The French & Indian War in North Carolina: The Spreading Flames of War

By John R. Maass

For eight decades, an epic power struggle raged across a frontier that would become Maine. Between 1675 and 1759, British, French, and Native Americans soldiers clashed in six distinct wars to claim the land that became the Pine Tree State. Though the showdown between France and Great Britain was international in scale, the decidedly local conflicts in Maine pitted European settlers against Native American tribes. Native and European communities from the Penobscot to the Piscataqua Rivers suffered brutal attacks. Countless men, women and children were killed, taken captive or sold into servitude. The native people of Maine were torn asunder by disease, social disintegration and political factionalism as they fought to maintain their autonomy in the face of unrelenting European pressure. This is the dark, tragic and largely forgotten struggle that laid the foundation of Maine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 27, 2007
• ISBN: 9781625846662

John R. Maass

John R. Maass is an education staff member of the new National Museum of the U.S. Army at Fort Belvoir. Dr. Maass received a PhD in early American history at The Ohio State University. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on early U.S. military history, including North Carolina and the French and Indian War: The Spreading Flames of War (2013); Defending a New Nation, 1783-1811 (2013); The Road to Yorktown: Jefferson, Lafayette and the British Invasion of Virginia (2015); and George Washington's Virginia (2017).

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INTRODUCTION

Most Americans know little, if anything, about the French and Indian War. Schoolchildren today are largely ignorant of this conflict, also called the Seven Years’ War, since knowledge of its history is not required on the standardized tests many of them take or the standards of learning most are required to master. General readers of United States history will usually recognize the war’s name and perhaps even guess that it occurred during the American colonial period, but most likely, they will recall it as a kind of hazy backdrop to the Revolution and little more than a footnote, in the words of noted historian Fred Anderson. When it happened and who fought whom are also questions that would no doubt stump the vast majority of Americans if asked.¹

Most people who have heard of the war, have read about it or have visited historic sites related to its events, and even many who consider themselves to be French and Indian War buffs, know only about the northern theater of the war. Places such as Fort Ticonderoga and the Plains of Abraham at Quebec are quite familiar to these enthusiasts, and many will also have visited or read about Fortress Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, Crown Point in New York and Fort William Henry on Lake George—the latter associated with the events described in The Last of the Mohicans and the many films and television productions based on James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel. Moreover, almost all the famous figures associated with the war served at these northern places—particularly Montcalm and Wolfe, as well as Major Robert Rogers of the famous ranger battalion he led.

There has been little attention paid to the southern area of operations during the French and Indian War or the wartime contributions of the southern colonies in contrast to the notoriety of the conflict’s battles and leaders in the northern theater—Canada and New York for the most part. When I began my research into North Carolina during this little-known conflict as part of the requirements for a master’s degree in history, the overwhelming response from people who asked me what I was studying was some variation of I didn’t know there was anything to do with the French and Indian War in the South. I heard this even from professional military and colonial historians, who assumed that this colonial struggle was waged exclusively up north. This is not surprising in that almost all histories of the war ignore the South, particularly North Carolina. Even the great French philosopher and historian of the Enlightenment Voltaire summed up the war in 1758 as merely a war about a few acres of snow somewhere around Canada.²

These responses validated my choice of a research topic, since little modern scholarship had been completed on the Tar Heel State’s participation in the war and because of a renewed interest in the pre-Revolutionary conflict by the early 2000s. Much of this new popular and academic enthusiasm for this subject area—including my own—can be attributed to the publication in 2000 of Fred Anderson’s The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766, the definitive history of these hostilities, which blends a wonderful accessibility for general readers with solid research to satisfy scholarly expectations. Unlike the majority of general histories of the war, which often fail to mention the South or its contributions to the war effort at all, Anderson provided an excellent overview of southern campaigns, operations and leaders from the British, colonial, French and American Indian perspectives. My book builds on the current interest in the forgotten theatre of the Seven Years’ War in America by focusing on North Carolina’s military role during the struggle.

Finally, it should be noted that my study is a military history of the war, primarily from the perspective of the colony of North Carolina. Those interested in other aspects of this period, such as economic, political or social history, will find fine studies of these fields, a number of which I have listed in the bibliography.

1

THE WAR BEGINS

The hostilities between Great Britain and France in America during the 1750s and early 1760s were part of a long history of conflicts between these two kingdoms dating back to the late seventeenth century and were rooted in European politics and expansion. The first of these conflicts to spill over into North America was the War of the League of Augsburg, known in the colonies as King William’s War. This minor struggle erupted in 1688, shortly after William of Orange and his wife, Mary, became England’s new Protestant monarchs once the Catholic James II was deposed. France’s power under Louis XIV during these years alarmed England, as did its fervent Catholicism and domination of Europe.

