of the early Seventeenth Century was called, missions were dotted
throughout the loneliness and terror of the wilderness; Breboeuf and
Daniel did their work and met their fate; Raymbault carried the cross
to Lake Superior; Gabriel Dreuilettes came down the Kennebec; Jogues
was tortured by the Mohawks; Lallemand shed his blood serenely;
Chaumont and Dablon built their chapel where now stands Syracuse; and
after all, there stood the primeval forests, pathless as before, and
the red men were but partially and transiently affected. The Hundred
Assistants were dissolved, and a new colonial organization was
operating in 1664; soldiers were sent over, and the Jesuits, still
unweariedly in the van, pushed westward to Michigan, and Marquette and
Joliet, two young men of thirty-six and twenty-seven, discovered the
Mississippi, and descended it as far as Des Moines; but still, all the
inhabitants of New France could easily have mustered in a ten-acre
field. Then, in 1666 came Robert Cavelier La Salle, a cadet of a good
family, educated in a Jesuit seminary, but destined to incur the enmity
of the order, and at last to perish, not indeed at their hands, but in
consequence of conditions largely due to them. The towering genius of
this young man--he was but just past his majority when he came to
Montreal, and he was murdered by his treacherous traveling companion,
Duhaut, on a branch of Trinity River in Texas, before he had reached
the age of five and forty--his indomitable courage, his tact and
firmness in dealing with all kinds of men, from the Grand Monarch to
the humblest savage, his great thoughts and his wonderful exploits, his
brilliant fortune and his appalling calamities, both of which he met
with an equal mind:--these qualities and the events which displayed
them make La Salle the peer, at least, of any of his countrymen of that
age. What must be the temper of a man who, after encountering and
overcoming incredible opposition, after being the victim of unrelenting
misfortune, including loss of means, friends, and credit, of deadly
fevers, of shipwreck,--could rise to his feet amid the destruction of
all that he had labored for twenty years to build up, and confidently
and cheerfully undertake the enterprise of traveling on foot from
Galveston in Texas to Montreal in Canada, to ask for help to
re-establish his colony? It is a formidable journey to-day, with all
the appliances of steam and the luxury of food and accommodation that
science and ingenuity can frame; it would be a portentous trip for the
most accomplished modern pedestrian, assisted though he would be by
roads, friendly wayside inns and farms, maps of the route, and
hobnailed walking boots. La Salle undertook it with thousands of miles
of uncharted wilderness before him, through tribes assumed to be
hostile till they proved themselves otherwise, with doubtful and
quarreling companions, and shod with moccasins of green hide. Even of
the Frenchmen whom he might meet after reaching Illinois, the majority,
being under Jesuit influence, would be hostile. But he had faced and
conquered difficulties as great as these, and he had no fear. At the
time the scoundrel Duhaut shot him from ambush, he was making hopeful
progress. But it was decreed that France was not to stay in America. La
Salle discovered the Ohio and the Illinois, built Fort Crevecoeur, and
started a colony on the coast of Texas; he received a patent of
nobility, and lost his fortune and his life. The pathos of such a death
lies in the consideration that his plans died with him. It was the year
before the accession of William of Orange; and the first war with
France began two years later.
France, after all drawbacks, was far from being a foe to be slighted.
The English colonists outnumbered hers, but hers were all soldiers;
they had trained the Indians to the use of firearms, had taught them
how to build forts, and by treating them as equals, had won the
confidence and friendship of many of them. The English colonies, on the
other hand, had as yet no idea of co-operation; each had its own ideas
and ways of existence; they had never met and formed acquaintance with
one another through a common congress of representatives. They were
planters, farmers and merchants, with no further knowledge of war than
was to be gained by repelling the attacks of savages, and retaliating
in kind. They had the friendship of the Five Nations, and they received
help from English regiments. But the latter had no experience of forest
fighting, and made several times the fatal mistake of undervaluing
their enemy, as well as clinging to impracticable formations and
tactics. The English officers did not conceal their contempt for the
"provincial" troops, who were not, indeed, comely to look at from the
conventional military standpoint, but who bore the brunt of the
fighting, won most of the successes, and were entirely capable of
resenting the slights to which they were unjustly subjected. What was
quite as important, bearing in mind what was to happen in 1775, they
learned to gauge the British fighting capacity, and did not fear, when
the time came, to match themselves against it.
