Bitchy History - July 31, 2023


Episode 17： American History 101 - The French and Indian War and the Rise of George Washington


Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

181.81

Word count

3,357

Sentence count

136

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

16

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Hate speech

15

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.060 Welcome to Bitchy History, the irreverent history podcast that doesn't really want to increase your anxiety, 0.98
00:00:05.260 but this episode will just go to show that one tiny mistake on someone's part can lead to two centuries of increasingly bloody wars.
00:00:12.380 So, read contracts before you sign them?
00:00:21.060 Welcome to episode 17 of the show, where we are once again exploring the key moments that led to the beginning of the American Revolution.
00:00:27.720 I know, I know, this episode is late, I'm making a habit of that recently, I'm very
00:00:31.780 sorry, but I have a good reason this time.
00:00:33.920 I have been neck deep in a website redesign for my research consulting company all week
00:00:38.040 and doing a lot of work to start finding new clients to grow my business, and time just
00:00:42.800 got away from me.
00:00:43.920 But hey, if you hop on over to rtphistoricalconsulting.com, you can see the new website, and if you or
00:00:49.640 anyone you know is in need of my company's services, send me an email.
00:00:53.560 Last time, we briefly skimmed over the military history of the first three French and Indian Wars,
00:00:58.540 which leaves us with only one more to discuss, and it definitely deserves its own episode for several reasons.
00:01:04.520 The Fourth French and Indian War was one of several wars taking place concurrently,
00:01:08.860 with one alliance led by the Great Britain and the other led by, well, the French, obviously, hence the name.
00:01:15.340 The other concurrent wars were the Seven Years' War, the Carnatic Wars, and the Anglo-Spanish War.
00:01:20.860 One reason this war needs its own episode is that unlike the three previous French and Indian wars,
00:01:26.260 this one was its own war, not just a spillover in tension from the wars of succession in Europe.
00:01:32.040 How do we know that?
00:01:32.900 Well, because the French and Indian War starts in 1754, and the Seven Years' War doesn't actually start until 1756.
00:01:41.420 Because it's essentially an entirely separate war, despite involving the same countries as the previous three,
00:01:47.200 I'm not going to spend much time on discussing the particulars of the European wars.
00:01:51.320 If this was a European history or world history podcast, I certainly would. 0.96
00:01:55.180 But alas, this is an American history, women's history, and queer history only zone. 0.72
00:01:59.580 And despite the fact that the Seven Years' War does involve the Holy Roman Empress Maria Therese of the Habsburg Dominion, 0.97
00:02:05.660 the only woman to hold that position in her own right,
00:02:07.920 that's just not enough reason to do a full rundown of this war on this show itself. 0.99
00:02:12.640 And again, unlike the other three wars which started in Europe over issues of succession
00:02:17.040 and spilled over into the colonies,
00:02:19.240 the French and Indian War is actually viewed as the roots of the Seven Years' War.
00:02:23.240 So for once, it's issues in the colonies that are lighting a powder keg in Europe instead of vice versa.
00:02:29.380 Overall, the justification for this war is imperialism and empire building.
00:02:33.740 Essentially, who is going to get global power and gobble up the most land in colonized areas?
00:02:39.380 That's a, well, that's honestly the cause for most of the wars over the next couple of centuries, let's be honest.
00:02:46.020 And while the remaining unresolved kerfuffle over land rights from the previous three French and Indian Wars is a major factor in this fourth war,
00:02:53.660 namely who got ownership of the Ohio River Valley region, which may very well be the first time and the last time anyone was that invested in Ohio,
00:03:02.820 except for the weird period between 1964 and 2016 when Ohio was seen as some kind of mythical
00:03:09.080 bellwether for who would win the presidential election. Somehow for 56 years Ohio was on the
00:03:14.980 winning side of every presidential election until 2020. They called that one wrong. But this time
00:03:21.320 the war was less about the sovereignty of who had control of those lands and more a personal
