French and Indian War

The French and Indian War was the North American theater of the broader Seven Years' War, fought from 1754 to 1763 between Great Britain and its colonies and France and its colonies, each allied with various Native American nations, for control of the North American frontier. Fighting began over competing claims to the Ohio Country, where a young Virginia militia officer named George Washington's skirmish at Jumonville Glen in 1754 helped ignite the wider conflict two years before Britain and France formally went to war in Europe. Early French and Native successes, including the destruction of General Edward Braddock's expedition in 1755, gave way to British momentum after 1758 under the direction of William Pitt, culminating in the capture of Quebec at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and Montreal's surrender in 1760. The 1763 Treaty of Paris ceded French Canada and territory east of the Mississippi to Britain, and the war's enormous cost, and Britain's subsequent attempts to tax the colonies to recoup it, became a direct precursor to the American Revolution.