-colonial struggle had brought Britain less success in America than might
have been expected. The English in
America outnumbered the French twelve to one, but their fourteen disunited and
uncooperative colonies were ill organized for war by comparison with New
France. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713)
had given the British Nova Scotia, but they had failed to make headway against
the colony on the St. Lawrence. As the
Seven Years' War rolled on, the rival empires were struggling for the control of
the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The
British colonies were exposed to the imminent
danger of being contained,
between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic coast, by a chain of French military
posts connecting Canada with Louisiana.
The very first shots of the war were fired in the Ohio Valley in 1754,
between French outposts and troops commanded by Colonel George Washington, who
had been sent by the governor of Virginia to warn the French off. Washington
attacked a French patrol and then was forced to surrender to the main body of
the French forces and return to Virginia.
In
1755 the British government intervened on a large scale in the inter-colonial
conflict. Edward Braddock was sent out
as Commander in, Chief, and the British Army, represented by two regular
infantry battalions, made its first attempt at operating actively in
America. The expedition, advancing on
Fort Duquesne, was disastrously defeated at the hands of an inferior French and
Indian force. The next two years
witnessed a largely unrelieved series of British disasters. The French commander Dieskau did meet defeat
on Lake George a couple of months after Braddock's reverse, but in 1756 a new
general, the Marquis du Montcalm, arrived from France. His first move was against Oswego, the only
British post on the shores of the Great Lakes, which he captured quickly. In 1757 he took Fort William
Henry, on Lake George, and ended for that year any idea of a British advance on
Montreal. The British commander
in-chief, Lord Loudoun, did not venture to deliver an attack on the great
French naval fortress of Louisbourg in Cape Breton Island because he was
doubtful whether his naval support was equal to mastering the French ships
based there.
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