The War That Made America

France did not have great plans for what its maps labeled la Belle Rivière, apart from keeping it out of British hands. French traders, soldiers, and priests rarely used the river to pass from the Canadian heartland to the pays des Illinois. To do so required a long, difficult initial portage from the south shore of Lake Erie to a shallow, unreliable tributary of the Allegheny. Only after many miles did the going become tolerable for the great cargo canoes that voyageurs used in trade. Travelers to the west preferred to take sailing vessels as far as Lake Michigan, then canoe to the Mississippi by one of two routes: either from Green Bay and the Fox River/Wisconsin River route to the upper valley, or from Fort Chicago by portage to the Illinois River, and thence directly to the midvalley settlements near Fort Chartres (Kaskaskia). The intrusion of Pennsylvania traders into the Ohio country, more than any other factor, made the French government place la Belle Rivière under the jurisdiction of the governor-general of New France in 1749. It was a first step toward direct involvement in the region, but only a tentative one. More information was necessary, so in June the governor, the comte de La Galissonière, dispatched Captain Pierre-Joseph de Céloron de Blainville of the troupes de la marine (Canada’s regular infantry) to lead a force of 265 Canadians and Indians on a tour of the Ohio country.

That November, with thousands of miles of canoe travel behind him, Céloron made a discouraging report to La Galissonière’s successor, the marquis de La Jonquière. The Ohio Indians had been surly, even hostile, in behavior. Céloron had met bands of Pennsylvania traders and warned them out; he had posted signs and buried lead tablets in the ground at various locations to renew His Most Christian Majesty’s claims to the region. None of it, he knew, would prevent the traders from returning. Particularly sobering had been the numbers of Miamis and other French-allied Indians he found at Pickawillany on the Great Miami River, where George Croghan and his associates had established a trading post on a spot that dominated the major canoe route from Detroit to the Mississippi. The Indians’ eagerness to trade with the English and their open contempt of Céloron’s authority meant only one thing: the alliances south of the Great Lakes were at the point of dissolution.

Céloron tablet. Only two of the lead tablets planted along the Ohio River by Céloron de Blainville’s 1749 expedition were ever found. Only this one has survived intact. It was discovered near the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers in the nineteenth century. (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia)

La Jonquière contemplated taking action, but in the end only procrastinated. Two years passed before he authorized Céloron to take a larger force back to Pickawillany to compel the Miamis to return to their previous settlement on the Maumee. When few Indians at Fort Detroit volunteered to join him, Céloron had to call off the expedition. Meanwhile France’s strategic position in the Ohio country grew even more tenuous when a new and aggressive set of intruders appeared in the valley in 1750. The previous year the Ohio Company of Virginia, a syndicate of twenty rich tobacco planters, had built a stockaded storehouse on the north branch of the Potomac at Wills Creek (the site of modern Cumberland, Maryland) in preparation for opening a route to the Ohio via the Youghiogheny and Monongahela rivers. Over the next two years the company’s principal agent, an experienced Indian trader and surveyor named Christopher Gist, explored lands on both sides of the river from the Forks as far as the Falls of the Ohio (modern Louisville, Kentucky), making trade and diplomatic contacts as he went. His presence did not go unnoticed, either by the French or by George Croghan and his associates.

La Jonquière died in March 1752 without having taken any effective action. Both his immediate successor, acting governor Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, and the new governor, Ange Duquesne de Menneville, marquis Duquesne, who arrived to take control in July, were less hesitant. Though they had differing opinions about how best to meet the English challenge, they saw the Pennsylvanian and Virginian intrusions into the Ohio Valley as two dimensions of a single, coordinated invasion. They were quite mistaken; the Pennsylvanians and Virginians were in fact bitter competitors. In overestimating the coherence of the English actions, the French effectively frightened themselves into taking steps that radically increased the likelihood of an armed confrontation over the Forks of the Ohio.