The English government also worried about French possession of territory in North America, especially as France’s lucrative fur trade posts on the Mississippi River and in the Illinois country increased and the French claimed all the land in the interior wilderness for themselves. France also posed a growing threat to England’s seaboard colonies by establishing and strengthening a string of forts, outposts and villages from Quebec on the St. Lawrence River to the Gulf of Mexico. During King William’s War, Americans in the northern colonies suffered French and Indian attacks on the frontiers, while English troops failed to take both Montreal and Quebec in 1690. The conflict in America ended in 1697, with neither side gaining any real advantage.

War flared up again in 1702 in Europe during the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict over who would become the king of Spain after the death of Charles II in 1700. This conflict, known as Queen Anne’s War in the American colonies, was fought primarily along the border between the French and English colonies in the North, the scene of numerous raids and massacres and the destruction of towns and farms. The fighting resulted in the capture of Newfoundland and Acadia by English forces before the war’s end in 1713. The English colonies also battled Spain (France’s ally) in Florida, although the fighting in the South was indecisive.

Over two decades later, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) involved most of Europe in a group of conflicts over territorial and dynastic disputes following the death of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI. The British feared French supremacy in Europe and territorial gains in America and the islands of the West Indies. By 1744, the war became primarily a fight between France and Britain, although the Prussians under Frederick the Great were actively involved against their bitter Austrian enemies as well.

In America, this military contest was called King George’s War, after the British monarch on the throne at the time, George II, who reigned from 1727 to 1760. During this conflict, British military officials launched a joint land and sea expedition in 1741 against the fortified Spanish port of Cartagena in modern Colombia. The ambitious campaign included the embodiment of a large regiment of 3,373 officers and men raised in the American colonies. The expedition, an unqualified disaster for the British and colonial force, included hundreds of North Carolina soldiers, few of whom ever returned from the Caribbean theater. This war also impacted North Carolinians in September 1748, when two Spanish ships sailed up the Cape Fear River and attacked the port town of Brunswick. A small force of armed locals drove off an enemy landing party a few days later but only after citizens lost £1,000 in property and suffered several casualties.

On a brighter note, a force of New England colonists supported by British navy warships managed to capture the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745, although once the war ended in 1748, British diplomats returned this strategic bastion to the French as part of the peace settlement. The duration of the conflict and its financial drain eventually led the weary European powers to negotiate a truce, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Signed in 1748, this treaty was more of an armistice or cease-fire in Europe, not a true end to the conflict, especially in the Americas.

The final colonial struggle between Britain and France for supremacy in North America was what Americans have come to call the French and Indian War (1754–1763), part of a global conflict now known as the Seven Years’ War or the Great War for Empire. Many of the old antagonisms between European powers had remained since the previous war, especially between France and Great Britain in the New World. As one recent historian has noted, The Seven Years’ War was…essentially a continuation of the War of the Austrian Succession, since Britain and France continued to skirmish in their colonies, on the high seas and in India.³ The Seven Years’ War quickly became a worldwide struggle, involving by 1756 France, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia after the initial hostilities began in the frontier wilderness of America two years earlier.

Something of a cold war existed after the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle between the French in Canada and the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and the British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. Both of the former belligerents sought to lure North American Indian tribes into their commercial and military spheres of influence—or at least keep them neutral. In search of trade opportunities, small numbers of British entrepreneurs began to move across the Appalachian Mountains toward the upper Ohio River Valley, while land company investors and speculators sought to obtain huge property grants to resell to future settlers. Pennsylvania and Virginia commercial interests also tried to muscle into the fur trade by establishing posts west of the Appalachians, which had long been the purview of French traders.

The colonial French government, headquartered in Quebec, sought to block these alarming English encroachments into what it considered to be its own territory, by right of earlier exploration and occupation. It feared that determined American colonists would eventually settle the fertile Ohio Country, which would block communications from New France (Canada) to the French settlements along the Mississippi River and in the Louisiana and Illinois Territories, including New Orleans. It began to construct new forts in this vast, sparsely settled wilderness to protect its scattered possessions, including the upper reaches of the Ohio River, where daring Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia traders and surveyors were already intruding.

As part of their new defensive measures, in 1753, French officials sent a strong force to construct a chain of earth-and-log forts to link Lake Erie with the strategic point called the Forks of the Ohio. This was the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers, which combined to form the Ohio River at today’s city of Pittsburgh. When French colonial troops arrived at the Forks in April 1754, they found a small contingent of Virginia provincial soldiers already building a stockade fort there, in what the French regarded as their own domain. Virginians had also established trading storehouses opposite the mouth of Wills Creek on the Potomac River, which also displeased the French.

The British North American colonies and New France during the French and Indian War. George Park Fisher, The Colonial Era, 1896.

The French soldiers constructed Fort Duquesne—a square earth-and-log fort with four bastions, outer works and a palisade to the east—after forcing the outnumbered Virginians to leave the Forks. This stronghold and three smaller forts between the Forks and Lake Erie would effectively block American commercial enterprises west of the mountains if they were allowed to stand by colonial leaders. A combination