colonies be guaranteed? France, however, humbled by the war, was forced to
yield territory somewhere; Canada had long been a burden on the French
treasury; since concession must be made, it seemed better to sacrifice the
northern colonies rather than the profitable West Indies. Choiseul, the
French Minister of Foreign Affairs, therefore ceded to England all the
French possessions east of the Mississippi except the tract between the
Amitic and the Mississippi, in which lay the town of New Orleans. The
island of Cape Breton went with Canada, of which it was an outlyer. The
wound to the prestige of France he passed over with a jaunty apothegm: "I
ceded it," he said, "on purpose to destroy the English nation. They were
fond of American dominion, and I resolved they should have enough of it."
[Sidenote: Louisiana ceded.]
Meanwhile, the Spaniards clamored for some compensation for their own
losses. The English yielded up Havana, and kept the two provinces of
Florida lying along the Gulf; and France transferred to Spain all the
province of Louisiana not already given to England, that is, the western
half of the Mississippi valley, and the Isle d'Orleans. The population was
stretched along the river front of the Mississippi and its lower branches;
it was devotedly French, and it was furious at the transfer. Of all her
American possessions France retained only her West Indies and the
insignificant islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of St
Lawrence. Thenceforward there were but two North American powers. Spain
had all the continent from the Isthmus of Panama to the Mississippi, and
northward to the upper watershed of the Missouri, and she controlled both
sides of the Mississippi at its mouth. England had the eastern half of the
continent from the Gulf to the Arctic Ocean, with an indefinite stretch
west of Hudson's Bay.
[Sidenote: Interior boundaries.]
The interior boundaries of the English colonies were now defined by
proclamations and instructions from Great Britain. A colony of Canada was
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