La spedizione britannica contro la Martinica fu un'azione militare che ebbe luogo a gennaio e febbraio 1762. Faceva parte della guerra dei sette anni. La Martinica fu restituita in Francia dopo il trattato di Parigi del 1763.

Invasione della Martinica

Siege of Havana

Montreal Campaign

French & Indian War (1754-1763)

The Proclamation of 1763

The French and Indian War (1754&ndash;1763) was the North American front of the global Seven Years&rsquo; War, fought between <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-England'>Britain</a> and <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-France'>France</a> with their respective Native allies over control of the continent. It began with George Washington&rsquo;s 1754 clash at Jumonville Glen and saw early British defeats, including Braddock&rsquo;s disastrous expedition, before turning in Britain&rsquo;s favor under William Pitt&rsquo;s leadership. Major victories at Louisbourg, Quebec, and Montreal brought the fall of New France. The 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the war, giving Britain control of <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-Canada'>Canada</a> and all French lands east of the Mississippi, while France ceded Louisiana to <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-Spain'>Spain</a>, leaving Britain the dominant power in North America.

By 1762, after seven years of war, both France and Britain were exhausted and searching for a way to end the conflict. Britain’s long naval blockade had crippled the French economy and bottled up its fleet, leaving far-flung colonies exposed. French leaders hoped to strengthen their hand in coming peace talks by seizing Newfoundland, believing control of its rich fisheries would be vital to rebuilding their navy in peacetime. In May, the Chevalier de Ternay slipped past the British blockade at Brest with a small squadron bound for the North Atlantic.On 27 June, French troops under the Comte d’Haussonville forced the surrender of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Under Ternay’s overall command, they fortified their new possession with artillery and redoubts clustered around Signal Hill, the steep height that dominated the harbor. From there, French lookouts could see ships for miles, and guns on the ridge could bar the harbor mouth to any British attempt to retake it.Through the summer, British reinforcements gathered. In late August, ships under Captain Campbell sailed from Halifax to Louisbourg, then onward to Newfoundland to join Admiral Lord Colvill’s fleet. On 12 September, the combined force landed unopposed at Torbay, just north of St. John’s. Unable to stop the landing, Haussonville sent a detachment to defend Signal Hill, the key to the town’s defence.At dawn on 15 September, British troops scaled the rocky slopes and caught the French off guard. The clash was brief but fierce. French commander Guillaume de Bellecombe was badly wounded, while the British suffered several casualties, including an officer named MacDonell whose legs were shattered by musket fire. Outnumbered and surprised, the French detachment broke and fled toward Fort William, leaving about 600 men to retreat into the town.With Signal Hill in British hands, the outcome was sealed. Heavy guns were dragged up from the beaches at Torbay to batter the French positions below. Three days later, on 18 September, the French garrison of St. John’s—just over seven hundred men—capitulated. The brief fight for Signal Hill marked the last major battle of the Seven Years’ War in North America, closing a chapter that had begun years earlier on the continent’s frontiers and now ended on a wind-beaten cliff above the Atlantic.

Battle of Signal Hill

British Conquest

The British government realized that with the Fortress of Louisbourg under French control, the Royal Navy could not sail up the St. Lawrence River unmolested for an attack on Quebec. After an expedition against Louisbourg in 1757 led by Lord Loudon was turned back due to a strong French naval deployment, the British under the leadership of William Pitt resolved to try again with new commanders. Pitt assigned the task of capturing the fortress to Major General Jeffery Amherst. Amherst's brigadiers were Charles Lawrence, James Wolfe and Edward Whitmore, and command of naval operations was assigned to Admiral Edward Boscawen.Continuing heavy seas and the difficulty inherent to moving siege equipment over boggy terrain delayed the commencement of the formal siege. In the meantime, Wolfe was sent with 1,220 picked men around the harbour to seize Lighthouse Point, which dominated the harbour entrance. This he did on 12 June. After eleven days, on 19 June, the British artillery batteries were in position and the orders were given to open fire on the French. The British battery consisted of seventy cannons and mortars of all sizes. Within hours, the guns had destroyed walls and damaged several buildings. On 21 July a mortar round from a British gun on Lighthouse Point struck a 64-gun French ship of the line, Le Célèbre , and set it ablaze. A stiff breeze fanned the fire, and shortly after Le Célèbre caught fire, two other French ships, L'Entreprenant and Le Capricieux, had also caught fire. L'Entreprenant sank later in the day, depriving the French of the largest ship in the Louisbourg fleet. The next major blow to French morale came on the evening of 23 July, at 10:00. A British 'hot shot' set the King's Bastion on fire. The King's Bastion was the fortress headquarters and the largest building in North America in 1758. Its destruction eroded confidence and reduced morale in the French troops and their hopes to lift the British siege.Most historians regard the British actions of 25 July as the 'straw that broke the camel's back'. Using a thick fog as cover, Admiral Boscawen sent a cutting-out party to destroy the last two French ships in the harbour. The British raiders eliminated these two French ships of the line, capturing Bienfaisant and burning Prudent, thus clearing the way for the Royal Navy to enter the harbour. James Cook, who later became famous as an explorer, took part in this operation and recorded it in his ship's log book.The fall of the fortress led to the loss of French territory across Atlantic Canada. From Louisbourg, British forces spent the remainder of the year routing French forces and occupying French settlements in what is today New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. The second wave of the Acadian expulsion began.The loss of Louisbourg deprived New France of naval protection, opening the Saint Lawrence to attack. Louisbourg was used in 1759 as the staging point for General Wolfe's famous siege of Quebec ending French rule in North America. Following the surrender of Quebec, British forces and engineers set about methodically destroying the fortress with explosives, ensuring that it could not return to French possession a second time in any eventual peace treaty. By 1760, the entire fortress was reduced to mounds of rubble.

Siege of Louisbourg

The Battle of Ticonderoga in July 1759 was a pivotal moment in the French and Indian War, marked by the British capture of Fort Carillon, later renamed Fort Ticonderoga. As General Jeffery Amherst led a British force of over 11,000 men toward the fort, they were met with little resistance from the French. Brigadier General François-Charles de Bourlamaque, commanding the French garrison of only 400 men, had been ordered by his superiors, General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and Governor Vaudreuil, to delay the British as much as possible before retreating.The French were aware of their disadvantage, given their severely outnumbered forces and limited reinforcements from France, which was prioritizing the European theater of the Seven Years' War. Montcalm’s orders were clear: delay the British but avoid annihilation. De Bourlamaque began withdrawing most of his men as the British approached, leaving a small force behind to defend the fort and lay charges to destroy it. On July 26, after the British had positioned their artillery, the French detonated the powder magazine, causing significant damage but failing to destroy the fort's walls entirely.The British occupied Fort Carillon the following day. Despite this success, Amherst’s slow campaign—including the need to build ships on Lake Champlain—prevented him from joining General James Wolfe in Quebec. While Amherst consolidated his control over the Champlain area, the larger strategic picture was already tipping in Britain’s favor. The fall of Quebec later that year and the eventual surrender of Montreal in 1760 confirmed British control over Canada, marking a decisive turn in the war.This victory at Fort Ticonderoga was part of what the British called the 'Annus Mirabilis' or 'Year of Wonders' of 1759, where several major successes led to the collapse of French power in North America. The fort, once an essential bastion for the French, would later change hands again during the American Revolutionary War.

