LITMIR.BIZ

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.