olled this much territory alarmed the English, whose colonies were pretty much concentrated up and down the Atlantic coast and whose subjects felt threatened by both French and Indians on their western borders. The French did not enslave the Indians as the Spanish had done in Florida and California. Black slavery was not endemic to New France as it was to the British-dominated colonies that would become the antebellum South. In the French and Indian War (known as the Seven Years War in Europe), Indians by and large sided with the French and against the English. Indeed, the British government faced a dilemma inasmuch as it wanted to persuade the Indians away from French influence even as the American colonists were demanding security from the Indians, and more and more the growing number of American colonists were pushing the Indians farther inland from the Atlantic coast.
After 1763, in the aftermath of the English victory in the Seven Years War, power in both Europe and the New World shifted. Freed of the French threat in North America, the colonists appear to have felt more comfortable pushing the Indians even further out of the way of expansion and settlement westward toward the Mississippi. The French threat had ended, and despite Pontiac's uprising against British encroachment on Indian lands in 1766 ("Pontiac" 321; Becker 210-211), this was considered a less serious threat against the security of British colonists. One important consequence was that the land was divided and far more rigid land controls than the Indians had ever seen were instituted.
Government power wielded first by the British colonial administration and then by the U.S. government's administration of Indian country was always ready to assist settlers in settling where they pleased, regardless of the Indian presence. Wiltse sees a shift at this time toward an increasingly aggressive approach to the expanding of the white-settler presence in Indian ...