King William's War lasted from 1689 to 1697. Louis XIV. had refused to
recognize William as a legitimate king of England, and undertook to
champion the cause of the dethroned James. The conduct of the war in
Europe does not belong to our inquiry. The proper course for the French
to have adopted in America would have been to encourage the English
colonies to revolt against the king; but the statesmanship of that age
had not conceived the idea of colonial independence. Besides, the
colonies would not at that epoch have fallen in with the scheme; they
might have been influenced to rise against a Stuart, but not against a
William. There was no general plan of campaign on either side. There
was no question as yet about the western borders. There was but one
point of contact of New France and the English colonies--the northern
boundaries of New England and New York. The position of the English,
strung along a thousand miles of the Atlantic coast, did not favor
concentration against the enemy, and still less was it possible for the
latter, with their small force, to march south and overrun the country.
What could be done then? Obviously, nothing but to make incursions
across the line, after the style of the English and Scottish border
warfare. Nothing could be gained, except the making of each other
miserable. But that was enough, since two kings, neither of whom any of
the combatants had seen, were angry with each other three thousand
miles away. Louis does not admit the right of William, doesn't
he?--says the Massachusetts farmer to the Canadian coureur des bois;
and without more ado they fly at each others' throats.
The successes, such as they were, were chiefly on the side of the
French. Small parties of Indians, or of French and Indians combined,
would steal down upon the New York and New England farms and villages,
suddenly leap out upon the man and his sons working in their clearings,
upon the woman and her children in the hut: a whoop, a popping of
musket shots and whistling of arrows, then the vicious swish and crash
of the murderous tomahawk, followed by the dexterous twist of the
scalping-knife, and the snatching of the tuft of hair from the bleeding
skull. That is all--but, no: there still remains a baby or two who must
be caught up by the leg, and have its brains dashed out on the
door-jamb; and if any able-bodied persons survive, they are to be
loaded with their own household goods, and driven hundreds of miles
over snows, or through heats, to Canada, as slaves. Should they drop by
the way, as Mrs. Williams did, down comes the tomahawk again. Or
perhaps a Mrs. Dustin learns how to use the weapon so as to kill at a
blow, and that night puts her knowledge to the proof on the skulls of
ten sleeping savages, and so escapes. Occasionally there is a more
important massacre, like that at Schenectady, or Deerfield. But these
Indian surprises are not only revolting, but monotonous to weariness,
and, as they accomplished nothing but a given number of murders, there
is nothing to be learned from them. They are meaningless; and we can
hardly imagine even the Grand Monarch, or William of Orange, being
elated or depressed by their details.
There were no French farms or small villages to be attacked in
requital, so it was necessary for the English to proceed against Port
Royal or Quebec. The aged but bloodthirsty Frontenac was governor of
Canada at this time, and proved himself able (aided by the imbecility
of the attack) to defend it. In March of 1690 a sort of congress had
met at Albany, which sent word to the several colonial governors to
dispatch commissioners to Rhode Island for a general conference for
adopting measures of defense and offense.
The delegates met in May or the last of April, at New York, and decided
to conquer Canada by a two-headed campaign; one army to go by way of
Lake Champlain to Montreal, while a fleet should proceed against
Quebec. Sir William Phips of Massachusetts was off to Port Royal within
four weeks, and took it without an effort, there being hardly any one
to defend it. But Leisler of New York and Winthrop of Connecticut
quarreled at Lake Champlain, and that part of the plan came to a
disgraceful end forthwith. A month or so later, Phips was blundering
pilotless into the St. Lawrence, with two thousand Massachusetts men on
thirty-four vessels. Their coming had been prepared for, and when they
demanded the surrender of the impregnable fortress, with a garrison
more numerous than themselves, they were answered with jeers; and it is
painful to add that they turned round and set out for home again
without striking a blow. A storm completed their discomfiture; and when
Phips at last brought what was left of his fleet into harbor, he found
the treasury empty, and was forced to issue paper money to pay his
bills.
