38. The Persecution of the Acadians

Thus the British, during 1755, went down on many fronts to ignominy and crushing defeat. However, the British took advantage of their lone victory in Nova Scotia to exert their power over the hapless French citizens of British Acadia. Frustrated by their lack of victory over French arms, they presumably decided to levy barbaric vengeance on helpless and peaceful French citizens in their midst.

Acadia had first been settled by Frenchmen in 1605, but was sacked and destroyed by Virginia’s Captain Argall in 1613. French settlement regained Acadia during the seventeenth century, but it was seized from France along with Newfoundland at the Peace of Utrecht, ending Queen Anne’s War in 1713. A treaty provided that the French population of Acadia would have liberty for at least a year to emigrate from Nova Scotia with their property, presumably to nearby Cape Breton Island, which remained in the hands of France. The treaty also provided that Acadians choosing to remain would, upon taking an oath of allegiance to Britain, enjoy complete religious liberty.

Many Acadians applied for permission to leave as promised by the treaty, but the British authorities peremptorily refused. Colonel Samuel Vetch, governor of Nova Scotia, had financial interests in the island and urged the Board of Trade not to permit its labor force to leave. The Acadians were prohibited from using British-owned vessels to leave. When the desperate Acadians began to build their own small boats to sail to Cape Breton, the new governor Francis Nicholson brutally confiscated the boats and prevented them from departing. By that time, the supposed year of grace for the Acadians was over, and they were from then on prohibited from leaving the island. Since the year was up, the British presumed to prohibit Acadian emigration with complete self-righteousness. After this British display of bad faith capped by hypocrisy, the Acadians naturally though courageously refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new King George I. In 1720, the new governor of Nova Scotia, Richard Philips, ordered the Acadians to take the oath in four months or leave the island, but taking with them no more than two sheep per family. When the despairing Acadians, deprived of all boats, tried to leave by cutting a road to nearby Cape Breton by land, Philips forced them to stop. He too did not want to lose the benefits of Acadian labor, that is, forced labor, since the Acadians were forced to stay on this alien-run island.

During the same year, Philips sent Lieutenant Governor Paul Mascarene to London. Mascarene converted the Board of Trade to a diabolic plan: eventually the Acadians should all be coercively expelled from the island, where they were too much under the influence of wicked French priests. But this should not be done until the French could work to build up and complete English fortifications on the island.

The Acadians, meanwhile, were neither allowed to leave the country nor permitted to settle down as full citizens. Instead, they were forced to supply the needs of the British troops and to strengthen the fortifications of their British masters. Despite these provocations, the Acadians remained peaceful.

In 1726, Lieutenant Governor Laurence Armstrong, a tough hard-liner, forced a public oath of allegiance on the Acadians of Annapolis (Port Royal), capital of Nova Scotia. The following year, however, the issue arose again with the ascension to the throne of George II. Armstrong sent naval troops to enforce a loyalty oath on the Acadians, but the persecuted Frenchmen continued to refuse. At least they would not lend their public sanction to their own tormentors.

The day was saved for the heroic Acadians by Ensign Robert Wroth, who, on his own initiative, promised the Acadians freedom of religion, exemption from the draft, and freedom to leave the island. In return for these rights, the Acadians took the oath of allegiance. Governor Armstrong, of course, angrily refused to ratify these “unwarrantable concessions” (which had already been promised them at the Peace of Utrecht). Having gained the public oath, however, Armstrong vaguely and grudgingly promised the Acadians the “liberties of English subjects.”

The Acadians of Annapolis had not yet taken the oath. When ordered to do so by the governing Council, the leading men in Annapolis resolved instead to follow the other Acadians in taking the oath only under the Wroth conditions. The Council called this action “insolent and defiant,” and arrested the four leading Acadian deputies for contempt and disrespect to the king. Lieutenant Governor Armstrong then announced that the four prisoners had been “guilty of several enormous crimes in assembling the inhabitants in a riotous manner contrary to the orders of the government... and in framing a rebellious paper.” Three of the prisoners were promptly clamped into prison. In consideration for his advanced age, Armstrong graciously allowed the fourth, Abraham Bourg, to leave Acadia, of course without any of his property. The rest of the people of Annapolis were punished by being prohibited from fishing on any British coasts. To cap his crimes, Armstrong pillaged the Church of Abbé Bresley and forced the priest to flee. For a blissful interlude, Governor Philips returned to the peninsula, permitted Bresley to return home, and promised the Acadians religious freedom. In response, the grateful Acadians of Annapolis and the rest of Nova Scotia took the oath of allegiance.

Soon, however, Armstrong was in charge again. He promptly violated the British promises. He began by expelling two French missionaries and then insisted on requiring his approval of all priests in the province, and on barring all priests immigrating from Quebec in French Canada.

During King George’s War, the Acadians, despite three decades of betrayal and oppression, remained strictly neutral in the war between England and their homeland. When the English captured the French fortress in Louisbourg in 1746, they promptly deported all the French citizens to France. The worried Acadians were reassured by Governor William Shirley; but Shirley omitted any pledge of religious freedom and indicted several Canadians for high treason against Great Britain.

