THE REAL FIRST
WORLD WAR
and the Making
of America
It has taken us two and a
half centuries to realize
just how important
this conflict was
BY FRED ANDERSON
A British officer's
silver-hilted sword
from 1761.
The Lenni
Lenape Indians
made this knife.
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.
far side of the Seven Years' War illuminates the changes
the war wrought and its lingering influences. The tradiSEEING
WHAT NORTH
AMERICA
LOOKED
ON THE
tional narrative
of American
history
treats LIKE
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 emergesone 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 150year 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.
76
WWW.AMERICANHERITAGE.COM
Epidemic diseases'-smallpox, diphtheria, measles, plaguedealt 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 mideighteenth 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
A pipe tomahawk,
probably from
Pennsylvania.
A busily scrimshawed
colonial powder
horn made in 1762.
The first American
military medal
was struck in 1756.
at last seize the Forks of the Ohi9, 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 ~nd 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
The war
was a momentous
I
I
American
ican 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
turning point.
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 Amer-
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
2005
AMERICAN
HERITAGE
77
Modern Pittsburgh
grew around the
vanished Fort Pitt,
where a green wedge
of park lies today.
ain 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.
war's effects were transforming, and tragic. By
eliminating the French Empire from North
WHAT and
OF dividing
THE INDIANS?
FOR THEM,
America
the continent
downTHE
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 carryon 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 senti-
AND
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. Brit78
WWW.AMERICANHERITAGE.COM
The war's effects were
tragic for the
Indians.
ment 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 nei-
A SPECTACULAR
IT'S A GOOD THI:iG
illa:
Eric Stange
AND PAINSTAKING
FOR BEN lOETERMAN
they didn't
AND
PBS SERIES BRINGS THE WAR TO THE SCREEN
Anderson
says, "A painstaking
effort has
general Edward Braddock, was killed. It'sfJOssi-
have a passion-
been made to show the war from the point
blethat
ate interest in the Thirty Years' War. Loeterman
of view of the natives, who were often forced
and Stange
to. play .both ends against the middle,
level he believed his talents merited he might
have viewed the later conflict between the colo-
are the co-writers
the six producers
broadcast
and two of
for the forthcoming
iflg in their hearts that ultimately they would
The War That Made America, and
probably Jose no matter who Won." Numemus
it took them as long to make it as it took
Iroquois and Canadian Mohawks
the French, British, colonists, and Indians to
contributing
fight
terization
the real thing.
"From
pre-production.
to final cut," says loeterman,
planning
know-
PBS
were cast,
their own ideas on the charac-
of their ancestors. In fact, the film'
had Washington been promoted to the
nies and the mother country much differently.
Unlike many historically based feature films
(suchas
the first two, versions of The Last of
the Njohicans, 1932 and 1936, which were
shot in California, and the 1992verslbn, which
"the
was. shot in the Mid-Atlantic
was as elaborate as that
states),
The War That Made America
was
of an actual military campaign. There
almost entirely shot on the location
were times when I felt we were fight-
of the actual events, in Pennsylvania
ing a war."
and upstate
If so, the first enemy the filmmakers faced was ignorance.
It's
American
doubtful that many educated Americans could
production
the title.
guess what war the
~,a~~even a military Choreographer
to supervise the marching and bat-
"The French and Indian
tle scenes. Tlie film's dialogue and
. voice-over narration were derived
War," says the historian Fred Anderconflict,
short
history
also titled
of the
f~om exisfingdocpments,
The War That
Made America, has justpeenfYlib-
our country's
cans don't
ti,messpeaking
The War
of
the
Mohicans'
or the
the
Last
cational
An
extra nal1ledWalter John, Jr."ishimself a Seneca.
!ish wear red, and the Indians wear paint."
oneof the most
of this
ever mad~"serves as a pri mer for history~
viewers, one that wi.II place the war
fYroper internqtional context, "The Seven
~as'Qarrated
by the
.. "At th~time,
strpggle betw~~ri the~rench
:~North~me~ica
a~ar
the
and the Briti~h
seemed like a sideshow in
that. stretched
from Europe to India."
N% one Gould know at the time that the
"sideshow", would decide the fate of the North
An'1.ericancontinent
whO. collectively
and its Indian
constituted
player in the struggle.
natives,
the thin:j major
and
War 250
of the regio/l's"
institutions.
and edu-
This unusual
of historians,American
scope probably woulq have caused every
9~F~iilHMoha\w~
~rahar:;\ Greene, best .known f'lr h(s perf OF
mance in Danoes With Wolves.
The Indians weren't the only .gnes q~Ught up
Hollywood studio to balk.
