It is in place here to take a momentary view of the two peoples, as we find them in America, who were about to grapple in a great final struggle for the control of the continent. There are many points of resemblance. Both had occupied portions of the continent for nearly two hundred years, both were intensely religious, representing different forms of Christianity, and each was bigoted and intolerant and jealous of its rival. However we may admire the religious fervor of the Puritan, the Presbyterian, and the Huguenot, we must equally admire the French Catholic, who made his home in the wilderness and gave his life to the conversion of the savage. The religious zeal of both peoples had, however, become greatly modified during the two centuries that had passed, owing chiefly to the coming of many who sought only adventure or gain. In 1750 we look in vain through the English colonies for the Puritan of the Winthrop type, and it is almost equally difficult to find in Canada the spirit of Allouez or Marquette. Again, the French and English were alike in personal courage, in a jealous love of tbe respective countries from which they had sprung; and both had imbibed that spirit of wild freedom inseparable from a life in the wilderness. But the points of difference between the English and the French in America are more striking than their points of agreement.

First, as to motive or object in settling in America. The chief object of the English was to find a home for themselves, far from persecution, where by patient industry they might build up a commonwealth; while secondarily, they would lead the red man to embrace Christianity.

The object of the Frenchman was twofold. First, he would build up a great New France which should be the glory of his native land; second, he would convert the native red man to his religion; and third, he sought the wealth to be derived from the fur trade. These are comprehensive statements. It was the French government, as reflected in its loyal sons, that aimed to build up a New France; it was the French Jesuit, typifying the religious sense of the nation, who labored to convert the Indian; it was the French settler who strove for the wealth of the fur trade.

But while the Englishman would found a new England by migrating in thousands, the Frenchman would do the same for his nation, not by migrating, but by making Frenchmen of the Indians. When the Englishman wished to marry, he found a wife among his fellow-immigrants, or imported her from England; the Frenchman desiring a wife found her in the forest--he married a squaw. The English generally migrated in families, or congregations; the French who came were mostly men, and thus they lacked the indispensable corner stone of the State--the family. One great blunder made by the Frenchman was his failure to diagnose the Indian character. He evidently believed the Indian more capable of civilization than he was. The Frenchman spent himself to lift up the Indian, but more frequently the Indian dragged him down to barbarism; he married the squaw and raised a family, not of Frenchmen, but of barbarians. The French made many thousands of nominal converts among the natives, but there is little evidence that the Indian was changed in habits or character by his conversion, or that he was led to aspire to a higher civilization.

A second important difference between the two peoples is found in their relation to their respective home governments. The English colonies had been left by their sovereign to develop themselves, and they grew strong and self-reliant. Two of them, Rhode Island and Connecticut, chose their own governors; and, aside from the ever irritable Navigation Acts, they all practically made their own laws. They were very democratic, and almost independent; and, indeed, but for want of one thing, union, they constituted a nation. The French colonies, on the other hand, were wholly dependent on the Crown. From the beginning the king had fostered and fed and coddled them, and they never learned to stand alone. As a whole they were a centralized, hierarchical despotism. As men they experienced an individual freedom, born of life in the wilderness, but political or religious freedom was beyond their dreams or desires.

Again, the English colonies opened wide their doors to all the world. The English Protestants were intolerant of Catholics, it is true, and even of one another; but their religious strife was chiefly intellectual and theological, and they continued to dwell together on the same soil. The French, on the other hand, excluded all except Catholics from their new domains. The French Huguenots, who were ill at ease among the English in Carolina, petitioned their king to permit them to settle in Louisiana, where they might still be Frenchmen and still be his subjects; but the bigoted monarch answered that he did not drive heretics from his kingdom only to be nourished in his colonies, and they remained with the English and became a part of them.¹ And the narrow-minded king reaped the reward of his folly; while the English in America numbered, at the opening of the French and Indian War, at least twelve hundred thousand souls, the French population barely reached sixty thousand. The French king might have had, without expense to himself, a quarter of a million industrious people of his own nation dwelling in the Mississippi Valley; but he threw away the opportunity, and that vast fertile region was now peopled only by roving Indian hordes. The French had control of a territory twenty times as great as that held by the English; but the English had a population twenty times as great as the French.

The Englishman, on the other hand, never received the native red man on the same footing with himself, never cared for his confidence, nor desired him as a neighbor. Often the two races were friendly, but a mutual suspicion was never absent.² Moreover, the English wanted land, which the Indians were loath to yield, and the French wanted furs, which they were always ready to furnish. In view of these facts is not strange that the majority of the natives sided with the French. Nearly all the Algonquin tribes were French in their sympathies. But the very notable exception we find in the fierce, warlike Six Nations, or Iroquois, of northern New York, who cast their lot with the English. The enmity of the Iroquois toward the French had its origin in a little skirmish they had in 1609 with Champlain, when a few of their chiefs were slain. But there was another cause. The Iroquois and the Algonquins were deadly, hereditary enemies, and so they had been from a time far back, beyond the coming of the white man to North America; and the intimacy between the Algonqnins and the French proved a serious barrier to the latter when they sought to make friends of the Iroquois.

¹Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," Vol.1, p.22. Return
²Sloane, "The French War and the Rsvolution," p.34. Return

Source:
History of the United States of America, by Henry William Elson, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1904. Chapter IX p. 174-178
Transcribed by Kathy Leigh