In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860. By Edward Watts. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
This review was originally published in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 8 no. 2, 2007.
In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860
Edward Watts
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
The message is slowly getting through that the American “west” (stretching, at any given moment, from Virginia to California) was not a virgin land. Schoolchildren now routinely learn that diverse and numerous groups of Native Americans inhabited that land, even if they are not always taught the full and bloody history of the conquest of those peoples and the part this played in creating a continental empire. Some lucky students are now even learning that the Spanish had trod many of the paths created by Native Americans long before Americans stumbled across them. But Edward Watts here reminds us that another important group has to be taken into consideration when considering the origins of the American nation. Indeed, long before late-twentieth-century American historians began widening their horizons, many nineteenth-century writers were plainly aware of the crucial role the French played in the early history of North America.
Long established, a constant thorn in the side of the English settlements, and seemingly more adept at creating alliances with native groups, the French were well known to colonial and Revolutionary generations of Anglo-Americans. Indeed, the American republic was borne, in part, over conflicts with the French over claims to the Ohio Valley and beyond. Tens of thousands of French settlers remained behind after 1763, too, spread across an arc reaching from the Gulf of St Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi. Thus it should come as no surprise — yet it does, somehow — that images of French settlers saturated nearly every text concerned with the west and American expansion in the nineteenth-century. Upon reflection, some of these representations are familiar, of course. Watts notes that important Anglo writers, from George Rogers Clark to James Fenimore Cooper, from Lyman Beecher to Francis Parkman often mentioned the French, but only to quickly denigrate them as slovenly and degraded, something less than white, and destined to “vanish” along with the Indians in the face of the expanding American republic/empire. Representations of the French as backwards by these imperialist writers were most often used to erase a pre-Anglo French presence in places such as Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. The triumph of the Anglo empire builders in the nineteenth-century helped ensure that these views became dominant.
Watts is well aware of these representations, and notes that they played a significant role in developing the identity of the new nation. But the true genius of Watts’ book consists of his presentation of alternative images of French, Métis, and Indian communities by equally important writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Hall, Henry Marie Brackenridge and Margaret Fuller. These and many other — often unpublished — writers also used images of French colonial culture, but to critique many of the less savoury values of the burgeoning American empire. Thus, as Watt persuasively argues, representations of eighteenth-century French colonists in nineteenth-century American narratives revealed the existence of multiple — and alternative - models of nation- and empire-building in the new republic. Such alternatives were raised to ask readers to imagine that the nation had options other than imperial, insular, aggressive, and racist masculine conquest. In a series of delightful chapters, Watts teases out these alternative ideas from writers great and small, ranging across representations of French colonial land tenure, labour, family, and religion. And throughout, he pays careful attention to the ways in which these issues cut across dominant and hardening lines of race, class and gender in the new republic. I can hardly do justice to the subtleties of Watts’ arguments in such a short review. But I can say that Watts’ clear mastery of a tremendous range of sources shows a mature writer clearly steeped in the literature of antebellum America, and refreshingly, of the Great Lakes and the Old Northwest. Who would have thought to juxtapose Francis Parkman and Métis historian William Warren in a fascinating look at masculinity, alternative forms of patriarchy, and racial exclusion in the imperial imagination?
In a book packed with many stimulating insights, I hesitate to quibble. But the cranky old historian in me cannot help but think this book would have benefited from some judicious editing. Long, digressive, and wandering introductions running to ten or twelve pages left this reader a bit lost at times. So too did chronological leaps back and forth, and far too many “as I discuss below”, “above” and “later”. There are also too many annoying and lengthy interventions from secondary sources, including quotes running half a page at times. Watts has something important to say to a very wide scholarly audience. These may be mere quibbles, but unfortunately they take away force from a powerful argument about the importance of colonial representations in a postcolonial world.
Finally, and perhaps inevitably, the author tends to sympathise with his protagonists and there is some dangerous slippage between presenting idealised representations of French colonial culture, and presenting that culture as an ideal alternative. Here Watts seems to fall back on earlier historiographical notions that the French were somehow better - more benign - at managing their relations with Native Americans and getting along with the ‘other.’ More recent interpretations emphasise French weakness and their inability in the circumstances to do little else but get along with others where and when they could. The French were no angels, as the Fox, Natchez, and Chickasaw — all of whom fell afoul of something resembling French genocidal wars - would attest. There was, of course, something different about French relations with the Indians, and Watts is at his best describing representations of mixed marriages, and metis cultures. But in spinning these differences as contemporary critiques of the traditional triumphalism of American history in a wider Atlantic world, Watts, along with the historians he draws from, are in danger of merely rehashing the debates of nineteenth century writers engaged in a previous incarnation of the “culture wars”.