“France built its best colony on a principle of exclusion, and failed; England reversed the system, and succeeded.”

I very much enjoyed reading The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America by Walter Borneman.  Great backdrop to the American Revolution.  So many of the American leaders of that conflict obtained their first martial experience in the French and Indian War.  It is always alluded to but this is the first book length treatment of the French and Indian war I have read.

Fantastic detail illuminating so many turns in history.

Page 12.

After the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the map of North America still showed the English colonies heavily encircled by a French empire stretching from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence to the Mississippi delta. A closer look at the map, however, revealed a startling chink in the French armor. Quite logically, France had established its outposts along the major rivers between the Great Lakes and New Orleans to afford the easiest avenues of transportation and communication. This line ran roughly between the western Great Lakes and the Mississippi River via either the Lake Michigan–Illinois River portage or the Lake Erie–Maumee River–Wabash River portage, the latter of which was scarcely a dozen miles long, just south of present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Between this line of French forts and the crest of the Appalachians 300 to 400 miles to the east, however, was a tremendous expanse of territory drained principally by the Ohio River and its tributaries. It was not a no-man’s-land. The English were beginning to overflow the Appalachians, which had once dammed their expansion and kept it in check. France might claim vast territory, but the English colonies had one thing that New France did not—the population to fill the land. The census of 1754 showed about 55,000 white inhabitants in Canada, plus perhaps another 25,000 in Acadia and Louisiana. By comparison, the English colonies boasted an estimated 1,160,000 white inhabitants, plus some 300,000 black slaves.

In large part this disparity in population was because the English colonies were already somewhat of a western European melting pot. France, on the other hand, kept a close check on immigration up the Saint Lawrence, rigidly controlling the numbers politically and restricting them religiously to French Catholics. Even Protestant Huguenots, banished from Catholic France by the hundreds of thousands, found their way to the middle and southern English colonies rather than New France.

As Francis Parkman summed it up: “France built its best colony on a principle of exclusion, and failed; England reversed the system, and succeeded.” No wonder, then, that traders and trappers and even a settler or two from the English colonies were crossing the Appalachians in increasing numbers and making themselves quite at home along the valleys and tributaries of what the French called the Belle-Rivière, “beautiful river.”