Battle of Ticonderoga

Tension over Acadia had simmered since the seventeenth century, when French settlements grew beside New England. After Britain took Acadia in 1710, both empires claimed the Chignecto isthmus: the English leaned on the Missaguash River as a boundary for Nova Scotia, while Acadians farmed on both banks and French posts pressed west toward Fort Beauséjour. By mid-century, Britain asserted jurisdiction into present-day New Brunswick and northern Maine, colliding with French outposts and Acadian villages. Franco-Mi’kmaq ties deepened the fault lines. Intermarriage and alliance gave the French a local base that checked Protestant expansion. Abbé Le Loutre, priest at Beauséjour and agent of French policy, urged Acadians to avoid English allegiance and kept Mi’kmaq resistance alive. In London and Boston, officials read Acadian neutrality as unreliable. In Halifax, Governor Charles Lawrence and his council weighed security first and farmland later, and debated forcing an unconditional oath. Wider war pushed the region to a decision. In 1754 fighting on the Ohio began with Jumonville Glen and Fort Necessity. New Englanders, battered by raids and fearing a coordinated French-Native strike from Chignecto, looked to preemption. Massachusetts Governor William Shirley planned to seize Beauséjour, judging that only an attack could steady the frontier. Colonel John Winslow mustered about two thousand Massachusetts provincials, joined by Lieutenant Colonel George Scott and Robert Monckton. The force sailed from Boston on 22 May 1755, reached Fort Lawrence on 2 June, and moved toward the Missaguash. Inside Beauséjour, Commandant Vergor called Acadians to arms and urged reinforcements from Louisbourg, Quebec, and the St. John valley. Engineer Jacau de Fiedmont pushed repairs, felled bridges, and scouted gun positions, but morale sagged and labor was scarce. The first clash came on 4 June at the river. British troops rebuilt a destroyed bridge under fire and took no losses, while French and Acadian irregulars showed little cohesion. That night Vergor burned surrounding buildings to deny cover, further souring Acadian spirits. Through rain and rumor the British dug forward; French allies brought in a captured British officer who warned of heavy siege guns now ashore. On 13 June British batteries opened, outmatching the fort’s pieces. Desertions rose as news spread that Louisbourg was blockaded. On 16 June a shell burst in the officers’ mess, killing several, including the prisoner Hay, the siege’s lone British fatality. The white flag went up. Terms protected Acadian civilians and limited French service in America for six months. That evening the British took possession and renamed the post Fort Cumberland; Fort Gaspereau yielded on the same conditions. A British detachment then forced the destruction of Fort Menagoueche, leaving Louisbourg the last French bastion in Acadia. The capitulation reshaped policy. British officers found proof that some Acadians had manned Beauséjour’s works. With the land bridge to French Canada cut, Lawrence and the Nova Scotia Council judged neutrality broken and the military risk unacceptable. On 31 July 1755 they ordered the deportation of the Acadian population, a decision historians link both to security calculations and, for some officials, to the lure of fertile dykelands. Fort Cumberland became a hub for removals and a quiet garrison through the rest of the war. The campaign at Chignecto closed one frontier chapter of a contest that had begun with boundaries and oaths and ended, for thousands of Acadians, in forced embarkation and exile.

Battle of Fort Beauséjour

The Treaty of Paris, also known as the Treaty of 1763, was signed on 10 February 1763 by the kingdoms of Great Britain, <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-France' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>France</a> and <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-Spain' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>Spain</a>, with <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-Portugal' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>Portugal</a> in agreement, after Great Britain and Prussia's victory over France and Spain during the <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/Seven-Years-War' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>Seven Years' War</a>. The signing of the treaty formally ended conflict between France and Great Britain over control of North America (the Seven Years' War, known as the French and Indian War in the <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-the-United-States' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>United States</a>), and marked the beginning of an era of British dominance outside Europe. Great Britain and France each returned much of the territory that they had captured during the war, but Great Britain gained much of France's possessions in North America.The war changed economic, political, governmental, and social relations among the three European powers, their colonies, and the people who inhabited those territories. France and Britain both suffered financially because of the war, with significant long-term consequences. Britain gained control of French <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-Canada' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>Canada</a> and Acadia, colonies containing approximately 80,000 primarily French-speaking Roman Catholic residents. The Quebec Act of 1774 addressed issues brought forth by Roman Catholic French Canadians from the 1763 proclamation, and it transferred the Indian Reserve into the Province of Quebec. The Seven Years' War nearly doubled Great Britain's national debt. The elimination of French power in America meant the disappearance of a strong ally for some Indian tribes.

Epilogue

The Expulsion of the Acadians took place between 1755 and 1764, when British authorities forcibly removed the French-speaking inhabitants of Acadia from their lands. The campaign covered what are now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, as well as parts of present-day Maine. During the French and Indian War, the British viewed the Acadians as a potential military threat because of their Catholic faith, their close ties with the French, and their alliances with the Mi’kmaq. Determined to sever Acadian support for French strongholds like Louisbourg and Beauséjour, Governor Charles Lawrence ordered the mass deportation of the population without distinction between those who were neutral and those who had resisted British rule. Beginning in 1755, British troops rounded up entire communities. Homes and churches were burned, crops destroyed, and families separated. Of the roughly 14,000 Acadians living in the region, about 11,500 were deported. Many were sent to the Thirteen Colonies, others to Britain or France, and later some of those exiles migrated to Spanish Louisiana, where their descendants became known as Cajuns. Thousands perished from disease, starvation, and shipwrecks during transport. Those who escaped fled to remote northern settlements or to French territories such as Île Saint-Jean and Île Royale. By 1764, a British census found only about 2,600 Acadians still in Nova Scotia, most having hidden or returned after the deportations ended. The expulsions devastated Acadian society and reshaped the region’s population. Their former lands were given to British settlers from New England and Scotland, transforming the Maritimes into predominantly English-speaking colonies. In 1764, the British government allowed limited resettlement under strict conditions, requiring new oaths of loyalty. The tragedy of the expulsion lingered for generations and became a central part of Acadian identity. In the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline brought the story of exile and loss to a wider audience, turning the suffering of the Acadians into a lasting symbol of displacement and endurance.