00:03:26.080 financial vendetta by one particular figure from colonial history. The man. The myth. The legend.
00:03:33.620 Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie of the Colony of Virginia. I'm kidding. He's not a myth or a
00:03:39.200 legend. In fact, this may very well be the first time you've ever heard the name unless you happen
00:03:43.820 to live in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, or call Dinwiddie Hall your home when you were attending
00:03:48.500 the College of William and Mary, which is a shame because Dinwiddie sounds conveniently like
00:03:53.480 Dimwit, which is a remarkably good description for this guy. Maybe I'm being too harsh here, 0.95
00:03:58.720 but you can judge for yourself as I explain how he started the French and Indian War.
00:04:03.920 What? You thought I was going to talk about someone you recognize, like George Washington?
00:04:07.640 Don't worry, we'll get to him later. So Dimwitty is the lieutenant governor of the Virginia colony
00:04:12.560 under two different governors during his career, governors William Ann Van Keppel and Governor
00:04:17.620 John Campbell. But because the royal governors couldn't really be bothered with visiting the
00:04:22.020 colonies they were supposed to be governing and were usually notably absentee. William Ann was
00:04:27.560 governor of Virginia from 1737 until his death in 1754, and he never once stepped foot in Virginia.
00:04:34.260 Dinwiddie ends up being more or less the de facto head of the colony during his time in office.
00:04:40.060 How much of the start of the French and Indian War is exactly Dinwiddie's personal fault is
00:04:45.020 moderately debatable. There are those pesky loose ends from the previously poorly constructed peace
00:04:50.180 treaties which led to boundary disputes that have to be considered, but it would be disingenuous and
00:04:55.260 more importantly less funny to only give that one sterile reason and leave out Dr. Fred Anderson's
00:05:01.220 speculations on Dinwiddie's own financial reasons for his aggression against the French in the Ohio
00:05:06.500 country. In his book Crucible of War, The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North
00:05:11.480 America, Anderson goes into this extensively. You see, Dinwiddie was a stockholder in the Ohio
00:05:17.400 Company, one of those joint stock companies that litter the history of the colonies and created the
00:05:22.380 first major trading posts and cities of the English colonies like Jamestown and Plymouth.
00:05:27.200 Robert Dinwiddie was one of the original members of the Ohio Company, along with several other more
00:05:31.680 famous names like Richard Squire Lee, not Richard Henry Lee, we'll talk about him later, George
00:05:37.160 Washington, and a few other founding fathers like George Mason and John Francis Mercer. The Ohio
00:05:42.420 Company was formed in 1748, and in 1749, King George granted them 500,000 acres in the Ohio
00:05:49.480 Valley. Only there was a catch. They got the first 200,000 acres immediately, and then they got the
00:05:55.860 rest of the 300,000 if they managed to settle 100 families in the next seven years. Sure, fine,
00:06:02.360 that shouldn't be a problem. The population of the colonies is booming at this point, and getting
00:06:06.400 100 families to move to the Ohio Valley shouldn't be that difficult. Except for one very big problem,
00:06:12.420 King George may have granted them that land, but that doesn't mean the French agreed that all of
00:06:17.400 that land was King George's to grant. France still very much feels like some of that is their land,
00:06:23.540 and that's going to make it pretty difficult to construct a fort and a garrison and establish
00:06:27.460 safe areas for settlers. And if there's no safe place for settlers, they aren't that likely to
00:06:32.740 want to take a chance moving to Ohio, of all places, when the more established New England
00:06:37.460 and southern colonies are an option. So they have seven years from 1749 to get this land settled,
00:06:43.740 which means they need 100 families, a garrison, and a fort by 1756. The pressure is on. If the
00:06:50.240 Ohio Company can't fulfill their end of the deal, not only do they not actually make any money off
00:06:54.800 of this venture, but they also lose out on that further 300,000 acres, which would suck. So the
00:07:00.780 Ohio Company starts trying to develop the area, beginning with building roads into the territory.
