French colonists

The rival French colonists, too, posed a military threat to the British colonies until they were defeated by a combination of British and colonial volunteer forces in the French and Indian War of 1754—63. The British government did not want to undertake the expense of maintaining and supplying large numbers of professional soldiers on a frontier 3,000 miles away. The colonists would have to take primary responsibility for their own defense. They naturally adopted and refined the historical model of the militia to the needs of a very different society. 

Permanent British settlement in America begins. The colonists use firearms daily for hunting as well as in ongoing conflicts with Native Americans and French colonists. 

The roots of the disaster unleashed by Hurricane Katrina date back to 1718, when Jean Baptiste le Moyne de Bienville, a French colonist, built his settlement on a hurricane-prone patch of swampland surrounded by three huge pools of water the Mississippi Delta, the Gulf of Mexico, and Lake Pontchartrain. (Economist, September 3, 2005) Much of this settlement, now the city of New Orleans, is 6-10 feet below sea level, and it has grown into a densely-packed city of almost 500,000 inhabitants. 

Following the end of the French and Indian War, disputes over the taxation and treatment of the colonists as well as their political rights eventually boiled over into revolution. In 1777, British colonial undersecretary William Knox proposed that to forestall rebellion. 

Conservative sentiment in England was also seriously disturbed, at this time, by the success of the American Revolution, and still more by the development of democratic spirit and the antichurch sentiment excited by the rise and progress of the French Revolution. As Priestley had favored the cause of the American colonists, so he was sympathetic with the ideals which dominated the rise and earlier development of the French revolutionary movement. The government party in England was aroused against Priestley, especially by his caustic reply to Edmund Burke s attack on the French Revolution in 1790. As Burke had been an outspoken advocate of the cause of the American colonists before the American Revolution, Priestley,... 

One can imagine what America would have looked like if Colonists continued this practice. Fortunately, they did not. In the 1780s, French chemist Nicolas Le Blanc (1742-1806) invented an inexpensive method for making soda ash. 

To make sure the army had uniforms and Americans did not freeze to death, Congress implored the colonists to raise as much hemp as possible so that clothing could be manufactured. Soldiers needed uniforms not only to keep warm, but also to keep up their morale. On at least one occasion, for instance, the Americans looked so pitiful next to the elegantly uniformed French. 

After the first disappointments subsided, the French thought they could still make a profit in hemp if they could simply persuade the colonists who were settling in New France to cultivate cannabis as a crop. To this end, Samuel Champlain, the great explorer and colonizer, brought hemp seeds with him on his early expeditions to New France. By 1606, hemp was growing in Port Royal in Nova Scotia under the watchful eye of the colony s botanist and apothecary, Louis Hebert. 

---