Fort Pitt (Pennsylvania) - French and Indian War

French and Indian War

The fort was built from 1759 to 1761 during the French and Indian War (Seven Years War), next to the site of former Fort Duquesne, at the confluence the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River. The French built Fort Duquesne in 1754, at the beginning of that war, and it became a focal point due to its strategic river location. The Braddock expedition, a 1755 attempt to take Fort Duquesne, met with defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela at present-day Braddock, Pennsylvania. The French garrison defeated an attacking British regiment in September 1758 at the Battle of Fort Duquesne. They abandoned and destroyed the fort at the approach of General John Forbes's expedition in November.

The Forbes expedition was successful where the Braddock expedition had failed because the Treaty of Easton of 1758 reduced French alliances with Native American tribes. Chiefs of 13 American Indian nations agreed to negotiate peace with the colonial governments of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and to abandon any alliances with the French. The nations were primarily those of the Iroquois, Lenape (Delaware), and Shawnee, who agreed to the treaty in return for the British governments' promising to respect their rights to hunting and territory in the Ohio Country, to prohibit establishing new settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains, and to withdraw British and colonial military troops after the war. The Indians wanted a trading post at Fort Duquesne, but they did not want a British army garrison or colonial settlement. The colonists built a new fort and named it Fort Pitt, after William Pitt the Elder.