Sandy Creed

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: The first three years of the French and Indian War, 1755-1757, witnessed an almost complete series of French victories. French commander Major General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm was clearly superior to his British counterparts, with a tactical boldness without equal. Incompetent British leadership and effective coordination between the French and their Native-American allies delivered devastating raids all along the western frontier and a powerful series of blows against British garrisons in New York, culminating in the 1757 collapse of British resistance at Fort William Henry on Lake George.

Lead: In the 1700s the United States broke from England. No colony in history had done that before. This series examines America’s Revolution.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: One of the primary catalysts of the American Revolution was the French and Indian War. The London government of the Duke of Newcastle sent General Edward Braddock to America to begin cleaning the French out of the Ohio Valley. Even before Braddock left England, word reached Paris, and the French dispatched troops to counteract the British thrust. Attempts by British naval units to interdict the French were measures that led to an official declaration of war between the antagonists in 1755. When Braddock arrived in North America he conferred with colonial governors and they planned a four-pronged attack on the French in the west. Nearly all of these efforts failed. In fact, nearly everything the British tried from 1755 to 1757 in America came to grief. Only the capture of Fort Beauséjour on the border between French Acadia and British Nova Scotia was an unrestrained success.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: Unable by negotiation to convince the French to withdraw from the Ohio Valley or to dislodge them by direct confrontation in a military expedition led by George Washington in 1754, the British government, led by the Duke of Newcastle, decided to ramp up its engagement and take the valley by force. It dispatched a large expedition under Major General Edward Braddock to confront the French and seize Fort Duquesne at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers at present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This action provoked the beginning in 1755 of the French and Indian War, the North American theater of a much wider conflict, the Seven Years’ War, history’s first truly world war.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: The French and Indian War was the North American theater of a much larger international conflict known to European historians as the Seven Years’ War. The land and naval forces of Great Britain and its allies secured a major victory over France and its allies in the years between 1755 and 1763. It was an enormously expensive enterprise and by prevailing in it Britain laid the foundation for its second empire while at the same time it sowed the seeds of destruction for its first empire.