Braddock's War: The French And Indian War

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TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO THIS winter, European courts and diplomats were moving ever closer to war. It would prove larger, more brutal, and costlier than anyone anticipated, and if would have an outcome more decisive than any war in the previous three centuries. Historians usually call it the Seven Years' War. Modern Americans, recalling a few disconnected episodes — Braddock's defeat, the Fort William Henry "massacre," the Battle of Quebec — know it as the French and Indian War. Neither name communicates the conflict's immensity and importance. Winston Churchill came closer in The History of the English-Speaking Peoples when he called it "a world war — the first in history," noting that unlike the previous Anglo-French wars, this time …show more content…
On the far side of that range lay a world where native peoples controlled the continent. On the other side we find a different world, in which Indian power waned as the United States grew into the largest republic and the most powerful empire on earth. In that sense it may not be too much to give the conflict yet another name: the War That Made America.
SEEING WHAT NORTH AMERICA LOOKED LIKE ON THE far side of the Seven Years'
War illuminates the changes the war wrought and its lingering influences. The traditional narrative of American history treats the "colonial period" as a tale of maturation that begins with the founding of Virginia and Massachusetts and culminates in the Revolution. It implies that the demographic momentum of the British colonies and the emergence of a new "American character" made independence and the expansion of Anglo-American settlement across the continent inevitable. Events like the destruction of New France, while interesting, were hardly central to a history driven by population expansion, economic growth, and the flowering of democracy. Indians, regrettably, were fated to vanish beneath the Anglo-American …show more content…
First, permanent colonies spread disease in their immediate vicinities; second, they radically increased the volume of trade goods that flowed into Indian communities. The results of this transformation were many, powerful, and enduring.
Epidemic diseases — smallpox, diphtheria, measles, plague — dealt a series of deadly blows to native populations. Ironically, the Indians nearest the European settlements, and who sustained the earliest and worst losses, also had the closest access to trade goods and weapons that gave them unprecedented advantages over more distant groups. As warriors raided for captives to prop up their dwindling populations and pelts to exchange for European weapons, wars among native peoples became ever more deadly. The Five Nations of the Iroquois, in what is now upstate New
York, grew powerful in the mid-seventeenth century by trading with the Dutch at Fort Orange
(Albany) and seizing captives from Canada to the Ohio Valley to the Carolinas. Iroquois
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