No further talk of "On to Quebec" was heard for some time. Port Royal
was retaken by a French vessel. Parties of Indians, encouraged by the
Jesuits, again stole over the border and did the familiar work.
Schuyler, on the English side, succeeded in making a successful foray
in 1691; and a fort was built at Pemaquid--to be taken, five years
afterward, by Iberville and Castin. In 1693 an English fleet, which had
been beaten at Martinique, came to Boston with orders to conquer
Canada; but as it was manned by warriors half of whom were dying of
malignant yellow fever, Canada was spared once more. The only really
formidable enemies that Frontenac could discover were the Five Nations,
whom he tried in vain to frighten or to conciliate. He himself, at the
age of seventy-four, headed the last expedition against them, in the
summer of 1696. It returned without having accomplished anything except
the burning of villages and the laying waste of lands. The following
year peace was signed at Ryswick, a village in South Holland. France
had done well in the field and by negotiations; but England had
sustained no serious reverses, and having borrowed money from a group
of private capitalists, whom it chartered as the Bank of England in
1694, was financially stronger than ever. Louis accepted the results of
the English Revolution, but kept his American holdings; and the
boundaries between these and the English colonies were not settled. The
Five Nations were not pacified till 1700. The French continued their
occupation of the Mississippi basin, and in 1699 Lemoine Iberville
sailed for the Mississippi, and built a fort on the bay of Biloxi.
Communication was now established between the Gulf of Mexico and
Quebec. The English, through the agency of a New Jerseyman named Coxe,
and a forged journal of exploration by Hennepin, tried to get a
foothold on the great river, but the attempt was fruitless. Fruitless,
likewise, were French efforts to find gold, or, indeed, to establish a
substantial colony themselves in the feverish Louisiana region.
Iberville caught the yellow plague and never fully recovered; and the
desert-girded fort at Mobile seemed a small result for so much exertion.
In truth, on both sides of the Atlantic, peace existed nowhere except
on the paper signed at Ryswick; and in 1702 William saw that he must
either fight again, or submit to a union between France and Spain,
Louis XIV. becoming, by the death without issue of the Spanish king,
sovereign of both countries, to the upsetting of the European balance
of power. Spain had become a nonentity; she had no money, no navy, no
commerce, no manufactures, and a population reduced by emigration, and
by the expulsion of Jews and Moors, to about seven millions: nothing
remained to her but that "pride" of which she was always so solicitous,
based as it was upon her achievements as a robber, a murderer, a despot
and a bigot. She now had no king, which was the least of her losses,
but gave her the power of disturbing Europe by lapsing to the French
Bourbons.
William himself was close to death, and died before the opening year of
the war was over. Louis was alive, and was to remain alive for thirteen
years longer; but he was sixty-four, was becoming weary and
discouraged, and had lost his ministers and generals. On the English
side was Marlborough; and the battle of Blenheim, not to speak of the
European combination against France, showed how the game was going. But
the peace of Utrecht in 1713, though it lasted thirty years, was not
based on justice, and could not stand. Spain was deprived of her
possessions in the Netherlands, but was allowed to keep her colonies,
and the loss of Gibraltar confirmed her hatred of England. Belgium,
Antwerp and Austria were wronged, and France was insulted by the
destruction of Dunkirk harbor. England embarked with her whole heart in
the African slave trade, securing the monopoly of importing negroes
into the West Indies for thirty years, and being the exclusive dealer
in the same commodity along the Atlantic coast. Half the stock in the
business was owned by the English people, and the other half was
divided equally between Queen Anne and Philip of Spain. The profits
were enormous. Meanwhile the treaty between Spain and England allowed
and legitimatized the smuggling operations of the latter in the West
Indies, a measure which was sure to involve our colonies sooner or
later in the irrepressible conflict. England, again, got Hudson's Bay,
Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, but not the Mississippi valley, from France.
Boundary lines were not accurately determined; and could not be until
the wars between 1744 and 1763 finally decided these and other matters
in England's favor. The most commendable clause in the treaty was the
one inserted by Bolingbroke that defined contraband, and the rights of
blockade, and laid down the rule that free ships should give freedom to
goods carried in them.
