III.

Beginning of the French and Indian War

The French and Indian War began in the struggle for control of the Ohio Valley. For more than a generation, the powerful Iroquois Confederacy dominated a middle ground between the French and British colonies in North America. They had gained control of a vast region in the interior of the continent by alliances with other Native American tribes and had successfully excluded the European nations from this territory. The Iroquois were able to maintain their power against that of both the British and the French, but this three-way balance of power began to break down during the 1740s. British traders penetrated deep into the Ohio country and established direct relations with tribal groups who previously had been controlled by the Iroquois, or had traded only with the French.

The Ohio Company, an association of land speculators based in Virginia, encouraged these excursions. The company had received a grant of 500,000 acres from George II and wanted to move traders and settlers into this interior region. In 1753 Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia, who was also a leading member of the Ohio Company, despatched 21-year-old George Washington to carry an ultimatum to the French, warning them to leave the region. In the following year Governor Dinwiddie ordered the construction of a fort at the forks of the Ohio (where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers meet, later the site of Pittsburgh).

Recognizing the need to dominate the Ohio Valley militarily in order to protect their strategic interests in the American interior, the French immediately reinforced their existing forts south of Lake Erie and expelled the British from the forks of the Ohio before Dinwiddie’s fort was completed. There they built a new military post, Fort Duquesne, and established firm title to the region.

These rival territorial claims in the Ohio Valley quickly led to violence. An armed party of Virginians under the command of Washington defeated a small French force east of the Ohio River and built a log stockade that became known as Fort Necessity. The French gathered more troops and quickly laid siege to this small fort, forcing Washington and his troops to surrender on July 4, 1754. The French then sent Washington and his troops back to Virginia.

In the meantime, in anticipation of the outbreak of war and on the urging of the British Board of Trade, the colonial governors convened a gathering of delegates from the seven British colonies in Albany, New York. The Albany Congress formalized an alliance with the Iroquois and planned other defensive measures. However, a plan of union developed by Benjamin Franklin, known as the Albany Plan, which was prophetic of the final constitutional settlement following independence, was rejected.