American Colonies: The Settling of North America

Chapter 16 loops back around to New France. In 1663 the French Crown took control of Canada from the fur-trading Company of New France and began to incentivize lagging immigration numbers with money. Like in the Chesapeake and the West Indies, most emigrants were poor young men who arrived as indentured servants (called engagés) to rich seigneurs. But the Crown failed to offer sufficient incentives for permanent residence and, in 1673 when subsidies slowed, so did emigration (365-66).

The French poor had good reason to immigrate (unlike the Dutch, with their high standard of living in the Netherlands), but cultural values kept them on their family farms. Many others were conscripted into Louis XIV’s army. Those who did immigrate preferred the warmer West Indies—Canada was seen as cold, dangerous, and demanding. Farming was difficult, and export to France was costly and time-consuming.

Throughout its existence, the French Canadian economy depended on the Crown for money (370). But most immigrants to Canada, called habitants, flourished, with better food, home ownership, no direct taxes, and lower tithes (370-71). A lack of surplus led to rough equality (371). While women in New France were still subordinate to men, they enjoyed more legal and economic equality than their English counterparts (372).

But France’s “governing ethos was paternalistic and monarchical rather than commercial and libertarian” (373). Louis XIV appointed three officials to govern New France—one military, one civil, and one religious—who acted as counter-balances to each other at the expense of efficiency. Catholicism was the only religion allowed. Local autonomy was limited; there were no elective assemblies, no schools, and no local governments. Vulnerability to the English necessitated military garrisons, with military leadership and the seigneurs kept separate to diffuse power. But the seigneurial class effectively imported the Old World nobility; social rank was essentially immutable (375).

While most habitants of the 18th century settled in the St. Lawrence Valley, there was opportunity for the minority who settled in the “upper country” across the Great Lakes. There, Indian refugees fleeing the Iroquois were forced into common social groups, requiring a third party to intermediate by providing access to trade goods (377-78). While some French traders, couriers de bois, married native women and integrated into native kin networks, in the 1680s many French met the Indians in the “middle ground” as gift-givers and resolvers of disputes (378-79). Armed with French firearms, the upper-country Indians forced peace with the Iroquois in 1701. But the defeat of their common enemy intensified infighting among the Indians and incentivized the French to cut costs by withholding the gifts, weakening their standing and leading to conflict (379-81).

In French territory to the south, the economy of Louisiana’s interior plantation zone was unprofitable due to agricultural challenges, disease, and issues with shipping. Habitants continued to rely on Crown subsidies and deerskin trade with the Indians. Officials of Louisiana’s arbitrary government were also notoriously corrupt (384-86). The elite distrusted Indians, enslaved Africans, and lower-class whites alike, as the latter were largely felons and vagrants, contrasting with “the British colonial tendency toward a greater, formal equality and liberty for all white men” (388).

Louisiana’s fortified interior could afford to treat Indians poorly, but in the frontier, the French had to compete with the English Carolinians for native allies. The upper-country model inspired them to act as a stabilizing force in the south as “an alternative to the Spanish mission system and the Carolina slave trade” (383). Indians generally preferred the French as allies; the inferiority and higher price of their goods was offset by the Carolinians’ poor treatment of Indians. But French and Indian interaction was not uniformly peaceful. Native confederations of misplaced tribes emerged “in response to the more violent world wrought by the European invasion” (391). A 1729 surprise attack by the Natchez, which unified African slaves with Indian rebels, terrified the French colonists (389-90). Eventually, a colony that had prized the idea of being mediator in an unstable region reverted to the usual brutal European colonial tactics (393-94).

Finally, the Company of the Indies surrendered Louisiana to the Crown in 1731, who kept it, despite being a money sink, for its strategic value in keeping the British contained to the east (386). New France was never profitable to Paris and was maintained at great cost to contain the English to the Atlantic seaboard.