[33] Œuvres, lxxv. 182.
[34] Corr. 1762. Œuvres, lxxv. 188.
[35] Œuvres, lxvii. 432.
[36] Condorcet, 170.
BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT
A.D. 1755
WINTHROP SARGENT GEORGE WASHINGTON CAPTAIN DE CONTRECŒUR
The repeated wars between France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had involved also their colonies in America and India. In America the Indians had been employed as allies upon both sides, and thus encouraged in their hideous deeds of massacre and torture. Hence there had grown an ever-increasing bitterness between the French in Canada and the English colonists along the Atlantic coasts, and this finally led to the momentous French and Indian war, which, contrary to the course of the earlier contests, originated in America and spread thence to Europe.
Its immediate cause was the disputed possession of the interior of the continent, the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. These had been first explored by the French, and when English pioneers began to penetrate thither the French built a chain of forts to resist them. An expedition of Virginians under the command of their youthful leader, Major George Washington, had a sharp encounter with the enemy in 1754; and then the English government determined to assert its authority by an overwhelming force. No war was declared against France, nor even against Canada; but a distinguished English general, Braddock, was sent over with three thousand regular troops to seize the French forts in the Ohio Valley, especially Fort Duquesne, on the site of the modern city of Pittsburg.