Unlike George Croghan and his associates—who had merely wanted to trade with the Indians and had as yet developed no coherent plans for encouraging white settlers to take up land on the Ohio—the Virginians saw the development of trade as a prelude to acquiring real estate for later sale. Virginia’s gentry had grown rich by planting tobacco, but tobacco’s tendency to exhaust the soil and the proliferation of enslaved African Americans by natural increase had made land speculation essential to the continued economic growth and social stability of the Old Dominion. Short of slave rebellion itself, there was no greater nightmare for planters than a future in which relentlessly increasing numbers of slaves would crowd land holdings of steadily decreasing fertility. Planters therefore constantly hunted for new lands to bring under cultivation, and also to resell or rent out to tenants in order to supplement their income from tobacco.

Typically, the larger the planter, the more deeply he was engaged in buying cheap frontier land whose value would rise as the population of the province increased. Gentlemen with good political connections could easily acquire forty or fifty thousand acres of woodland at bargain rates in return for the promise to “seat” settlers on the land within a specified period. Then the speculators located their own younger sons on frontier property, gave them their inheritances in the form of slaves to clear and plant it, and designated them as agents for the sale or rental of the remainder of their holdings in the region.

In this way the gentry society of the Tidewater steadily reproduced itself on frontier after frontier, and avoided the Malthusian calamity that would surely have resulted in the absence of new lands to settle. Virginia’s planters could literally see no end to the expansion of this system. Thanks to Virginia’s charter of 1609, drawn up by royal officials who thought that North America might be at most three or four hundred miles across, the colony’s southern boundary ran straight west to the Pacific on a latitude of 36 degrees 30 minutes, while its northern boundary proceeded northwest-ward from the mouth of the Potomac to somewhere in the neighborhood of the Bering Strait. Acting both as individuals and in groups (the members of which formed joint-stock corporations with a view to acquiring tracts of a quarter-million acres or more), rich Virginians looked constantly toward the future, identifying it above all with the West.

The Ohio Company, made up of investors from the northern part of the province, was thus only one of several land-speculating syndicates active in the 1740s. This group differed from the others, however, in one crucial way: its stockholders were effectively blocked from speculating in lands close to home by the Fairfax Grant—a Massachusetts-sized tract between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers, from the Chesapeake to the Appalachian crest, that belonged to the only British nobleman who made his permanent home in America, Lord Thomas Fairfax, baron Cameron. The Ohio partners accordingly looked beyond the limits of the Fairfax proprietary to the broad, well-watered lands of the trans-Appalachian west, which seemed destined to become a magnet for farmers as soon as the mountain barrier could be breached by roads and waterways.

The Ohio Company coveted the Forks of the Ohio, to which the Youghiogheny and Monongahela rivers offered access by way of the upper Potomac. The opportunity to acquire lands there appeared, fortuitously, when one of the leading shareholders in the company was appointed as a commissioner to represent Virginia at a great conference with the Six Nations, at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1744. The Iroquois League, now at the height of its influence and well aware of the benefits that it derived from close cooperation with the Penn family, offered to cede all of its remaining claims within the limits of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia in return for a substantial diplomatic gift, recognition of the Six Nations as sovereign over several southern Indian peoples, and free passage of Iroquois warriors through Virginia on their way to raid the Cherokees and Catawbas of South Carolina. The League’s negotiators did not imagine that Virginia’s claims extended farther than the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley. The Virginia delegation did not feel obliged to instruct them on the details of the charter of 1609.

The year after the Treaty of Lancaster, Virginia’s legislature, the House of Burgesses, granted the Ohio Company rights to three hundred square miles of land at the Forks of the Ohio. The sole condition was that they seat two hundred families there; once they had done so, the grant would be further enlarged. King George’s War kept the company from proceeding, but with the return of peace with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the shareholders lost no time in resuming their program. Wills Creek Fort, completed in 1749, became the base of operations from which Christopher Gist explored the valley and established trade and diplomatic ties with the Ohio Indians in 1750 and 1751. The following year he opened a trading post, Gist’s Plantation, in the valley of the Youghiogheny. Fully fifty miles west of Wills Creek and well within the watershed of the Ohio, the company expected Gist’s settlement to become a way station on a thoroughfare from Virginia to the Forks of the Ohio.

