The Conquest of New France Part 3

The real goal which Mackenzie sought was that of La Verendrye, a western and not a northern ocean. Three years later, after months of preparation, he attempted the great feat of crossing the Rocky Mountains to the sea. After nine months of rugged travel, across mountain streams and gorges, in peril daily from hostile savages, on July 22, 1793, he reached the sh.o.r.e of the Pacific Ocean, the first white man to go by land over the width of the continent from sea to sea. It was thus a Scotchman who achieved that of which La Verendrye had so long dreamed; and with no aid from the state but with only the resources of a trading company.

Ten years later, when France sold to the United States her last remaining territory of Louisiana, the American Government equipped an expedition under Lewis and Clark to cross the Rocky Mountains by way of the Missouri, the route from which the La Verendrye brothers had been obliged to turn back. The party began the ascent of the Missouri on May 14, 1804, and arrived in the Mandan country in the late autumn. Here they spent the winter of 1804-05. Not until November 15, 1805, had they completed the hard journey across the Rocky Mountains and reached the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean. Little did La Verendrye, in his eager search for the Western Sea, imagine the difficulties to be encountered and the hardships to be endured by those who were destined, in later days, to realize his dream.

CHAPTER VI. The Valley Of The Ohio

Almost at the moment in 1749 when British ships were lying at anchor in Halifax harbor and sending to sh.o.r.e hundreds of boatloads of dazed and expectant settlers for the new colony, there had set out from Montreal, in the interests of France, an expedition with designs so far-reaching that we wonder still at the stupendous issues involved in efforts which seem so petty. The purpose of France was now to make good her claim to the whole vast West. It was a picturesque company which pushed its canoes from the sh.o.r.e at Lachine on the 15th of June, six days before the British squadron reached Halifax. There was a procession of twenty-three great birchbark canoes well filled, for in them were more than two hundred men, at least ten in each canoe, together with the necessary impedimenta for a long journey. There were twenty soldiers in uniform, a hundred and eighty Canadians skilled in paddling and in carrying canoes and freight over the portages, a band of Indians, and fourteen officers with Celoron de Blainville at their head.

The acting Governor of Canada at this time was a dwarf in physique, but a giant in intellect, the brilliant naval officer, the Marquis de la Galissoniere, destined later to inflict upon the English in the Mediterranean the naval defeat which caused the execution of Admiral Byng as a coward. This remarkable man-planning, like his predecessor Frontenac, on a scale suited to world politics-saw that the peace of 1748 settled nothing, that in the balance now was the whole future of North America, and that victory would be to the alert and the strong. He chose Celoron, the most capable of the hardy young Canadian n.o.blesse whom he had at hand, a man accustomed to the life of the forest, and sent with him this large party to a.s.sert against the English the right of France to the valley of the Ohio. The English were now to be shut out definitely from advancing westward and to be confined to the strip of territory lying between the Atlantic coast and the Alleghany Mountains, a little more than that strip fifty miles wide talked about in Quebec as the maximum concession of France, but still not very much according to the ideas of the English, and even this not secure if France should ever grow strong enough to crowd them out.

At no time do we find more vivid the contrast in type between the two nations. Before a concrete fact the British take action. When they gave up Louisbourg they built Halifax. Their traders had pressed into the Ohio country, not directed under any grandiose idea of empire, but simply as individuals, to trade and reap for themselves what profit they could. When they were checked and menaced by the French, they saw that something must be done. How they did it we shall see presently. It was the weakness of the English colonies that they could not unite to work out a great plan. If Virginia took steps to advance westward, Pennsylvania was jealous lest lands which she desired should go to a rival colony. France, on the other hand, had complete unity of design. Celoron spoke in the name of the King of France and he spoke in terms uncompromising enough. "The Ohio," said the King of France through his agent, "belongs to me." It is a French river. The lands bordering upon it are "my lands." The English intruders are foreign robbers and not one of them is to be left in the western country: "I wilt not endure the English on my land." The Indians, dwelling in that region, are "my children."

