The War That Made America

Twenty years later, in the summer of 1796, President George Washington found himself contemplating how best to announce to his fellow Americans that he would return to private life. After seven years as chief executive he had grown weary of public office, and felt that he might not have long to live. What time remained he intended to spend at Mount Vernon, under (as he put it) his own “vine and fig tree,” far from the bitter partisan wrangling that had overtaken the United States during his second term of office. Yet as much as his quarrelsome countrymen had disappointed him, he had not yet given up on them, and was determined to leave them with a Farewell Address pointing out how they might still preserve the values of the Revolution and fulfill its liberating potential. Above all, he cautioned, Americans must “guard against the Intreigues of any and every foreign Nation,” avoiding all entanglements with European powers while concentrating on developing the interior of the continent. If the United States could avoid war for even a generation and build unity through strength at home, it would become truly independent: a nation able “to bid defiance, in a just cause, to any earthly power whatsoever.”

It was a fundamentally imperial prescription for the future of the Republic, and so far as Washington was concerned, there was nothing ironic in that at all. His whole adult life, in one way or another, had tended toward opening the interior of North America to orderly colonization. In 1754 he had first tried to impose British imperial order on the Ohio country—and failed, triggering the war that changed the landscape of power in America forever. Forty years later, in 1794, he had overseen two military campaigns that subordinated that region and its peoples to the authority of the United States. With the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion at Pittsburgh and the defeat of the Ohio Valley Indian peoples at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the United States had succeeded where Britain failed, proving itself capable of projecting military power west of the Appalachians, and thus of exercising dominion as far as the Mississippi. What remained now was for the citizens of the Republic to occupy, settle, and civilize that vast realm in a way consistent with the liberties that the Revolution had secured. To do less would be to betray its promise.

By the time Washington died, in 1799, white American citizens were marshaling their strength to conquer the continent, and their first staging ground for that long campaign would be Pittsburgh. They would not do it in the systematic way that Washington had intended, but in a democratic and disorderly fashion that nevertheless proved highly effective. Before another half-century had passed, these triumphant, populist empire-builders would come to believe that the existence of their nation and its expansion across North America had somehow been inevitable all along, and that Washington’s role in starting it had been divinely ordained. They did not understand how the barely remembered imperial war that began Washington’s military career had created the conditions that made it possible for the America they knew—the spread-eagle, expansionist republic of Andrew Jackson and James Knox Polk—to extend its sway across ever-greater territories until it spanned the continent.

Yet it had been the French and Indian War that removed the French imperial presence from America and deprived the Indians of the ally they needed to arm them against the Anglo-American settlers who lusted after their lands. It had been Britain’s unexampled victory in that war that tempted the men who governed the British empire to imagine that their military and naval supremacy was such that they could solve the massive problems of the postwar era by exercising power over the American colonists without restraint. It had been that war that inspired the colonists to conceive of themselves as equal partners in the empire, ultimately enabling them to rebel against Britain’s sovereign power in the name of liberty. Finally, by encouraging the Americans to see Indians as enemies to be hated without reserve or distinction, that war had encouraged them, in the midst of Revolution and afterward, to see native peoples as impediments to the expansion of freedom in North America, who could justly be attacked and rightly be subdued. In all these ways the French and Indian War opened the door to Revolution and to the destruction or subjugation of native societies west of the Appalachian Mountains.

When a desperate Indian chief murdered a French ensign before a young Virginian’s horrified eyes in 1754, then, an old world—one in which native peoples played determining roles in diplomacy and war—began to pass away. Within a half-century it was gone forever. Today its traces linger mainly in the names—Allegheny, Youghiogheny, Monongahela, Ohio—that forgotten peoples gave to places that we now claim as our own. That we remember so little of this earlier world—and understand so little of its peoples and their ways—bears witness to the evanescence of all historical worlds, including the one that we ourselves inhabit. In that sense, to grasp the story of the great transformation that the French and Indian War began is above all to understand it as a cautionary tale: one that demonstrates the unpredictability and irony that always attend the pursuit of power, reminding us that even the most complete victories can sow the seeds of reversal and defeat for victors too dazzled by success to remember that they are, in fact, only human.