French and Indian War Begins — Fort Necessity
A twenty-two-year-old Virginian militia officer fired on a French detachment in the woods of western Pennsylvania in May 1754 and started a world war. The quarrel was over the forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela meet, which both France and Virginia claimed and where the French had just built Fort Duquesne. George Washington had been sent with about 160 men to assert the Virginian claim. His Mingo allies under Tanacharison led him to a French party camped in a hollow; the fight lasted about fifteen minutes, some ten French were killed including the officer Jumonville, and the survivors said they had been on a diplomatic mission to warn the Virginians off. Tanacharison is reported to have killed the wounded Jumonville with a hatchet. Washington built a stockade he called Fort Necessity in a meadow overlooked on three sides, was besieged in July, and surrendered on terms — signing, in French, which he could not read, a document in which he acknowledged the assassination of Jumonville. The document was published in Paris. Braddock's expedition the following year was destroyed on the Monongahela with the general killed, and by 1756 the war had spread to Europe, where it became the Seven Years' War, and to India, West Africa, the Caribbean and the Philippines. Horace Walpole wrote that a volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire. Washington also took from it the only military education available to him. He learned about supply, about Indigenous allies who chose their own moment, and about what British regulars thought of colonial officers, and every one of those lessons was applied against them twenty years later.
- Year: 1754 CE
- Category: Military
