It may be said with approximate accuracy that, while the British flag
supplanted the French for a little on a few scattered forts on the east
side of the Mississippi and the Spanish flag floated for a little while on
the other side of the river, the heart of America really knew in turn,
first, only the old Americans, the Indians; second, the French pioneers;
and third, the new Americans.
The valley heard, as I have said, hardly a sound of the Seven Years' War,
the "Old French War" as Parkman called it. Only on its border was there
the slightest bloodshed. All it knew was that the fleur-de-lis flags no
longer waved along its rivers and that after a few years men came with
axes and ploughs through the passes in the mountains carrying an emblem
that had never grown in European fields--a new flag among national
banners. They were bearing, to be sure, a constitution and institutions
strange to France, but only less strange to England, and perhaps no less
strange to other nations of Europe.
I emphasize this because our great debt to English antecedents has
obscured the fact that the great physical heritage between the mountains,
consecrated of Gallic spirit, came, in effect, directly from the hands
that won its first title, the French, into the hands of American settlers,
at the moment when a "separate and individual people" were "springing into
national life.
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