Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey

Illinois Country

      Tables

       1. Bison-hunting vocabulary in contact-era Illinois language

       2. Distribution of slaves in Illinois households, 1732

       3. Illinois households with fewer than 10 slaves, 1732

       4. Farm labor in Illinois

       5. Habitant petitions to Provincial Council, 1720–50

       Introduction

       An Earnest Invitation

      In 1772, a pamphlet came off the presses in Philadelphia. Like many pamphlets of this era, it was a political manifesto, a rallying cry. Written by a subject of the British empire in North America, it painted an almost utopian vision of the future. Addressing fellow colonists, the author urged them to “strive to improve our situation.” He confidently predicted a coming age of economic prosperity, telling his readers to expect “the perfection of their settlements.” He counseled his audience to abandon outdated tradition and move forward into a brave new world of self-reliance and self-improvement. The author called for action, encouraging his audience to work for their own interests, in solidarity, as a wholly unified community. In many ways, like other pamphlets printed in the radical ferment of 1770s Philadelphia, this one was calling for change, for a kind of revolutions.¹

      This pamphlet was not John Dickinson’s famous Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Nor was it Thomas Jefferson’s Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Instead it was an anonymous tract, surely obscure in its day, and almost totally forgotten now, titled Invitation sérieuse aux habitants des Illinois [An Earnest Invitation to the Inhabitants of Illinois].² Written by an unknown author who identified himself only as “un habitant des Kaskaskia,” it represents the voice of an obscure American colonial community.

      Kaskaskia was the largest of five French villages located along the Mississippi River in the Illinois Country, recently taken over by the British government at the end of the Seven Years’ War. Founded as a mission and fur trade outpost at the end of the seventeenth century, here colonists had intermarried with Indians and settled agricultural villages. These colonies, together with the Indian alliances based around them, were an important part of the former French colonial empire, the midway point of a Creole Crescent stretching from Louisiana to Quebec. On the edge of empire, Kaskaskia was home to French, Indian, African, and mixed-race peoples. The Invitation gives us a window into this forgotten world.³

Figure 1. Invitation sérieuse aux habitants des Illinois. Published in 1772 in Philadelphia and authored by an anonymous “habitant de Kaskaskia,” this pamphlet voiced an appeal for economic development and stable government in the Illinois settlements.

      Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

      The Invitation reveals an ambitious colony looking forward to the future. But what is more interesting is that it is a window into a distinctive political tradition that had formed on the margins of empire. The pamphlet celebrates values like self-sufficiency, advising the inhabitants of Illinois to stand on their own feet and promote economic development, education, and legal order. But where other political pamphlets of this era took these same values and called for colonial independence, the Invitation called for almost the exact opposite course of action. Rather than making an argument for independence, the farmers of Illinois were appealing to the empire to send them a government. They expressed hope not that they could be autonomous but that the empire would come and give them “advantages” that they could not create themselves: “We are true and zealous subjects of his Britannic majesty and we doubt not at all that in a short time … the administration of civil government will be established among us. We are able at present only to desire these happy results.”⁴

      It’s a surprising message for the 1770s in North America. Here was a group of colonists calling for the British empire to send them government officials, regulations, and laws. Their worst problem was not oppression, monarchy, or an arbitrary government, their spokesman said. It was neglect. Although they had suffered a bit under “tyranny,” what had mostly hurt them was too little investment, too little support, which led to ignorance and backwardness. The answer to these problems was not independence, less government. It was more government. What the colonists wanted was not some abstract notion of “freedom”; it was a more specific notion of “benefits” and “advantages.”

      If the message is surprising, it is especially surprising to note that the inhabitants of Illinois were mostly French and mixed-race peoples calling for the British government, of which they professed to be “true and zealous subjects,” to rule them. Unlike their Creole compatriots in New Orleans, who had recently rebelled against the Spanish government when the latter tried to take over their colony at the end of the Seven Years’ War, the French colonists of Illinois seemed happy to put themselves under the authority of the British.⁵ As the pamphlet suggested, they were flexible and adaptable enough to want to learn to speak English and to live as Englishmen, to “experience the liberty and the wisdom of the laws of that great nation.”⁶

      In all sorts of ways, the Invitation seems unexpected. But the message was actually not new. Since 1673, the initially illegal colonists of Illinois had been striving to make a colony. Settling together around a Jesuit mission, French fur traders married Illinois Indian women and eventually began to farm. The opportunistic Illinois Indians welcomed the French as neighbors and allies, establishing their own permanent villages nearby. Together they made a thriving, enterprising, and in many ways autonomous colonial world. Like the author of the Invitation, they sought their self-interests and pursued their own goals.

      But these people could not do it alone. French and Indian peoples of this colonial region partnered with empire and from the beginning used the support of Quebec and Louisiana to their own ends. They did this not because they were “submissive” or “dependent” as myths would later hold—far from it. Indeed, many things they did in their remote colonial zone were positively contrary to imperial logic. Yet for all their autonomy, they willingly made their lives together with government authority and relied on it. The resulting cooperation produced a distinctive form of colonialism in early America and informed a distinctive political tradition that the author of the Invitation expressed in 1772. Even as the British colonists were calling increasingly for independence, here were French farmers calling for what this book calls empire by collaboration. Indeed, this was the key to their history. The authors of the Invitation came out of a long and interesting history of collaboration at the frontiers of empires.

      This book explores the interaction of peoples and governments in the middle of the continent in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. Even from the very beginning, when the French at Quebec established a mostly reluctant alliance with the Illinois Indians, and Jesuits and fur traders planted defiant outposts in the Illinois River Valley beyond the Great Lakes Watershed, the Illinois was a territory in tension with imperial plans. In fact, much evidence suggests that the earliest colony in Illinois was not only unplanned but clearly opposite to the designs that French officials had for their North American colonial empire. Although the colony eventually became substantial, its relationship to the imperial governments in the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes was frequently in question. Throughout the eighteenth century, as both Canada and Louisiana alternately claimed authority over the Illinois, and as British and Spanish authorities later tried to divide the region with a political border at the Mississippi River, there was considerable uncertainty about who really would control this colonial region, giving the inhabitants options as they played one government off another. Illinois became a haven for fur traders, farmers, missionaries, and Indians who sought to realize alternative visions for colonial