Colonial America
Page 62
It has been argued that a final factor explaining the Indians' conversions was that both the friars' behavior and the Christian liturgy could be understood in ways that were compatible with traditional Pueblo beliefs. In this view, flagellation seemed to demonstrate that the friars had extraordinary powers, since it could be equated with the native practice of flogging their leaders to see if they could endure pain. The friars' abstinence from sexual activity could be seen as confirmation that these were men of extraordinary power. Pueblo men abstained from sex before hunting and war, believing this gave them greater power, both spiritual and physical. To abstain permanently seemed miraculous. The Indian Corn Mother became the Virgin Mary, while the cult of the rain spirits, or katsinas, was incorporated into the veneration of the saints. The traditional prayer sticks used to summon the rain spirits were replaced by the cross.9
But though the Indians may have imagined Christianity as a new source of magic that could be added to traditional practices and beliefs, the Franciscans expected them to relinquish all traces of their old culture once they had been baptized. As in Florida, conversion went hand in hand with a restructuring of Indian civil society. The adoption of European-style farming, especially the keeping of domestic animals, considerably strengthened Spanish authority since it meant a downgrading of hunting, the prerogative of the former civil chiefs. Men's role as warriors was undermined, since warfare was now primarily the responsibility of the Spanish. The priestly class had been discredited by their failure to conjure sufficient magic to defeat the Spanish. Indian icons were destroyed and replaced with those of the cross and the Virgin Mary. The priests even took control over the institution of marriage and sought to change Indian sexual mores, which had permitted both polygamy and serial monogamy. They insisted that Indian women cover their bodies and imposed harsh punishments for what they perceived as a lack of chastity, with no appreciation of Indian attitudes to fertility and sex.
Despite the missionaries' success in converting the Indians to Christianity, New Mexico failed to flourish economically. The arid climate made New Mexico unattractive to Spanish settlers, compared to a place that could support the production of tropical commodities like sugar. Thus the Hispanic population never exceeded 1,500 during the seventeenth century, though the number of Indians acknowledging Spanish authority may have been as high as 17,000. The settlers supported themselves mainly by ranching and raising crops. But besides livestock, the only other export commodity – an illegal one under the royal ordinance of 1573 – was the sale of slaves. Prisoners captured from the Apache could always be sold in New Spain as labor for the mines. The practice, however, invited retaliation by the Apache on the outlying Pueblo communities, causing considerable economic destruction. Another constraint on trade was the colony's isolation. San Gabriel and Santa Fe were almost 800 miles from the nearest Spanish settlements in northern Mexico. Even El Paso, founded in 1659, was nearly as remote. New Mexico in consequence could expect a supply convoy only once every three years, and frequently the period was longer. This meant that there were few trade goods to offer to the local Indians, making it difficult for the Spanish to maintain good relations with the local Indians or to forge new ties.
Another constraint on growth was the Spanish reliance on the encomienda system. Unlike Florida, New Mexico's soldiers were not supported by the Crown, and instead levied tribute from the Indians in both goods and services, which, when added to the friars' demands for labor to build, repair, and feed the missions, amounted to a harsh exploitative regime. What made the situation even more repressive was that the demands on each individual increased as the Indian population declined, and many Indians effectively fell into permanent servitude.
Ultimately the Pueblos realized that the Franciscans were not the powerful shamans they had initially seemed to be. Not only the Spanish soldiers but some friars as well sexually abused Indian women and appropriated Indian land for their own use. Moreover by the last quarter of the seventeenth century the religion of the conquistadors had seemingly lost much of its magic. The ravages of disease continued, as did other natural calamities like droughts, which were severe in the 1660s and 1670s. Moreover the Spanish had failed to shield the Pueblos from Apache raids, which simultaneously undermined respect for their temporal power.
Finally, in 1680 the Pueblo peoples decided to combine against their oppressors. The difficult climatic conditions of the 1660s and 1670s, combined with the ever increasing demands of the Spanish for tribute and a renewed attempt to suppress Pueblo dancing and kivas, drove a majority of the native inhabitants secretly to agree on a concerted bid for freedom. Led by a dynamic shaman named Popé, thousands of Indians rose up against the Spanish in August 1680. The rebels attacked farms, churches, and Santa Fe itself, as the rebellion spread to dozens of communities ranging over an area of more than 100 miles. After six weeks, the governor decided to abandon the capital and retreat down the Rio Grande to El Paso, whither another 1,500 had already fled. By the end, about 400 Spanish had been killed, including 21 missionaries.
The Pueblo people of New Mexico had reached the same conclusion as the followers of King Phillip in New England, only they had implemented it more successfully: by working together they had driven out the European invaders. In the weeks that followed the rebellion, Popé encouraged his followers to destroy all traces of the Spanish occupation, both secular and religious, in an effort to cleanse and restore the native way of life. The Indians destroyed altars and crosses, restored the kivas, and resumed the practice of polygamy. They were so successful that for more than a decade after the Pueblo Revolt, the Spanish abandoned New Mexico entirely.
