3.2

• The French and Indian War was a smaller conflict in the context of a much larger global conflict between the British and French called the Seven Years' War
• The cause of the French and Indian War was the British American colonists steadily encroaching on land in the Ohio River Valley that the French laid claim to
• George Washington


  • Young and scrappy Virginian officer
  • Appointed Lieutenant Colonel in the Virginia militia
  • Sent by Virginia's governor to warn the French of encroaching on British holdings in the Ohio River Valley
• The French commander whom Washington met rebuffed him, and six months later this same commander took control of a British post in Pennsylvania called Fort Duquesne
• Washington's actions


  1. Led a surprise attack on Fort Duquesne and gained it back

  2. Two months later, the French led a much larger force against the fort and took it right back
• The territorial disputes in the Ohio River Valley between the French and the British caused the French and Indian War to begin in 1754
• Albany Congress/Albany Convention


  • Delegates from several of the British colonies met to discuss a more organized colonial response to frontier defense, trade, and westward expansion
  • Invited a delegation from the Iroquois Confederacy to join them, but they were more like a token presence
• Reason for American Indians allying with European powers

  They could see that the best chance of maintaining some modicum of control over their lands lay in the perpetual conflict between European powers
• Benjamin Franklin's Albany Plan of Union


  • Proposed that the colonies establish a council of representatives to decide on matters of frontier defense, trade, and westward expansion
  • Ultimately rejected, not least because the taxation it required to exist stunk in the nostrils of the delegates
• At first the French kind of mopped the floor with the British colonists, and it was going very badly for them
• The British implemented policies that ended up being very unpopular with their American colonists, including forced impressment of American men to join the Royal Navy and quartering troops in colonial homes
• The French and Indian War ended in 1763 with the signing of the Peace of Paris
• The Peace of Paris treaty had massive results for the American colonists, including Spain ceding Florida to the British, the French being ousted from the North American continent, and all the land east of the Mississippi River being granted to the British
• The land in the Ohio River Valley being under British control


  American colonists hungry for more land began to push westward, intensifying conflicts with the Native Americans who lived there
• The British Parliament established the Proclamation Line of 1763 which forbade colonists from migrating west across the Appalachian mountains and taking land in the Ohio River Valley, but the colonists went ahead and migrated west anyway
• The French and Indian War was expensive, and as a result of fighting this war, the British national debt roughly doubled and the cost of running the colonies increased something like five-fold
• In order to pay for the costs of the French and Indian War, the British Parliament decided to raise the revenue by raising taxes on the American colonies