Theme 4. American Colonial Empires: France and England

Part 1: The French in North America

By Amanda Garibay

History 140

American Colonies 5 - Canada and Iroquoia

1500-1660A French engraving of the 1609 battle in which Samuel de Champlain and two other

French musketeers helped their Indian allies defeat Iroquois warriors beside Lake Champlain. The advent of firearms revolutionized Indian warfare, discouraging

the use of the mass formations and wooden shields depicted here.

American Colonies 5 - Canada and IroquoiaThe Fur Trade

• 1580, around Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the fisheries and the whale and seal hunts employed at least four hundred vessels, and twelve thousand men.

• This attracted the French, Basque, Portuguese, and English.

• The fur trade paid for its transatlantic transportation.• The fur trade that was amongst the Indians grew and

became commercial and distinct from diplomacy.• Indians raised prices for their furs and eventually

mariners interrupted trade to kidnap Indians as human commodities.

• Kidnapped Indians were taken to Europe and trained to assist future voyages as interpreters.

• Trade increased their demands upon the environment. • Indians extended their hunting into the territories of their

neighbors, provoking new and more desperate conflicts.• The trade enabled violence and enabled Europeans to

monopolize their end of trade.

Canada• 1541 was when the French voyagers developed a

profitable and semi permanent presence at the Lawrence River in Canada, this made northern colonization possible.

• The St. Lawrence river in Canada was a valuable piece of land for multiple reasons. This caused others to want it.

• 1608, Champlain recognized that French success in Canada depended uon buildin an alliance with a network of native peoples and he built a small fortified trading post at Quebec.

• The trading post helped with food and trade, however it caused problems with others.

• Problems resolved by alliances. 1609, Champlain and nine French soldiers joined a large allied war party that ventured south to attack the Iroquois.

• The attack led Iroquois to buy more weapons, and waylaying and plundering Huron, Algonkin, and Montagnais canoes.

American Colonies 5 - Canada and Iroquoia

The Five Nations• The French, and the Five Nation Iroquois fought

for power, and territory.• To appease grief, to restore power, and to build

their own status, Iroquois warriors conducted mourning wars in which they sought prisoners from their enemies.

• During the fifteenth century, the Five Nation Iroquois had waged ferocious wars upon one another until a prophet named Deganawida.

• 1600’s Deganawida persuaded the Five Nations to form a Great League of Peace, which resulted to about 22,000-95,000 northeastern Iroquoians.

• 1700’s, the Five Nations needed ever more captives as they coped with an increased death rate wrought primarily by new diseases and secondarily by a more violent warfare, which escalated.

The Dutch Trade• August 1609,Henry Hudson, and English

mariner in Dutch employ, ascended the river later named for him to initiate a fur trade with the Mohawks.

• 1614 Dutch company established a year round trading post on the upper Hudson near present day Albany.

• Late 1620’s the easternmost Iroquois nation, the Mohawk, improved their access to Fort Orange by displacing the Algonquian speaking Mohicans, who had lived around the post and had tried to control the trade.

• The French came dependant on the Iroquois hostility as a barrier that kept the northern Indians from traveling south to trade with the Dutch.

• Finally the French and the Five Nation Iroquois became equally ambivalent about peace.

American Colonies 5 - Canada and Iroquoia

Jesuits• The missionary in 1625-1626, caused

reinforcements from the arrival of eight priests of the Jesuits order.

• Jesuits took the lead in Canada's the Recollects faded.

• Jesuits proceeded farther west to target the Huron.

• 1609 the Huron compelled Champlain to help them fight the Iroquois as the price of trade.

• Jesuits learned the language and built churches.• During 1630’s, epidemics killed half of the

Huron, reducing their number to then thousand and made the mission more challenging.

• The Jesuits denounced torture and ritual cannibalism, premarital sex, divorce, polygamy, and the traditional games, feasts, and dances.

Destruction• Mid seventeenth century, Iroquois warfare

dramatically escalated to nearly genocidal proportions, devastating their native enemies and imperiling the French colony.

• 1640’s-1650’s native peoples attacked and killed each other.

• 1648-1649 Iroquois warriors stormed the Huron villages, killing and capturing hundreds.

• 1650 a stray Huron surrendered to the Mohawk.• 1660 through conquest, the Great League of

Peace and Power seemed at least to have absorbed almost all of the Iroquoians- but at a heavy cost of bloodshed.

American Colonies 16 - French America

1650-1750

In 1684 the Iroquois spokesman Grangula addresses the French governor-general de la Barre on

the shores of Lake Frontenac (now Lake Ontario). The image

conveys the prominence of native protocols of diplomacy in the attempted French exercise of empire in the vast reaches of

the North American interior. From Baron Lahontan, New Voyages to North America.

American Colonies 16 - French America

Emigrants• 1632 a peace treaty restored to the French a

thoroughly plundered set of ruins.• In fear of losing their colony, the French crown

ordered the Company of New France to recruit more inhabitants.

