The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War

204 Pages·2016·7.68 MB·English

by  Fred Anderson

Praise for The War That Made America
“A tale with many facets . . . Anderson writes with intelligence and vigor. He
has given us a rich, cautionary tale about the unpredictability of war.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Well-written, well-organized and well-illustrated . . . All this makes for a great
story . . . Anderson’s admirable project is a reminder that if the long ago conflict
he so ably depicts had gone another way, the newspaper you’re reading now
would likely be written in French.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Short does not mean simplistic. Skillful . . . Compelling . . . This is history at its
finest.”
—The Star Telegraph
“The War That Made America is an important introduction to a forgotten war,
and a fascinating chapter in the life of a founding father long before he became a
dad.”
—The Albany Time Union
“A smartly written history of the Seven Years War in America . . . Lucid and
swift-moving . . . Anderson’s book will awaken interested in a critically important
period in colonial history.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The author of the award-winning, scholarly account Crucible of War offers a
scaled-down, popular version of that history in this companion volume to the PBS
documentary. . . . An excellent introduction to a conflict that most Americans
know little about . . . Like the best popular historians, Anderson combines exhaus-
tive research and an accessible prose style in a volume that should help rescue
the French and Indian War from historical obscurity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An outstanding account of a frequently misunderstood war.”
—Booklist
“This vibrant, sweeping history . . . deserves a place on the bookshelf of every
American.”
—Gary B. Nash, author of The Unknown American Revolution
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fred Anderson is Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
He is the author of A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the
Seven Years’ War, winner of the 1982 Jamestown Prize; Crucible of War: The
Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754–1766,
which won the Francis Parkman and Mark Lynton prizes in 2001; and, most re-
cently (with Andrew Cayton), The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North
America.
ALSO BY FRED ANDERSON

A People’s Army:
Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War

Crucible of War:
The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754-1766

with Andrew Cayton
The Dominion of War:
Empire and Liberty in North America 1500-2000
THE WAR THAT MADE AMERICA
A Short History of the French and Indian War
FRED ANDERSON
Illustrations chosen and captioned by R. Scott Stephenson
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
Copyright © War That Made America Productions LLC and French and Indian War 250, Inc., 2005
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eISBN 978-1-101-11775-0
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Anderson, Fred
The war that made America : a short history of the French and Indian War /
Fred Anderson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-670-03454-3 (hc.)
ISBN 978-0-14-303804-7 (pbk.)
1. United States—History—French and Indian War, 1755–1763. I. Title.
E199.A595 2005
973.2’6—dc22 2005050397
Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward
Version_2
Table of Contents
Praise for The War That Made America
About the Author
Also by Fred Anderson
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface

PART ONE - THE END OF A LONG PEACE
CHAPTER ONE - A Delicate Balance
CHAPTER TWO - The Half King’s Dilemma
CHAPTER THREE - Confrontation on the Ohio
CHAPTER FOUR - “Thou Art Not Yet Dead, My Father”

PART TWO - LA GUERRE SAUSAGE
CHAPTER FIVE - Intervention
CHAPTER SIX - Braddock’s March
CHAPTER SEVEN - A Lake Defended, a Province Purged
CHAPTER EIGHT - La Guerre Sauvage
CHAPTER NINE - The European War Begins
CHAPTER TEN - The Making of a “Massacre”

PART THREE - TURNING POINT
CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Ascent of William Pitt
CHAPTER TWELVE - The Red Cross of Carillon
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Louisbourg
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Colonel Bradstreet’s Coup
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Makers of War, Makers of Peace
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - General Forbes’s Last Campaign
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Reckonings

PART FOUR - CONQUESTS AND CONSEQUENCES
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - A Shift in the Balance
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Incident at La Belle Famille
CHAPTER TWENTY - General Amherst Hesitates
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - The Plains of Abraham
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - “A Mighty Empire”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - The Spanish Gambit
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Peace
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Insurrection
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Crisis and Resolution
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - A Patriot’s Progress

Epilogue: Legacies
Bibliographic Note
Acknowledgments
Index
To some gaffers in Fort Collins
Preface
Today, two hundred and fifty years after the French and Indian War, most Americans are no more
familiar with its events and significance than they are with those of the Peloponnesian War. Few know
that George Washington struck the first spark of a war that set the British North American frontier
ablaze from the Carolinas to Nova Scotia, then spread to Europe, Canada, the Caribbean, West Africa,
India, and, finally, the Philippines. Historians call this immense conflict the Seven Years’ War; with
great justice and characteristic vigor, Winston Churchill described it as “the first world war.” It over-
threw what had been stable balances of power in both Europe and North America and helped to foster
a secessionist rebellion in Britain’s North American colonies. That the man who triggered the war by
trying to project British power into the heart of the continent should have gone on to lead an American
revolutionary army and then to serve as the first president of the United States is surely one of the
greater ironies in a national history that abounds in them.
This book, and the television series it accompanies, tells the tale of the little-known war that
helped to shape George Washington into a man capable of playing the role he ultimately did in Ameri-
can history. But Washington is only a part of the story. In bringing to an end the French empire in
North America, the French and Indian War undermined, and ultimately destroyed, the ability of native
peoples to resist the expansion of Anglo-American settlement. The war’s violence and brutality, more-
over, encouraged whites—particularly those on the frontier—to hate Indians with undiscriminating fury.
In the prewar world of competing empires, Indian-hating had of course been far from unknown. Yet it
had never been so indiscriminate, if only because backwoods settlers knew that their survival could
easily hinge upon making accurate distinctions between friendly and hostile groups. The widespread
Indian-hating that the French and Indian War engendered would be reinforced by the War of Indepen-
dence and contribute to the formation of American cultural identity, sanctioning the removal or annihi-
lation of native peoples as necessary to the advance of civilization.
In that sense the story that this book tells is not merely of the French and Indian War as a prelude
to the American Revolution with which we are familiar—the struggle for liberty against oppression,
rights against power, independence against subjugation. It is a darker story than that: one in which
imperial ambitions produce unpredictable, violent results; in which victory breeds unanticipated disas-
ters for the victor; in which the evidently benign growth of a population of peaceable farmers leads to
the wholesale destruction of native peoples. This one is as much a part of American history as the
brighter, more familiar, more comfortable story of rights defended and liberty maintained, which is the
usual way we think of the birth of our Republic. That both stories meet in the person of George Wash-
ington is a fact worth remembering as we seek to understand the causes, character, and conse-
quences of a war no one wanted, but which nonetheless transformed the colonists’ world forever. It is
not too much to call it the war that made America.