France and England in North America, Volume 2

France and England in North America

by Francis Parkman

This is the second of two Library of America volumes (the companion volume here) presenting, in compact form, all seven parts of Francis Parkman’s monumental narrative history of the struggle for control of the American continent. Thirty years in the writing, Parkman’s “history of the American forest” is an accomplishment hardly less awesome than the explorations and adventures he so vividly describes. The story reaches its climax with the fatal confrontation of two great commanders at Quebec’s Plains of Abraham—and a daring stratagem that would determine the future of a continent.

Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877) details how France might have won her imperial struggle with England. Frontenac, a courtier who was made governor of New France by that most sagacious of monarchs, oversaw the colony’s brightest era of growth and influence. Had Canada’s later governors possessed his administrative skill and personal force, his sense of diplomacy and political talent, or his grasp of the uses of power in a modern world, the English colonies to the south might have become part of what Frontenac saw as a continental scheme of French dominion.

England’s American colonies flourished, while France, in both the Old World and the New, declined from its greatness of the late seventeenth century. Conflict over the developing western regions of North America erupted in a series of colonial wars. As narrated by Parkman in A Half-Century of Conflict (1892), these American campaigns, while only part of a larger, global struggle, prepared the colonies for the American Revolution.

In Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) Parkman describes the fatal confrontation of the two great French and English commanders whose climactic battle marked the end of French power in America. As the English colonies cooperated for their own defense, they began to realize their common interests, their relative strength, and their unique position. In this imperial war of European powers we also begin to see the American figures—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington—soon to occupy a historical stage of their own.

Parkman’s chronicle of nearly two and a half centuries of conflict will permanently transform our image of the American landscape. Written with verve, suppleness, and wit, this grand narrative history of political and theological conflict, of feats of physical endurance, of courtly manners practiced with comic disproportion against the backdrop of a looming wilderness, is itself one of the still-undiscovered treasures of our national and of world literature.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Classics, 19th Century, American, Canada

1620 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1877

About the author

Francis Parkman was an American historian.

He is best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as historical sources and as literature. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a Professor of Horticulture at Harvard University and author of several books on the topic.

Parkman was a trustee of the Boston Athenæum from 1858 until his death in 1893.

Reviews

[James Violand · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work is an incredible journey. One forgets that he is reading. From the very beginning of France in the New World until its demise, the traveler sees the evolution of a people and the discovery of breathtaking vistas and the sacrifices of our ancestors. Our modern existence exhibits an ennui because we have become remote to our human natures. Not so with the historical characters and unsung people who lived during these times. An exceptional work by an unsurpassed historian that should put to shame the current crop of so-called scholars who rely on the work of other authors. Parkman spent years reviewing thousands of documents written contemporaneously with the events described by those who endured them. What a wonderful work!

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

New England humanitarianism, melting into sentimentality at a tale of woe, has been unjust to its own. Whatever judgment may be passed on the cruel measure of wholesale expatriation, it was not put in execution till every resource of patience and persuasion had been tried in vain. The agents of the French Court, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, had made some act of force a necessity. We have seen by what vile practices they produced in Acadia a state of things intolerable, and impossible of continuance. They conjured up the tempest; and when it burst on the heads of the unhappy people, they gave no help. The Government of Louis XV. began with making the Acadians its tools, and ended with making them its victims.

[Ronala · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second volume of the collected works of Francis Parkman, a great 19th-century American historian. This is an exhaustive history of French settlement and conflict in North America. This volume begins with Frontenac's arrival in Quebec in 1672 and ends with the final dissolution of French Canada in 1763. The author's biases and preconceptions are always on display in these works, but his scholarship is so comprehensive, his writing so elegant, that one makes allowances and continues with his fascinating, often poetic, narrative.

[Gary Land · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have now completed Parkman's volumes on the French and British conflict in North America. Parkman was a terrific writer whose research holds up well more than a century later, although his prejudices against Catholics and "savage" Indians don't fair so well. The books are long but very readable, for Parkman wrote at a time when history was considered a branch of literature rather than an academic enterprise. Highly recommended.

[Martin Bihl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV - finished 07.26.22

A Half Century of Conflict - finished 07.13.23

Montcalm and Wolfe - finished 09.09.24