Unit 2 · English Settlement

In 1606 King James I gave a charter to a group of investors called the Virginia Company of London. A charter is an official paper that gives permission to do something, such as start a colony. The company hoped to find gold and make a profit. In May 1607 about 100 English men and boys sailed up a river they named the James. They built a fort on a swampy island and called it Jamestown.

The site was a poor choice. The river water was salty and dirty, and mosquitoes spread disease. Many settlers were gentlemen who had never farmed. They spent their time hunting for gold instead of planting food. By the end of the first year, more than half of the settlers had died.

The land already belonged to the Powhatan Confederacy, a union of about 30 Algonquian-speaking peoples. Their leader was Wahunsenacah, whom the English called Powhatan. His people traded corn to the colonists, sometimes willingly and sometimes under threat. A tough soldier named John Smith took charge in 1608. He ordered that anyone who would not work would not eat.

After Smith was hurt and went home in 1609, things fell apart. Fighting with the Powhatan broke out, and trade stopped. The winter of 1609–1610 became known as the Starving Time. Of about 500 colonists, only about 60 survived. The survivors were ready to give up when new ships arrived with supplies and settlers in 1610.

Around 1612 a colonist named John Rolfe began growing a sweeter kind of tobacco from seeds brought from the Caribbean. People in England loved it. Soon tobacco was Virginia’s cash crop, a crop grown to sell rather than to eat. Colonists planted it on every field they could clear.

In 1614 Rolfe married Pocahontas, a daughter of Powhatan. Years earlier, as a young girl, she had visited the fort and carried messages between her people and the English. In 1613 the English captured her and held her. As a captive she became a Christian and took the name Rebecca. Her marriage brought a few years of peace. She traveled to England and died there in 1617, at about age 21.

Tobacco needed many workers. Most came as indentured servants. These were poor English people who agreed to work for four to seven years in return for the trip across the ocean, food and shelter. When their time was up, they were free. Many died before then. To draw more settlers, the company also gave 50 acres of land for each person a colonist paid to bring over.

In 1619 the company let Virginia colonists elect representatives to help make local laws. This group was called the House of Burgesses. It was the first elected lawmaking assembly in the English colonies. Only men took part. Meanwhile, as tobacco fields spread, Powhatan land shrank. In 1622 the Powhatan, led by Opechancanough, attacked the settlements and killed about 350 colonists. Years of war followed. In 1624 the king took control of Virginia as a royal colony.

In late August 1619 an English ship called the White Lion reached Point Comfort, near Jamestown. It carried about 20 Africans. They had been captured in Angola, in southwest Africa, and forced onto a Portuguese slave ship. English raiders seized them at sea. Virginia’s leaders traded food for these men and women. They are among the first Africans known to have lived in English Virginia.

At first, Virginia’s laws did not say clearly who could be enslaved. Some Africans were treated like servants and later gained their freedom. A few, such as Anthony Johnson, even came to own land. But over the next decades, Virginia passed laws that made slavery permanent. Enslaved people were held as property for life, and their children were born enslaved too.

Meanwhile, many freed servants were poor and angry. Rich planters, the owners of large farms, held the best land near the coast. Freed men pushed west onto Native land, which led to fighting. In 1676 a young planter named Nathaniel Bacon led hundreds of frontier settlers, servants and some enslaved Africans against Governor William Berkeley. They attacked Native villages and even burned Jamestown. This was Bacon's Rebellion.

The rebellion fell apart after Bacon died of illness in October 1676. But it frightened Virginia’s leaders. Poor white colonists and Black workers had joined forces against them. After the rebellion, planters bought more enslaved Africans and relied less on English servants, who were also arriving in smaller numbers. New laws drew a sharper line between white and Black people. By 1700 slavery was at the center of Virginia’s economy.

The Pilgrims were a small group who wanted to separate from the Church of England, which they believed was not pure enough. In England that could mean jail. In 1620, 102 passengers crowded onto a ship called the Mayflower. Some were Pilgrims seeking religious freedom. Others simply wanted land and a new start.

Rough seas kept the ship from reaching Virginia, where the colonists had permission to settle. Instead they landed at Cape Cod, in what is now Massachusetts. They had no charter for this land, and the leaders worried the group might split apart. Before going ashore, 41 men signed the Mayflower Compact. They agreed to make fair laws for the good of the colony and to obey them. It was an early example of self-government, people ruling themselves.

