1608-1763.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN AMERICA.
The American colonies of France and England grew up to maturity under
widely different auspices. Canada, the offspring of Church and State,
nursed from infancy in the lap of power, its puny strength fed with
artificial stimulants, its movements guided by rule and discipline, its
limbs trained to martial exercise, languished, in spite of all, from the
lack of vital sap and energy. The colonies of England, outcast and
neglected, but strong in native vigor and self-confiding courage, grew yet
more strong with conflict and with striving, and developed the rugged
proportions and unwieldy strength of a youthful giant.
In the valley of the St. Lawrence, and along the coasts of the Atlantic,
adverse principles contended for the mastery. Feudalism stood arrayed
against Democracy; Popery against Protestantism; the sword against the
ploughshare. The priest, the soldier, and the noble, ruled in Canada. The
ignorant, light-hearted Canadian peasant knew nothing and cared nothing
about popular rights and civil liberties. Born to obey, he lived in
contented submission, without the wish or the capacity for self-rule.
Power, centered in the heart of the system, left the masses inert. The
settlements along the margin of the St. Lawrence were like a camp, where
an army lay at rest, ready for the march or the battle, and where war and
adventure, not trade and tillage, seemed the chief aims of life. The lords
of the soil were petty nobles, for the most part soldiers, or the sons of
soldiers, proud and ostentatious, thriftless and poor; and the people were
their vassals. Over every cluster of small white houses glittered the
sacred emblem of the cross. The church, the convent, and the roadside
shrine were seen at every turn; and in the towns and villages, one met
each moment the black robe of the Jesuit, the gray garb of the Recollet,
and the formal habit of the Ursuline nun. The names of saints, St. Joseph,
St. Ignatius, St. Francis, were perpetuated in the capes, rivers, and
islands, the forts and villages of the land; and with every day, crowds
of simple worshippers knelt in adoration before the countless altars of
the Roman faith.
If we search the world for the sharpest contrast to the spiritual and
temporal vassalage of Canada, we shall find it among her immediate
neighbors, the Puritans of New England, where the spirit of non-conformity
was sublimed to a fiery essence, and where the love of liberty and the
hatred of power burned with sevenfold heat. The English colonist, with
thoughtful brow and limbs hardened with toil; calling no man master, yet
bowing reverently to the law which he himself had made; patient and
laborious, and seeking for the solid comforts rather than the ornaments of
life; no lover of war, yet, if need were, fighting with a stubborn,
indomitable courage, and then bending once more with steadfast energy to
his farm, or his merchandise,--such a man might well be deemed the very
pith and marrow of a commonwealth.
In every quality of efficiency and strength, the Canadian fell miserably
below his rival; but in all that pleases the eye and interests the
imagination, he far surpassed him. Buoyant and gay, like his ancestry of
France, he made the frozen wilderness ring with merriment, answered the
surly howling of the pine forest with peals of laughter, and warmed with
revelry the groaning ice of the St. Lawrence. Careless and thoughtless, he
lived happy in the midst of poverty, content if he could but gain the
means to fill his tobacco-pouch, and decorate the cap of his mistress with
a ribbon. The example of a beggared nobility, who, proud and penniless,
could only assert their rank by idleness and ostentation, was not lost
upon him. A rightful heir to French bravery and French restlessness, he
had an eager love of wandering and adventure; and this propensity found
ample scope in the service of the fur-trade, the engrossing occupation and
chief source of income to the colony. When the priest of St. Ann's had
shrived him of his sins; when, after the parting carousal, he embarked
with his comrades in the deep-laden canoe; when their oars kept time to
the measured cadence of their song, and the blue, sunny bosom of the
Ottawa opened before them; when their frail bark quivered among the milky
foam and black rocks of the rapid; and when, around their camp-fire, they
wasted half the night with jests and laughter,--then the Canadian was in
his element. His footsteps explored the farthest hiding-places of the
wilderness. In the evening dance, his red cap mingled with the scalp-locks
and feathers of the Indian braves; or, stretched on a bear-skin by the
side of his dusky mistress, he watched the gambols of his hybrid
offspring, in happy oblivion of the partner whom he left unnumbered
leagues behind.
