Quebec And Boston
At the end of the seventeenth century it must have seemed a far cry from
Versailles to Quebec. The ocean was crossed only by small sailing
vessels haunted by both tempest and pestilence, the one likely to
prolong the voyage by many weeks, the other to involve the sacrifice of
scores of lives through scurvy and other maladies. Yet, remote as the
colony seemed, Quebec was the child of Versailles, protected and
nourished by Louis XIV and directed by him in its minutest affairs. The
King spent laborious hours over papers relating to the cherished colony
across the sea. He sent wise counsel to his officials in Canada and with
tactful patience rebuked their faults. He did everything for the
colonists--gave them not merely land, but muskets, farm implements, even
chickens, pigs, and sometimes wives. The defect of his government was
that it tended to be too paternal. The vital needs of a colony
struggling with the problems of barbarism could hardly be read correctly
and provided for at Versailles. Colonies, like men, are strong only when
they learn to take care of themselves.
The English colonies present a vivid contrast. London did not direct and
control Boston. In London the will, indeed, was not wanting, for the
Stuart kings, Charles II and James II, were not less despotic in spirit
than Louis XIV. But while in France there was a vast organism which
moved only as the King willed, in England power was more widely
distributed. It may be claimed with truth that English national
liberties are a growth from the local freedom which has existed from
time immemorial. When British colonists left the motherland to found a
new society, their first instinct was to create institutions which
involved local control. The solemn covenant by which in 1620 the worn
company of the Mayflower, after a long and painful voyage, pledged
themselves to create a self-governing society, was the inevitable
expression of the English political spirit. Do what it would, London
could never control Boston as Versailles controlled Quebec.
The English colonist kept his eyes fixed on his own fortunes. From the
state he expected little; from himself, everything. He had no great
sense of unity with neighboring colonists under the same crown. Only
when he realized some peril to his interests, some menace which would
master him if he did not fight, was he stirred to warlike energy. French
leaders, on the other hand, were thinking of world politics. The voyage
of Verrazano, the Italian sailor who had been sent out by Francis I of
France in 1524, and who had sailed along a great stretch of the Atlantic
coast, was deemed by Frenchmen a sufficient title to the whole of North
America. They flouted England's claim based upon the voyages of the
Cabots nearly thirty years earlier. Spain, indeed, might claim Florida,
but the English had no real right to any footing in the New World. As
late as in 1720, when the fortunes of France were already on the wane in
the New World, Father Bobé, a priest of the Congregation of Missions,
presented to the French court a document which sets forth in
uncompromising terms the rights of France to all the land between the
thirtieth and the fiftieth parallels of latitude. True, he says, others
occupy much of this territory, but France must drive out intruders and
in particular the English. Boston rightly belongs to France and so also
do New York and Philadelphia. The only regions to which England has any
just claim are Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay, ceded by France
under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. This weak cession all true
Frenchmen regret and England must hand the territories back. She owes
France compensation for her long occupation of lands not really hers. If
she makes immediate restitution, the King of France, generous and kind,
will forego some of his rights and allow England to retain a strip some
fifty miles wide extending from Maine to Florida. France has the right
to the whole of the interior. In the mind of the reverend memorialist,
no doubt, there was the conviction that England would soon lose the
meager strip, fifty miles wide, which France might yield.
These dreams of power had a certain substance. It seems to us now that,
from the first, the French were dreaming of the impossible. We know what
has happened, and after the event it is an easy task to measure
political forces. The ambitions of France were not, however, empty
fancies. More than once she has seemed on the point of mastering the
nations of the West. Just before the year 1690 she had a great
opportunity. In England, in 1660, the fall of the system created by
Oliver Cromwell brought back to the English throne the House of Stuart,
for centuries the ally and usually the pupil of France. Stuart kings of
Scotland, allied with France, had fought the Tudor kings of England.
Stuarts in misfortune had been the pensioners of France. Charles II, a
Stuart, alien in religion to the convictions of his people, looked to
Catholic France to give him security on his throne. Before the first
half of the reign of Louis XIV had ended, it was the boast of the French
that the King of England was vassal to their King, that the states of
continental Europe had become mere pawns in the game of their Grand
Monarch, and that France could be master of as much of the world as was
really worth mastering. In 1679 the Canadian Intendant, Duchesneau,
writing from Quebec to complain of the despotic conduct of the Governor,
Frontenac, paid a tribute to "the King our master, of whom the whole
world stands in awe, who has just given law to all Europe."
