The results of the French and Indian War were out of all proportion to the scale of its military operations. Contrasted with the campaigns which were then shaking all Europe, it sank into insignificance; and the world, its eyes strained to see the magnitude and the issue of those European wars, little surmised that they would dictate the course of history far less than yonder desultory campaigning in America. Yet here and there a political prophet foresaw some of these momentous indirect consequences of the war. "England ...
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The results of the French and Indian War were out of all proportion to the scale of its military operations. Contrasted with the campaigns which were then shaking all Europe, it sank into insignificance; and the world, its eyes strained to see the magnitude and the issue of those European wars, little surmised that they would dictate the course of history far less than yonder desultory campaigning in America. Yet here and there a political prophet foresaw some of these momentous indirect consequences of the war. "England will erelong repent," said Vergennes, then the French ambassador at Constantinople, "of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. They no longer stand in need of her protection. She will call on them to contribute toward supporting the burdens they have helped to bring upon her, and they will answer by striking off all dependence." This is, in outline, the history of the next twenty years. The war in Europe and America had been a heavy drain upon the treasury of England. Her national debt had doubled, amounting at the conclusion of peace to 140,000,000 Pounds sterling. The Government naturally desired to lay upon its American subjects a portion of this burden, which had been incurred partly on their behalf. The result was that new system of taxation which the king and his ministers sought to impose upon the colonies, and which was the immediate cause of the Revolution. The hated taxes cannot, of course, be traced to the French and Indian War alone as their source. England had for years shown a growing purpose to get revenue out of her American dependencies; but the debt incurred by the war gave an animus and a momentum to this policy which carried it forward in the face of opposition that might otherwise have warned even George III. to pause ere it was too late. [1765] While the war thus indirectly led England to encroach upon the rights of the colonies, it also did much to prepare the latter to resist such encroachment. It had this effect mainly in two ways: by promoting union among the colonies, and by giving to many of their citizens a good training in the duties of camp, march, and battle-field. The value to the colonists of their military experience in this war can hardly be overestimated. If the outbreak of the Revolution had found the Americans a generation of civilians, if the colonial cause had lacked the privates who had seen hard service at Lake George and Louisburg, or the officers, such as Washington, Gates, Montgomery, Stark, and Putnam, who had learned to fight successfully against British regulars by fighting with them, it is a question whether the uprising would not have been stamped out, for a time at least, almost at its inception. Especially at the beginning of such a war, when the first necessity is to get a peaceful nation under arms as quickly as possible, a few soldier-citizens are invaluable. They form the nucleus of the rising army, and set the standard for military organization and discipline. In fact, the French and Indian War would have repaid the colonies all it cost even if its only result had been to give the youthful Washington that schooling in arms which helped fit him to command the Continental armies. Without the Washington of Fort Necessity and of Braddock's defeat, we could in all likelihood never have had the Washington of Trenton and Yorktown. Besides Washington, to say nothing of Gates, Gage, and Mercer, also there, Dan Morgan, of Virginia, began to learn war in the Braddock campaign.
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