French & Indian War: Empire, Alliances & Debt · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Why the nations chose France

Most Native nations in the Ohio country and the Great Lakes sided with France, and the reason was straightforward: the French came to trade and the British came to settle. New France held perhaps 70,000 European inhabitants against well over a million in the British colonies, and a thin population of traders and soldiers does not take your farmland. French officials married into Native families, learned the languages, and dealt through gift-giving and alliance in ways the nations recognised.

The Haudenosaunee were the great exception and played a harder game. Their long-standing policy was neutrality between the two empires — leaning toward the British at Albany for trade while avoiding commitment that would make them anyone's auxiliary. Holding that line for decades is why they mattered so much to both sides, and it eventually broke under the pressure of this war.

Alliance also meant obligation in both directions, and the nations expected it honoured. Gifts of powder, cloth, kettles and tools were not bribes but the recognised form of a continuing relationship, renewed at councils where speeches and wampum did the work a signed treaty did in Europe. When the British took the French posts in 1760 and their commander Jeffery Amherst cut gift-giving as wasteful expense, he was not economising on a courtesy — he was ending the relationship, and Pontiac’s War followed within three years.

Colonial attempts to co-ordinate failed. At the Albany Congress of 1754, delegates from seven colonies met partly to secure the Haudenosaunee alliance and partly to discuss union; Benjamin Franklin proposed the Albany Plan and published the *Join, or Die* cartoon. Every colonial assembly rejected it. Twenty-two years before independence, the colonies could not agree to combine even when a war had started.

Part 2 · A war that became a world war

The early years went badly for Britain. In 1755 General Braddock marched on Fort Duquesne with regulars trained for European lines and was destroyed in the woods, losing nearly a thousand men and his own life; Washington, serving as his aide, had two horses shot under him and helped lead the survivors out.

Britain's fortunes turned when William Pitt took charge of the war effort and committed money on a scale nobody had attempted — subsidising Prussia in Europe, paying colonial assemblies to raise troops, and sending the navy to strangle French reinforcement. Quebec fell in 1759 and Montreal in 1760.

The scale was unlike anything the continent had seen. Britain sent regular regiments across the Atlantic in numbers never previously attempted, and colonial assemblies raised thousands of provincial troops alongside them; Massachusetts alone put a substantial share of its military-age men into service across the war years. Paying for it is what put the colonial assemblies in debt too, and why they felt they had already contributed when Parliament came asking in 1764.

Colonists fought in large numbers and formed views. They saw British regulars as arrogant and their officers as contemptuous of provincial troops; British officers regarded colonial militia as undisciplined and the colonial assemblies as grudging about paying for their own defence. Both impressions were partly fair, and both were remembered.

Part 3 · Victory, debt and a line on the map

Winning cost more than anyone had planned. Britain's national debt stood near £72 million in 1754 and about £133 million by 1763 — nearly doubled in nine years — and servicing it consumed a large share of annual revenue. On top of that, holding the new territory required a standing force of roughly ten thousand troops in America, at something like £220,000 a year.

Parliament's conclusion was that the colonies, who had been defended at this expense and now enjoyed the security, should contribute. The Sugar Act followed in 1764 and the Stamp Act in 1765. From London this was obvious fairness. From Boston it looked like a new kind of taxation imposed by a body in which nobody from Boston sat.

Then came the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlement west of the Appalachian crest. London's motive was practical: Pontiac's War had erupted that year as Native nations across the Great Lakes attacked British posts, and another frontier war was unaffordable. But colonists had just fought a war substantially about access to the Ohio country, and were now told they could not go there. Washington himself called the line a temporary expedient and went on acquiring western land.

Part 4 · Two reasonable readings of the same nine years

It helps to see that both sides had a defensible case, because the quarrel that follows is otherwise just villainy. Parliament had spent an enormous sum defending the colonies, had acquired territory the colonies wanted, and was asking them to carry a modest share of the ongoing cost. British taxpayers at home paid considerably more per head than colonists did, and knew it.

The colonial case was not mainly about the amount. It was that these taxes were voted by a Parliament containing no colonial member, while the colonists' own assemblies had been voting their taxes for a century. The principle they appealed to — that an Englishman is taxed only by a body he has a hand in choosing — was not invented for the occasion, as you saw in the last chapter.

The war also removed the reason the colonies had needed Britain. For a century a French Canada on the northern border had made British protection worth accepting almost any terms for. After 1763 France was gone from the mainland, and the colonies were suddenly far safer — and far less dependent. Victory dissolved the common interest that had held the empire together, which is among the reasons a quarrel about taxes could escalate as fast as it did.

What made it insoluble was that both were right about different things. Parliament was right that the colonies were lightly taxed and well defended. The colonists were right that they had a long practice of self-taxation that was now being set aside. Neither argument answers the other, which is usually the shape of a quarrel that ends in a war.