By 1755, George Washington’s frontier skirmish had turned into a major war. The British expected quick victories on three fronts. General Edward Braddock, recently arrived from England, marched his army toward Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania. Farther north, British troops moved toward Fort Niagara, critically located between Lakes Erie and Ontario. And William Johnson, a New Yorker recently appointed superintendent of northern Indian affairs, led forces north toward Lake Champlain, intending to defend the border against the French in Canada (see Map 6.1).

Unfortunately for the British, the French were prepared to fight and had enlisted many Indian tribes in their cause. When Braddock’s army of 2,000 British soldiers marched west toward Fort Duquesne, a mere eight Oneida warriors came as guides. They were ambushed by 250 French soldiers joined by 640 Indian warriors. Surviving soldiers reported that they never saw more than a half dozen Indians at a time, so hidden were they in the woods. But the soldiers could hear them. One soldier wrote weeks later that “the yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me until the hour of my dissolution.” The disciplined British troops stood their ground, making them easy targets. In the bloody battle nearly a thousand on the British side were killed or wounded, including General Braddock.

For the next two years, British leaders stumbled badly, deploying inadequate numbers of undersupplied troops. What finally turned the war around was the rise to power in 1757 of William Pitt, Britain’s prime minister, a man ready to commit massive resources to fight France and Spain worldwide. In America, British troops aided by American provincial soldiers at last captured Forts Duquesne, Niagara, and Ticonderoga, followed by the French cities of Quebec and finally Montreal, all from 1758 to 1760. By 1761, the war subsided in America but expanded globally, with battles in the Caribbean, Austria, Prussia, and India. The British captured the French sugar islands Martinique and Guadeloupe and then invaded Spanish Cuba with an army of some four thousand provincial soldiers from New York and New England. By the end of 1762, France and Spain capitulated, and the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763.

In the complex peace negotiations that followed, Britain gained control of Canada, eliminating the French threat from the north. British and American title to the eastern half of North America was confirmed. But French territory west of the Mississippi River, including New Orleans, was transferred to Spain as compensation for Spain’s assistance during the war. Strangely, Cuba was returned to Spain, and Martinique and Guadeloupe were returned to France (Map 6.2).

The British credited their army for their victory and criticized the colonists for inadequate support. William Pitt was convinced that colonial smuggling—beaver pelts from French fur traders and illegal molasses in the French Caribbean—“principally, if not alone, enabled France to sustain and protract this long and expensive war.”

Colonists read the lessons of the war differently. American soldiers had turned out in force, they claimed, but had been relegated to grunt work by British commanders and subjected to harsh military discipline, including floggings and executions. They bristled at British arrogance, as when Benjamin Franklin heard General Braddock brag that “these savages may, indeed, be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.” Braddock’s crushing defeat “gave us Americans,” Franklin wrote, “the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regulars had not been well founded.”

Perhaps most important, the enormous expense of the war cast a huge shadow over the victory. By 1763, Britain’s national debt, double what it had been when Pitt took office, posed a formidable challenge to the next decade of leadership in Britain.