The fur-trade engendered a peculiar class of restless bush-rangers, more
akin to Indians than to white men. Those who had once felt the
fascinations of the forest were unfitted ever after for a life of quiet
labor; and with this spirit the whole colony was infected. From this
cause, no less than from occasional wars with the English, and repeated
attacks of the Iroquois, the agriculture of the country was sunk to a low
ebb; while feudal exactions, a ruinous system of monopoly, and the
intermeddlings of arbitrary power, cramped every branch of industry.[43]
Yet, by the zeal of priests and the daring enterprise of soldiers and
explorers, Canada, though sapless and infirm, spread forts and missions
through all the western wilderness. Feebly rooted in the soil, she thrust
out branches which overshadowed half America; a magnificent object to the
eye, but one which the first whirlwind would prostrate in the dust.
Such excursive enterprise was alien to the genius of the British colonies.
Daring activity was rife among them, but it did not aim at the founding of
military outposts and forest missions. By the force of energetic industry,
their population swelled with an unheard-of rapidity, their wealth
increased in a yet greater ratio, and their promise of future greatness
opened with every advancing year. But it was a greatness rather of peace
than of war. The free institutions, the independence of authority, which
were the source of their increase, were adverse to that unity of counsel
and promptitude of action which are the soul of war. It was far otherwise
with their military rival. France had her Canadian forces well in hand.
They had but one will, and that was the will of a mistress. Now here, now
there, in sharp and rapid onset, they could assail the cumbrous masses and
unwieldy strength of their antagonists, as the king-bird attacks the
eagle, or the sword-fish the whale. Between two such combatants the strife
must needs be a long one.
Canada was a true child of the Church, baptized in infancy and faithful to
the last. Champlain, the founder of Quebec, a man of noble spirit, a
statesman and a soldier, was deeply imbued with fervid piety. "The saving
of a soul," he would often say, "is worth more than the conquest of an
empire;"[44] and to forward the work of conversion, he brought with him
four Franciscan monks from France. At a later period, the task of
colonization would have been abandoned, but for the hope of casting the
pure light of the faith over the gloomy wastes of heathendom.[45] All
France was filled with the zeal of proselytism. Men and women of exalted
rank lent their countenance to the holy work. From many an altar daily
petitions were offered for the well-being of the mission; and in the Holy
House of Mont-Martre, a nun lay prostrate day and night before the shrine,
praying for the conversion of Canada.[46] In one convent, thirty nuns
offered themselves for the labors of the wilderness; and priests flocked
in crowds to the colony.[47] The powers of darkness took alarm; and when a
ship, freighted with the apostles of the faith, was tempest-tost upon her
voyage, the storm was ascribed to the malice of demons, trembling for the
safety of their ancient empire.
The general enthusiasm was not without its fruits. The Church could pay
back with usury all that she received of aid and encouragement from the
temporal power; and the ambition of Richelieu could not have devised a
more efficient enginery for the accomplishment of its schemes, than that
supplied by the zeal of the devoted propagandists. The priest and the
soldier went hand in hand; and the cross and the _fleur de lis_ were
planted side by side.
Foremost among the envoys of the faith were the members of that mighty
order, who, in another hemisphere, had already done so much to turn back
the advancing tide of religious freedom, and strengthen the arm of Rome.
To the Jesuits was assigned, for many years, the entire charge of the
Canadian missions, to the exclusion of the Franciscans, early laborers in
the same barren field. Inspired with a self-devoting zeal to snatch souls
from perdition, and win new empires to the cross; casting from them every
hope of earthly pleasure or earthly aggrandizement, the Jesuit fathers
buried themselves in deserts, facing death with the courage of heroes, and
enduring torments with the constancy of martyrs. Their story is replete
with marvels--miracles of patient suffering and daring enterprise. They
were the pioneers of Northern America.[48] We see them among the frozen
forests of Acadia, struggling on snowshoes, with some wandering Algonquin
horde, or crouching in the crowded hunting-lodge, half stifled in the
smoky den, and battling with troops of famished dogs for the last morsel
of sustenance. Again we see the black-robed priest wading among the white
rapids of the Ottawa, toiling with his savage comrades to drag the canoe
against the headlong water. Again, radiant in the vestments of his
priestly office, he administers the sacramental bread to kneeling crowds
of plumed and painted proselytes in the forests of the Hurons; or, bearing
his life in his hand, carries his sacred mission into the strongholds of
the Iroquois, like one who invades unarmed a den of angry tigers. Jesuit
explorers traced the St. Lawrence to its source, and said masses among the
solitudes of Lake Superior, where the boldest fur-trader scarcely dared to
follow. They planted missions at St. Mary's and at Michillimackinac; and
one of their fraternity, the illustrious Marquette, discovered the
Mississippi, and opened a new theatre to the boundless ambition of France.