Apart from careful planning and substantial capital investments, the Ohio Company took one more significant step to ensure its success: its members presented a share, as a gift, to Virginia’s new lieutenant governor,

Treaty of Lancaster, 1744 (title page). Benjamin Franklin printed these minutes of a treaty negotiated at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in June 1744, by which Iroquois leaders, hoping to strengthen their ties to Pennsylvania and Virginia, approved a vague cession of their claims to lands along the Allegheny Mountains. Virginia construed this as authorizing the Ohio Company to establish trade and promote settlement near the Forks of the Ohio, alarming French and Canadian officials, who responded by building forts from Lake Erie to the Forks. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Robert Dinwiddie, upon his arrival in the province in 1751.¹ This furnished what amounted to an ironclad guarantee that the most important man in Virginia’s government, and the person with the most reliable connections to the crown, would pay scrupulous attention to the company’s welfare. Dinwiddie soon proved that he was indeed a friend; it was with his approval that Gist proposed a treaty council at Logstown in the spring of 1752, to gain Tanaghrisson’s approval for an Ohio Company “strong house,” or fortified trading post, at the Forks of the Ohio.

Tanaghrisson accepted a thousand pounds’ worth of diplomatic gifts at the Logstown conference and agreed to the construction of the post knowing full well that the Virginians’ other proposal, to create a white settlement near the trading center, was unlikely to be approved by the Iroquois Council at Onondaga. He desperately needed the resources the Ohio Company offered because he strongly suspected that Céloron de Blainville would not be the last French officer to appear on the Allegheny at the head of an expedition. He knew, too, that when the French returned, it would likely be with sufficient force to impose their control over the region. Unless he had an ally strong enough to stand them off, the influence of the Iroquois League on the Ohio would be a dead letter. Offensive as the proposed Virginia settlement at the Forks was to the Delawares, Shawnees, Mingos, and other groups in the valley, Tanaghrisson accepted the company’s present as an earnest of the support he hoped would continue to flow his way thereafter.

George Mercer’s map of Ohio Company lands. The Ohio Company agent George Mercer drafted this map of the area surrounding the Forks of the Ohio after the 1752 Treaty of Logstown. The location originally selected for the company “strong house” (fort) and settlement is at the base of “Fort Hill,” an eminence known in today’s Pittsburgh as McKee’s Rocks. (The National Archives of the UK [PRO])

Meanwhile, in Canada, the future that Tanaghrisson dreaded was rapidly taking shape. The acting governor, Longueuil, approved of an expedition by more than two hundred Ojibwa and Ottawa warriors under Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade, the son of a French trader and an Ottawa Indian mother, to discipline the breakaway Miamis at Pickawillany and destroy the trading post that had drawn so many other Indians away from the French alliance. In June, a few days after the Logstown conference ended, Langlade’s force attacked Pickawillany, destroying the settlement, looting its trading post, and taking five of its six resident traders captive. The sixth trader, who had been wounded in the attack, they killed. The Miami chief Memeskia—such a consistent Anglophile that the traders had called him Old Briton—met the same fate. Then, to prove beyond a doubt what the consequences of defection from the French alliance could be, the warriors boiled the trader’s heart and ate it, along with Old Briton tout ensemble, in a ritual feast.