Expulsion of the Acadians

In 1755 General Edward Braddock arrived in the Thirteen Colonies as the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America. Bringing with him the 44th and 48th Regiments from Ireland, he supplemented his ranks with colonial recruits, mustering roughly 2,200 men by the time his column left Fort Cumberland, Maryland, on 29 May. His objective was to capture Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio River—France’s key stronghold in the contested Ohio Country—and then advance toward Fort Niagara to secure British control of the region. Among Braddock’s aides was the 23-year-old Colonel George Washington, already familiar with the terrain from his earlier campaign. Braddock’s expedition formed part of a broader British plan for a four-pronged offensive against New France. From the outset he met daunting obstacles: narrow forest trails that had to be widened for cannon and wagons, a lack of pack animals, and his refusal to employ large numbers of Native scouts, taking only a handful of Mingo guides. Progress was agonizingly slow, forcing Braddock to split his force. He led an advance “flying column” of 1,300 picked men and left Colonel Thomas Dunbar to follow with the heavy baggage and artillery. By 9 July, Braddock’s vanguard had crossed the Monongahela River, only ten miles from Fort Duquesne. Inside the fort, Captain Claude-Pierre Pécaudy de Contrecœur commanded about 1,600 French troops, Canadian militia, and Native allies. As the British closed in, he dispatched Captain Daniel Liénard de Beaujeu with roughly 800 men—among them 600 Indigenous warriors—to intercept them. Beaujeu’s detachment, delayed in reaching the ford, stumbled directly into Braddock’s advance guard under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage. In the opening volley, Beaujeu was killed, but his men swiftly rallied under Captain Jean-Daniel Dumas. From the cover of trees, the French and their Native allies poured a deadly crossfire into the British line. The dense forest nullified European tactics. Gage’s forward troops fell back and collided with the main column on the narrow road, sowing confusion. British platoons, trained to fight shoulder to shoulder on open ground, fired blindly—sometimes into their own ranks—while Native warriors moved fluidly through the woods, shouting and scalping to terrorize their foes. Attempts to deploy artillery failed in the cramped space, and the provincial troops, taking to trees for cover, were mistakenly shot at by regulars. Braddock had several horses killed beneath him but continued to rally his men until, after three hours of fighting, he was mortally wounded. With Braddock down and no clear command, the British line collapsed. Washington improvised a rear guard that covered the retreat and likely prevented total annihilation. The survivors fell back across the Monongahela, harried at close quarters. The Native warriors, more interested in plunder than pursuit, stayed behind to loot and drink from the captured British rum supply. Of about 1,300 soldiers engaged, 456 were killed and 422 wounded; among 86 officers, more than half were casualties. The French and Canadians lost fewer than 50 men, though their commander Beaujeu was among the dead. Braddock succumbed to his wounds on 13 July and was buried near the road he had cut through the wilderness. The defeat at the Monongahela was one of the most disastrous in British colonial history. It shattered the illusion of European invincibility in North America and galvanized France’s Native allies. Colonel Dunbar, left with the rear echelons, destroyed supplies and retreated east. The French remained masters of the Ohio frontier until 1758, when General John Forbes’s expedition finally captured the abandoned Fort Duquesne. Strategically, Braddock’s failure taught the British a lasting lesson: that rigid line tactics were useless in forest warfare. In later campaigns of the Seven Years’ War—and eventually in the American Revolution—they would rely far more on light infantry and skirmishers trained to fight in the North American wilderness.

Battle of the Monongahela

The Albany Congress was a meeting of representatives sent by the legislatures of seven of the British colonies in British America to discuss better relations with the Native American tribes and common defensive measures against the French threat from <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-Canada' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>Canada</a> in the opening stage of the French and Indian War, the North American front of the <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/Seven-Years-War' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>Seven Years' War</a> between Great <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-England' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>Britain</a> and <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-France' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>France</a>.Delegates did not have the goal of creating an American nation; rather, they were colonists with the more limited mission of pursuing a treaty with the Mohawks and other major Iroquois tribes. This was the first time that <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/Conquests-of-Alexander-the-Great' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>American colonists</a> had met together, and it provided a model that came into use in setting up the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, as well as the First Continental Congress in 1774, which were preludes to the <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/American-Revolutionary-War' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>American Revolution</a>.

Albany Congress

In the summer of 1755, Britain launched a broad offensive against New France, and General Edward Braddock led the main column toward the forks of the Ohio. His force—about 1,400 regulars of the 44th and 48th Foot, 700 provincials, artillery, and support—set out from Fort Cumberland on May 29. George Washington, now a 23-year-old lieutenant colonel, rode as a volunteer aide. Braddock struggled to recruit Native allies and moved with only a handful of Mingo scouts while many regional leaders waited to see which side would prevail. The route west over the Alleghenies was the first battle. Braddock insisted on cutting a proper road to supply the fort he expected to capture, inching forward sometimes two miles a day and leaving behind what became Braddock’s Road. To gain speed he split the army: a “flying column” of roughly 1,300 under his direct command went ahead, with Colonel Thomas Dunbar trailing with the heavy baggage and most of the wagons. Skirmishers shadowed the advance, and the column marched past the ruins of Fort Necessity, a reminder of the previous summer’s defeat. Inside Fort Duquesne, Captain Contrecœur knew his small garrison could not withstand a siege. He sent a mixed force of French marines, Canadian militia, and Native warriors to meet Braddock before the British artillery arrived. On July 9, after crossing the Monongahela in parade-perfect order and encountering no opposition, Braddock’s advance guard under Thomas Gage unexpectedly collided with the French-led party moving to set an ambush. Their commander, Daniel de Beaujeu, fell in the first exchange, but Jean-Daniel Dumas rallied the line and spread his men through the timber. The fight that followed was a meeting engagement, not a planned ambush, but the ground and tactics favored the French and their Native allies. British regulars tried to dress lines on a narrow forest road under fire from concealed flanks. Provincial companies broke into the trees to fight back, and in the confusion some redcoats fired on them by mistake. Artillery could not deploy effectively. For hours the column bled in place while officers rode the line and fell in high numbers. Braddock was mortally wounded as the resistance unraveled. Washington helped form a rear guard and got a portion of the column off the field, earning the sobriquet “Hero of the Monongahela.” By nightfall the army was in retreat along its own road. Of roughly 1,300 engaged, about 456 were killed and 422 wounded; officer losses were severe. French and Canadian casualties were light by comparison, with modest losses among their Native allies. Four days later, on July 13, Braddock died during the withdrawal and was buried in the trace of the road. Colonel Dunbar took command, destroyed surplus guns and wagons, and fell back to the east. Though the beaten British still outnumbered their opponents, the victors did not pursue, turning instead to the grim work of the battlefield. Braddock’s defeat stalled the British thrust to the Ohio and confirmed to many Native communities that the French alliance still had teeth—at least for that campaign season.

