the struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the New World took a turn neither country could have anticipated: during an engagement between British and French troops on the Plains of Abraham just outside Quebece City, British commander General James Wolfe and French main battle force leader the Marquis de Montcalm were killed within seconds of each other. Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.

The nearly simultaneous deaths of Montcalm and Wolfe seriously complicated battle planning on both sides and turned what had been a 15-minute clash into a week-long siege and meant that the conflict modern historians now call the Fifteen Years' War would drag on well into the 1760s.

Part 1 of the thread "Double Jeopardy" With the two most experienced field commanders in the North American theater gone, London and Paris were obliged to sharply rewrite their respective campaign strategies. The Fifteen Years' War left both a victorious Britain and a defeated France exhausted.

It also created a power vacuum in which advocates for the independence of Britain's colonies in North America could work with relatively little opposition from the powers that be back in London; by 1775 the thirteen colonies which today comprise the original states of the USA had declared their independence from Britain and the French-Canadian citizens of Quebec had thrown out the token British garrison which had attempted to occupy their homeland after the war ended.