“The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire,” British writer Horace Walpole commented at the time. At the age of twenty-two, Washington had committed a political misstep of global consequence. The British and the French were now formally engaged in a battle (known as the French and Indian War) for American land, forcing their allies in Austria, Germany, Prussia, Russia, Spain, and Sweden to take sides. The theater of war quickly spread into far-flung colonial holdings in the Americas, Africa, India, and even the Philippines. If the American
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