1700-1750.
THE CHAIN OF POSTS.
OPPOSING CLAIMS.--ATTITUDE OF THE RIVAL NATIONS.--AMERICA A FRENCH
CONTINENT.--ENGLAND A USURPER.--FRENCH DEMANDS.--MAGNANIMOUS
PROPOSALS.--WARLIKE PREPARATION.--NIAGARA.--OSWEGO.--CROWN
POINT.--THE PASSES OF THE WEST SECURED.
We have seen that the contest between France and England in America
divided itself, after the Peace of Utrecht, into three parts,--the
Acadian contest; the contest for northern New England; and last,
though greatest, the contest for the West. Nothing is more striking
than the difference, or rather contrast, in the conduct and methods of
the rival claimants to this wild but magnificent domain. Each was
strong in its own qualities, and utterly wanting in the qualities that
marked its opponent.
On maps of British America in the earlier part of the eighteenth
century, one sees the eastern shore, from Maine to Georgia, garnished
with ten or twelve colored patches, very different in shape and size,
and defined, more or less distinctly, by dividing-lines which, in some
cases, are prolonged westward till they touch the Mississippi, or 45
even cross it and stretch indefinitely towards the Pacific. These
patches are the British provinces, and the westward prolongation of
their boundary lines represents their several claims to vast interior
tracts, founded on ancient grants, but not made good by occupation, or
vindicated by any exertion of power.
These English communities took little thought of the region beyond the
Alleghanies. Each lived a life of its own, shut within its own limits,
not dreaming of a future collective greatness to which the possession
of the West would be a necessary condition. No conscious community of
aims and interests held them together, nor was there any authority
capable of uniting their forces and turning them to a common object.
Some of the servants of the Crown had urged the necessity of joining
them all under a strong central government, as the only means of
making them loyal subjects and arresting the encroachments of France;
but the scheme was plainly impracticable. Each province remained in
jealous isolation, busied with its own work, growing in strength, in
the capacity of self-rule and the spirit of independence, and
stubbornly resisting all exercise of authority from without. If the
English-speaking populations flowed westward, it was in obedience to
natural laws, for the King did not aid the movement, the royal
governors had no authority to do so, and the colonial assemblies were
too much engrossed with immediate local interests. The power of these
colonies was that of a rising flood slowly invading and conquering, 46
by the unconscious force of its own growing volume, unless means be
found to hold it back by dams and embankments within appointed limits.
In the French colonies all was different. Here the representatives of
the Crown were men bred in an atmosphere of broad ambition and
masterful and far-reaching enterprise. Achievement was demanded of
them. They recognized the greatness of the prize, studied the strong
and weak points of their rivals, and with a cautious forecast and a
daring energy set themselves to the task of defeating them.
If the English colonies were comparatively strong in numbers, their
numbers could not be brought into action; while if the French forces
were small, they were vigorously commanded, and always ready at a
word. It was union confronting division, energy confronting apathy,
military centralization opposed to industrial democracy; and, for a
time, the advantage was all on one side.
The demands of the French were sufficiently comprehensive. They
repented of their enforced concessions at the Treaty of Utrecht, and
in spite of that compact, maintained that, with a few local and
trivial exceptions, the whole North American continent, except Mexico,
was theirs of right; while their opponents seemed neither to
understand the situation, nor see the greatness of the stakes at
issue.
In 1720 Father Bobé, priest of the Congregation of Missions, drew up 47
a paper in which he sets forth the claims of France with much
distinctness, beginning with the declaration that “England has usurped
from France nearly everything that she possesses in America,” and
adding that the plenipotentiaries at Utrecht did not know what they
were about when they made such concessions to the enemy; that, among
other blunders, they gave Port Royal to England when it belonged to
France, who should “insist vigorously” on its being given back to her.
He maintains that the voyages of Verrazzano and Ribaut made France
owner of the whole continent, from Florida northward; that England was
an interloper in planting colonies along the Atlantic coast, and will
admit as much if she is honest, since all that country is certainly a
part of New France. In this modest assumption of the point at issue,
he ignores John Cabot and his son Sebastian, who discovered North
America more than twenty-five years before the voyage of Verrazzano,
and more than sixty years before that of Ribaut.
