French and Indian War – the Start of US History

                                                                                         

It's hard for us now to imagine George Washington as anything other than the stately, even regal figure staring back at us from the dollar bill or from the slopes of Mount Rushmore. But George Washington wasn't always a stoic visage carved in granite. He was once just a young man, trying to stay ahead of shifting circumstances – just like anyone else. This May 28th marks the 255th anniversary of George Washington's first brush with greatness… and also his first brush with catastrophe. He was 22 years old at the time and, like most of us at that age, he wasn't quite sure what he was doing.

Conflict had been brewing for some time between the British and French Empires over who should have control over the Ohio Valley, the wilderness area sandwiched between Britain's settlements on the Atlantic seaboard and France's outposts in Canada. Washington led a small company of Virginia soldiers, accompanied by Indian allies, into the Ohio Valley to deliver a formal British ultimatum that the French leave the area. Instead, not far from the site of modern-day Pittsburgh, he ended up fighting a small pitched battle against a French outfit intending to send a diplomatic message of its own. After a few minutes of chaotic fighting, the French surrendered. Washington had won his first great victory! But then, to Washington's surprise and horror, the Seneca chief Tanaghrisson – leader of the Indian warriors in Washington's entourage – suddenly ordered a massacre of the surrendered French prisoners. The French sent a much larger force to retaliate, capturing Washington and his men just over a month later. While in their custody, perhaps confused or frightened, the young Washington signed a document (written in French, which he could not read) confessing to the deliberate assassination of a French diplomat. That was a war crime and it was also formal justification for war; with Washington's confession secured, France declared war upon Britain.

The resulting conflict, the Seven Years War, might be regarded as the first true world war, and its outcome dramatically changed the history of the world. Fighting spread across Europe and to colonial outposts around the globe. In North America, it was better known to American colonists as the French & Indian War, and it was a war that had an enormous impact on the future of the continent.

In fact, it might not be an exaggeration to say that the French & Indian War marked the real beginning of US History. Before the war, there was little hint that Virginians and New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians and New Englanders saw themselves as part of a shared community; they regarded themselves as Englishmen abroad, or as citizens of their own specific colonies, but not as "Americans." The experience of war changed that, forcing residents of various colonies to fight alongside each other and also demonstrating many serious differences between them and the British. It wasn't a long journey from the end of the French & Indian War in 1763 to the first stirrings of the American Revolution in the 1770s. And to think that it all happened because a young George Washington, not quite sure what he was doing, allowed his first great victory to turn into a fiasco.

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