How a treaty sparked a North American revolution
The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America, By Colin G. Calloway, Oxford University, 219 pp., illustrated, $28
As he negotiated the Treaty of Paris, ending the French and Indian War in 1763, the duc de Choiseul, the French foreign minister, forecast that the war's end would so liberate the American colonists from reliance on Britain as to give them the freedom to seek their independence.
In an account that deepens our understanding of the treaty's impact, especially on the peoples most adversely affected -- the Indians and the French-Canadians -- Colin G. Calloway argues in ``The Scratch of a Pen" that the American Revolution was preceded by ``the First War of Independence," or Pontiac's War.
Touched off barely six months after the treaty was signed, in February 1763, that war was fought by Indians along the frontier who feared British control as a threat to their freedom -- as would the colonists a dozen years later.
Indians, writes Calloway, a professor of history and Native American studies at Dartmouth College, ``had never regarded the French presence and alliance as constituting any kind of dominion over them."
The appearance of British troops after the signing of the treaty concerned the Indians and, Calloway writes, ``produced a struggle for independence." Pontiac's War raged over the upper Midwest during the summer and fall of 1763. Before it ended, ``Britain's hard-won empire in the West was all but swept away."
In his discussion of this initial war of independence, Calloway cites a gathering at Fort Niagara in 1764 of some 2,000 Indians from 24 nations to discuss the implications of the 1763 treaty -- an event, writes historian David Hackett Fischer in an editor's note, that will surprise readers.
And, Calloway notes, Pontiac's War would not be ``the last Indian war for independence," for ``multi-tribal coalitions resisted American occupation of the lands ceded by Britain in 1783 just as they had resisted British occupation of the lands ceded by the French in 1763."
Also living in those lands were the French settlers in Quebec and Acadia (now Nova Scotia) . And while they did not follow the Indian path of armed resistance, Calloway notes, they and their culture ultimately survived.
The Acadians had been expelled as early as 1755, four years before the British victory at Quebec effectively ended French control in Canada. But, Calloway writes, that ``did not mean the end of French presence and influence."
Around the Great Lakes, the fur trade came under British control, but ``French-Canadian voyageurs continued to provide [its] muscle," and throughout the region, ``French-Canadian lifestyles survived intact."
In Louisiana, where there were some 4,000 Acadians settled by the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, ``the Acadians had made adjustments to their new environment," preserving vital elements of their culture, ``adapting Acadian cuisine to Louisiana's agricultural products," in the process of becoming today's Cajuns.
And even in the lands from which they had been expelled, some 8,000 Acadians were, by 1800, living in Canada's Maritime Provinces, descendants of those who had managed to evade expulsion and of those who subsequently returned -- restoring a culture that flourishes today.
A colonial revolution, Indian wars for independence, the cultural survival of a defeated empire. All of that, and half of a continent changing hands, just from ``the scratch of a pen" -- Francis Parkman's phrase from ``Montcalm and Wolfe," his classic history of the French and Indian War. And all here brought into sharp focus by Calloway's illuminating account.