Eventually, however, the Spanish decided to try to reconquer the colony because of the need for a military outpost to guard against French attacks on the northern frontier of New Spain. By the 1680s, the Spanish had become aware that the French were searching for a waterborne route to the Pacific. Then they learned that the French were trying to create a colony on the Texas coast, threatening Spanish control over the Gulf of Mexico. To protect its claims in North America, the Spanish Crown would have to maintain a continued military presence in New Mexico. Therefore in 1691, Spanish authorities appointed Diego de Vargas as governor of the province with the charge of restoring Spanish authority. Vargas reorganized the refugees at El Paso, who were in large part able to regain the initiative because the Pueblo communities were once more divided among themselves. Popé had alienated many of his supporters by acting in the manner of a Spanish governor and by now many Pueblos were ready to play the Spanish off against their rivals. These divisions allowed Vargas to return with military reinforcements in 1693, fighting his way into Santa Fe in an effort to restore Spanish authority in the Pueblos.
However, the Franciscans found that without a continuous military presence they could no longer remain in their missions, as before. When another rebellion broke out, Spanish authorities undertook a number of reforms, abandoning the encomienda system and replacing it with the less extortionate repartimiento labor requirement. The Spanish government sent in paid, professional military men to defend the colony instead of relying on the encomenderos. They also made religious concessions as the Franciscans recognized the need to be more accommodating of native customs and beliefs.
Map 16 Spanish, French, and Indian settlements in the Gulf of Mexico in the mid eighteenth century. From David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992), 185 (map drawn specifically for Professor Weber's book by Don Bufkin).
Reproduced with permission of Yale University Press.
During the eighteenth century, the colony struggled more than ever. During the long absence of the Spanish, some of the Plains peoples including the Comanches had acquired abandoned Spanish horses and become adept at using them in hunting and warfare. Moreover, with French settlements in the Mississippi Valley, some of these peoples were now able to obtain European guns. The defense of Spain's northern frontier now became much more difficult as mounted rai
ders launched surprise attacks, using their new firearms, to carry off captives from the Pueblos to be sold as slaves. Meanwhile the Spanish were still unable to provide the trade goods that would have genuinely strengthened their alliances with local Indians.10 Although the Spanish population grew gradually, the native population had declined to about 10,000 by 1750, as people from the Pueblos drifted away. Even with the Spanish government's commitment to sustain the colony, New Spain's northern frontier had become dangerously unstable.
3 The Growth of New France
In contrast to the Spanish colonies, the French colony of New France had grown and prospered economically during the latter decades of the seventeenth century and the settled area within the colony had spread. There were now a number of royal trading posts inhabited by fishermen and traders near Tadoussac, at the entrance to the St. Lawrence River, along with whaling and fishing camps along the Atlantic coast to the north in Labrador and Newfoundland. About 1,100 French farmers and fishermen lived in Acadia to the south, mostly in Port Royal, on what is now Nova Scotia. The towns of Québec, Trois-Rivières, and Montréal (also called Ville-Marie) had grown, and settlers lined the banks of the St. Lawrence River in between them. The fertility of the French Canadians was high, just as in New England to the south, and in the cold, healthy climate of New France life expectancies were longer than for contemporaries in Europe. As a result the settler population continued to expand rapidly through natural increase. The total population of New France would grow to about 25,000 by 1720, and by 1760 it would nearly triple again, reaching almost 75,000.
During the latter half of the seventeenth century, French settlers around the St. Lawrence region had begun shifting away from their almost exclusive reliance on the fur trade to develop a subsistence-based, family farming economy. Since farmers all wanted access to the St. Lawrence River, the main transportation route within the colony, farms were laid out along its banks in narrow vertical strips which often extended out away from the river for more than a mile. The result was a settlement pattern which brought farmers not only close to the water but close to one another. By the eighteenth century a visitor traveling down the river from Québec to Montréal would have seen a farmhouse every 200 yards or so, interrupted every so often by a manor house, a mill, or a church. The rural families who lived in these farmhouses lived much like their counterparts in New England. They grew corn and wheat and raised cattle, sheep, and pigs to feed their own families, and by the 1720s were able to sell a small surplus of grain to buyers in Montréal and Québec and other French colonies in North America and the West Indies. In many respects the St. Lawrence Valley resembled British colonies further south. However, their societies were developing some distinct differences.
Though its farms produced commodities similar to those found in New England, French Canadian society remained a more aristocratic society; most of the land was owned by large landlords, called seigneurs, but farmed by renters known as habitants, who paid their landlords annual dues or rent. Since the land produced few if any profitable products during the seventeenth century, the seigneurs did not grow rich from their rents. However, they still enjoyed more prestige than the ordinary settlers. For example, members of seigneurial families were preferred for civil offices within the colonial government and members of the officer corps in the regular army were almost always seigneurs. Members of seigneurial families also tended to share the values of the French aristocracy, stressed the importance for young men of earning honor and glory for their families through military service. As a result the Canadian troupe de marines included an unusually large number of noble officers from local families, many of them eager to prove themselves in battle.