00:07:06.100 As a side note, we really take the existence of roads for granted today, to be honest.
00:07:10.780 Every time I realize that people in the 1750s had to actively build roads to get access to places,
00:07:16.860 I'm amazed for some reason.
00:07:18.340 And after this many years studying history, I still don't know why that's the thing that shocks me consistently,
00:07:23.280 but, well, my main focus is the Cold War, and I still take the existence of the interstate system for granted,
00:07:29.160 even though I know it didn't exist when my dad was born.
00:07:32.740 But back to Ohio country.
00:07:34.020 The Ohio Company is aggressively working on getting their new land settled, sending out surveyors, building storehouses,
00:07:40.620 but trouble is looming because no one can really agree where the British territory ends and the French territory begins,
00:07:47.320 and Dinwiddie is pretty damn insistent that their land grant includes the area around what is now Pittsburgh.
00:07:53.460 But the colonial government of Pennsylvania disagrees, and so does France.
00:07:58.540 France claimed land in North America that included everything drained by the Mississippi River,
00:08:03.260 which includes the Ohio River, which seems like an unreasonably large claim to me that covers
00:08:08.560 way too much land and is also wildly unspecific. But hey, I once saw a modern 20th century land
00:08:15.280 deed that dictated that the end of someone's property was the third oak tree north of the
00:08:19.760 creek, which is similarly unhelpful. Yes, that was a Texas survey map. How did you guess? I swear,
00:08:26.420 that map was created to fuel a Hatfields versus McCoy style feud for future generations.
00:08:31.760 which is basically what this land survey did for the British and French, actually.
00:08:36.700 France is severely not amused by Dinwiddie and the Ohio Company making inroads into the Ohio River Valley,
00:08:42.800 and they send in soldiers to enforce the French sovereignty in the area.
00:08:46.980 The French established Fort Duquesne in 1754 at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahala Rivers,
00:08:53.180 and yes, for those of you screaming at me, I'm aware that I butchered the pronunciation of at least one, maybe both of those names.
00:09:00.360 I'm sorry, but frankly, not sorry enough to figure out how to actually pronounce them and correct it.
00:09:05.840 You're also going to hate how I pronounce every French word that comes up in the rest of this episode.
00:09:10.680 Dinwiddie isn't particularly happy about the building of this fort,
00:09:13.360 so he sends out a military unit led by a 22-year-old lieutenant colonel by the name of George Washington to the region.
00:09:19.740 And it doesn't go well.
00:09:21.960 Washington had tangled with the French before in the Ohio River Valley.
00:09:25.320 In 1753, he had been sent to deliver a diplomatic warning to the French,
00:09:29.360 basically a politely worded version of an eviction notice. 0.99
00:09:32.700 This is British territory, pack your shit and get the hell out. 0.99
00:09:36.080 I will now insert a dramatization of the French response to this. 1.00
00:09:39.620 We shall take your castle by force. 1.00
00:09:41.620 You don't frighten us, English pigdogs. 1.00
00:09:45.100 Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. 1.00
00:09:49.340 Ah, blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur King. 1.00
00:09:53.140 You and all your silly English can-niggets. 1.00
00:09:59.000 What a strange person. 1.00
00:10:05.240 Now look here, my good man.
00:10:06.940 I don't want to talk to you no more, 0.99
00:10:09.220 you empty-headed animal food-trough whopper. 0.99
00:10:13.120 I fart in your general direction. 1.00
00:10:16.160 Your mother was a hamster 0.99
00:10:17.740 and your father smelt of elderberrys.
00:10:22.600 Is there someone else up there we can talk to? 0.88
00:10:25.660 No, now go away or I shall taunt you 0.99
00:10:28.220 a second time. Well, okay, maybe that's not 100% historically accurate. History books do describe
00:10:35.060 it as a polite rebuffing of the warning, but how polite can the French be? They're French. 0.81
00:10:41.040 In the spring of 1754, Washington is sent back with a force of around 200 militiamen,
00:10:45.780 and he's ordered to defend Virginia's claim to the forks of the Ohio River,
00:10:49.800 modern-day Pittsburgh. In a dawn attack, Washington and his men end up attacking an
