Montcalm and Wolfe Part 53

On the day when the preliminaries were signed, France made a secret agreement with Spain, by which she divested herself of the last shred of her possessions on the North American continent. As compensation for Florida, which her luckless ally had lost in her quarrel, she made over to the Spanish Crown the city of New Orleans, and under the name of Louisiana gave her the vast region spreading westward from the Mississippi towards the Pacific.

On the ninth of December the question of approving the preliminaries came up before both Houses of Parliament.

There was a long debate in the Commons. Pitt was not present, confined, it was said, by gout; till late in the day the House was startled by repeated cheers from the outside. The doors opened, and the fallen Minister entered, carried in the arms of his servants, and followed by an applauding crowd.

His bearers set him down within the bar, and by the help of a crutch he made his way with difficulty to his seat. "There was a mixture of the very solemn and the theatric in this apparition,"

says Walpole, who was present. "The moment was so well timed, the importance of the man and his services, the languor of his emaciated countenance, and the study bestowed on his dress were circ.u.mstances that struck solemnity into a patriot mind, and did a little furnish ridicule to the hardened and insensible. He was dressed in black velvet, his legs and thighs wrapped in flannel, his feet covered with buskins of black cloth, and his hands with thick gloves." Not for the first time, he was utilizing his maladies for purposes of stage effect. He spoke for about three hours, sometimes standing, and sometimes seated; sometimes with a brief burst of power, more often with the accents of pain and exhaustion.

He highly commended the retention of Canada, but denounced the leaving to France a share in the fisheries, as well as other advantages tending to a possible revival of her maritime power. But the Commons listened coldly, and by a great majority approved the preliminaries of peace.

These preliminaries were embodied in the definitive treaty concluded at Paris on the tenth of February, 1763. Peace between France and England brought peace between the warring nations of the Continent. Austria, bereft of her allies, and exhausted by vain efforts to crush Frederic, gave up the attempt in despair, and signed the treaty of Hubertsburg. The Seven Years War was ended.

Chapter 32

1763-1884

Conclusion

"This," said Earl Granville on his deathbed, "has been the most glorious war and the most triumphant peace that England ever knew." Not all were so well pleased, and many held with Pitt that the House of Bourbon should have been forced to drain the cup of humiliation to the dregs. Yet the fact remains that the Peace of Paris marks an epoch than which none in modern history is more fruitful of grand results. With it began a new chapter in the annals of the world. To borrow the words of a late eminent writer, "It is no exaggeration to say that three of the many victories of the Seven Years War determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With that of Rossbach began the re-creation of Germany, with that of Pla.s.sey the influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alexander on the nations of the East; with the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States."[876]

[Footnote 876: Green, _History of the English People_, IV. 193 (London, 1880).]

So far, however, as concerns the war in the Germanic countries, it was to outward seeming but a mad debauch of blood and rapine, ending in nothing but the exhaustion of the combatants. The havoc had been frightful. According to the King of Prussia's reckoning, 853,000 soldiers of the various nations had lost their lives, besides hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who had perished from famine, exposure, disease, or violence. And with all this waste of life not a boundary line had been changed. The rage of the two empresses and the vanity and spite of the concubine had been completely foiled. Frederic had defied them all, and had come out of the strife intact in his own hereditary dominions and master of all that he had s.n.a.t.c.hed from the Empress-Queen; while Prussia, portioned out by her enemies as their spoil, lay depleted indeed, and faint with deadly striving, but crowned with glory, and with the career before her which, through tribulation and adversity, was to lead her at last to the heads.h.i.+p of a united Germany.

Through centuries of strife and vicissitude the French monarchy had triumphed over n.o.bles, parliaments, and people, gathered to itself all the forces of the State, beamed with illusive splendors under Louis the Great, and shone with the phosph.o.r.escence of decay under his contemptible successor; till now, robbed of prestige, burdened with debt, and mined with corruption, it was moving swiftly and more swiftly towards the abyss of ruin.

While the war hastened the inevitable downfall of the French monarchy, it produced still more notable effects.

France under Colbert had embarked on a grand course of maritime and colonial enterprise, and followed it with an activity and vigor that promised to make her a great and formidable ocean power. It was she who led the way in the East, first trained the natives to fight her battles, and began that system of mixed diplomacy and war which, imitated by her rival, enabled a handful of Europeans to master all India. In North America her vast possessions dwarfed those of every other nation. She had built up a powerful navy and created an extensive foreign trade. All this was now changed. In India she was reduced to helpless inferiority, with total ruin in the future; and of all her boundless territories in North America nothing was left but the two island rocks on the coast of Newfoundland that the victors had given her for drying her codfish. Of her navy scarcely forty s.h.i.+ps remained; all the rest were captured or destroyed. She was still great on the continent of Europe, but as a world power her grand opportunities were gone.