Scattered over the vast region about the Great Lakes were a good many French. At the lower end of Lake Ontario stood Fort Frontenac, a menace to the colony of New York, as the dwellers in the British post of Oswego on the opposite sh.o.r.e of the lake well knew. We have already seen that the French held a fort at Niagara guarding the route leading farther west to Lake Erie and to regions beyond Lake Erie, by way of the Ohio or the upper lakes, to the Mississippi. Near the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans was now becoming a considerable town with a governor independent of the governor at Quebec. Along the Mississippi at strategic points stretching northward beyond the mouth of the Missouri were a few French settlements, ragged enough and with a shiftless population of fur traders and farmers, but adequate to a.s.sert France's possession of that mighty highway. The weak point in France's position was in her connection of the Mississippi with the St. Lawrence by way of the Ohio. This was the place of danger, for here English rivalry was strongest, and it was to cure this weakness that Celoron was now sent forth.

Celoron moved toilsomely over the portage which led past the great cataract of Niagara and launched his canoes on Lake Erie. From its south sh.o.r.e, during seven days of heart-breaking labor, the party dragged the canoes and supplies through dense forest and over steep hills until they reached Chautauqua Lake, the waters of which flow into the Allegheny River and by it to the Ohio. For many weary days they went with the current, stopping at Indian villages, treating with the savages, who were sometimes awed and sometimes menacing. They warned the Indians to have no dealings with the scheming English who would "infallibly prove to be robbers," and a.s.serted as boldly as Celoron dared the lordship of the King of France and his love for his forest children. Celoron realized that he was on an historic mission. At several points on the Ohio, with great ceremony, he buried leaden plates, as La Verendrye had done a few years earlier in the far West, bearing an inscription declaring that, in the name of the King of France, he took possession of the country. On trees over these memorials of lead he nailed the arms of France, stamped on sheets of tin. Since that day at least three of the plates have been found.

Celoron's expedition went well enough. He advanced as far west on the Ohio as the mouth of the Great Miami River, then up that river, and by difficult portages back to Lake Erie. It was a remarkable journey; but in the late autumn he was back again in Montreal, not sure that he had achieved much. The natives of the country were, he thought, hostile to France and devoted to the English who had long traded with them. This opinion was in truth erroneous, for, when the time of testing came, the Indians of the West fought on the side of France. Montcalm had many hundreds of them under his banner. The expedition meant the definite and final throwing down of the gauntlet by France. With all due ceremony she had declared that the Ohio country was hers and that there she would allow no English to dwell.

Legardeur de Saint-Pierre could hardly have known, when he left the hard region of the Saskatchewan in 1752, that a year later he would be sent to protect another set of outposts of France in the West. In 1753 we find him in command of the French forces in the Ohio country. Celoron had been sent to Detroit. If Saint-Pierre had played his part feebly on the Saskatchewan, he was now made for a brief period one of the central figures in the opening act of a world drama. It is with a touch of emotion that we see on the stage, as the opponent of this not great Frenchman, the momentous figure of George Washington.

The fight for North America was now rapidly approaching its final phase in the struggle which we know as the Seven Years' War. During forty years, commissioners of the two nations had been trying to reach some agreement as to boundaries. Each side, however, made impossible demands. France claimed all the lands drained by the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes and by the Mississippi and its tributaries a claim which, if made good, would have carried her into the very heart of the colony of New York and would have given her also the mastery of the Ohio and the regions beyond. Britain claimed all the lands ever occupied by the Iroquois Indians, who had been recognized as British subjects by the Treaty of Utrecht. As those Indians had overrun regions north of the St. Lawrence, the British thus would become masters of a good part of Canada. Neither side was prepared for reasonable compromise. The sword was to be the final arbiter.

Events moved rapidly towards war. In 1753 Duquesne, the new Governor of Canada, sent more than a thousand men to build Fort Le Boeuf, on upper waters flowing to the Ohio and within easy reach of support by way of Lake Erie. In the nest year the French were swarming in the Ohio Valley, stirring up the Indians against the English and confident of success. They jeered at the divisions among the English and believed their own unity so strong that they could master the colonies one by one. The two colonies most affected were Pennsylvania and Virginia, either of them quite ready to see its own citizens advance into the Ohio country and possess the land, but neither of them willing to unite with the other in effective military action to protect the frontier.