00:10:54.160 encampment of French soldiers, wounding their commander, Joseph Colon de Jumonville.
00:10:58.220 In the aftermath, Washington believes he was preventing a French attack on his own men,
00:11:02.880 but the wounded leader begins to explain that he had been on a diplomatic mission only.
00:11:07.640 While he's trying to clarify that, sources say that Washington's Seneca guide, Tanagra-san,
00:11:12.740 killed Jamonville with a tomahawk blow to his head.
00:11:15.620 Washington and his men retreat to build a stockade, which they name Fort Necessity.
00:11:20.100 The fort is not big enough to house all the soldiers, conditions are poor,
00:11:23.560 there's almost constant rain which for anyone that's experienced spring in that area of the
00:11:27.980 United States yeah that tracks and Washington realizes quickly that he is outmanned outgunned
00:11:33.960 and not likely to get out of this alive. To be honest his little troop of 200 militiamen hadn't
00:11:39.260 started out that well supplied in the first place. In fact we have a letter from March 7th of 1754
00:11:44.740 from Washington to Dinwiddie which states that Washington's men are much in want of cutlasses
00:11:49.900 halberds and officers half pikes and that some of the equipment sent up to them is very bad and is
00:11:55.740 scarcely worth the trouble of carrying. The men he writes are also very much in want of clothing
00:12:00.540 and many are not actually in uniform because no uniforms were given out. Washington also wants
00:12:05.820 to know who is going to be paymaster for the regiment and when his men can expect to be paid
00:12:10.020 which as a person who has personally had payroll screw up before at different jobs I've worked
00:12:15.780 it kind of makes you a little bit nervous about the entire solvency of the people you're working for when that happens.
00:12:21.480 Of course, they end up under attack by French soldiers and their native allies,
00:12:25.620 surrounded, outnumbered, and quickly running out of supplies.
00:12:28.780 Washington makes the executive decision to save the lives of as many of his men as he can by taking French terms of surrender.
00:12:35.020 So Washington gets the French Articles of Capitulation, which are written in French, obviously,
00:12:39.840 and reportedly soaked in rain when he gets them.
00:12:42.300 But even though he can't really make out what the Articles of Capitulation say, he signs them.
00:12:47.540 Now, I do remind you that signing contracts without reading them is generally a big no-no. 0.69
00:12:52.560 But when you're surrounded by a bunch of angry Frenchmen and half your men are starving
00:12:56.240 and probably have dysentery or some other gross era-appropriate disease,
00:13:00.820 they kind of have you over a barrel and you don't have much room to discuss terms.
00:13:05.140 Unfortunately for Washington, the Articles of Capitulation he signed without understanding them fully
00:13:09.840 described him as being personally responsible for the assassination of Jumonville.
00:13:15.240 This admission would become the basis for the French declaration of war against Britain.
00:13:19.480 The only thing worse than inadvertently starting a war
00:13:22.020 because you didn't pay close enough attention in your French class
00:13:24.600 would be getting stalked by the Duolingo owl for ignoring too many reminders to do your lessons.
00:13:29.540 Listen, I'm busy. I'll get back to my German lessons eventually.
00:13:32.880 Stop threatening my friends and family. 0.82
00:13:35.120 And thus, a war begins.
00:13:36.460 If we want to apportion blame, we can put about two-fifths on the poorly constructed territorial boundaries
00:13:41.940 and the treaties from the first three French and Indian Wars,
00:13:45.020 another two-fifths on Dinwiddie and the Ohio Company,
00:13:48.400 and maybe one-fifth on Washington getting an F in French conjugation in grammar school.
00:13:53.500 Maybe even less than one-fifth, since even if Washington had been perfectly fluent,
00:13:57.760 what was he going to do? Negotiate for better terms while surrounded and outgunned?
00:14:01.920 I don't think so. He kind of made the only choice he could given his remarkably bad situation,
00:14:07.180 especially considering that the leader of the French that had them surrounded and outgunned
00:14:11.180 was Jumonville's brother. Now, I personally wouldn't start a war over the death of one of
00:14:16.220 my siblings, but apparently the Jumonville brothers got along better than my siblings and I ever have.
