Episode Details
Back to EpisodesThe 7 Years War: A World Set Ablaze (Part 1)
Description
Before he was the marble man on the money, George Washington was a twenty-two-year-old Virginia militia officer with more ambition than judgment, standing in a rain-soaked hollow in western Pennsylvania watching something happen that he did not order and could not stop.
Ten French soldiers were dead. Their commander had been carrying a diplomatic summons that nobody read. And within two years, the consequences of that morning were being fought out on the Elbe and the Ganges, in the sugar islands of the Caribbean, on the beaches of Senegal, in the harbour at Manila, and on a cliff above the St. Lawrence.
Part one of three. This episode traces how a land-speculation scheme run by Virginia's own governing class collided with French imperial strategy in a river valley neither empire had mapped, and how the man who actually decided the outcome was neither British nor French. He was a Seneca diplomat named Tanaghrisson, he had his own reasons, and history has handed him a footnote.
It's also the story of the worst fourteen months of Washington's life: the only surrender of his military career, a confession of assassination signed in a language he couldn't read, and a massacre on the Monongahela road that taught him the lesson he would spend the Revolution applying.
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