The Expulsion of the Acadians Charles Lawrence was a military man. A man of duty. A man of action. For him, the world was divided into allies and enemies, for or against. The Acadians fit neither category. With the fall of Fort Beauséjour, the cold war had heated up. An attack on Louisbourg was imminent, and after that, Québec itself. But first the Acadians under his rule would have to be dealt with. They must either take an unconditional oath or they must leave. Cornwallis had made a similar threat, but he had backed down at the last moment. Lawrence, however, was not bluffing. And so it was that he conceived and carried out what he called the final resolution. Lawrence and his council summoned a delegation of Acadians and demanded that they take the oath. When they refused, they were thrown into jail. The delegates argued that they were being held illegally. For 40 years they had remained neutral. For 40 years they had never taken up arms against Britain. What more did Lawrence want from them? When a second delegation arrived, demanding the release of the prisoners, they were imprisoned as well. The moment of reckoning was at hand. At Grand Pré The Minas Basin was the breadbasket of Acadia, and Grand Pré was its most developed and prosperous community. It was here at Grand Pré, on September 5, 1755, that Acadian farmers gathered at the church to hear a royal proclamation being read. It was a bombshell: the Acadians had been declared noncitizens. Their land and livestock were to be confiscated, and their farms destroyed. A mad clamour broke out, but the British soldiers were already in position and they began rounding up unarmed settlers. More than 2000 Acadians were taken prisoner at Grand Pré alone. They were herded into transport ships at gunpoint as the British troops fanned out, laying waste to generations of hard work and toil. The soldiers burnt
farms, homes, mills, and barns some 700 buildings in the first wave alone. The Great Expulsion had begun. The Voyages I would have you not wait for the Wives and Children coming in but Ship Off the Men without them. - from Governor Lawrence s instructions The expulsion of the Acadians was a displacement unprecedented in North American history, and it happened with remarkable speed. In a matter of months, writes historian Christopher Moore, Acadia ceased to exist. In the confusion and chaos, families were torn apart: parents were separated from children, husbands from wives. Villages and homes were destroyed so that any Acadians who managed to escape would have no place to seek shelter or warmth after the British troops had departed. The transport ships were grossly overcrowded even by the standards of the day. The Acadians were packed onboard to the point of suffocation. Squalid, dismal, dangerous: they were not so much ships as they were floating prisons. When the first boatload arrived in New York, the Acadian refugees were described as poor, naked and destitute. The Acadians were scattered throughout England s North American colonies, as thousands more fled to the French-held territories of Ile Royale (Cape Breton) and Ile St. Jean (P.E.I.), but the escape was only temporary. When Louisbourg was captured in 1758, the deportations began anew. The Acadians were hunted down methodically, and among the officers leading the persecution was Robert Monckton, who left scorched earth in his path. (Which makes it all the more ironic that one of the strongholds of Acadian education and culture today is the city named and misspelled after him: Moncton, New Brunswick.) Those who resisted were locked up. Hundreds were sent to England where they spent seven years in internment camps. Those repatriated to France found themselves in a foreign country. After more than 100 years in the New World, the Acadians considered France an alien environment. Within years of arriving in France, most had departed, many of them for Louisiana, which had become an Acadia-in-exile. Their descendants would become known as Cajuns.
Others pushed north, into the Madawaska region of what is now north-western New Brunswick, where they evolved into a rough-hewn, independent lumbering cuture known as les Brayons. The deportations lasted from 1755 to 1762, during which the Acadian region was almost completely depopulated. Some 10,000 people were forcibly evicted and sent to distant lands. Of those, more than 3,000 died, either in shipwrecks or from smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever brought on by their ragged condition and unsanitary holding pens.