The Pilgrims built Plymouth colony. Their first winter was terrible. About half of them died of cold, hunger and illness. The land they settled had been a Wampanoag village called Patuxet. Its people had been wiped out a few years earlier by a disease brought by European sailors.

In spring 1621 the Wampanoag leader Massasoit made an agreement with the Pilgrims. Each side promised to help the other against enemies. A Patuxet man named Tisquantum, or Squanto, helped the English. Years before, he had been kidnapped and taken to Europe, where he learned English. He showed the colonists how to plant corn. That fall, the Pilgrims and about 90 Wampanoag men shared a three-day harvest feast.

The Puritans also disagreed with the Church of England. But unlike the Pilgrims, they wanted to purify the church from within rather than leave it. In 1630 a fleet of ships carried hundreds of Puritans to New England under a charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company. Their governor was a lawyer named John Winthrop. They founded Boston and other towns nearby.

Winthrop wanted the colony to be a model for the world. He warned the settlers that everyone would be watching them. Over the next ten years, about 20,000 more English people came to New England. Historians call this the Great Migration. Unlike the first settlers at Jamestown, most of them arrived as whole families.

Religion shaped daily life. The law required everyone to attend church, and church leaders had great influence on the government. Only male church members could vote for the colony’s leaders. In each town, voters gathered at a town meeting to decide local matters. In 1636 the colony founded Harvard College to train ministers. Parents were expected to teach their children to read so they could read the Bible.

Puritans valued hard work, order and a close community. But their idea of community had limits. They expected everyone to share the same beliefs. People who openly disagreed could be fined, whipped or forced to leave. Some of those who left went on to start new colonies.

Roger Williams was a young minister in Massachusetts. He argued that the government should not punish people for their religious beliefs. He also said the king had no right to give away Native land, and that colonists should buy land fairly. Puritan leaders saw him as dangerous. In 1635 they ordered him to leave the colony.

In 1636 Williams got land from the Narragansett people and founded Providence. His settlement welcomed people of different faiths, including Baptists, Quakers and, later, Jewish families. It grew into the colony of Rhode Island. It was one of the first places to practice separation of church and state, keeping the government and religion apart.

Anne Hutchinson was a skilled midwife and a sharp thinker. She held meetings in her Boston home to discuss sermons, and soon dozens of men and women came. She taught that people could know God’s will directly, without ministers. Leaders were angry that a woman was teaching religion to men. In 1637 she was put on trial. The next year she was banished, or ordered to leave the colony forever. She moved with her family to Rhode Island.

Other colonists left for less dramatic reasons. In 1636 the minister Thomas Hooker led about 100 people west to the Connecticut River valley, where the soil was richer. In 1639 Connecticut’s towns adopted the Fundamental Orders, a written plan of government. People who practiced dissent, or disagreement with leaders, helped spread new colonies and new ideas about freedom.

At first, trade linked Native nations and the English. Native people traded furs and corn for metal tools, cloth and guns. But English towns kept growing. Colonists cleared forests, fenced fields and let their pigs and cattle wander into Native cornfields. Disease had already killed many Native people, which left their nations weaker. Conflict over land grew.

In 1636 fighting broke out between the English and the Pequot, a powerful nation in what is now Connecticut. In 1637 English soldiers and their Native allies attacked a fortified Pequot village near the Mystic River. They set it on fire, and hundreds of Pequot people, many of them women and children, died. The Pequot War ended in 1638. Many survivors were killed, enslaved or forced to live among other nations.

By the 1670s the Wampanoag had lost much of their land. Their leader was Metacom, a son of Massasoit, the man who had made peace with the Pilgrims. The English called him King Philip. In 1675, after Plymouth hanged three Wampanoag men for a murder, war exploded. Metacom joined with several other nations against the colonists.

King Philip's War, also called Metacom’s War, lasted into 1676. Native fighters attacked more than half of New England’s towns. Thousands of people died on both sides. In August 1676 Metacom was killed. Afterward, many Native captives were sold into slavery in the Caribbean, and others fled. For its size, it was one of the deadliest wars in American history. Native power in southern New England was broken.

In 1609 Henry Hudson, an English sailor working for the Dutch, sailed up the river that now bears his name. He was looking for a water route to Asia. He did not find one, but he found land rich in beaver. The Dutch soon built fur trading posts there. Their colony was called New Netherland.