To men thus obsessed by the greatness of their own ruler it seemed no
impossible task to overthrow a few English colonies in America of whose
King their own was the patron and the paymaster. The world of high
politics has never been conspicuous for its knowledge of human nature. A
strong blow from a strong arm would, it was believed both at Versailles
and Quebec, shatter forever a weak rival and give France the prize of
North America. Officers in Canada talked loftily of the ease with which
France might master all the English colonies. The Canadians, it was
said, were a brave and warlike people, trained to endure hardship, while
the English colonists were undisciplined, ignorant of war, and cowardly.
The link between them and the motherland, said these observers, could be
easily broken, for the colonies were longing to be free. There is no
doubt that France could put into the field armies vastly greater than
those of England. Had the French been able to cross the Channel, march
on London and destroy English power at its root, the story of
civilization in a great part of North America might well have been
different, and we should perhaps find now on the banks of the Hudson
what we find on the banks of the St. Lawrence--villages dominated by
great churches and convents, with inhabitants Catholic to a man,
speaking the language and preserving the traditions of France. The strip
of inviolate sea between Calais and Dover made impossible, however, an
assault on London. Sea power kept secure not only England but English
effort in America and in the end defeated France.
England had defenses other than her great strength on the sea. In spite
of the docility towards France shown by the English King, Charles II,
himself half French in blood and at heart devoted to the triumph of the
Catholic faith, the English people would tolerate no policies likely to
make England subservient to France. This was forbidden by age-long
tradition. The struggle had become one of religion as well as of race. A
fight for a century and a half with the Roman Catholic Church had made
England sternly, fanatically Protestant. In their suspicion of the
system which France accepted, Englishmen had sent a king to the
scaffold, had overthrown the monarchy, and had created a military
republic. This republic, indeed, had fallen, but the distrust of the
aims of the Roman Catholic Church remained intense and burst into
passionate fury the moment an understanding of the aims of France gained
currency.
There are indeed few passages in English history less creditable than
the panic fear of Roman Catholic plots which swept the country in the
days when Frontenac at Quebec was working to destroy English and
Protestant influence in America. In 1678, Titus Oates, a clergyman of
the Church of England who had turned Roman Catholic, declared that,
while in the secrets of his new church, he had found on foot a plot to
restore Roman Catholic dominance in England by means of the murder of
Charles II and of any other crimes necessary for that purpose. Oates
said that he had left the Church and returned to his former faith
because of the terrible character of the conspiracy which he had
discovered. His story was not even plausible; he was known to be a man
of vicious life; moreover, Catholic plotters would hardly murder a king
who was at heart devoted to Catholic policy. England, however, was in a
nervous state of mind; Charles II was known to be intriguing with
France; and a cruel fury surged through the nation. For a share in the
supposed plots a score of people, among them one of the great nobles of
England, the venerable and innocent Earl of Stafford, were condemned to
death and executed. Whatever Charles II himself might have thought, he
was obliged for his own safety to acquiesce in the policy of
persecution.
Catholic France was not less malignant than Protestant England. Though
cruel severity had long been shown to Protestants, they seemed to be
secure under the law of France in certain limited rights and in a
restricted toleration. In 1685, however, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of
Nantes by which Henry IV a century earlier had guaranteed this
toleration. All over France there had already burst out terrible
persecution, and the act of Louis XIV brought a fiery climax. Unhappy
heretics who would not accept Roman Catholic doctrine found life
intolerable. Tens of thousands escaped from France in spite of a law
which, though it exiled the Protestant ministers, forbade other
Protestants to leave the country. Stories of plots were made the excuse
to seize the property of Protestants. Regiments of soldiers, charged
with the task, could boast of many enforced "conversions." Quartered on
Protestant households, they made the life of the inmates a burden until
they abandoned their religion. Among the means used were torture before
a slow fire, the tearing off of the finger nails, the driving of the
whole families naked into the streets and the forbidding of any one to
give them shelter, the violation of women, and the crowding of the
heretics in loathsome prisons. By such means it took a regiment of
soldiers in Rouen only a few days to "convert" to the old faith some six
hundred families. Protestant ministers caught in France were sent to the
galleys for life. The persecutions which followed the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes outdid even Titus Oates.
Charles II died in 1685 and the scene at his deathbed encouraged in
England suspicions of Catholic policy and in France hope that this
policy was near its climax of success. Though indolent and dissolute,
Charles yet possessed striking mental capacity and insight. He knew well
that to preserve his throne he must remain outwardly a Protestant and
must also respect the liberties of the English nation. He cherished,
however, the Roman Catholic faith and the despotic ideals of his Bourbon
mother. On his deathbed he avowed his real belief. With great
precautions for secrecy, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church
and comforted with the consolations which it offers to the dying. While
this secret was suspected by the English people, one further fact was
perfectly clear. Their new King, James II, was a zealous Roman Catholic,
who would use all his influence to bring England back to the Roman
communion. Suspicion of the King's designs soon became certainty and,
after four years of bitter conflict with James, the inevitable happened.