In England as in France the several members of the State had battled together since the national life began, and the result had been, not the unchecked domination of the Crown, but a system of balanced and adjusted forces, in which King, n.o.bility, and Commons all had their recognized places and their share of power. Thus in the war just ended two great conditions of success had been supplied: a people instinct with the energies of ordered freedom, and a masterly leaders.h.i.+p to inspire and direct them.

All, and more than all, that France had lost England had won. Now, for the first time, she was beyond dispute the greatest of maritime and colonial Powers. Portugal and Holland, her precursors in ocean enterprise, had long ago fallen hopelessly behind. Two great rivals remained, and she had humbled the one and swept the other from her path. Spain, with vast American possessions, was sinking into the decay which is one of the phenomena of modern history; while France, of late a most formidable compet.i.tor, had abandoned the contest in despair. England was mistress of the seas, and the world was thrown open to her merchants, explorers, and colonists. A few years after the Peace the navigator Cook began his memorable series of voyages, and surveyed the strange and barbarous lands which after times were to transform into other Englands, vigorous children of this great mother of nations. It is true that a heavy blow was soon to fall upon her; her own folly was to alienate the eldest and greatest of her offspring. But nothing could rob her of the glory of giving birth to the United States; and, though politically severed, this gigantic progeny were to be not the less a source of growth and prosperity to the parent that bore them, joined with her in a triple kins.h.i.+p of laws, language, and blood. The war or series of wars that ended with the Peace of Paris secured the opportunities and set in action the forces that have planted English homes in every clime, and dotted the earth with English garrisons and posts of trade.

With the Peace of Paris ended the checkered story of New France; a story which would have been a history if faults of const.i.tution and the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode. Yet it is a noteworthy one in both its lights and its shadows: in the disinterested zeal of the founder of Quebec, the self-devotion of the early missionary martyrs, and the daring enterprise of explorers; in the spiritual and temporal va.s.salage from which the only escape was to the savagery of the wilderness; and in the swarming corruptions which were the natural result of an attempt to rule, by the absolute hand of a master beyond the Atlantic, a people bereft of every vestige of civil liberty. Civil liberty was given them by the British sword; but the conqueror left their religious system untouched, and through it they have imposed upon themselves a weight of ecclesiastical tutelage that finds few equals in the most Catholic countries of Europe. Such guardians.h.i.+p is not without certain advantages. When faithfully exercised it aids to uphold some of the tamer virtues, if that can be called a virtue which needs the constant presence of a sentinel to keep it from escaping: but it is fatal to mental robustness and moral courage; and if French Canada would fulfil its aspirations it must cease to be one of the most priest-ridden communities of the modern world.

Scarcely were they free from the incubus of France when the British provinces showed symptoms of revolt. The measures on the part of the mother-country which roused their resentment, far from being oppressive, were less burdensome than the navigation laws to which they had long submitted; and they resisted taxation by Parliament simply because it was in principle opposed to their rights as freemen. They did not, like the American provinces of Spain at a later day, sunder themselves from a parent fallen into decrepitude; but with astonis.h.i.+ng audacity they affronted the wrath of England in the hour of her triumph, forgot their jealousies and quarrels, joined hands in the common cause, fought, endured, and won. The disunited colonies became the United States. The string of discordant communities along the Atlantic coast has grown to a mighty people, joined in a union which the earthquake of civil war served only to compact and consolidate.

Those who in the weakness of their dissensions needed help from England against the savage on their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity to make firm the foundations on which that prosperity rests, and turn some fair proportion of her vast mental forces to other objects than material progress and the game of party politics. She has tamed the savage continent, peopled the solitude, gathered wealth untold, waxed potent, imposing, redoubtable; and now it remains for her to prove, if she can, that the rule of the ma.s.ses is consistent with the highest growth of the individual; that democracy can give the world a civilization as mature and pregnant, ideas as energetic and vitalizing, and types of manhood as lofty and strong, as any of the systems which it boasts to supplant.

Appendix A

Chapter 3. Conflict for the West

_Piquet and his War-Party_.--"Ce parti [_de guerre_] pour lequel M. le General a donne son consentement, sera de plus de 3,800 hommes.... 500 hommes de nos domicilies, 700 des Cinq nations a l'exclusion des Agniers [_Mohawks_] qui ne sont plus regardes que comme des anglais, 600 tant Iroquois que d'autres nations le long de la Belle Riviere d'ou ils esperent cha.s.ser les anglais qui y formentu des etabliss.e.m.e.ns contraires au bien des guerriers, 2,000 hommes qu'ils doivent prendre aux tetes plates [_Choctaws_] ou ils s'arresteront, c'est la ou les deux chefs de guerre doivent proposer a l'armee l'expedition des Miamis au retour de celle contre la Nation du Chien [_Cherokees_]. Un vieux levain, quelques anciennes querelles leur feront tout entreprendre contre les anglais de la Virginie s'ils donnent encore quelques secours a cette derniere nation, ce qui ne manquera pas d'arriver...."

"C'est un grand miracle que malgre l'envie, les contradictions, l'opposition presque generale de tous les Villages sauvages, j'aye forme en moins de 3 ans une des plus florissantes missions du Canada.... Je me trouve donc, Messieurs, dans l'occasion de pouvoir etendre l'empire de Jesus Christ et du Roy mes bons maitres jusqu'aux extremites de ce nouveau monde, et de plus faire avec quelques secours que vous me procurerez que la France et l'angleterre ne pourraient faire avec plusieurs millions et toutes leur troupes." _Copie de la Lettre ecrite par M. l'Abbe Picquet, dattee a la Presentation du 8 Fev. 1752_ (Archives de la Marine).

I saw in the possession of the late Jacques Viger, of Montreal, an illuminated drawing of one of Piquet's banners, said to be still in existence, in which the cross, the emblems of the Virgin and the Saviour, the fleur-de-lis, and the Iroquois totems are all embroidered and linked together by strings of wampum beads wrought into the silk.

_Directions of the French Colonial Minister for the Destruction of Oswego_.--"La seule voye dont on puisse faire usage en temps de paix pour une pareille operation est celle des Iroquois des cinq nations. Les terres sur lesquelles le poste a ete etabli leur appartiennent et ce n'est qu'avec leur consentement que les anglois s'y sont places. Si en faisant regarder a ces sauvages un pareil etabliss.e.m.e.nt comme contraire a leur liberte et comme une usurpation dont les anglois pretendent faire usage pour acquerir la propriete de leur terre on pourrait les determiner a entreprendre de les detruire, une pareille operation ne seroit pas a negliger; mais M. le Marquis de la Jonquiere doit sentir avec quelle circonspection une affaire de cette espece doit etre conduite et il faut en effet qu'il y travaille de facon a ne se point compromettre."

_Le Ministre a MM. de la Jonquiere et Bigot, 15 Avril, 1750_ (Archives de la Marine).

Appendix B

Chapter 4. Acadia

_English Treatment of Acadians._--"Les Anglois dans la vue de la Conquete du Canada ont voulu donner aux peuples francois de ces Colonies un exemple frappant de la douceur de leur gouvernement dans leur conduite a l'egard des Accadiens."

"Ils leur ont fourni pendant plus de 35 ans le simple necessaire, sans elever la fortune d'aucun, ils leur ont fourni ce necessaire souvent a credit, avec un exces de confiance, sans fatiguer les debiteurs, sans les presser, sans vouloir les forcer au payement."

"Ils leur ont laisse une apparence de liberte si excessive qu'ils n'ont voulu prendre aucune difference [_sic_] de leur differents, pas meme pour les crimes.... Ils ont souffert que les accadiens leur refusa.s.sent insolemment certains rentes de grains, modiques & tres-legitimement dues."

"Ils ont dissimule le refus meprisant que les accadiens ont fait de prendre d'eux des concessions pour les nouveaux terreins qu'ils voulaient occuper."

"Les fruits que cette conduite a produit dans la derniere guerre nous le savons [_sic_] et les anglois n'en ignorent rien. Qu'on juge la-dessus de leur ressentiment et des vues de vengeance de cette nation cruelle.... Je prevois notamment la dispersion des jeunes accadiens sur les vaisseaux de guerre anglois, ou la seule regle pour la ration du pain suffit pour les detruire jusqu'au dernier."

_Roma, Officier a l'Isle Royale a----, 1750._

_Indians, directed by Missionaries, to attack the English in Time of Peace._--"La lettre de M. l'Abbe Le Loutre me paroit si interessante que j'ay l'honneur de vous en envoyer Copie.... Les trois sauvages qui m'ont porte ces depeches m'ont parle relativement a ce que M. l'Abbe Le Loutre marque dans sa lettre; je n'ay eu garde de leur donner aucun Conseil la-dessus et je me suis borne a leur promettre que je ne les abandonnerai point, aussy ai-je pourvu a tout, soit pour les armes, munitions de guerre et de bouche, soit pour les autres choses necessaires."

"Il seroit a souhaiter que ces Sauvages ra.s.sembles p.u.s.s.ent parvenir a traverser les anglois dans leurs entreprises, meme dans celle de Chibouctou [_Halifax_], ils sont dans cette resolution et s'ils peuvent mettre a execution ce qu'ils ont projette il est a.s.sure qu'ils seront fort incommodes aux Anglois et que les vexations qu'ils exerceront sur eux leur seront un tres grand obstacle.

Ces sauvages doivent agir seuls, il n'y aura ny soldat ny habitant, tout se fera de leur pur mouvement, et sans qu'il paraisse que j'en eusse connoissance."

"Cela est tres essentiel, aussy ai-je ecrit au Sr. de Boishebert d'observer beaucoup de prudence dans ses demarches et de les faire tres secretement pour que les Anglois ne puissent pas s'apercevoir que nous pourvoyons aux besoins des dits sauvages."

"Ce seront les missionnaires qui feront toutes les negociations et qui dirigeront les pas des dits sauvages, ils sont en tres bonnes mains, le R.P. Germain et M. l'Abbe Le Loutre etant fort au fait d'en tirer tout le party possible et le plus avantageux pour nos interets, ils menageront leur intrigue de facon a n'y pas paroitre...."

"Je sens, Monseigneur, toute la delicatesse de cette negociation, soyez persuade que je la conduirai avec tant de precautions que les anglois ne pourront pas dire que mes ordres y ont eu part."

_La Jonquiere au Ministre, 9 Oct. 1749_.

_Missionaries to be encouraged in their Efforts to make the Indians attack the English._--"Les sauvages.... se distinguent, depuis la paix, dans les mouvements qu'il y a du cote de l'Acadie, et sur lesquels Sa Majeste juge a propos d'entrer dans quelques details avec le Sieur de Raymond...."

"Sa Majeste luy a deja observe que les sauvages ont ete jusqu'a present dans les dispositions les plus favorables. Il est de la plus grande importance, et pour le present et pour l'avenir, de ne rien negliger pour les y maintenir. Les missionnaires qui sont aupres d'eux sont plus a portes d'y contribuer que personne, et Sa Majeste a lieu d'etre satisfaite des soins qu'ils y donnent. Le Sr. de Raymond doit exciter ces missionnaires a ne point se relacher sur cela; mais en meme temps il doit les avertir de contenir leur zele de maniere qu'ils ne se compromettent pas mal a propos avec les anglois et qu'ils ne donnent point de justes sujets de plaintes."

_Memoire du Roy pour servir d'Instruction au Comte de Raymond, 24 Avril, 1751_.

_Acadians to join the Indians in attacking the English._--"Pour que ces Sauvages agissent avec beaucoup de Courage, quelques accadiens habilles et mataches comme les Sauvages pourront se joindre a eux pour faire coup sur les Anglois. Je ne puis eviter de consentir a ce que ces Sauvages feront puisque nous avons les bras lies et que nous ne pouvons rien faire par nous-memes, au surplus je ne crois pas qu'il y ait de l'inconvenient de laisser meler les accadiens parmi les Sauvages, parceque s'ils sont pris, nous dirons qu'ils ont agi de leur propre mouvement." _La Jonquiere au Ministre, 1 Mai_, 1751.

_Cost of Le Loutre's Intrigues._--"J'ay deja fait payer a M.

Le Loutre depuis l'annee derniere la somme de 11183l. 18s. pour acquitter les depenses qu'il fait journellement et je ne cesse de luy recommander de s'en tenir aux indispensables en evitant toujours de rien compromettre avec le gouvernement anglois." _Prevost au Ministre, 22 Juillet, 1750_.

_Payment for English Scalps in Time of Peace._--"Les Sauvages ont pris, il y a un mois, 18 chevelures angloises [_English scalps_,]

et M. Le Loutre a ete oblige de les payer 1800 l., argent de l'Acadie, dont je luy ay fait le rembours.e.m.e.nt." _Ibid., 16 Aout, 1753_.