Its main town, New Amsterdam, sat at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, land where the Lenape people lived. In 1626 the Dutch leader Peter Minuit gave the Lenape trade goods for the island. The Lenape probably thought they were agreeing to share the land, not give it up forever. The Dutch West India Company ran the colony mainly to make money from the fur trade.

New Amsterdam was a lively, crowded port. People from many lands lived there, including Dutch, French, English, Germans, Jews and Africans. The company brought enslaved Africans to build its forts and roads. Some of them later won partial freedom and farmed land of their own. The Dutch were fairly tolerant. They generally allowed people of different faiths to live and work in the town.

England wanted this fine harbor. In 1664 English warships sailed into it. The Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, had few soldiers, and the townspeople refused to fight. He surrendered without a battle. King Charles II gave the colony to his brother James, the Duke of York, and it was renamed New York. Part of the land became New Jersey. Each became a proprietary colony, owned by one person or a small group.

The Quakers were a religious group who believed God’s light was in every person. They refused to fight in wars or bow to nobles, and women could speak in their meetings. Many English people disliked them, and many Quakers were jailed. William Penn, the son of a wealthy admiral, became a Quaker as a young man.

King Charles II owed Penn’s father a large debt. In 1681 he paid it by giving Penn a huge piece of land in America. It was named Pennsylvania, meaning Penn’s woods. Penn called his colony a holy experiment. He wanted it to be a place where people of any faith could live together in peace.

Penn planned the city of Philadelphia, whose name comes from Greek words meaning brotherly love. He wrote a plan of government that let settlers elect an assembly to make laws. He allowed freedom of worship for anyone who believed in God. Settlers poured in from England, Wales and Germany, and later from Ireland. Philadelphia grew into one of the largest cities in the colonies.

Penn tried to deal fairly with the Lenape, who lived along the Delaware River. He met with their leaders and paid for land. For decades, Pennsylvania stayed at peace with its Native neighbors. After Penn died in 1718, however, later colony leaders cheated the Lenape out of large areas of land. Penn also gained land to the south that later became the colony of Delaware.

In 1632 King Charles I gave a charter for land north of Virginia to Cecil Calvert, known as Lord Baltimore. The Calvert family was Catholic. In England, Catholics were often mistreated. Maryland was meant to be a refuge, a safe place, for them. The first settlers arrived in 1634. Like Virginia, Maryland soon grew tobacco, first with servants and later with enslaved workers.

Protestants soon outnumbered Catholics in Maryland. To protect Catholics, the colony passed the Toleration Act in 1649. It promised freedom of worship to Christians. It did not protect Jews or people who did not believe in Jesus. Still, it was an important early step toward religious freedom.

In 1663 King Charles II gave the land south of Virginia to eight of his wealthy supporters. They named it Carolina, after the king. In 1670 settlers founded Charles Town, now Charleston. Many early settlers came from Barbados, an English island in the Caribbean where sugar planters used enslaved labor. They brought the plantation system with them. A plantation is a large farm where many workers grow a cash crop.

In southern Carolina, planters soon grew rice, a crop that required huge amounts of hard labor. Traders also bought deerskins from Native nations. Some traders captured Native people and sold them as slaves. Northern Carolina had more small farms. The two parts grew apart, and by 1729 they were separate royal colonies, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Georgia was the last of the thirteen colonies. In 1732 King George II gave a charter to a group of trustees led by James Oglethorpe, a soldier and member of Parliament. Oglethorpe had seen people thrown into prison in England because they could not pay what they owed. He hoped some of these debtors and other poor people could build new lives in America. In the end, few debtors actually came.

The British government had another reason for the colony. Georgia lay between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, and Spain and Britain were rivals. Georgia could act as a buffer, an area that protects one place from another. In 1733 Oglethorpe and the first settlers founded Savannah. He made peace with Tomochichi, a leader of the Yamacraw people who lived nearby.

The trustees set strict rules. Settlers could own only small farms. Strong liquor was banned. Slavery was banned too, partly to keep settlers working their own land and partly so enslaved people would not escape to nearby Florida. Many settlers complained. They saw planters in South Carolina growing rich from enslaved labor.

The trustees gave in. Slavery became legal in Georgia in 1751, and Georgia soon became a plantation colony like South Carolina. By then England had thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coast. Historians group them into three regions: New England, the Middle Colonies and the Southern Colonies. Each region had its own land, climate, economy and way of life.

