American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

But the number of army commissions, civil offices, and fur trade licenses lagged behind the proliferating children of seigneurial families. Inhibited from entering trade by their code of nobility, growing numbers dwelled in genteel indolence and poverty.

Far more readily than their English or Dutch competitors, the French traders married native women, which proved critical to their persistent predominance in the fur trade of the Great Lakes country.

The Indians accepted the terminology only because they understood it very differently, for they did not have patriarchal families. In their matrilineal kinship systems, mothers and uncles had far more authority than did fathers. The natives happily called the French their “fathers” in the expectation that they would behave like Indian fathers: indulgent, generous, and weak.

To a far greater degree than in Canada, the French used Louisiana as a penal colony, which further undermined its reputation.

Conditions, however, improved during the 1740s as the surviving colonists acquired partial immunities to the fevers and developed sufficient farms to feed themselves.

Despite the virtual cessation of both European emigration and slave imports after 1731, the Louisiana population grew by natural increase to 4,100 slaves, 3,300 settlers, and 600 soldiers by 1746.

At its core, Louisiana was a plantation colony with an enslaved African majority, a much poorer and smaller version of South Carolina, which had 41,000 slave and 20,000 free colonists in 1745.

Louisiana failed to develop a profitable export staple. The planters raised inferior grades of tobacco and indigo that sold in France for less than the high costs of production and shipment. Shipping was usually scarce and always expensive, because the voyage around Florida and across the Atlantic was very long and dangerously exposed to pirates, sandbars, and hurricanes. Because many mariners refused to sail to Louisiana, planters often could not ship their crop before it spoiled and usually had to pay prohibitive freight ch...

Unchecked by an electorate and far from imperial supervision, the Louisiana officials were notoriously corrupt.

Lacking a profitable economy and suffering from corrupt government, the colony cost much more to administer than it yielded in revenue. After losing 20 million livres on Louisiana, the bankrupt Company of the Indies surrendered the colony to the French crown in 1731.

In the French imperial scheme, Louisiana was the least valuable colony, lagging behind even Canada, to say nothing of the valuable French West Indies.

As with New France, the crown retained Louisiana primarily for its strategic value in confining the British colonies to the east.

When a slave assaulted a planter or officer, he could expect to be broken on the wheel, but a slave who crippled a common soldier merely suffered the loss of an ear and a flogging. The elite reasoned that a slave was too valuable to be executed for injuring a cheaper and more expendable soldier.

In sum, the 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.

Relative to the French, the British colonists enjoyed greater liberties from, and voice within, their government—and more shared power over slaves.

Britain’s libertarian tradition compared with the more authoritarian ethos of France.

The crown retained New Mexico primarily as a military buffer zone meant to maximize the distance between valuable Mexico to the south and the rival European empires, which were growing more powerful, to the northeast.

Although commercially weaker than the British of Carolina, the French of Louisiana had the edge as Indian traders over the Spanish of New Mexico. Compared with the French, Spanish workshops were less productive and Spanish shipping was more expensive.

By combining Hispanic horses with French guns, many native bands reinvented themselves as buffalo-hunting nomads, which brought them unprecedented prosperity and power.

Rather than class, the most important distinction in nomad society was gender. Women gathered seeds and fruits, fetched wood and water, and cured and tanned animal hides to make clothing and tipis. Although men led the hunts, these often involved everyone in a band, young and old, women and men, to surround, drive, and kill the buffalo.

Two horses and a few knives could usually purchase an adolescent Indian girl—the preferred commodity of the slave trade. Male captives were worth half as much.

In fact, the association of Great Plains Indians with the horse is relatively recent and depended upon the colonial intrusion. Although horses first evolved in North America, before spreading eastward into Asia and Europe about twelve thousand years ago, they had become extinct in this continent by about ten thousand years ago. During the sixteenth century, the horse returned to North America as a domesticated animal kept by the Hispanic colonists.

Not until the late seventeenth century did the Pueblo and Apache acquire horses from the New Mexicans, by a mixture of illicit trade and nocturnal raiding.

Common among the Indians of the southern plains by 1720, horses spread to the northern plains by 1750.

In the short run, the horse improved life substantially for the village dwellers and immensely for the nomads.

The horse simply enabled them to extend their seasonal hunts deeper into the plains and to bring more meat and robes back to their villages.

In addition, several Algonquian-speaking peoples, including the Blackfoot, Plains Cree, Gros Ventre, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, moved westward from homelands at the headwaters of the Mississippi or in the southern reaches of the Hudson Bay watershed. In sum, most of the Indian peoples we now associate with the Great Plains were relative newcomers who arrived during the eighteenth century.

Unwelcome intruders in the eyes of the longer-term residents, the newcomers provoked frictions that led to widespread warfare between men on horseback.

