The New Criterion

I first encountered the mind of David Hackett Fischer in 1970 while I was a graduate student. Like many others I had fallen in love with good narrative history only to learn in my Ph.D program that the historical profession rewards skepticism, revisionism, and critical analysis over story-telling even though sophisticated historiography denies the possibility of objectivity. If historians’ secret embarrassment is their lack of epistemology, how then can they pretend to judge each other or advance knowledge of the past? One answer soon to be embraced by a whole generation of academics was to deny the reality of “so-called” facts altogether, denounce historical interpretations as the constructs of the hegemonic race, class, and gender, then proceed to impose favored discourses of their own.

I stuck with old-fashioned empirical, narrative history even when it threatened to hurt my career. I attribute that stubbornness to my original love and respect for the past, the erudition and integrity of my mentors, and a book published just when I needed it most. Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought argued that whereas historians cannot claim to deduce Truth with a capital-T, they can indeed apprehend truths by exposing falsehoods through rigorous, honest application of the rules of logic and evidence. Fischer made his case in disarming fashion by cleverly naming and defining more than a hundred logical fallacies to which even celebrated historians were prone. I was somewhat intimidated by Fischer’s syllabus of errors: to remember them all would induce permanent writer’s block; to forget them would invite serial solecisms. But Fischer’s compelling defense of sound method sustained my faith in the historian’s craft.

Fischer’s own faith (I am guessing) stemmed from his father, a great educator who ran Baltimore’s school system; his own mentors at Princeton and Johns Hopkins, especially Frederic Lane, Wilson Smith, Charles Barker, and C. Vann Woodward; and his colleagues and students at Brandeis, where he has taught for forty years. But Fischer’s confidence in the human ability to tell truths about the past also rests on his very humility about human nature in general. That is, his appreciation that no one narrative can do justice to the diversity of human experience allows him to tease out falsehoods and truths from the interstices of competing narratives. Such humility is the antidote to professional pride. Thus did Fischer confess after winning the Pulitzer Prize that he used to think of himself as a professor and historian, but nowadays just a teacher and storyteller.

Fischer’s championship of factual narrative, or l’histoire événementielle, is all the more impressive given his reputation was made by an analytical treatise as great as anything done by the Annales school of social history. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989) was an encyclopedic contrast of the four “cradle cultures” (Puritan, Quaker, Cavalier, and Scots-Irish Borderman) that shaped colonial American notions of everything from child-rearing and barn-raising to education and cooking to God and government. In Historians’ Fallacies Fischer insisted that “historical scholarship can usefully serve to help us find out who we are.” In Albion’s Seed he proved it.

The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (1996) and Liberty and Freedom (2005) were also thematic analyses of momentous phenomena over la longue durée. But over time Fischer has increasingly marched to the rhythm he drummed back in 1970: “Good historians tell true stories. Great historians, from time to time, tell the best true stories which their topics and problems permit.” The stories Fischer has told are among the best because of his irresistible topics, including Paul Revere’s Ride (1994), Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (2000), Washington’s Crossing (2004), and now Champlain’s Dream (2008).[1] This new book may seem a de- parture in a career heretofore focused on British America. But in truth it suggests a good deal about New England by offering New France as a foil. The book’s occasion is the quadricentennial of the founding of Québec by Samuel de Champlain, but its relevance is not time-bound at all.

This encyclopedic (that word again) tome contains 531 pages of text, plus 150 pages of notes and bibliography, plus thirty-six vignettes called “memories of Champlain” that describe his shifting historical image over the centuries, plus sixteen appendices detailing the ships, boats, firearms, coinage, weights and measures, commercial companies, Indian tribes, and other contexts, players, and props in his drama. But the man and his times are captured with elegance in the modest eleven-page introduction. It begins by describing the only known likeness of Champlain: a tiny self-portrait that shows him firing an arquebus in support of his Native American allies in a 1609 battle against the Iroquois. The engraving suggests a sturdy, nervy leader of men, but offers no other clues to his body, mind, or spirit. It serves as a metaphor for all the primary sources concerning Champlain: “He wrote thousands of pages about what he did, but only a few words about who he was.” The introduction adumbrates his life as a mariner, soldier, explorer, spy, diplomat, cartographer, ethnographer, promoter, courtier, and colonizer. The paucity of evidence about the man and riot of contradictory pen-portraits bequeathed by others complicated Fischer’s task of describing not just what he did, but who he was. But at length his research persuaded Fischer that Champlain was a dreamer who dreamed of an empire embracing, on equal footing, Europeans and Indians, farmers, merchants, and priests, Catholics, Protestants, and sauvages. He was not a pacifist like William Penn but rather a weary soldier who imagined “a place where people of different cultures could live together in amity and concord. This became his grand design for North America.”