After the war ended in 1748, Great Britain embarked on a new phase of its program for Nova Scotia: It decided to settle Englishmen on the peninsula, as yet inhabited only by French settlers and British soldiers. In that way military benefits would accrue for the expected future war with France, and a population and labor force would be available to replace the Acadians, who by that time might be expelled. Several thousand English colonists were settled in this way.

The new governor, Edward Cornwallis, on instructions from the Crown, embarked on a new policy of repression of the Acadians. He was instructed to force another oath of allegiance and to permit Acadians to leave but never with any of their property. They could not, for example, sell their lands and leave with any of the proceeds. Cornwallis also prohibited the Acadians from trading with the French or from accepting religious jurisdiction from Quebec. Further, he embarked on determined efforts to force Protestantism upon the devoutly Roman Catholic populace. Acadian exemption from the draft was removed, no priest was permitted in the province without a license from the governor, and another loyalty oath was insisted upon on pain of confiscation of Acadian land.

One thousand Acadians reacted by protesting their faithful service as subjects of the Crown, and proposed instead to renew their oath on the old conditions granted them by Governor Philips. Cornwallis in turn bitterly denounced Philips for “not doing his duty.” Unable to win renewal of the Philips conditions, the Acadians in the spring of 1750 decided to leave Nova Scotia. The Board of Trade, however, decided that the time was not yet ripe as the French might entice them to Cape Breton and use them in the next war. Cornwallis, therefore, patrolled Nova Scotia to keep the Acadians as prisoners on the peninsula. Many of the desperate Acadians, however, managed to slip through the patrols, aided by the French and the missionaries. Eight hundred Acadians managed to reach French Prince Edward Island during 1750. Cornwallis hastily built more forts to prevent more Acadians from leaving.

A peaceful and happy lull ensued, however, during 1752-53. Under the governorship of Peregrine Hopson, the Acadians enjoyed religious liberty and were permitted to take the oath under the old conditions.

The peace was not to last long. The active imperialist and hard-liner Charles Lawrence soon became acting governor. Lawrence regarded the Acadians as part and parcel of the French enemy and treated them accordingly. In August 1754, Lawrence denounced the “obstinacy,” “treachery,” and “ingratitude” of the “incendiary French priests.” The evil Acadians, he thundered, persisted in trading with the French and with the Indians; what is more—here was an ominous warning indeed—“they possess the best and largest tracts of land in this province.” Not surprisingly, since the French had settled these lands. Underneath the mock surprise were the words of a man getting ready to loot the hard-earned property of others. Lawrence warned the Acadians of expulsion should they not take an unconditional oath.

Lawrence then proceeded to prohibit all export of corn from the province. The order served to prohibit the sale of corn to the French and Indians, and thus to force a sale at a far lower price to the British town of Halifax in Nova Scotia. The next step in the English exploitation of the labor of the French Acadians was the order by Lawrence to bring in wood to the British fort. The Acadians protested that their oath of allegiance did not require them to supply wood to the fort. The British reply to this eminently reasonable claim was to denounce the evil influence of Abbé Daudin over the minds of the Acadians and to hold the abbé and five of the Acadians in Halifax. The abbé protested that the people are free and should be contracted with for firewood and not be treated as slaves. The Council of Nova Scotia’s reply was to reprimand the protesters and to order the Acadians to bring in wood under pain of death. Abbé Daudin, in the meanwhile, was expelled from the province, and the hapless Acadians agreed to comply with the forced-labor decree.

Of all the British campaigns during 1755, the only successful attack was, we have seen, the capture of Fort Beauséjour and the consequent reduction of the New Brunswick area. Naively, the Acadians took at face value the English claim that their hostility stemmed from worry over the Acadians as potentially subversive allies of the French. With the French “threat” greatly reduced, the poor Acadians actually believed that the English would ease their oppression. Accordingly, they requested Lawrence that they once again be allowed use of their canoes for fishing and that they again be allowed to bear arms for hunting and general self-defense. Lawrence denounced the petition as impertinent and insolent, and ordered once again an unconditional loyalty oath for all Acadians. In fact, he ordered the deputies who had presented the petition to take the full oath on the spot; they, of course, insisted on the old conditions. Not only did Lawrence and his Council insist on the immediate oath, but they also informed the deputies that once anyone refused to take the oath, he would not be allowed another chance and would be summarily expelled from Nova Scotia! When the frightened deputies then offered to take the oath, they were informed that this act would now be coerced and therefore not sincere; hence they could not have even this chance! Incredibly, the deputies were then promptly arrested and branded “popish recusants” and subjects of France.

It was now clear that for the British on Nova Scotia, the reduction of the French power in the area, combined with the continued state of war, provided an excellent opportunity for the final solution of the Acadian problem without further worry about the Acadians becoming a war threat by joining the French. Lieutenant Governor Lawrence and his Council now moved to the climactic stroke: an order for the expulsion of every Acadian from Nova Scotia soil. The order was issued illegally, without authority from Britain or from the absent Governor Hopson, but with a pliant legal opinion handed down by Chief Justice Jonathan Belcher, Jr.