Anne, a daughter of James II., but a partisan of William, succeeded him
in 1702 at the age of thirty-seven; she was herself governed by the
Marlboroughs and Mrs. Mashamam--an intelligent woman of humble birth,
who became keeper of her majesty's privy purse. The war which the queen
inherited, and which was called by her name, lasted till the final year
of her reign. Only New England on the north and Carolina on the south
were participants in the fray on this side, and no great glory or
advantage accrued to either. New York was sheltered by the neutrality
of the Five Nations, and Pennsylvania, Virginia and the rest were
beyond the reach of French operations.
The force raised by South Carolina to capture St. Augustine had
expected to receive cannon for the siege from Jamaica; but the cannon
failed them, and they retreated with nothing to show but a debt which
they liquidated in paper. They had better luck with an expedition to
sever the Spanish line of communication with Louisiana; the Spanish and
Indians were beaten in December, 1705, and the neighboring inhabitants
along the Gulf emigrated to South Carolina. Then the French set out to
take Charleston; but the Huguenots were mindful of St. Bartholomew and
of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and they set upon the
invaders when they landed, and slew three out of every eight of them.
The South Carolinians were let alone thereafter.
In the north, the French secured the neutrality of the Senecas, but the
English failed to do the like with the Abenakis, and the massacring
season set in with marked severity on the Maine border in the summer of
1703. It was in the ensuing winter that the Deerfield affair took
place; the crusted snow was so deep that it not only gave the French
and Indian war party good walking down from Canada, but enabled them to
mount up the drifts against the palisades of the town and leap down
inside. The sentinels were not on guard that morning, though, warned by
the Mohawks, the people had been looking for the attack all winter
long. What is to be said of these tragedies? When we have realized the
awful pang in a mother's heart, wakened from sleep by that shrill,
triumphant yell of the Indian, and knowing that in a moment she will
see her children's faces covered with the blood and brains from their
crushed skulls, we shall have nothing more to learn from Indian
warfare. How many mothers felt that pang in the pale dawn of that
frosty morning in Deerfield? After the war party had done the work, and
departed exulting with their captives, how many motionless corpses, in
what ghastly attitudes, lay huddled in the darksome rooms of the little
houses, or were tossed upon the trodden snow without, the looks of
mortal agony frozen on their features? But you will hear the howl of
the wolves by-and-by; and the black bear will come shuffling and
sniffing through the broken doors; and when the frightful feast is
over, there will be, in place of these poses of death, only disordered
heaps of gnawed bones, and shreds of garments rent asunder, and the
grin of half-eaten skulls. Nothing else remains of a happy and innocent
community. Why were they killed? Had they harmed their killers? Was any
military advantage gained by their death?--They had harmed no one, and
nothing was gained, or pretended to be gained, by their murder: nothing
except to establish the principle that, since two countries in Europe
were at war, those emigrants of theirs who had voyaged hither in quest
of peace and happiness should lie in wait to destroy one another. Human
sympathies have, sometimes, strange ways of avouching themselves.
People become accustomed even to massacre. But the children born in
these years, who were themselves to be the fathers and mothers of the
generation of the Revolution, must have sucked in stern and fierce
qualities with the milk from their mothers' breasts. No one, even in
the midst of Massachusetts, was safe during that first decade of the
Eighteenth Century. A single Indian, in search of glory, would spend
weeks in creeping southward from the far border; he would await his
chance long and patiently; he would leap out, and strike, and vanish
again, leaving that silent horror behind him. Such deeds, and the
constant possibility of them, left their mark upon the whole
population. They grew up familiar with violent death in its most
terrible forms. The effect of Indian warfare upon the natures of those
who engage in it, or are subjected to its perils, is different from
that of what we must call civilized fighting. The end as well as the
aim of the Indian's battle is death--a scalp. Murder for the mere
pleasure of murdering has an influence upon a community far more
sinister than that of death by war waged for recognizable causes. The
Puritans of the Eighteenth Century were another people than those of
the Seventeenth. There had been reason in the early Indian struggles,
when the savages might have hoped to exterminate the settlers and leave
their wilderness a wilderness once more; but there could be no such
hope now. The desire for revenge was awakened and fostered as it had
never been before. Many other circumstances combined to modify the
character of the people of New England during this century; but perhaps
this new capacity for revenge was not the least potent of the
influences that made the seven years of the Revolution possible.
