The Real First World War and the Making of America

Fort Ligonier, in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, was rebuilt in the 1950s to plans supplied by the British War Office.

(© W. CODY/CORBIS)

Two hundred and fifty years ago this winter, European courts and diplomats were moving ever closer to war. It would prove larger, more brutal, and costlier than anyone anticipated, and it would have an outcome more decisive than any war in the previous three centuries.

Historians usually call it the Seven Years’ War. Modern Americans, recalling a few disconnected episodes—Braddock’s defeat, the Fort William Henry “massacre,” the Battle of Quebec—know it as the French and Indian War. Neither name communicates the conflict’s immensity and importance. Winston Churchill came closer in The History of the English-Speaking Peoples when he called it “a world war—the first in history,” noting that unlike the previous Anglo-French wars, this time “the prize would be something more than a rearrangement of frontiers and a redistribution of fortresses and sugar islands.”

That prize was the eastern half of North America, and the war in which Britain won it raised, with seismic force, a mountain range at the midpoint of the last half-millennium in American history. On the far side of that range lay a world where native peoples controlled the continent. On the other side we find a different world, in which Indian power waned as the United States grew into the largest republic and the most powerful empire on earth. In that sense it may not be too much to give the conflict yet another name: the War That Made America.

Seeing what north america looked like on the far side of the Seven Years’ War illuminates the changes the war wrought and its lingering influences. The traditional narrative of American history treats the “colonial period” as a tale of maturation that begins with the founding of Virginia and Massachusetts and culminates in the Revolution. It implies that the demographic momentum of the British colonies and the emergence of a new “American character” made independence and the expansion of Anglo-American settlement across the continent inevitable. Events like the destruction of New France, while interesting, were hardly central to a history driven by population expansion, economic growth, and the flowering of democracy. Indians, regrettably, were fated to vanish beneath the Anglo-American tide.

But if we regard the Seven Years’ War as an event central to American history, a very different understanding emerges—one that turns the familiar story upside down. Seen this way, the “colonial period” had two phases. During the first, which lasted the whole of the sixteenth century, Indian nations controlled everything from the Atlantic to the Pacific, north of the Rio Grande, setting the terms of interaction between Europeans and Indians and determining every significant outcome. The second phase began when the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English established settlements in North America around the beginning of the seventeenth century, inaugurating a 150-year period of colonization and conflict by changing the conditions of American life in two critical ways. First, permanent colonies spread disease in their immediate vicinities; second, they radically increased the volume of trade goods that flowed into Indian communities. The results of this transformation were many, powerful, and enduring.

Epidemic diseases—smallpox, diphtheria, measles, plague—dealt a series of deadly blows to native populations. Ironically, the Indians nearest the European settlements, and who sustained the earliest and worst losses, also had the closest access to trade goods and weapons that gave them unprecedented advantages over more distant groups. As warriors raided for captives to prop up their dwindling populations and pelts to exchange for European weapons, wars among native peoples became ever more deadly. The Five Nations of the Iroquois, in what is now upstate New York, grew powerful in the mid-seventeenth century by trading with the Dutch at Fort Orange (Albany) and seizing captives from Canada to the Ohio Valley to the Carolinas. Iroquois power, of course, had its limits. Tribes driven west and north by their attacks forged alliances with the French, who supplied them with arms, and encouraged them to strike back.

The Iroquois were already under pressure when England seized New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664. This deprived the tribes of an essential ally when they could least afford it. Iroquois fortunes spiraled downward until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the battered Five Nations finally adopted a position of neutrality toward the French and British empires.

The Iroquois soon found that this neutrality gave them a new form of power. They could play Britain and France off against each other in the wars that the contending empires fought during the first half of the eighteenth century. By the 1730s a half-dozen Indian groups—Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Abenakis, and various Algonquians, as well as the Iroquois—were engaging in balance-of-power politics that made any maneuverings of the French, the British—and the Spanish too—indecisive. While it lasted, this balance permitted Indian and European groups to develop along parallel paths. When it ended, however, the whole edifice of native power came crashing down.

The Seven Years’ War brought about that shift and, in doing so, opened a third American epoch, which lasted from the mid-eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The shift was not immediately perceptible, for from beginning to end the war reflected the importance of Indian power. The fortunes of war in North America ebbed and flowed according to when the Indian allies of the Europeans decided to engage or withdraw. When, in 1758, the French-allied Indians on the Ohio chose to make a separate peace, Anglo-American forces could at last seize the Forks of the Ohio, the site of modern Pittsburgh and the strategic key to the transappalachian West, bringing peace to the Virginia-Pennsylvania frontier. The following year the Iroquois League shifted from neutrality to alliance with the British, permitting the Anglo-Americans to take Fort Niagara and with it crucial control of the Great Lakes. In 1760 Iroquois diplomats preceding Gen. Jeffery Amherst’s invading army persuaded the last Indian allies of New France to make peace, facilitating the bloodless surrender of French forces at Montreal.

