There was a keen rivalry between church and state for dominance in this new empire. In 1659 arrived at Quebec a young prelate of noble birth, Francois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, who had come to rule the church in Canada. An ascetic, who practised the whole cycle of medieval austerities, he was determined that Canada should be ruled by the church, and he desired for New France a Puritanism as strict as that of New England. His especial zeal was directed towards the welfare of the Indians. These people showed, to their own ruin, a reckless liking for the brandy of the white man. Laval insisted that the traders should not supply brandy to the natives. He declared excommunicate any one who did so and for a time he triumphed. More than once he drove from Canada governors who tried to thwart him. In 1663 he was actually invited to choose a governor after his own mind and did so, but with no cessation of the old disputes. In 1672 Louis de Buade, comte de Frontenac (q.v.), was named governor of New France, and in him the church found her match. Yet not at once; for, after a bitter struggle, he was recalled in 1682. But Canada needed him. He knew how to control the ferocious Iroquois, who had cut off France from access to Lake Ontario; to check them he had built a fort where now stands the city of Kingston. With Frontenac gone, these savages almost strangled the colony. On a stormy August night in 1689 1500 Iroquois burst in on the village of Lachine near Montreal, butchered 200 of its people, and carried off more than 100 to be tortured to death at their leisure. Then the strong man Frontenac was recalled to face the crisis.
It was a critical era. James II. had fallen in England, and William III. was organizing Europe against French aggression. France’s plan for a great empire in America was now taking shape and there, as in Europe, a deadly Struggles with England. struggle with England was inevitable. Frontenac planned attacks upon New England and encouraged a ruthless border warfare that involved many horrors. Him, in return, the English attacked. Sir William Phips sailed from Boston in 1690, conquered Acadia, now Nova Scotia, and then hazarded the greater task of leading a fleet up the St Lawrence against Quebec. On the 16th of October 1690 thirty-four English ships, some of them only fishing craft, appeared in its basin and demanded the surrender of the town. When Frontenac answered defiantly, Phips attacked the place; but he was repulsed and in the end sailed away unsuccessful.
Each side had now begun to see that the vital point was control of the interior, which time was to prove the most extensive fertile area in the world. La Salle’s expedition had aroused the French to the importance of the Mississippi, and they soon had a bold plan to occupy it, to close in from the rear on the English on the Atlantic coast, seize their colonies and even deport the colonists. The plan was audacious, for the English in America outnumbered the French by twenty to one. But their colonies were democracies, disunited because each was pursuing its own special interests, while the French were united under despotic leadership. Frontenac attacked the Iroquois mercilessly in 1696 and forced these proud savages to sue for peace. But in the next year was made the treaty of Ryswick, which brought a pause in the conflict, and in 1698 Frontenac died.
After Frontenac the Iroquois, though still hostile to France, are formidable no more, and the struggle for the continent is frankly between the English and the French. The peace of Ryswick proved but a truce, and when in 1701, on the death of the exiled James II., Louis XIV. flouted the claims of William III. to the throne of England by proclaiming as king James’s son, renewed war was inevitable. In Europe it saw the brilliant victories of Marlborough; in America it was less decisive, but France lost heavily. Though the English, led by Sir Hovenden Walker, made in 1711 an effort to take Quebec which proved abortive, they seized Nova Scotia; and when the treaty of Utrecht was made in 1713, France admitted defeat in America by yielding to Britain her claims to Hudson Bay, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. But she still held the shores of the St Lawrence, and she retained, too, the island of Cape Breton to command its mouth. There she built speedily the fortress of Louisbourg, and prepared once more to challenge British supremacy in America. With a sound instinct that looked to future greatness, France still aimed, more and more, at the control of the interior of the Continent. The danger from the Iroquois on Lake Ontario had long cut her off from the most direct access to the West, and from the occupation of the Ohio valley leading to the Mississippi, but now free from this savage scourge she could go where she would. In 1701 she founded Detroit, commanding the route from Lake Erie to Lake Huron. Her missionaries and leaders were already at Sault Ste Marie commanding the approach to Lake Superior, and at Michilimackinac commanding that to Lake Michigan. They had also penetrated to what is now the Canadian West, and it was a French Canadian, La Vérendrye, who, by the route leading past the point where now stands the city of Winnipeg, pressed on into the far West until in 1743, first recorded of white men, he came in sight of the Rocky Mountains. In the south of the continent France also crowned La Salle’s work by founding early in the 18th century New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. It was a far cry from New Orleans to Quebec. If France could link them by a chain of settlements and shut in the English to their narrow strip of Atlantic seaboard there was good promise that North America would be hers.