The path of the missionary was a thorny and a bloody one; and a life of
weary apostleship was often crowned with a frightful martyrdom. Jean de
Brebeuf and Gabriel Lallemant preached the faith among the villages of the
Hurons, when their terror-stricken flock were overwhelmed by an irruption
of the Iroquois. The missionaries might have fled; but, true to their
sacred function, they remained behind to aid the wounded and baptize the
dying. Both were made captive, and both were doomed to the fiery torture.
Brebeuf, a veteran soldier of the cross, met his fate with an undaunted
composure, which amazed his murderers. With unflinching constancy he
endured torments too horrible to be recorded, and died calmly as a martyr
of the early church, or a war-chief of the Mohawks.
The slender frame of Lallemant, a man younger in years and gentle in
spirit, was enveloped in blazing savin-bark. Again and again the fire was
extinguished; again and again it was kindled afresh; and with such
fiendish ingenuity were his torments protracted, that he lingered for
seventeen hours before death came to his relief.[49]
Isaac Jogues, taken captive by the Iroquois, was led from canton to
canton, and village to village, enduring fresh torments and indignities at
every stage of his progress.[50] Men, women, and children vied with each
other in ingenious malignity. Redeemed, at length, by the humane exertions
of a Dutch officer, he repaired to France, where his disfigured person and
mutilated hands told the story of his sufferings. But the promptings of a
sleepless conscience urged him to return and complete the work he had
begun; to illumine the moral darkness upon which, during the months of his
disastrous captivity, he fondly hoped that he had thrown some rays of
light. Once more he bent his footsteps towards the scene of his living
martyrdom, saddened with a deep presentiment that he was advancing to his
death. Nor were his forebodings untrue. In a village of the Mohawks, the
blow of a tomahawk closed his mission and his life.
Such intrepid self-devotion may well call forth our highest admiration;
but when we seek for the results of these toils and sacrifices, we shall
seek in vain. Patience and zeal were thrown away upon lethargic minds and
stubborn hearts. The reports of the Jesuits, it is true, display a copious
list of conversions; but the zealous fathers reckoned the number of
conversions by the number of baptisms; and, as Le Clercq observes, with no
less truth than candor, an Indian would be baptized ten times a day for a
pint of brandy or a pound of tobacco. Neither can more flattering
conclusions be drawn from the alacrity which they showed to adorn their
persons with crucifixes and medals. The glitter of the trinkets pleased
the fancy of the warrior; and, with the emblem of man's salvation pendent
from his neck, he was often at heart as thorough a heathen as when he wore
in its place a necklace made of the dried forefingers of his enemies. At
the present day, with the exception of a few insignificant bands of
converted Indians in Lower Canada, not a vestige of early Jesuit influence
can be found among the tribes. The seed was sown upon a rock.[51]
While the church was reaping but a scanty harvest, the labors of the
missionaries were fruitful of profit to the monarch of France. The Jesuit
led the van of French colonization; and at Detroit, Michillimackinac, St.
Mary's, Green Bay, and other outposts of the west, the establishment of a
mission was the precursor of military occupancy. In other respects no
less, the labors of the wandering missionaries advanced the welfare of the
colony. Sagacious and keen of sight, with faculties stimulated by zeal and
sharpened by peril, they made faithful report of the temper and movements
of the distant tribes among whom they were distributed. The influence
which they often gained was exerted in behalf of the government under
whose auspices their missions were carried on; and they strenuously
labored to win over the tribes to the French alliance, and alienate them
from the heretic English. In all things they approved themselves the
stanch and steadfast auxiliaries of the imperial power; and the Marquis du
Quesne observed of the missionary Picquet, that in his single person he
was worth ten regiments.[52]
Among the English colonies, the pioneers of civilization were for the most
part rude, yet vigorous men, impelled to enterprise by native
restlessness, or lured by the hope of gain. Their range was limited, and
seldom extended far beyond the outskirts of the settlements. With Canada
it was far otherwise. There was no energy in the bulk of her people. The
court and the army supplied the mainsprings of her vital action, and the
hands which planted the lilies of France in the heart of the wilderness
had never guided the ploughshare or wielded the spade. The love of
adventure, the ambition of new discovery, the hope of military
advancement, urged men of place and culture to embark on bold and
comprehensive enterprise. Many a gallant gentleman, many a nobleman of
France, trod the black mould and oozy mosses of the forest with feet that
had pressed the carpets of Versailles. They whose youth had passed in
camps and courts grew gray among the wigwams of savages; and the lives of
Castine, Joncaire, and Priber[53] are invested with all the interest of
romance.
