RSS
From the New York Times opinion page:
The War That Made Our World
July 13, 2021By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
Two hundred and sixty-six years ago this month, a column of British regulars commanded by Gen. Edward Braddock was cut to pieces by French soldiers and their Native American allies in the woods just outside today’s Pittsburgh. The defeat turned into a rout when Braddock was shot off his horse, leaving the retreat to be managed by a young colonial officer named George Washington, whose own previous foray into the region had lit the tinder for the war.
This was the beginning of the French and Indian War (also known, much less poetically, as the Seven Years’ War), which I thought as a boy was the most interesting war in all of history.
… Indeed, from a certain perspective, it was more important than the American War of Independence: The Revolution merely determined in what form Anglo-America would spread to embrace continental empire and global power, while the French and Indian War determined whether that continent-spanning America would come into being at all.
As a kid, I — a good patriotic American and stalwart New Englander — naturally rooted for the British and the American colonists …
For an adult, though, … it’s easy enough to end up rooting for the French.
First, because they were obvious underdogs — New France had less than a fifteenth of the population of the 13 colonies, it was constantly being cut off from its motherland by the British Navy, and it’s something of a miracle that it lasted for as long and won as many victories as it did.
But also because the French empire in North America represented an unusual model of European colonization: The combination of the smaller, scattered population, the harsher climate and the distinctive vision of figures like Samuel de Champlain and the French Jesuits all contributed to a friendlier relationship with Native American populations than obtained in the English colonies.
So a world where the French somehow held on to their territories might have been more Catholic (obviously a good thing) while offering more possibilities for Indigenous influence, power and survival than the world where England simply won the continent. …
Imagining an alternative timeline, a history in which New France endures and a more, well, “French and Indian” civilization takes shape in the Great Lakes region, isn’t exactly the stuff of the patriotic American education that I wrote about last weekend.
But it also makes a poor fit with contemporary progressive pieties, in which organized Christianity is a perpetual scapegoat for the mistreatment of Native peoples — since it was arguably the power of the church and the Catholic ancien régime in New France, relative to the greater egalitarianism, democracy and secular ambition in the English colonies, that helped foster a more humane relationship between the French colonizers and the Native American population.
If Montcalm had defeated Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec in 1759, then Latin America North might well have developed somewhat like Latin America South, such as Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina. How’d that work out, anyway?
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Interesting, always thought the majority of Amerinds were pro-French because there were far fewer French colonists than British.
It would work out for native populations, whom Anglos simply exterminated based on English idea of white supremacy. The Anglo was acting in North America the way Nazis acted in Eastern Europe, and no amount modern-day kneeling and other virtue signalling can atone for that.
The Huron accepted Jesus into their hearts, making it easier for their enemies to decimate them.
Indian population was lower in North America than in South America, and French North America would have attracted lots of French immigration from Europe. Latin America North would have basically been a large Quebec. French Quebeckers and the French in general tend to be intermediate between Iberians/Southern Europeans and Northern Europeans. So Latin America North would not have been as advanced and dominant as a British/Northern European North America, but it would be more advanced than Latin America South and Iberia/Southern Europe.
I tend to think that the differences between Spanish, English, and French mixing patterns were mostly climatic in nature, and that a cultural explanation is over-emphasized.
In the alternate timeline past I like to imagine, there ends up being three countries in North America proper, based on their respective cultures. First of all, a French-speaking Quebec as an independent nation. The 2nd country is more or less contiguous with the Confederacy, but also includes Arizona, New Mexico and maybe even parts of Northern Mexico. The third, and by far the most populous country would include the rest of United States plus Lower Canada and everything west and north of it. It is this last country that would be the one to dominate world affairs in this alternate timeline.
Except the Africans would die like flies. It would be Méti-co du Nord.
Ross has this ahistorical fantasy of an harmoniously Catholic America: If the French hadn’t over-extended themselves sponsoring the American Revolution, their Revolution might never have happened, meaning no Napoleon to depose the Spanish king and hasten the rebellions against Spanish rule in South and Central America…
Latin American indios and mestizos do seem more integrated and certainly much more numerous than in the north (although seldom among the upper classes) but it’s difficult to know how much that’s down to the southern Indians simply being more populous and having a more advanced culture before colonization. The creation of multiple legal categories (criollo, mestizo, mulato, etc.) rather than just white/not white might have discouraged intermarriage less/encouraged whites to acknowledge children as mixed more.
“French North America would have attracted lots of French immigration from Europe”
Would it?
The French generally seem to like France and aren’t in a hurry to leave.
The first half or two-thirds of the piece could be summed up as “England sucks and America sucks; i wish the French (and Indians) had won.”
then at the end he throws in a “but wait, the French were bad too!” and then gets into the supposed point of his piece which is “history should be taught neutrally so that either position would be ok.”
a) i agree that it should generally be taught that way and, afaik it has been for decades. Even a couple of decades ago AP American History or AP European history weren’t particularly jingoistic; I doubt it’s become more so since then… all things considered.
b) That ending is pretty weak sauce given the ISIS style assault on history by the Left currently going on.
c) How many of the readers will even read past the “america sucks!” bulk of the article ? Maybe it’s there to lure to entice NYT readers to root him on before getting to that mild “correction” at the end? i guess…that could work / makes sense. maybe.
Yes, I believe the early French model for involvement in the New World was:
Go to North America. Get rich. Go home.
Similar attitudes led to the failure of New Sweden and New Netherland. The Swedes and Dutch were minorities in their own colonies.
Liechtenstein considered buying Alaska before we did. That probably wouldn’t have worked out, either.
Funny: I was thinking exactly the same thing as Steve before I even read his commentary. Somehow I’m doubting that a North American version of Latin America would have turned out much better than the South/Central American version. Maybe a little betteer – France is better off than Spain, after all – but not much.
Douthat seems to come from a pretty WASP-ish background, and his wife, Abigail Tucker, seems to have a fairly standard English surname.
Please Ross, for the love of God, just accept the awesomeness of your WASP background and get over the guilt trip already.
New France claimed far more territory then it could handle. Had it stayed north of the great lakes it might have endured. Trying to seal in the thirteen colonies by holding lands across the modern USA made no sense with a population fifteen times smaller.
France was culturally, intellectually, militarily, and demographically ahead of the rest of the Europe from the medieval period up until around Louis XIV.
They lost this position because they failed to have enough babies.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, of course.
I doubt that the French in America would have stayed allied with the Indians for very long either. People, including this Douthat clueless dipshit, need to understand a simple concept that is the key to how the clash of peoples from the Old World and in the New was bound to turn out. The Europeans had the concepts of property and rights, and the Indians simply didn’t. There is no way it could have every worked out in peace and harmony on any large scale. It didn’t anywhere else, unless you include the situations in which Indians were simply forced to live like the White man. They kinda resent that.
The French were allied with the Indians during the time for political expediency. Those French that got along with the Indians up in the northern regions were ones who lived a lot like Indians. Those were the voyageurs, an amazing bunch of men who travelled all over the Great Lakes and beyond often solo in canoes and living off the land and the sale of furs. That was no civilized life, but I’m sure these were guys who liked it that way. They had freedom that is hard for us to even imagine, but just as with the Indians, one could not have that and be a part of a civilization at the same time.
If Ross Douthat thinks there could have been a large civilization consisting of French and Indians he doesn’t really understand the history and the difference in peoples.
That’s right. Just compare Quebec with Haiti.
Ross Douthat is smart enough to know that. This piece of his is just more virtue signaling. Part of his job requirement.
Assimilationists will wipe you out every time. Whether it’s in the name of Muh Religion or Muh Ideology. Sadly, Catholicism did have a more lax attitude toward race and you can see the results in South America. To this day, E Michael Jones pushes the idea that if everybody just accepted “logos” they’d all start acting like White men.
It’s magical thinking. It’s silly.
(Notice that France was a quite nice place until recently while being Catholic. England was quite nice as a Protestant free market society. And Sweden was quite nice as basically atheist and semi-socialistic. Hmmm, I wonder what the key ingredient could be?)
So… Mexico?
Scott Greer is right about goofy LARPy online “TradCaths”.
As I wrote to commenter Desiderius, who vaguely defended Douthat:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/constructive-cope-for-biden/#comment-4759235 (#137, etc.)
‘Métis’ is still a recognized legal identity in northern Canada as much as mestizo was in Spanish America, referring to the descendants of native Americans and French-Canadians. I think there was mixing everywhere (as male colonists preceded females so took wives/concubines from the native populations) but the influence of the Catholic religion probably had something to do with Spanish and French Americans seeing the indigenous more as to be converted rather than simply displaced. Then again, in the case of Spanish America that was probably easier due to encountering settled populations with agriculture rather than warlike hunter-gatherer tribes in the north.