Braddock Expedition

In 1758 the tide began to turn. After a bloody check at Carillon in July, British forces cracked open Louisbourg in August, handing them Atlantic Canada and a clear sea road toward the St. Lawrence. That same month, the fall of Fort Frontenac severed French supply lines feeding the Ohio posts. Some Indigenous allies made peace with the British, and French commanders in Canada—Governor de Vaudreuil and General Montcalm—pulled forces inward, uneasy as the noose tightened around Quebec.Through the winter and spring planning for 1759, London set a three-pronged push. One arm would move up Lake Champlain, another along the upper St. Lawrence, and the fleet would carry Major General James Wolfe to Quebec. Wolfe expected about 12,000 men but stepped ashore with closer to 7,000 regulars, supported by Admiral Charles Saunders’s heavy squadron. Ahead of the fleet, James Cook sounded the dangerous channels of the river—especially the Traverse—so the ships could thread their way toward the city.On 28 June the army took the Île d’Orléans. That night seven French fire ships drifted down, flames towering, but British boat crews hauled them harmlessly aside. The next day Wolfe seized Point Lévis on the south shore and emplaced guns that pounded the lower town in early July. Across the water, Montcalm, the Chevalier de Lévis, Bougainville, and de Sennezergue spread roughly 12,000 troops and militia along nine kilometers of the Beauport shore between the Saint-Charles River and Montmorency Falls, fortifying redoubts and batteries where a landing seemed most likely.Wolfe probed those lines and found a wall of farmhouses loopholed for muskets and screened by the Montmorency woods. On 31 July he tried to force a crossing. About 3,500 British and colonial troops splashed through the shallows under a storm of fire. Louisbourg Grenadiers, once ashore, rushed the entrenchments and were driven back; a thunderstorm broke over the field as casualties mounted—roughly 450 for Wolfe to about 60 for Montcalm—and the attackers withdrew to their camps.August dragged on with sickness in the British tents and Wolfe himself bedridden. Frustrated, he sent light troops and rangers to scour nearby parishes, burning mills and stone houses to choke French supplies. The navy’s blockade pinched traffic from France, yet Quebec still held out behind its riverside works. Inside the French camp, some officers thought the worst had passed; others readied for another descent while sleeping in boots and saddles.Late in August Wolfe and his brigadiers fixed on a new idea: slip upstream, land above the city, and force Montcalm to fight on open ground. Bougainville guarded that stretch from Cap Rouge, but on the night of 12 September British boats drifted down with the ebb toward a small cove, L’Anse-au-Foulon. A French-speaking officer answered a sentry’s challenge, and a party led by William Howe scrambled up the cliff, seized the path, and rolled Vergor’s picket from its post. Before dawn on 13 September, battalions filed up to the plateau and formed a thin two-rank line across the Plains of Abraham.Montcalm faced a hard choice. With Bougainville still upriver and the British already landing guns on the heights, he chose to strike at once. Around 10 a.m. his regulars advanced in uneven order across the stubbled fields while Canadian militia and Indigenous skirmishers worried the British left from the scrub above the Saint-Charles. Wolfe held his men steady until the French closed to short range. Two crushing volleys—muskets double-shotted—shook the line and sent it reeling. Wolfe fell mortally wounded near the center; Montcalm, struck during the retreat, died in Quebec that night.Brigadier George Townshend gathered the British as Bougainville’s column appeared, wheeled units to face it, and the French fell back behind the river. Within days, on 18 September 1759, Quebec capitulated to Townshend and Saunders while Vaudreuil withdrew west to join the field army. Winter locked the St. Lawrence, and in April 1760 Lévis marched back, beat James Murray outside the walls at Sainte-Foy, and besieged the city. Lacking heavy guns and with British naval relief arriving first in May, the French lifted the siege.That summer the wider war decided the colony’s fate. British control at sea after Quiberon Bay kept French reinforcements from crossing the Atlantic. In September 1760 three British columns converged on Montreal. Outnumbered, Lévis and the civil authorities accepted terms on 8 September. With the capitulation of Canada and, later, the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the campaigns that began with Louisbourg, Frontenac, and the gamble at L’Anse-au-Foulon ended with Britain in command of the St. Lawrence and the interior river routes.

Battle of Quebec

By early 1758 the war had gone badly for Britain, so William Pitt flipped the strategy: hold defensively in Europe and strike hard in North America. Three blows were planned—Louisbourg, Fort Duquesne, and a drive up the Champlain corridor. The Champlain thrust fell to General James Abercrombie; his battlefield spark was Brigadier George Howe, the army’s tireless reformer and second-in-command. Across the water Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and Governor Vaudreuil, short of men and food and at odds with each other, argued over how to meet the coming storm. With perhaps 3,500 regulars at Carillon and thin militia and Native support, Montcalm chose to fight forward of the fort, shaping ground rather than waiting behind stone. Abercrombie massed the largest army yet seen in North America—about 16,000 regulars and provincials—at Lake George. On 5–6 July the flotilla rowed to the lake’s head and pushed into the woods. Near Bernetz Brook a French patrol under Captain Trépezet blundered into the advance. The skirmish scattered the patrol, but one shot killed Howe. In an instant the expedition lost its nerve center. That same night the French hacked together a killing ground: entrenchments on the rise northwest of Carillon fronted by tangled abatis—felled trees bristling with sharpened branches. From Rattlesnake Hill, British eyes misread the works as flimsy and incomplete. Abercrombie, fearing imagined reinforcements and spurred by overconfident reports, chose a rapid assault without bringing up heavy guns. On 8 July Rogers’ Rangers and light troops felt out the line, then three columns of redcoats went forward. The abatis stopped them cold. Volleys from battalion to battalion along Montcalm’s breastwork cut lanes in the ranks; every attempt to tear a passage ended in piles of men. On the left the Black Watch surged to the base of the wall and some clambered over, only to be bayoneted back. Barges with light cannon drifted into the wrong channel and were raked by fire from the fort. From noon until dusk fresh waves met the same fate. As darkness fell Abercrombie pulled back; by morning the army was in full retreat up Lake George. The day had been the war’s bloodiest: British losses ran to well over two thousand killed and wounded, including more than six hundred in the Black Watch alone; French casualties were a fraction of that. Montcalm’s men, sleepless and thirsty, repaired their works and waited for a second blow that never came. The defeat stalled the Champlain campaign and shook Native confidence in British arms. Abercrombie, stung and soon recalled, attempted nothing more than supporting Bradstreet’s separate strike on Fort Frontenac. News of Carillon dimmed the glow of Louisbourg’s fall, yet Pitt’s wider plan held: by 1759–60 the British would return with siege guns and steadier generalship, take Ticonderoga, and push on to Quebec and Montreal. Carillon became a textbook of errors. The British never properly scouted, never emplaced artillery, and kept feeding men into a frontal fight the ground had already decided. Montcalm, for his part, had chosen the right ridge and built the right obstacles. In a war that often rewarded those who moved like skirmishers in a forest, he won this day by turning a wooded slope into a wall.

Battle of Carillon

French Victories

The siege of Havana was a successful British siege against Spanish-ruled Havana that lasted from March to August 1762, as part of the Seven Years' War. After <a href='https://history-maps.com/story/History-of-Spain' rel='noopener noreferrer' target='_blank'>Spain</a> abandoned its former policy of neutrality by signing the family compact with France, resulting in a British declaration of war on Spain in January 1762, the British government decided to mount an attack on the important Spanish fortress and naval base of Havana, with the intention of weakening the Spanish presence in the Caribbean and improving the security of its own North American colonies. A strong British naval force consisting of squadrons from Britain and the West Indies, and the military force of British and American troops it convoyed, were able to approach Havana from a direction that neither the Spanish governor nor the Admiral expected and were able to trap the Spanish fleet in the Havana harbour and land its troops with relatively little resistance.Havana remained under British occupation until February 1763, when it was returned to Spain under the 1763 Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war.

