Colin Woodard (7 page)

While the French had hoped to peaceably assimilate the Indians into their culture, religion, and feudal way of life, ultimately they themselves became acculturated into the lifestyle, technology, and values of the Mi'kmaqs, Passamaquoddies, and Montagnais. Indeed, New France became as much an aboriginal society as a French one and would eventually help pass this quality on to Canada itself.

The Indians' influence would also be the undoing of the French effort to transplant feudalism to North America. Starting in 1663, Louis XIV's minions tried to bend New France's increasingly aboriginal society to his will. The Sun King wanted a society in which most of the land was divided among nobles with ordinary people bound to it, toiling in the fields and obeying their superiors' commands. A government bureaucracy would attempt to control every aspect of their lives, including how they addressed one another, what clothing and weapons a given class of people could wear, whom they could marry, what they could read, and which types of economic activities they could undertake. There were rules forbidding bachelors from hunting, fishing, or even entering the forests (to prevent them from “going native”) and penalizing fathers whose daughters remained unmarried at age sixteen or sons at twenty (to spur the colony's growth). In the St. Lawrence Valley almost all arable land not reserved for the Church was divided among well-born gentlemen to enable them to become landed aristocrats, or
seigniors
. Protestants were no longer welcome because, as Bishop François Xavier de Laval put it, “to multiply the number of Protestants in Canada would be to give occasion for the outbreak of revolutions.”
⁸

Louis XIV also sent thousands of settlers to New France at the crown's expense, including 774
filles de roi
, impoverished young women who agreed to wed colonists in Quebec in exchange for a small dowry.
⁹
Officials at Versailles hired recruiters to round up indentured servants, who would be sold at bargain rates into three years of bondage to aspiring seigniors. Most of those sent to Canada in the seventeenth century came from Normandy (20 percent), the adjacent Channel provinces (6 percent), or the environs of Paris (13 percent), although a full 30 percent came from Saintonge and three adjacent provinces on the central Bay of Biscay. The legacy of these regional origins can still be seen in the Norman-style fieldstone houses around Québec City and heard in the Québécois dialect, which preserves archaic features from the early modern speech of northwestern France. (In Acadia, where the Biscay coast provided the majority of settlers, people have a different dialect that reflects this heritage.) Very few settlers came from eastern or southern France, which were remote from the ports that served North America. During the peak of immigration in the 1660s, most colonists came alone, two-thirds were male, and most were either very young or very old and had little experience with agriculture. The situation became so serious that in 1667 Jean Talon, Québec's senior economic official, begged Versailles not to send children, those over forty, or any “idiot, cripples, chronically ill person or wayward sons under arrest” because “they are a burden to the land.”
¹⁰

Regardless of their origins, most colonists found working the seigniors' land to be burdensome. Few accepted their assigned role as docile peasants once their indentures were concluded. Two-thirds of male servants returned to France, despite official discouragement, because of rough conditions, conflict with the Iroquois, and the shortage of French brides. Those who stayed in New France often fled the fields to take up lives in the wilderness, where they traded for furs with the Indians or simply “went native.” Many negotiated marriages with the daughters of Native leaders to cement alliances. As John Ralston Saul, one of Canada's most prominent public intellectuals, has characterized it, these Frenchmen were “marrying up.” By the end of the seventeenth century, roughly one-third of indentured servants had taken to the forests and increasing numbers of well-bred men were following them. “They . . . spend their lives in the woods, where there are no priests to restrain them, nor fathers, nor governors to control them,” Governor Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville explained to his superior in 1685. “I do not know, Monseigneur, how to describe to you the attraction that all the young men feel for the life of the savage, which is to do nothing, to be utterly free of constraint, to follow all the customs of the savages, and to place oneself beyond the possibility of correction.”
¹¹

In contemporary terms, these woodsmen—or
coureurs de boi
s—were first-generation immigrants to aboriginal societies whose cultures and values they partially assimilated. Their numerous children were as much Mi'kmaq, Montagnais, or Huron as they were French; indeed, they formed a new ethnoracial group, the
métis
, who, unlike New Spain's mestizos, tended to be just as comfortable living in an aboriginal setting as in the European settlements. The coureurs de bois were proud of their independence and of the relative freedom of their seminomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. “We were Caesars, [there] being nobody to contradict us,” explained one of the most famous, Pierre-Esprit Radisson, in 1664. Among these new Caesars was Jean Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, a French baron who had served at Fort Pentagoet (now Castine, Maine), the Acadian administrative capital. Dutch pirates destroyed the fort in 1674, but Saint-Castin didn't bother to rebuild it when he returned to the site three years later. Instead he set up a trading post in the middle of a Penobscot Indian village, married the daughter of Penobscot chief Madockawando, and raised a métis family in the Penobscot manner. His sons, Joseph and Bernard, would both lead Penobscots in raids against the English in the bloody imperial wars for control of the continent, becoming among the most feared men in New England.
¹²

With much of their labor force deserting to Indian ways, the seigniors found themselves sinking into poverty. At least one was forced to work his own grain mill after his miller was drafted. Another donated his land to a nunnery, having become too old to work his own fields. Even leading families like the Saint-Ours and Verchères were forced to beg Louis XIV for pensions, salary-paying appointments, and fur trading licenses. “It is necessary to help them by giving them a means of . . . livelihood,” Governor Denonville wrote the crown, “for, in truth, without it there is a great fear that the children of our nobility . . . will become bandits because of having nothing by which to live.”
¹³

At the same time, commoners displayed an unusual degree of independence and contempt for hierarchy. On the island of Montréal, settlers hunted and fished on the seigniors' reserves, damaged their fences, and threatened their overseers. The obstinacy of the Acadian farmers infuriated an eighteenth-century colonial official. “I really think the Acadians are mad. Do they imagine we wish to make
seigniors
of them?” he asked. “They seem offended by the fact that we wish to treat them like our peasants.” Throughout New France, rough equality and self-reliance prevailed over Old World feudal patterns. The French had intended to assimilate the Indians, but inadvertently created a métis society, as much Native American in its core values and cultural priorities as it was French.
¹⁴

By the middle of the eighteenth century, New France had also become almost entirely dependent on Native Americans to protect their shared society from invaders. Even a century and a half after the foundation of Port Royal, there were only 62,000 French people living in Québec and Acadia, and only a few thousand in the vast Louisiana Territory, which encompassed much of the continental interior. To the south, however, France's longtime enemies were gaining strength at an astonishing rate, for in the Chesapeake Tidewater and New England, two aggressive, vibrant, and avowedly Protestant societies had taken root, cultures with very different attitudes about race, religion, and the place of “savages.” Together they numbered over 750,000, and another 300,000 inhabited the other English-controlled colonies of the Atlantic seaboard.
¹⁵

The leaders of Québec and Acadia could only hope that New England and Tidewater would remain what they had been from the outset: avowed enemies of one another with little in common beyond having come from the same European island.

CHAPTER 3

I
n the traditional account of the Jamestown story, the dashing Captain John Smith leads a can-do party of adventurers as they hunt for gold, fight with savages, and seduce Indian princesses. They construct a fort, tough out the winters, and build the foundations of “real” American society: bold, scrappy, and individualistic. They came seeking a better life and created the New World's first representative assembly, harbinger of the great democracy to follow.

In reality, the first lasting English colony in the New World was a hellhole of epic proportions, successful only in the sense that it survived at all. Founded by private investors, it was poorly planned, badly led, and foolishly located. With much of the American seaboard at their disposal, the leaders of the Virginia Company chose to build on a low-lying island surrounded by malarial swamps on the James River, a sluggish body of water that failed to carry away the garbage and human waste the colonists dumped into it, creating a large disease incubator. To make matters worse, almost none of the settlers knew anything about farming. Half were haughty gentlemen-adventurers, the rest beggars and vagrants rounded up on the streets of London and sent to the New World by force. “A more damned crew hell never vomited,” the Virginia Company president later said of them.

