about two million acres to promoters and speculators in the Ohio Valley. These efforts could not fail to attract the attention of the French, who were already established in the St. Lawrence and Mississippi valleys, and in the lake region, and who were at this time planning to seize the Ohio valley. Although this will be discussed at length later, it may be noted in passing that this situation gave George Washington his first important public mission. In 1753 Governor Dinwiddie sent him into the valley to warn the French to keep out. Dinwiddie himself was anxious to meet the French threat with force, and in February 1754 he issued a proclamation, urging men to enlist for service in the West, and promising to all volunteers grants of land in the Ohio valley. This proclamation furnished the basis for subsequent claims put in by Virginia soldiers, in whose rights George Washington was actively interested. In the meantime, promoters in other colonies were becoming interested in the prospects in this region. Philadelphia merchants, unwilling to see Virginia monopolize the new territory, were planning to send fur-traders into the valley, and Benjamin Franklin tried to arouse enough interest to bring about the establishment of new colonies there. The outbreak of the Seven Years' War put a temporary stop to all those plans for pushing the settled areas over the Allegheny Mountains, but after the English captured Fort Duquesne, in November 1758, the Ohio Company and other parties all showed a lively interest in land grants and settlement. To the Americans the West had long been the land of opportunity, and there was no thought of holding back merely because of a range of mountains. If democracy existed at all in these two widely different communities, tidewater and Piedmont, it was to be found in the latter. Equality of economic condition and of opportunity, plus hard work, made for political equality. In the older sections there was no democracy during colonial days. Every colony had its ruling class: merchants in New England, merchants and great land holders in New York, merchants in Pennsylvania, and planters in the South. By means of property qualifications they kept laborers and tenants away from the polls, and by means of social distinctions and discriminations they kept the fact of inequality always in evidence. Democracy was not an importation from abroad, but a product of the frontier. As for liberty, it seemed clear that the ruling class THE OHIO VALLEY 113 defended their own "against the encroachments of their equals in England, without sharing it with their inferiors in the colonies." Without the impetus of the West, exerted both directly and indirectly, it is more than doubtful if the Revolution would have occurred. Many of the causes of this movement had their origin in western problems, such as the notorious Stamp Act for example, and it was from the Piedmont, rather than from the Tidewater, that the greatest strength of the movement was derived. But before that chapter in American growth can be covered, it is necessary to see how the expulsion of the French completely altered the relations between the colonies and England. CHAPTER XII THE EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH Because of the tendency of the British colonies to expand into the West, they would sooner or later have come into conflict with the French, whose settlements, or rather fur-trading posts, bordered the whole northern and western frontiers in an arc reaching from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi. It seems certain that the contest for possession of the Ohio valley would have come anyway, even if both sets of settlements, French and English, had been entirely independent of Europe. If wars are ever inevitable, those are most certainly so which result from a crossing of the natural lines of expansion of two energetic, aggressive peoples. But the American and French colonists were not independent of Europe, and therefore their own quarrels were intensified by the long-drawn-out controversy between France and England. From the accession of William of Orange in 1689 to the Peace of Paris in 1763, or perhaps better until 1815, those two governments were engaged in a struggle for commerce and colonies. There were intervals of peace between those dates, to be sure, but they were only truces, during which one or the other, if not both, combatants could prepare for the next plunge. In these contests, there were always two sets of issues involved, one bound up with the balance in the New World, the other with the balance in Europe. Thus the lack of stability in European relationships subjected the Americans to more than one aspect of the "Gallic peril," and made them dependent upon England for protection. The constant pressure of a common enemy and the continuous need of help served to conceal from almost every one, on both sides of the Atlantic, that steady growth toward national maturity described in the preceding chapters. The expulsion of the French from North America, the result of the Seven Years' War, was the biggest single factor in American colonial history, for it made independence a possibility. Furthermore, the war served to reveal more clearly than ever before both the lack of imperial loyalty in the colonies and the startling weaknesses in the FRENCH COLONIZATION 115 whole imperial system. With the traditional danger gone, it is not surprising that the British officials should have attempted to solve the problems brought to light by the war; in doing so, they made possible the loss of the colonies. FRENCH COLONIZATION Perhaps the germs of Anglo-French rivalry should be sought back in the days of James I and Henry IV, for Quebec was founded the year after Jamestown. Champlain had begun his explorations along the St. Lawrence in 1603. During these years of beginnings, he gave the Iroquois Indians their first sight of firearms, and by unnecessary shooting, he made them the bitter enemies of the French. As a result, when the French tried to seize northern and western New York, they found the Iroquois always ready to block their way. In the course of the seventeenth century the French established their centers at both Quebec and Montreal, and worked back toward the Lake region. Here widely scattered, thinly populated fur-trading posts, like Fort Frontenac at the outlet of Lake Ontario, Niagara, Detroit, and others strengthened their hold on the country, and at the same time revealed the true nature of the French enterprise. They were not interested in farms, but in furs, so they could cultivate the friendship of the Indians—as they did after Champlain's unfortunate blunder with the Iroquois-instead of exterminating them, as the English farmers not infrequently did. The French preferred to keep the virgin territory unspoiled. At the same time, they brought spiritual blessings in the introduction of the Roman Catholic faith, which the Indians adopted as the half-savage Franks under Clovis had done in their day. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, La Salle began to investigate the possibilities along the lower Mississippi, the same region that Spanish explorers had discovered, and virtually abandoned a hundred and fifty odd years before. In 1682, the great Frenchman built a fort at St. Louis, thus taking the first step in the project of linking up the St. Lawrence and the Lakes with the Mississippi. Settlement in this newer part of New France, or Louisiana, as it was called, came slowly. New Orleans was not founded until 1718, and by 1750 the region could boast only six thousand inhabitants, two thousand of whom were negro slaves. The others were mostly officials, traders, soldiers, or missionaries; real home-builders, of the type so common in English settlements, were rare. Champlain and La Salle were the founders of New France; the builders of it were Louis XIV; his famous financial adviser, Colbert; and the agent of these two, Count Frontenac, governor of Canada from 1672 to 1698, with the exception of the seven years before 1689. Supported by his superiors in France, Frontenac aimed to enlarge the French colonial holdings, and to increase the strength of his army. As a means to the first end, he cultivated the Indians in the Ohio valley, and made a vigorous effort to win the Iroquois over from their English connections. While the English were establishing themselves on the seaboard, the French were looking toward the control of the great central valleys of North America. In their plans, the Ohio valley played a conspicuous part because it furnished a much shorter route from Canada to Louisiana than that around by the Great Lakes. Signs of friction between the expanding interests were not slow in appearing. One reason for the establishment of the New England Confederation was to provide for defense against possible French forays down the Connecticut valley. Then with the establishment of the Hudson Bay Company in 1670, the Restoration promoters planned to secure a share of the fur-trade, by establishing a line of communication with the Lake region which should be beyond the reach of French influence. Again in 1685, Governor Dongan of New York, working with the Five Nations, had an ambitious plan to divert some or all of the fur-trade from Montreal to Albany. This plan failed, not because of any inherent unsoundness, or lack of power, but largely because the New England colonies would have nothing to do with it. On account of the absolute necessity of cooperation, Dongan had to abandon the enterprise. It was this policy that was closely bound up with the Andros experiment in New England. ANGLO-FRENCH WARS But these thrusts were merely preliminary and experimental. In 1690 Louis XIV became involved in the third one of his wars, the War of the League of Augsburg, or of the Palatinate, as Europeans describe it, while the Americans prefer to call it King William's War. Frontenac had his eyes fixed on the Hudson River and New York, |