french indian war essay

The French and Indian war is also called by the name of “Seven Years’ War.” This war took place in what is present day Pittsburgh, USA. There are both causes and repercussions due to the actions of the English and French and their participation in the war. Each party felt entitled to land and each party was willing to fight and wage war in order to prove that they would be in fact the sole inhabitants of the region. The war began as a dispute over land in the Ohio River Valley, as both French and English settlers had moved towards colonization of this region. English settlers had previously settled in Virginia, moving northwest into the region. French settlers were moving east from the Great Lakes area and south from Canada. George Washington was working with the English forces to remove the French from the region by force. The English ran into a French group at Uniontown, and the English massacred the French at the Battle of Jumonville. Washington setup a camp at Great Meadows and began constructing a fort, however the French and their 600 soldiers were able to overpower the English and gain control of the area. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 marked the ending of the French and Indian war/Seven Years’ War. Consequences to the war included France and its removal as a party from the New World. The French were expelled to Canada and dispersed to smaller colonies. This war nearly doubled the size of Britain’s national debt, and the debt was attempted to be lightened by taxation on the colonies, but this attempt was met with great opposition. This opposition to British taxation in the colonies was the initial driving force for the American Revolutionary War. France was militarily defeated and the loss eventually led to the French Revolution, which began in 1789. For the native populations, the loss of French allies in the New World was a blow to their independence and their.
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By the 1580s the French were ahead of the British in reaching into the interior of North America. They had established trading companies there, and their ships regularly brought furs back to France. Early in the seventeenth century they had two successful permanent settlements—Acadia (1604) and Quebec (1608)—but any advantage they accrued from all this was soon lost. Although the European population of New France grew steadily—from 3,200 in 1666 to some 10,000 in 1700, and roughly 70,000 by 1750—it was far outpaced by the English colonies to the south where during this period the population grew to more than a million. Despite this, however, the French remained convinced that their presence in North America had real strategic value. They believed that, if they could link New France, via the Ohio River, to their settlements in Louisiana and along the Mississippi, they could establish an effective military barrier to English expansion. If not, they feared, it would only be a matter of time before the British dominated all of North America and its vast resources. By the middle of the eighteenth century both the British and the French believed that a military contest in North America was inevitable as an element of their global rivalry. In 1749, Jacques-Pierre de Taffanel de la Jonquiere, the governor of New France began dispatching military units and friendly American Indians to attack English settlers in lands the French claimed, threaten tribes loyal to the English, arrest or kill British traders, and construct fortifications at key points. He also sent a small force to put into place, along the Ohio River, a set of lead plates that proclaimed that France owned the waterway and all the land whose waters emptied into it—in effect, all of the Ohio country. When this detachment came upon some British traders, they sent them back to Philadelphia with a letter to Governor.
Enter Your Search Terms to Get Started! The French and Indian War The French and Indian War caused the American colonies to become more unified as Americans and more distant from Britain, due to differing political, economic, and ideological relations after the war. Throughout the war the colonists wanted to head west to get away form British control. After the war Britain started reducing salutary neglect and started imposing more taxes. The colonists are resistant to this. On the other side many people praised Britain for their actions in the war. Before the French and Indian war North America was dominated by the French and English, but after the war it was dominated by the English and Spanish. (Document A) In 1755 George Washington was loyal to Britain, he showed the first signs of colonial leadership. The Ohio River Valley was a place of contention between the French and the British. George Washington went to the French Fort Duquesne to try to defeat the French. Later in 1763 the Treaty of Paris was made which took French power off of North America. Stated in a soldiers diary from Massachusetts during the war, the colonial soldiers were being treated poorly. The soldier is comparing the colonial soldiers to the British soldiers which he calls slaves. There was much tension between the colonists and the Indians before the war. (Document B) The colonists were moving west to escape British control. The Indians didn’t like this because they felt that the colonists did not use the land the way it was supposed to be used. After the war the economic relation between Britain and the colonies was very unstable. Britain arranged many taxes on the colonies which were unaccepted by the colonists. Britain imposed these taxes in order to pay for the war. In 1763 a British order in council proclaimed that Britain needed to stop practicing salutary neglect because they were not.