The Seven Years' War part 2

So we've been discussing the Seven Years' War in North America, also commonly called the French and Indian War. But as I mentioned in the last video, I think "Seven Years' War" is a better name for this conflict because it was the first global war that happened more than 150 years before World War One. This global war was, at its heart, about who would be the dominant empire in the world: would it be England or would it be France?

Now, in the North American theater of this war, England, France, and their Native American allies on both sides were vying for territory, particularly territory along the Appalachian Mountain range in upstate New York and Canada. This kind of western territory was the border between the English settlement and Indian country to the west. So in this video, let's talk about how the war actually progressed and what its consequences were for North America and later the United States.

All right, so we've got the English, the French, and a number of Native American tribes all kind of jostling for position in North America. Now, what stresses the British out the most is the presence of the French in the Ohio River Valley. Both the British and the French have laid claim to this territory, and they're both eager to strengthen their territorial claims by building forts and otherwise having a show of possession of the area. They argue over who had a presence there first.

To establish the English presence in the Ohio River Valley, the English send a young officer named George Washington to build a fort. George Washington is only 22 years old at the time, and he and his men go out to this area. They run into some French with their Native American allies at Fort Duquesne, which is where the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers come together, which is today Pittsburgh. So George Washington and his allies get the jump on the French, but that doesn't last very long. They're overpowered, and they fall back and establish Fort Necessity on account of it was necessary. They managed to hold out for a little while, but eventually, the French, the Canadians, and their Native American allies force Washington to surrender, and he goes back to Virginia. So that’s 1754, and we'll call that fail number one.

All right, so then a year later, 1755, the British try to displace the French from Fort Duquesne once again, and they send Major General Edward Braddock with George Washington once again. Now he's 23, back to Fort Duquesne, and it's a complete disaster. This time, the French and their Indian allies get the drop on the English, and with a much smaller force, completely decimate the English troops. Braddock is killed, and George Washington has to take command of the retreat. So that's fail number two.

In general, this war does not go terribly well for the British at the beginning, except in one area: Acadia, where the British manage to attain control and they kick out the French settlers, the Acadians, who are transported down to the French settlement of New Orleans in Louisiana, where eventually their name becomes garbled, and they're known as the Cajuns—not the Acadians, but the Cajuns. In 1756, England finally gets around to actually declaring war on France, but it's really not for another year that the war starts to actually go well. In 1757, the reason that the war starts going well for the English finally is that the Prime Minister, William Pitt, decides that he is going to pour money into this endeavor.

He thinks that the English have just not had enough men, materials, money, and Indian allies up until this point, so he is really going to commit the British Empire to exiling the French from this area of North America. So between 1757 and 1760, things really start looking up for the British. They finally capture Fort Duquesne, and they capture the Ohio Valley, Nova Scotia, upstate New York, and Quebec. So by 1760, pretty much all the fighting is done in North America. The English have more or less forced the French out of the eastern seaboard and Canada.

In 1763, the English and the French sit down to hammer out the Treaty of Paris. So the Treaty of Paris in 1763— and I apologize, I cannot help the fact that there are like a million Treaties of Paris. There's also the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War; there's the Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-American War. Paris was the place where you made treaties, and they're all called the Treaty of Paris, but this is the one that happened in 1763.

In general, this was a big victory for the English. The English not only got most of France's possessions in the New World, they got New France, aka Canada. They got Spanish Florida, as Spain was fighting on the side of France, so they lose that. They got a bunch of sugar islands in the Caribbean, and they pretty much got recognized as the premier power in Europe and the premier imperial power, so the largest and most powerful empire in the world.

Let’s not forget that the colonial Americans, citizens of Massachusetts and New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia—they were on the winning side here. They fought alongside the British regulars; they repelled the French and their Native American allies. This was actually a pretty big confidence boost for young America.

However, there were some other consequences of this war on the not-so-good side. The Seven Years' War was not particularly good for Native Americans in general, both those who had allied with the British and those who had allied with the French. They no longer had two imperial powers vying against each other in North America that they could play off of each other. Now Native Americans were only dealing with the British, who certainly were not giving them a fair seat at the table.

Not long after the Seven Years' War, they will institute what's called the Proclamation of 1763, which was basically a boundary line along the Appalachian Mountains, saying that that was going to be the end of white settlement, that they would reserve all the lands west of the Appalachians for Native Americans. Well, you can imagine how much the American white settlers respected that, which is to say they completely ignored this boundary line.

So the Native Americans will continue to be pushed farther west and to develop more of what we call a race consciousness: the idea that they were all in one big group together who had to combine forces to repel English settlement. The other major outcome of the Seven Years' War was taxation. Remember that William Pitt won the Seven Years' War by pouring money into it. At the end of the Seven Years' War, England is in a lot of debt, and they have just gone to a lot of trouble to protect their North American interests.

Now, as they are looking for ways to make revenue to make up the deficit the Seven Years' War has placed on them, they look at their North American colonists and say, "You should pay your way." The American colonists, who have been used to more than a century of called salutary or benign neglect, are shocked and outraged that the British Empire is now clamping down on them. The colonists' reaction to those new taxes will propel the colonies into revolution.