When the English, proceeds Father Bobé, have restored Port Royal to
us, which they are bound to do, though we ceded it by the treaty, a
French governor should be at once set over it, with a commission to
command as far as Cape Cod, which would include Boston. We should also
fortify ourselves, “in a way to stop the English, who have long tried
to seize on French America, of which they know the importance, and of
which,” he observes with much candor, “they would make a better use 48
than the French do.[43]... The Atlantic coast, as far as Florida, was
usurped from the French, to whom it belonged then, and to whom it
belongs now.” England, as he thinks, is bound in honor to give back
these countries to their true owner; and it is also the part of wisdom
to do so, since by grasping at too much, one often loses all. But
France, out of her love of peace, will cede to England the countries
along the Atlantic, from the Kennebec in New France to the Jordan[44]
in Carolina, on condition that England will restore to her all that
she gave up by the Treaty of Utrecht. When this is done, France,
always generous, will consent to accept as boundary a line drawn from
the mouth of the Kennebec, passing thence midway between Schenectady
and Lake Champlain and along the ridge of the Alleghanies to the river
Jordan, the country between this line and the sea to belong to
England, and the rest of the continent to France.
If England does not accept this generous offer, she is to be told that
the King will give to the Compagnie des Indes (Law’s Mississippi
Company) full authority to occupy “all the countries which the English
have usurped from France;” and, pursues Father Bobé, “it is certain 49
that the fear of having to do with so powerful a company will bring
the English to our terms.” The company that was thus to strike the
British heart with terror was the same which all the tonics and
stimulants of the government could not save from predestined ruin.
But, concludes this ingenious writer, whether England accepts our
offers or not, France ought not only to take a high tone (_parler
avec hauteur_), but also to fortify diligently, and make good her
right by force of arms.[45]
Three years later we have another document, this time of an official
character, and still more radical in its demands. It admits that Port
Royal and a part of the Nova Scotian peninsula, under the name of
Acadia, were ceded to England by the treaty, and consents that she
shall keep them, but requires her to restore the part of New France
that she has wrongfully seized,--namely, the whole Atlantic coast from
the Kennebec to Florida; since France never gave England this country,
which is hers by the discovery of Verrazzano in 1524. Here, again, the
voyages of the Cabots, in 1497 and 1498, are completely ignored.
“It will be seen,” pursues this curious document, “that our kings have
always preserved sovereignty over the countries between the thirtieth
and the fiftieth degrees of north latitude. A time will come when 50
they will be in a position to assert their rights, and then it will be
seen that the dominions of a king of France cannot be usurped with
impunity. What we demand now is that the English make immediate
restitution.” No doubt, the paper goes on to say, they will pretend to
have prescriptive rights, because they have settled the country and
built towns and cities in it; but this plea is of no avail, because
all that country is a part of New France, and because England
rightfully owns nothing in America except what we, the French, gave
her by the Treaty of Utrecht, which is merely Port Royal and Acadia.
She is bound in honor to give back all the vast countries she has
usurped; but, continues the paper, “the King loves the English nation
too much, and wishes too much to do her kindness, and is too generous
to exact such a restitution. Therefore, provided that England will
give us back Port Royal, Acadia, and everything else that France gave
her by the Treaty of Utrecht, the King will forego his rights, and
grant to England the whole Atlantic coast from the thirty-second
degree of latitude to the Kennebec, to the extent inland of twenty
French leagues [about fifty miles], on condition that she will
solemnly bind herself never to overstep these limits or encroach in
the least on French ground.”
Thus, through the beneficence of France, England, provided that she
renounced all pretension to the rest of the continent, would become
the rightful owner of an attenuated strip of land reaching southward 51
from the Kennebec along the Atlantic seaboard. The document containing
this magnanimous proposal was preserved in the Château St. Louis at
Quebec till the middle of the eighteenth century, when, the boundary
dispute having reached a crisis, and commissioners of the two powers
having been appointed to settle it, a certified copy of the paper was
sent to France for their instruction.[46]
Father Bobé had advised that France should not trust solely to the
justice of her claims, but should back right with might, and build
forts on the Niagara, the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Alabama, as
well as at other commanding points, to shut out the English from the
West. Of these positions, Niagara was the most important, for the
possession of it would close the access to the Upper Lakes, and stop
the western tribes on their way to trade at Albany. The Five Nations
and the governor of New York were jealous of the French designs,
which, however, were likely enough to succeed, through the prevailing
apathy and divisions in the British colonies. “If those not
immediately concerned,” writes a member of the New York council, “only
stand gazing on while the wolff is murthering other parts of the
flock, it will come to every one’s turn at last.” The warning was well
founded, but it was not heeded. Again: “It is the policy of the French
to attack one colony at a time, and the others are so besotted as to
sit still.”[47]
For gaining the consent of the Five Nations to the building of a 52
French fort at Niagara, Vaudreuil trusted chiefly to his agent among
the Senecas, the bold, skilful, and indefatigable Joncaire, who was
naturalized among that tribe, the strongest of the confederacy.
