Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika" in English, Chapter 18

 18.

The Seventy Years War

If the saying that war is the father of all things has justification for anything, it is for the emergence of Anglo-Saxon America. The nearly two hundred years from the landing of the first settlers to the Declaration of Independence are really one struggle. Even the people who crossed over at that time were fighters, and had to be. They left the old homeland because they did not want to bow to the prevailing views, laws and customs. They crossed the ocean to live the life they wanted, and they paid the price of almost unceasing struggle.

Already on the crossing, a relentless selection began. What was not necessarily resistant died. After landing, the struggle for existence became even harder. In fact, for a considerable part of the newcomers it meant fighting with weapons against an opponent who was as brave as he was cruel and deceitful, the native inhabitants of the country. In this struggle the German settlers paid their blood toll abundantly.

Even that was not enough, for almost from the beginning besides the fight against the natives, at the same time an even harder one was to be led against the French. The French and English colonization of North America went parallel to each other. It is a race that goes from the icy territory of the Hudson Bay to the sultry islands of the Caribbean Sea. It was the competition of the two rising Western European powers for supremacy, which played over to America as it did to India. It was exacerbated by the local antagonism of the French and English colonists. For them, it was not only a matter of great power, interests and prestige, but also directly a matter of land. As great as America was, its borders soon became apparent. If the French succeeded in establishing a serious foothold in the Mississippi Valley, the English colonies were cut off from their hinterland. If, however, the British settlers advanced up to and across the great river, the French were confined to Canada, which at that time was not considered to have any great prospects for the future. Thus, on the one hand, the war spread from Europe to America, on the other hand, the guns of local militias went off there, and the two powers became involved in new fighting in Europe.

The French and English development of the New World took place side by side at exactly the same pace and rhythm. About the same time as the discovery of Newfoundland by Cabot, Cartier sailed the Saint Lawrence. The premature settlement attempt of the French in the 16th century corresponds to the futile colonization of Raleigh on the English lines. Then, at the beginning of the 17th century, almost in the same year, Quebec was founded by the French and Jamestown by the British. Thereupon it goes blow after blow, until the colonists, who at the beginning had heard of each other only as of something quite distant, hardly real, came hard on each other in the endless forests and fought each other in incessant wars.

This Anglo-French war for North America lasted seventy-four years, with brief pauses for peace, which were no more than occasional truces, from 1689 to 1763. It began with an Indian raid, instigated by the governor of Canada, on the settlement of Dover in New Hampshire. At that time, the French already preferred to fight their wars through colored troops. The "coupe coupe," the broad shark knife used by the Senegalese in the First World War, was the equivalent of the Redskins' scalping knife. It was used ruthlessly, incidentally by whites as well. The British authority paid a premium for each Indian scalp.

There were women who earned it. Most famous is the story of Hannah Dustin. This was a farmer's wife from Haverhill, Massachusetts. While being dragged away, captured by the savages along with a neighbor and a boy, she had to watch her home go up in flames and the redskins smash the skulls of her children on a tree trunk. She managed to escape and take revenge. One night she and her two fellow prisoners secretly got up. With well-aimed tomahawk blows they slew the ten Indians who had robbed them. But that was not enough, the two strong-hearted women still held the nerve to scalp all the Indians and carry the bloody scalps with them as they fled. It was worth it; for they received for it the handsome sum of 50 pounds!

If one reads today details of the Seventy Years' War and especially of the horrible atrocities committed by the Indians led by the French against the American colonists, one cannot understand how the memory of it could have slipped so completely from the minds of the American people. Everything that the French did to the Americans at that time has been overshadowed by French aid during the War of Independence. Through it, the blind hatred of the French during the colonial period turned into an equally blind fondness and glorification of everything French.

The French, after the Peace of Paris, which wiped them off the map as the American colonial power, went from bitter enemies to traditional friends of the United States, as it were, in the twinkling of an eye. The legend created by their participation in the War of Independence, which found its culmination in the romantic ideal figure of young Lafayette, seems unshakable. It made one completely forget that relations between France and the United States became anything but rosy fairly soon after peace was concluded with England. At first, France was most reluctant to cede to Great Britain all land up to the Mississippi. It would have liked to have the young state less large. A little later, in 1798, this disagreement between France and America escalated into open hostility. Over American trade, which France would have liked to destroy, skirmishes broke out between French and American frigates and a full-scale naval war broke out, although it was officially never declared.