Apparently Ross has never read the line attributed to the Indian who killed Lt. Jumonville; “You are not dead yet, my father”. Said right before he slammed a tomahawk right into his head.
I really don’t think now is a good time to bring up how relations between Catholics and First Nations could have been good.
Google “Canada native residential schools.”
This scandal is an existential crisis for Canada. Its very existence as a nation is under question.
Ross Douthat needs to keep his job with the New Duranty Times. He’ll do just about anything. Hold that thought.
Now, look at his face. Use the search tool of your choice. Got the image in your head?
Bear in mind…physiognomy is real. He thinks like he looks.
Yes, he does.
Why take this fake seriously?
They didn’t seem to mind going to Algeria. Different time frame though.
The French government at that time (17th/18th century) really wasn’t interested in colonization as much as extraction of resources.
Sharp’s follow up tweet was good too. https://twitter.com/davidsharp84/status/1414971230092935174?s=21
Agreed. The concept of a “French and Indian civilization” developing in peace and harmony is absolutely absurd. As Douthat even pointed out, the French were at a significant numerical disadvantage against the British and so pretty much had to rely on their Indian allies. If the French/British ratio changed in their favor, then the French would’ve had a much different relationship with the Indians.
Also, while Douthat is apparently a staunch Catholic apologist, he goes too far in making the French Catholics seem so gosh darned friendly towards the Indians. France during this period was actively involved in the slave trade. See Haiti. I don’t recall too many stories of kindly French Catholic priests in Haiti.
It’s true. Few settlers came to New France. Only the Huguenots are another “French diaspora” and they were expelled from France. French Canadian surnames are all over North America and Quebec exist not as a folk thing like for the Louisiana Bayou only because French Canadians used to have Amish-like birthrate for the fist 300 years.
Based upon the Creoles of Color in Louisiana and the Métis of the Canadian Prairies, the French took a more relaxed, Latin attitude toward racial mixing. However, this was in part driven by the fact that French women were in short supply – French immigration was small and mostly male. The passengers on the Mayflower were also 3/4 male but at least it was 1/4 and not zero. The French did have a scheme to bring over young women at government expense (Les filles du roi – the King’s daughters) but the numbers were small (in the hundreds).
Wisely scrapped lyric from “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
People are focusing upon the Catholic aspect of Douthat’s column, and while this should not be ignored, I think what makes his column appealing in Current Year terms is that he is positing an alternate history where the Indians would not have lost North America so comprehensively and would live side by side with the (French speaking) Europeans.
In this fantasy universe, there exists a Native American Wakanda where the Indians would have modernized and yet maintained their Indian culture. This (like the other Wakanda) is an appealing fantasy to salve white guilt, but it is a complete and total impossibility (even if the English had lost the French and Indian War). The clash between European and non-European civilizations has rarely turned out well. Either the native people become Europeanized and lose much of their native culture or else they resist and remain poor and primitive. (The Japanese seem to be the only exception – they were already fairly advanced for a “primitive” people and were clearly pretty smart to begin with so they were able to adapt the parts of Western culture that were useful to them without losing their essential Japaneseness.) There is no reason to think that French Canada would have turned out any different for the native people.
Heh, he sounds like one of the people who only read the first half of the article. I figured it would rile people up, but in the essay it’s mostly a “for instance” used to introduce his actual argument that only appears near the end of the piece: it’s some (dumb) thing about how he thinks US history is taught in an overly nationalistic way and should be more neutral.
This reminds me of that anecdote you posted about how John McCain used to root for the hawk to attack the family dog. Douthat is of the same, “leapfrogging loyalties” loser mindset.
Douthat’s Thesis is silly. That convolution of the Indians would have only been possible if the Vikings had founded a colony and the Indians had decided to integrate with and befriend them over a few centuries. The Indians simply decided to kill them all and drive them away. The French in North America didn’t settle the smaller coves, rivers and estuaries and eventually were swamped by the more fertile British Colonists who settled the less lucrative farmland. God gave North America to English speaking people. That’s what it looks like. BooHoo.
They also didn’t have the excess fertility to populate North America like the British did.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20146324
One piece of that war.They sure don’t write ’em like that anymore:
Indians in Siberia have fared as badly as their cousins in North America.
Tell that to the Hurons, who were exterminated by the Mohawks.
It’s also complete bollocks. A lie from start to finish. The “natives” have been given money for the upkeep of those cemeteries for 50 years – and spent it all on firewater.
Now they’re whining and looking for more handouts.
Dunno, Quebec is quite nice. The defining characteristic of the French who colonised North America was just how blue eyed and unlatin they were hailing from the North and Brittany. American contempt for France seems to be one of the few Anglo inheritances that it has successfully imparted to it’s waves of immigrants.
And, needless to say, it’d have worked out a lot better for the natives, there’d be a lot more of them.
Yes it would have–Malthus.
Yeah, France has a more pleasant climate and better farmland than England. And England had more religious “churn” that pushed out more dissidents seeking religious freedom.
But the fundamentals remain. America–the territory of the US–is pretty darn terrific. The US midwest is perhaps–there are only a few credible competitors–the best farmland in the world. If France had it, it would have filled with French. If nothing else by population expansion.
But it turns out … mobility is warfare really matters! Who knew?
British seafaring, their enduring commitment to naval supremacy made the difference and the premier colonizers.
~~~
I much, much prefer the British victory timeline–as that’s the only one i’m in. But if the French had somehow prevailed, French North America would not have been Latin America, it would have been … pretty much like Quebec. Distinctly different–but not that different–than the Anglo, then Anglo-Irish-Germanic America we got.
What really would have made America dramatically better …. not introducing African slavery. And on that score there is no evidence the French would have done any better. That sort of wise foresight just seems to be lacking in mankind.
No matter the alternate history, it is inevitable that the Indians would’ve lost North America completely and comprehensively. Just look at the fact that the Europeans (the French, Spanish, British, etc.) all were able to produce and manufacture rifles and cannons in large numbers. The Indians could only hope to trade for rifles, and if they couldn’t get them, had to use Stone Age weapons. As we know, weapons technology rapidly advanced over the years making the disparity between accurate/fast-loading rifles and Stone Age weapons absurd. Only in a fairytale-like world where the Indians became very literate and knew how to build arms and munitions factories, would the possibility of them holding onto North America be remotely possible.
Uh … no.
Canada’s existence as an actual nation is not “under question” It’s gone. And the destruction of the Canadian nation has absolutely nothing to do with natives or residential schools.
(It’s weird how even here on Sailer–the home of HBD sanity–you get weird otherwordly blathering about completely fringe things–Israel, the dollar, Iraq, natives in Canada–as if they are important.
Nope minoritarianism–immigrationism–and to a much less time critical extent eugenic/dysgenic fertility are what matters. The humans you share your nation with are what matters. Everything else is pretty much noise. It’s HBD all the way down.)
“The US midwest is perhaps–there are only a few credible competitors–the best farmland in the world. If France had it, it would have filled with French. If nothing else by population expansion.”
Ah, but the French did have the Midwest, or at least portions of it. The French settled Michigan, and Illinois if I’m not mistaken. Also, didn’t the French initially control the Mississippi River? The French even started a quaint little city that you may have heard of, Detroit. The French had Detroit from 1701-1760. Amazingly, the British were able to kick the French out of North America completely, with the exception of Quebec.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detroit
Well said. The French set up a number of forts up and down the Mississippi river and around the Great Lakes, but how well were these forts actually manned? It seems like they were not much more than placeholders and would not have been able to withstand a significant attack.
The French were very ambitious, but did not have the manpower to support and defend such a vast undertaking.
The fall of the US Dollar will be no fringe matter to you, AD, when it happens soon enough. The immigration invasion has indeed been the most critical, really an existential, problem in the long run. However, the economic pain that will come with the fall of the Dollar will change the long run around, in hard-to-predict ways. Yeah, you’re gonna hear some noise all right.
Still, in a later era about one third of all Swedes migrated to North America. See those Emigrants movies from the 1970s for instance.
New Sweden failed due to being conquered by the Dutch, as history has it.
As I recall, Champlain had great respect for the First Nations and advocated a hybrid European/First Nations civilization in Quebec. This is an inconvenient truth for those who promote propaganda about European genocide of First Nations as the only kind of historical relationship between the two cultures. Even our Drama teacher Prime Minister is ginning up this sentiment.