It is at this crisis that there appears for the first time in history George Washington of Virginia. In December, 1753, in the dead of winter, he made a long, toilsome journey from Virginia to the north through snow and rain, by difficult forest trails, over two ranges of mountains, across streams sometimes frozen, sometimes dangerous from treacherous thaws. On the way he heard gossip from the Indians about the designs of the French. They boasted that they would come in numbers like the sands of the seash.o.r.e; that the natives would be no more an obstacle to them than the flies and mosquitoes, which indeed they resembled; and that not the breadth of a finger-nail of land belonged to the Indians. Washington was told by one of the French that "it was their absolute design to take possession of the Ohio and, by-, they would do it!" It was no matter that the French were outnumbered two to one by the English, for the English were dilatory and ineffective.

In the end, Washington arrived at Fort Le Boeuf and presented a letter from Dinwiddie, the Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia, pointing out that the British could not permit an armed force from Canada to invade their territory of the Ohio and requiring that the French should leave the country at once. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, to whom this firm demand was delivered, "an elderly gentleman," says Washington, with "much the air of a soldier" gave, of course, a polite answer in the manner of his nation, but he intended, he said, to remain where he was as long as he had instructions so to do. Washington kept his eyes open and made careful observations of the plan of the fort, the number of men, and also of the canoes, of which he noted that there were more than two hundred ready and many others building. The French tried to entice away his Indians and he says, "I cannot say that ever in my life I suffered so much anxiety." On the journey back he nearly perished when he fell into an ice-cold stream and was obliged to spend the night on a tiny island in frozen clothing. He brought comfort as cold to the waiting Dinwiddie.

The French meanwhile were always a little ahead of the English in their planning. Early in April, 1754, a French force of five or six hundred men from Canada, which had set out while Quebec was still in the icy grip of winter, reached the upper waters of the Ohio. They attacked and destroyed a fort which the English had begun at the forks where now stands Pittsburgh, and, in its place, began a formidable one, called Fort Duquesne after the Governor of Canada. In vain was Washington sent with a few hundred men to take possession of this fort and to a.s.sert the claim of the English to the land. He fell in with a French scouting party under young Coulon de Jumonville, killed its leader and nine others, and took more than a score of prisoners-warfare b.l.o.o.d.y enough in a time of supposed peace. But the French were now on the Ohio in greater numbers than the English. At a spot known as the Great Meadows, where Washington had hastily thrown up defenses, which he called Fort Necessity, he was forced to surrender, but was allowed to lead his force back to Virginia, defeated in the first military adventure of his career. The French took the view that his killing of the young officer Jumonville was a.s.sa.s.sination, since no state of war existed, and raised a fierce clamor that Washington was a murderer-a strange contrast to his relations with France in the years to come.

What astonishes us in regard to these events is that Britain and France long remained nominally at peace while they were carrying on active hostilities in America and sending from Europe armies to fight. There were various reasons for this hesitation about plunging formally into war. Each side wished to delay until sure of its alliances in Europe. During the war ending in 1748 France had fought with Frederick of Prussia against Austria, and Britain had been Austria's ally. The war had been chiefly a land war, but France had been beaten on the sea. Now Britain and Prussia were drawing together and, if France fought them, it must be with Austria as an ally. Such an alliance offered France but slight advantage. Austria, an inland power, could not help France against an adversary whose strength was on the sea; she could not aid the designs of France in America or in India, where the capable French leader Dupleix was in a fair way to build up a mighty oriental empire. Nor had France anything to gain in Europe from an Austrian alliance. The shoe was on the other foot. The supreme pa.s.sion of Maria Theresa who ruled Austria was to recover the province of Silesia which had been seized in 1740 by Prussia and held-held to this day. Austria could do little for France but France could do much for Austria. So Austria worked for this alliance. It is a story of intrigue. Usually in France the King carried on negotiations with foreign countries only through his ministers, who knew the real interests of France. Now the astute Austrian statesman, Kaunitz, went past the ministers of Louis XV to Louis himself. This was the heyday of Madame de Pompadour, the King's mistress. Maria Theresa condescended to intrigue with this woman whom in her heart she despised. There is still much mystery in the affair. The King was flattered into thinking that personally he was swaying the affairs of Europe and took delight in deceiving his ministers and working behind their backs. While events in America were making war between France and Britain inevitable, France was being tied to an ally who could give her little aid. She must spend herself to fight Austria's battles on the land, while her real interests required that she should build up her fleet to fight on the sea the great adversary across the English Channel.