Of the 104 settlers who arrived in April 1607, only 38 were alive nine months later. That spring John Smith arrived with a fresh company of settlers and within weeks became the colony's leader after typhoid carried off his predecessor. Smith would last only two years, largely because he forced the colonists to work for six hours a day in the fields, which they found intolerable. (“Most of them would rather starve than work,” Smith later recalled.) Instead of growing food to survive the following winter, the colonists spent their time digging up great piles of mica and, believing it to be gold, convinced the resupply ship to delay its departure by three months until fully loaded with the worthless mineral. During that time, the ship's crew ate a large proportion of the provisions they'd brought for the colony. As a result, in the winter of 1609–1610 food ran out again, and the settlers were forced to eat rats, cats, snakes, and even their boots and horses. They dug up the bodies of those who'd died and ate those. One man killed, salted, and ate his pregnant wife. Only 60 of 220 colonists survived to the spring, at which point they loaded all their possessions on a ship and abandoned the colony. Unfortunately, at the mouth of the James River they were cut off by supply ships carrying 300 fresh colonists and a humorless new governor, who forced them back to the island, which was pockmarked with shallow graves into which corpses had been dumped face-first into the mud. Despite these sobering experiences, the colonists continued to refuse to tend crops, preferring to bowl in the streets instead.
¹

These first Virginians proved to be such incompetent settlers because they hadn't come to the New World to farm and build a new society, but rather to conquer and rule, much as the Spanish had. The Virginia Company's founders expected their hirelings to act like the
conquistadors
, seizing control of awestruck Indian kingdoms and putting their new subjects to work mining gold and silver or slaving in the fields to feed their new masters. After all, the English had been following much the same program in Ireland, where Gaelic-speaking “savages” toiled on English-owned plantations. Jamestown wasn't meant to feed itself, which is why it lacked farmers. It was, in essence, a corporate-owned military base, complete with fortifications, martial law, a small elite of officers, and a large contingent of rank-and-file soldiers.
²

But the Virginia Company's plan was based on the faulty assumption that the Indians would be intimidated by English technology, believe their employers were gods, and submit, Aztec-like, to their rule. The Indians, in fact, did none of these things. The local chief, Powhatan, saw the English outpost for what it was: weak and vulnerable but a potential source of useful European technology such as metal tools and weapons. Powhatan ruled a confederation that spanned the lower Chesapeake, comprising 30 tribes and 24,000 people. He lived in a large lodge on the York River, attended by forty bodyguards, a hundred wives, and a small army of servants, all supported by tributes paid by subordinate chiefs. In his sixties when Jamestown was founded, Powhatan had built his confederation piece by piece, defeating rival chiefs and taking them as sons in ritual adoption ceremonies. His plan was to isolate the English and make them into vassals, securing tools and firearms in tribute. The ensuing struggle would turn Tidewater into a war zone.
³

While the gentlemen of New France were inviting Mi'kmaq chiefs to their gastronomic competitions, hungry Virginians resorted to extorting corn from Powhatan's Indians by force, triggering a cycle of violence. The Indians ambushed one raiding party, killed all seventeen soldiers, stuffed their mouths with corn, and left the corpses for the English to find. John Smith led another party to try to capture Powhatan but instead stumbled into another ambush. Brought before the chief, Smith was subjected to the Indians' adoption ritual—a mock execution (interrupted by the chief's eleven-year-old daughter, Pocahontas) and theatrical ceremony which, from the Indians' point of view, made Smith and his people into Powhatan's vassals. Smith interpreted the situation differently: the child, overwhelmed by his charm, had begged that he be spared. Smith returned to Jamestown and carried on as if nothing had changed, flabbergasting the Indians. Skirmishes eventually led to massacres, and in 1610 the English wiped out an entire Indian village, throwing its children into a river and shooting them for sport. (Pocahontas herself was captured in 1613, married off to a colonist, and sent to back to England, where she died of illness a few years later.) The Indians gained revenge in 1622, launching a surprise attack on the expanding colony that left 347 English dead—a third of Virginia's entire population. The English offered peace the following spring but poisoned the drinks they served at the treaty ceremony and slaughtered all 250 attendees. Warfare would continue, off and on, for decades.
⁴