Peter Schuyler protested in vain against the "savage and boundless
butchery" into which the conflict between "Christian princes, bound to
the exactest laws of honor and generosity," was degenerating; but the
only way to stop it appeared to be to extirpate the perpetrators; and
to that end a fifth part of the population were constantly in arms. The
musket became more familiar to their hands than the plow and spade; and
their marksmanship was near perfection. They gradually developed a
system of tactics of their own, foreign to the manuals. The first thing
you were aware of in the provincial soldier was the puff of smoke from
the muzzle of his weapon; almost simultaneously came the thud of his
bullet in your breast, or crashing through your brain. He loaded his
gun lying on his back beneath the ferns and shrubbery; he advanced or
retreated invisibly, from tree to tree. Your only means of estimating
his numbers was from your own losses. It was thus that the American
troops afterward gained their reputation of being almost invincible
behind an intrenchment; it gave its character to the engagements at
Concord and along the Boston Road, and sent hundreds of redcoats to
death on the slopes of Bunker Hill. It was not magnificent--to look at;
but it was war; combined with the European tactics acquired later on,
it survived reverses that would have driven other troops from the
field, and, with Washington at the head, won our independence at last.
The least revolting feature of the Indian warfare was the habit they
acquired, through French suggestion doubtless, of taking large numbers
of persons captive, and carrying them north. If they weakened on the
journey, they were of course tomahawked out of the way at once; but if
they survived, they were either sold as slaves to the Canadians, or
were kept by the Indians, who adopted them into their tribes, having no
system of slavery. Many a woman and little girl from New England became
the mother of Indian children; and when the captives were young enough
at the beginning, they generally grew to love the wild life too well to
leave it. Indeed, they were generally treated well by both the
Canadians and the Indians after they got to their destination. On the
other hand, there were the fathers and mothers and relatives of the
lost planning their redemption or rescue, and raising money to buy them
back. Many a thrilling tale could be told of these episodes. But we
must imagine beautiful young women, who had been taken away in
childhood, found after years of heart-breaking search and asked to
return to their homes. What was their home? They had forgotten New
England, and those who loved them and had sorrowed for them there. The
eyes of these young women, clear and bright, had a wildness in their
look that is never seen in the children of civilization; their faces
were tanned by sun and breeze, their figures lithe and athletic, their
dress of deerskin and wampum, their light feet clad in moccasins; their
tongues and ears were strange to the language of their childhood homes.
No: they would not return. Sometimes, curiosity, or a vague
expectation, would induce them to revisit those who yearned for them;
but, having arrived, they received the embraces of their own flesh and
blood shyly and coldly; they were stifled and hampered by the houses,
the customs, the ordered ways of white people's existence. A night must
come when they would arise silently, resume with a deep in-breathing of
delight the deerskin raiment, and be gone without one last loving look
at the faces of those who had given them life, but from whom their
souls were forever parted. There is a harrowing mystery in these
estrangements: how strong, and yet how helpless is the human heart; all
the world cannot break the bonds it ties, nor can all the world tie
them again, once the heart itself has dissolved them.
Thus, in more ways than one, the blood of the English colonists became
wedded to the soil of the wilderness, if wilderness the settlements
could now be called. And they became like the captives we have just
been imagining, who cared no longer for the land and the people that
had been their home. Not more because they were estranged by England's
behavior than because they had formed new attachments beside which the
old ones seemed pale, were they now able to contemplate with composure
the idea of a final separation. America was no longer England's
daughter. She had acquired a life of her own, and could look forward to
a destiny which the older country could never share. The ways of the
two had parted more fully than either, as yet, quite realized; and if
they were ever to meet again hereafter, it must be the older, and not
the younger, who must change.