Is Ross going to talk about Jews becoming a crypto-WASP line of ubermensch since 1946? The alliance of WASP aristocrats and the Ashkenazis has completely obliterated, in the Western world, any preceding ideology or social structure. It once was that Mediterraneans, Teutons, WASPs, Scots-Irish, Irish Catholics, and Jews all vied for greater clout. Then that all got desperately buried during and after WW2 when we were led to believe that ethnic competition gave us horrific wars and we must not ever let it happen again. In reality Jews and elite WASPs cynically lunged at dominating elite status, grabbed it, and are now more arrogant than ever (particularly Jews who in the absence of genuine fear of honest appraisal are as shameless as ever). The South with it’s highly homogenous white population of Scots-Irish admirably stuck to it’s guns for decades after WW2 (begrudgingly going along with federally mandated civil rights but otherwise maintaineing it’s culture), but even parts of the South are now crumbling (Charlottesville is going to tear down statues soon) and as one can imagine it’s more pronounced in areas of the region with newly arrived white demographics and immigrants.
No, had Montcalm had defeated Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec in 1759, then some other Brit would have defeated some other French general shortly afterwards. As Douhat says,
And then either the British crown would have let the Colonists at the Indians or the Colonists would have overthrown British rule, the unenforceable Stamp Act being much less important to triggering it than the Crown’s interference with the acquisition of Indian land. (The richest man in the Colonies — G. Washington — was a land speculator, after all.) Absent a large meteor strike or a successful invasion of England by Napoleon what happened was what was basically going to happen regardless.
Not in the least. Wherever Europeans encountered nomadic peoples they drove them off the land. Wherever they encountered stable population groups they enslaved and worked them.
Germany had numerous alliances with eastern Europeans and the Turks in both great wars.
The Comanche would have put the Nazis to shame.
Apparently the French had different opinions as to the merits of Native Americans and Native Africans.
Don’t forget Louisiana…
> Douthat’s Thesis is silly. That convolution of the Indians would have only been possible if the Vikings had founded a colony and the Indians had decided to integrate with and befriend them over a few centuries.
That gets to a — perhaps the — key point, unknown to the Times pundit and unmentioned in this thread.
The impact of “virgin soil” diseases. Maybe if the Indians had been friendly with the Vikings and contacts had deepened and continued…
The Columbian Exchange introduced smallpox, measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, trachoma, malaria, typhus fever, typhoid fever, influenza, cholera, and bubonic plague to the American tribes. [I’m unsure about reliable references — Charles Mann’s 1492/1493/1491? Here is an undated encyclopedia entry.]
Populations experienced demographic collapse when they came into contact with Europeans (and then Africans). In the case of influenza and other highly contagious diseases, the mass mortality spread out in an invisible wave along trade routes, preceding contact by months or years.
Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2007 account of the founding of Plymouth Plantation times the start of mass mortality to a few years prior to 1620, when shipwrecked fishermen were integrated into (or enslaved by) American communities on Cape Cod.
The colonists experienced New Zion as a mostly empty land that invited their settlement. Unbeknownst to them, that was a very recent development.
Douthat seems to subscribe to an ersatz Whig-(Woke) view of history. “In the long run, history progresses and conditions improve, franchises are extended–(Except where gentile white males are involved, and their evil agency causes setbacks.)”
I can’t think of a single Civilization/Aboriginal contact story that ended happily for the aboriginals. Anywhere in the world. Disease or no. Qing/Dzungar (Wiki), Bantu Expansion/Non-Bantus e.g. Khoisians (Nature), Aztecs/subjects as examples. The after-a-fashion exceptions would be the steppe nomads who repeatedly devastated the civilizations of China, Europe, and the Middle East thanks to mobile warfare, horse archery, and asabiyya (Razib).
Continuing in the not even wrong vein, Douthat embraces the Zinn et al. vision of “the Native Americans” as a single polity. They weren’t; Whataboutery2020 mentions the Mohawks’ extermination of the Hurons. His fantasy Happy Ending for one tribe would have meant genocide for their neighbor.
Ross Douthat is a traitor and should be hanged.
It was a terrible mistake to ever allow his ancestors into this country.
There was a lot of French colonial settlement along the Mississippi between modern Illinois and Missouri, and along the Illinois River as well. Peoria, Illinois is the oldest city in Illinois having been founded by the French in the 1600’s. Ste. Genevieve, Missouri still retains French colonial buildings and is a tourist attraction due to this.
White southerners lost the civil war so they deserve to be exterminated AND Indians lost the frontier wars so poor them?
Also it’s bullish for Unz that hasabara sends trolls here now.
Too soon to tell.
Ross gussies up his split-the-differenceism better than the other ConJobs but at the end of the day it’s still the same old mush. A true synthesis is far more than a mere solution, let alone this kind of simple mixture that the rote pox-on-both-your houses approach continues the churn out ad nauseum.
The ease with which radicals can game that approach by putting wheels on their goalpoast suggests that those who still ascribe to it are either sympathetic to the radicals or too preoccupied to adequately carry out the proper duties of their exalted station.
It would be more productive to look at what the French were up to on the other pertinent continent at the time and consider the implications for our nascent global polity and what measures can be taken now and planned for in the coming years to keep it from descending into what France became there and encourage it toward what America became here.
Unbelievable.
I looked it up, and although Douthat is part Irish, he is mostly old stock American.
How is it even possible to be as much of a self-hating American as Douthat is?
He basically wishes that his own ancestors had been exterminated by being gruesomely tortured to death, which is what the Indians (with French help) were doing to the American frontiersmen and their women and children, before and during the Seven Year’s War.
The Seven Years War was, by far, the single most righteous and justifiable war Americans have ever fought, just as WWII was the least.
Today, July 14th, is the feast day of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha. She was a member of the Algonquin–Mohawk tribe and died in 1680 at the age of 24 in the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory of Quebec, Canada.
The movie “Black Robe” was a pretty good representation of the first contacts between the French and the Indians. Definitely worth checking out.
The French state would have ruled far beyond the Great Lakes. They would have had the Mississippi River and Ohio River Valleys, the Missouri basin, and all of Canada. Whether it would be Latin America North is another question. Quebec isn’t. New Orleans and St. Louis aren’t, despite large black populations. And without slavery, an Anglo import, there would not be much of a black population in the Mississippi Valley.
A real possibility had Montcalm won would have been the cessation of Anglo immigration into the New World, and the absorption of the English colonies into French Canada. Certainly there would be no English west of the Appalachians.
Parkman wrote that it was very hard to get french settlers to come to Canada. I think the attraction for the Jesuits was the Indian boys. At least that’s what the Brits said.
Didn’t mere contact with the french wipe out the Hurons?
However, 200 years after the founding of New Sweden large numbers of Swedes emigrated to the new world.
Ok, slav.
It was pretty much the elimination of the French threat to the North that allowed the colonies to go their own way about 20 years later.
Plus Braddock’s defeat taught both sides in the Revolution the value of light infantry. There were six future generals in this fight (three per side in the Revolution) that learned a great deal from this disaster. Among them that the British army could be defeated.
World War I was the war that made our world. WWII was a follow-on to WWI, with the line up of the competing sides shuffled a bit. The Seven Years War/French and Indian War was significant, but rather far removed from today in a way WWI is not. (One could make similar claims for the fall of Constantinople, the Battle of Lepanto and the siege of Vienna.) The real long-lasting effect of the French loss in the Seven Years War was the French desire for revenge, which led the Bourbons to the unwise policy of supporting American independence. That support was a huge financial drain on France, supported people rebelling against their God-appointed monarch (not a wise position for a monarch who similarly thought himself appointed by God to take) and led to no tangible gains for France in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. It was probably a factor in the revolution that broke out in France in 1789.
Without French support, American independance would have been very unlikely. But a settlement that kept the colonies loyal to the Crown, but with a high degree of autonomy and voting representation in the British pariament might have been a better resolution. Cooler heads in Whitehall and Westminster could have headed off the Civil War and ended slavery at the time that it ended in the rest of the empire, with a program of gradual, compensated emancipation and migration of newly-freed Africans to Africa or colonies in the Carribean. North America could have become several nations, with the Mason-Dixon Line being a more natural border than the present one between the United States and Canada.
Alternative history is fun to contemplate, although in the end rather a pointless exercise, except as a thought experiment.
Was there a hunter-gatherer (parts of the north) versus farmer (more concentrated in points south) divide or spectrum in the Americas similar to the one that supposedly existed millenia ago in Europe?
A beautiful 1000 word essay, devastated by the simple observation that his hypothetical did happen in much of America, with patently inferior outcomes. A good editor would have noted this early on and saved Ross and his readers much time.
Your question may be too narrow. Can you think of a single Mass Immigration/Native Inhabitant event that ended well for the Native Inhabitants?
