In New England, the brief span of peace was drawing to a
close. The Abnakis had pledged their allegiance to Queen Anne, but their true
loyalties lay with the French. Provoked by the English settlers who kept
pushing into their territory, the Indians were urged on by French agents who
kept them well supplied with ammunition. One of these men, a Jesuit priest
named Sebastian Rale, had lived for years among the Norridgewock tribe on the
Kennebec River in Maine. A trusted adviser who spoke their own tongue, Rale
incited the Indians to strike back at the English, who were dotting Abnaki
lands with blockhouses and farms. In the autumn of 1721, his charges began
attacking isolated farmsteads.
The Massachusetts authorities reacted particularly strongly
to these raids; Rale, living among the Indians in their forest home, was the
embodiment of all the English feared and loathed. In 1723, a force of 230 men
moved up the Penobscot and burned the mission town of Passadumkeag, but they
failed to capture the soldier-priest. The next summer, another expedition
struck north at Rale’s headquarters in the town of Norridgewock and took the
village completely by surprise. The English held their fire while the Indians
got off a wild, scattered volley, and then killed twenty-six of the panicked
natives with a well-aimed fusillade. The surviving Norridgewocks jumped into
the river and swam to safety, but Rale refused to surrender, forcing the
English to shoot him although they had hoped to take him alive.
His death had the predictable results: The Abnakis struck
back not only along the Maine frontier but in Massachusetts and New Hampshire
as well. The English counterattacked with forces raised by the colonial
governments and with companies of volunteers who offered to fight Indians in
return for pay, scalp bonuses, and booty. Captain John Lovewell, a resident of
Dunstable, raised one such company after the Indians burned his Massachusetts
border town in the autumn of 1724. He petitioned the General Court in Boston to
pay five shillings a day for his volunteers. The court would not put up more
than two and a half, but it offered a bounty of £100 on every male Indian
scalp. Late in February 1724, Lovewell and his eighty-seven men surprised a
small encampment of ten Indians, killed them all, and went home to collect
£1,000.
Cheered by his success and the easy money, Lovewell
immediately embarked on a summer campaign accompanied by forty-seven
volunteers. On May 8, the company sighted a single Indian on the shore of Saco
Pond. Lovewell gave chase, suspecting that he had been posted to lure the
company into an ambush but confident that the English could handle any assault.
He was wrong. A large party of Indians ambushed the company and boldly closed
to within a few yards of the English. “The battle continued fiercely throughout
the day,” said a contemporary account, “the Indians roaring and yelling and
howling like wolves, barking like dogs, and making all sorts of hideous noises;
the English frequently shouting and huzzaing, as they did after the first
round.” But the shouting and huzzaing died away as one Englishman after another
went down. Lovewell himself died late in the afternoon, and though the Indians
finally abandoned the field, they left only a few of their opponents unhurt.
The survivors retreated at once, leaving the badly wounded
behind, among them a lieutenant who asked that his gun be charged and left with
him. “The Indians will come in the morning to scalp me,” he said, “and I’ll
kill one more of ‘em if I can.” Only fourteen soldiers eventually made it home
to receive barren solace from such ministers as the Reverend Thomas Symmes of
Bradford, who declaimed that the reason “so many brave men should descend into
battle and perish” was clearly the general backsliding and irreverence of New
Englanders, which had aroused the wrath of a vengeful God. Nevertheless,
further English campaigns in Maine once more forced Abnaki chiefs to the treaty
table in 1725, where they again acknowledged their submission to England.
Except for an occasional isolated atrocity, the New England
frontier remained quiet for the next two decades, then boiled up again in 1744
when England went to war over who should succeed to the throne of Austria. This
time, George II gave his name to the struggle in the colonies, and King
George’s War saw the frontiers again convulsed from New York to Maine by Indian
raids and white counterraids. The most significant part of the colonial war,
however, was not the Indian fighting but an extraordinary expedition, mounted
by New Englanders without any help from England, against the great
fortress-rock of Louisburg, the anchor of France’s right flank in the New
World. Built on Cape Breton Island, the fort guarded the approaches to the
vital St. Lawrence River with the strongest concentration of cannons in North
America. Nevertheless, 4,200 Massachusetts militiamen took it in June 1745.
England, astonished and delighted at this unprecedented triumph of provincial
arms, repaid Massachusetts for the cost of the expedition but then enraged the
colonists by handing the fort back to the French in return for Madras when the
treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the European phase of the war in 1748.
