GREAT ATLANTIC WAR, THE, 1755-62, the general war fought against the Bourbon crowns of France and Spain on four continents at once, and the first in which the Commonwealth's Western Provinces supplied as large a proportion of the fighting strength engaged as the Home Provinces themselves. It began, as such wars commonly do, over a frontier neither side could precisely draw: the forested marches beyond the Ohio, claimed by both New England traders and the French posts of the interior, where skirmishing between militia parties had been continuous for two years before either government troubled to declare what both had long been fighting.
The war's decisive theatre proved to be the Saint Lawrence rather than the Ohio. The Commonwealth's expedition against Quebec, mounted in 1759 and carried through a full campaigning season before the fortress city's defences were reduced, found a citadel sited about as strongly as nature and engineering together could contrive — high ground above a river too narrow for a fleet to pass unmolested and too well watched to be forded below it — and the action that finally took it, by a night ascent of the river cliffs to ground the French had judged impassable to any body of men larger than a scouting party, is reckoned by this contributor's own profession among the more instructive pieces of siegecraft of the century, whatever its cost: the young general Wolfe who led the ascent did not live to see the capitulation (q.v.) he had won, dying of his wounds on the field the action was decided upon in 1760.
The Indian theatre ran on a longer and less tidy calendar. The contest for Bengal opened in 1757 and was not settled, in the sense of leaving the Commonwealth's merchants and the provincial powers of the interior in a stable relation to one another, until 1765, well after the European peace had been signed; readers wishing the particulars of that unsettled settlement, and of the Commission that eventually followed from it, are referred to INDIA, THE COMMISSION FOR (q.v.). At sea the war was fought less by any single decisive action than by a long attrition of convoys and colonial garrisons, in which the Commonwealth's advantage in shipping told steadily rather than dramatically, and by 1762 the French crown's ability to reinforce any of its overseas possessions had been reduced, in the candid estimate of its own ministers, very nearly to nothing.
The Peace signed at Paris in 1763 registered the arithmetic the fighting had already settled: French America (q.v.) was ceded to the Commonwealth in its entirety, from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence to the Mississippi's eastern bank, and the French crown's remaining ambitions in India were reduced to a handful of trading posts held on the Commonwealth's sufferance. It was, on any accounting, the most complete victory the Commonwealth had yet won in a general European war, and it left the republic in possession of a continental interior larger than either the framers of 1660 or the negotiators of the Second Frame had thought themselves acquiring an empire over; the quarrels that interior's own growth then provoked among the Western Provinces are treated under REAPPORTIONMENT QUARRELS, THE. (G. M. T.)