Fischer’s trademark art is textured description of regional topographies, climates, economies, cultures, and language, so he must have had great fun exploring Champlain’s hometown of Brouage and province of Saintonge on the Bay of Biscay. The region was known for its individualism, prosperity based on fishing, commerce, and salt, and a turbulent history Fischer describes as “the salty broth in which our hero was cooked.” Mystery has swirled for centuries about such vital statistics as Champlain’s date of birth, parentage, and cradle religion. But Fischer’s meticulous assay of the nuggets of evidence suggests that Champlain was born around 1570 and baptized a Protestant, but illegitimately sired by a nobleman, quite likely the future King Henri IV. That would explain many anomalies including the royal access and favors enjoyed by Champlain and his loyalty to the Bourbon cause. When Henri sought to end religious strife by tolerating Calvinism but re-embracing Catholicism, Champlain dutifully did likewise. As the years passed the explorer’s Catholic faith and devotion steadily deepened, but so did his commitment to tolerance.

Fischer fixes the context for that precocious commitment through a simple comparison. Whereas our civil war lasted four years and killed over 600,000 Americans, the French civil wars after 1562 lasted almost forty years and killed at least 2 million. No wonder a whole generation swallowed its pride to embrace a Christian Humanism that looked back to the best of the Renaissance and prefigured the best of the Enlightenment. It included a cohort of politiques seeking pragmatic institutions and principles to restore peace and prosperity to the kingdom and revive its fortunes in the competition for power and pelf in Europe and overseas. Henri IV fought for all that and Champlain fought for Henri IV. When, in 1598, the Peace of Vervins with Spain and the tolerant Edict of Nantes ended the foreign and civil strife, swashbuckling adventurers from France’s Atlantic ports, supported in turn by the king, redirected their energies to a project just then transfixing all the rivals of imperial Spain: colonization of North America.

Champlain’s first preparation was to sign on with a Spanish fleet and make a reconnaissance of the West Indies and Mexico. He returned in 1601 to write a “brief discourse” that was in fact a book-length intelligence debriefing. He also returned with searing memories of the Spaniards’ cruelty toward native Americans and religious tyranny. Champlain began then to dream of an American colony in which Europeans and Indians might live in harmony.

Champlain’s second preparation was his service as a royal geographer. He pored over maps of America and accounts of prior French failures to plant colonies on the St. Lawrence River and Florida coast. The lessons he drew suggested the imperative need for careful planning and exploration, clear lines of authority, Catholicism without coercion or persecution, honest and equitable treatment of Indians, and constant attention to the “home front” lest envious courtiers, merchants, or foreign agents undermine royal patronage. Accordingly, Champlain canvassed constantly among officials, investors, and clergy in hopes of getting the support needed to plant French civilization in cold, inhospitable Canada. Suffice it to say he sailed back and forth across the Atlantic twenty-seven times in thirty-seven years.

Champlain first explored the St. Lawrence River in 1603 when he chose a place called Kebec in Algonquian as the site for a future town. But that future was predicated on his delicate diplomacy in a great tabagie, or tobacco feast, at the mouth of the Saguenay River where he smoked pipes of peace with more than a thousand Indians from neighboring tribes. That marked the beginning of one of the most durable friendships between Europeans and native Americans. Champlain recounted the journey in a book he titled Des Sauvages, which Fischer explains did not mean primitive, barbaric, brutal, or even inferior in the seventeenth century. On the contrary, sauvage or salvage was derived from the Latin silva and simply meant forest-dweller. To be sure, he rued the Indians’ habits of lying and of torturing captives, which perpetuated vengeful feuds given the absence of religious and legal constraints and limited authority of the sagamores (chiefs). In short, native Americans lived ni foi, ni loi, ni roi, and their “savagery” was really just a surfeit of natural liberty. But their essential humanity, even nobility, was evident in dozens of ways that never ceased to delight Champlain and encourage him to believe his dream was in no way utopian.