Also the French were not allied with the Iroquois, most of them, anyway, who were oriented toward the English and Dutch. Ask the French lieutenant whose skull was cleaved (clove?) in two by the Iroquois half king at Jumonville Glen.
And, for further clarification check out Brian Moore’s novel Black Robe. Moore relied on the accounts of the Jesuits in New France. Bruce Beresford made the book into a good movie featuring the quite fetching 20 year old Sandrine Holt.
Fred Anderson’s (no relation) book, The Crucible of War, is the best book I’ve read about the French and Indian War.
He’s pretty open that he thinks it a self-evident fact that more Catholicism is better. I imagine the billions of non-Catholics out there would disagree (I know I do), but you can’t blame a believer, I guess.
What’s odd is that he thinks “Indigenous” (gag, and note the capital) dominance is also self-evidently better. Really? And why?
Algeria was part and parcel of France, much as Alaska is to the US.
I’m starting to doubt the narrative that disease wiped out the natives. I think there just weren’t very many (in North America) to begin with. The population density possible with hunter-gatherers is low. Latin America certainly wasn’t depopulated of natives and we know they were hit with all the same diseases.
We stood on the cliffs
And watched the ships
Slowly sinking to their rendezvous
I say:
Washington stood on the rocky ledge
And watched the surrender pledge
And then an Indian cleaved Jumonville
George Washington was an Anglo-Norman Virginian aristocrat with some balls and maybe when Washington was younger he couldn’t use his brains to keep his balls from causing unnecessary trouble.
I wrote this about our best president, GEORGE WASHINGTON, in March of 2017:
Young George Washington decided to blast the French at the 1754 Battle of Jumonville Glen in Western Pennsylvania. As I remember it from a book, the French were in some kind of rocky low area and Washington, being young and full of beans, attacked the French. The leader of the French, Jumonville, was killed. Later, Washington surrendered to French troops sent out from Fort Duquesne.
All about the trans-Appalachian rivers and their strategic value to the British Empire and the French Empire.
Now the American Empire is all about a debt-based fiat currency system electronically conjured up out of thin air. The American Empire’s military and intelligence wings operate globally as muscle to maintain the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. A new young Washington is going to set things in motion that causes a disruption to the global financial system.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/world-war-zero/#comment-1799590
About 10+ years ago I read a book comparing the Sioux and the Zulu. The title was something like, “The Dust Rose Like Smoke”.
My takeaway, and it may not have been the author’s intention, was that as of 1491, many if not most African and Native American tribes enslaved, oppressed, and/or colonized neighboring tribes to the extent their relative strength and technology allowed them to. This was true for hundreds of years before, during, and after first contact with Europeans. They were just SOL after the more technologically advanced tribe (i.e. French, English, Spanish) moved in and did the same thing they would have done, had they had the means.
More Acadian Driftwood Stuff
NY Times:
Weaving elements of pop, jazz, blues and rock into an old-timey approach to his instrument, Mr. Berline contributed instrumental selections to Bob Dylan’s soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 anti-western, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” He also overdubbed Nova Scotia-style fiddle on the Band’s 1976 single “Acadian Driftwood” and played on the albums “GP” (1973) and “Grievous Angel” (1974) by Gram Parsons, the country-rock progenitor and founding member of the Burrito Brothers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/arts/music/byron-berline-dead.html
I like the Last Waltz live version:
A good editor would have noted this early on and saved Ross and his readers much time.
Agree
I thought it was because they all liked to dance, get drunk, and sleep together.
Sounds more like the current situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
But you wouldn’t know anything about that, right?
Lots of them fled during their bloody revolution. If there had been a large French-speaking American community to welcome them then they might have had a big displacement, like the radical Germans in 1848.
Moroccans were hankering for colonies in the New World, at one time, but apparently lacked the wherewithal to defeat the existing powers or to convince any to enter into alliance with them.
It would have been interesting to see some alternate universe, where they settled the American tropics, since they were probably more acclimated to the heat and some of the diseases.
You’re an idiot, practically half of the Iroquois confederacy fought side by side with the British. Committing depredations upon European settlers and their Indian allies!
Douthat (and I) were talking more about the culture that would have evolved out on the prairies and what later became the American midwest.
Basically, there were two models of French settlement in America – in areas along the major rivers (keep in mind there were few if any roads) the French founded towns that were set up like French towns with an all pervasive Church and government structure. Obviously there was no room for intermarriage with heathens in such places. The Quebec French are the descendants of these settlers.
But then you had a separate community (mostly male) of fur trappers and traders who ventured far out into the wilderness in their canoes. These were more like American frontiersmen and they had much less interaction with the Church and much more with native people, including taking native “wives” and having half breed children.
I can’t say which model would have dominated the alternate universe in which the French won the French and Indian War. As Steve says, the French were never really very interested in leaving France – Quebec was populated because the Quebecois, under the influence of the Church, bred like rabbits so that all of the millions of French Canadians are descended from a few hundred settlers. This model was perhaps good enough to populate a sparsely populated province (although Montreal later had a lot of immigration – Irish and then the same crowd as went to Ellis Island and later on the French Canadians spilled over into New England as their numbers exceeded what a rural economy could support) but probably not a continent.
France made a specific effort to import women into Canada and encourage large (> 10 children) families. This was in 1663,
https://www.cbc.ca/2017/canadathestoryofus/most-french-canadians-are-descended-from-these-800-women-1.4029699
800 at a time when the total population was 3,000 (including many priests). Not sure I’d call that small.
Agreed. Worth considering other examples of French colonization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_colonial_empire
I think this falls under the category of French colonization is good when it can be used to make the US look bad.
.. the stuff of the patriotic American education that I wrote about last weekend.
What’s this? Schools should teach ..
Lefties: CRT.
Righties: Patriotism.
Middles: STEAM.
The political consensus guarantees that the schools will continue to “teach” something.
All of above: A_p_e is a lunatic.
Santo Domingan refugees are fairly large French diaspora that ended up in the US. Many Catholic Southerners with deeper roots are descended from them at least in part, from Louisiana all the way up to Virginia.
Part of why the South is starting to crumble comes from not from transplants but from the middle-class native Southerner millennials who were raised in strict, evangelical households. They are very susceptible to woke propaganda once they grow up and leave home.
Do you think Douthat is aware of the FIRST law of the French Code Noir:
Article I. We desire and we expect that the Edict of 23 April 1615 of the late King, our most honored lord and father who remains glorious in our memory, be executed in our islands. This accomplished, we enjoin all of our officers to chase from our islands all the Jews who have established residence there. As with all declared enemies of Christianity, we command them to be gone within three months of the day of issuance of the present [order], at the risk of confiscation of their persons and their goods.
???
French America wouldn’t be comparable to either Latin America or Anglo America. It likely would have attracted a lot of Irish, German Catholic, and Italian immigrants given time.
I’m not so sure about the superiority of Anglo America relative to Latin America, either. Which civilization will still be recognizable 300 years from now? Cultural stagnation isn’t always a bad thing. The US accomplished a lot at its peak but it appears ready to burn out soon.
Even the mother country Britain will last longer. Ideological foundations are feeble.
“If Montcalm had defeated Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec in 1759, then Latin America North might well have developed somewhat like Latin America South, such as Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina. How’d that work out, anyway?”
BTW – how’s that Anglo-American liberalism working out? All is peachy in the Anglosphere, right?
Meanwhile in the real world, an error from the 1970’s has been revived and sent to the World Economic Forum.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon
Yes, it’s the Club of Rome ‘study’ that contained several absurd premises. Revived by some schoolie woman who has apparently been engaged in confirmation bias for her entire career.
This kind of error is why we are all supposed to eat a meal consisting of fake meat and bugs, illuminated by a single LED in our converted shipping container, while the elite enjoy their Wagyu entree in a private jet on the way to yet another conference all about saving the world.
There are some left. They use their own demonym, Wyandot. They objected when Eastern Michigan University canceled them as a mascot, without even bothering to learn of their existence, let alone actually soliciting their opinion.
No mention is made of actual living Hurons in this 2015 article. They interview a Potawatomi freshman instead. She has Pokagon points!
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/06/16/eastern-michigan-university-hurons-logo/28797179/
Besides, “Eagle” is a clan name used in the Northwest nations, and they outnumber Hurons several times over. Same with “Ravens”. Will we be seeing Philadelphia’s and Baltimore’s “Football Team” along with Washington’s?
We’d all enjoy long, thin lots along the rivers. Beats a cul-de-sac, though.