The peace that followed King George’s War was a truce, a
brief respite before the culminating struggle for supremacy in North America
that would have bagpipes and French battle horns challenging one another in
virgin pine forests. This final clash of arms would come to be known as the
French and Indian War, an inadequate title that fails to distinguish it from
all the wars, large and small, that preceded it. Lawrence Henry Gipson, the
most thorough historian of the climactic struggle, chose a far better name –
the Great War for Empire.
As before, Indian support would be crucial to both French
and English in the coming fight, and one who saw that fact clearly was a
cheerful, indefatigable Irishman who had come to America in the 1730s to manage
his uncle’s estates in the Mohawk Valley. His name was William Johnson, but the
Iroquois knew him as their brother Warraghiyagey – “He-Who-Does-Much.” He
opened a small trading post in 1738 and immediately won a reputation among the
Indians as one of the few white men who would deal fairly with them. By the
1750s, this reputation had made him the largest trader in the area. He kept his
home, which he shared with his wife, a Mohawk woman, open to his Indian friends
at all times. In 1756, he wrote of the people he knew so well: “Whoever
pretends to say, as some have fatally imagined, that the American savages are
of little or no account to our interest on that continent, and that, therefore,
it is not of great consequences, whether or no we endeavour to cultivate
friendship with them must be so extremely ignorant, or else so wilfully
perverse, that it would be wasting time to expose the absurdity of such
preposterous suggestions.”
Johnson’s conviction was borne out by the demography of
North America on the eve of the war. The French, concentrated in a thin line
stretching down the St. Lawrence from Louisburg through the Great Lakes and
down the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, numbered only about 55,000
in 1754. But their Indian neighbors in the Great Lakes region alone could field
perhaps as many as 70,000 warriors.
The English colonies, with well over 1 million white
inhabitants, enjoyed an overwhelming superiority in numbers, but the population
was confined to the seaboard. The French controlled the interior, largely by
dint of their policy of befriending Indians whenever possible rather than fighting
them. In some cases, the French commitment to coexistence became so strong that
one observer wrote, “Those with whom we mingle do not become French, our people
become Indian.” Despite close ties, the French were never wholly successful in
their efforts to secure their southern flank with allies in the southeastern
tribes. They formed strong bonds with the numerous and powerful Choctaw Indians
who occupied the lands along the coast north of the French bases at Biloxi and
Mobile, but they never won over the Chickasaws, who lived to the north of their
ancient Choctaw enemies in lands east of the Mississippi River. The English
retained Chickasaw loyalty, and despite a series of hard-fought battles, the
French never subdued the tribe.
Nevertheless, by the mid-1750s, the French had seized the
initiative and begun advancing into the Ohio Valley just when Virginia
speculators were beginning to take a strong interest in the same rich region.
Robert Dinwiddie, the determined sixty-year-old governor of
Virginia, saw which way the wind was blowing, and in October 1753, sent a
twenty-one-year-old militia major named George Washington to the recently begun
Fort Le Boeuf (now Waterford, Pennsylvania) to tell the French commander there
that his garrison was on English lands. Washington arrived after a long, cold
journey. Having received him courteously, the commander bluntly informed
Washington that he was on French soil and that thenceforth any Englishmen who
set foot in the Ohio Valley would be taken prisoner.
Acting promptly on Washington’s news, Dinwiddie sent a small
force of men to build a fort at the crucial junction of the Monongahela and
Allegheny rivers – where Pittsburgh stands today – and early in April 1754
dispatched 120 reinforcements under Washington.
The undertaking was wretched from the beginning. Hacking
their way across Pennsylvania’s endless ridges, the men under Washington soon
became exhausted. Supplies of food and arms failed to arrive; what did get
through was the disheartening news that the men Washington was marching to
support had been chased from the fort by the French. But most serious of all
was the failure of Washington’s command to enlist the aid of more than a handful
of friendly Indians. Dinwiddie knew the value of Cherokee, Catawba, and
Chickasaw support for the expedition, but those Indians had long been
accustomed to dealing with South Carolina, whose governor was outraged that
Virginia might think of enlisting “his” Indians without first getting his
permission. So Washington began his march without Indian support and only
belatedly received native detachments.
