1909 Champlain Tercentenary
Report of the NY Lake Champlain Tercentenary Commission
to the Legislature of the State of New York, Sept. 19, 1911

THE IROQUOIS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR AMERICA

It is no ordinary event that we celebrate.

The beauty of this wonderful lake, first revealed to the eye of civilized man by the visit of Samuel Champlain three hundred years ago; the powerful personality, noble character, and romantic career of the discoverer: the historic importance of this controlling line of strategic military communication, along which have passed in successive generations the armies whose conflicts were to determine the control and destinies of great empires: the value to Canada and to the United States of this natural pathway of commerce: the growth and prosperity of the noble states that have arisen on the opposing shores: their contributions to the wealth of mankind, to civil and religious liberty, to the world’s progress in civilization — all these, withdraw the first coming of the white man to Lake Champlain from the dull and uninteresting level of the commonplace; while comparative antiquity, so attractive and inspiring to the people of the New World, lends dignity and romance to the figures and the acts that have escaped oblivion through centuries.

Even a dull imagination must be stirred as it dwells upon the influence which the events attending the discovery were to have, upon the issue of the great struggle between France and Great Britain for the control of the continent: the struggle between the two white races for the opportunity to colonize and expand, and between the two systems of law and civil polity, for the direction and development of civilization among the millions who were to people the vast region extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Rio Grande to the frozen limits of the North.

Authentic history records that late in June, 1609, Champlain, accompanied by several white companions and by a great array of Algonquin Indians of the Saint Lawrence Valley, left the French station on the site of the old Indian village of Stadacona, where now stands the City of Quebec, upon an expedition intended by the Indians for war and by the whites for exploration. They proceeded in canoes up the Saint Lawrence and turned south into the Richelieu, and, in the early days of July, after many vicissitudes and the desertion of the greater part of the Indians, they dragged their canoes around the rapids of the river and came to the foot of the lake on whose shores we stand.

They proceeded up the lake with all the precautions of Indian warfare in an enemy’s country. As they approached the head of the lake they rested concealed by day, and urged forward their canoes by night. At last, in this month of July, three hundred years ago, they came upon a war party of the Iroquois. Both parties landed, in the neighborhood of the present Ticonderoga, and, with the coming of the dawn, joined battle.

Protected by the light armor of the period, Champlain advanced to the front in full view of the contending parties, and, as the Iroquois drew their bows upon him, he fired his arquebuse. One of his white companions also fired. The Iroquois chief and several of his warriors fell killed or wounded; and the entire band, amazed and terror stricken by their first experience with the inexplicable, miraculous, and death-dealing power of firearms, fled in dismay.

They were pursued by the Algonquins, some were killed, some were taken prisoners, and the remainder returned to their homes to spread through all the tribes of the Iroquois the story that a new enemy had arisen bringing unheard of and supernatural powers to the aid of their traditional Algonquin foes. The shot from Champlain’s arquebuse had determined the part that was to be played in the approaching conflict by the most powerful military force among the Indians of North America. It had made the confederacy of the Iroquois and all its nations and dependencies the implacable enemies of the French and the fast friends of the English for all the long struggle that was to come.

A century or more before the white settlement, five Indian nations of the same stock and language, under the leadership of extraordinary political genius, had formed a confederacy for the preservation of internal peace and for common defense against external attack. Their territories extended in 1609 from the Saint Lawrence to the Susquehanna; from Lake Champlain and the Hudson to the Genesee, and, a few years later, to the Niagara. There, dwelt side by side the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas, in the firm union of Ho-de-no-sau-nee — the Long House of the Iroquois.

The Algonquin tribes that surrounded them were still in the lowest stage of industrial life and for their food added to the spoils of the chase only wild fruits and roots. The Iroquois had passed into the agricultural stage. They had settled habitations and cultivated fields. They had extensive orchards of the apple, made sugar from the maple, and raised corn and beans and squash and pumpkins. The surrounding tribes had only the rudimentary political institution of chief and followers. The Iroquois had a carefully devised constitution well adapted to secure confederate authority in Motters of common interest, and local authority in Motters of local interest.

Each nation was divided into tribes, the Wolf tribe, the Bear tribe, the Turtle tribe, etc. The same tribes ran through all the nations, the section in each nation being bound by ties of consanguinity to the sections of the same tribe in the other nations. Thus a Seneca Wolf was brother to every Mohawk Wolf, a Seneca Bear to every Mohawk Bear. The arrangement was like that of our college societies with chapters in different colleges. So there were bonds of tribal union running across the lines of national union; and the whole structure was firmly knit together as by the warp and woof of a textile fabric.