I guess it depends on who you call aboriginal. The Japanese contact with the West turned out pretty well for the Japanese (at least until they started a war and then we nuked them) in that they kept their sovereignty and their culture and did not allow themselves to be colonized or converted to an alien religion and yet they were able to adapt to, and even excel at, modern technology. But I guess you could say that the Japanese were civilized already.
The Japanese encounter with the West went better for the Japanese than the Chinese encounter. This could be because Japanese were already skilled at picking and choosing which aspects of an alien culture (before the West, the Chinese) they would mimic and adapt and which parts they would reject. Whereas the Chinese viewed themselves as the center of the universe and didn’t really know how to live in a world where barbarians could outgun them.
Even if you take “aboriginal” to mean primitive, not all aboriginal encounters with civilization went equally badly. They all went mostly bad, but, for example, the Maori encounter went better (for the Maori) than the Australian.
Douthat: “Let’s talk about the French and Indian War.”
Feryl: “Let’s talk about the Joos instead and how they control the world.”
Douthat: “Can we talk about the All-Star Game?”
Feryl: “Let’s talk about the Joos instead.”
Doubthat: “The weather?”
Feryl: “Nope, just Joos.”
If you want to talk about the Joos, get your own newspaper column.
“Just compare Quebec and Haiti.”
The French plantations in Haiti in the late 1600s to 1700s provided fertile ground for an interesting syncretic mix of Catholicism and African animism. Some of these French plantation owners followed a sect of Jesuitism that contained a strain of Sabbatean-Frankism — Jewish black magic. Later, this mixture of dark rhythms gave New Orleans its gothic atmosphere.
It looks like at least some of the double scanned ballots were voted for Republicans. So unless they were double scanning only Democrat ballots it wouldn’t necessarily change the outcome. Also we don’t know how many were double scanned. I assume there is a limit – if a precinct has 1,000 registered voters and 1,500 ballots scanned, clearly something is wrong. Doesn’t the precinct also keep count of how many people voted?
It seems to me that it should be pretty easy for software to distinguish duplicate ballots. The scanner could have an attached printer or cutter that would make a mark or trim the margin of the ballot to a different size and the 2nd time you tried to run it thru it would reject the ballot as already having been scanned. This could be as simple as a human with a $2 rubber stamp or a paper cutter. Human poll watchers would also be able to see the mark or cut and object when they saw previously scanned ballots being loaded into the scanner.
This does not seem to be a difficult problem to solve. Of course if you have a truly corrupt government in charge of counting the votes, then nothing will help. But in that case you don’t have to double scan ballots – you can just falsify the vote totals and be done with it.
Here in WNY we still have forts that date back to this time period. Fort Niagara and Fort Erie are still standing and open as tourist attractions. Remarkable timber and stone structures, with extensive berms and breastworks with cannon ports and cannons still in place. Worth a visit you are ever visiting here.
France had lots of colonial enterprises around the planet, not just Canada. how did they turn out? we don’t need any hypothetical “If Nazis had won” type military fiction here. we can check former French colonies today. how are they? pretty much crap. which is the state of France now too. the French literally think if you kinda speak French, you ARE French. a civilization destroying concept.
France was and is an inferior civilization to Britain. be glad that the hated anglophones prevailed globally over the francophones. otherwise today you’d just be speaking French and living in some dump country outnumbered by “French” africans and muslims. the French leadership does NOT think you have any rights. freedom of speech, firearm ownership, you don’t have that under the French.
“I wish France had won the global battle for dominance hundreds of years ago” leads you to total nonsense ideas like, France would have started the industrial revolution, France would have defeated the Soviets in the Cold War, France would have got humans to the moon, France would have won all those science Nobels and invented the 20th century work. what complete bullshit. France prevailing hundreds of years ago leads to either a dumpy, sucky world today that is MUCH lower tech, and/or to Soviet domination of the planet. the French military can’t stop shit. they literally got beaten out of their own colonies by useless africans.
IDK about the “given money to maintain” claim, but this “bodies found at residential schools” is the dumbest non-scandal scandal to come through in a while.
It’s even dumber than the BLM Floyd stuff in that there at least there was a new event that could be misinterpreted. The Canada stuff is more like what happened (or happens) in South Asia when cell phones were introduced and wild rumors would be spread around in chat rooms that outsiders were in town kidnapping kids and people would then randomly lynch people and burn down houses for imagined offenses.
From Canada:
That’s just one case, but so far there hasn’t been any indication that anything new or unknown has been discovered.
From a lengthy recent piece:
the cold hard truth is that realistic HBD race attitudes are practically the entire determining factor in how colonial projects turned out a few hundred years later. the Chinese understand this. they’ll be displacing the locals and bringing in Han. and it will work.
Spanish and French approaches didn’t work. we just need to check the results today. British approaches worked by far the best, and created several of the best nations in the world out of nothing.
if Roman tech levels were higher 2000 years ago, it’s probable lots of nations today wouldn’t even exist. Romans probably would have just moved thousands of Roman people into their conquered colonies and slowly replaced the locals. tech limitations prevented them from doing that, and forcing them into the tithe and tribute model. the food production and transportation and communication systems just weren’t there yet.
nothing prevented France from doing that. instead they deliberately set up stupid stuff like the French Foreign Legion. Maghreb people, american indians, and negros could be “French” too.
There’s an argument to be made that Northern French are different than Southern (Mediterranean) French on a genetic and also dietary level. Basically, different population migrations and influences at different times, all eventually unified under Parisian control.
Now, I’m not personally aware or sure if French in the regions (excluding Breton) are more closely related than not when compared to each other, or if there is a kind of core french racial genome that is modified based on the region and other influences, vs “different tribes welded under a polity.”
ic1000, depends on what you define as a happy ending. Peter Freuchen lived with the ‘Eskimos’, as they were then called. This would be pre WWI and he lived with them for 50 plus years. Wrote a great book ‘The Eskimos.’ Simple things that the Europeans took for granted were life changing for the Eskimos. Needles, thread, copper or steel pots and pans, steel axes and knives and matches. The ability to light a fire with a single match was big. A single shot musket allowed a hunter to kill his game from a 100 yards out, big advantage. Of course, not too many Europeans wanted to live in the tundra or Artic.
Not necessarily. Latin American governments have tended to be anti-Catholic. See the Christero War.
Interesting note: During the Christero War, the KKK sent donations to the militantly anti-Catholic Mexican government.
Quebec (pre-1960) tended to be very pro-Catholic. Speaking French and going to Church didn’t keep Quebec from being the financial capital of Canada.
Most of the native populations were devastated by European disease. The survivors were sometimes treated fairly, mostly not. Without the Columbian Exchange of disease, the native civilizations and ethnicities would have been able to resist Europeans, to adapt their military organization and technologies and fight back. There would have been European enclaves on the coasts, as in Asia, but no seizure of the continent.
That’s also why surviving native populations tend to whiteness, because the admixture provided disease resistance.
For a counterfactual comparison: the English tried repeatedly to genocide the culturally disadvantaged Irish and failed miserably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange#Disease
.
Quebec’s strongly Catholic culture probably had a lot to do with being ruled by British protestants (like Ireland before and just after independence), and with the British preference for dealing with the established church. In a timeline where the French had remained in charge, Quebec would have been more exposed to the turbulence from the French Revolution, as Haiti and eventually the Spanish colonies were.
Yeah, I’d like to see the French deal with the Comanches. The Comanches in 1840 probably could have fought several European countries to a standstill (not all at once, obv), and defeated some others.
How can that be?
What happened to
“No sex please, we’re British?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Sex_Please,_We%27re_British
> [Aboriginal encounters with civilization] went mostly bad, but, for example, the Maori encounter went better (for the Maori) than the Australian.
Yeah, the Maori experience is probably the standout. And Buffalo Joe mentions the Eskimos. Any others?
It is interesting to see what the choices made by Indian tribes in the French and Indian War has had on the fortunes of these tribes in modern times.
The main tribes to join with the British, rather than the French, were the Iroquois Confederation and the Cherokee Nation. These tribes fared better than other Eastern tribes.
The novel “Top of the World” by Hans Ruesch gave a memorable portrayal of Eskimo life in the early 20th Century that squares with your account. Out of print, though.
Black Robe in an absolutely great movie. A lot people were upset it showed the Indians as murderous, barbaric savages not noble savages.
It’s a simply truth, everyone involved was human, some more civilized then others, everyone flawed.
The issue is much more that State’s Executive branch controls the count and there are several States where the Legislative branches are Republican with a Democratic Governor.
Given that the Constitution clearly gives sole authority to the Legislatures to determine the manner of determining Electors the House/Senate clearly have the right to check how it was done.
Venereal disease was widespread causing lowered fertility and was aggravated by native promiscuity. The North American aborigines must have felt cursed as they moved to oblivion.
