1755 The Exile Of The Acadian Neutrals, 1755
by William H. Withrow
The deportation and dispersion of the French Neutrals from
their Acadian homes at Grandpre, on the peninsula that projects
into Minas Basin, Nova Scotia, was one of the most pitiful
incidents in the French and Indian war, known as the American
phase of the Seven Years' War. The region is familiar to
Americans, through the epic of the poet Longfellow, as the Land
of Evangeline. The district around Minas Basin was settled in
the early years of the seventeenth century by immigrants from La
Rochelle, Saintonge, and Poitou. During the wars between France
and England the Acadians, as a Nova Scotian historian relates,
"were strongly patriotic, and took up arms in the cause of their
native land. Intensely devoted to the Roman Catholic Church, and
considering these wars as in the nature of crusades, they fought
valiantly and well. But when Nova Scotia was finally ceded to
Great Britain (in 1713) their position became very awkward and
painful. Many of them refused to take the oath of allegiance,
and for others a modified formula was framed. Emissaries of the
French power at Louisburg and Quebec circulated among them and
maintained their loyalty to France at a fever heat, while their
priests pursued the same policy and kept up the hostility to the
conquerors.
The British provincial government was located at Annapolis,
and though its laws were mild and clement, it could not command
respect on account of its physical weakness. Under these
circumstances hundreds of Acadians joined the French armies
during every war between the two powers, and proved dangerous
foemen on account of their knowledge of the region. British
settlers were unwilling to locate among these people on account
of their racial hostility, and the fairest lands of the province
were thus held by an alien and hostile population.
The expulsion and exile of the French Neutrals from their
homes in Acadia - the region now included in the Canadian
provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick - are one of the
saddest episodes in history. The occasion for their removal and
dispersion was the alleged charge that they secretly took sides
with their French compatriots against the English in every
struggle on this continent between the two nations, each seeking
supreme dominion in the New World, and were thus a constant
menace to the English colonists on the seaboard. The trouble at
this period was complicated by disputed boundary lines, the
whole interior of the continent being claimed by France, while
the English were shut in between the mountain ranges of the
Alleghanies and the sea. But the English colonies would not be
hemmed in either by nature or by France. Their hardy sons sought
adventure and gain in the Far West, while not a few for this
purpose pushed their way to the St. Lawrence and the Lakes by
the water-ways and woodland valleys of the continent. The
French, resenting this intrusion, began to erect a series of
forts to mark the boundaries of their possessions and conserve
the inland fur trade.
Already, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the first scene in the
opening drama had been enacted at Louisburg. This stronghold in
Cape Breton, which guarded the marine highway to New France, had
surrendered in 1745 to the forces of England and her colonial
levies on the Atlantic. French pride was hurt at this disaster
and the loss of the important naval station in the gulf. To
recover the lost prestige, Count de la Galissoniere was sent as
governor to Canada. This nobleman's extravagant assumptions of
the extent of the territorial possessions of New France,
however, offended the English colonists and roused the jealousy
of many of the Indian tribes. Nor was this feeling allayed when
France, by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, recovered Louisburg,
and when her boundary commissioners claimed all the country
north of the Bay of Fundy as not having been ceded to England by
the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the inevitable result followed;
hostilities between the two nations were precipitated in the
valley of the Ohio by the persistent encroachment of the
English.
English successes in other parts of the continent in some
measure atoned for Braddock's defeat. Beausejour fell before an
expeditionary force sent out from Massachusetts, while Dieskau
was routed and made a prisoner near Lake George by Colonel
(afterward Sir William) Johnson, in command of the colonial
militia and a band of Mohawk warriors.
The command of the expedition against Beausejour, in the
Acadian isthmus, to which the French still laid claim, had been
given to Colonel Moncton, who, in the spring of 1755, sailed
from Boston with forty-one vessels and two thousand men.
Ill-manned by a few hundred refugees and a small body of
soldiers it soon capitulated and was renamed Fort Cumberland.
The Acadian peasants, on the beautiful shores of the Bay of
Fundy, Canadian historians tell us, "were a simple, virtuous,
and prosperous community," though other writers give them less
favorable character, speaking of them as turbulent, aggressive,
and meddlesome. With remarkable industry they had reclaimed from
the sea by dikes many thousand of fertile acres, which produced
abundant crops of grain and orchard fruits; and on the sea
meadows at one time grazed as many as sixty thousand head of
cattle. The simple wants of the peasants were supplied by
domestic manufacture or by importations from Louisburg. So great
was their attachment to the government and institutions of their
fatherland that during the aggressions of the English after the
conquest of the region a great part of the population - some ten
thousand in number, it is said, though the figures are disputed
- abandoned their homes and migrated to that portion of Acadia
still claimed by the French, while others removed to Cape Breton
or to Canada. About seven thousand still remained in the
peninsula of Nova Scotia, but they claimed a political
neutrality, resolutely refusing to take the oath of allegiance
to the alien conquerors. They were accused of intriguing with
their countrymen at Louisburg, with resisting the English
authority, and with inciting, and even leading, the Indians to
ravage the English settlements.
The cruel Micmacs needed little instigation. They swooped
down on the little town of Dartmouth, opposite Halifax, and
within gunshot of its forts, and reaped a rich harvest of scalps
and booty. The English prisoners they sometimes sold at
Louisburg for arms and ammunition. The Governor asserted that
pure compassion was the motive of this traffic, in order to
rescue the captives from massacre. He demanded, however, an
excessive ransom for their liberation. The Indians were
sometimes, indeed generally, it was asserted, led in these
murderous raids by French commanders. These violations of
neutrality, however, were chiefly the work of a few turbulent
spirits. The mass of the Acadian peasants seem to have been a
peaceful and inoffensive people, although they naturally
sympathized with their countrymen, and rejoiced at the victory
of Du Quesne, and sorrowed at the defeat of Lake George. They
were, nevertheless, declared rebels and outlaws, and a council
at Halifax, confounding the innocent with the guilty, decreed
the expulsion of the entire French population.
The decision was promptly given effect. Ships soon appeared
before the principal settlement in the Bay of Fundy. All the
male inhabitants over ten years of age were summoned to hear the
King's command. At Grandpre four hundred assembled in the
village church, when the British officer read from the altar the
decree of their exile. Resistance was impossible; armed soldiers
guarded the door, and the men were imprisoned. They were marched
at the bayonet's point, amid the wailings of their relatives, on
board the transports. The women and children were shipped in
other vessels. Families were scattered; husbands and wives
separated - many never to meet again. Hundreds of comfortable
homesteads and well-filled barns were ruthlessly given to the
flames. A number, variously estimated at from three to seven
thousand, were dispersed along the Atlantic seaboard from Maine
to Georgia. Twelve hundred were carried to South Carolina. A few
planted a New Acadia among their countrymen in Louisiana. Some
sought to return to their blackened hearths, coasting in open
boats along the shore. These were relentlessly intercepted when
possible, and sent back into hopeless exile. An imperishable
interest has been imparted to this sad story by Longfellow's
beautiful poem Evangeline, which describes the sorrows and
sufferings of some of the inhabitants of the little village of
Grandpre.
