British Colonial Administrator and Lieutenant Governor of Colonial Virginia. His actions while serving as the lieutenant governor are generally cited as a direct cause for instigating the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years War. He was born in 1692 (some sources say he was born in 1690; others say 1693) near Glasgow, Scotland, where his father was a successful merchant. He received his formal education at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and initially pursued an accounting career in his father's mercantile business. In 1721, the British government appointed him to the job of customs collector in Bermuda. In 1738, he was appointed to be the surveyor-general for the British colonies in North and Central America where he was responsible for collecting all the taxes and enforcing all trade laws in the British colonies. He settled in Virginia and became a member of the Council of Virginia, which was a part of the colony's legislature. He became the Virginia colony's lieutenant governor in 1751. (At that time, colonial governors were largely absentee and the job of administrating the duties and roles of the governor fell to the lieutenant governor as the de facto head of the colony.) He became a strict enforcer of the British tax laws which soon alienated the Virginia colonists. To increase revenue for the British Crown, he tried to levy a fee for land patents, known as the "Pistole Fee," which would also require landowners to pay quitrents. This was greatly opposed by the House of Burgesses as an unlawful tax. Additionally, he advocated British expansion to the west and sought to form alliances with the Native American tribes who lived in that region in the struggle against the French, who were threatening Virginia's interests in the Ohio Country and Virginia's western frontier, which were virtually defenseless against any French attack. In December 1753, he sent a small expedition under George Washington to Fort LeBoeuf in western Pennsylvania, asking the French to leave the Ohio Country. The French commandant refused and in January 1754, Dinwiddie sent a small militia force to construct a fort at the forks of the Ohio River, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers merge to form the Ohio, near present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The French forced the Virginians to retreat and in the spring of 1754, Dinwiddie sent George Washington and a small militia force to construct a road to the Monongahela River to help defend the British fort. Washington was defeated in a skirmish against the French at Fort Necessity and was forced to surrender. In February 1755, British General Edward Braddock arrived in Virginia with two regiments of soldiers in response to the French threat. Dinwiddie and other colonial governors persuaded Braddock to take military action against the French which resulted in disaster for the British and Virginia militia forces in a battle on 9 July 1755 near Great Meadows, Pennsylvania, in which Braddock was mortally wounded. Dinwiddie was then forced to begin the construction of new forts along major transportation routes in order to help protect Virginia from any future attack. This action, along with securing alliances with the Native Americans, left Virginia relatively unscathed for the remainder of the French and Indian War. In 1758, with his health deteriorating from the rigors of his office, he resigned his position and returned to England where he retired from public service.