KING GEORGE'S WAR

KING GEORGE'S WAR (1744–1748). Nominally at peace from 1713 to 1744, France and England conflicted over boundaries of Acadia in Canada and northern New England and over claims in the Ohio Valley. When the War of Jenkins's Ear (England's commercial war with Spain, 1739–1743) merged into the continental War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748), England and France declared war on each other. The French at Louisburg (Cape Breton Island) failed in an early attack in which they attempted to take Annapolis (Port Royal). In retaliation, New Englanders captured Louisburg and planned, with English aid, to attack Quebec and Montreal simultaneously. Seven colonies cooperated to raise forces in 1746, but the promised English aid did not arrive, and the colonials finally disbanded the next year.

Meanwhile, France sent a great fleet in June 1746 to recapture Louisburg and devastate English colonial seaports. However, assorted fiascoes—including storms, disease, and the death of the fleet's commander—frustrated the attempt. British squadrons defeated a second French fleet on the open sea in 1747. Gruesome raids along the New England–New York borders by both conflicting parties and their Indian allies characterized the remainder of the war, with no result except a temporary check on frontier settlement. Weary of futile and costly conflict, the warring parties signed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in October 1748, granting mutual restoration of conquests but leaving colonial territorial disputes unresolved.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Merrell, James H. Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. New York: Norton, 1999.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1615–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

ShelbyBalik

Raymond P.Stearns

See alsoColonial Wars ; Jenkins's Ear, War of ; Ohio Valley .

King George's War

Between 1689 and 1763, England and France fought four wars for dominance in the New World. The wars are known collectively in English history as the French and Indian Wars. In American history, the French and Indian War name applies to the last of the four wars, fought from 1754 to 1763.

The third of the French and Indian Wars was King George's War (1744–48), named for King George II (1683–1760). From Europe's perspective, King George's War was just the New World theater for a larger war being fought in Europe called the War of the Austrian Succession. The conflict was also an escalation of war between England and Spain in the New World, which had begun in 1739. When France entered the war, it fought alongside Spain.

In King George's War, as in all of the French and Indian Wars, Native American tribes fought either for France or England. Sir William Johnson (1715–1774) served as superintendent of the Iroquois for England and worked to bring the Mohawk tribe onto Britain's side.

King George's War ended with a peace treaty in 1748 that restored colonial borders to where they had been prior to the war.

King George's War

KING GEORGE'S WAR. 1744–1745. British colonists called military operations in North America during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) "King George's War," after King George II.

SEE ALSO Austrian Succession, War of the; Colonial Wars.

                              revised by Harold E. Selesky