Atlantic Politics, Military Strategy and the French and Indian War

Richard Hall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319306650
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

1755 marked the point at which events in America ceased to be considered subsidiary affairs in the great international rivalry that existed between the colonial powers of Great Britain and France. This book examines the Braddock Campaign of 1755, a segment of the wider 'Braddock Plan' that aimed to drive the French from all of the contested regions they occupied in North America. Rather than being an archetypal military history-styled analysis of General Edward Braddock's foray into the Ohio Valley, this work will argue that British defeat at the infamous Battle of the Monongahela should be viewed as one that ultimately embodied military, political and diplomatic divergences and weaknesses within the British Atlantic World of the eighteenth century. These factors, in turn, hinted at growing schisms in the empire that would lead to the breakup of British North America in the 1770s and the birth of the future United States. Such an interpretation moves away from theconclusion so often advanced that Braddock's Defeat was a distinctly, and principally 'British', martial catastrophe; hence allowing the outcome of this pivotal event in American history to be understood in a different vein than has hitherto been apparent.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Richard HallAtlantic Politics, Military Strategy and the French and Indian WarWar, Culture and Society, 1750-185010.1007/978-3-319-30665-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction, Book Structure and the Context of Historiography

Richard Hall¹

(1)

Department of History and Classics, University of Swansea, Swansea, UK

End Abstract

Francis Parkman, one of nineteenth-century America’s most recognized early scholars of the French and Indian War, once commented that “great events obscure the great events that came before them,” as he reflected on the Seven Years War and its declining relevance in the eyes of his contemporaries. ¹ In this statement of undoubted lamentation, Parkman was alluding to the unfortunate reality that the Seven Years War was increasingly slipping into the haze of historical obscurity as subsequent events, such as the American War of Independence and Napoleonic conflicts, overshadowed what had been one of the world’s major conflagrations. Even to this day, Parkman’s reflection carries some weight and, as a consequence, legendary names such as James Wolfe, Edward Braddock, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and Tanaghrisson (the “Half King”) do not have the same iconic impact they once possessed in the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. Perhaps, however, it always was inevitable that the passage of time and the influence of subsequent history would push these fundamental characters and events to the back of national consciousness. ² Certainly, unless one were to place the chronology of the French and Indian War in the context of fiction, such as James Fennimore Cooper’s iconic Last of the Mohicans and subsequent associated twentieth-century films, then widespread familiarity with this most pivotal of conflicts is very unlikely indeed. Alas, as time progresses and as new historic epochs are written, it is probable that this great war for imperial preeminence will fade yet further into the distance of national memory.

Nevertheless, the French and Indian War and the wider Seven Years War it spawned are decisive conflicts in global history. The latter was a conflagration that would be fought on all of the world’s major continents; from Europe to Asia, the Americas and Africa. Its immediate legacies included the bankrupting of nations, the wanton sacrifice of countless lives and the devastation of whole communities. In Europe, the Seven Years War led to the emergence of Russia and Prussia as great continental powers, while in North America, the French and Indian War was instrumental in laying the political foundations of the American Revolution; which in turn led to the birth of the United States of America.

What was an undoubtedly global war should, therefore, be proclaimed the true First World War and, indeed, this is how many historians now view this momentous event. That such a transformative conflict began in the sparsely settled and unfamiliar terrain of the Ohio Valley, a region in the then backwoods of North America, is testimony to that continent’s increasing strategic importance to the courts and governments of eighteenth-century Europe. ³ From being a region completely devoid of any major European influence prior to 1492, North America, settled by the French, British (and Dutch) in the early seventeenth century, became a theater that by 1754, the eve of conflict, played a pivotal role in the great dynastic game that was European diplomacy in the eighteenth century. Consequently, as the frontiers of British and French America began to merge as they expanded inexorably, the jealousies and rivalries of the “Old World” became violently transposed upon the New.