• In part of the Marginal growing season, New France grew slowly, from seven hundred colonists in 1650 to three thousand by 1663.

• 1660 the English had 58,000 colonists in New England and the Chesapeake.

• 1770’s, fewer than 250 families emigrated to Canada, and only 12 percent of the immigrants were female.

• The expensive program of subsidized emigration produced relatively little long term benefit.

• 1673, the government retrenched to save money, the emigration ground led to a halt but afterwards grew.

• Prior to 1663, New France suffered from a dilemma: the colony could not attract enough people for effective defense because the French balked at emigrating to such a dangerous land.

Opportunity• 80 percent of the colonist used their land and

farms as opportunity.• Habitants took pride in their regular

consumption of meat and white bread, which few French peasants could afford.

• Canadian habitant enjoyed privileges of hunting and fishing, which were environmentally and legally denied to the peasants.

• A rough equality prevailed in rural New France, because of the limited opportunities to hire laborers or to sell a surplus on the market.

• Canadian emigration and settlement improved the status and conditions of the peasantry but had little effect on the legal an cultural subordination of women.

• The civil contracts caused celibacy and religious devotion in a convent in Montreal or Quebec, where nuns ran schools, asylums, and hospitals, providing a thicker network of social welfare than in the British colonies.

American Colonies 16 - French AmericaAuthority

• The demographic weakness and military peril of New France demanded a more frequent and total mobilization for defense.

• Louis XIV reigned in 1661 and raised taxes to sustain his vast army and growing navy.

• In both France and New France, crown power was also diluted by its reliance on aristocratic officers of their royal master.

• New France was governing with ethos that were paternalistic and monarchical rather than commercial and libertarian.

• Crowning helped reinforce social rank with assured prosperity.

• Bypassing the seigneurs in the chain of military authority prevented the development of a true feudalism in the colony.

• The colonial authorities favored the seigneurs with almost all of the commissions as regular army officers, salaries as civil officials, and coveted licenses to conduct the fur trade.

• Authorities reasoned that only men of aristocratic honor could command respect from the common people.

The Upper Country• During the early eighteenth century, New

France consisted of two very different sectors: the narrow, cultivated St. Lawrence Valley and the cast intergraded colonization by settlement

• The mission Indians provided warriors essential to the defense of Canada, the French felt obliged to respect their autonomy for the purpose to engage them in any war for the defense of this same country.

• 1750 a mere 261 French soldiers garrisoned all of the posts around the Great Lakes.

• In the upper country, the Indians and the French gradually developed an effective alliance based upon mutual accommodations on what the historian Richard White has called “the middle ground”.

• Never stable, the middle ground alliance required constant attention from the French.

American Colonies 16 - French AmericaLouisiana

• 1670’s and 1680’s, English founded Carolina, and the French traders and priests probed southwestward from their trading posts along the Great Lakes into the Mississippi Valley.

• The Sieur de La Salle was responsible for leading the French and allied Indians down the river to the Gulf of Mexico.

• In Louisiana the French made expanding trade.• Louisiana languished as the most peripheral

colony in an overstretched empire.• In 1708, Louisiana consisted of merely 122

soldiers and sailors, 80 slaves, and 77 habitants.• After the war, the crown entrusted Louisiana to a

private corporation, the Company of the Indies, which promoted plantations to cultivate tobacco and indigo.1720’s the Louisiana French was underdeveloped and suffered from an arbitrary government.

• Louisiana elite pitted all of the races against one another, relying on blacks and natives to control lower-class whites, just as they employed Africans and Indians against one another.

Rebels and Allies• French numbered only about 550 colonists and

200 slaves, they bullied the 1,800 Natchez as if they were a subjugated Petite Nation.

• African slaves joined the Indian rebels, combining the two greatest nightmares of a colonial people: an Indian massacre and a slave rebellion.

• The French relied on native allies.• Chickasaw warriors afflicted Choctaw villages

and waylaid French riverboats and outposts. • 1739, Bienville invaded the Chickasaw country

with mixed forces of French soldiers, Choctaw warriors, and armed slaves.

• The allied Choctaw collected French bounties for 233 scalps taken from the western rebels.

• 1750, the surviving rebels submitted, restoring a semblance of the French Choctaw alliance.

American Colonies 16 - French America

Dependence• The retreat demonstrated that as the Indians

became dependent upon French trade, the French empire became captive to Indian demand.

• The dependence allowed the French to live comfortably without metal ware, firearms, and gunpowder.

• Indians faced hunger and destitution if denied access to European goods.

• The dependence caused war threats and hostility.• Colonial officials were warned to accept a trade

and alliance on Indian terms.• 1720’s, the French posts on the Great Lakes slide

goods at below market value to dissuade the Indians from trading with the British colonists.

• The program reveals that the French strategic dependence on the Indians exceeded amongst the French.

• However, the French needed native allies to hold the interior and so contain the British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard.