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What I’m Reading Now 16

Posted May 30, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

What I’m Reading Now: Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick published by Viking (2006)
What I Just Finished Reading: Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer published by Simon & Schuster (2008).

A couple of years ago I was at a fundraising dinner in Westchester. A fellow at the table whom I had never met before was discussing his background and said that while he was now an attorney, when he was in college in the 1960s he had studied to be a colonial-era historian. Someone asked him how he got interested in the subject and several of us blurted out “Ticonderoga” and laughed.

For men of a certain age, the trip to the reconstructed French fort on the shores of Lake Champlain was a pilgrimage to the foreign country of the past. Along with learning about the heroic and gory deeds done there during the French and Indian Wars, we also found out that it is believed to be the site of a battle between Samuel d’Champlain and the Iroquois four hundred years ago.

Champlain is the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer’s latest book. The explorer essentially started French North America, whose cultural heritage lives on in Quebec, Louisiana, and Nova Scotia, and he helped found two great cities; Montreal and Quebec. He also, as the book’s title indicates, had a dream for the new world unlike that of the Spanish conquistadors, the Puritans, or the Dutch.

I had often wondered at French policies towards the native populations in Canada. They were significantly more enlightened than those of the other empires. And I knew that it could not have been due to some ethical superiority on the part of France as a whole, because elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere the French were every bit as likely to slaughter and enslave Indians as their rivals.

Fischer makes a convincing case that the difference was Champlain.

Champlain came of age during France’s wars of religion. His family was likely a Protestant one that converted to Catholicism. Fischer speculates that Champlain, with relatives on both sides of the religious divide, developed a habit of thriving in diversity. Although himself a Catholic, he saw the damage done by the fanatics of the Catholic League to France. They constantly disrupted the peace desired by most Frenchmen with assassinations and massacres.

When he founded New France in 1609, Champlain made it a place where the Catholic majority would have their institutions transplanted to the west, but where Protestants would also have freedom of conscience. In fact, in one of his earliest voyages he brought along both a Catholic Priest and a Calvinist minister, who annoyed everyone with their incessant arguing.

Champlain was aided in his quest by his remarkable record as a sea captain. He made 27 crossings of the Atlantic without ever losing a ship. He also explored six Canadian provinces and five American states. In fact, his exploration of northern New York took place at almost the same time Henry Hudson was sailing to what is now Albany and he visited Plymouth harbor years before the Pilgrims arrived.

Champlain had little of the contempt for the indigenous peoples that marked other colonizers. He was an excellent ethnographer and possessed a fine understanding of native cultures. He told people that in his experience the natives had “excellent judgment” and were as intelligent as Europeans. Fischer says that Champlain envisioned the new world as “a place where people of different cultures could live together in amity and concord.”

Unlike New England, founded by religious zealots or New Spain, in the grip of cruel adventurers, New France was the product of French humanism, says Fischer. Champlain did not try to throw the natives off their land as the Virginians did, or live segregated from them in the New England style. His settlements were mixed, with French and Indians living together. He encouraged his men to intermarry with the Indians in a way that was forbidden by the more race-conscious English. He even made a speech to Native peoples in Quebec in which he said that through inter-marriage “we shall be one people”.

Champlain established a pattern of mutual respect and cooperation in relations with the Native Americans in Quebec. Fischer writes; “Champlain could do that because he was genuinely interested in others and comfortable with their diversity. ...He came to maturity in a time of cruel and bitter conflict: forty years of religious strife…and millions of deaths. After that experience, this war-weary soldier dreamed of a new world where people lived in peace with others unlike themselves.”

Too bad so many of us still have such a problem with Champlain’s Dream.

What I’m Reading Now are occasional blogs that I post when I start a new book. They are not always immigration related. Here are some other notes I’ve written on books I’ve finished since September 2009:

15. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson by Eve LaPlante.

14. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson.

13. Einstein by Walter Isaacson

12. The Possessed by Elif Batuman.

11. Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew

10. The Renaissance At War by Thomas Arnold

9. Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America by Allen Guelzo

8. Lincoln: Speeches and Wriitings 1832-1858 by Abraham Lincoln

7. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan

6. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

5. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand

4. Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel