Читать книгу A School History of the United States - John Bach McMaster - Страница 33

%71. Louisiana, or the Mississippi Basin.%—The landing of La Salle on the coast of Texas, and the building of Fort St. Louis of Texas, gave the French a claim to the coast as far southward as a point halfway between the fort and the nearest Spanish settlement, in Mexico. At that point was the Rio Grande, a good natural boundary. On the French maps, therefore, Louisiana extended from the Rocky Mountains and the Rio Grande on the west, to the Alleghany Mountains on the east, and from the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to New France on the north. This confined the English colonies to a narrow strip between the Alleghany Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. As the colonies were growing in population, and as the charters of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and Carolina gave them great stretches of territory in the Mississippi valley, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, a bitter contest for possession of the country should take place between the French and the English in America.

The contest began in 1689, and ended in 1763, and may easily be divided into two periods: 1. That from 1689 to 1748, when the struggle was for Acadia and New France. 2. That from 1754 to 1763, when the struggle was not only for New France, but for Louisiana also.

%72. The Struggle for Acadia and New France; "King William's War."%—In 1688–89 there was a revolution in England, in the course of which James II. was driven from his throne, and William and Mary, his nephew and daughter, were seated on it. James took refuge in France, and when Louis XIV. attempted to restore him, a great European war followed, and of course the colonists of the two countries were very soon fighting each other. As the quarrel did not arise on this side of the ocean, the English colonists called it "King William's War"; but on our continent it was really the beginning of a long struggle to determine whether France or England should rule North America.

The French recognized this at once, and sent over a very able soldier—Count Frontenac—with orders to conquer New York; but the colony was saved by the Iroquois, who in the summer of 1689 began a war of their own against the French, laid siege to Montreal, and roasted French captives under its walls. Frontenac was compelled to put off his attack till 1690, when in the dead of winter a band of French and Indians burned Schenectady, N.Y. Salmon Falls in New Hampshire was next laid waste (1690), and Fort Loyal, where Portland, Me., is, was taken and destroyed. A little later Exeter, N.H., was attacked. The boldness and suddenness of these fearful massacres so alarmed the people exposed to them that in May, 1690, delegates from Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New York met at New York city to devise a plan of attack on the French. Now, at the opening of the war, there were three French strongholds in America. These were Montreal and Quebec in Canada, and Port Royal in Acadia. In 1690 a Massachusetts fleet led by Sir William Phips destroyed Port Royal. It was decided, therefore, to send another fleet under Phips to take Quebec, while troops from New York and Connecticut marched against Montreal. Both expeditions were failures, and for seven years the French and Indians ravaged the frontier. In 1692 York, in Maine, was visited and a third of the inhabitants killed. In 1694 Castine was taken and a hundred persons scalped and tomahawked. At Durham, in New Hampshire, prisoners were burned alive. Groton, in Massachusetts, was next visited; but the boldest of all was the massacre, in 1697, at Haverhill, a town not thirty-five miles from Boston. In 1696, Frontenac, at the head of a great array of Canadians, coureurs de bois, and Indians, invaded the country of the Onondagas, and leveled their fortified town to the earth.

[Illustration: MAP OF PART OF ACADIA]

%73. The Struggle for Acadia and New France; "Queen Anne's War."%—In 1697 the war ended with the treaty of Ryswick, and "King William's War" came to a close in America with nothing gained and much lost on each side. The peace, however, did not last long, for in 1701 England and France were again fighting. As William died in 1702, and was succeeded by his sister-in-law Anne, the struggle which followed in America was called "Queen Anne's War." Again Port Royal was captured (1710); again an expedition went against Quebec and failed (1711); and again, year after year, the French and Indians swept along the frontier of New England, burning towns and slaughtering and torturing the inhabitants. At last the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, ended the strife, and the first signs of English conquest in America were visible, for the French gave up Acadia and acknowledged the claims of the English to Newfoundland and the country around Hudson Bay. The name Acadia was changed by the conquerors to Nova Scotia. Port Royal, never again to be parted with, they called Annapolis, in honor of the Queen.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's A Half-century of Conflict, Vol. I., pp. 1–149.]

%74. The French take Possession of the Mississippi Valley; the Chain of Forts.%—The peace made at Utrecht was unbroken for thirty years. But this long period was, on the part of the French in America, at least, a time of careful preparation for the coming struggle for possession of the valleys of the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Lakes. In the Mississippi valley most elaborate preparations for defense were already under way. No sooner did the treaty of Ryswick end the first French war than a young naval officer named Iberville applied to the King for leave to take out an expedition and found a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, just as La Salle had attempted to do. Permission was readily given, and in 1698 Iberville sailed with two ships from France, and in February, 1699, entered Mobile Bay. Leaving his fleet at anchor, he set off with a party in small boats in search of the great river. He coasted along the shore, entered the Mississippi through one of its three mouths, and went up the river till he came to an Indian village, where the chief gave him a letter which Tonty, thirteen years before, when in search of La Salle, had written and left in the crotch of a tree.

