Early in June, he marched for the Cherokee towns. Near the place where the action had been fought the preceding year by Montgomery, the Indians again assembled in force, and gave battle in defence of their country. The action commenced about eight in the morning, and was maintained with spirit until eleven, when the Cherokees began to give way. They were pursued for two or three hours, after which Grant marched to the adjacent village of Etchoe, which he reduced to ashes. All the towns of the middle settlement shared the same fate. Their houses and corn fields were destroyed, and the whole country laid waste. Reduced to extremity, they sued sincerely for peace; and, in the course of the summer, the war was terminated by a treaty.[177]
[Footnote 177: History of South Carolina and Georgia.]
It was not in America only that the vigour presiding in the councils of Britain shed lustre on the British arms. Splendid conquests were also made in Asia and Africa; and in Europe, her aids of men and money enabled the greatest monarch of his age to surmount difficulties which only Frederick and Mr. Pitt could have dared to encounter.
At length, Spain, alarmed at the increase of British power in America, and apprehensive for the safety of her own dominions, determined to take part against Great Britain; and, early in the year 1762, the two crowns declared war against each other. It was prosecuted, on the part of Great Britain, with signal success; and, in the course of the year, Martinique, Granada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and all the Caribbee Islands were wrested from France; and the very important city of Havanna, which in a great degree commands the gulf of Mexico, was taken from Spain.
This course of conquest, which no force in possession of France and Spain seemed capable of checking, while any of their distant possessions remained to be subdued, was arrested by preliminary articles of peace signed at Paris.
By this treaty, his Christian Majesty ceded to Britain, all the conquests made by that power on the continent of North America, together with the river and port of Mobile; and all the territory to which France was entitled on the left bank of the Mississippi, reserving only the island of New Orleans. And it was agreed that, for the future, the confines between the dominions of the two crowns, in that quarter of the world, should be irrevocably fixed by a line drawn along the middle of the Mississippi, from its source as far as the river Iberville, and thence, by a line drawn along the middle of that river, and of the lakes Maurepas and Pont Chartrain.