The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 by Julian Hawthorne

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1

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The pioneering on this continent of the Spanish and the French, though in
itself a captivating story, cannot properly be dwelt on in a history of
the growth of the American principle. Ponce de Leon traversed Florida in
the first quarter of the Sixteenth Century, hunting for the Fountain of
Immortality, and finding death. Hernando de Soto wandered over the area of
several of our present Southern States, and discovered the lower reaches
of the Mississippi; he was a man of blood, and his blood was shed. Some
score of years later Spaniards massacred the Huguenot colony at St.
Augustine, and built that oldest of American cities. Beyond this, on the
Atlantic slope, they never proceeded, having enough to do further south.
But they lay claim, even in these closing years of the Nineteenth Century,
to the entire American continent--"if they had their rights."

The French began their American career with an Italian employe,
Verrazano, who spied out the coast from Florida to Newfoundland in 1524.
Then Cartier peered into the wide mouth of the St. Lawrence, and tried to
get to India by that route, but got no further than the present Montreal.
In the next century, Champlain, one of the great explorers and the first
governor of Canada, laid the corner-stone of Quebec; it became at once the
center of Canadian trade which it has ever since remained. This was in
1608. In respect of enterprise as explorers, the French easily surpassed
the farm-loving, home-building, multiplying colonists of England. But
England took advantage of French discoveries, and stayed, and prevailed.
God makes men help each other in their own despite.

Richelieu said in 1627 that the name, New France, designated the whole
continent of America from the North Pole down to Florida. The Jesuits, who
arose as a counteracting force to Luther and the Reformation, supplanted
the Franciscans as missionaries among the heathen, and performed what can
only be called prodigies of self-sacrifice and intrepidity. Loyola was a
worthy antagonist of Calvin, and the first achievements of his followers
were the more striking. But the magnificent exploits of these men were not
the preliminary of commensurate colonization. The spirit of Calvin
inspired large bodies of men and women to establish themselves in the
wilderness in order to cultivate his doctrines without interference; the
spirit of Loyola embodied no new religious principle; it simply kindled
individuals to fresh exertions to promulgate the unchanging dogmas of the
Roman Church. The Jesuits were leaders without followers; their mission
was to bring the Church to the heathen, and the heathen into the Church;
and the impressiveness of their activity was due to the daring and faith
which pitted units against thousands, and refused to accept defeat. They
were the knight-errantry of religion. The fame of their deeds inspired
enthusiasm in France, so that noble women gave up their luxurious lives,
for the sake of planting faith in the inhospitable immensities of the
Canadian forests; but the mass of the common people were not stimulated or
attracted; the profits of the fur-trade employed but a handful; and the
blood of the Jesuit martyrs--none more genuine ever died--was poured out
almost without practical results. Our estimate of human nature is exalted;
but there are no happy communities to-day which owe their existence to the
Jesuit pioneers. The priests themselves were wifeless and childless, and
the family hearthstone could not be planted on the sites of their
immolations and triumphs. Nor were the disciples of Loyola aided, as were
the Calvinists, by persecution at home. All alike were good Catholics. But
had the Jesuits advocated but a single principle of human freedom, France
might have been mistress of America to-day.

So, under the One Hundred Assistants, as the French colonizing Company 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.

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