Settler families in New France, like those in the British colonies, were patriarchal in the sense that they assumed the superior authority of a male household head. Yet French household heads possessed somewhat less power over their dependents than their counterparts further south. French law made it difficult for a father to disinherit his children, meaning he could not exercise as much control over them in practice as a British colonial father could. Moreover French women in New France fared considerably better than white women in the British colonies in several respects. For one thing, married French women retained substantially more control over marital property than did British wives, owning half of all marital property rather than losing control over all of it. French widows received their half of the marital property outright after their husbands died instead of being limited to the use of only a third. For another, elite French women had more occupational choices than British colonial women. While most French Canadian women married and defined their lives largely in terms of their productive household work, those who could afford the payment of a “dowry” could remain single, enter a Catholic convent, and engage in teaching and charitable work. Women in female religious communities possessed considerably more autonomy than wives and daughters.
Just as in other colonies in North America, African slavery had gained a small foothold in New France by the eighteenth century. Since the agricultural economy produced minimal profits, farmers had no incentive to import slaves on a large scale. Nevertheless wealthy settlers in Canada brought in small numbers of African slaves purchased in the Caribbean or the British colonies (as well as Pawnee slaves from the far west) to work as household servants. As in other “societies with slaves,” Africans were not invariably excluded from the society of poor whites or prevented from developing relationships with white patrons. Their situation was not enviable, however, for they faced the same kinds of problems as Africans in New England. The cold climate of New France was inhospitable and alienating for people of African origin. Even more important, because the number of Africans in New France remained tiny, opportunities for marriage and family life were limited. Life in New France often entailed isolation and loneliness for Africans who had been brought there involuntarily.
Government authority over the settlers in New France was considerably more centralized than authority in the British colonies. The governor-general, intendant, and bishop cooperated to govern the colony, assisted by a sovereign council of seigneurs along with governors and deputy intendants to help carry out their policies at the local level. The governor-general, answerable to the Crown, was in charge of military affairs and commanded the French regulars who were permanently garrisoned in the colony. The intendant enforced the laws and carried out economic policy. There was no elective assembly. Although the royal government conducted annual public assemblies in which the governor and the intendant listened to the people's views on matters of policy, these assemblies had no power to veto government decisions.
In sharp contrast to the town meetings that had developed in some of the British colonies, local government entities in New France were not independent decision-making bodies but administrative agencies responsible for carrying out government policy and mobilizing the militia when instructed to do so. A capitaine de milice was responsible for organizing militia companies, in which all white men in the colony between the ages of 16 and 60 were expected to serve, and providing the settlers with appropriate military training. The governor-general appointed militia captains to command the militia companies, and also to help enforce the law when necessary. Despite the absence of local autonomy, these institutions aroused little resistance from the settler population. Militia captains were habitants rather than seigneurs, which helped them to win the trust of their subordinates and to help mediate between local populations and the intendant. Another feature of government that helped to mitigate potential resentment was that most habitants paid no taxes. Certainly in comparison to peasants in France during the eighteenth century, the habitants in New France were lightly governed. Thus despite its top-down structure, the government did not seem oppressive to most of the colonists.
This relationship between the colonial government and the French settler population provided an important advantage to the French. For even though the population of New Fran
ce remained small relative to the British population further south, it could be mobilized rapidly and efficiently to defend the colony when needed. Of course the settlers did not provide the colony's sole military force. The professional soldiers in the troupe de marines along with the colony's Indian allies would provide its first line of defense in case of an attack, and were usually on the front lines in any offensive action.
Another major difference between society in New France and the societies that were developing in the British colonies further south was the presence of Native Americans in or near white settlements, and the frequency of interactions between the Indians and the French. French settlers frequently encountered Indians in their day-to-day lives, particularly during the summer when Indian hunters and trappers visited Montréal in large numbers to sell their furs. During the late seventeenth century the royal government in New France followed a policy of trying to assimilate the Indians into French society by encouraging marriages between French men and Indian women as well as the adoption of Indian children by white families. Although the policy had been abandoned by the eighteenth century, the government continued to encourage Christian Indians to settle in Catholic reserves right next to the French settlements. A group of Huron refugees had settled at Lorette, north of Québec, sometime after being driven from their villages in Huronia during the 1640s. South of Québec was the Abenaki village of St. Francois. Considerable numbers of Christian Mohawks had settled southwest of Montréal in Kahnawake by 1700 on land owned by the Jesuits, and more Christian Iroquois migrated to Kahnawake as well as a second Jesuit reserve, Kanesatake, during the eighteenth century.