Charles de Langlade’s commission. Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade (1729-1801), the son of a French trader and his Ottawa Indian wife, was appointed cadet in the colonial troupes de la marine in 1750. He led his Ottawa kinsmen against the Miami Indians at Pickawillany in 1752. Langlade received this lieutenant’s commission, signed by Louis XV, shortly before the fall of New France in 1760. (Courtesy of the Neville Public Museum of Brown County)

The message was not lost on the Indians of Pickawillany, who soon discovered that Pennsylvania had no intention of sending arms and ammunition to help them resist. Lacking other options, they reaffirmed solidarity with the French and moved back to the Maumee. Nor was the message lost on the Pennsylvania traders, who evacuated the Ohio country, effectively ending the Indian trade there in 1752 and 1753. The members of the Ohio Company, less concerned than they should have been by what had just happened two hundred miles to the west of the Forks, saw the departure of the Pennsylvanians as an opportunity to enhance their connections with the Half King. Forging ahead with their plans for a settlement, they quickly established a new fortified storehouse at the confluence of Red Stone Creek and the Monongahela. Red Stone Fort lay a dozen miles west of Gist’s Plantation, and only thirty-seven miles from the Forks. In Canada the French could see in the Virginians’ boldness nothing less than a defiant continuation of an English threat that Langlade’s raid had not, somehow, eradicated.

With this in mind, the marquis Duquesne, the bull-headed naval officer who arrived in Quebec on July 1, 1752, as Canada’s new governor-general, moved rapidly to assert French control on the Ohio. In October he announced his intention to fortify the key locations on Céloron’s route from Lake Erie to the Forks of the Ohio, and create a permanent French presence on la Belle Rivière. To do so he effectively put Canada on a war footing. Building the four forts that Duquesne had in mind would take two years and require the mobilization of two thousand men from the colony’s militia and troupes de la marine. This was a phenomenal commitment in proportion to the total size of the Canadian population, which had only about eleven thousand able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and sixty. More than four hundred workers lost their lives by accident and disease in the construction of Fort Presque Isle (on the site of modern Erie, Pennsylvania), Fort de la Rivière au Boeuf (or Fort Le Boeuf, in modern Waterford, Pennsylvania), Fort Machault (near today’s Franklin, Pennsylvania), and Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio. The cost of four million livres—equivalent to about £180,000 sterling, with roughly the purchasing power of 30 million of today’s dollars—imposed a tremendous financial burden on the colony.

Only a man with Duquesne’s force of will, and sheer disdain for the Canadians who begged him not to proceed, would have undertaken such a heroic expenditure of the colony’s resources in pursuit of a goal that could have been much more cheaply achieved by diplomacy. The most dangerous of the British, the Pennsylvania traders, had already fled the Ohio. The Virginians could have been countered by making substantial diplomatic gifts to the Ohio Indians and opening a subsidized trade among them. If Duquesne had done so, the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos would have had the resources they needed to defy the attenuated power of the Iroquois League and to resist the Virginians’ efforts to found a settlement at the Forks. It would have put them in a position to begin playing off one empire against the other, thus enabling them to secure the independence of action they most desired. But that alternative would have required Duquesne to trust the negotiating expertise of Canadian colonists (whom he disdained as provincials) and to rely on Indians (whom he understood as savages) to carry out policy. Neither were actions that he, as a metropolitan aristocrat and servant of the crown, could have found acceptable.

Charles-Jacques Le Moyne, Second Baron de Longueuil, artist unknown, c. 1730-1740. The Canadian nobleman Charles Le Moyne was an experienced colonial regular officer and acting governor of New France when the marquis Duquesne arrived from France in July 1752. Like many Canadians, he opposed Duquesne’s program of military action on the Ohio River, advocating commercial competition with British traders and reliance on the Iroquois Confederacy to keep the region free of settlements. (Oil on canvas; Collection of the Musée d’art de Joliette, Quebec, long-term loan of Historical Society of Longueuil; Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay)

Instead Duquesne pursued a plan that could only provoke a confrontation between the French and British empires. In opting for direct military occupation of the Ohio, Duquesne had not yet chosen a path that would lead inevitably to war. It was, however, a path that made violence infinitely more likely when the confrontation occurred, and war infinitely harder to avoid in its aftermath.