Moor’s Indian Charity School is founded.
Congregational minister Eleazer Wheelock establishes Moor’s Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, with the support of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. The school will educate approximately 45 Indian boys and 15 Indian girls. The boys will receive a classical education, including lessons in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The girls will be trained in sewing and housekeeping, so they will be able to assist the male students in future missionary work. The school will later be moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, and become part of Dartmouth College (see entry for 1769).
A Virginia militia attack initiates the French and Indian War.
Following a failed attempt to persuade the French to leave the Ohio River valley (see entry for 1753), George Washington leads the Virginia militia to the region, where the English have begun building forts to protect their land claims. With the help of the Mingo Indians under Chief Half-King, the soldiers attack a patrol of Frenchmen, killing 10 and capturing 24. In response to the attack, the French force the militia to retreat and drive off the Englishmen constructing the forts.
The incident leads the French to amass a huge army of Indian warriors and helps initiate the French and Indian War. Although this conflict, pitting the English against the French for control over North America, begins with Washington’s attack, war will not be formally declared until two years later. (See also entries for JULY 9, 1755; September 8, 1755; September 9, 1760; and FEBRUARY 10, 1763.)
Preparing for war with France, representatives from seven British colonies gather in Albany, New York, to organize a united military offensive. Also in attendance are Iroquois leaders, whom the colonists want to impress with their resolve to band together to battle the French. The colonial leaders hope to coax the Iroquois into abandoning their policy of neutrality in European wars (see entry for SUMMER 1701) and joining the British cause.
“It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union, and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsisted for ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous, and whom cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interests.”
—Benjamin Franklin in 1751 on the Iroquois League as a model for a confederacy of colonies
The British fail miserably in these aims. The meetings are contentious, and leaders from Pennsylvania and Connecticut scramble to make secret, illegal deals with the Iroquois for Indian land that both colonies claim as their own. Disgusted by the colonists’ behavior and unconvinced of their military preparedness, the Iroquois declare that the
English are “like women: bare and open and without fortifications.”
The congress does, however, succeed in approving the Albany Plan of Union. This document, based on the ideas of Benjamin Franklin, proposes a centralized colonial government modeled after the Grand Council of the Iroquois Confederacy (see entry for CA. 1400). The plan, however, is later rejected by the colonial legislatures and is never even examined by the British government.