French Canadian Americans

Nearly one million French Canadians immigrated to the United States from 1840 to 1930. They settled primarily in the northeastern United States, and their descendants today form the region's large ethnic population known commonly as Franco Americans. French-speaking Catholic immigrants from Canada not only helped diversify Anglo-Protestant New England and New York, but they also assisted in the industrialization of the country and in its development of social, welfare, and credit institutions, among other contributions. Until the middle of the 20th century, French Canadian Americans successfully fostered an intertwined identity that was ethnic and American.

Most French Canadians immigrated to the United States from the Province of Quebec, a province that has preserved its language and culture since the colonial era. French explorer Jacques Cartier claimed northern North America for France as the result of several voyages from 1534 to 1542. Not until Samuel de Champlain established an agricultural colony in Acadia (today's Nova Scotia) in 1604 and a permanent [Page 924]settlement at Quebec in 1608 did French speakers migrate to North America. French explorers and fur traders as well as Catholic missionaries ventured far into the interior of the continent, establishing outposts on the Great Lakes and along the Mississippi River as far south as New Orleans. Nearly all migrants from France were Catholic, and most settled along the St. Lawrence River.

An imperial war between Britain and France, known in North America as the French and Indian War, resulted in the conquest of New France in 1760. Under British rule, French Catholics in North America lost their connection to France. The Quebec Act of 1774, a British security measure viewed as one of the Intolerable Acts by the American colonists, helped ensure the continuation of French Catholic lifeways while effectively preventing French Canadians from joining the American Revolution. The British North America Act of 1867, establishing the Dominion of Canada, provided French speakers with their own province, Quebec, within which they have since functioned as a nation within the nation-state of Canada and within which they have effectively preserved their language and culture.

During the 19th century, prior to 1840, most migrations of French Canadians to the United States constituted seasonal migrations for employment in agricultural, lumbering, and brick-making industries. A lack of access to arable farmland, resulting from natural population growth and landholding patterns, considerable unemployment, and the slower pace of industrialization in Quebec motivated more permanent migrations from the 1840s, and especially from the 1860s to 1930, after which date the United States imposed immigration restrictions on Canadians. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, French-speaking Catholics migrated with family and friends in a chain migration to northeastern manufacturing centers such as Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Manchester, New Hampshire; Lewiston, Maine; Fall River, Massachusetts; and Cohoes, New York. Succeeding the Irish as the predominant source of unskilled labor after the Civil War, they sought waged work in textile mills and shoe factories and contributed to the industrialization of the country.

French Canadian Americans comprised as much as 60 to 70 percent of the population of some northeastern cities by 1930. They formed ethnic communities called petits Canadas (little Canadas) with their own national churches and parish schools in order to preserve their French language, Roman Catholic faith, and French Canadian customs. They drew upon models, inspiration, and even personnel from Quebec to found their own newspapers, to create their own mutual aid societies, and to develop their own social welfare institutions, such as hospitals, orphanages, and old-age homes. French Canadian Americans launched the credit union movement in the United States by establishing in 1908 the first credit union in the country at Saint Marie parish in Manchester, New Hampshire, making a significant, though little-known, contribution to their host society.

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