Book Structure

The purpose of the preliminary chapters will be to outline the central premise of this project and examine the causes of the French and Indian War. Concurrently, this will provide an opportunity to highlight several features of the early skirmishes between the British and French which clearly portended some of the reasons for Britain’s failure to successfully prosecute the grand designs of the “Braddock Plan” of 1755. Therefore, by assessing the rival colonies and their claims to the disputed lands of the Ohio, the territory that was truly the catalyst of the French and Indian War, it will be shown that while both sides had very real strengths and failings—politically, militarily and economically—the fractured political traditions of the British colonies, manifested in the intense rivalries that had developed between them, severely offset the vast numeric and economic supremacy they enjoyed over New France. In 1755, such divisions made the prosecution of the ambitious Braddock Plan, in particular Edward Braddock’s Fort Duquesne campaign, that much more arduous, as assumptions made about the essential provisos of the strategy—recruiting colonists into the British Army, raising a colonial central fund to support the war effort, and appointing a commander-in-chief with sweeping prerogative powers (at least by American standards)—were policies that bore little appreciation of the political culture that existed within Britain’s North American Empire. Further into this work, a more detailed examination of such issues will be used to demonstrate that the quasi-pluralism the colonies had enjoyed, exacerbated by the laissez faire attitude the British ministry had historically adopted towards the governance of its American possessions, made a hugely ambitious military strategy, devised in London, principally by the authoritarian hand of the Duke of Cumberland, and reliant upon the centralisation of authority among the various colonial bodies politic, flawed from its very outset.

Interestingly, the historiography of this period, specifically as it relates to the French and Indian War’s final outcome, has not always shared this assumption. In the nineteenth century, the popular consensus among many American historians (those who ostensibly represented the “Whig” interpretation of the Revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary period) was that the greater individual autonomy enjoyed by the British colonies, when compared to the autocratic government of New France (and its pervasive corruption), made British victory in the French and Indian War virtually inevitable. ⁴ According to this theory, Braddock’s defeat, for example, was a wholly military disaster that he, and his army, brought about through their contempt for their American allies and a mode of war that was unique to the New World. As an examination of that unfortunate officer’s campaign proves, this was always a specious argument failing, as it does, to properly account for the impact a fractured political base can have upon a distinctly centralised military campaign. Indeed, the British colonies’ inability to independently drive the French from the Ohio Valley (and other contested regions) prior to 1755 had already provided ample evidence of the divided nature of that segment of Britain’s empire; and the effect such separation had upon a concerted approach to what were considered serious French encroachments in the Ohio and beyond.

Most contemporary provincial statesmen would have been familiar with the dichotomies emergent from the parochial political structure of British North America. Benjamin Franklin, commenting on provincial jealousies after news reached him of Ensign Ward’s surrender of Fort Prince George at the Forks of the Ohio in 1754, would summarise the effect of British-American particularism when he lamented that,

The Confidence of the French in this Undertaking [the capture of Fort Prince George] seems well-grounded on the present disunited State of the British Colonies, and the extreme Difficulty of bringing so many different Governments and Assemblies to agree in any speedy and effectual Measures for our common defense and Security; while our Enemies have the very great Advantage of being under one Direction, with one Council, and one Purse. ⁵

Compounding this “extreme difficulty” was the fact that, within the bodies politic of individual British colonies, matters were hardly less tumultuous than the wider field of inter-colonial diplomacy. Fundamentally, internal politics in British America was a minefield of inherent mistrust between governor and assembly that was often epitomised by the struggle over prerogative powers and the respective rights of lower houses. This constitutional reality had also frequently hamstrung efforts to meet the challenges the French posed to British territorial claims in the American interior, as attempts to raise money and soldiers for military campaigns became enmeshed in disputes over who had the right to raise taxes or appropriate funds (Fig. 1.1). ⁶

Fig. 1.1

Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 political cartoon ‘Join, or Die’.

Edward Braddock, commander-in-chief of the British war effort in America for 1755, would very quickly learn of these tribulations as they encumbered his pivotal campaign against Fort Duquesne.