Recognizing the central role of Indians in the war certainly should not deny the importance of French and British operations in America or diminish the critical part played by the large-scale mobilization of the colonists. Those too were decisive and were part of the worldwide extension of the fighting. Britain’s war leader, William Pitt, knew that the British army was too small to confront the forces of Europe on their home ground. He therefore used the navy and army together to attack France’s most vulnerable colonies, while subsidizing Prussia and smaller German states to do most of the fighting in Europe. Similarly, from late 1757 Pitt promised to reimburse North America’s colonial governments for raising troops to help attack Canada and the French West Indies, treating the colonies not as subordinates but as allies. This policy precipitated a surge of patriotism among the colonists. Between 1758 and 1760 the number of Anglo-Americans voluntarily participating in the war effort grew to equal the population of all New France.

Britain’s colonists continued to enlist in numbers that suggest they had come to believe they were full partners in the creation of a new British empire that would be the greatest since Rome. Their extraordinary exertions made for a decisive victory, but one that came at a fearful cost. And that in turn had an impact that extended far beyond the Peace of Paris, which put an end to the hostilities in 1763.

Paradoxically, the war had seemed to damage the vanquished less than it did the victor. Despite the loss of its North American possessions and the destruction of its navy, France recovered with remarkable speed. Because the British chose to return the profitable West Indian sugar islands to France and to retain Canada, always a sinkhole for public funds, French economic growth resumed at pre-war rates. Because France funded its re-armament program by borrowing, there was no taxpayers’ revolt. The navy rebuilt its ravaged fleet using stateof-the-art designs. The army, re-equipped with the most advanced artillery of the day, underwent reforms in recruitment, training, discipline, and administration. These measures were intended to turn the tables on Britain in the next war, which was precisely what happened when France intervened in the American struggle for independence. (The expense of that revenge tempered its sweetness somewhat, but it was only in 1789 that King Louis and his ministers, facing a revolution of their own, learned how severe the reckoning would be.)

For Britain and its American colonies the war had complex, equivocal legacies. Pitt’s prodigal expenditures and the expansion of the empire to take in half of North America created immense problems of public finance and territorial control. The virtual doubling of the national debt between 1756 and 1763 produced demands for retrenchment even as administrators tried to impose economy, coherence, and efficiency on a haphazard imperial administration. Their goal was both to control the 300,000 or so Canadians and Indians whom the war had ushered into the empire and to make the North American colonies cooperate with one another, take direction from London, and pay the costs of imperial defense.

The war’s most pernicious effect, however, was to persuade the Crown that Britain was unbeatable. The extraordinary battlefield triumphs of the previous years made this inference seem reasonable, and the perilous conviction that Britannia had grown too mighty to fail contributed to the highhanded tone imperial officials now used to address the colonists and thus helped sow the seeds of revolution.

Britain’s American colonists had come to believe they were members of a transatlantic community bound together by common allegiance, interests, laws, and rights. Imperial administrators found this absurd. Even before the war they had been proposing reforms that would have made it clear the colonists were anything but legal and constitutional equals of subjects who lived in Britain. The outbreak of the fighting had suspended those reforms, and then Pitt’s policies had encouraged the colonists to see the empire as a voluntary union of British patriots on both sides of the ocean.

So when the empire’s administrators moved to reassert the pre-war hierarchy, the colonists reacted first with shock, then with fury. What happened, they wanted to know, to the patriotic partnership that had won the war? Why are we suddenly being treated as if we were the conquered, instead of fellow conquerors?

During the 12 years between the Peace of Paris in 1763 and the battles of Lexington and Concord the colonists clarified their beliefs, using language echoing the broad, inclusive spirit of equality that had rallied them during the late war. In time those ideas became the basis of all our politics, but between 1763 and 1775 they were not yet founding principles. Rather, what took place in the postwar years was a long, increasingly acrimonious debate about the character of the empire, a wrangle over who belonged to it and on what terms and about how it should function. The dispute became so bitter precisely because the colonists believed they were British patriots who had proved their loyalty by taking part in a vast struggle for an empire they loved.

The irony here is intense and bears examining. The most complete victory in a European conflict since the Hundred Years War quickly became a terrible thing for the victor, whereas the defeated powers soon recovered purpose and momentum. Even a decisive victory can carry great dangers for the winner. Britain emerged from the war as the most powerful nation of its day, only to find that the rest of Europe feared it enough to join ranks against it; it confidently undertook to reassert itself in America only to unite its colonists in opposition to imperial authority. Finally, when Britain used its military might to compel the fractious colonists to submit, it turned resistance into insurrection—and revolution.

