6. The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis, 1754

French-British Rivalry in the Ohio Country

For several decades, French traders had cultivated alliances with the Indian tribes in the Ohio Country, a frontier region they regarded as part of New France, establishing a profitable exchange of manufactured goods for beaver furs (Map 6.1). But in the 1740s, aggressive Pennsylvania traders began to infringe on the territory. Adding to the tensions, a group of enterprising Virginians, including the brothers Lawrence and Augustine Washington, formed the Ohio Company in 1747 and advanced on the same land. Their hope for profit lay not in the fur trade but in land speculation, fueled by American population expansion.

Map 6.1 European Areas of Influence and the Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763 In 1750, the French and Spanish empires had relatively few people on the ground, compared to the exploding population of the Anglo-American colonies. The disputed lands shown here, contested by the imperial powers, were inhabited by a variety of Native American tribes.

Ohio River Valley, 1753

In response to these incursions, the French sent soldiers to build a series of military forts to secure their trade routes and to create a western barrier to American expansion. In 1753, the royal governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, himself a shareholder in the Ohio Company, dispatched a messenger to warn the French that they were trespassing on Virginia land. For this dangerous mission, he chose the twenty-one-year-old George Washington, half-brother of the Ohio Company leaders, who did not disappoint. Washington returned with crucial intelligence confirming French military intentions. Impressed, Dinwiddie appointed the youth to lead a small military expedition west to assert Virginia’s claim and chase the French away—but without attacking them.

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In the spring of 1754, Washington set out with 160 Virginians and a small contingent of Mingo Indians equally concerned about the French military presence in the Ohio Country. Early one morning the Mingo chief Tanaghrisson led a detachment of Washington’s soldiers to a small French encampment in the woods. Who fired first was in dispute, but fourteen Frenchmen (and no Virginians) were wounded. While Washington, lacking a translator, struggled to communicate with the injured French commander, Tanaghrisson and his men intervened to kill and then scalp the wounded soldiers, including the commander, probably with the aim of inflaming hostilities between the French and the colonists.

Washington Crossing the Allegheny, 1753 Experienced backwoodsman Christopher Gist proved essential to George Washington’s mission. When snowstorms halted Washington’s band of men in December, Gist and Washington set out alone on foot. Their trek as narrated by Washington reads like a modern action movie, with attacks by Indians and passage over a swift river filled with tossing chunks of ice. Washington fell off the crude raft they constructed; Gist saved him from drowning.

PhotoQuest/Getty Images.

This sudden massacre violated Dinwiddie’s instructions to Washington and raised the stakes considerably. Fearing retaliation, Washington ordered his men to throw together a makeshift “Fort Necessity.” Several hundred Virginia reinforcements arrived, but the Mingos, sensing disaster and displeased by Washington’s style of command, fled. (Tanaghrisson later said, “The Colonel was a good-natured man, but had no experience; he took upon him to command the Indians as his slaves, [and] would by no means take advice from the Indians.”) Retaliation arrived in the form of six hundred French soldiers aided by one hundred Shawnee and Delaware warriors, who attacked Fort Necessity, killing or wounding a third of Washington’s men. The message was clear: The French would not depart from the disputed territory.