On May 24, Washington reached a place called Great Meadows,
where a Mingo chief known as the Half-King told him that the French were
nearby. Washington took forward a detachment of forty men and, joined by a
dozen of Half-King’s warriors, surprised a party of thirty-three Frenchmen. The
English killed ten, and the rest surrendered after a brief defense during which,
for the first time in his life, Washington heard bullets whistling past him, a
sound he described as “charming.” The French later charged that Washington had
murdered innocent soldiers in time of peace; the young militia officer
responded that they had brought it upon themselves by shadowing his forces in a
surreptitious and apparently hostile manner. Whatever the truth, the Great War
for Empire had begun, as Gipson put it, in an “isolated mountain ravine on the
western slopes of the Alleghenies.” It would spread like a forest fire “to leap
over oceans, to illuminate continents, and to end by reducing to ashes the
bright dreams of Frenchmen of a great future in the New World.”
Washington fell back on Great Meadows, where he had his men
throw up a stockade he named Fort Necessity. Reinforcements had brought the
strength of his command up to about 400, a considerable improvement, but
nowhere near enough to hold off the 900 French troops who moved out from Fort
Duquesne to avenge the death of their comrades. They attacked the English fort
on July 3, fighting in a steady downpour that turned Washington’s entrenchments
to soup and rendered his swivel guns useless. With nearly half his men dead,
sick, or wounded, Washington surrendered. He and his men were allowed to march
from the fort with full honors of war. The French could afford to be generous –
they had swept the English from the Ohio Valley.
The English struck back the next year. This time, there
would be no inept campaign by provincial troops, but a well-planned attack by
two regiments of British regulars under the command of General Edward Braddock.
A tough, competent officer, Braddock had spent forty-five of his sixty years in
the army. He was brave, popular, and considerate of his men. If he had a
failing, it was his confident determination to prove that his troops had
nothing to fear from “naked Indians . . . [or] Canadians in their shirts.”
Braddock moved out of Fort Cumberland, Maryland, at the head
of some 2,500 men in June. There were no Indians with him as he plunged into
the 100 miles of forest that separated him from Fort Duquesne; Governor
Dinwiddie had promised the support of the southern tribes, but their help had
failed to materialize. The French, on the other hand, had successfully courted
their Indian allies and sent them to harry the English settlements along the
route of Braddock’s march. Braddock had such trouble chopping his way through
the dense forest that, at last, he detached some 1,500 of his best troops and
led this flying column quickly toward the fort. He had little fear of the
French: Fort Duquesne had only 800 defenders, and they would be powerless
against the British artillery. On July 7, Braddock’s men made camp less than
ten miles away from their objective.
The French, however, had no intention of waiting for the
British to roll over them. On July 8, a captain named Hyacinth de Beaujeu took
a detachment of 200 men out of the fort and persuaded an equal number of
reluctant Indians to join him by crying, “I am determined to go against the
enemy! What! Will you allow your father to go alone?”
On the morning of July 9, the British army splashed across
the Monongahela with the fifers shrilling out “The Grenadiers March.”
Washington, who had resigned his command and was serving without pay as an aide
to Braddock, thought it the most splendid sight he had ever seen. As the troops
pushed on through the woods, they suddenly heard war whoops. The English
vanguard formed a skirmish line, sent a volley crashing into de Beaujeu’s troops,
and then fell back. The Indians and French scattered to the ravines that ran
along both sides of the English forces. Posting themselves behind trees, they
raked the milling, panicked British with a murderous crossfire. As the English
in the van fell back, they collided with troops coming up, and in the confusion
men began to drop by the hundreds. Braddock, wildly and vainly trying to rally
his men, had five horses shot out from under him before he was himself brought
down with a mortal wound. The slaughter went on for three hours.
With British troops flinging away their muskets and fleeing
and the drums rattling out retreat, Washington found a wagon, got Braddock into
it, and pulled the stricken general away from the carnage. The afternoon had
cost the French fewer than sixty casualties; of the 1,373 English noncoms and
privates involved, only 459 escaped being killed or wounded, and three-quarters
of the eighty-six officers became casualties. “Who would have thought it?” the
wounded Braddock kept muttering, He died two days later, and Washington had him
buried in an unmarked grave in the road so that the Indians would not mutilate
his remains.
The debacle threw Virginia into a panic and left the
frontier of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania open to French and Indian
raids. To the north, the English had better luck, thanks to the efforts of
William Johnson, whom the king had appointed superintendent of northern Indian
affairs. Johnson led 3,000 New Englanders against Crown Point, a French
stronghold at the southern end of Lake Champlain. The French marched to meet
him and, getting word of their advance on September 8, Braddock sent forward a
detachment of 1,000 militiamen and 200 Mohawks under Chief Hendrick, a canny
old warrior who had visited Queen Anne in 1710. Hendrick was dubious about the
detachment: “If they are to be killed, too many; if they are to fight, too
few.” The command marched straight into an ambush where French musketry ripped
it apart. Chief Hendrick was among those killed.