And what of the indians? for them, the war’s effects were transforming, and tragic. By eliminating the French Empire from North America and dividing the continent down its center between Britain and Spain, the Peace of Paris made it impossible for the Iroquois and other native groups to preserve their autonomy by playing empires off against one another. The former Indian allies of New France came to understand the tenuousness of their position soon after the war, when the British high command began to treat them as if they, not the French, had been conquered. They reacted with violence to Britain’s abrupt changes in the terms of trade and suspension of diplomatic gift giving, launching an insurrection to teach the British a lesson in the proper relationship of ally to ally. By driving British troops from their interior forts and sending raids that once again embroiled the frontier in a huge refugee crisis, the Indians forced the British to rescind the offending policies. Yet by 1764, when various groups began to make peace, native leaders understood that their ability to carry on a war had become limited indeed. Without a competing empire to arm and supply them, they simply could not keep fighting once they ran out of gunpowder.

Meanwhile, the bloodshed and captive-taking of the war and the postwar insurrection deranged relations between Indians and Anglo-American colonists. Even in Pennsylvania, a colony that had never known an Indian war before 1755, indiscriminate hatred of Indians became something like a majority sentiment by 1764. When most native groups sided with the British in the Revolution, the animosity only grew. By 1783 Americans were willing to allow neither Indians nor the ex-Loyalists with whom they had cooperated any place in the new Republic, except on terms dictated by the victor.

In the traditional narrative mentioned earlier, the fate of native peoples is a melancholy historical inevitability; Indians are acted upon far more than they are actors. To include the Seven Years’ War in the story of the founding of the United States, however, makes it easier to understand Indians as neither a doomed remnant nor as noble savages, but as human beings who behaved with a canniness and a fallibility equal to those of Europeans and acted with just as much courage, brutality, and calculated self-interest as the colonists. In seeking security and hoping to profit from the competition between empires, they did things that led to a world-altering war, which in turn produced the revolutionary changes that moved them from the center of the American story to its margins. No irony could be more complete, no outcome more tragic.

Finally, treating the Revolution as an unintended consequence of the Anglo-American quest for empire offers a way to understand the persistence of imperialism in American history. We like to read the rhetoric of the Revolution in such a way as to convince ourselves that the United States has always been a fundamentally anti-imperial nation. What the story of the Seven Years’ War encourages us to do is to imagine that empire has been as central to our national self-definition and behavior over time as liberty itself has been—that empire and liberty indeed can be seen as complementary elements, related in as intimate and necessary a way as the two faces of a single coin.

Changing our thinking about the founding period of the United States by including the Seven Years’ War can enable us to see the significance not only of America’s great wars of liberation—the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II—but of the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and all of the country’s other wars for empire as well. Those conflicts are not exceptions to some imagined antimilitarist rule of American historical development; they too have made us who we are. To understand this may help us avoid the dangerous fantasy that the United States differs so substantially from other historical empires that it is somehow immune to the fate they have all, ultimately, shared.

Fred Anderson’s most recent book is The War That Made America, which accompanies the PBS series and was just published by Viking.