The destiny of North America might, indeed; well have been other than it is. A France strong on the sea, able to bring across to America great forces, might have held, at any rate, her place on the St. Lawrence and occupied the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. We can hardly doubt that the English colonies, united by a common deadly peril, could have held against France most of the Atlantic coast. But she might well have divided with them North America; and today the lands north of the Ohio and westward beyond the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean might have been French. The two nations on the brink of war in 1754 were playing for mighty stakes; and victory was to the power which had control of the sea. France had a great army, Britain a great fleet. In this contrast lay wrapped the secret of the future of North America.

As the crisis drew near the vital thought about the future of America was found, not in America, but in Europe. The English colonies were so accustomed to distrust each other that, when Virginia grew excited about French designs on the Ohio, Pennsylvania or North Carolina was as likely as not to say that it was the French who were in the right and a stupid, or excitable, or conceited, colonial governor who was in the wrong. In Paris and London, on the other hand, there were no illusions about affairs in America. In both capitals it was realized that a grim fight was on. During the winter of 1754-55 extensive preparations were being made on both sides. France equipped an army under Baron Dieskau to go to Canada; Britain equipped one under General Braddock to go to Virginia. Each nation asked the other why it was sending troops to America and each gave the a.s.surance of benevolent designs. But in the spring of 1755 a British fleet under Admiral Boscawen put to sea with instructions to capture any French vessels bound for North America. At the same time the two armies were on the way across the Atlantic. Dieskau went to Canada, Braddock to Virginia, each instructed to attack the other side, while in the meantime amba.s.sadors at the two courts gave bland a.s.surances that their only thought was to preserve peace.

The English colonists showed a political blindness that amounted to imbecility. Albany was the central point from which the dangers on all sides might best be surveyed. Here came together in the summer of 1754 delegates from seven of the colonies to consider the common peril. The French were busy in winning, as they did, the support of the many Indian tribes of the West; and the old allies of the English, the Iroquois, were nervous for their own safety. The delegates to Albany, tied and bound by instructions from their a.s.semblies, had to listen to plain words from the savages. The one Englishman who, in dealing with the Indians, had tact and skill equal to that of Frontenac of old, was an Irishman, Sir William Johnson. To him the Iroquois made indignant protests that the English were as ready as the French to rob them of their lands. If we find a bear in a tree, they said, some one will spring up to claim that the tree belongs to him and keep us from shooting the bear. The French, they added, are at least men who are prepared to fight; you weak and un-prepared English are like women and any day the French may turn you out. Benjamin Franklin told the delegates that they must unite to meet a common enemy. Unite, however, they would not. No one of them would surrender to a central body any authority through which the power of the King over them might be increased. The Congress-the word is full of omen for the future-failed to bring about the much-needed union.

In February, 1755, Braddock arrived in Virginia with his army, and early in May he was on his march across the mountains with regulars, militia, and Indians, to the number of nearly fifteen hundred men, to attack Fort Duquesne and to rid the Ohio Valley of the French. He knew little of forest warfare with its use of Indian scouts, its ambushes, its fighting from the cover of trees. On the 9th of July, on the Monongahela River, near Fort Duquesne, in a struggle in the forest against French and Indians he was defeated and killed. George Washington was in the fight and had to report to Dinwiddie the dismal record of what had happened. The frontier was aflame; and nearly all the Indians of the West, seeing the rising star, went over to the French. The power of France was, for the time, supreme in the heart of the continent. At that moment even far away in the lone land about the Saskatchewan, the English trader, Hendry, had to admit that the French knew better than the English how to attract the support of the savage tribes.

