THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR OF 1756 - 1763

Before the colonies separated from England, war with the native indians caused much trouble with the settlers. Among known Chelsea participants in the countryside warfare was John Pratt. Though none of the battles in the French-Indian war were fought in Chelsea, several skirmishes took place in nearby villages and towns. Samuel Pratt had charge of the stock of arms and ammunition which each town kept on hand for any emergency. In 1757 two expeditions were contemplated, one against Louisburg, and the other against the French Forts in New York. The Chelsea quota was six men, and on March 17, 1757, the town voted thirty-six pounds to encourage six men to enlist in the expedition. Henry Newhall was one of the six. He was sent to Lake George, and went through Mohawk Valley. He was a grandfather of Isaac Pratt, who was born March 25, 1796. While in the country, Newhall learned the Mohawk language and could sing many of the Mohawk songs.

The picture shows British soldiers preparing to embark for battle (Source: Library of Congress). The surrender of George Washington at Fort Necessity in the Ohio valley after an unsuccessful attack on a French detachment. One third of Washington's soldiers died in the fighting, This picture shows Native Americans with a man bound to a stake (Source: Library of Congress). Painting showing an Indian attack.

History of the French and Indian War

The French and the English had coexisted relatively peacefully in North America for nearly a century. But by the 1750's, as both English and French settlements expanded, religious and commercial tensions began to produce new frictions and new conflicts. The French had explored and claimed a vast region of the continental interior, ranging from Louisiana in the South to the Great Lakes in the North. To secure their hold on these enourmous claims, they founded a whole string of communities, missions, trading posts, and fortresses. The region was enclosed by the four major cities: Montreal, Detroit, New Orleans, and Quebec, the center of the French empire in North America. The English, meanwhile, were preparing for the great population leap accross the Appalachians into Ohio and beyond. In 1749 a group of Virginian businessmen secured a grant of 500,000 acres of Ohio valley land for settlement purposes. They were not impressed by Joseph Celeron who in the same year had claimed that region for France. This prompted the French, in an effort to keep the English from expansion into French lands, to construct new fortresses in the Ohio valley. This, in turn, caused the English, interpreting the French activity as a threat to their western settlements, to begin making military preparations and building fortresses of their own. For the next five years, tensions between the English and the French increased, until in the summer of 1754 the governor of Virginia sent a militia force (under the command of an inexperienced young colonel named George Washington) into the Ohio valley to challenge French expansion. Washington built a crude stockade (Fort Necessity) and staged an unsuccessful attack on a French detachment. The French countered with an assault on Fort Necessity, trapping Washington and his soldiers inside. After a third of them died in the fighting, Washington surrendered. This clash marked the beginning of the French and Indian War. The French and Indian War, unlike other wars, began on North American soil and then spread to Europe, where Britain and France continued battling. Britain officially declared war on France in 1756, marking the beginnings of the Seven Years' War in Europe. Native Americans fought for both sides, but primarily alongside the French. The major battles include French victories at Fort William Henry, Fort Ticonderoga, and against the Braddock Expedition and British victories at Louisburg, Fort Niagara, Fort Duquesne, and – most significantly of all– at the Plains of Abraham outside of Quebec City, in which James Wolfe defeated a French garrison led by Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and then captured New France's capital. The war resulted in France's loss of all its possessions in North America except for some Caribbean islands and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, two small islands off Newfoundland. The British acquired Canada while Spain gained Louisiana in compensation for its loss of Florida to the British. One result of the war was that Britain gained control of a large French-speaking, Roman Catholic population in Lower Canada. Near the beginning of the war, in 1755, the British had expelled French speaking populations in Acadia to Louisiana – creating the Cajun population – but this would not be possible in Canada. The war officially ended with the signing of the 1763 Treaty of Paris on February 10, 1763. France agreed to cede Canada to Britain, preferring to keep the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe because of its rich sugar crops and the ease with which it could be controlled. The decisive result of the war meant that it was the last of the French and Indian Wars and helped create conditions that led to the American Revolutionary War. The British colonists no longer needed British protection from the French and resented the taxes imposed by Britain to pay for its military commitments as well as limitation on colonial settlements imposed by the British Royal Proclamation of 1763 in the newly acquired French territories in the Ohio Country and Illinois Country in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys.

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