In the early 1750s, tension along the Ohio frontier began to boil over. British and French traders were both pressing into the valleys of western Pennsylvania, where the forks of the Ohio River offered control of the interior. New France, determined to shut out British influence, began building a chain of forts southward from Lake Erie in 1753. This alarmed not only colonial governors but also Native nations who relied on trade with both sides. Tanacharison, the Mingo leader known as the Half King, was particularly angered after a heated exchange with the French commander Paul Marin de la Malgue, who dismissed his words, insulted him, and threw down his wampum belt. From that moment, Tanacharison turned decisively toward the British.That winter, Virginia’s governor, Robert Dinwiddie, sent a young major, George Washington, west with a formal letter demanding that the French withdraw. The reply from Captain Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre was courteous but firm: he was acting under orders and would not leave. Washington’s report of the refusal convinced Dinwiddie that Virginia must act. Without waiting for London’s approval, he ordered a fort to be built at the forks of the Ohio. William Trent led the work in early 1754, but before it was finished, a strong French force under Claude-Pierre Pécaudy de Contrecœur arrived and compelled Trent’s men to withdraw. The French completed the fort themselves and named it Fort Duquesne.Dinwiddie then sent Washington back with a small regiment and instructions to defend Virginia’s interests. The orders were loosely worded—Washington could strike back if “any attempts” were made to obstruct the British. As historian Fred Anderson later noted, the instructions amounted to an invitation to start a war. Washington marched in April with about 160 men and reached the Great Meadows, where he began work on a small fort. In May he heard that a party of French soldiers was nearby. They were actually led by Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, sent by Contrecœur with a summons ordering Washington to withdraw.On the night of 27 May, Tanacharison brought word that he had found the French camp. Washington took forty men to join him, and together with a dozen Mingo warriors they surrounded the sleeping French party at dawn. What happened next lasted only fifteen minutes. Shots were fired; the French were quickly overrun. Jumonville was among ten or more killed, and twenty-one were taken prisoner. Later accounts claimed that Tanacharison approached the wounded officer, called him “my father,” and split his skull with a hatchet—a symbolic act declaring war on the French. Washington’s own reports played down the killing and made no mention of the execution, describing the action as a skirmish against armed enemies.The incident at Jumonville Glen shocked both sides. Washington withdrew to the Great Meadows and completed his makeshift fort, naming it Fort Necessity. In late June, Jumonville’s brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers, marched from Fort Duquesne with 600 French and Indigenous warriors to avenge him. On 3 July they surrounded the fort and, after a day of fighting in the rain, forced Washington to surrender. The surrender terms, written in French, referred to Jumonville’s “assassination”—a word Washington may not have fully understood when he signed. The skirmish in the woods above the Youghiogheny River and the defeat that followed at Fort Necessity became the spark that ignited the French and Indian War, the North American front of the Seven Years’ War.

Battle of Jumonville Glen

War on the New York–Canada frontier intensified after 1754. British forts rose at the south end of Lakes George and Champlain, while the French built Fort Carillon to block advances toward the St. Lawrence. Early British setbacks at Braddock’s defeat and at Oswego left Lord Loudoun in command by 1756; his 1757 plan shifted elite troops to a seaborne strike on Louisbourg and left Brigadier Daniel Webb with a thin force to hold the Hudson–Lake George corridor. Fort William Henry, a square log-and-earth work at Lake George’s head, could house only a fraction of its garrison; most men lived in an entrenched camp nearby. Lieutenant Colonel George Monro commanded about 2,500 by early August 1757, many sick. Up the lake at Carillon, Montcalm assembled roughly 8,000 French regulars, Canadian militia, and nearly 2,000 Indigenous allies, judging the frontier weak while British strength sailed for Louisbourg. Montcalm’s column moved at the end of July. On 3 August Lévis cut the road to Fort Edward; Montcalm summoned Monro to surrender, was refused, and opened formal siege works. French guns began from long range on 5 August, shifting to closer batteries the next day that created a crossfire against the northwest bastion. British pieces burst or were dismounted under the strain, and casualties climbed. On 7 August Bougainville delivered an intercepted letter from Webb advising Monro to seek terms. By 8 August the walls were breached and trenches crept still nearer. With guns silenced in places and no relief in sight, Monro raised a flag on 9 August to negotiate. The capitulation allowed the garrison to march to Fort Edward with honors, muskets, and one gun, on parole for 18 months; French prisoners were to be exchanged within three months. Montcalm tried to bind a heterogeneous Indigenous host to those terms, but control frayed. That evening warriors plundered the fort and killed some wounded. At dawn on 10 August, as the column formed to depart, assaults resumed: people were dragged off, baggage seized, and a number of soldiers, women, and children taken or killed. French officers recovered many captives, yet hundreds vanished into Indigenous camps. Best modern estimates put British missing and dead from the surrender at roughly 70 to 180. Most Indigenous contingents departed that afternoon. Montcalm secured the release of about 500 captives, demolished the works, and withdrew to Carillon on 18 August. Webb, holding at Fort Edward, had refused to advance despite William Johnson’s arrival with militia and Mohawk allies. Monro died in November; Webb and, later, Loudoun were recalled. Prisoner exchanges in the autumn returned several hundred survivors via Quebec and Halifax. British anger over the violations shaped policy: Amherst later denied the honors of war at Louisbourg in 1758 and Montreal in 1760, citing French failures at Fort William Henry. Strategically, the siege removed a forward British post, but Montcalm did not exploit the opening against Fort Edward. Within a year, British fortunes reversed with Louisbourg’s fall; by 1759–60 Carillon, Quebec, and Montreal also fell, closing the campaign that Fort William Henry had so starkly defined.

Siege of Fort William Henry

After Dominica fell in 1761, Martinique braced for the same. The French gathered roughly 1,200 regulars, 7,000 militia, and 4,000 privateersmen, trusting the island’s steep ridges and ravines to slow any landing. In early January 1762 Admiral Rodney escorted General Robert Monckton’s transports past Saint Lucia and into Sainte-Anne Bay. First probes at Les Anses-d'Arlet stumbled over impassable gun roads, so the troops re-embarked and looked for a cleaner approach.On 16 January the whole army came ashore at Case Navire, just north of Fort Royal’s harbor. The road to the town ran straight into broken ground studded with French redoubts and a commanding height, Morne Tortenson. Monckton answered earthworks with earthworks, hauling up guns and building batteries to smother the hill before moving.At daybreak on 24 January the British batteries opened. Infantry pushed in under their fire, while a flanking party slid around the French right. The sea-side redoubts went first; post after post on Morne Tortenson followed. By nine o’clock the crest, its guns, and its entrenchments were in British hands. The French fell back in disorder, some into Fort Royal and others to Morne Grenier, the next ridge to the north. Farther along the front, Brigadiers William Haviland and Walsh forced back outworks toward the same height. The day cost Monckton about 33 officers and 350 men killed and wounded.With Fort Royal now in range, Monckton began new batteries but Morne Grenier’s guns kept biting. On the afternoon of 27 January the French tried to seize the initiative, plunging off Morne Grenier in three columns against the British left. One column turned its flank to Highlanders and broke; the others wavered and collapsed. British troops chased them through a ravine and clawed up Morne Grenier ‘by every path, road, and passage,’ clearing the works by one in the morning on 28 January for a little over a hundred casualties.Guns climbed again. Batteries on Morne Tortenson were completed; others crept to within about 370 meters of the citadel. Under cross-fire and with the outer hills lost, Fort Royal’s position unraveled. On 3 February the citadel surrendered. By 12 February the remaining posts on Martinique yielded in turn.The army was a patchwork of regular battalions and light troops—line regiments from the 4th through the 60th and beyond, Highland units, American Rangers, Barbados volunteers, and colonial companies. Among the Rangers were about 150 Native Americans from Carolina, including the scout known as Silver Heels. Rodney’s ships kept pressure on the shoreline and covered each shift of the siege guns.With Martinique secured, Monckton fanned detachments across the arc of the Lesser Antilles. Between 26 February and 3 March, Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Saint Vincent accepted British terms without a fight. Plans were laid for Tobago next, but new orders cut them short: troops were needed for the strike at Havana. The campaign in the Windwards had done its work—bridges seized, heights turned, and the capital pried open ridge by ridge.