Meanwhile Dieskau had arrived at Quebec. In the colony of New York Sir William Johnson, the rough and cheery Irishman, much loved of the Iroquois, was gathering forces to attack Canada. Early in July, 1755, Johnson had more than three thousand provincial troops at Albany, a motley horde of embattled farmers, most of them with no uniforms, dressed in their own homespun, carrying their own muskets, electing their own officers, and altogether, from the strict soldier's point of view, a rabble rather than an army. To meet this force and destroy it if he could, Dieskau took to the French fort at Crown Point, on Lake Champlain, and southward from there to Ticonderoga at the head of this lake, some three thousand five hundred men, including his French regulars, some Canadians and Indians. Johnson's force lay at Fort George, later Fort William Henry, the most southerly point on Lake George. The names, given by Johnson himself, show how the dull Hanoverian kings and their offspring were held in honor by the Irish diplomat who was looking for favors at court. The two armies met on the sh.o.r.es of Lake George early in September and there was an all-day fight. Each side lost some two hundred men. Among those who perished on the French side was Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, who had escaped all the perils of the western wilderness to meet his fate in this border struggle. The honors of the day seem to have been with Johnson, for the French were driven off and Dieskau himself, badly wounded, was taken prisoner. That Johnson had great difficulty in keeping his savages from burning alive and then boiling and eating Dieskau and smoking his flesh in their pipes, in revenge for some of their chiefs killed in the fight, shows what an alliance with Indians meant.

There was small gain to the English from Johnson's success. He was too cautious to advance towards Canada; and, as winter came on, he broke up his camp and sent his men to their homes. The colonies had no permanent military equipment. Each autumn their forces were dissolved to be reorganized again in the following spring, a lame method of waging war.

For three years longer in the valley of the Ohio, as elsewhere, the star of France remained in the ascendant. It began to decline only when, farther east, on the Atlantic, superior forces sent out from England were able to check the French. During the summer of 1758, while Wolfe and Boscawen were pounding the walls of Louisbourg, seven thousand troops led by General Forbes, Colonel George Washington, and Colonel Henry Bouquet, pushed their way through the wilds beyond the Alleghanies and took possession of the Ohio. The French destroyed Fort Duquesne and fled. On the 25th of November the English occupied the place and named it "Pitts-Bourgh" in honor of their great war minister.

CHAPTER VII. The Expulsion Of The Acadians

We have now to turn back over a number of years to see what has been happening in Acadia, that oldest and most easterly part of New France which in 1710 fell into British hands. Since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the Acadians had been nominally British subjects. But the Frenchman, hardly less than the Jew, is difficult of absorption by other racial types. We have already noted the natural aim of France to recover what she had lost and her use of the priests to hold the Acadians to her interests. The Acadians were secure in the free exercise of their religion. They had no secular leaders and few, if any, clergy of their own. They were led chiefly by priests, subjects of France, who, though working in British territory, owned no allegiance to Great Britain, and were directed by the Bishop of Quebec.

For forty years the question of the Acadians remained unsettled. Under the Treaty of 1713 the Acadians might leave the country. If they remained a year they must become British subjects. When, however, in 1715, two years after the conclusion of the treaty, they were required to take the oath of allegiance to the new King, George I, they declared that they could not do so, since they were about to move to Cape Breton. When George II came to the throne in 1727, the oath was again demanded. Still, however, the Acadians were between two fires. Their Indian neighbors, influenced by the French, threatened them with ma.s.sacre if they took the oath, while the British declared that they would forfeit their farms if they refused. The truth is that the British did not wish to press the alternative. To drive out the Acadians would be to strengthen the neighboring French colony of Cape Breton. To force on them the oath might even cause a rising which would overwhelm the few English in Nova Scotia. So the tradition, never formally accepted by the British, grew up that, while the Acadians owed obedience to George II, they would be neutral in case of war with France. A common name for them used by the British themselves was that of the Neutral French. In time of peace the Acadians could be left to themselves. When, however, war broke out between Britain and France the question of loyalty became acute. Such war there was in 1744. Without doubt, some Acadians then helped the French-but it was, as they protested, only under compulsion and, as far as they could, they seem to have refused to aid either side. The British muttered threats that subjects of their King who would not fight for him had no right to protection under British law. Even then feeling was so high that there was talk of driving the Acadians from their farms and setting them adrift; and these poor people trembled for their own fate when the British victors at Louisbourg in 1745 removed the French population to France. a.s.surances came from the British government, however, that there was no thought of molesting the Acadians.

