Guide to Documents Relating to French and British North America in ...

the Society "pacate ac tranquille."40 [See Appendix A for translation.] As to the British colonies of
America, after receiving some information on Maryland in the seventeenth century, Propaganda
completely lost track of them. The Jesuits became the only missionaries there, and received their
faculties directly from their English provincials. 41 When the bishopric of Baltimore was created in 1789,
the secular clergy of the United States consisted almost exclusively of former Jesuits, Carroll included,
so that they were accused of being a powerful and exclusive clique. 42 By that time, though, Propaganda
had delegated the administration of the former British colonies to the bishop of Baltimore, and
competition with the formerly powerful Society had long been forgotten.
Propaganda's relationship with other orders operating in North America was simpler and never
posed any problems. Capuchins, who had been active in Acadia in the early days of European
settlement and were later entrusted with missions in the Louisiana area, enjoyed a long and well
established relationship with Propaganda. 43 The Recollets were in a similar position. In fact, when
Propaganda first mentioned the need for a bishopric in Canada, the choice fell to a Recollet candidate. 44
The Sulpicians had no relationship with Propaganda but only with Paris, and, except for the controversy
between Champvallon and Laval mentioned above, they also did not present any problems for the
Congregation. 45 The Spiritains, who were sent to Canada and to Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in the late
eighteenth century, were sent and administered by their Paris superiors. These often asked Propaganda
for faculties and reported on the state of their missions. 46
The relationship between Propaganda and the secular clergy in North America was, then, very
direct and well-structured. There is no doubt that they all -- from the bishops to the simple missionaries
-- looked upon Rome and particularly upon Propaganda as the source of their jurisdiction and spiritual
power. This is less true of the regular orders, since they had a double loyalty -- toward Rome
(propaganda) and their direct superiors. Still, with a few important exceptions, they too maintained a
good relationship with the Congregation, especially after the creation of the bishoprics of Quebec and
Baltimore.
4. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The America of the eighteenth century was markedly different from that of the seventeenth
century. In the seventeenth century, the focus was on the Atlantic Ocean rather than on the American
mainland. Englishmen and Frenchmen alike were still confined to the shores of the New World, and,
while the French enjoyed a better knowledge of and claimed dominance over the interior of the
continent, in fact they were clustered around the St. Lawrence basin. While skirmishes between the
French and the English virtually began the very moment they set foot in the New World, Americans
and Canadians were too busy with their economic and demographic problems to try to overpower each
other. For their part, London and Versailles reasoned in terms of European strategies, and the American
colonies weighed little in the European balance of power. North America was not only a new world,
but a different one, separated from Europe by a vast and perilous ocean and overwhelmingly populated
by non-Europeans.
Eighteenth-century North America was very different. While the British colonies grew
spectacularly in population, New France extended itself to the Gulf of Mexico and the Rocky
Mountains, though in most cases the French enjoyed only token possession. The economy became less
and less an issue, while both Versailles and London came to regard their colonies in imperial and
military terms in the much wider theatre of worldwide pre-dominance. Not only the Atlantic Ocean,
but most of the North American continent had been tamed. The Mediterranean Sea was now more
hostile than the Atlantic Ocean, and the shores of North Africa (let alone the interior) certainly more
foreign to Europeans than their American counterparts. What had been outposts in an unknown world
became only appendages of their European mother countries. 47
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