Another reason Hollywoog
would. have re-
frained from making a film On the French and
Indian War is the average American's
lack of
in circumstanc~s they c9,pldn't con\wl.,Colo"
nials such as George WastJington, an ambitious
knowledge about the struggle that set Amer-
but insecure tw~nttone:~~ar-oldarm~
courier,
were, also caught in the clasli of empires.
son sees thatas.a
flayed by Larry~etJring,~aclassically
t~~i~ed
actor and the artistic director for the Cleveland
thi~~,manyyiewers
with preconceived
Shakespeare
fascinated
War Was part of the first genuine world
wa{)"exPlain~enderson
Pittsburgh
Indian
Indian groups, ~nd historical associations resulted in a film whose size
that the French wear blUe, the Engc
documentaries
and
combination
ing who or why. All you know is
dramatized
French
hi.storic sites, foundations,
movie you don't know who's fight-
elaborate
the joint efforts of
Inc., a partnership
1992
movie with Daniel Day-Lewis. In that
The four-ho.ur production,
di-
Made America
. WQED Multimedia
know it through
James Fenimore Coope(sThe
That
is the result.of
torians call it the War of ~onquest.
Even those who know something
it usually
thoughts
nl.anner uncommon, to most documentaries:
the cor-
rect title for it; most Canqdian his-
about
their
rectly into th~. camera, a deviCe that
personqlizes the characters
in .a
in
history. North Ameri-
even agree
letters,
and journals, with the. actors some-
Iished by Viking Books, "is the least
known and least understo'od'war
and one Canadian histo-
rian were on set at .all times; there
depicts on the basis of
son, whose
New york all the way
to the Canadian border. At least one
Festival, Washin~on
trated tly his inability
prominence
was frus~
to rise toa position
of
in.the British army. He wa~ a key
figure in the w~r's first s~ir,~iSh in'1Z54
led the retreatinthe
1755"inwhichhis
and'
BattIeof Monon~ahelain
commander, th~ British
N OVEM
ica on the course for manifest destiny. Anderpotential
plus: "I
will approach the program
notions. I think they'll be
fo discover the rich background to
a war that has all too often been relegated
a paragraph inmost
textbooks."
The War That Made America will air on PBS
stations on January 18 and 25 fror:; ~,;,OO
11:00 P.M.'(check locallistings).-AllenBarra
B ER/OECEMB
ER 2005
AM ERI CAN
HERITAGE
79
ther 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 u,nintended 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
THE MOST AMBITIOUS
Monongahela
*
Fred Anderson's most recent book is The War That Made America, which accompanies the PBS series and was just published
by Viking.
EXHIBIT EVER ON THE WAR HAS JUST OPENED
WH,EN A YOUNG GEORGE WASHINGTON
veyed the confluence
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 SpanishAmerican 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.
SUR-
of the Allegheny
Rivers, forming
and
the Ohio, in
president and CEO of the center, poi nts out, is
signed
gripping.
a language he 90uld not read-that
was,
in essence, a confession to the assassi nation
"It's the story of a young, red-haired
George Washington
who fired the first shot
document
in French-
of Jumonville.
1753, he observed that the land there was
that set the world ablaze,"
"extreamly
well situated for a Fort; as it has
to the volley Washington exchanged with the
That document will be on display as part of
the absolute Command of both Rivers," After
"Clash of Empires." "It makes the hair on the
wresfed control from the
ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de
Jumonville outside what is now Uniontown in
French in 1758, they christened the surround-
May 1754. Washington, allied with the Seneca
hold it, to see his signature,
the English finally
he says, referring
a surrender
back of my neck stand up," says Masich. "To
ing area "Pittsbourgh."
The 250th
struggle
to see the rain
spatters. To see the words that are
anniversary
the smoking gun that triggered a
of this
global war."
Other artifacts include remains
is being commemorated
by events and exhibits
through-
out the country, (www.frenchand"
of the wagons Benjamin
indianwar250.org).
secured for Gen. Edward Braddock,
But the center
Franklin
who suffered one of the worst de-
of the fighting then, and the comnow, can be found in
feats in British history on the Mo-
the place where Washington made
his assessment. The celebration in-
nongahela; a lead plate the French
memoration
cludes a voluminous
exhibition
used to mark their territory; and ornate swords from both sides. These
at
the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh
objects
Regional
paintings,
History
Center, (www.
be on view
there
through
April 15, 2006, when it will travel
to the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington,
D.C. With nearly 300
For the exhibit, a model maker works on a likeness of John Bush,
a
celebrated maker of powder horns.
of period char-
For many Americans,
history
shows, the Revolution was born of
artifacts
warrior Tanaghrisson, surrounded the French
and defeated them handily
ers in 12 countries,
utes. Then he watched in horror as Tanaghris-
it is the largest exhibit
ever on the confl ict.
Even though the French and Indian War
in just 15 min-
son split the wounded Jumonville's
an ax. The French retaliated
act two months later, surrounding
other conflicts,
ton's
the story, as Andy Masich,
skull with
for this brutal
doesn't have the blockbuster appeal of many
WWW.AMERICANHERITAGE.COM
with
videos, and
begins in 1776, but as this exhibit
painstakingly culled from more than 100 lend-
BO
dioramas,
lifelike sculptures
acters.
pghhistory.org). "Clash of Empires:
The British, French & Indian War"
will
are complemented
forces at Fort Necessity.
Washing-
Washington
the Fre.nch 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
.
Hcrover
"..•.