The government was vested in a council of fifty sachems, a fixed number coming from each nation. The sachems from each nation came in fixed proportions from specific tribes in that nation; the office was hereditary in the tribe; and the member of the tribe to fill it was elected by the tribe. The sachems of each nation governed their own nation in all local affairs. Below the sachems were elected chiefs on the military side and Keepers of the Faith on the religious side. Crime was exceedingly rare; insubordination was unknown; courage, fortitude and devotion to the common good were universal.

The territory of the Long House covered the watershed between the Saint Lawrence basin and the Atlantic. From it the waters ran into the Saint Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the Ohio. Down these lines of communication the war parties of the confederacy passed, beating back or overwhelming their enemies until they had become overlords of a vast region extending far into New England, the Carolinas, the Valley of the Mississippi, and to the coast of Lake Huron. They held in subjection an area including the present States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Northern Virginia and Tennessee, and parts of New England, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ontario.

Of all the inhabitants of the New World they were the most terrible foes and the most capable of organized and sustained warfare; and of all the inhabitants north of Mexico they were the most civilized and intelligent.

The century which followed the voyages of Columbus had been for the Northern continent a period of exploration and discovery, of search for gold and for fabulous cities and for a passage to the Indies, of fugitive fur trade with the natives, of fisheries on the banks, and of feeble, disastrous attempts at occupation, but not of permanent settlement.

Ponce de Leon and De Soto and Verrazano, Cartier and the Cabots and Drake and Frobisher and Gilbert and Cosnold, had brought the Western coast of the Atlantic out from the mists of fable; but they had left no trace upon its shores. Jean Ribaut and his French Huguenots had attempted to do for their religion in Florida what the Pilgrims did in the following century on the coast of Massachusetts; but their colony was destroyed with incredible cruelty, in the name of religion, by the ferocious Spaniard, Menendez, and the colony of Menendez was in turn destroyed by the Gascon de Gourgues, save a feeble remnant on the site of Saint Augustine. Raleigh, with noble constancy and persistency, had wasted his fortune in repeated and vain attempts to establish a colony in Virginia.

On the sites of the modern Quebec and Montreal, at Tadousac, at the mouth of the Saint Croix, and at Port Royal, Jacques Cartier and Roberval, Pontgravé and De Monts, Poutrincourt and Lescarbot, had seen their heroic and devoted efforts to establish a new France brought to naught by cold and starvation and disease. In that month of July, 1609, in all the vast expanse between Florida and Labrador no settlement of white men held its place or presaged the coming of the future multitude save at Jamestown, behind the Capes of Virginia, where Christopher Newport’s handful of colonists had barely survived two years of privation, and at Quebec, where the undaunted Pontgravé and Champlain only one year before had again gained a foothold.

At Jamestown the mournful record of the winter of 1609 to 1610 shows us that in the spring but sixty of the colonists were living. At Quebec twenty-eight Frenchmen with Champlain had braved the rigors of a Canadian winter, and in the spring of 1610, but eight remained alive. In this same month of July. 1609, the Half Moon of Henry Hudson was repairing damages in Penobscot Bay after her voyage across the Atlantic, and preparing to sail on to the noble river that still bears her commander’s name.

The field was open; the hands upon the margin that reached out to grasp control seemed few and feeble; but the period of preparation was past. The mighty forces that were to urge on the most stupendous movement of mankind in human history had already received their direction. The time was ripe for the real conflict to begin, and it had its momentous beginning when the Chief of the Mohawks fell before the arquebuse of Champlain at Ticonderoga.

The conditions which limited the powers and directed the purposes of the various countries of Europe in the early years of the seventeenth century made it inevitable that the struggle for American control should ultimately become a single combat between France and Great Britain.

It is true that Spain had overturned the tribal government of the Aztecs and held possession along the Northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, a vantage ground from which she might well have pressed to the northward successful plans of occupation. But Spain had no such plans. When the search for treasure had failed, and it was plain that no more Perus and Mexicos were to be found, the dark forests of the North Atlantic offered no attractions to the Spanish Conquistadores, who sought the spoils of conquest rather than the rewards of labor.