However, all this was later forgotten. In American schoolbooks, even in some history books, there is not a word of all this, nor of the scurrilous unconscionability with which the French from Canada incited the Indians against the New England settlers. France remained the "selfless" friend of America, the standard-bearer of civilization, the shining hoard of culture. Since the French never immigrated to America in any significant numbers, this ideal image was never tarnished by all too close acquaintance and the friction that naturally develops as a result, until the end of the World War. The American soldiers who had fought shoulder to shoulder with their French comrades-in-arms returned with substantially different views of France, and in general the French were severely resented for not paying their war debts. An often heard bitter joke is: "As the last American troops embarked to return, the French officers shouted after them: "We don't know how we are ever going to pay you back!"  - Well, they still don't know today!"

There is no saying, however, that the mood will not change again and that the next time the American public will not side as blindly with France as it did at the outbreak of the World War. The French legend seems indestructible and the French myth invincible. It is a similar story with England. As hard and as often as Americans and British have clashed, and as great as the antagonisms between them have been, Britain has always been able to win over American sympathies and maintain the insinuation that the United States is an Anglo-Saxon country based on English language, English culture, English law, and English customs and habits. Thus, through skillful propaganda during the World War, Americans succeeded in raising the specter of an Anglo-Saxon country supposedly threatened by the Germans, when in reality it was merely a matter of the threatened financial interests of a group of financiers who were fundamentally neither English nor American.

If German blood in the United States was never given its full right as an equal co-builder of America, the reason for this lies not in any antagonisms between the Union and Germany, which never existed, but solely in the presence of this same German blood itself on American soil and the claims which it made but was never resolutely prepared to represent and fight for. The German-American antagonism is rather an antagonism between the Americans of German and British blood. It stems from the moment when the German part of the population first in Pennsylvania and later in the state of New York had become so strong that it posed a danger to the purely Anglo-Saxon character of the colonies. With this moment the English defense set in. It was justified as long as the Union Jack flew over the thirteen colonies. It became a heavy debt when freedom was won; for in the winning of independence the Germans residing in America participated to a much greater extent than would have corresponded to their proportion of the population.

When the foundation was laid for the America of today - and in spite of all that came later, the thirteen colonies still form that foundation today - Americans of German and British blood fought against the French and Indians for seventy years.

In this struggle, the Anglo-Saxon Americans bore the brunt. Not to acknowledge this would be unfair, even in a book such as this, which has set itself the task of helping the German share of America to a fair appreciation. The New England states, which were closest to French Canada, had the fewest German colonists. The Palatine peasants on the Mohawk and Schoharie admittedly stood within the first places against the French and Indians, and they more than once intercepted their advances. When, in the last and decisive moment of the great struggle, the French advanced to the Ohio and established Fort Duquesne as a barrier against further American advance westward, the Pennsylvanian and Virginian militia were the nearest to their defense.

From the St. Lawrence across the Great Lakes to the Mississippi is a long, arduous journey, especially when, as in those days, the canoe is the only means of transportation. The Ohio with its tributary Alleghany decisively shortens this route. If the French sat on the Ohio, they secured the shortest connection with their southern colony of Louisiana and finally pushed the English colonists away from the hinterland.

Possession of the Ohio was crucial, and therefore the British Americans would not tolerate the French on that river. Thus, in the forests of the American continent, guns banged and militias marched against each other, while the French and British governments remained in peaceful relations for two more years.

Of this decisive battle for Fort Duquesne and the Ohio, every schoolchild knows that George Washington, as a young Virginian captain, won his first military laurels here, but few know that numerous German colonists served in the Virginian regiments, and that one especially raised for these battles, the "Royal Americans," was composed almost entirely of Germans under German officers. Its commander was a Swiss, the brave Bernese Colonel Bouquet. But even fewer know that the fall of Fort Duquesne was not due to George Washington, but to a German, Christian Friedrich Post, a member of the Moravian Brethren.

And this was how it happened. The French waged their wars mainly with Indians. When in 1755 the British under General Braddock set out to conquer Fort Duquesne, the French commander sent a force against them, two thirds of which consisted of Indians. The French Regulars and Canadian militia managed to put Braddock to flight, but the Indians latched onto his heels and for the most part ambushed his troops. The only ones able to stand the forest fight were the Virginia militia, of which George Washington was one.