00:14:21.880 But that's the opening volley of the French and Indian War, a convoluted issue of territorial
00:14:26.600 colonial boundaries and profit protection by a joint stock company trying to settle the Ohio
00:14:31.540 country. As per usual, I have zero interest in getting into the nitty-gritty details of the
00:14:37.240 actual battles here. That's just not my area of history by any means, and there's probably 200
00:14:42.880 plus decent military history books on the war at your local Barnes & Noble. The overarching
00:14:47.900 important fallout of this war is something we'll talk about in a future episode, but the important
00:14:52.760 bit I'd like to mention here and now is that this war is the moment when George Washington begins to
00:14:57.620 become the figure we know more or less from the history books. Despite that early failure, which
00:15:03.200 we really can't blame on Washington himself since he was sent out undersupplied and without nearly
00:15:08.340 enough men to do what Dinwiddie wanted him to do, Washington would end up gaining a lot of positive
00:15:13.680 notoriety during this war and it would give him the military experience he would later rely on as
00:15:19.140 the general of the Revolutionary Army. It was also the publication of Washington's journals
00:15:24.060 from his expedition to Fort Leboeuf in 1753, which were published under the title The Journal of
00:15:29.720 Major George Washington, which went a long way to convincing those in power that the Ohio River
00:15:34.800 Valley was of great importance to securing Britain's control over the North American part
00:15:39.100 of their empire, which would eventually lead to Britain sending in military forces to fight this
00:15:44.320 War in the colonies. So I guess the greater context of the French and Indian War is maybe
00:15:49.300 more than one-fifth Washington's responsibility. But look, hindsight is 20-20. Washington's service
00:15:56.140 in the French and Indian War would see him promoted to being the commander-in-chief of
00:15:59.560 the Virginia militia forces, which he would hold until 1758, though his time as commander-in-chief
00:16:05.240 was plagued by the British Army underestimating Washington at every turn because of his comparative
00:16:09.800 lack of military experience and education. This would shape Washington's views on the relationship
00:16:15.160 between the colonies and the British, because to some degree he felt as if he was being undervalued
00:16:20.100 or found inferior by the British because he was from the colonies. Which, given the context of
00:16:25.640 the song Yankee Doodle during the American Revolution, that definitely does track with
00:16:30.560 the way Britain seemed to view the colonies. Hicks. But we'll talk about that in more detail later when
00:16:36.420 we get to that period of history. The French and Indian War drags on for several years with a lot
00:16:41.820 of back and forth on who has the upper hand at any given time, but eventually the war is decided in
00:16:47.460 Britain's favor, helped along by some strategic choices in the European Seven Years' War which
00:16:52.300 divided France's attention sufficiently, making the colonial war swing in Britain's favor.
00:16:57.700 Ultimately the war ends with the British victory in 1763, but numerous policy issues at the end
00:17:03.520 of the war will end up creating the necessary friction points over the next decade, which will
00:17:08.220 ultimately lead us into the American Revolution. Thank you for tuning in to listen to me bitch 1.00
00:17:12.620 about history. Next time we'll be taking a brief break from working our way through American 0.97
00:17:16.620 History 101 for another episode of How Did America Get Here, where we'll be talking about a very
00:17:22.000 interesting slash infuriating bit of anti-feminist rhetoric that I've seen being utilized a lot
00:17:27.900 lately, mainly that life was so much easier for women before the women's lib movement forced them
00:17:33.800 out of the home and into jobs. It's a lie, and a very dangerous one in this era of continuous 0.97
00:17:39.140 pressure by the religious right to push women into a pre-1973 life. So let's talk about what
00:17:44.900 life was actually like for women throughout the Western world in the past and discuss why
00:17:49.320 romanticization of history is a problem, not just for historians, but for the world as a whole.
00:17:54.860 Thank you for listening, and I'll see you back here on Monday.
00:17:57.900 Thank you.