Invasion of Martinique

In the summer of 1758, after the shock of Carillon on July 8, Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet revived a plan that General James Abercrombie had shelved: strike Fort Frontenac. The post sat where Lake Ontario narrows into the St. Lawrence and fed French positions from Niagara to the Ohio. A quick blow there, Bradstreet argued, would restore British morale, cut French logistics, and unsettle the fur trade that ran through the fort. Abercrombie, eager for a redeeming success, approved the raid. Bradstreet gathered about 3,500 provincial militia and 135 regulars at Schenectady and pushed up the Mohawk to the ruins of Oswego. The route was rough, the waterways choked, and desertions trimmed his numbers, but French patrols offered little resistance. By 21 August the column reached Oswego; four days later his flotilla slipped across Lake Ontario and landed a mile west of Frontenac without opposition. Through the night of 25 August, the British threw up batteries and opened trenches toward the aging limestone walls. At dawn on the 26th their guns went to work. The small garrison—about a hundred troops with militia and Indigenous allies under Pierre-Jacques Payen de Noyan—returned fire, but the British kept hauling their pieces closer. On the 27th a new battery rose within 200 yards. When two French vessels tried to run for it on the morning of the 28th, British shot drove them aground. With relief still days away, Noyan called a council and raised the white flag. The magazines told the larger story. Bradstreet’s men found over sixty cannon, hundreds of barrels of provisions, and stores marked for the Ohio forts—much of it seized, some of it burned under orders not to hold the place. Bales of furs piled for shipment to Montreal underscored the fort’s commercial reach. Using captured vessels, the British ferried prisoners and prizes back toward Oswego; Noyan was paroled on a pledge to secure British captives in return. Montreal’s relief column arrived after the surrender. The French shifted their forward base to Fort de La Présentation on the St. Lawrence, while Frontenac—lightly re-garrisoned the next year—ceased to matter. For New France the loss severed a key supply hub; for the British it tightened the noose on the Great Lakes line and buoyed a shaken army. Responsibility in Quebec fell on Governor Vaudreuil, who had assumed British light craft would not risk Lake Ontario while French vessels cruised it. He forced Noyan into retirement; the old officer later faced charges in France before receiving a token fine. Strategically, Bradstreet’s quick, economical victory balanced the ledger of 1758: with Louisbourg down on the Atlantic and Fort Frontenac gone on the inland route, the French western posts were left thin and the road to Niagara and, in time, Montreal grew shorter.

Battle of Fort Frontenac

After open fighting broke out in North America in 1754 with the Battle of Jumonville Glen, Britain and France both rushed regular troops across the Atlantic to secure their colonial frontiers. Among the most contested regions was the frontier between New France and the British province of New York—modern Upstate New York—where both sides sought control of the Iroquois lands and access to the Great Lakes. Under Governor William Shirley, the British built up the fortifications at Oswego on Lake Ontario in 1755, constructing two new positions—Fort Ontario and Fort George—to complement the original Fort Oswego. Shirley’s plan was to advance west to capture Fort Niagara, but poor logistics and French naval dominance on Lake Ontario forced him to abandon the expedition. That winter, the French struck first, destroying the British supply post at Fort Bull, which crippled Oswego’s supply chain. When the spring of 1756 arrived, Governor Vaudreuil of New France gathered French regulars, Canadian militia, and Indian allies to eliminate the British presence at Oswego. In May, General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm reached Montreal to assume command of French forces. Despite personal friction between Montcalm and Vaudreuil, both agreed on an offensive against Oswego after encouraging reports from raiding parties near the fort. Meanwhile, British command was in disarray: Shirley was replaced by Lord Loudoun, and confusion over leadership left Oswego under Colonel James Mercer, with a garrison weakened by disease and short supplies. Of nearly 2,000 men, barely 1,200 were fit for duty. In early August 1756, Montcalm advanced from Fort Frontenac with 3,000 men—including the regiments of La Sarre, Guyenne, and Béarn, troupes de la marine, and about 250 Native warriors from across New France. The French landed east of Fort Ontario under cover of darkness on August 10, undetected by the British. By the next morning, their guns were in place, and Montcalm’s engineers began siege works against the fort. After a day of bombardment, Colonel Mercer ordered Fort Ontario abandoned, and Montcalm immediately occupied it, turning its guns across the river toward Fort Oswego. By dawn on August 14, French artillery was firing from the heights above the river, smashing Fort Oswego’s exposed eastern wall. The British defenders—caught off guard, with their guns facing inland—scrambled to return fire. During the exchange, Mercer was killed by a cannonball. As a French detachment under Rigaud crossed the river to encircle the fort, the British command passed to Lieutenant Colonel John Littlehales, who soon raised the white flag. About 1,700 men, including soldiers, shipbuilders, and civilians, were taken prisoner. Montcalm denied the garrison the honors of war, believing they had surrendered too easily. When the Canadian militia and Indian allies entered the captured fort, chaos erupted. Barrels of rum were broken open, leading to looting, drunkenness, and sporadic killings of prisoners attempting to flee. Montcalm, horrified, restored order but later lamented that compensating his allies for restraint “would cost the King eight or ten thousand livres.” The French burned what supplies they could not carry and destroyed the unfinished British ships before marching the prisoners to Montreal. British reinforcements sent too late under Colonel Bradstreet learned of Oswego’s fall on their approach and were ordered to withdraw. The loss of Oswego gave the French full control of Lake Ontario and cut Britain’s main supply line to the west. It was one of Montcalm’s first major victories and a severe setback for British ambitions in the Great Lakes region. The site would remain in French hands until 1758, when Bradstreet’s successful expedition against Fort Frontenac reversed the balance of power on Lake Ontario and paved the way for the later British advance toward Fort Niagara and Montreal.

Battle of Fort Oswego

In the summer of 1758, Britain launched a large expedition to seize control of the Ohio Country from France and open the way for an invasion of Canada. General John Forbes led about six thousand men, among them a Virginian contingent commanded by George Washington. Moving west from Pennsylvania, Forbes’s army advanced slowly, building a new military road and a string of forts along the route. Ill and unable to travel, Forbes left much of the field command to his second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swiss officer in the Royal American Regiment. By late August, as the force neared Fort Duquesne—the French stronghold at the forks of the Ohio River—Bouquet sent Major James Grant of the 77th Highlanders ahead with 850 men to scout the enemy position. Grant believed the fort weakly defended and planned a bold reconnaissance. On September 13, after reaching a hill near the fort, he divided his force: one company under Captain McDonald approached the fort playing drums and bagpipes to draw out the defenders, while others lay in ambush. Major Andrew Lewis’s Virginians guarded the baggage train to the rear. The plan quickly fell apart. The French and their Native allies were far stronger than Grant expected. They charged from the fort, overwhelmed McDonald’s decoy, and turned the ambush against the British. The dense forest favored the French-allied warriors, who fired unseen from cover while the Highlanders stood exposed on open ground. Lewis’s Virginians tried to rally the fight but were soon surrounded. Grant and Lewis were both captured. Of the 850 men, more than three hundred were killed or wounded, with especially heavy losses among the Highlanders. The French and Native forces lost fewer than twenty. The survivors straggled back to Fort Ligonier, shaken but still intact. Yet their defeat did not change the larger course of the campaign. Commandant François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery knew his small French garrison could not withstand the full British advance. As Forbes’s main force approached in November, he ordered Fort Duquesne destroyed. On November 24, the French set fire to the fort and withdrew down the rivers. When the British arrived, they found only ruins and grim evidence of battle. Soon after, they began constructing a new fort on the same site, naming it Fort Pitt in honor of Britain’s war minister, William Pitt. The fall of Fort Duquesne marked the end of French control in the Ohio Valley and a turning point in the struggle for North America.

