Social Studies 10Canada: A Peoples HistoryBattle for a ContinentCompanion ReadingsI.Rumblings of War - IntroductionA period of a little more than two decades in the mid-18th century changed the destiny of North America. England and France battled each other in the Seven Years War, a conflict that began as a clash between les Canadiens and land-hungry American settlers in the Ohio Valley and became a world war that engulfed the continent. Fortress Louisbourg, symbol of the French empire, was the target of 27,000 soldiers and sailors in the greatest naval invasion in North Americas history. In 1759, General James Wolfe led the assault against Quebec but the citadel withstood a devastating siege and bombardment. With winter soon arriving, Wolfe forced the commander of the French troops, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, into one last desperate encounter. The battle for North America unfolded on an abandoned farmers field, the Plains of Abraham, just outside the citys walls. When war ended in 1763, 70,000 French colonists came under British rule, setting in motion the ever-evolving French-English dynamic in Canada.A. Clashes in the Ohio ValleyIn the mid-eighteenth century, France controlled the largest part of the North American continent.In the mid 1700s, native people in the Ohio Valley feared that settlers from the American colonies would drive them off their land. A Catholic, French-speaking society of 55,000 was centred in the cities of Quebec and Montreal, in the fortress of Louisbourg, and spread thinly through villages along the St. Lawrence and in small forts that advanced their territory into the interior. France also controlled the west. It was a frail empire that ran from Detroit to Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi River.The much more populous English colonies, from Halifax to Savannah, were hemmed in by the French and the Allegheny Mountains, a source of great frustration and bitterness to the English settlers.The Indians lived uneasily among both groups two hundred nations that were increasingly resentful of the English presence. Many were allied with the French, though it was a fragile alliance.And the Indians themselves were fractured along traditional battlelines.In the 14 colonies of British America, economies were booming and the population was doubling in size every decade. There was only one direction to expand over the mountains to the west into the Indian homelands and the land claimed by the French as Canada. Thousands of settlers from the American colonies streamed into the richest part of the interior the Ohio Valley, where clashes broke out in the summer of 1754. The Indians saw a dark intent behind the tide. A Delaware chief wrote .We have great reason to believe you intend to drive us away and settle the country or else why do you come and fight in the Land God has given us.The fears of the natives were well founded.Soon, fueled by the Pennsylvania Gazette and its publishers vision for the future, politicians, merchants and speculators all wanted a part of the Ohio Valley. Benjamin Franklin, convinced of the colonies destiny, intended to see their one million people grow to cover the continent with one language and one religion: unified, English and Protestant.Franklin wrote: This Million doubling, supposed but once in 25 years, will in another Century be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side of the Water.The French and the Indians considered the American settlers invaders and burned many out of their homes on the Canadian frontier.Three thousand settlers were killed or captured, thousands more driven away.With the fighting over expansion and the burnings in the Ohio Valley, North America was becoming a regular and bloody battleground, a prelude to what would become Europes most monumental confrontation, the Seven Years War (1756-63).B. French and English Sever Diplomatic TiesThe illusion of a formal peace between the English and French was maintained despite the frequent, venomous skirmishes on the Canadian frontier.In 1756, England declared war with France and their North American colonies became a battleground. But on July 8, 1755, England finally severed its diplomatic ties with France and the following year it would declare war.In North America, the tension between the colonies of these European empires escalated. Benjamin Franklin determined there could be no future for English America, until the French were eliminated.The French will. set the Indians to harass our frontiers, kill and scalp our people, and drive in the advanced settlers; and so, preventing our obtaining more subsistence by cultivating of new lands, they discourage our marriages, and keep our people from increasing; thus (if the expression may be allowed) killing thousands of our children before they are born.Citing the need t