With the order "As you were" the dominant thought of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the highly organized and efficient champions of French policy took every step to ensure that in the next struggle the interests of France should prevail. Peace had no sooner been signed than Versailles was working in Nova Scotia on the old policy. The French priests taught that eternal perdition awaited the Catholic Acadians who should accept the demands of the heretic English. The Indians continued their savage threats. Blood is thicker than water and no doubt the natural sympathies of the Acadians were with the French. But the British were now formidable. For them the founding of Halifax in 1749 had made all the difference. They, too, had a menacing fortress at the door of the Acadians, and their tone grew sterner. As a result the Acadians were told that if, by October 15, 1749, they had not taken an unconditional oath of allegiance to George II, they should forfeit their rights and their property, the treasured farms on which they and their ancestors had toiled. The Acadians were in acute distress. If they yielded to the English, not only would their bodies be destroyed by the savage Micmac Indians, but their immortal souls, they feared, would be in danger.

The Abbe Le Loutre was the parish priest of the Acadian village of Beauba.s.sin on Chignecto Bay and also missionary to the Micmac Indians, whose chief village lay in British territory not many miles from Halifax. British officials of the time denounced him as a determined fanatic who did not stop short of murder. As in most men, there was in Le Loutre a mingling of qualities. He was arrogant, domineering, and intent on his own plans. He hated the English and their heresy, and he preached to his people against them with frantic invective. He incited his Indians to bloodshed. But he also knew pity. The custom of the Indians was to consider prisoners taken by them as their property, and on one occasion Le Loutre himself paid ransom to the Indians for thirty-seven English captives and returned them to Halifax. It is certain that the French government counted upon the influence of French priests to aid its political designs. "My masters, G.o.d and the King" was a phrase of the Sulpician father Piquet working at this time on the St. Lawrence. Le Loutre could have echoed the words. He was an ardent politician and France supplied him with both money and arms to induce the Indians to attack the English. The savages haunted the outskirts of Halifax, waylaid and scalped unhappy settlers, and, in due course, were paid from Louisbourg according to the number of scalps which they produced. The deliberate intention was to make new English settlements impossible in Nova Scotia and so to discourage the English that they should abandon Halifax. All this intrigue occurred in 1749 and the years following the treaty of peace. If the English suffered, so did the Acadians. Le Loutre told them that if once they became British subjects they would lose their priests and find their religion suppressed. Acadians who took the oath would, he said, be denied the sacraments of the Church. He would also turn loose on the offenders the murderous savages whom he controlled. If pressed by the English, the Acadians, rather than yield, must abandon their lands and remove into French territory.

At this point arises the question as to what were the limits of this French territory. In yielding Acadia in 1713, France had not defined its boundaries. The English claimed that it included the whole region stretching northeastward to the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the frontier of New England. The French, however, said that Acadia meant only the peninsula of Nova Scotia ending at the isthmus between Baie Verte and the Bay of Chignecto; and for years a Canadian force stood there on guard, daring the British to put a foot on the north side of the little river Missaguash, which the French said was the international boundary.

There was much excitement among the Acadians in 1750, when an English force landed on the isthmus and proceeded to throw up defenses on the south side of the river. This outpost, which in due time became Fort Lawrence, was placed on what even the French admitted to be British territory. Forthwith on a hill two or three miles away, on the other side of the supposed boundary, the French built Fort Beausejour. Le Loutre was on the spot, bl.u.s.tering and menacing. He told his Acadian parishioners of the little village of Beauba.s.sin, near Fort Lawrence and within the British area, that rather than accept English rule they must now abandon their lands and seek the protection of the French at Fort Beausejour. With his own hands he set fire to the village church. The houses of the Acadians were also burned. A whole district was laid waste by fire. Women and children suffered fearful privations-but what did such things matter in view of the high politics of the priest and of France?

During four or five years the hostile forts confronted each other. In time of peace there was war. The French made Beausejour a solid fort, for it still stands, little altered, though it has been abandoned for a century and a half. It was chiefly the Acadians, nominal British subjects, who built these thick walls.

