Ill success did but increase the disposition to continue the war. To advance the colony, a royal edict, in 1737, permitted a ten years freedom of commerce between the West India Islands and Louisiana; while, in 1739, a new expedition against the Chickasas, receiving aid not from Illinois only, but even from Montreal and Quebec, and from France, made its rendezvous in Arkansas, on the St. Francis River. In the last of June, the whole army, composed of twelve hundred whites, and twice that number of red and black men, took up its quarters in Fort Assumption, on the bluff of Memphis. But autumn wasted itself in languor and weariness of spirit; the recruits from France, the Canadians, sunk under the climate. When, in March, 1740, a small detachment proceeded towards the Chickasa country, they were met by messengers, who supplicated for peace; and Bienville gladly accepted the calumet. The fort at Memphis was razed; the troops from Illinois and from Canada drew back; the fort on the St. Francis was dismantled; and Bienville returned, to conceal his shame under false pretences. Peace, it was said, was established between France and the Chickasas; but the settlements between Lower Louisiana and the Illinois were interrupted. From Kaskaskia to Baton Rouge was a wilderness; the Chickasas remained the undoubted lords of their country; and, in the great expanse of territory claimed by France, the jurisdiction of her monarch was but a name. The French were kept of the country by the Chickasas by that nation itself; red men protected the English settlements on the west. Such was Louisiana more than a half century after the first attempt at colonization by La Salle. Its population may have been five thousand whites and half that number of blacks. Louis XIV. had fostered it with pride and liberal expenditures; and opulent merchant, famed for his successful enterprise, assumed its direction; the company of the Mississippi, aided by boundless but transient credit, had made it the foundation of their hopes; and, again, Fleury and Louis XV. had sought to advance its fortunes. Priests and friars, dispersed through nations from Biloxi to the Dahcotas, propitiated the favor of the savages. But still the valley of the Mississippi was nearly a wilderness. All its patrons -- though among them it counted kings and ministers of state -- had not accomplished for it, in half a century, a tithe of the prosperity which, within the same period, sprung naturally from the benevolence of William Penn to the peaceful settlers on the Delaware. End of Chapter 48. History of the Colonization of the United States, 1841
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 08:50:26 +0000
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