In 1800 a trader on the northern plains marveled at the abundant buffalo and remarked, “This is a delightful country, and were it not for perpetual wars, the natives might be the happiest people on earth.”

The prevalence of epidemics also promoted a fatalism about early death and a zeal to prove courage and prowess before it was too late.

Because so many males died in their youth or prime, women outnumbered men, which encouraged polygamy by the most successful warriors.

Environmentally, the horse-centered way of life was highly unstable. Near their encampments the Indians concentrated horses in numbers greater than the local grass could bear. The strain was greatest in the winter, when the people were least mobile and the grass was less nutritious, but the horses needed more calories to stay warm. Consequently, the horse herds depleted the most fragile, scarce, and important niches on the Great Plains: the river and stream valleys that provided the winter refuges.

As natives increased their hunt to serve commerce as well as subsistence, the buffalo died in unprecedented numbers. The diminished herds intensified the violent competition between native peoples.

On the Great Plains, the eighteenth century was a period of violent flux as native peoples competed to exploit the buffalo and to steal horses and women.

But the Hispanic losses to the Apache paled by comparison to Apache sufferings at the hands of the Comanche and their Wichita allies. Some Apache became so desperate that they sought Hispanic protection by entering the mission system.

Increasingly beleaguered, Texas and New Mexico became shrinking Hispanic pockets amid increasingly powerful Indian enemies. During the mid-eighteenth century on the northern frontier of New Spain, the colonial conquest seemed to shift into reverse, as Hispanic defenses weakened.

During the 1770s and 1780s, Spanish officials rescued New Mexico by adopting reforms that bolstered the frontier defenses.

But the British colonists dissipated their numerical advantage by their division into fourteen distinct mainland colonies (Nova Scotia was the fourteenth, neglected by historians who speak of only thirteen). The

That Indian support, however, was soft, because the British colonists had one great countervailing advantage; although rude and intrusive, they offered superior trade goods in abundant quantities and at relatively attractive prices. Dependent upon European cloth, metals, and alcohol, native peoples often embraced the better deals that British traders offered for their deerskins and beaver pelts. In wartime, the British navy compounded the trade advantage by controlling the sea lanes and destroying French merchant shipping.

Montcalm also weakened his victories by alienating many of his Indian allies. A regular officer trained in Europe, Montcalm despised the disorder and atrocities of frontier raiding—a mode of war that the Canadian-born Vaudreuil championed as essential to the defense of undermanned New France. At Lake George, Montcalm enraged the Indians with his well-intentioned but ineffectual attempts to liberate their prisoners.

In Great Britain the embarrassing military setbacks of 1755–57 brought to power a new and more competent administration headed by William Pitt, a blunt man whose ability matched his towering ego.

Instead of ordering colonial cooperation, Pitt bought it by reimbursing in cash their expenditures, which dramatically increased the colonial contributions. Although politically expedient, Pitt’s policy was financially reckless: by augmenting the monstrous public debt, Pitt saddled the colonists and Britons with a burden that would violently disrupt the empire after the war.

France could muster only 6,800 regulars and 2,700 provincials, supplemented by volatile Indian warriors and drafted Canadian militiamen. Their morale flagged as hunger prevailed in Canada after the disappointing harvests of 1757 and 1758.

The skyrocketing price of food devastated the Canadian economy and virtually bankrupted the colonial government. Putting a higher priority on operations in Europe, the French government virtually wrote off Canada, leaving Vaudreuil and Montcalm to muddle and squabble through with their small and shrinking forces.

The British war effort in North America also thrived as the royal navy won control of the Atlantic, reducing the reinforcements and supplies that reached New France.

The conquest of Canada cost the British empire about £4 million, more than ten times what the French spent to defend it. Never before had any empire spent so much money to wage war on a transoceanic scale.

In 1759 the British reaffirmed their naval supremacy by crippling the Spanish and French fleets in battles at Lagos, off Portugal, and Quiberon Bay, on the west coast of France. In the Caribbean, a British amphibious operation captured the lucrative sugar island of Guadeloupe. In West Africa, the British seized the French slaving entrepôt at Senegal. The British also secured a dominant position in India by routing the French and their local allies.

the Spanish remained on the sidelines, but they became alarmed as continued British victories shattered the old balance of power. Instead of reversing the British victories, the Spanish entry escalated them. British forces captured Manila in the Philippines and the great port of Havana on Cuba, where the Spanish had stored much of their Mexican bullion. Another British fleet and army seized the sugar-rich French West Indian islands of Martinique, Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada, and St. Vincent. So many victories embarrassed British diplomats striving to draw the proud French and Spanish to negotiate peace.

As a sop to their Spanish allies, the French gave them New Orleans and most of Louisiana (west of the Mississippi River).

To regain Havana, the Spanish ceded Florida to the British.