The project was far-reaching, but France could do little to make it effective. Louis XV. allowed her navy to decline and her people showed little inclination for emigration to the colonies. In 1744, when the war of the Austrian Succession broke out, the New England colonies planned and in 1745 effected the capture of Louisbourg, the stronghold of France in Cape Breton Island, which menaced their commerce. But to their disgust, when the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was made in 1748, this conquest was handed back to France. She continued her work of building a line of forts on the great lakes—on the river Niagara, on the Ohio, on the Mississippi; and the English colonies, with the enemy thus in their rear, grew ever more restive. In 1753 Virginia warned the French on the Ohio that they were encroaching on British territory. The next year, in circumstances curiously like those which were repeated when the French expedition under Marchand menaced Britain in Egypt by seeking to establish a post on the Upper Nile, George Washington, a young Virginian officer, was sent to drive the French from their Fort Duquesne on the Ohio river, where now stands Pittsburgh. The result was sharp fighting between English and French in a time of nominal peace. In 1755 the British took the stern step of deporting the Acadian French from Nova Scotia. Though this province had been ceded to Great Britain in 1713 many of the Acadians had refused to accept British sovereignty. In 1749 the British founded Halifax, began to colonize Nova Scotia, and, with war imminent, deemed it prudent to disperse the Acadians, chiefly along the Atlantic seaboard (see [Nova Scotia]: History). In 1756 the Seven Years’ War definitely began. France had no resources to cope with those of Britain in America, and the British command of the sea proved decisive. On the 13th of September 1759 Wolfe won his great victory before Quebec, which involved the fall of that place, and a year later at Montreal the French army in Canada surrendered. By the peace of Paris, 1763, the whole of New France was finally ceded to Great Britain.
With only about 60,000 French in Canada at the time of the conquest it might have seemed as if this population would soon be absorbed by the incoming British. Some thought that, under a Protestant sovereign, the Canadian English possesion. Catholics would be rapidly converted to Protestantism. But the French type proved stubbornly persistent and to this day dominates the older Canada. The first English settlers in the conquered country were chiefly petty traders, not of a character to lead in social or public affairs. The result was that the government of the time co-operated rather with the leaders among the French.
After peace was concluded in 1763, Canada was governed under the authority of a royal proclamation, but sooner or later a constitution specially adapted to the needs of the country was inevitable. In 1774 this was provided by the Quebec Act passed by the Imperial parliament. Under this act the western territory which France had claimed, extending as far as the Mississippi and south to the Ohio, was included with Canada in what was called the Province of Quebec. This vast territory was to be governed despotically from Quebec; the Roman Catholic church was given its old privileges in Canada; and the French civil law was established permanently side by side with the English criminal law. The act linked the land-owning class in Canada and the church by ties of self-interest to the British cause. The habitant, placed again under their authority, had less reason to be content.
In 1775 began the American Revolution. Its leaders tried to make the revolt continental, and invaded Canada, hoping that the French would join them. They took Montreal and besieged Quebec during the winter of 1775-1776; but the prudent leadership of Sir Guy Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester, saved Quebec and in 1776 the revolutionary army withdrew unsuccessful from Canada. Since that time any prospect of Canada’s union to the United States has been very remote.
But the American Revolution profoundly influenced the life of Canada. The country became the refuge of thousands of American loyalists who would not desert Great Britain. To Nova Scotia, to what are now New Brunswick (q.v.) and Ontario (q.v.) they fled in numbers not easily estimated, but probably reaching about 40,000. Until this time the present New Brunswick and Ontario had contained few European settlers; now they developed, largely under the influence of the loyalists of the Revolution. This meant that the American type of colonial life would be reproduced in Canada; but it meant also bitter hostility on the part of these colonists to the United States, which refused in any way to compensate the loyalists for their confiscated property. Great Britain did something; the loyalists received liberal grants of land and cash compensation amounting to nearly £4,000,000.
A prevailingly French type of government was now no longer adequate in Canada, and in 1791 was passed by the British parliament the Constitutional Act, separating Canada at the Ottawa river into two parts, each with its own government; Lower Canada, chiefly French, retaining the old system of laws, with representative institutions now added, and Upper Canada, on the purely British model. (For the history of Lower and Upper Canada, now Quebec and Ontario, the separate articles must be consulted.) Each province had special problems; the French in Lower Canada aimed at securing political power for their own race, while in Upper Canada there was no race problem, and the great struggle was for independence of official control and in all essential matters for government by the people. It may be doubted whether at this time it would have been safe to give these small communities complete self-government. But this a clamorous radical element demanded insistently, and the issue was the chief one in Canada for half a century.