Conspicuous in the annals of Canada stands the memorable name of Robert
Cavelier de La Salle, the man who, beyond all his compeers, contributed to
expand the boundary of French empire in the west. La Salle commanded at
Fort Frontenac, erected near the outlet of Lake Ontario, on its northern
shore, and then forming the most advanced military outpost of the colony.
Here he dwelt among Indians, and half-breeds, traders, voyageurs,
bush-rangers, and Franciscan monks, ruling his little empire with absolute
sway, enforcing respect by his energy, but offending many by his rigor.
Here he brooded upon the grand design which had long engaged his thoughts.
He had resolved to complete the achievement of Father Marquette, to trace
the unknown Mississippi to its mouth, to plant the standard of his king in
the newly-discovered regions, and found colonies which should make good
the sovereignty of France from the Frozen Ocean to Mexico. Ten years of
his early life had passed, it is said, in connection with the Jesuits, and
his strong mind had hardened to iron under the discipline of that
relentless school. To a sound judgment, and a penetrating sagacity, he
joined a boundless enterprise and an adamantine constancy of purpose. But
his nature was stern and austere; he was prone to rule by fear rather than
by love; he took counsel of no man, and chilled all who approached him by
his cold reserve.
At the close of the year 1678, his preparations were complete, and he
despatched his attendants to the banks of the river Niagara, whither he
soon followed in person. Here he began a little fort of palisades, and was
the first military tenant of a spot destined to momentous consequence in
future wars. Two leagues above the cataract, on the eastern bank of the
river, he built the first vessel which ever explored the waters of the
upper lakes.[54] Her name was the Griffin, and her burden was forty-five
tons. On the seventh of August, 1679, she began her adventurous voyage
amid the speechless wonder of the Indians, who stood amazed, alike at the
unwonted size of the wooden canoe, at the flash and roar of the cannon
from her decks, and at the carved figure of a griffin, which sat crouched
upon her prow. She bore on her course along the virgin waters of Lake
Erie, through the beautiful windings of the Detroit, and among the
restless billows of Lake Huron, where a furious tempest had well nigh
ingulphed her. La Salle pursued his voyage along Lake Michigan in birch
canoes, and after protracted suffering from famine and exposure reached
its southern extremity on the eighteenth of October.[55]
He led his followers to the banks of the river now called the St. Joseph.
Here, again, he built a fort; and here, in after years, the Jesuits placed
a mission and the government a garrison. Thence he pushed on into the
unknown region of the Illinois; and now dangers and difficulties began to
thicken about him. Indians threatened hostility; his men lost heart,
clamored, grew mutinous, and repeatedly deserted; and worse than all,
nothing was heard of the vessel which had been sent back to Canada for
necessary supplies. Weeks wore on, and doubt ripened into certainty. She
had foundered among the storms of these wilderness oceans; and her loss
seemed to involve the ruin of the enterprise, since it was vain to
proceed farther without the expected supplies. In this disastrous crisis,
La Salle embraced a resolution characteristic of his intrepid temper.
Leaving his men in charge of a subordinate at a fort which he had built on
the river Illinois, he turned his face again towards Canada. He traversed
on foot more than a thousand miles of frozen forest, crossing rivers,
toiling through snow-drifts, wading ice-encumbered swamps, sustaining life
by the fruits of the chase, and threatened day and night by lurking
enemies. He gained his destination, but it was only to encounter a fresh
storm of calamities. His enemies had been busy in his absence; a malicious
report had gone abroad that he was dead; his creditors had seized his
property; and the stores on which he most relied had been wrecked at sea,
or lost among the rapids of the St. Lawrence. Still he battled against
adversity with his wonted vigor, and in Count Frontenac, the governor of
the province,--a spirit kindred to his own,--he found a firm friend. Every
difficulty gave way before him; and with fresh supplies of men, stores,
and ammunition, he again embarked for the Illinois. Rounding the vast
circuit of the lakes, he reached the mouth of the St. Joseph, and hastened
with anxious speed to the fort where he had left his followers. The place
was empty. Not a man remained. Terrified, despondent, mutinous, and
embroiled in Indian wars, they had fled to seek peace and safety, he knew
not whither.