The survivors fled back to the English lines, where,
incredibly, Johnson succeeded in rallying them behind a log barricade. When the
French regulars attacked, the provincials beat them off. Johnson never got to
Crown Point, but he did build Fort William Henry on Lake George and received a
knighthood for his part in the campaign.
In the spring of 1756, a formidable new commander named
Louis-Joseph, marquis de Montcalm joined the French in America. Short, nervous,
brilliant, and brave, Montcalm moved quickly and skillfully. He threw 3,000
troops at Oswego, the English fort on the south side of Lake Ontario, and
captured it in August 1756. His victory encouraged the western Indians, whom
the English had hoped to secure as allies, to support the French. One Indian delegation
to Montreal said, “We wanted to see this famous man who tramples the English
under his feet. But you are a little man, my father. It is when we look into
your eyes that we see the greatness of the pine-tree and the fire of the
eagle.” Throughout the colonies, Indians began to pull away from any
associations they might have had with the English. In January 1757, Washington,
training a Virginia regiment, wrote that “the French grow more and more
Formidable by their alliances, while our Friendly Indians are deserting Our
Interest.”
The year 1757 dawned bleakly for the English. Seven years
before, the French had had 800 regular troops in America; now they had 6,600.
Everywhere, England was on the defensive. In the spring, Montcalm prepared to
attack Fort William Henry. He recruited 2,000 Indians from the upper Great
Lakes, and, sensitive to the diplomatic niceties required, presented many of
them with belts of wampum in the name of the king of France. At last, the
French and Indians marched toward Lake George, 8,000 strong, destroying several
British parties on the way. The Indians scalped and even practiced cannibalism
on some of the English dead, behavior the French justified on the grounds that
they could not prevent it without losing the Indians.
Montcalm besieged the fort early in August. The hopelessly
outnumbered garrison put up a spirited defense before surrendering. Montcalm
allowed the men to keep their arms and promised to protect them from his Indian
allies. But the English had no sooner left the fort than the Indians fell on
them and, berserk with plundered brandy, began to strip and murder the
captives. Unable to check the chaos, Montcalm finally bared his breast to the
Indians and cried, “Since you are rebellious children who break the promise you
have given to your Father and who will not listen to his voice, kill him first
of all.” His officers finally restored some order, but not before 200 of the
2,000 prisoners had been murdered. Montcalm’s Indian allies immediately
abandoned him, and the French destroyed Fort William Henry and then withdrew to
their posts at Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Montreal.
These events had marked the nadir of British fortunes in the
war; the next year saw the British taking the offensive and redressing the balance
with powerful strokes. On July 26, Louisburg fell to 12,000 British regulars
under Lord Jeffrey Amherst, and a month later, a provincial force of 3,600 men
captured Fort Frontenac, on the north side of Ontario, giving the British
control of the lake. Indians took only a minor part in these battles, but they
were to play a major role in the campaign that began to take shape in the Ohio
Valley late that spring. Rankling over their two ill-starred attempts to seize
Fort Duquesne, the British had appointed General John Forbes to lead a new
assault. Though only fifty-one, Forbes, wracked with disease, was a dying man –
he had to be carried on a litter – but his capacity for intelligent, meticulous
planning had not deserted him. Forbes’s campaign differed from the earlier
failures of Washington and Braddock not only in the general’s choice of a new
route, but in his vigorous efforts to secure Indian support.
That support was difficult to get and to control.
Washington, commanding the Virginia regiment, wrote in disgust: “The Indians
are mercenary; every service of theirs must be purchased; and they are easily
offended, being thoroughly sensible of their own importance.” The natives often
arrogantly demanded food, supplies, and presents, and sometimes left in a huff
when they felt the provisions were inadequate. But they were not drawing
regular military pay, and despite the moralizing of the frustrated white
commanders, they could hardly be expected to serve Europeans in a European
manner for no good Indian purpose.
By April 10, 1758, more than 500 southeastern Indians had
gathered at the English camp, eager to go into the field on scalp-seeking
parties. As summer came on, however, and the campaign failed to get under way,
they became disgusted and went home, carrying their presents with them. By
July, most of the Cherokees and Catawbas had drifted away.
