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Spotswood parrotted SC's concerns of French expansion
Source: The Southern Frontier #86
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It was not until the summer of 1718, apparently, that Spotswood returned in his voluminous correspondence to the subject of checkmating the French, and then in reply to queries from the Board prompted by Berresford's noteworthy memorial of 1717. 58 [Note 58 Spotswood, Letters, II] He had learned a good deal in eight years, partly from his own travels and investigations among the Indians, though he was too easily persuaded that only a five days' march separated his pass from the Great Lakes. But most of his information seems to have come from Charles Town, the southern capital of the Indian trade. To give point to his theme of French encirclement he sent home a table of distances from Montreal to Mobile, given him by three Frenchmen who had accompanied the ill-fated Ramesay-D' Adoucourt expedition against the Fox Indians when it was attacked by the Cherokee. 59 [Note 59 L. P. Kellogg, French Regime in Wisconsin, 1925] The French, he warned, were now able to engross the whole skin trade of the West. If they completed their connections from Canada to the Gulf, 'they might even possess themselves of any of these Plantations they pleased.' To forestall them he proposed that he be permitted to finance a Virginia expedition to the Great Lakes out of the provincial surplus. An English post on Lake Erie would serve to cut the line of French communications. This project was Spotswood's only real contribution to that discussion of anti-French strategy which the Carolinians had set in train, and even in this matter he had been anticipated by Nicholson. It was based, of course, upon a serious miscalculation of trans-Appalachian distances. Again in 1720 Spotswood added his voice to the chorus of demands from America for an aggressive English western policy.60 [Note 60 Spotswood, Letters]
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