Iberville now knew that he was on the Mississippi; but having seen no spot along its low banks suitable for the site of a city, he went back and led his colony to Biloxi Bay, and there settled it. Thus when the eighteenth century opened there were in all Louisiana but two French settlements—that founded on the Illinois River by La Salle, and that begun by Iberville at Biloxi. But the occupation of Louisiana was now the established policy of France, and hardly a year went by without one or more forts appearing somewhere in the valley. Before 1725 came, Mobile Bay was occupied, New Orleans was founded, and Forts Rosalie, Toulouse, Tombeckbee, Natchitoches, Assumption, and Chartres were erected. Along the Lakes, Detroit had been founded, Niagara was built in 1726, and in 1731 a band of Frenchmen, entering New York, put up Crown Point.[1]

[Footnote 1: Parkman's A Half-century of Conflict, Vol. I., pp. 288–314. For the French posts see map on pp. 74, 75.]

The meaning of this chain of forts stretching from New Orleans and Mobile to Lake Champlain and Montreal, was that the French were determined to shut the English out of the valley of the Mississippi, and to keep them away from the shores of the Great Lakes. But they were also determined at the first chance to reconquer Annapolis and Nova Scotia, which they had lost by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. As a very important step towards the accomplishment of this purpose, the French selected a harbor on the southeast coast of Cape Breton Island, and there built Louisburg, a fortress so strong that the French officers boasted that it could be defended by a garrison of women.

%75. The Struggle for New France; "King George's War."%—Such was the situation in America when (in March, 1744) France declared war on England and began what in Europe was called the "War of the Austrian Succession"; but in our country it was known as "King George's War," because George II. was then King of England. The French, with their usual promptness, rushed down and burned the little English post of Canso, in Nova Scotia, carried off the garrison, and attacked Annapolis, where they were driven off. That Nova Scotia could be saved, seemed hopeless. Nevertheless, Governor Shirley of Massachusetts determined to make the attempt, and that the King might know the exact situation he sent to London, with a dispatch, an officer named Captain Ryal, who had been taken prisoner at Canso and afterwards released on parole.[2]

[Footnote 2: The reception of that officer well illustrates the gross ignorance of America and American affairs which then existed in England. When the Duke of Newcastle, who was prime minister, read the dispatch, he exclaimed: "Oh, yes—yes—to be sure. Annapolis must be defended—troops must be sent to Annapolis. Pray where is Annapolis? Cape Breton an island! Wonderful! Show it me on the map. So it is, sure enough. My dear sir [to Captain Ryal], you always bring us good news. I must go and tell the King that Cape Breton is an island."]

Although Shirley applied to the King for help with which to defend Nova Scotia, he knew full well that the burden of defense would fall on the colonies. And with that determination and persistence which always brings success he labored hard to persuade New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to join with Massachusetts in an effort to capture Louisburg. It would be delightful to tell how he overcame all difficulties; how the young men rallied on the call for troops; how at the end of March, 1745, 4000 of them in a hundred transports and accompanied by fourteen armed ships set sail, followed by the prayers of all New England, and after a siege of six weeks took the fortress on the 17th of June, 1745. But the story is too long.[1] It is enough to know that the victory was hailed with delight on both sides of the Atlantic, but that when peace came, in 1748, the British government was still so blind to the struggle for North America which had been going on for fifty years, that Louisburg was restored to the French.

[Footnote 1: Read Samuel Adams Drake's Taking of Louisburg; Parkman's A Half-century of Conflict, Vol. II., pp. 78–161.]

%76. The French on the Allegheny River; the Buried Plates.%—With Louisburg back in their possession and no territory lost, the French went on more vigorously than ever with their preparations to shut the British out of the Mississippi valley; and as but one highway to the valley, the Ohio River, was still unguarded, the governor of Canada, in 1749, dispatched Céloron de Bienville with a band of men in twenty-three birch-bark canoes to take formal possession of the valley. Paddling up the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario, they carried their canoes across to Lake Erie, and, skirting the southeastern shore, they landed and crossed to Chautauqua Lake, down which and its outlet they floated to the Allegheny River. Once on the Allegheny, the ceremony of taking possession began. The men were drawn up, and Louis XV. was proclaimed king of all the region drained by the Ohio. The arms of France stamped on a sheet of tin were nailed to a tree, at the foot of which a lead plate was buried in the ground. On the plate was an inscription claiming the Ohio, and all the streams that run into it, in the name of the King of France.

[Illustration: [1]Half of one of the lead plates]

[Footnote 1: Now owned by the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester,

Mass.]

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