Governor Hunter of New York sent Peter Schuyler and Philip Livingston
to counteract his influence. The Five Nations, who, conscious of
declining power, seemed ready at this time to be all things to all
men, declared that they would prevent the French from building at
Niagara, which, as they said, would “shut them up as in a prison.”[48]
Not long before, however, they had sent a deputation to Montreal to
say that the English made objection to Joncaire’s presence among them,
but that they were masters of their land, and hoped that the French
agent would come as often as he pleased; and they begged that the new
King of France would take them under his protection.[49] Accordingly,
Vaudreuil sent them a present, with a message to the effect that they
might plunder such English traders as should come among them.[50]
Yet so jealous were the Iroquois of a French fort at Niagara that they
sent three Seneca chiefs to see what was going on there. The chiefs
found a few Frenchmen in a small blockhouse, or loopholed storehouse,
which they had just built near Lewiston Heights. The three 53
Senecas requested them to demolish it and go away, which the Frenchmen
refused to do; on which the Senecas asked the English envoys, Schuyler
and Livingston, to induce the governor of New York to destroy the
obnoxious building. In short, the Five Nations wavered incessantly
between their two European neighbors, and changed their minds every
day. The skill and perseverance of the French emissaries so far
prevailed at last that the Senecas consented to the building of a fort
at the mouth of the Niagara, where Denonville had built one in 1687;
and thus that important pass was made tolerably secure.
Meanwhile the English of New York, or rather Burnet, their governor,
were not idle. Burnet was on ill terms with his assembly, which
grudged him all help in serving the province whose interests it was
supposed to represent. Burnet’s plan was to build a fortified
trading-house at Oswego, on Lake Ontario, in the belief that the
western Indians, who greatly preferred English goods and English
prices, would pass Niagara and bring their furs to the new post. He
got leave from the Five Nations to execute his plan, bought canoes,
hired men, and built a loopholed house of stone on the site of the
present city of Oswego. As the Assembly would give no money, Burnet
furnished it himself; and though the object was one of the greatest
importance to the province, he was never fully repaid.[51] A small
garrison for the new post was drawn from the four independent companies 54
maintained in the province at the charge of the Crown.
The establishment of Oswego greatly alarmed and incensed the French,
and a council of war at Quebec resolved to send two thousand men
against it; but Vaudreuil’s successor, the Marquis de Beauharnois,
learning that the court was not prepared to provoke a war, contented
himself with sending a summons to the commanding officer to abandon
and demolish the place within a fortnight.[52] To this no attention
was given; and as Burnet had foreseen, Oswego became the great centre
of Indian trade, while Niagara, in spite of its more favorable
position, was comparatively slighted by the western tribes. The chief
danger rose from the obstinate prejudice of the Assembly, which, in
its disputes with the Royal Governor, would give him neither men nor
money to defend the new post.
The Canadian authorities, who saw in Oswego an intrusion on their
domain and a constant injury and menace, could not attack it without
bringing on a war, and therefore tried to persuade the Five Nations to
destroy it,--an attempt which completely failed.[53] They then
established a trading-post at Toronto, in the vain hope of stopping 55
the northern tribes on their way to the more profitable English
market, and they built two armed vessels at Fort Frontenac to control
the navigation of Lake Ontario.
_Marquis Charles de Beauharnois._
From the painting by Tournières, in the Musée de Grenoble.
A HALF CENTURY OF CONFLICT, II., 54.
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1897, by Little, Brown & C^o.
Goupil & C^o. Paris_]
Meanwhile, in another quarter the French made an advance far more
threatening to the English colonies than Oswego was to their own. They
had already built a stone fort at Chambly, which covered Montreal from
any English attack by way of Lake Champlain. As that lake was the
great highway between the rival colonies, the importance of gaining
full mastery of it was evident. It was rumored in Canada that the
English meant to seize and fortify the place called Scalp Point
(_Pointe à la Chevelure_) by the French, and Crown Point by the
English, where the lake suddenly contracts to the proportions of a
river, so that a few cannon would stop the passage.