The grand genocidal design for eradication of the Acadians from the land they had built was now under way. By a ruse the Acadian men were assembled together, and were then suddenly denounced as rebels by the authorities and taken prisoner without warning. All the land, the cattle, and the corn of the Acadian people were confiscated by the Crown: only ready cash and furniture could be removed from the province. All the Acadian villages and many farms and homes were burned and destroyed by the British troops, who also used every possible method to flush out any Acadians hiding in the woods. In Posiquid, the British troops arrogantly quartered themselves in a Roman Catholic church and took the precaution of ordering the Acadians to furnish them with provisions before rounding them up. To ensure submission, the young male prisoners were coercively separated from their families.

The massive expulsion of the Acadians began in early October 1755, and ship after ship, separating families and friends, conveyed the unfortunates to all parts of the hemisphere. Shortly after the expulsion began, Lawrence received the king’s order not to molest the Acadians. Reasoning as the typical bureaucrat, Lawrence rationalized his disobeying the king’s order: once begun, even if in error, the expulsion process could not be reversed! By the end of the year, over six thousand Acadians were deported and their property confiscated or destroyed. A remnant remained hiding in the woods. Some of the ships were decimated by smallpox. The Acadians were shipped to Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, with Lawrence instructing their governors to dispose of the refugees in such a way as to prevent them from remaining together as a people. In some of the colonies, the younger Acadians were conscripted as indentured servants for a few months.

Typical of the cold treatment of the Acadians in the American colonies was that of South Carolina, where about a third of the Acadians were sent. They were immediately thrown into custody. Soon after, they were compulsorily dispersed, quotas being sent to all of the parishes of the colony. Finally they were given permission to go where they wished, the bulk of them deciding to migrate to French Canada.

Pennsylvania’s treatment of the hapless refugees was particularly ill-natured, and was capped by bitter attacks by Pennsylvania’s Governor Robert Hunter Morris and New Jersey’s Governor Jonathan Belcher (father of Nova Scotia’s pliable chief justice). Morris and Belcher raised the alarm about an imminent, giant subversive Roman Catholic conspiracy in the colonies’ midst—an unholy potential alliance of Acadians, Irish, and German Catholics. All these groups were attacked by the governors as “rebels and traitors”; besides, the colonies had “too many strangers” already. Only the generosity of the Quakers made the lot of the coercively dispersed Acadians at all tolerable.

New York led in seizing Acadian youth and forcing them into the bondage of indentured service. All the men were placed under arrest and dispersed by quota among the various districts in the province. Massachusetts received over one thousand Acadians, many filtering down through the wilderness from Nova Scotia. A tract of land was set aside for Acadians in Worcester, but when many began to move to Boston, the city’s selectmen expelled them to the outlying districts. Virginia expelled all of its Acadians, most of whom moved to French Louisiana.

Some Acadians who had left voluntarily for New Brunswick, made the mistake of asking for readmission to Acadia. Granted the permission, they were promptly placed in vassalage in Nova Scotia or deported to France and England. Also unfortunate were the fifteen hundred who ended up in supposedly hospitable Quebec. There, however, they were treated cruelly, robbed of their remaining possessions by the French commander, and allowed virtually no food. Many died from smallpox. After the British conquered Quebec later in the war, many Acadians were seized and shipped as defeated prisoners of war to Halifax, where they were forced to work on the roads.

Only in Maryland, where Catholics were not unknown monsters, were the Acadians treated with courtesy and kindness in the Americas. They were voluntarily housed in private homes, and were able to find work and build homes in Baltimore.

Many Acadians had voluntarily emigrated to Prince Edward Island, and by 1755 four thousand former Acadians had settled there. Upon the final British capture of Louisbourg and Prince Edward, the British deported them all to France, two of the ships sinking with seven hundred Acadians aboard.

A few of the Acadians managed to hide successfully in the woods of Nova Scotia, and there they teamed up with dissident Indians to wage guerrilla war upon their tormentors. Two hundred of them were rounded up by January 1756 and shipped to South Carolina. The prisoners managed to take over the ship and sailed to Canada, where they became privateers for the French. After the war in America was over, however, the British captured this community and carried off the inhabitants as prisoners to Halifax.

Charles Lawrence’s defiance of the king’s order not to expel the Acadians went unpunished. Shortly afterward, war between England and France broke out officially, and Lawrence only seemed to be a premature patriot.

The tragedy of the poor Acadians was not over, even with the end of the war in America in 1760. By 1761, Jonathan Belcher, Jr., now lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, professed to miss the Acadians. Who could now repair the dikes? Yet when Acadians began to drift back to Nova Scotia, their very presence changed Belcher’s mind and he and the Council expelled them once again. Unfortunately, they were deported to Massachusetts, which refused to receive the five shiploads of Acadians and sent them back again.