America 751
ists as William Smith, helped to inoculate the Canadiens against sympathy for the
new France.
The two countries, representing the losers and the winners of the American
Revolution, remained in an odd conjunction in the 1790’s. Both were involved in
the war between France and England, and in the agitations of Genet; both had
their furor over Jacobinism, and their alien and sedition laws. The difference was
that there was as yet no significant indigenous democratic movement in Canada.
Neither France nor Great Britain yet quite accepted the boundaries in the
North American interior as really final. For both, it might seem reasonable for the
United States to remain confined east of the Appalachians. The French had plans,
never of high priority, for a possible recovery of the whole of the former Louisiana,
of which the part east of the Mississippi now belonged to the United States, and
the part west of the Mississippi to Spain. When Genet was minister to Philadel-
phia in 1793, at a time when France was at war with both Spain and England, he
tried to organize expeditions against the possessions of both these powers. In these
designs he found many Americans eager to participate—South Carolinians against
the Spanish in Florida (William Tate, who later led the French raid into Wales,
was one of the moving spirits here); George Rogers Clark and his Kentuckians
against St. Louis and the lower Mississippi; Vermonters against the British in
Lower Canada. Genet and a certain French Canadian, Mezière, prepared a revolu-
tionary pamphlet, Les Français libres à leurs frères canadiens. It called for Canadian
independence, and for abolition of seigneurial dues, compulsory road work, and
privileged trading companies. It was circulated by hand, and read aloud at the door
of a church in Montreal. Next to nothing happened, but enough happened to
alarm the British authorities. Lord Dorchester, the governor of Lower Canada,
feared disaffection among the French- speaking people of his province. An act was
passed for the expulsion of aliens. Loyalty Associations were formed, as in En-
gland. The governor in Upper Canada, J. G. Simcoe, who until the Jay treaty con-
sidered much of the Great Lakes and Illinois country to be part of his territory,
was sure that the woods were full of “Jacobin emissaries” far into the back country.
In what must surely be one of the earliest references to the politics of Chicago and
St. Louis, Simcoe, in 1794, named both places as centers of agitation against En-
gland. He was particularly annoyed at a “Black Chief ” at Chicago, whom he be-
lieved to be in the pay of the United States.^7 This individual must have been
Baptiste Point du Sable, a French- speaking Negro remembered as the first “white
man” to live permanently at the site of Chicago, a mysterious figure of whom noth-
ing is really known, but who was said to be—as if to show the long interconnec-
tions in this wilderness—an escaped slave from San Domingo.
The agitations went on for several years. In 1796 the French general, Victor
Collot, on the pretense of a scientific expedition, made a western tour as far as the
Mississippi. He found the French at St. Louis to be “excellent patriots,” and the
spot well suited as a base from which to end “the usurpations of England”; but the
British, in consequence of the Jay treaty, were now beginning to withdraw from the
region south of the Lakes, and the drift of Collot’s secret plans was to detach the
7 The Correspondence of Lt. Gov. John Graves Simcoe, 5 vols. (Toronto, 1923–31), II, 222.