With the death of Philip the Second the decline of Spanish power had already begun. His successors were feeble and incapable. The stern, repressive, and despotic control over body and soul effected by the union of military and religious organization during the first century of United Spain was accompanied by a marvelous efficiency and energy that made Spain for a time the foremost maritime and colonizing power of the world. The price of that efficiency, however, was the loss of the only permanent source of national energy, the independence and free initiative of individual character among her citizens.

Thenceforth Spain was no longer to sway the rod of empire, but, holding it weakly in feeble hands, was to lose one by one the world-wide possessions of Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second, until the time when the penalty of her national sin against civil and religious freedom should have been paid and the native strength and nobility of her character should be able to reassert themselves in a period of renewed growth and reestablished power and prosperity; a time which we hope and trust has already come.

Portugal, still clinging to the fruits of her explorers’ genius, and sturdy Holland, strong in her newly won freedom, were looking not to North America, but to Brazil and to the Orient for their opportunities to expand; and the future colony of New Amsterdam was destined to be readily transferred to the English for the sake of greater opportunities to the Dutch East India Company.

Germany was not yet a maritime power. Loosely compacted under the failing hegemony of the House of Austria, she was upon the threshold of the Thirty Years’ War in which the most frightful slaughter and devastation were to destroy her cities, lay waste her fields, reduce her population from thirty millions to twelve millions, and set back her civilization for centuries.

Into that vortex of destruction Sweden also was about to be drawn, and her forces were to be engrossed in the struggle for national existence, so that the hopes of Gustavus Adolphus for a New Sweden, upon the banks of the Delaware, were to fail of fruition, and the Swedish colony in America was to pass with hardly a struggle into the hands first of the Dutch and then of the English.

Prussia was a dependent dukedom. Russia had still three-quarters of a century to wait before Peter the Great was to begin to lead her from semi-barbarism into the ranks of civilized powers. Italy was a geographical expression covering a multitude of petty states.

Of all the peoples of Europe, only the French and the English possessed the power, the energy, the adventurous courage, the opportunity and the occasion, for expansion across the Atlantic. The field and the prize were for them, and for them alone. Upon the throne of France was Henry the Fourth, the greatest of French kings. In the governing class of Frenchmen, political and religious, were the virile strength, the intellectual acumen, the romantic chivalry, the strong passions, the love of glory, the capacity for devotion to ideals; which were to make possible the rule of Richelieu, the ascendancy of Louis the Fourteenth, the political idealists of the Eighteenth century, the tremendous social forces whose outbreak in the French Revolution appalled the world, and the armies of Napoleon.

In England the reign of great Elizabeth had just closed. It was the England of Spenser and Shakespeare and Bacon; of Cecil and Raleigh; of Drake and Frobisher. John Hampden and Cromwell and Milton were in their childhood. For four centuries since Magna Charta Englishmen had become accustomed to the assertion of individual rights of the citizen against arbitrary power. Since the repudiation of Roman supremacy over the national church, by Henry the Eighth, three generations had become wonted to the assertion of religious freedom. King James’s translation of the Bible was in progress and nearly completed. The deep religious feeling of the Puritan reaction against both Roman and Royal Episcopacy that was to cost Charles the First his life and James the Second his throne, had already become a controlling motive among a great multitude of the English people.

From these two countries, each possessed of great powers, each endowed with noble qualities, proceeded the colonists who were to dispute for the possession of America. The French movement was in the main governmental, aristocratic, proceeding from state and church, designed to extend and increase the power, dominion, and glory of the King, to convert the Indians to the true faith, and to extend over them and over all the lands through which they roamed, and over all who should come after them and take their place, the same iron rule of conformity against which the Huguenots of France were vainly contending.

The English movement was in the main popular, proceeding from the people of England who wished to escape either church or state at home and to find freedom in a new world for the practice of their religion or the pursuit of their fortunes according to their own ideas. Some of the English colonies braved the hardships of exile rather than conform against their consciences to requirements of practice and doctrine which the English church imposed. Some sought for fortune in the New World because the State had so distributed the property and so closed the avenues for advancement in England that they must needs seek opportunities elsewhere if at all.

For centuries the struggle between civil and religious absolutism on the one hand and individual liberty on the other were waged alike in France and in England. The attempt to colonize America came from one side of the controversy in France and from the other side of the same controversy in England. The virtues of the two systems were to be tried out and the irrepressible conflict between them was to be continued in the wilderness. For capable and efficient leadership, for far-sighted and comprehensive plans, for clear understanding of existing conditions and prevision as to the future, for conspicuous examples of heroic achievement and self-devotion, the palm must be awarded to the French over their English competitors.