The Seven Years’ Movie A spectacular and painstaking PBS series brings the war to the screen By Allen Barra An extra named Walter John, Jr., is himself a Seneca. (ARCHIE CARPENTER/The War That Made America, LLC) It’s a good thing for Ben Loeterman and Eric Stange that they didn’t have a passionate interest in the Thirty Years’ War. Loeterman and Stange are the co-writers and two of the six producers for the forthcoming PBS broadcast The War That Made America, and it took them as long to make it as it took the French, British, colonists, and Indians to fight the real thing. “From pre-production to final cut,” says Loeterman, “the planning was as elaborate as that of an actual military campaign. There were times when I felt we were fighting a war.” If so, the first enemy the filmmakers faced was ignorance. It’s doubtful that many educated Americans could guess what war the production depicts on the basis of the title. “The French and Indian War,” says the historian Fred Anderson, whose short history of the conflict, also titled The War That Made America, has just been published by Viking Books, “is the least known and least understood war in our country’s history. North Americans don’t even agree on the correct title for it; most Canadian historians call it the War of Conquest. Even those who know something about it usually know it through James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans or the 1992 movie with Daniel Day-Lewis. In that movie you don’t know who’s fighting who or why. All you know is that the French wear blue, the English wear red, and the Indians wear paint.” The four-hour production, one of the most elaborate dramatized documentaries of this type ever made, serves as a primer for history-minded viewers, one that will place the war in its proper international context. “The Seven Years’ War was part of the first genuine world war,” explains Anderson. “At the time, the struggle between the French and the British in North America seemed like a sideshow in a war that stretched from Europe to India.” No one could know at the time that the “sideshow” would decide the fate of the North American continent and its Indian natives, who collectively constituted the third major player in the struggle. Anderson says, “A painstaking effort has been made to show the war from the point of view of the natives, who were often forced to play both ends against the middle, knowing in their hearts that ultimately they would probably lose no matter who won.” Numerous Iroquois and Canadian Mohawks were cast, contributing their own ideas on the characterization of their ancestors. In fact, the film was narrated by the Canadian Mohawk actor Graham Greene, best known for his performance in Dances With Wolves. The Indians weren’t the only ones caught up in circumstances they couldn’t control. Colonials such as George Washington, an ambitious but insecure twenty-one-year-old army courier, were also caught in the clash of empires. Played by Larry Nehring, a classically trained actor and the artistic director for the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival, Washington was frustrated by his inability to rise to a position of prominence in the British army. He was a key figure in the war’s first skirmish in 1754 and led the retreat in the Battle of Monongahela in 1755, in which his commander, the British general Edward Braddock, was killed. It’s possible that had Washington been promoted to the level he believed his talents merited he might have viewed the later conflict between the colonies and the mother country much differently. Unlike many historically based feature films (such as the first two versions of The Last of the Mohicans, 1932 and 1936, which were shot in California, and the 1992 version, which was shot in the Mid-Atlantic states), The War That Made America was almost entirely shot on the location of the actual events, in Pennsylvania and upstate New York all the way to the Canadian border. At least one American and one Canadian historian were on set at all times; there was even a military choreographer to supervise the marching and battle scenes. The film’s dialogue and voice-over narration were derived from existing documents, letters, and journals, with the actors sometimes speaking their thoughts directly into the camera, a device that personalizes the characters in a manner uncommon to most documentaries. The War That Made America is the result of the joint efforts of WQED Multimedia Pittsburgh and the French and Indian War 250 Inc., a partnership of the region’s historic sites, foundations, and educational institutions. This unusual combination of historians, American Indian groups, and historical associations resulted in a film whose size and scope probably would have caused every major Hollywood studio to balk. Another reason Hollywood would have refrained from making a film on the French and Indian War is the average American’s lack of knowledge about the struggle that set America on the course for manifest destiny. Anderson sees that as a potential plus: “I don’t think many viewers will approach the program with preconceived notions. I think they’ll be fascinated to discover the rich background to a war that has all too often been relegated to a paragraph in most textbooks.” The War That Made America will air on PBS stations on January 18 and 25 from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. (check local listings). —Allen Barra

The Clash of Empires The most ambitious exhibit ever on the war has just opened By Elizabeth Hoover For the exhibit, a modelmaker works on a likeness of John Bush, a celebrated maker of powder horns. (ANNE EMBLETON) When a young George Washington surveyed the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, forming the Ohio, in 1753, he observed that the land there was “extreamly well situated for a Fort; as it has the absolute Command of both Rivers.” After the English finally wrested control from the French in 1758, they christened the surrounding area “Pittsbourgh.” The 250th anniversary of this struggle is being commemorated by events and exhibits throughout the country, (www.frenchandindianwar250.org). But the center of the fighting then, and the commemoration now, can be found in the place where Washington made his assessment. The celebration includes a voluminous exhibition at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center (www.pghhistory.org). “Clash of Empires: The British, French & Indian War” will be on view there through April 15, 2006, when it will travel to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. With nearly 300 artifacts painstakingly culled from more than 100 lenders in 12 countries, it is the largest exhibit ever on the conflict. Even though the French and Indian War doesn’t have the blockbuster appeal of many other conflicts, the story, as Andy Masich, president and CEO of the center, points out, is gripping. “It’s the story of a young, red-haired George Washington who fired the first shot that set the world ablaze,” he says, referring to the volley Washington exchanged with the ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville outside what is now Uniontown in May 1754. Washington, allied with the Seneca warrior Tanaghrisson, surrounded the French and defeated them handily in just 15 minutes. Then he watched in horror as Tanaghrisson split the wounded Jumonville’s skull with an ax. The French retaliated for this brutal act two months later, surrounding Washington’s forces at Fort Necessity. Washington signed a surrender document in French—a language he could not read—that was, in essence, a confession to the assassination of Jumonville. That document will be on display as part of “Clash of Empires.” “It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” says Masich. “To hold it, to see his signature, to see the rain spatters. To see the words that are the smoking gun that triggered a global war.” Other artifacts include remains of the wagons Benjamin Franklin secured for Gen. Edward Braddock, who suffered one of the worst defeats in British history on the Monongahela; a lead plate the French used to mark their territory; and ornate swords from both sides. These objects are complemented with paintings, dioramas, videos, and lifelike sculptures of period characters. For many Americans, history begins in 1776, but as this exhibit shows, the Revolution was born of the French and Indian War. After the fighting had drained Britain’s coffers, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, the first of the unacceptable taxes that spurred the colonists to rebellion. They would be led by Washington, who reported to the Continental Congress in his French and Indian War uniform. —Elizabeth Hoover