Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

its command of the key cabinet posts: Bedford had moved up from the
admiralty to the crucial post of secretary of state for the South; his protege
the Earl of Sandwich assumed his former post; while, as we have seen, his
other protege the Earl of Halifax came in as president of the Board of Trade.
William Shirley was selected by Bedford to sabotage the boundary negotiations
with France over Nova Scotia and other colonial areas, and thus to
keep the war pot brewing. Pelham managed to oust Bedford and Sandwich
from office in 1751, and to horrify the war party by slashing army and
navy appropriations and pursuing a pacific policy. Halifax, however, at the
Board of Trade not only aggrandized his power over colonial affairs, but
also pressed his desire for aggression against New France. Finally, the
death of the prime minister Henry Pelham in early 1754 eliminated the
great leader of the peace forces. Although he succeeded his brother as prime
minister, Newcastle, isolated and surrounded by the war party, was pushed
into another and far more grandiose war against France.
Caught in a war drive that he opposed, Newcastle decided that the
Cumberland-Fox clique, which wanted a limited war against France concentrated
on the continent of Europe, was far less dangerous than the Pitt-
Bedford warmongers for unlimited aggression against all the French colonies.
Newcastle therefore threw in with the former group, and Henry Fox
was brought into the cabinet as secretary of war and then as secretary of state.
All the previous intercolonial wars had begun in Europe and were then
reflected in the colonies. But the French and Indian War between Britain
and France began in the colonies, and only later was extended to Europe
as the Seven Years' War. While the war in Europe lasted from 1756 to
1763, the war in America broke out—albeit unofficially—in late 1753 and
was virtually over by 1760.
The French had heroically explored the Mississippi and Ohio valleys
and had settled them as efficient fur traders with the Indians. With a population
throughout their extensive territory of no more than seventy-five
thousand, the French faced an aggressive and powerful set of English colonies
containing a million and a half persons—and despite this overwhelmingly
superior population, ever subject to hysteria over the supposed "menace"
of New France. Moreover, behind the colonies was a British government
directing the royal colonial governors, and increasingly in the hands
of an extremely aggressive war party frankly dedicated to the total conquest
of New France and the reduction of France and French trading
competition to second-class status.
The final conflict between British America and New France was precipitated
not so much by these general forces as by an Anglo-Virginian attempt
at a huge land-grab. English settlements had now reached the Appalachian
Mountains. Beyond stretched New French territory, tempting opportunity
not only for ousting French fur traders but also for land speculation. Vir-
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