The Ifs of History/Chapter 8
ON the 18th of July, in the year 1605, Samuel de Champlain, in command of a ship of the King of France, and engaged in the search for an eligible site for a great settlement, anchored in the harbor which was afterward to be known as the harbor of Plymouth, in New England. Two days before, he had been in Boston Bay. He mapped both these havens, and expressed his approval of the physical resources, and also the native Indian peoples, of the region.
At that time the coast of New England was really unappropriated, though soon after it was claimed by both France and England. It was merely a question which power should first seriously undertake the settlement of the country. If France planted her colony here, the land was destined to be French. If England hers, it would be English.
Champlain carefully studied the advantages of Boston and Plymouth. That he thought favorably of the latter place is proved by the very decent map, still extant, which he made of Plymouth and Duxbury waters. "Port St. Louis," he called the place, after the patron saint of France, and after his royal master. It looked very much as if he hoped that the spot he so honored would be made the seat of the French empire in the western world.
But Champlain sailed away, bearing with him the blessing of the thickly settled and sedentary native people. He passed around Cape Cod, and went westward as far as Nauset harbor, near New Bedford. And then, in due time, he sailed for France. When, in 1608, he finally laid the foundations of the city which was to be the capital of France in the new world, he did not lay them at Plymouth or Boston, but at Quebec, on the St. Lawrence.
Why was his choice thus made? Largely, no doubt, because Champlain, whose accurate information and seemingly always wise observation were greatly trusted by the King of France, was infatuated with the noble aspect and vast proportions of the gulf and river of St. Lawrence. He was first of all a sailor, and he had seen nothing to compare with the magnificence of this great embouchure. Here were scope and refuge for the greatest of navies! Here, it seemed, was a place designed by the Almighty to be the seat of an empire!
Champlain had an excellent eye for harbors, but not so good an eye of prophecy for the grand constructive events that were to be. He left the Massachusetts coast unappropriated. First its native inhabitants, so numerous, so gentle, so industrious, were decimated by a plague that came to them from the white men. Only a remnant survived. And when, in 1620, their sachem, Samoset, shouted "Welcome, Englishmen!" to the men of the Mayflower, the Indian king hailed, unconsciously, the advent of an empire which was to cast the domain of New France into a cold and waning shadow. For Quebec was too far north, and its hinterland too poor and restricted, ever to nurse an imperial race.
What if Champlain had been more sagacious, and had made his stand on the coast of Massachusetts? In all probability the settlement would have been definitive. The Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Boston, finding no place for their settlement in the north, would, in 1620, have gone to Virginia or Georgia. The steely Yankee wedge which, on one side, was to force the Dutch out of New Amsterdam, and on the other the French out of Port Royal and Acadia, would never have been driven. New England would have been French forever, and New York Dutch.
The principle of the hinterland was asserted so successfully in our early history that Massachusetts and Connecticut were able to claim territory as far west as the Mississippi River. It was by means of this hinterland claim that the young American republic succeeded in rounding out its northwestern possessions, after the War of the Revolution, and obtaining Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. All these would have been French if Champlain had made New England French; and the English colonies, if they had ever become strong enough to throw off the British yoke, would have consisted of a restricted section in the Southeast.
Indeed, without Sam Adams, Otis, Warren, and Israel Putnam, without the revolt against the Stamp Act, and without Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, it is impossible to conceive of the American republic at all.
Supposing it to have been constituted notwithstanding, it would have had to do without the influence of the New England town meeting, the New England common free school, the New England college, and the congregational system of church organization. It would have been deprived of the work of Franklin, Hancock, the Adamses, Webster, Sumner, Garrison, Phillips, Grant and the Shermans, in its affairs, and of Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne and Parkman in its intellectual life.
What would the New England country and the people have been like, if Champlain had never turned back from Plymouth Bay? We know from Benjamin Franklin's account what the progeny of the English settlers had become even as long ago as 1772. "I thought often," he wrote in that year, "of the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the manufacture perhaps of his own family. Long may they continue in this situation!" What the Canadian habitant is to-day, we know. Very often he is unable to read or write, and his material and moral condition very low. Even as late as 1837 the Canadian provinces were still arbitrarily ruled by royal governors, with appointed councils or upper houses which had a veto on all legislation. There was no self-rule, and the mass of the French people were illiterate and miserably poor.
Sieur Samuel de Champlain did a good day's work for English-speaking America, and the great free republic that was to be, when he pointed his prow northward and sailed away, out of sight of Cape Cod, in the summer of 1605.