The Roman Catholic Stuart King was driven from his throne and his
daughter Mary and her Protestant husband, William of Orange, became the
sovereigns of England by choice of the English Parliament. Again had the
struggle between Roman Catholic and Protestant brought revolution in
England, and the politics of Europe dominated America. The revolution in
London was followed by revolution in Boston and New York. The authority
of James II was repudiated. His chief agent in New England, Sir Edmund
Andros, was seized and imprisoned, and William and Mary reigned over the
English colonies in America as they reigned over the motherland.
To the loyal Catholics of France the English, who had driven out a
Catholic king and dethroned an ancient line, were guilty of the double
sin of heresy and of treason. To the Jesuit enthusiast in Canada not
only were they infidel devils in human shape upon whose plans must rest
the curse of God; they were also rebels, republican successors of the
accursed Cromwell, who had sent an anointed king to the block. It would
be a holy thing to destroy this lawless power which ruled from London.
The Puritans of Boston were, in turn, not less convinced that theirs was
the cause of God, and that Satan, enthroned in the French dominance at
Quebec, must soon fall. The smaller the pit the fiercer the rats.
Passions raged in the petty colonial capitals more bitterly than even in
London and Paris. This intensity of religious differences embittered the
struggle for the mastery of the new continent.
The English colonies had twenty white men to one in Canada. Yet Canada
was long able to wage war on something like equal terms. She had the
supreme advantage of a single control. There was no trouble at Quebec
about getting a reluctant legislature to vote money for war purposes. No
semblance of an elected legislature existed and the money for war came
not from the Canadians, but from the capacious, if now usually depleted,
coffers of the French court at Versailles. In the English colonies the
legislatures preferred, of all political struggles, one about money with
the Governor, the representative of the King. At least one of the
English colonies, Pennsylvania, believing that evil is best conquered by
non-resistance, was resolutely against war for any reason, good or bad.
Other colonies often raised the more sordid objection that they were too
poor to help in war. The colonial legislatures, indeed, with their
eternal demand for the privileges and rights which the British House of
Commons had won in the long centuries of its history, constitute the
most striking of all the contrasts with Canada. In them were always the
sparks of an independent temper. The English diarist, Evelyn, wrote, in
1671, that New England was in "a peevish and touchy humour." Colonists
who go out to found a new state will always demand rights like those
which they have enjoyed at home. It was unthinkable that men of Boston,
who, themselves, or whose party in England, had fought against a
despotic king, had sent him to the block and driven his son from the
throne, would be content with anything short of controlling the taxes
which they paid, making the laws which they obeyed, and carrying on
their affairs in their own way. When obliged to accept a governor from
England, they were resolved as far as possible to remain his paymaster.
In a majority of the colonies they insisted that the salary of the
Governor should be voted each year by their representatives, in order
that they might be able always to use against him the cogent logic of
financial need. On questions of this kind Quebec had nothing to say. To
the King in France and to him alone went all demands for pay and honors.
If, in such things, the people of Canada had no remote voice, they were
still as well off as Frenchmen in France. New England was a copy of Old
England and New France a copy of Old France. There was, as yet, no
"peevish and touchy humour" at either Quebec or Versailles in respect to
political rights.
Canada, in spite of its scanty population, was better equipped for war
than was any of the English colonies. The French were largely explorers
and hunters, familiar with hardship and danger and led by men with a
love of adventure. The English, on the other hand, were chiefly traders
and farmers who disliked and dreaded the horrors of war. There was not
to be found in all the English colonies a family of the type of the
Canadian family of Le Moyne. Charles Le Moyne, of Montreal, a member of
the Canadian noblesse, had ten sons, every one of whom showed the spirit
and capacity of the adventurous soldier. They all served in the time of
Frontenac. The most famous of them, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, shines
in varied rôles. He was a frontier leader who made his name a terror in
the English settlements; a sailor who seized and ravaged the English
settlements in Newfoundland, who led a French squadron to the remote and
chill waters of Hudson Bay, and captured there the English strongholds
of the fur trade; and a leader in the more peaceful task of founding, at
the mouth of the Mississippi, the colony of Louisiana. Canada had the
advantage over the English colonies in bold pioneers of this type.