Battle of Fort Duquesne

By the early 1750s, France held a vast but thinly peopled North American empire. With perhaps 75,000 to 90,000 colonists, New France relied on river corridors and alliances with Native nations to link Canada to Louisiana. The Ohio Country, between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, became the key overland hinge in that system. At the same time, Britain’s far larger seaboard colonies pressed over the Appalachians. British traders offered cheaper goods and drew Native commerce their way, sharpening a contest that was political, economic, and territorial all at once.In 1753 Canadian authorities moved to shut out British influence by building forts south from Lake Erie. That alarmed Native leaders as well as colonial governors. Tanacharison, the Mingo Half King, turned against the French after a tense council in which the French commander scorned his wampum. Virginia’s governor, Robert Dinwiddie, claimed the Ohio for Virginia and sent Major George Washington to warn the French off. Captain Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, polite but firm, refused. Dinwiddie then ordered a post at the forks of the Ohio.William Trent’s small party began a stockade there in February 1754 with Mingo help, but Claude-Pierre Pécaudy de Contrecœur arrived with a superior force in April. Trent’s men withdrew, and the French raised Fort Duquesne at the confluence. Dinwiddie next sent Washington with a provincial regiment and elastic orders to defend Virginia’s claims. Washington cut a road toward the Youghiogheny and stopped at the Great Meadows to build a small post while scouting ahead.Late in May, Contrecœur dispatched Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville with a summons for Washington to leave. Guided by Tanacharison, Washington struck first at dawn in a short fight in a rocky glen. Jumonville was killed, over twenty French were taken, and the incident instantly widened the crisis. French accounts emphasized that their party carried a diplomatic summons; Virginian accounts framed it as a skirmish with armed men in the woods. Tanacharison’s ritual slaying of the wounded officer, reported by multiple witnesses, signaled a break with France.Expecting retaliation, Washington fell back to the Great Meadows and threw up Fort Necessity. Through June his position worsened: rain soaked the clearing, powder stores were vulnerable, and most Native allies drifted away. On 3 July 1754, Jumonville’s brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers, arrived with several hundred French and Native warriors. From the surrounding timber they poured fire into the shallow trenches. By evening, ammunition was low, men were wet and exhausted, and negotiation followed.Washington and Captain James Mackay accepted terms to withdraw under arms. The French text they signed referred to the assassination of Jumonville, a phrasing Washington later rejected as a mistranslation. On 4 July the garrison marched out as French and Native auxiliaries plundered abandoned stores. The Virginians retreated east, and Dinwiddie praised Washington despite the loss, blaming colonial disunity and supply failures.News of the clashes convinced London to send a regular army under Major General Edward Braddock in 1755. France, forewarned, reinforced Canada. Skirmishes at sea and on land accelerated until both crowns declared war in 1756. The road first cut by Washington through the Pennsylvania woods thus became the opening scene of a much larger war: a frontier dispute over the Ohio Country that pulled Europe’s powers into the Seven Years’ War.

Battle of Fort Necessity

In the early 18th century, the lands east of the Mississippi River were divided among the great colonial powers of Britain and France, though vast tracts remained under the control of Indigenous nations. The French presence in North America was small, around seventy-five thousand, centered in the St. Lawrence River valley with smaller outposts in Acadia, Louisiana, and the Illinois Country. French traders and trappers moved freely through the river networks, forming alliances and families with Indigenous communities, often through marriages with the daughters of tribal leaders. The British colonies, by contrast, were populous and expanding. Nearly one and a half million settlers stretched along the Atlantic coast from Newfoundland to Georgia. While the settlements clustered near the shoreline, colonial ambitions reached far westward, often on paper only, through royal charters that ignored the continent’s actual geography. The British had taken Nova Scotia from France in 1713, inheriting a French-speaking population, and claimed Rupert’s Land through the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur trade. Between these European rivals, Indigenous nations held the balance of power. In the northeast, the Mi'kmaq and Abenaki still fought to preserve their lands in Nova Scotia and Maine. To the west, the Iroquois Confederacy dominated from New York to the Ohio Country, exerting authority over Algonquian-speaking peoples such as the Delaware and Shawnee. The Iroquois tried to remain neutral, playing French and British interests against each other to secure trade advantages, though the strain of neutrality grew as tensions rose. Farther south, the Catawba, Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee nations controlled the interior. When war came, the French used their trade relationships to rally the Hurons, Ojibwas, and Potawatomi from the Great Lakes, while the British gained the support of the Iroquois and, for a time, the Cherokee. The British also negotiated with tribes in the Ohio Country through the Treaty of Easton in 1758, winning promises of neutrality in exchange for land concessions. Spain’s role was limited to Florida, a sparsely populated province centered on St. Augustine, though Spanish holdings in Cuba and the Caribbean soon became part of the wider imperial struggle. Neither France nor Britain maintained large standing forces in America at first. New France relied on colonial regulars, the troupes de la marine, while the British colonies depended on local militias, loosely organized and often uncoordinated. This lack of unity among the British colonies complicated dealings with Indigenous nations, whose territories crossed multiple colonial borders. As the conflict widened, British military leaders struggled to bring order to the patchwork of colonial forces and provincial governments, setting the stage for the larger war that would follow.