New England had cold winters, short summers and rocky soil. Most families ran small farms that grew enough to feed themselves, with a little extra to trade. This is called subsistence farming. Everyone worked, including children. Boys cleared stones from fields and chopped wood. Girls helped spin wool, make candles and care for younger children.

The sea offered more. The waters off New England were full of cod. Dried and salted cod became a major export, a good sent away to be sold in other places. Thick forests provided wood for ships, and Massachusetts became a center of shipbuilding. New England merchants traded with England, other colonies and islands in the Caribbean. Whaling also grew, especially on Nantucket Island.

Port towns such as Boston filled with sailors, craftworkers and merchants. Some merchants took part in the slave trade. There were far fewer enslaved people in New England than in the South, but slavery was legal in every colony. Enslaved Africans in New England worked as house servants, dockworkers, farmhands and sailors.

New England towns ran their own local affairs. At a town meeting, voters gathered to choose leaders, set taxes and decide questions such as where to build a road or a school. Usually only men who owned property could vote. Still, town meetings gave many colonists practice in debating and governing themselves, a habit that would matter later.

New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware had rich soil and a longer growing season than New England. Farmers grew wheat, corn, oats and rye, and they raised cattle and hogs. They grew far more grain than they needed, so they shipped flour and bread to other colonies and to the Caribbean. People called the region the breadbasket colonies.

Two port cities handled much of this trade. Philadelphia and New York bustled with ships, warehouses, flour mills and markets. By the 1760s Philadelphia had become the largest city in the colonies. Skilled workers such as blacksmiths, printers, carpenters and shoemakers ran shops in both cities.

The Middle Colonies had great diversity, meaning a wide variety of peoples. Along with English settlers, there were Dutch families in New York, Swedes and Finns along the Delaware River, and many Germans in Pennsylvania. In the 1700s large numbers of Scots-Irish settlers, Protestants from northern Ireland, moved to the western frontier, the edge of colonial settlement. Enslaved and free Africans lived in the cities and on farms.

This mix of peoples meant a mix of religions. Quakers, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Jews and others lived side by side. No single church controlled daily life the way the Puritan church did in New England. Some German settlers kept their own language, newspapers and churches for generations. Their descendants are often called the Pennsylvania Dutch, from Deutsch, the German word for German.

The Southern Colonies had a long, warm growing season and rich soil. In Virginia and Maryland, the area around Chesapeake Bay called the Chesapeake, tobacco remained the main crop. In South Carolina and Georgia, planters grew rice in wet, swampy fields along the coast. Both crops took enormous amounts of labor.

Many Africans who were enslaved and brought to South Carolina came from parts of West Africa where people had grown rice for centuries. Historians believe their skills helped make rice farming succeed. Planting, flooding and weeding rice fields in the heat was brutal work. By the early 1700s, enslaved Africans made up a majority of South Carolina’s people.

In the 1740s a young woman named Eliza Lucas ran her father’s plantations near Charleston while he was away. She experimented with indigo, a plant used to make blue dye for cloth. After several failed tries, she and the enslaved workers on her plantations produced a good crop. Indigo became South Carolina’s second major cash crop after rice.

Southern society was sharply divided. At the top were a small number of wealthy planter families with large houses and many enslaved workers. Most white Southerners, however, were small farmers who owned few or no enslaved people. Farther west, in the backcountry near the Appalachian Mountains, settlers lived on rough frontier farms. Enslaved people had no rights under the law.

European nations in this era believed in mercantilism. This is the idea that a nation grows strong by collecting gold and silver and by selling more to other countries than it buys from them. Colonies were supposed to help. They would supply raw materials, such as lumber, tobacco and furs, and buy finished goods, such as cloth and tools, from the home country.

To make this system work, Parliament passed the Navigation Acts, starting in 1651. These laws said that goods going to or from the colonies had to travel on English or colonial ships. Certain valuable products, such as tobacco and sugar, could be sold only to England. Many colonists broke the rules and smuggled goods. For many years, England did not strictly enforce these laws.

Ships linked England, Africa, the Caribbean and the colonies in a web of trade. One well-known pattern is often called the triangular trade. Ships carried goods such as rum and guns from New England or Europe to West Africa. There, traders exchanged them for captured Africans. The ships carried the captives to the Caribbean or the mainland colonies. Sugar and molasses went back to New England, where molasses was made into rum.