When Forbes finally moved out of the main supply base he had
built, at what was to become Bedford, Pennsylvania, he had few Indian allies
with his 5,000 provincial troops and 1,400 Scots Highlanders. Newcomers
arrived, however, including some Cherokees under their chief Little Carpenter,
whose demands Forbes met, though he termed them “sordid and avaricious.” The
army moved forward with care, leaving a string of fortified posts behind it.
Despite their precautions, the English suffered a setback in September when
Forbes sent out some 800 Highlanders to scout around Fort Duquesne. The Scots
got themselves badly cut up, losing a third of their number. The French had
relied heavily on their Indian allies in the light, and the natives were shaken
by the number of casualties they had sustained. When more of them were killed
in a skirmish in October, they began to leave the French camp. They were sick
of dying for their allies, and they had begun to get word of a series of peace
conferences between English and Indians in Philadelphia.
Forbes and the colonial authorities had convened the
conferences to recapture the allegiance of the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos
and to reassure the western Indians that the English did not intend to
dispossess them of their lands. At the same time, Christian Frederick Post, a
Moravian missionary who had twice been married to Indian women, carried out a
delicate mission in the country of the western Indians, assuring them of
English good will and inviting the Delawares to return to their original home
in the Susquehanna Valley. Post managed to counter a good deal of legitimate
skepticism: “You intend to drive us away and settle this country,” the Indians
said, “or else, why do you come to fight in the land that God has given us?”
“I am your flesh and blood,” Post replied, “and sooner than
I would tell you any story that would be of hurt to you, or your children, I
would suffer death . . . I do assure you of mine and the people’s honesty.”
Some 500 Indians, Iroquois among them, attended another
treaty conference at Easton, Pennsylvania, in October, where several colonial
governors discussed and redressed many native grievances. The proceedings,
subsequently ratified by the king of England in Council, returned land west of
the Appalachians – which had been deeded to the Pennsylvania proprietors by the
Iroquois – to the other tribes that lived on it. Colonel Henry Bouquet,
Forbes’s chief of staff, issued a proclamation prohibiting English movement
west of the mountains without special authorization. The Easton treaty, Bouquet
said, was a blow that “knocked the French in the head.”
When, a little later, a French officer from the threatened
Fort Duquesne approached an Indian camp with a string of wampum and offered it
to one of the Delaware chiefs with whom Post was conferring, the Indian refused
it. The Frenchman thereupon threw the belt to a nearby group of Delawares, who
treated it like a snake, kicking it from one to the other until one of them
picked it up with a stick and flung it away.
By November 24, the English forces had advanced to within a
few miles of Fort Duquesne. As they approached they heard a terrific explosion,
and when they arrived at the fort the next day, they found it gutted and the
defenders gone. Inside the ruined fort, the English troops came upon a row of
stakes on which were fastened the heads of Highland troops who had been taken
in the earlier engagement, each with a Scottish kilt tied beneath it.
For all its savagery, there was a note of despair in the
grisly taunt. The French were losing the war, and they knew it. The final blow
came the following September when British troops under General James Wolfe
faced off against French regulars commanded by Montcalm on the Plains of
Abraham, near Quebec. Both commanders died in the battle – surprisingly brief,
considering all the years and wars that had led up to it – but Wolfe lived long
enough to know he had won. The peace treaty would not materialize for three
years, but after Quebec, New France never had a chance.
Still, the fighting went on. While Wolfe was taking Quebec,
the back country of the Carolinas was again in an uproar. The Cherokee nation,
about 10,000 strong and scattered through some forty villages along the
frontiers of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, had taken
up the hatchet against the English. The war apparently began when Cherokee
warriors, returning home from Forbes’s campaign against Fort Duquesne,
appropriated several horses they found running wild in the woods. A group of
frontiersmen, claiming the horses as their own, ambushed and killed a dozen of
the Cherokees. The Cherokees retaliated by murdering twenty or thirty settlers,
and soon a full-scale war engulfed the frontier. The fighting lasted for two
years, ending in the winter of 1761 after a long, devastating campaign
conducted against the Indians by regular and provincial troops. The harsh terms
of the treaty included the establishment of a boundary line between Indian and
white settlements.
Three years before, when the English had set up a similar
line, they had done so in hopes of placating a valuable ally. The contrast
between that boundary and the one forced on the Cherokees at gunpoint indicated
how Native Americans had fared in the war. No matter which side the Indians
chose, their true interests lay in a continued stalemate between the English
and the French. With the French forces driven from the New World, the natives
could no longer be of any use to the colonists. Just as much as the French, the
Indians lost the long struggle that had begun with a bloodless scuffle at a
Maine trading post seventy years before.