This political fragmentation within British America and its divisive consequences also hampered efforts in the crucial field of American-Indian affairs—a factor that significantly contributed to the failure of the Braddock Plan (the Acadia expedition of Robert Monkton notwithstanding) in 1755. Instead of forging a united and coordinated approach towards Indian diplomacy, the British colonies often pursued individualistic policies that protected vested local interests as opposed to any common good (including the “good” of Britain’s indigenous allies).

The establishment of a Covenant Chain with the Iroquois from 1677 was one of the more successful avenues through which the British colonies had attempted to improve security and defend their sovereign rights along their borders, using Indian alliances as the guarantor of these various territorial claims. However, by the 1750s, the traditional conventions of American-Indian diplomacy had shifted considerably from what they had been in 1677. The Covenant Chain, and its subsequent evolutions, rested on the diplomatic and, to a certain extent, military primacy of Six Nations who had traditionally dominated regional politics. This provided a convenient syllogism to justify British sovereignty over the Iroquois and, by extension, their vassals in the Ohio Valley and beyond. As Francis Jennings suggested, British dominion over distant western lands became tied to a belief that,

…if the Iroquois had conquered the western tribes who held “natural right,” and had thus set up a “savage empire,” Britain would have the Iroquois rights of conquest because Iroquois dependency meant that what belonged to the Iroquois belonged to Britain. ⁷

The problem with this interpretation was that, by the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Iroquois power, undermined by years of near-incessant war with the French and their native allies (frequently on behalf of the English), was beginning to wane and those tribes who had once formed the vassals of “Greater Iroquoia” gradually demanded greater autonomy over their own affairs. Further corrosive to the Chain’s initial premise was the fact that, over time, the Iroquois became closely linked to New York, seeking military supplies and even direct intervention in their wars against the French and their affiliated Indian tribes. When their aspirations for control of areas governed by the English led to difficulties, the Six Nations used their New York allies to resolve matters. Likewise, New York officials used their relationship with the Iroquois to promote their trading and territorial ambitions at the expense of their fellow colonies. Needless to say, this rather convenient (some feared exclusive) arrangement had for some time caused a degree of discontent among New York’s equally ambitious neighbors. ⁸

The issue of British-Native American relations is important because it directly affected the prosecution of Britain’s strategy for 1755. Specifically, the loss of many western groups to the French by the eve of conflict requires explanation, as it was a factor that had a demonstrable effect on the Fort Duquesne prong of the Cumberland strategy (or “Braddock Plan”) of 1755; in addition, of course, to the two other campaigns of this grand strategy—those of William Johnson and William Shirley in New York. Edward Braddock himself has been, perhaps rightly, criticized for his failure to retain his native allies. He, however, was merely the apex of an array of Anglo-American officials that simply did not grasp the evolving nature of Indian affairs and the implications of this among the tribes of the Ohio.

The concluding section of the following chapter will be dedicated to a brief examination of the events that would lead directly to the deployment of Braddock and two British regiments to America in 1755. The infamous Great Meadows defeat, for example, exemplifies the difficulties of merging two very different military traditions (British regulars and locally raised American units) under one unified command. This was most obviously reflected by George Washington’s bitter disputes over seniority with Captain James Mackay of the Independent South Carolina Regiment, which resulted in a rather awkward (and eventually failed) joint command. ⁹ Unsurprisingly, this issue of precedence between British and American officers would become a notorious source of resentment between Anglo-American units raised to fight the wider French and Indian War. These di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction, Book Structure and the Context of Historiography
• 2. The Causes of the French and Indian War and the Origins of the “Braddock Plan”: Rival Colonies and Their Claims to the Disputed Ohio
• 3. Metropolitan Intervention: Britain’s Strategy for a New Colonial War
• 4. “Stupid Brutes Led by an Eighteenth-Century Colonel Blimp?” The British Army of the Eighteenth Century
• 5. Edward Braddock in America: Provincial Politics, Indian Alliances and the Prolonged and Arduous March to the Monongahela
• 6. The Battle of the Monongahela: A Clash of Military Cultures
• Backmatter