Suppositos cineri doloso.”
During the one hundred and forty-seven years of which we speak, sixteen distinct wars with various Indian tribes or confederacies, averaging one every nine years, had been carried on at various points, from the extreme northeast to the farthest southern border. In these wars, formal expeditions were organized, bodies of troops, large for the populations, raised, equipped, and sent out amid the sighs of young ladies and the fears of their mothers, punishing old massacres, and wasting, like prairie fires, whole districts, and of course kindling other Indian resentments that swept back over the settlements.
Over nearly all of these combustible war piles it was found that French oil was poured to make the fire take readily, and French bellows were at work to blow the savage flames into a disastrous conflagration. Between these more formidable expeditions were interjected petty skirmishes, midnight attacks, sorties, and reprisals, as numerous and as little regarded by the colonists in general as railroad killings or corporation massacres with us. Guns and swords were as common in farmers’ houses, as spades and hoes to-day. Arrows to the right, left, and in front of them, pointed many colonial morals, and adorned many a sad tale of border life. Bloody Brooks were christened with red water in three different settlements; and poor, indeed, are the annals of that town—whose records reach back beyond the half-way mile-stone of the eighteenth century—that cannot show the garnishments of the bow and arrow. Few, indeed, were the families of New England that could keep the Passover, commemorative of exemptions from the terrible visitations of the Indian smiter.
Besides these chronic and almost ceaseless domestic troubles, the great continental wars—those of 1651 and 1664 between England and Holland, in 1656 between England and Spain, King William’s war from 1688 to 1697, Queen Anne’s from 1702 to 1713, and that free European fight for the Austrian succession which closed the half-century, covering in all twenty-nine years on this side the sea—drew between their mailed hands the tender Colonies, wrenched their young and growing interests from them, and hurled their protectors sometimes against the French of Acadia and New France, sometimes against the ever-hostile Indian tribes. The patched-up peaces which followed these great wars, and which covered the European breaches, left the colonial combatants battered and bruised, ragged in clothes, in debt for expenses, and in mourning for the lost, with Frenchmen and Indians irritated by the conflict, and goaded into hot revenges, which even the snows of New France could not cool.
In a word, the entire belt of land northwards and westward of the plantations was highly volcanic, some peak almost continually in eruption, while always throughout its whole extent mutterings under the cindered heat threatened wide-shaking action and crimsoned tidal waves.
The animosity between the French and English races in Europe, in 1754, almost surpasses our belief. For four centuries, from the days of Edward I. and the black-mailed Prince, who, with their armies, overran France, almost as numerously, and wrought as violently on her pride and taste as the irruptions of green-backed Americans to-day, French and English armies in the field, navies on the sea, wit, caricature, heavy-folioed bombs, light artillery, pasquinades, and exploding mines of sarcasm and raillery, not only mounded new graves on either side the Channel, and gashed ever-reminding physical wounds, but fretted and frayed Saxon self-complacency and Gallic egotism. Cressy, in 1346; Agincourt, in 1415; the battle of the Spurs, in 1513; the war in aid of the Huguenots, in 1627; Blenheim and Malplaquet, in 1706 and 1709,—planted bitter memories that waved continually in vigorous harvests of rancorous hatred. Jealous rivals stood by to remind each of her supposed disgraces, and thus to profit by new quarrels. Commercial competition rubbed salt water into the raw places. Differences of religious faith chafed them with brimstone. Squibs, tossed backwards and forwards, lit on inflamed parts, and raised national sores. Spanish-fly several times drew angry blisters, and proud flesh often set in around the edges. Plasters were of course put on by diplomatic surgeons; but the trouble was deeper than their patches could reach. The knife and steel scissors were then brought in again, and the national vivisections began anew. These surgical operations were almost constantly going on, and their description in Hume, Robertson, and other historians, might be appropriately called Memoirs of Celebrated Cases in Surgery.
It must be remembered that, at the period to which we are drawing the reader’s attention, railroads and swift steamers had not yet ironed out the stiff mastiff-like ruffles around the necks of these high-spirited, full-blooded nations. International expositions had not spread their cloths over the Field of Gold, on which rapiers should only be used to cut English roast beef and French pudding, and helmets be turned up into drinking-cups, to quaff, in cool Bordeaux, toasts to the entente cordial of solid peace. On the contrary, at the middle of the eighteenth century the mutual hatred of the two nations saturated everything. National drinks, popular on one side of the twenty-mile strait which parted the imbibers, were poisons on the other. Clothes, worn by one race, were not only shunned, but caricatured with pen and pencil by the other. The paintings, the plastic arts, the literature, and legislation of the period have preserved in enduring forms the widely felt antipathy. Their mutual rancor dissolved the obligations of courtesy, dripped through diplomatic despatches, and left the green mould of jealousy on all the relations of the two governments, and even the business transactions of their people.
This envenomed home feeling had early crossed the Atlantic, and lost none of its acridity on the passage. In point of time the English were before the French in their American discoveries, but in settlement the French preceded the English. While the Cabots, the first Englishmen who ran down our country, touching in 1498 at Newfoundland, and thence coasting along our shores as far as Florida, without leaving any colonists behind them, anticipated Verizzanni, the first French discoverer in America, by twenty-five years, the French under Cartier in 1534, Roberval in 1542, and Ribault in 1562, landed and made fugitive settlements at various points, from the Huguenot plantation in South Carolina northwards around the present Provinces of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and up the St. Lawrence as far westward as Montreal. Over this entire broad strip they had affixed the label “New France.” The English made no further discoveries of, nor any settlements in, America, after Cabot’s expedition, until 1583, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert, freighted with a charter from Queen Elizabeth, sailed for Virginia with a company of settlers. This was rapidly followed up, with little permanent result, however, by Raleigh, Granville, and Gosnold. The French settlement of Port Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, antedated that of the English at Jamestown five years.
England and France now vied with each other in granting large deeds of American territory, most of which conflicted with each other, as their martial deeds had done at home. The English Henry VII. granted to Mr. John Cabot all the lands which he might discover, reserving to his royal self a small commission of twenty per cent. Five years later the French Henry IV., without employing any lawyer to search the title, gave to De Monts so much of the same North American lot as now embraces Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, the New England States, and the confederated Dominion of Canada. Other unwarrantable warranty deeds were subsequently made and done by the rival grantors, involving the titles in distressing doubt and confusion. Military actions of ejectment followed. As early as 1629, Champlain and his French colony were driven from Quebec, like squatters on the property of another, and the French would then have been all ejected from New France but for an unwise and ignorant settlement between the two large European landlords, called the Treaty of 1630. Subsequently the French were dispossessed, as we have elsewhere recorded, of patches of the large estate given to De Monts,—Nova Scotia in 1710, and Cape Breton in 1745,—mere strips, it is true, compared with that broad-sweeping tract around which they had carried chain and compass, and planted the boundary stakes of stockades and forts, but which touched their national pride at its very heart centre.