Why are we still calling them indians????? Seriously it makes no sense…
Agree.
WWI was devastating to Canada. More WWI fatalities than WWII (~60K vs. ~40K). Canadian and Australian combined WWI fatalities (~118K) exceeded those of the United States (~117K).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
In WWI, Serbia, Ottoman Empire hardest hit. France devastated also: twice UK’s losses (as %).
Because the impovershed Finnish majority was in no hurry to fight for the enormous Johan Printz and his squareheads.
Nor would Germans die for the Dutch.
It was recently discovered that the namesake of the Bronx was actually a Swede. An Irishman in the Giuliani administration named Andersson told me.
Or is that just bjarney?
Agreed. Charles Mann’s “1491” book explores this but spends most of the book on South and Central America. The Aztec capital was larger than any European city, there is evidence of large scale agriculture and countless archeological sites there.
The North? Not much at all. No ruins of cities, no evidence of agriculture, no large numbers of bones of butchered animals. Revisionist historians throwing out numbers like 10mm in North America provide very little evidence. They start with a guess of the native population when colonization began, and work backwards using an estimate of death rates due to disease.
Its more likely there just weren’t that many people living in the North. If there were, there would be evidence of it.
Why are we still calling them indians?????
In the lower 48 of the US, that’s what they call themselves. At least, all the Indians I’ve met did so.
No ruins of cities,
Well…what were the mounds along the Mississippi built for? How many people were required to build one and maintain it?
https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/mounds/builders.htm
no evidence of agriculture,
Oh, come on. What were the Pueblo Indians using the Rio Grande for when the Spanish arrived? What were the various South Eastern tribes doing when De Soto blundered into the area? Who taught the Pilgrims in Massachusetts to fertilize plants with parts of fish? Who taught the Virginia colony how to grow tobacco? Maybe not agriculture on the scale of the Valley of Mexico, but agriculture nevertheless.
no large numbers of bones of butchered animals.
Yes and no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump
At this site, the buffalo bones are over 12 feet deep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulm_Pishkun
“no evidence of agriculture”
According to my third grade class play for Thanksgiving, Squanto taught the Pilgrims the best way to fertilize their corn (putting a fish next to the root).
Montreal’s financial community was Anglophone and mostly Protestant. In recent years Anglophone Toronto has become the financial capital.
“But also because the French empire in North America represented an unusual model of European colonization: The combination of the smaller, scattered population, the harsher climate and the distinctive vision of figures like Samuel de Champlain and the French Jesuits all contributed to a friendlier relationship with Native American populations than obtained in the English colonies.”
The French settlers mostly arrived as isolated individuals. The English colonists, for the most part, arrived with intact families. They already had a strong sense of community. Example: The Puritans that settled in New England were convinced they were founding a land “a city on a hill”, to be a beacon of light to the savage, unsettled world around them. These white settler communities would lay the foundation for the 13 colonies as well as the trek westward during the 19th century. The Indians simply couldn’t match the sheer numbers of whites, who kept coming and coming. Ever westward, until the Pacific.
But a few thousand French settlers in New France and in all their New World colonies perhaps 15,000 thousand total? They were no match for the English. But then, between 1754 and 1945, few nations were.
What were these isolated individuals looking for in New France? Certainly not gold, or attempts to create new communities akin to the 13 colonies. What was it they were looking for in the New World that finally eluded them?
Then can we replace Columbus Day with Cabot Day ?
Ah, crap. The local library has neither of these 2. (I was going for the movie version of Black Robe per your description of the actress there.)
Thank you anyway, Mr. G. Now, totally O/T, there is a recent issue of some magazine that I saw at the grocery check-out counter that was nothing but a long Grateful Dead issue. 16 bucks, though? I couldn’t do it.
I saw a guy at the job site in Nevada one time with a hat that had F B I in big letters. He was no Fed. “Hey, you’re not with the FBI. What’s that hat about?” “Full Blooded Indian”, he said, and he smiled proudly about it.
I prefer “Indian” simply because it’s the most un-PC term, not that I see why it isn’t PC. It worked pretty well until the country got flooded with •Indians. How about they change their damn terminology out of respect for our Indians?
Sandrine Holt was luminous in that movie.
“Venereal disease was widespread causing lowered fertility and was aggravated by native promiscuity.”
In Empire of the Summer Moon, Gwynne claimed that Comanches had a low birth rate due to all that bouncing around on horses throughout pregnancy, for whatever that’s worth. Also:
There were 69,000 people scattered across New France in 1750, not 15,000.
What were they looking for? What the majority of all the other Europeans who came the the Americas were looking for….adventure and money. Plus your additional petty criminals and oddballs deported from France (unlike the British settlers in comparable positions they typically weren’t forced into indentured servitude first).
The Puritans were the exception not the rule among the English settlers anyway. Their foundation myth is maudlin BS that has resulted in a whole host of unforeseen consequences for the US. There were plenty of merchants and adventurers who arrived Boston too, but they are downplayed so we can hear propaganda about the dreary, dull pilgrims instead.
White Man Bad !!!
Orange Man Bad !!!
let’s see, what other ad hominem argument can I make with great wit and wisdom …
There won’t be a dramatic “fall of the US Dollar” more like the “slump of the US dollar”–like the slow leak of air from a balloon.
But more on point, pain from the dollar’s fall is because of the immigration invasion and minoritarianism. I.e. the US ceasing to be the US. Absent that, even with the rise of credible alternative power–say China–the US would still have a competent population, better politics, more responsible economic management. The loss of reserve currency status would just mean Americans standard of living would go down a bit–imports more expensive. Americans would have to build more of their own stuff and pay more for other peoples. This would not be a huge deal. Canadians and Australians do not have world reserve currency status, they work less than Americans … and have comfortable lives.
At root … it’s who you’re sharing the nation with–their genes and culture. The other stuff is all built on top of that.
If you are going to indulge in counterfactual history, another instance is what would have followed if the British “Southern Strategy” had succeeded in 1780. Being stalemated in the Northern colonies, the British decided that to try to maintain a foothold on the Atlantic seaboard by reconquering at least three of the Southern colonies. They already owned East and West Florida as a result of the Treaty of Hubertusburg concluding the Seven Years War.
Georgia was invaded and Savannah and Augusta taken in late 1778 and early 1779. Charles Town was taken in May of 1780 and more than a half-dozen posts were established in the Upper Coastal Plain and Lower Piedmont (Camden, Ninety-Six, Orangeburg, Fort Motte, Hanging Rock and others). The militiamen who had been captured at Charles Town were paroled after pledging not to take up arms against Britain again. Other militia in the Upper Piedmont had not been captured nor taken parole, and they were awaiting events.
In July, 1780, two relevant events transpired. The British commander in North America, Sir Henry Clinton, degreed that all paroled Whig militia must join Loyalist militia regiments and fight for Britain. The parolees deemed this an abrogation of the terms of their parole, decided that their paroles were no longer in effect, and began reconstituting their Whig regiments. The second event was more local. A British Loyalist captain of German descent, Christian Houck, was sent deep into the Upper Piedmont to intimidate any Whigs near the Waxhaws, where a Continental regiment had been massacred six weeks earlier. Houck burned Presbyterian churches, an ironworks, Whig homes, took civilian prisoners and planed to hang them. Local Whigs quickly mustered and wiped out Houck’s detachment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huck%27s_Defeat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waxhaws
Houck’s brutality and Clinton’s political miscalculation caused the Scots-Irish Whigs of the Upper Piedmont to resist local Loyalists as well as incursions by regular British forces. In a score of engagements, the British were driven out of the Upper Piedmont and the Loyalists there were suppressed. This was the beginning of the Whig reconquest of South Carolina. The reconquest was assisted by elements of the Continental Army, but was predominantly due to the steadfastness of the Whig militia. Slightly more than a year after Houck’s defeat, the battle of Eutaw Springs near Charles Town forced the British to recognize that their Southern Strategy had failed.
If the Southern Strategy had succeed it is arguable that Britain would have eventually obtained the French owned expanse of North America later known as the Louisiana Purchase, and that the United States would have constituted a small country from Virginia to Maine and west no farther than Pittsburg. The implications for a WWI and II would have been substantial.
New Orleans and Quebec City controlled entrance to the middle of North America. As Benjamin Franklin explained, who controlled those two chokepoints would rule the world from 1900 onward.
Regarding your first paragraph, I am not sure of that one, AD. The $ is used all over the world. Once faith in the ability of a nation to support its currency – as in, could the debts possibly ever be paid back – it can go down fast. We have huge trade deficits, especially with China. Do you understand how large a $500 Billion yearly trade deficit is? The total value of US farmland is between $2 and $4 Trillion.
