To maintain her claims France had erected a cordon of forts extending diagonally across the continent from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico.  If one will follow, in thought, a line starting at Louisburg, and thence running up this great river to Quebec and Montreal, and thence up Lake Champlain to Crown Point and Ticonderoga, and on westward and south-westward to Frontenac, Niagara and Detroit, and thence down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, he will trace the line across which the two nations looked in defiance at each other, and see instantaneously that the claims of France were inadmissable, and that another war was inevitable.  It mattered little that of the forty-five years immediately preceding the treaty of Aix La Chapelle, fourteen, or one-third of the whole number, had been years of war between these two neighbors.  They were now, after a peace of only half a dozen years, as ready for a fresh contest as if they were to meet for the first time upon the battle field.  In fact, another conflict was unavoidable; a conflict of the Teuton with the Gaul; of medievalism with daylight; of conservatism with progress; of the old Church with the new; of feudalism with democracy—­a conflict which should settle the destiny of North America, making it English and Protestant, or French and Roman Catholic; a contest, too, in which the victor was to gain more than he knew, and the vanquished was to loose more than he ever dreamed of.

Hostilities may be said to have been commenced by the French, when, on the 18th day of April, 1754, they dispossessed the Ohio company of the fort which they were erecting at the forks of the Ohio River, afterwards named Fort Du Quesne.

The plan of a Colonial Confederation, formed at the Albany convention in July of that year, having failed of acceptance by the mother country and the Colonies both, the Home government was forced to meet the exigency by the use of British troops, aided by such others as the several Provinces were willing to furnish.

The campaign of the next year (1755) embraced: 

1st.  An expedition, under General Braddock, for the capture of Fort Du Quesne.

2d.  A second, under General Shirley, for the reduction of Fort Niagara, which was not prosecuted.

3d.  A third, under Colonel Moncton, against the French settlements on the Bay of Fundy, resulting in the capture and deportation of the Acadians.

4th.  A fourth, under General William Johnson, against Crown Point, a strong fortification, erected by the French, in the very heart of New England and New York, whence innumerable bands of Indians had been dispatched by the French to murder the defenceless dwellers upon the English frontiers, particularly those of New Hampshire, to destroy their cattle and to burn their buildings and other property.

To the army of this latter expedition New Hampshire contributed, in the early part of this year, a regiment of ten companies, the first being a company of Rangers, whose Captain was Robert Rogers, and whose Second Lieutenant was John Stark. [A]