The Battle of Fort Niagara was a siege late in the French and Indian War, the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War. The British siege of Fort Niagara in July 1759 was part of a campaign to remove French control of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions, making possible a western invasion of the French province of Canada in conjunction with General James Wolfe's invasion to the east.
British General Jeffery Amherst made plans for the 1759 military campaigns of the Seven Years' War that included an expedition to capture Fort Niagara, a major French military and supply point between the French province of Canada and their forts in the Ohio Valley. Amherst chose Brigadier General John Prideaux to lead the expedition, which also included Sir William Johnson, the British Indian agent who led the expedition's Haudenosaunee forces.
Fort Niagara had been largely constructed under the direction of Captain Pierre Pouchot of the French Army. In early 1759, General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and New France's governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, sent him with about 2,500 men to fortify Niagara beyond the 500 men that had wintered there. Pouchot, under orders from Vaudreuil, sent many of those men south to Fort Machault in mid-June as part of a plan to reinforce the French forts of the Ohio Country and attack the British at Fort Pitt. The forces left to defend Niagara consisted of about 200 men from the regiments of Royal Roussillon, Languedoc, La Sarre, and Béarn, 20 artillerymen, and about 300 provincial troops and militia.
Prideaux's British Army troops consisted of the 44th and 46th Regiments, and two companies from the 60th, numbering about 2,200 men. He also commanded 2500 provincial militia from New York and 700 from Rhode Island. Delayed by high water on the Mohawk River and the late arrival of some of the provincial companies, the expedition did not begin leaving Schenectady until mid-May. On 27 June the army arrived at Fort Oswego, where they were joined by Johnson and about 600 Haudenosaunee.
Leaving men behind to garrison Oswego Prideaux departed on 1 July for Niagara with about 3,200 men. While the French had ships patrolling Lake Ontario for British movements, inattention on the part of one of the crews allowed the British flotilla to avoid discovery. They arrived at Fort Niagara on 6 July, landed near a marsh out of sight of the fort, and immediately began siege operations.
The French had about one hundred Haudenosaunee allies at the fort who withdrew to meet with the fellow Haudenosaunee who had accompanied the British. Captain Pouchot directed a vigorous defense.
European colonization of North America accelerated after 1600, with England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands establishing competing settlements along the Atlantic coast, the St. Lawrence River, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi Valley. The first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia (1607) struggled with starvation and conflict; the Plymouth colony (1620) and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630) followed. By the mid-1700s, thirteen English colonies stretched along the Atlantic seaboard, governed through a mix of royal charters, proprietary grants, and elected assemblies. The colonial economy depended on tobacco in Virginia and Maryland, rice and indigo in the Carolinas, and maritime trade in New England — all increasingly reliant on enslaved African labor after 1619. Conflict with Indigenous peoples over land was continuous, punctuated by major wars including King Philip's War (1675–1676) in New England and the Yamasee War (1715–1717) in the South. The French and Indian War (1754–1763), part of the global Seven Years' War, ended French power in North America and left Britain deeply in debt — triggering the taxation disputes that would lead to revolution.
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