We are getting behind to where foreign holders of the dollar may bail out in short order, causing its value to crash. The US can get looted just as Russia got looted in the 1990s.
Hey, you are quite right that the immigration invasion has been the worst problem, as if the financial crash coming were to happen in the old 89% real American country, we could get back on our feet as the same country. Maybe not, though, as this is not the self-sufficient country of the 1930’s Great Depression. See my first paragraph about China and Chinese money – it CAN get taken away. If one thinks regular Americans have no say in what goes on now, imagine if land, real estate, factories, etc. were all owned by Chinese businessmen!
This is one issue that cannot be blamed on immigration – the FED was created in 1913 by Americans. Amendment XVI, allowing a Federal income tax, was ratified that same year. This damage was done long ago. “There’s a lot of ruin in a Nation”, and it’s taken a century for the damage to get to this point. I will admit that it’s mostly the same people who ruin the country via immigration that have ruined it financially. They aren’t the immigrants. The immigrants just vote more solidly for the idiots and care even less than Americans about what the elites are doing.
Finally, one can be pretty sure that Germany of 1923 was full of competent people too, wouldn’t you say, AD? You know the history of that era.
Oh, and I don’t know the extent of Canada’s and Australia’s financial stupidity. They can be conquered economically just as we can be.
Agreed. What’s missing is that the English were also very good at including fellow European immigrants in their numbers. Just think of the number of Irish, German and Scottish immigrants who made it across the Atlantic to bolster their numbers. I could be mistaken, but it seems that the French only had to French to rely upon and couldn’t count on any other European immigrants. It was a recipe for disaster for France.
Yep, quite a coup for the young United States to pull off the Louisiana purchase in 1803. An immense land grab with not a shot fired. At that point, it was only academic that the country would expand westward all the way to the Pacific.
Indeed, but his view had little influence on New England’s attitude.
Considering how much the New England elite considered America theirs in 1861, they were very stingy in providing resources to thwart the British Southern Strategy. No Continental troops from north of Virginia were sent to South Carolina in 1780-81. Yet North Carolina Continentals fought in the Pennsylvania Campaign and as far south as the Florida Expedition. Virginia Continental riflemen from the Shenandoah Valley (mostly Scots-Irish) were the backbone of the attempt to take Quebec City, while much of the Massachusetts militia went home midway on the horrible northward trek through the Maine wilderness. And such Virginia riflemen were crucial for the victory at Saratoga. Only the opportunity at Yorktown drew the Massachusetts Continental Line as far south as Virginia.
Perhaps New England was foreshadowing the 20th century dichotomy of charitable giving: poor Southern states were more generous per capita than rich Northern ones.
For this to make a difference you would have to go back further in history. Imagine if Cortez had gone rogue and declared himself King of Mexico, fighting off Spanish attempts to subdue him. You now have an independent Euro/Indian power in existence in the Americas 300 years before Bolivar. Presumably this state would have gone on to dominate the entire continent, keeping all other Europeans out. We would be living in a completely different world now.
The U.S. ambassadors asked Talleyrand in 1803 at the end, “Hey, what exactly are the boundaries of this Louisiana Purchase of ours?” Napoleon’s foreign minister replied, “You have made yourselves a noble bargain and I’m sure you’ll make the best of it,” and walked away.
Yes, Franks, Occitans, Bretons and Basques are all very different peoples. The latter three have been hammered down for a millennium by the first. The result is “France”.
Thanks. I meant “large scale” agriculture, similar to what existed in S. and Central America.
Agree some of the eastern tribes had advanced beyond nomadic hunter-gatherers and did some farming but the fact remains there is no evidence there were millions (much less in excess of 10mm) of people living in North America in 1491.
I said “cities”. You said “mounds”.
That is a question for you. I’m not the one arguing there were millions of people living in N. America.
If you can extrapolate some “mounds” and some bone piles into 10mm+ people please show your work.
Steve Sailer and anon [200] have already answered your incorrect assertions, but I’ll just add that cultivation of the so-called Three Sisters —Corn, Beans and Squash — was widely practiced throughout N. America where conditions allowed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
It is likely that the decline of the Mississippian and related cultures occurred before the arrival of the French and other Europeans, and was brought about by climate change during the Little Ice Age. It is not known if the native tribes inhabiting the Illinois Country when the French arrived are related to the earlier Cahokian culture. Today these tribes are known as the Illinois, or Illini, but they called themselves Inoca.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_copper_plates
French explorers and missionaries who accompanied or witnessed the results of Illinois hunting trips spoke of the great numbers of deer, buffalo, bears and other beasts killed by the hunting parties.
http://virtual.parkland.edu/lstelle1/len/center_for_social_research/inoca_ethnohistory_project/DEGANNES.HTM
The Inoca had allied themselves with the French, and suffered mightily at the hands of the Iroquois during the so-called Beaver Wars, when the Iroquois ranged into the Illinois Country, cut their corn and used their ready supply of firearms supplied by the Dutch to eventually all but exterminate the Illinois Confederacy, which did not have many firearms, and who also came under attack by many other native tribes who lusted after the rich Illinois Country.
I said “cities”. You said “mounds”.
Say, what do suppose a “city” looks like after it has been abandoned for a century or more in an area with significant annual rainfall?
In other contexts the “mounds” along the Mississippi would be called “pyramids”. Do we find population centers associated with “pyramids” anywhere on the planet? Logistics matter, one cannot build extensive earthworks while also doing the hunter-gatherer thing, so how much agriculture was required along the banks of the Mississippi to support the number of workers (slaves?) required to move enough dirt to build those things?
Oh, right, I forgot, you insist there was no agriculture outside of parts of Mexico. None.
lol
That is a question for you.
Nope. You are the one claiming no cities in North America pre Columbus, outside of the Valley of Mexico. Do you want to play an endless game of “define a city” next?
I’m not the one arguing there were millions of people living in N. America.
Neither am I. I’m the guy pointing out the gaping flaws in your argument.
You are the one arguing there was no agriculture outside of the Valley of Mexico, despite historical reports of eyewitnesses and extensive archeological findings. You might ask yourself this question: what else are you overlooking or getting wrong?
HINT: Again, what were the Pueblo Indians doing with the water from the Rio Grande when the Spanish arrived? Was it something like what their ancestors did for centuries on top of Mesa Verde?
The wiki on this subject starts out well:
So far so good – pro-native ideologues have a big incentive to exaggerate pre-Columbian populations to increase the white man’s guilt
[1
Never mind. The wiki doesn’t say what high estimates are reflective of…
Good afternoon Achmed,
While I generally agree with your comment, I’ve noticed a couple small errors.
Allow me to nitpick, if you will…
This is quite an over simplification. The Fed is the product of foreign intervention into the United States from Europe, especially Great Britain. Many of the men behind the “Federal Reserve Act” were international Jewish bankers. Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff, Abraham Kuhn, Solomon Loeb, and James Stillman worked hand in hand with American Bankers J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Frank A. Vanderlip as well as Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich (who sponsored the 16th amendment) to help create the creature from Jekyll Island.
Even the treasonous Woodrow Wilson came to regret signing the “Federal Reserve Act”…
And…
It is a very common misconception that the 16th somehow changed the constitution to allow for an income tax.
The supremes ruled in Brushaber v. Union Pacific R. Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916) and again in Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103 (1916) that “The provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation”. As the supremes said in Brushaber…
I do think Canada and Australia are just as conquered as the U.S.
(All three “nations” are part of the same empire.)
I otherwise agree with your comment. I too believe that it’s mostly the same people who have ruined the country via immigration that have ruined it financially. Once people lose faith in the value of a currency, it’s value can spiral out of control very quickly.
I hope you have a great day.
☮
That’s an interesting point. Thanks.
Speaking of Voyageurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbfA5L3YAO0
Even if those mounds were once cities, they were already abandoned before European diseases hit.
I know natives were capable of growing crops but it was small scale, nothing like it was in the old world. I was surprised in reading accounts of the Powhatan wars how little corn there was for the Anglos to burn/steal during raids. By the 1630s the Powhatan were already outnumbered by the English.
Anon[258], its nice that you feel so strongly about agriculture, but I already replied to Steve I meant “large scale” agriculture, of the type to support 10mm+ people. The point was that there is no evidence that N. America was populated anywhere near that. While your dissertation on pre-Columbian agriculture is interesting (not really) its not relevant.
If you’d like to challenge the relevant – my assertion regarding the 1491 population of North America – have at it.
You’re being a pedantic ass, Corvinus.
Even if those mounds were once cities, they were already abandoned before European diseases hit.