Real trade was messier than a neat triangle. Many ships simply sailed back and forth between two places. But the triangle shows a hard truth. Much of the Atlantic world’s wealth, including the wealth of northern merchants and shipbuilders, was tied to slavery and to the sugar, tobacco and rice that enslaved people grew.

The forced voyage from Africa to the Americas was called the Middle Passage. Captives were chained below deck in crowded, airless spaces for weeks. Many died of disease. Over the whole history of the Atlantic slave trade, millions of Africans were forced across the ocean. Most were taken to Brazil and the Caribbean. A smaller share, several hundred thousand people, were brought to the land that became the United States.

As the number of enslaved people grew, colonies passed slave codes. These were laws that controlled enslaved people’s lives. Enslaved people could not leave a plantation without a written pass. They could not gather in groups, carry weapons or testify against white people in court. Some colonies made it a crime to teach enslaved people to write.

Enslaved people worked from sunrise to sunset, in fields, kitchens, workshops and homes. Families could be split apart at any time when an owner sold a husband, wife or child. Punishments were harsh. Under the law, enslaved people had no right to their own families or their own labor.

Still, enslaved people built lives and communities. They formed families even without legal marriage. They kept alive African music, stories, foods and words, blending them with new ones. On the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, the Gullah people developed a language and culture that survive today. Over time, many enslaved people also embraced Christianity and made it their own, finding in it a message of hope and freedom.

Enslaved people practiced resistance, or pushing back against slavery, every day, often in quiet ways. They worked slowly, broke tools, pretended to be sick or kept secret knowledge from their owners. Some ran away, hiding in swamps or forests for days or even years. These acts were dangerous. Anyone caught could be whipped or sold far away.

Spanish Florida offered a hope of freedom. Spain promised freedom to people who escaped slavery in the English colonies and became Catholic. Near St. Augustine, formerly enslaved people built Fort Mose in 1738. It was the first legally recognized free Black town in what is now the United States.

On a Sunday in September 1739, about 20 enslaved men gathered near the Stono River, south of Charleston. Their leader is remembered as Jemmy. Many of the rebels may have come from the kingdom of Kongo, in Central Africa. They broke into a store, took guns and marched south toward Florida, beating drums and calling others to join them. Their group grew to perhaps 60 or more. Along the way, they killed more than 20 white colonists.

That afternoon, armed colonists caught up with the group. In the fighting and in the days that followed, most of the rebels were killed. This was the Stono Rebellion, the largest uprising of enslaved people in the British mainland colonies before the American Revolution. South Carolina answered with a harsh new law in 1740. It banned enslaved people from growing their own food, gathering in groups, earning money or learning to write.

Many colonists could read, especially in New England, where Puritans wanted everyone to read the Bible. White New Englanders had one of the highest rates of literacy, the ability to read and write, in the world. In 1647 Massachusetts ordered its larger towns to hire teachers and set up schools. In other colonies, children learned at home, in church schools or from tutors. Girls usually got less schooling than boys.

In the 1700s a movement called the Enlightenment spread from Europe. Enlightenment thinkers believed that human reason could explain the world and improve society. The English thinker John Locke argued that people are born with natural rights to life, liberty and property. Governments, he said, exist to protect those rights. If a government fails to do so, people may change it.

Benjamin Franklin became the most famous colonial example of these ideas. Born in Boston in 1706, he ran away at 17 to Philadelphia, where he became a printer. Beginning in 1732 he published Poor Richard’s Almanack, a yearly book full of weather predictions, jokes and wise sayings. He helped start a lending library, a fire company and a hospital in Philadelphia.

Franklin was also a scientist. In the early 1750s he studied electricity and showed that lightning is a form of electricity. He invented the lightning rod, which protected buildings from fires caused by lightning. Meanwhile, newspapers in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and other towns spread news and ideas from colony to colony. Colonists were becoming a people who read, argued and asked questions.

By the 1730s, many ministers worried that colonists cared more about making money than about their faith. Then a religious revival swept through the colonies. A revival is a time of renewed religious excitement. This one, which lasted through the 1740s, is known as the Great Awakening.

In Massachusetts, the minister Jonathan Edwards preached powerful sermons about sin and God’s judgment. The most famous preacher of the revival was George Whitefield, a young minister from England. Starting in 1739 he traveled up and down the colonies, preaching outdoors to crowds of thousands. Even Benjamin Franklin, who did not share his beliefs, went to hear him and was amazed by how far his voice carried.