As early as 1726 the French made an attempt to establish themselves on
the east side of the lake opposite Crown Point, but were deterred by
the opposition of Massachusetts. This eastern shore was, however,
claimed not only by Massachusetts, but by her neighbor, New Hampshire,
with whom she presently fell into a dispute about the ownership, and,
as a writer of the time observes, “while they were quarrelling for the
bone, the French ran away with it.”[54]
At length, in 1731, the French took post on the western side of the
lake, and began to intrench themselves at Crown Point, which was 56
within the bounds claimed by New York; but that province, being then
engrossed, not only by her chronic dispute with her governor, but by a
quarrel with her next neighbor, New Jersey, slighted the danger from
the common enemy, and left the French to work their will. It was
Saint-Luc de la Corne, Lieutenant du Roy at Montreal, who pointed out
the necessity of fortifying this place,[55] in order to anticipate the
English, who, as he imagined, were about to do so,--a danger which was
probably not imminent, since the English colonies, as a whole, could
not and would not unite for such a purpose, while the individual
provinces were too much absorbed in their own internal affairs and
their own jealousies and disputes to make the attempt. La Corne’s
suggestion found favor at court, and the governor of Canada was
ordered to occupy Crown Point. The Sieur de la Fresnière was sent
thither with troops and workmen, and a fort was built, and named Fort
Frédéric. It contained a massive stone tower, mounted with cannon to
command the lake, which is here but a musket-shot wide. Thus was
established an advanced post of France,--a constant menace to New York
and New England, both of which denounced it as an outrageous
encroachment on British territory, but could not unite to rid
themselves of it.[56]
While making this bold push against their neighbors of the South, the 57
French did not forget the West; and towards the middle of the century
they had occupied points controlling all the chief waterways between
Canada and Louisiana. Niagara held the passage from Lake Ontario to
Lake Erie. Detroit closed the entrance to Lake Huron, and
Michilimackinac guarded the point where Lake Huron is joined by Lakes
Michigan and Superior; while the fort called La Baye, at the head of
Green Bay, stopped the way to the Mississippi by Marquette’s old route
of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Another route to the Mississippi was
controlled by a post on the Maumee to watch the carrying-place between
that river and the Wabash, and by another on the Wabash where
Vincennes now stands. La Salle’s route, by way of the Kankakee and the
Illinois, was barred by a fort on the St. Joseph; and even if, in
spite of these obstructions, an enemy should reach the Mississippi by
any of its northern affluents, the cannon of Fort Chartres would
prevent him from descending it.
These various western forts, except Fort Chartres and Fort Niagara,
which were afterwards rebuilt, the one in stone and the other in
earth, were stockades of no strength against cannon. Slight as they
were, their establishment was costly; and as the King, to whom Canada
was a yearly loss, grudged every franc spent upon it, means were
contrived to make them self-supporting. Each of them was a station of
the fur-trade, and the position of most of them had been determined 58
more or less with a view to that traffic. Hence they had no slight
commercial value. In some of them the Crown itself carried on trade
through agents who usually secured a lion’s share of the profits.
Others were farmed out to merchants at a fixed sum. In others, again,
the commanding officer was permitted to trade on condition of
maintaining the post, paying the soldiers, and supporting a
missionary; while in one case, at least, he was subjected to similar
obligations, though not permitted to trade himself, but only to sell
trading licenses to merchants. These methods of keeping up forts and
garrisons were of course open to prodigious abuses, and roused endless
jealousies and rivalries.
France had now occupied the valley of the Mississippi, and joined with
loose and uncertain links her two colonies of Canada and Louisiana.
But the strength of her hold on these regions of unkempt savagery bore
no proportion to the vastness of her claims or the growing power of
the rivals who were soon to contest them.[57]
[43] “De manière qu’on puisse arrêter les Anglois, qui depuis
longtems tachent de s’emparer de l’Amérique françoise, dont
ils conoissent l’importance et dont ils feroient un
meillieur usage que celuy qui les françois en font.”
[44] On the river Jordan, so named by Vasquez de Ayllon, see
“Pioneers of France in the New World,” 11, 39, _note_. It was
probably the broad river of South Carolina.
[45] _Second Mémoire concernant les Limites des Colonies
présenté en 1720 par Bobé, prêtre de la Congrégation de la
Mission_ (Archives Nationales).
[46] _Demandes de la France_, 1723 (Archives des Affaires
Étrangères).
[47] _Colonel Heathcote to Governor Hunter, 8 July, 1715.
Ibid, to Townshend, 12 July, 1715._
[48] _Journal of Schuyler and Livingston, 1720._
[49] _Vaudreuil au Conseil de Marine, 24 Octobre, 1717._
[50] _Vaudreuil et Bégon au Conseil de Marine, 26 Octobre, 1719._
[51] “I am ashamed to confess that he built the fort at his
private expense, and that a balance of above £56 remains due
to his estate to this very day.”--Smith, _History of New York_,
267 (ed. 1814).
[52] _Mémoire de Dupuy, 1728._ Dupuy was intendant of Canada.
The King approved the conduct of Beauharnois in not using
force. _Dépêche du Roy, 14 Mai, 1728._
[53] When urged by the younger Longueuil to drive off
the English from Oswego, the Indians replied, “Drive them
off thyself” (_“Chassez-les toi-même”_). _Longueuil fils au
Ministre, 19 Octobre, 1728._
[54] Mitchell, _Contest in America_, 22.
[55] _La Corne au Ministre, 15 Octobre, 1730._
[56] On the establishment of Crown Point, _Beauharnois et
Hocquart au Roy, 10 Octobre, 1731_; _Beauharnois et Hocquart
au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1731_.
[57] On the claim of France that all North America, except
the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Florida, belonged to her,
see Appendix A.