Prologue

When Quebec fell in 1759, French troops and officials pulled back toward Montreal. Through the winter, James Murray held Quebec with a sick, underfed garrison, trapped by ice on the Saint Lawrence. In April 1760, the Chevalier de Lévis crossed the river, beat Murray at Sainte-Foy, and ringed Quebec with fieldworks. From 29 April to 15 May his guns probed the walls, but the sails that rose first in the thaw were British, not French. The relief squadron forced Lévis to break off and retreat upriver.In Montreal, Lévis and Governor Vaudreuil scraped together a defence. Word came that a convoy had sailed from France in April; then came the blow that a blockade off Europe scattered it. A handful of ships slipped into the Gulf and hid in the Restigouche, only to be hunted down in July. The colony’s hope of a naval rescue ebbed with that fight.Jeffery Amherst now set the finishing move. He ordered three columns to converge on Montreal: his own, more than 10,000 strong, down the Saint Lawrence from Lake Ontario; William Haviland’s 3,500 from Lake Champlain along the Richelieu; and Murray’s 4,000 up from Quebec. Rangers under Robert Rogers struck first in June, burning the depot at Sainte-Thérèse and shaking militia confidence along the Richelieu. Lévis reinforced Chambly, Saint-Jean, and Île aux Noix, placed Jean-Daniel Dumas to harry Murray’s flotilla, and told Captain Pierre Pouchot to delay Amherst at a new post named Fort Lévis.Murray moved first. In mid-July he advanced by boat and road, brushing past French posts at Deschambault and Grondines, disarming parish after parish, and taking oaths to King George. Small fights flared at Sorel and Varennes in late August, but Canadian militia slipped away in numbers. By 27 August Murray lay below Montreal and waited for the other columns.Amherst left Oswego on 10 August with regulars, provincials, and several hundred Indigenous allies. His lake flotilla seized the French corvette l’Outaouaise and ringed Fort Lévis with batteries on nearby islets. After three days of bombardment Pouchot’s powder ran out on 24 August and he surrendered. Amherst pushed into the rapids: boats shattered at Les Cèdres, the Cascades, and other chutes; scores of men drowned; yet the column reached Île Perrot, repaired, and on 6 September landed unopposed at Lachine and marched on the city.Haviland, coming down the Richelieu, faced Bougainville at Île aux Noix. British guns opened on 23 August while Rogers’ Rangers and light infantry hauled pieces through swamp to enfilade the French river squadron. The sloop Waggon went ashore, other craft fled and were taken; Bougainville evacuated to Saint-Jean and then Chambly. Saint-Jean burned; Chambly fell after a short bombardment; and Haviland moved on toward Montreal.By 7 September, white tents ringed the island: Amherst above the town, Murray below, Haviland on the south shore. Inside stood barely 2,200 French regulars, remnants of the Compagnies Franches de la Marine, a few guns, and a swelling crowd of refugees. Militia had melted away; most Indigenous allies had laid down arms or made their own terms. Vaudreuil called a council of war and drafted terms.Bougainville carried fifty-five articles to Amherst’s tent. Amherst granted many civil protections but refused the honours of war. Lévis protested, even threatened to break the swords rather than yield them; Amherst would not bend. On the morning of 8 September 1760, officers signed the capitulation in a house just outside the walls. French troops stacked arms on the Place d’Armes; colours were burned; British detachments took the gates.In the weeks that followed, British ships ferried prisoners to Quebec and then to France. Amherst issued medals to allied chiefs; the Kahnawake treaty opened trade routes between Montreal and Albany. Rogers pushed west and took Detroit before winter. Provincial regiments went home; garrisons settled in for the cold.The conquest of Montreal ended major fighting in North America. Spain entered the war in 1762 and lost Havana and Manila; French fleets, gutted at Quiberon Bay, could not reopen the St. Lawrence. In 1763 the Treaty of Paris confirmed the transfer of Canada and the east of Louisiana to Britain. In Montreal, Thomas Gage kept much of the old civil framework while London’s Proclamation and later the Quebec Act secured property and religion for the new subjects. The campaign that began with Sainte-Foy’s blood and the summer’s river marches closed with pen and seal at a small table outside the city walls.

In early 1759, British General Jeffery Amherst organized a campaign to seize Fort Niagara, the key French stronghold guarding the route between Canada and the Ohio Valley. Amherst placed Brigadier General John Prideaux in command, with Sir William Johnson accompanying him to lead a contingent of Iroquois allies. The expedition formed part of Britain’s larger strategy to dismantle French power in North America during the Seven Years’ War. Fort Niagara, built under the direction of Captain Pierre Pouchot, was one of France’s most important outposts. In the spring, Governor Vaudreuil and General Montcalm sent Pouchot to reinforce the fort with about 2,500 men. However, by June, many of these troops had been sent south to support operations in the Ohio Country, leaving fewer than 600 defenders behind—regulars, militia, and a small artillery detachment. Pouchot could not have known that a much larger British army was already advancing across upstate New York toward him. Prideaux’s force consisted of two regular regiments—the 44th and 46th—two companies of the 60th, and thousands of colonial militia from New York and Rhode Island. Delayed by spring floods and slow mobilization, the expedition did not leave Schenectady until May. By late June, it reached Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario, where Johnson joined with 600 Iroquois warriors. After leaving a garrison at Oswego, the army crossed the lake unseen by French patrols and landed near Fort Niagara on July 6, beginning siege works immediately. Inside the fort, Captain Pouchot organized a determined defense. The French had about one hundred Native allies, but they soon withdrew to confer with the Iroquois on the British side. During the siege, tragedy struck the British camp when a shell from one of their own mortars fatally wounded General Prideaux. Command passed to Sir William Johnson, whose irregular status caused some tension with the regular officers, though he held his position and continued the operation. On July 24, a French relief column under François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery attempted to break through to the fort but was intercepted and crushed at La Belle-Famille, two miles south of the fort. With no hope of rescue, Pouchot surrendered Fort Niagara on July 26. The fall of the fort opened the western frontier to British control and severed France’s communication with its Ohio posts. The loss of Niagara came as other French positions collapsed. That same day, Fort Carillon on Lake Champlain fell to Amherst, and the French abandoned Forts St. Frédéric and Rouillé, burning them as they retreated toward Montreal. Within months, Quebec City fell to General James Wolfe after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in September 1759. A year later, with Montreal captured and New France surrounded, the French signed the Articles of Capitulation in 1760, bringing an end to major fighting in North America. Fort Niagara’s capture thus marked one of the decisive steps in Britain’s conquest of Canada.

Battle of Fort Niagara

In late August 1755, William Johnson, the newly appointed British agent to the Iroquois, arrived at the southern end of Lac du Saint Sacrement. Renaming it Lake George in honor of King George II, he planned an advance northward toward the French stronghold at Fort St. Frédéric on Lake Champlain. The French, under Baron Jean-Armand Dieskau, moved swiftly to intercept him. Dieskau left Crown Point with a mixed force of French regulars, Canadian militia, and Native allies, and advanced through dense forest to strike Johnson’s forward base at Fort Edward. His Abenaki and Nipissing allies, wary of the fort’s cannons, refused a direct assault, and Dieskau instead turned north toward Johnson’s camp by the lake. Early on 8 September, Johnson sent Colonel Ephraim Williams south with a thousand provincial troops and several hundred Mohawk warriors to reinforce Fort Edward. They marched straight into Dieskau’s ambush near a ravine three miles from Lake George. In what became known as the Bloody Morning Scout, Williams and the Mohawk leader Hendrick Theyanoguin were killed, and their men fell back under heavy fire. The survivors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Seth Pomeroy and Nathan Whiting, fought a stubborn retreat that inflicted serious casualties on the French and their allies. Dieskau pressed on toward Johnson’s camp, but his Indian and Canadian forces hesitated to attack an entrenched position defended by their Mohawk kin. To inspire them, Dieskau led his grenadiers forward in formation. As they advanced into the clearing, Johnson’s artillery opened up with grapeshot, tearing through the French ranks. Johnson was wounded in the leg and carried from the field, leaving command to Phineas Lyman. Dieskau, shot through the hip, was captured as his men withdrew in confusion. Later that afternoon, a detachment from Fort Edward under Nathaniel Folsom intercepted the French baggage train retreating south. A sharp skirmish ensued in which the French suffered heavy losses, and their dead were thrown into a nearby pond—thereafter called Bloody Pond. The day’s fighting, divided into three engagements, ended in a British victory. Though Johnson advanced no farther north, he secured the southern end of Lake George and built Fort William Henry, consolidating British control of the region. The battle marked one of the first major colonial victories of the war and checked the French drive toward the Hudson Valley.

Battle of Lake George

Sporadic Engagements

The Treaty of Easton was a colonial agreement in North America signed in October 1758 during the French and Indian War (Seven Years' War) between British colonials and the chiefs of 13 Native American nations, representing tribes of the Iroquois, Lenape (Delaware), and Shawnee.