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, 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!

[Hatuxka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read on the seat of a stationary bike over much of the months of the pandemic; no other way was sustainable. This volume was bought when the Scribners Building in NYC was still a bookstore, off the sale shelf after Christmas; the second volume a year later from Brentano’s across the street when there was a Brentano’s bookstore. Also marked as a sale item. Both disappeared by a couple of years later. The second chapter in the first of the seven works of history assembled in this two-volume Library of America set devoted to the conflict between France and England over settlement in North America presages the final outcome of the nearly 250 years of that struggle. A Huguenot (French Protestant) attempt to settle Florida as the first of eight French Wars of Religion over 36 years was beginning meets a Spanish Inquisition-era response by Spain, the prior claimant of that territory. The bloody encounter described encapsulates in several ways the entirety of this massive body of work and the principal causes of the outcome. French settlement of the New World would be obstructed by feudalism and religious strife, as of course in the same way learning, knowledge, and social progress had been stifled violently in the Old World. This early chapter also sets the approach the author takes throughout the total 3,224 pages of the work: a brief but engrossing history of the events, their broader background, and people involved in those events and that preceded the events that are described in a meticulously almost exhaustively detailed narrative. sets the approach the author takes throughout the total 3,224 pages of the work: a brief but engrossing history of the events, their broader background, and people involved in those events and that preceded the events that are described in a meticulously almost exhaustively detailed narrative.

Throughout the series of seven originally separate works Parkman wrote over 30 years that comprise these two Library of America volumes, the geography of the lands explored and fought over is perhaps never as well depicted had the author not visited a large majority of them. The natural settings of that long history, skirmish by skirmish, battle by battle, expedition by expedition, retreat by retreat, and massacre by massacre described with such detail reflects that personal documentation. The sheer expenditure of human effort and the dangers and sufferings over vast distances mark almost every part of the conflict described. To that are added his deep and broad study of the personalities involved, their conflicts, using diaries, letters, official records, biographies, military reports, and early historical works. It seems unlikely any other historian has covered this same ground since this massive work was produced.

Despite the prodigious detail he renders, Parkman is very succinct at widely dispersed points in the narrative in specifying what is in progress that will make the final outcome. This may be attributed to his stated intention that the seven works be considered separately. Late in the final part (2700 pages into the series of histories he wrote on France and England in North America), he describes the mission of a member of the Moravian brotherhood sent at the beginning of the “French and Indian War” from settlers in eastern Pennsylvania to parley with the tribes in Ohio to convince them to join with the English. While he doesn’t quote this emissary, he uses that moment to sum up a major ultimate conclusion he draws from these 7 works. “He addressed an audience filled with an inordinate sense of their own power and importance, believing themselves greater and braver than either of the European nations, and yet deeply jealous of both. “We have heard,” they said, “that the French and English mean to kill all the Indians and divide the land among themselves.” “And on this string they harped continually.” “If they had known their true interest, they would have made no peace with the English, but would have united as one man to form a barrier of fire against their farther progress; for the West in English hands meant farms, villages, cities, the ruin of the forest, the extermination of the game, and the expulsion of those who lived on it; while the West in French hands meant but scattered posts of war and trade, with the native tribes cherished as indispensable allies.” In this first volume of the series, Pioneers of France in the New World, as the 36-year-long, eight wars of religion were about to break out back in France, in describing the beginning of conflict with England over Canada, Huguenots reappear. Parkman here expresses for the first of many times throughout these works why France lost this conflict. Since its founding, Canada had barely existed, facing near starvation, insecurity against hostile tribes, and suffered under the sway of an oligopoly of traders and, worst of all, the church. The royal remedy was to designate the Huguenot trader de Caen to take over the concession for New France. This fostered an increased presence of Huguenots, a group predominantly of bourgeois origin and so notably industrious and enterprising, but bold heretics. The latter trait especially, along with selling guns to surrounding tribes, led to their banning. Thenceforth, settlement and trade were restricted to and controlled by the French Catholic hierarchy. England, meanwhile, in settling its narrow strip along the Atlantic coast, had no eligibility requirements of any kind. This is the determining contrast between the two powers that is mentioned repeatedly by Parkman and referred to above. The relative freedoms assumed by and given to settlers by Britain versus the conditions imposed by French royal edict and the intrigues, decay, and decadence brought from a France, ruled essentially by the Cardinal, Richelieu, sealed the ultimate fate of New France. Put still another way is that while the earlier pioneering and explorations had paved a way for French settlement, strict Catholic orthodoxy had barred the Huguenots, the French settlers most likely to match the energy of settlers Britain treated with a much lighter hand.

The Seven Years War in Europe just underway, saw the French general Montcalm given a relatively small force to defend the French North America that the English had not yet driven France from, a France that was edging toward Revolution. After early success the surging of additional British troops, led to French defeat. He was famous defeated on the Plains of Abraham in Canada and was killed in battle there, as was the British general Wolfe. It is symbolic that at the time of Parkman’s writing, Montcalm was buried in a shell crater on the grounds of the Ursuline sisters’ nunnery in Quebec, whereas Wolfe’s body was disinterred and taken back to England. A huge monument to him has a place in Westminster Abbey.


Finally, this entire body of work can be seen as a “prequel” to the inevitable onset and successful result of the American Revolution. Parkman’s final word on the Fall of Canada is that it led inevitably to the American colonies revolting, given that French dominance beyond the Appalachians, that threatened their expansion eastward, was ended and Britain itself became the singular impediment.

[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