The arrogant Micmacs demanded that the British should hand over to them the best half of Nova Scotia, and they emphasized their demand by treachery and ma.s.sacre. One day a man, in the uniform of a French officer, followed by a small party, approached Fort Lawrence, waving a white flag. Captain Howe with a small force went out to meet him. As this party advanced, Indians concealed behind a dike fired and killed Howe and eight or ten others. Such ruses were well fitted to cause among the English a resolve to enforce severe measures. The fire burned slowly but in the end it flamed up in a cruel and relentless temper. French policy, too, showed no pity. The Governor of Canada and the colonial minister in France were alike insistent that the English should be given no peace and cared nothing for the sufferings of the unhappy Acadians between the upper and the nether millstone.

At last, in 1755, the English accomplished something decisive. They sent an army to Fort Lawrence, attacked Fort Beausejour, forced its timid commander Vergor to surrender, mastered the whole surrounding country, and obliged Le Loutre himself to fly to Quebec. There he embarked for France. The English captured him on the sea, however, and the relentless and cruel priest spent many years in an English prison. His later years, when he reached France, do him some credit. By that time the Acadians had been driven from their homes. There were nearly a thousand exiles in England. Le Loutre tried to befriend these helpless people and obtained homes for some of them in the parish of Belle-Isle-en-Mer in France.

In the meantime the price of Le Loutre's intrigues and of the outrages of the French and their Indian allies was now to be paid by the unhappy Acadians. During the spring and summer of 1755, the British decided that the question of allegiance should be settled at once, and that the Acadians must take the oath. There was need of urgency. The army at Fort Lawrence which had captured Fort Beausejour was largely composed of men from New England, and these would wish to return to their homes for the winter. If the Acadians remained and were hostile, the country thus occupied at laborious cost might quickly revert to the French. Already many Acadians had fought on the side of the French and some of them, disguised as Indians, had joined in savage outrage. A French fleet and a French army were reported as likely to arrive before the winter. In fact, France's naval power with its base at Louisbourg was still stronger than that of Britain with its base at Halifax. When the Acadians were told in plain terms that they must take the oath of allegiance, they firmly declined to do so without certain limitations involving guarantees that they should not be arrayed against France. The Governor at Halifax, Major Charles Lawrence, was a stern, relentless man, without pity, and his mind was made up. Shirley, Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, was in touch with Lawrence. The Acadians should be deported if they would not take the oath. This step, however, the government at London never ordered. On the contrary, as late as on August 13, 1755, Lawrence was counseled to act with caution, prudence, and tact in dealing with the "Neutrals," as the Acadians are called even in this official letter. Meanwhile, without direct warrant from London, Lawrence and his council at Halifax had taken action. His reasoning was that of a direct soldier. The Acadians would not take the full oath of British citizenship. Very well. Quite obviously they could not be trusted. Already they had acted in a traitorous way. Prolonged war with France was imminent. Since Acadians who might be allied with the savages could attack British posts, they must be removed. To replace them, British settlers could in time be brought into the country.

The thing was done in the summer and autumn of 1755. Colonel Robert Monckton, a regular officer, son of an Irish peer, who always showed an ineffable superiority to provincial officers serving under him, was placed in charge of the work. He ordered the male inhabitants of the neighborhood of Beausejour to meet him there on the 10th of August. Only about one-third of them came-some four hundred. He told them that the government at Halifax now declared them rebels. Their lands and all other goods were forfeited; they themselves were to be kept in prison. Not yet, however, was made known to them the decision that they were to be treated as traitors of whom the province must be rid. No attempt was made anywhere to distinguish loyal from disloyal Acadians. Lawrence gave orders to the military officers to clear the country of all Acadians, to get them by any necessary means on board the transports which would carry them away, and to burn their houses and crops so that those not caught might perish or be forced to surrender during the coming winter. At the moment, the harvest had just been reaped or was ripening.

When the stern work was done at Grand Pre, at Pisiquid, now Windsor, at Annapolis, there were harrowing scenes. In command of the work at Grand Pre was Colonel Winslow, an officer from Ma.s.sachusetts-some of whose relatives twenty-five years later were to be driven, because of their loyalty to the British King, from their own homes in Boston to this very land of Acadia. Winslow issued a summons in French to all the male inhabitants, down to lads of ten, to come to the church at Grand Pre on Friday, the 5th of September, to learn the orders he had to communicate. Those who did not appear were to forfeit their goods. No doubt many Acadians did not understand the summons. Few of them could read and it hardly mattered to them that on one occasion a notice on the church door was posted upside down. Some four hundred anxious peasants appeared. Winslow read to them a proclamation to the effect that their houses and lands were forfeited and that they themselves and their families were to be deported. Five vessels from Boston lay at Grand Pre. In time more ships arrived, but chill October had come before Winslow was finally ready.

