{"id":8383,"date":"2013-06-01T07:00:17","date_gmt":"2013-06-01T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=8383"},"modified":"2013-05-31T12:31:36","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T16:31:36","slug":"1758-document-hints-at-a-very-different-north-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2013\/06\/01\/1758-document-hints-at-a-very-different-north-america\/","title":{"rendered":"1758 Document hints at a very different North America"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Screen<\/a>

Screen shot of 1758 document offered as Lot 66 <\/a>at June 11 Sotheby’s auction in New York City.<\/p><\/div>\n

There’s a genre of fiction called ‘Alternate history<\/a>‘.<\/p>\n

You know: Abraham Lincoln survived John Wilkes Booth’s\u00a0assassination\u00a0attempt or someone managed to kill Hitler before WW II – that sort of thing. Romps that mix what we know did happen with\u00a0how things could have gone quite differently<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Well, here’s a historical document from 1759 that practically screams ‘write this’.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0reported by Randy Boswel<\/a>\u00a0of Postmedia news:<\/p>\n

A New York auction house has revealed the discovery of a previously unknown document from a pivotal moment in Canadian history \u2014 a hand-written report detailing an \u201cobscure\u201d and startling December 1758 proposal by an unnamed French official to relocate the 60,000 people of New France to Louisiana in the event of a British victory in the Seven Years\u2019 War.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hmm. If that had happened, the\u00a0Louisiana\u00a0Purchase<\/a> in 1803 would have become less probable. At 4 cents per acre, the total sum of 15 million paid to France was no small chunk of money back in the day. As we all learned in school, that sale enabled the young U.S. to expand westward and incorporate the tremendously important\u00a0Mississippi\u00a0River watershed. The Library of Congress calls it<\/a> the “greatest real\u00a0estate\u00a0deal in history”. (Thomas Jefferson basically bought the parts encompassed by the green lines in the map below.)<\/p>\n

The 1758 document is among many other items to be offered by Sotheby’s on that date: Fine Books and Manuscripts, including Americana<\/a>. The estimated price range runs from $100,000 to $150,000 USD<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"essay1e_lg\"<\/a>I will\u00a0shamelessly\u00a0quote from the Sotheby catalog notes, because they are fascinating:<\/p>\n

A previously un<\/span>known manuscript account of an obscure French project to relocate some 60,000 French inhabitants of Canada to Louisiana during the French and Indian War<\/span>. This plan was not known to historians until 1954 when Lionel Grouls published a study of another similar, but shorter, manuscript from the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (C11 A, 103), dated 27 December 1758, in\u00a0Revue d’Histoire de l’Am\u00e9rique fran\u00e7aise<\/em>(vol. VIII [1954]: 97-118).<\/p>\n

The anonymous author details the advantages of such a project: increasing the population of Louisiana; making it a stronger colony, capable of withstanding English encroachment; developing the agriculture of the region; and establishing new trade routes and partners. The author also is adamant that the any \u00e9migr\u00e9s must be persuaded to join the project voluntarily because of the personal advantages to them\u2014they are not to be coerced or forced to move. He actually tabulates twenty-seven points that can be used to convince the settlers to abandon Canada for Louisiana, and he also speculates that camels might be sent to the settlers in their new southern homeland. The movement of settlers is to be preceded by a military convoy, which will then report on how many people can travel at once, as well as the feasibility of traveling on board vessels across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River. The author assumes that the entire project would be paid for by Louis XV, but in addition to the enormous logistical problems this project would have faced, the French treasury simply could not have afforded an expenditure on this scale at that time, and the project never developed beyond the proposal stage.<\/p>\n

This manuscript is in a clerical hand, and there is no clue to the identity of the actual author, but some possible authors include Colonel Louis Antoine de Bougainville,\u00a0<\/em>deputy to General Montcalm; Jean Antoine Nicolas Fran\u00e7ois de Capellis, marquis de Capellis, who wrote several\u00a0<\/em>“m\u00e9moires” about France\u2019s North American colonies; Fran\u00e7ois-Pierre de Vaudreuil, whose brother had been the French colonial governor of Louisiana and of New France.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Convoys of French to sette the American ‘heartland’! (Louisiana\u00a0was the whole middle of modern-day America back then, not just Louisiana.)<\/p>\n

Camels, oh my! Not to mention how different Canada would be, had the French pulled up and left at that time.<\/p>\n

OK, these were just proposals on paper. Implausible, never happened.<\/p>\n

But still, it’s amusing imagining it playing out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a genre of fiction called ‘Alternate history‘. You know: Abraham Lincoln survived John Wilkes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[12065,880,7,12064,10502],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8383"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8442,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8383\/revisions\/8442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}