Once more the dauntless discoverer turned back towards Canada. Once more
he stood before Count Frontenac, and once more bent all his resources and
all his credit to gain means for the prosecution of his enterprise. He
succeeded. With his little flotilla of canoes, he left his fort, at the
outlet of Lake Ontario, and slowly retraced those interminable waters, and
lines of forest-bounded shore, which had grown drearily familiar to his
eyes. Fate at length seemed tired of the conflict with so stubborn an
adversary. All went prosperously with the voyagers. They passed the lakes
in safety, crossed the rough portage to the waters of the Illinois,
followed its winding channel, and descended the turbid eddies of the
Mississippi, received with various welcome by the scattered tribes who
dwelt along its banks. Now the waters grew bitter to the taste; now the
trampling of the surf was heard; and now the broad ocean opened upon their
sight, and their goal was won. On the ninth of April, 1682, with his
followers under arms, amid the firing of musketry, the chanting of the _Te
Deum_, and shouts of "Vive le roi," La Salle took formal possession of the
vast valley of the Mississippi, in the name of Louis the Great, King of
France and Navarre.[56]
The first stage of his enterprise was accomplished, but labors no less
arduous remained behind. Repairing to the court of France, he was welcomed
with richly merited favor, and soon set sail for the mouth of the
Mississippi, with a squadron of vessels freighted with men and material
for the projected colony. But the folly and obstinacy of a jealous naval
commander blighted his fairest hopes. The squadron missed the mouth of the
river; and the wreck of one of the vessels, and the desertion of the
commander, completed the ruin of the expedition. La Salle landed with a
band of half-famished followers on the coast of Texas; and, while he was
toiling with untired energy for their relief, a few vindictive miscreants
conspired against him, and a shot from a traitor's musket closed the
career of the iron-hearted discoverer.
It was left with another to complete the enterprise on which he had staked
his life; and, in the year 1699, Lemoine d'Iberville planted the germ
whence sprang the colony of Louisiana.[57]
Years passed on. In spite of a vicious plan of government, in spite of the
bursting of the memorable Mississippi bubble, the new colony grew in
wealth and strength. And now it remained for France to unite the two
extremities of her broad American domain, to extend forts and settlements
across the fertile solitudes between the valley of the St. Lawrence and
the mouth of the Mississippi, and intrench herself among the forests which
lie west of the Alleghanies, before the swelling tide of British
colonization could overflow those mountain barriers. At the middle of the
eighteenth century, her great project was fast advancing towards
completion. The lakes and streams, the thoroughfares of the wilderness,
were seized and guarded by a series of posts distributed with admirable
skill. A fort on the strait of Niagara commanded the great entrance to the
whole interior country. Another at Detroit controlled the passage from
Lake Erie to the north. Another at St. Mary's debarred all hostile access
to Lake Superior. Another at Michillimackinac secured the mouth of Lake
Michigan. A post at Green Bay, and one at St. Joseph, guarded the two
routes to the Mississippi, by way of the rivers Wisconsin and Illinois;
while two posts on the Wabash, and one on the Maumee, made France the
mistress of the great trading highway from Lake Erie to the Ohio. At
Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and elsewhere in the Illinois, little French
settlements had sprung up; and as the canoe of the voyager descended the
Mississippi, he saw, at rare intervals, along its swampy margin, a few
small stockade forts, half buried amid the redundancy of forest
vegetation, until, as he approached Natchez, the dwellings of the
_habitans_ of Louisiana began to appear.
The forest posts of France were not exclusively of a military character.
Adjacent to most of them, one would have found a little cluster of
Canadian dwellings, whose tenants lived under the protection of the
garrison, and obeyed the arbitrary will of the commandant; an authority
which, however, was seldom exerted in a despotic spirit. In these detached
settlements, there was no principle of increase. The character of the
people, and of the government which ruled them, were alike unfavorable to
it. Agriculture was neglected for the more congenial pursuits of the
fur-trade, and the restless, roving Canadians, scattered abroad on their
wild vocation, allied themselves to Indian women, and filled the woods
with a mongrel race of bush-rangers.
Thus far secure in the west, France next essayed to gain foothold upon the
sources of the Ohio; and about the year 1748, the sagacious Count
Galissonniere proposed to bring over ten thousand peasants from France,
and plant them in the valley of that beautiful river, and on the borders
of the lakes.[58] But while at Quebec, in the Castle of St. Louis,
soldiers and statesmen were revolving schemes like this, the slowly-moving
power of England bore on with silent progress from the east. Already the
British settlements were creeping along the valley of the Mohawk, and
ascending the eastern slopes of the Alleghanies. Forests crashing to the
axe, dark spires of smoke ascending from autumnal fires, were heralds of
the advancing host; and while, on one side of the mountains, Celeron de
Bienville was burying plates of lead, engraved with the arms of France,
the ploughs and axes of Virginian woodsmen were enforcing a surer title on
the other. The adverse powers were drawing near. The hour of collision was
at hand.