A Criminal Soul Were the deportations necessary? Was Lawrence justified in his actions? Some say he was. Refugees, after all, are a hard fact of war. Conflict displaces people, and at that time deportations were a common enough occurrence (though never of the scale or scope of the
Acadian exile). A century before, when the French had captured the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies, they promptly deported 2,500 English colonists and were so proud of their actions that they even issued a commemorative medal marking the event. Under Frontenac, the French, intent on capturing Albany and New York, had made plans to round up and exile the settlers. Louis XIV had expelled the Protestant Huguenots from France, and when the French led their rampage across the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland in the 1690s, they too had deported the English settlers they captured. On the basis of these and other examples, some historians have defended Lawrence s decision as regrettable but justified. Others are not so sure. Aside from the usual two wrongs don t make a right argument, a few key points are worth remembering: The deportations happened during peacetime. True, the frontier was effectively at war by 1755, but no official declaration had been issued. The English had originally gone out of their way to stop the Acadians from leaving. The Acadians were there because of British policy, not in spite of it. The British had accepted an earlier conditional oath. The Acadians had lived and worked the land for 40 years under British rule, during which they had never led a general uprising against the British nor had they taken up arms for France. The deportations were carried out at a local level. Governor Lawrence and his Council notified Britain only after the decision had been made, and though Britain gave its approval once the policy was underway, the ultimate responsibility lies firmly with Lawrence. French-Canadian historians have long since dismissed him as a cruel and cold man, a criminal soul in the words of one. Lawrence himself never gave the deportations much thought and he certainly never regretted it. He died, unexpectedly, after a grand ball in Halifax in 1760, while the deportation orders were still in effect. The Return of the Acadians In 1764, after New France had been conquered, the ban on Acadians was lifted and the deportation orders cancelled. Like the Huron, the Acadians had become a Lost Tribe. Unlike the Huron, however, the Acadians were able to regroup and return. They had survived lootings, shipwrecks, mutinies, starvation, forced labour, mass arrests, and imprisonment. Slowly, they began to make their way home. Some 3,000 Acadians returned to Nova Scotia, only to discover that the lands they had cleared and farmed for generations had been given away to New England squatters (dubbed Planters ). With the best estates taken, the Acadians had to start again from scratch. This time, they took the oath.
The biggest single demographic change that resulted from the deportations was that the centre of Acadian culture shifted north, into New Brunswick. The lifestyle changed too, as farmers became fishermen (or, in the case of the Brayons, lumberjacks). The Acadians suffered through years of hardship and poverty following their return, but through it all they knew that they had done nothing wrong. They were a people who had stood on principle and had suffered greatly for it. That they have survived without being overcome by anger and bitterness is even more remarkable. They have maintained their historical neutrality even today. Throughout the rise and fall of tensions between French and English Canada, the Acadians have, for the most part, steadfastly refused to be drawn into the conflict. In December 2003, in what would be one of his final acts as Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, with the support of his Cabinet, issued a proclamation acknowledging that the deportation of the Acadians had been wrong and unjustified. It stopped short of a full apology, but it did finally give official recognition to what the Acadians had endured. It was the final chapter of a story that had begun almost 250 years earlier. In history, if you try to hide something, it always comes back. With this, now we can more on and turn the page. - Euclide Chaisson, President of the Société Nationale de l Acadie, on news of the 2003 Proclamation Evangeline When the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard the accounts of the heartache and loss caused by the expulsion of the Acadians, he composed a long sad narrative poem about it, entitled Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. First published in 1874, nearly 100 years after the events described, the poem tells the story of two young lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, who are separated at Grand Pré and spend the rest of their lives trying to find one another. They meet only at the very end, when Evangeline, now a kindly, grey-haired nun, comes upon Gabriel, bent and stricken with pestilence. They get one final kiss just as Gabriel dies. Translated into French, Longfellow s epic poem had an enormous impact upon the Acadian sense of identity. Evangeline gave a voice and focus to their community, and it soon replaced the oral traditions of the older Acadians as their main source of information and inspiration. Today, a statue of the fictional Evangeline stands outside the chapel at Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, not far from where the first deportations began.