There are few chapters in history so full of romantic interest, so compelling in their demands for sympathy and admiration, as the record of the century and a half that began with the wooden fortress of Champlain under the bluff at Quebec and ended with the fall of Montcalm on the Heights of Abraham. The world owes many debts to France. Not the least of these is the inspiration the men of every race can find in the noble examples of such explorers as Nicollet and Joliet and La Salle; such leaders as Champlain and Frontenac and Duquesne and Montcalm; and such missionaries as Le Caron and Bréboeuf and Marquette. They strove for the execution of a great design, holding hardship and suffering and life of little account in their loyalty to their religion and their King. With infinite pains they won the friendship of the Indians of the Saint Lawrence and the far Northwest; they carried the flag of France to the mouth of the Mississippi; they drew a cordon of military posts up the Saint Lawrence, across to the Mississippi, and down to the Gulf, well designed to bar the westward advance of the English colonies, to save the great West for their race, and thence to press the English backward to the sea. Their soldiers were, as a rule, better led, better organized, and moved on more definite and certain plans than the English.

Occasionally some born fighter on the English side would accomplish a great deed, like Pepperrell at Louisburg, or some man of supreme good sense would bring order out of confusion, as did Franklin and Washington; but as a rule Colonial legislatures were slow and vacillating; Colonial governors were indifferent and short-sighted; and Colonial movements were marked by a lack of that definite responsibility, coupled with power, so essential to successful warfare.

Fortunately for England between the two parties all along the controlling strategic line from this Lake Champlain to the gateway of the West at Fort Duquesne, stretched the barrier of the Long House and its tributary nations. They were always ready, always organized, always watchful. They continually threatened and frequently broke the great French military line of communication. Along the whole line they kept the French continually in jeopardy. Before the barrier the French built forts and trained soldiers — behind it the English cleared the forests and built homes and cultivated fields and grew to a great multitude, strong in individual freedom and in the practice of self-government.

Again and again the French hurled their forces against the Long House, but always with little practical advantage. At one time De Tracy, the Viceroy, burned villages and laid waste the land of the Iroquois with twelve hundred French soldiers. At another, La Barre, the Governor, with eighteen hundred; at another, Denonville, with two thousand; at another, Frontenac with six hundred; at still another, Frontenac with a thousand. Always there came also a cloud of Algonquin allies. Always the Iroquois retired and then returned, rebuilt their villages, replanted their fields, resumed their operations, and in their turn took ample revenge for their injuries.

So, to and fro the war parties went, harrying and burning and killing, but always the barrier stood, and always with its aid the English colonies labored and fought and grew strong. When the final struggle came between the armies of France and England, the French had the genius of Montcalm and soldiers as brave as ever drew sword; but behind Wolfe and his stout English hearts was a new people, rich in supplies, trained in warfare, and ready to fight for their homes.

South Carolina, the records show, furnished twelve hundred and fifty men for the war; Virginia, two thousand; Pennsylvania, two thousand seven hundred; New Jersey, one thousand; New York, two thousand six hundred and eighty; New Hampshire and Rhode Island, one thousand; Connecticut, five thousand; Massachusetts, seven thousand. It was not merely the army — it was that a nation had arrived, too great in numbers, in extent of territory, in strength of independent, individual character, to be overwhelmed by any power that France could possibly produce.

The conclusion was foregone. A battle lost or won at Quebec or elsewhere could but hasten or retard the result a little. The result was sure to come as it did come.

In all this interesting and romantic story may be seen two great proximate causes of the French failure and the English success; two reasons why from Quebec to the Pacific we speak English, follow the course of the common law, and estimate and maintain our rights according to the principles of English freedom.

One of these was the great inferiority of the Indian allies of the French, and the great superiority of the Indian allies of the English; the effective and enduring organization, the war-like power of the Iroquois and their fidelity to the “covenant chain” which bound them to our fathers. The other cause lies deeper: It is that peoples, not monarchs, settlers, not soldiers, build empires: that the spirit of absolutism in a royal court is a less vital principle than the spirit of liberty in a nation.

In these memorial days let there be honor to Champlain and the chivalry of France: honor to the strong free hearts of the common people of England; and honor also to the savage virtues, the courage and loyal friendship of the Long House of the Iroquois.

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