The new preachers taught that people could have a personal, emotional experience of God. What mattered was a changed heart, not wealth or education. Women, free and enslaved Black people, and some Native people joined the new congregations. Many African Americans became Christians during this period.

The Great Awakening split many churches into those who supported the revival and those who opposed it. New groups grew, such as the Baptists. Each separate branch of a religion like this is called a denomination. New colleges were founded, including the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. Most important, many colonists learned that they could question leaders and choose for themselves. That lesson would soon be applied to politics.

English colonists believed they carried their rights with them across the ocean. Those rights had a long history. In 1215 English nobles forced King John to accept the Magna Carta, or Great Charter. It said that even the king had to follow the law. It also promised that free men could not be jailed or punished except by lawful judgment or the law of the land.

Over the centuries, Parliament, England’s lawmaking body, grew stronger. In 1688 Parliament replaced King James II in what was called the Glorious Revolution. In 1689 the new rulers, William and Mary, accepted the English Bill of Rights. It said the monarch could not raise taxes or keep an army in peacetime without Parliament’s consent. It also protected the right to petition the monarch and banned cruel and unusual punishments.

In the colonies, elected assemblies such as Virginia’s House of Burgesses made local laws. Most important, they voted on taxes and on the royal governor’s pay. This gave them real power over governors sent from England. Over time, many colonists came to believe that only their own elected assemblies should tax them.

In 1735 a New York printer named John Peter Zenger was put on trial. His newspaper had criticized the royal governor, William Cosby. At that time, printing harsh criticism of an official could be a crime, even if the words were true. Zenger’s lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, argued that printing the truth should not be a crime. The jury agreed and found Zenger not guilty. The case was an important step toward freedom of the press.

By the 1750s France claimed a huge area stretching from Canada down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. It included the Illinois Country, where French villages such as Kaskaskia and Cahokia stood near the Mississippi. French settlers were few, but France had strong trade ties and alliances with many Native nations.

British colonists far outnumbered the French. Land companies in Virginia and Pennsylvania wanted to settle the rich Ohio River valley. The French built a chain of forts to keep them out. The Native nations who lived there, such as the Shawnee, Lenape and Miami, wanted to keep their land. They and the Haudenosaunee tried to play the two European powers against each other.

In 1754 Virginia’s governor sent a young militia officer named George Washington, just 22 years old, with soldiers to the Ohio country. The French had just built Fort Duquesne where Pittsburgh stands today. Washington’s men attacked a small French party, and its commander was killed. The French struck back. In early July 1754, Washington had to surrender his small, hastily built Fort Necessity. The French and Indian War had begun.

That same summer, delegates from seven colonies met in Albany, New York, to talk with Haudenosaunee leaders and plan for defense. Benjamin Franklin proposed the Albany Plan of Union. It would have created one council to handle defense and relations with Native nations for all the colonies. The colonial assemblies rejected it because they did not want to give up power. Still, the plan was an early idea of colonies working together.

The war went badly for Britain at first. In 1755 British General Edward Braddock marched toward Fort Duquesne with a large army. French soldiers and their Native allies ambushed them in the forest, and Braddock was killed. Washington, serving as his aide, had two horses shot out from under him but escaped. In 1756 the fighting spread to Europe and beyond, where it was called the Seven Years' War.

Then a British leader named William Pitt sent more soldiers and money to America, and the tide turned. In 1758 the French abandoned Fort Duquesne, and the British renamed it Fort Pitt. In 1759 General James Wolfe’s troops climbed steep cliffs in the dark to reach the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec. Wolfe and the French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, both died in the battle, but the British won and took the city. In 1760 Montreal fell.

The Treaty of Paris of 1763 ended the war. France gave Britain Canada and nearly all its land east of the Mississippi River, including the Illinois Country. Spain, which had joined France late in the war, gave Florida to Britain. France had already handed Louisiana, west of the Mississippi, to Spain. France’s empire in North America was almost gone.

Native nations had not been defeated, and they had not been asked. The British stopped giving the gifts the French had always offered, and they treated Native leaders as conquered people. In 1763 the Odawa leader Pontiac led a war against British forts around the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, the war had nearly doubled Britain’s national debt. British leaders decided the colonists should help pay for their own defense. That decision would lead to trouble.