Canada was never doubtful of the English peril or divided in the desire
to destroy it. Nearly always, a soldier or a naval officer ruled in the
Château St. Louis, at Quebec, with eyes alert to see and arms ready to
avert military danger. England sometimes sent to her colonies in America
governors who were disreputable and inefficient, needy hangers-on, too
well-known at home to make it wise there to give them office, but
thought good enough for the colonies. It would not have been easy to
find a governor less fitted to maintain the dignity and culture of high
office than Sir William Phips, Governor of Massachusetts in the time of
Frontenac. Phips, however, though a rough brawler, was reasonably
efficient, but Lord Cornbury, who became Earl of Clarendon, owed his
appointment as Governor of New Jersey and New York in 1701, only to his
necessities and to the desire of his powerful connections to provide for
him. Queen Anne was his cousin. He was a profligate, feeble in mind but
arrogant in spirit, with no burden of honesty and a great burden of
debt, and he made no change in his scandalous mode of life when he
represented his sovereign at New York. There were other governors only
slightly better. Canada had none as bad. Her viceroys as a rule kept up
the dignity of their office and respected the decencies of life. In
English colonies, governors eked out their incomes by charging heavy
fees for official acts and any one who refused to pay such fees was not
likely to secure attention to his business. In Canada the population was
too scanty and the opportunity too limited to furnish happy
hunting-grounds of this kind. The governors, however, badly paid as they
were, must live, and, in the case of a man like Frontenac, repair
fortunes shattered at court. To do so they were likely to have some
concealed interest in the fur trade. This was forbidden by the court but
was almost a universal practice. Some of the governors carried trading
to great lengths and aroused the bitter hostility of rival trading
interests. The fur trade was easily controlled as a government monopoly
and it was unfair that a needy governor should share its profits. But,
after all, such a quarrel was only between rival monopolists. Better a
trading governor than one who plundered the people or who by drunken
profligacy discredited his office.
While all Canada was devoted to the Roman Catholic Church, the diversity
of religious beliefs in the English colonies was a marked feature of
social life. In Virginia, by law of the colony, the Church of England
was the established Church. In Massachusetts, founded by stern Puritans,
the public services of the Church of England were long prohibited. In
Pennsylvania there was dominant the sect derisively called "Quakers,"
who would have no ecclesiastical organization and believed that religion
was purely a matter for the individual soul. Boston jeered at the
superstitions of Quebec, such as the belief of the missionaries that a
drop of water, with the murmured words of baptism, transformed a dying
Indian child from an outcast savage into an angel of light. Quebec
might, however, deride Boston with equal justice. Sir William Phips
believed that malignant and invisible devils had made a special invasion
of Massachusetts, dragging people from their houses, pushing them into
fire and water, and carrying them through the air for miles over trees
and hills. These devils, it was thought, took visible form, of which the
favorite was that of a black cat. Witches were thought to be able to
pass through keyholes and to exercise charms which would destroy their
victims. While Phips and Frontenac were struggling for the mastery of
Canada, a fever of excitement ran through New England about these perils
of witchcraft. When, in 1692, Phips became Governor of Massachusetts, he
named a special court to try accused persons. The court considered
hundreds of cases and condemned and hanged nineteen persons for wholly
imaginary crimes. Whatever the faults of the rule of the priests at
Quebec, they never equaled this in brutality or surpassed it in blind
superstition. In New England we find bitter religious persecution. In
Canada there was none: the door was completely closed to Protestants and
the family within were all of one mind. There was no one to persecute.
The old contrast between French and English ideals still endures. At
Quebec there was an early zeal for education. In 1638, the year in which
Harvard College was organized, a college and a school for training the
French youth and the natives were founded at Quebec. In the next year
the Ursuline nuns established at Quebec the convent which through all
the intervening years has continued its important work of educating
girls. In zeal for education Quebec was therefore not behind Boston. But
the spirit was different. Quebec believed that safety lay in control by
the Church, and this control it still maintains. Massachusetts came in
time to believe that safety lay in freeing education from any spiritual
authority. Today Laval University at Quebec and Harvard University at
Cambridge represent the outcome of these differing modes of thought.
Other forces were working to produce essentially different types. The
printing-press Quebec did not know; and, down to the final overthrow of
the French power in 1763, no newspaper or book was issued in Canada.
Massachusetts, on the other hand, had a printing-press as early as in
1638 and soon books were being printed in the colony. Of course, in the
spirit of the time, there was a strict censorship. But, by 1722, this
had come to an end, and after that the newspaper, unknown in Canada, was
busy and free in its task of helping to mold the thought of the English
colonies in America.