After this disaster - sixty-three of eighty-six officers had fallen, including General Braddock - the country lay open to Indian incursions. Thriving settlements, including the German Tulpehocken and Gnadenhütte, were burned, and the inhabitants massacred and scalped.

At the urging of the German and Irish frontiersmen, the Pennsylvania government finally decided on a countermeasure, a move against the French fort.

The expeditionary force of six thousand men this time was composed almost entirely of Americans, including the German-Virginian Riflemen and the Royal Americans. It was commanded by General Forbes, who was assisted by Colonel Bouquet and George Washington.

Among the troops was Konrad Weiser, an American-born German who had already performed many valuable services as a mediator between the English and the Indians. He was already an old man, but he had not hesitated for a moment to make himself available once again. His presence was soon to prove exceedingly useful; for when General Forbes fell so seriously ill that he had to be carried on a stretcher, the Indian confederates refused to follow further a leader who had to be carried.

Weiser, however, knew the redskins: "Brothers," he said to them, "we had no choice but to tie the general down on a stretcher for the time being. This man is too terrible; were we to let him go, he would drown the whole world in blood!"

The decisive service, however, was rendered by Christian Friedrich Post. This Herrnhuter, fluent in the Delaware dialect, had been dispatched to the Indians on the Ohio with a message of peace from the governor of Pennsylvania. Despite French opposition, he succeeded in changing the Indians' minds and drawing them over to the British lines. Under these circumstances, Fort Duquesne was beyond the reach of the French. Although they had only a short time before decisively defeated a detachment of Forbes's corps under Major Grant, they decided to evacuate. When Washington, who had been sent out by Forbes with two thousand five hundred men in front, arrived at the Ohio, he found only smoking ruins. The French had set fire to the hotly contested fort themselves.

In the context of the entire seventy-year struggle of the two Western powers for America, the battles in which Germans were involved play a relatively minor role, but nevertheless the figure of a German stands at its beginning as well as its end: Jakob Leisler and Frederick the Great.

Jakob Leisler, relying on the will of the people, had taken the reins of government in the colony of New York in the same year that the Indians invaded American territory at the instigation of the French. He at once recognized the greatness of the danger as well as the favor of the hour to unite the colonies, jealous of each other, in a great common act. He, the German, summoned the first American Congress to New York and proposed a joint campaign to conquer French Canada. An army was to advance across Lake Champlain against Montreal, a fleet across the St. Lawrence against Quebec. Had the rest of the Americans been possessed by the spirit of Leisler, Canada might have fallen even then, and the American colonists might have spared themselves seventy years of bloody war.

As it was, however, the enterprise was pursued only casually and suffered, moreover, from the cowardice of the military leaders. The land army was defeated by Frontenac and returned discouraged. The fleet, however, under Sir William Philipps, did not attack at all when it found Quebec well fortified.

Thus, if Canada was almost conquered by a German for England and English America at the beginning of the Seventy Years' War, it fell at the end by another German, Frederick the Great. The last act of the Seventy Years' War was the Seven Years' War, and no less than William Pitt made the statement that Canada had been conquered in Germany.

When the fighting on American soil between the colonies of the two Western powers became more and more bitter, the latter nevertheless felt compelled to intervene in the struggle. They also sought to win over their confederates. From the War of the Austrian Succession, England was still allied with Austria, and France with Prussia. Prussia, however, had just as little inclination to attack the then British Hanover for the sake of France as Austria had inclinations to protect it for England. Thus, in the way of Russian-British intrigues, there was a general change of allies, the Prussian-English alliance of Westminster and the Austro-French alliance of Versailles.

In America, British and French colonists had been at war with each other since 1754. The following year, the privateer war began, but the actual war between the two powers, however, did not begin until about the same time as Frederick II's invasion of Saxony.

Subsequently, the fighting in the European and overseas theaters of war affected each other. The troops that Prussia tied up in Europe were lacking for France in America. Rossbach was celebrated by Virginians and New Englanders as if it were an American victory.

In this way, Prussia, together with Great Britain and in union with Americans of both German and Anglo-Saxon blood, fought to eliminate the French colonial empire in America, thus laying the foundation for a unified and independent America.