Yes. So?
This is the main pyramid / mound at Cahokia, across the river from St. Louis. The small objects on top are humans, the center one an adult. How many human-hours would it take to build that by hand, using wood and stone tools plus baskets to carry dirt? Who would feed those humans while they were building this earthwork? Where would the food come from ?
These are not difficult questions, by the way.
I know natives were capable of growing crops but it was small scale, nothing like it was in the old world.
Perhaps you should increase your knowledge of agriculture?
Powhatan
The climate of New England is not the same as the climate of the Mississippi valley near what is now St. Louis.
I already replied to Steve I meant “large scale” agriculture, of the type to support 10mm+ people
Oh, boy, wheeling your goalposts around.
Remember, these are your claims:
You’ve already had to move your goalposts from “no evidence of agriculture” to “no evidence of large scale agriculture”, which obviously gives you lots of squirming room to play your definition games, where others are supposed to guess what you mean by “large scale”.
Let’s see if you can be pinned down to some sort of quantifiable definition.
First, let’s see how you define a “city”. Is it in terms of population? Or something else? Maybe you “know one when you see one, but you can’t define it”?
Next, three questions:
Would you consider London a “city” in the year 1100?
Would you agree that England had sufficient agriculture to support a “city” of the size of London in 1100?
Do you consider that to be “large scale” agriculture?
Oh, one more question; why are you so fixed on the number “10 million”? Nobody else seems to care, but its obviously of emotional importance to you, wondering why.
Adam, thank you for the corrections. You are right that I overly simplified who some of these “Americans” were at Jekyll Island. They weren’t your average Americans, and the regular Americans were too distracted at Christmas time to think about what these elites were up to.
As for your 2nd correction, it will take me a long time to digest all the info. in that Cornell Law School link (Brushaber v. Union Pacific).
Also, I didn’t know one could use one [MORE] tag after the next. I find it easier to understand, though, than Brushaber v. Union Pacific. ;-}
LOL! Thank you, Unitlock. I’d only heard of Kids in the Hall before from my brother, but had never seen any of the show. They even made fun of French Canadians. You can’t do that, can you? (It must have been nice to live during the time that those were the only strangers you knew of to make fun of.)
When I see immigrants from Mexico or Guatemala, I see the Spanish approach in the New World: take over Indian societies, kill off the leadership caste, and become the leaders. Don’t actually kill the Indians.
By contrast, I see a lot fewer Indians left in British North America. Was it like Nazis in Eastern Europe? Dunno. But the difference is striking.
I didn’t know one could use more than one [MORE] tag either.
Not sure how that typo happened. Lol…
As the supremes say, “the authority conferred upon Congress by § 8 of article 1 ‘to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises’ is exhaustive”.
☮
So the conversation was about how I don’t believe that European disease depopulated North America. I don’t know, or care, what your agenda is in inserting yourself into that conversation. North America could have been Wakanda in 1491, but that’s irrelevant if it wasn’t in 1492.
There’s no point in debating early colonial history with you, an anon, who doesn’t even know where the Powhatan lived.
I wonder if a lot of the early English settlers were in fact former Huguenots who spoke English but had weak loyalties to England.? Judging by their names ( Delano, Mayo, Revere, Diamond, Fernald, Doane, etc) they look sort of French.
Comments are closed.
Follow Us
Order Them Here
Why are music and sports negatively correlated?
This is bad
Will Shoeless Sho Ohtani play a year of basketball?
How to find where the Pretendians live
How many Presidents have had an artistic bent?
Surprise! Society's 2020 war on order leads to disorder in 2024
1945: The Year Zero of American Architecture
NPR: "In the world of medicine, race-based diagnoses are still very real"
The New Dim Age
"Noticing" blurb survey
How to find where the Pretendians live
The New Dim Age
Surprise! Society's 2020 war on order leads to disorder in 2024
Will Shoeless Sho Ohtani play a year of basketball?
Why are music and sports negatively correlated?
1945: The Year Zero of American Architecture
"Noticing" blurb survey
Kids These Days
USA Today: "it matters that the faces of the future look like the faces of the past"
What keeps our Octogenarian Elite going?
Google Gemini on who had a more negative impact on humanity: Joe Stalin or J.K. Rowling?
What's the New Current Thing?
WaPo: Only bad people predicted how bad things would get
Has any supporter of affirmative action admitted why it's necessary?
The New Dim Age
Kids These Days
NYT: How did Christopher Nolan get away with making "Oppenheimer" about "powerful and privileged men?"
How to find where the Pretendians live
What's a good job?
Anti-whiteness
Anniversaries matter to Palestinians
Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings at the Super Bowl Parade?
A Classic
The Atlantic: Whites use up the Magic Dirt, leaving only the Tragic Dirt for nonwhites
Female Hotness Index
The dog-who-caught-the-car
John Podhoretz: "Jews are not white"
The Competency Crisis is growing
Why are the cops so mean to blacks in San Francisco? Nobody knows!
Satire is obsolete
Why are music and sports negatively correlated?
This is bad
How many Presidents have had an artistic bent?
How to find where the Pretendians live
Will Shoeless Sho Ohtani play a year of basketball?
Surprise! Society's 2020 war on order leads to disorder in 2024
"Noticing" blurb survey
1945: The Year Zero of American Architecture
The New Dim Age
USA Today: "it matters that the faces of the future look like the faces of the past"
How to find where the Pretendians live
Will Shoeless Sho Ohtani play a year of basketball?
Why are music and sports negatively correlated?
Surprise! Society's 2020 war on order leads to disorder in 2024
1945: The Year Zero of American Architecture
The New Dim Age
This is bad
"Noticing" blurb survey
Kids These Days
How many Presidents have had an artistic bent?
WaPo: Only bad people predicted how bad things would get
NYT: How did Christopher Nolan get away with making "Oppenheimer" about "powerful and privileged men?"
How to find where the Pretendians live
What's the New Current Thing?
Has any supporter of affirmative action admitted why it's necessary?
Why isn't "nudist" an identity politics identity?
Google Gemini on who had a more negative impact on humanity: Joe Stalin or J.K. Rowling?
Why not let users adjust how Bridgertonish they want their AI pictures?
The New Dim Age
Will Shoeless Sho Ohtani play a year of basketball?
Anniversaries matter to Palestinians
The dog-who-caught-the-car
John Podhoretz: "Jews are not white"
Officer Chauvin stabbed in federal prison
The Triumph of Principle
Why not let users adjust how Bridgertonish they want their AI pictures?
WaPo: Only bad people predicted how bad things would get
iSteve: Perhaps on the Wrong Side of History, but on the right side of reality.
The iSteve Blogroll
Intersectionality
Steve Sailer
Contact Steve Sailer
iSteve Panhandling
Steve Sailer
I always appreciate my readers’ help, especially monetary. Here’s how you can help:
First: You can use PayPal (non-tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. PayPal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual.
Second: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617-0142
Third: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. (Paypal and credit cards accepted, including recurring “subscription” donations.) Please make sure to click the box for:
Note: the VDARE site goes up and down on its own schedule, so if this link stops working, please let me know.
College Bowl, 12/1/1979
Fourth: You can use Bitcoin:
I’m using Coinbase as a sort of PayPal for Bitcoins.
The IRS has issued instructions regarding Bitcoins. I’m having Coinbase immediately turn all Bitcoins I receive into U.S. dollars and deposit them in my bank account. At the end of the year, Coinbase will presumably send me a 1099 form for filing my taxes.
Payments are not tax deductible.
Below are links to two Coinbase pages of mine. This first is if you want to enter a U.S. dollar-denominated amount to pay me.
Pay With Bitcoin (denominated in U.S. Dollars)
This second is if you want to enter a Bitcoin-denominated amount. (Remember one Bitcoin is currently worth many U.S. dollars.)
Pay With Bitcoin (denominated in Bitcoins)
Fifth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrAT aol.com — replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.) There is no 2.9% fee like with PayPal or Google Wallet, so this is good for large contributions.
Sixth: if you have a Chase bank account (or even other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com — replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it’s StevenSailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.) There is no 2.9% fee like with PayPal or Google Wallet, so this is good for large contributions.
Steve Sailer
Seventh: send money via the Paypal-like Google Wallet to my Gmail address(that’s isteveslrATgmail .com — replace the AT with a @). (Non-tax deductible.)
Here’s the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: “You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps.” You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.
You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.
Or you can send money via credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, Discover) with the industry-standard 2.9% fee. (You don’t need to put money into your Google Wallet Balance to do this.)
Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone
app (Android and iPhone — the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).
Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google’s free Gmail email service. Here’s how to do it.
(Non-tax deductible.)