Alas, Champlain’s townsman, fellow dreamer, and initial sponsor, le sieur de Mons, lacked the deftness and luck their grand dessein needed. Their first colony in Acadia (the future Nova Scotia) ended calamitously when nearly half the habitants perished over the winter. Their search for a warmer site in Norumbega (the future Maine and Massachusetts) then aborted when Mons inadvertently bred anger and distrust among local tribes. Settlers in Port-Royal, a third initiative, were obliged to sail home after Mons lost his backing at court. That was how matters stood when Champlain personally lobbied the king to restore royal patronage for New France in light of “the good quality and fertility of lands in that country, and that the inhabitants thereof are disposed to receive the knowledge of God.” Champlain enlisted new investors, interested the Jesuits, and sailed west again determined the next seed he planted would sprout. On July 3, 1608, he mounted the rocky promontory overlooking a narrows in the St. Lawrence and deployed his settlers to fell trees, saw logs, dig cellars, and ferry supplies for the ville de Québec. The long list of trials common in start-up colonies followed apace: hunger, isolation, mutiny, murder, corruption, betrayal, wars against the enemies of his allied tribes, insecure patronage following the assassination of Henri IV in 1610, even an English capture of Québec in 1628. But Champlain managed somehow to surmount all the challenges, usually with prudence, justice, shrewdness, and loyalty to his dream.

How—and why—did he surmount challenges that are exhausting simply to read about? What explains Champlain’s sheer perseverance? The easy way out would have been to reverse cause and effect by concluding that Champlain’s deeds prove his lifelong devotion to (even obsession with) his dream. But Fischer ruled out that dodge long ago when he wrote in Historians’ Fallacies, “a historian must distinguish between an analysis of the becoming of an object and an analysis of the object as it has become.” So Fischer pored over the meager clues about Champlain’s life and more abundant data about his times until settling upon a persuasive account for his becoming. The account is grounded in something on which all authorities concur, whether approvingly like the Jesuit missionary Paul le Jeune or disparagingly like the Protestant historian Francis Parkman. That something was Champlain’s intense Christian faith which was forged in the crucible of the Wars of Religion, but which transcended their hatred and fear. Even Champlain’s measured campaigns against the Iroquois, far from provoking the “French and Indian wars” of English parlance, in fact helped to establish the long “French and Indian peace” in his neck of the woods.

Champlain believed he was called to spread the knowledge and love of God in the New World. He cherished his own growing knowledge and love of Creation, as expressed in his rhapsodies over Cana- da’s mighty forests and waters, enchanted seasons, and beguiling Indians. Hence, the struggles that seem insufferable to us were divine dispensation to him. That is why Champlain could write of his merchants and investors, “I am not dependent on them.” And that is why Fischer could sketch Champlain’s soul through proper seventeenth-century definitions of words his subject revered: foi, piété, loyauté, devoir, humanité, renommée (renown in the sense of worthiness), and prévoyance in the sense of preparedness, sound judgment, magnanimity, and unflagging focus on the larger purpose and longer run. It was very different from the Puritan soul of those English who, after 1630, swarmed into “Norumbega” anxious to prove through earthly success their status as God’s elect. Champlain’s was a specific sort of Catholic soul that imagined all human beings to be children of God: fallen in sin, but endowed with reason and immortal souls. Believing that, Champlain did the thing needed for good relations with Indians that few other Europeans would do: he spent lots and lots of time with them without himself going native.

Still, didn’t it all come to naught? Following Champlain’s death in Québec on Christmas Day 1635, King Louis XIII and Richelieu, then Louis XIV and Colbert, then Louis XV and Choiseul lost the competition for overseas empire by wasting resources on wars in Europe while foolishly banning Protestants from their colonies. In 1759 the British captured Québec and in 1763 the French ceded all their North American possessions. Yet, one of the last and most valuable contributions of Champlain’s Dream is to alert us to its vibrant legacies. The dream’s human legacy is evident in Fischer’s customarily brilliant description of the folkways of the Acadiens (Cadjins or Cajuns), Québecois, and Métis, the French and Indian offspring whose descendants may number twelve million today. The dream’s material legacy is evident in Québec, perhaps the most charming city-scape in North America. The dream’s cultural legacy is evident in the authentic respect for diversity of which most Canadians are proud and most Americans uncomprehending.

In Historians’ Fallacies Fischer wrote that history can help us “to learn about other selves” than ourselves. His own stories have done that for forty years, and if he takes after his ninety-eight-year-old father (to whom this volume is dedicated) we can look forward to many more good and true stories from him.

Notes
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1. Champlain’s Dream: The European Founding of North America, by David Hackett Fischer; Simon & Schuster, 848 pages, $40. Go back to the text.