By this time the Acadians realized what was to happen. The men were joined by their families. As far as possible the people of the same village were kept together. They were forced to march to the transports, a sorrow-laden company, women carrying babes in their arms, old and decrepit people borne in carts, young and strong men dragging what belongings they could gather. Winslow's task, as he says, lay heavy on his heart and hands: "It hurts me to hear their weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." By the 1st of November he had embarked fifteen hundred unhappy people. His last ship-load he sent off on the 13th of December. The suffering from cold must have been terrible.

In all, from Grand Pre and other places, more than six thousand Acadians were deported. They were scattered in the English colonies from Maine to Georgia and in both France and England. Many died; many, helpless in new surroundings, sank into decrepit pauperism. Some reached people of their own blood in the French colony of Louisiana and in Canada. A good many returned from their exile in the colonies to their former home after the Seven Years' War had ended. Today their descendants form an appreciable part of the population of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. The cruel act did one thing effectively: it made Nova Scotia safe for the British cause in the attack that was about to be directed against Canada.

CHAPTER VIII. The Victories Of Montcalm

In France's last, most determined, and most tragic struggle for North America, the n.o.blest aspect is typified in the figure of Montcalm.

The circle of the King and his mistress at Versailles does not tell the whole story of France at this time. No doubt Madame de Pompadour made and unmade ministers, but behind the ministers was the great administrative system of France, with servants alert and efficient, and now chiefly occupied with military plans to defeat the great Frederick of Prussia. At the same time the intellect of France was busy with problems of science and was soon to express itself in the ma.s.sive volumes of Diderot's Encyclopaedia. The soldiers of France were preparing to fight on many battlefields. The best of them took little part in the debilitating pleasures of Versailles.

Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, was a member of the ancient n.o.bility of Languedoc, in the south of France. He was a scholar, a soldier, and a landowner. He could write a Latin inscription, fight a battle, and manage a farm-all with excellence. His was a fruitful race. His wife had borne him ten children, of whom six had survived. He was sincerely religious, a family man, enjoying quiet evenings at home. In his career, as no doubt in that of many other French leaders of the time, we find no lurid lights, no gay scenes at court-nothing but simple and laborious devotion to duty. Though a grand seigneur, Montcalm was poor. His letters show that his mind was always much occupied with family affairs, the need of economy, the careers of his sons, his mill, his plantations. He showed the minute care in management which the French practise better than the English. In 1756 he was forty-four years of age, a soldier who had campaigned in Germany, Bohemia, and Italy, had known victory and defeat, had been a prisoner in the hands of the Austrians, and had made a reputation as a man fit to lead. He lived far from court and went to Paris only rarely. It was this quiet man who, on January 31, 1756, was summoned to Paris to head the military force about to be sent to Canada. Dieskau was a captive in English hands, and Montcalm was to replace Dieskau.

Thus began that connection of Montcalm with Canada which was destined three or four years later to bring to him first victory and then defeat, death, and undying fame. On receiving his appointment he went to Paris, thanked the King in person for the honor done him, and was delighted that his son, a mere boy, was given the rank and pay of a colonel, one of the few abuses of court favor which we find in his career. On March 26, 1756, Montcalm embarked at Brest with his staff. War had not yet been declared, but already Britain had captured some three hundred French merchant ships, had taken prisoner nearly ten thousand French sailors, and was sweeping from the sea the fleets of France.

Owing to the fear of British cruisers, the voyage of Montcalm had its excitements. As usual, however, France was earlier in the field than Britain, who had in April no force ready for America which could intercept Montcalm. The storms were heavy, and on Easter Day, when Ma.s.s was celebrated, a sailor firm on his feet had to hold the chalice for the officiating priest. On board there were daily prayers, and always the service ended with cries of "G.o.d save the King!" Some of the officers on board were destined to survive to a new era in France when there should be no more a king.