The Expulsion of the Acadians

The year of the conflicts last described was marked by another event of great importance, and one which has aroused more feeling than any other circumstance of the war. This was the removal of the French settlers from Acadia, and their dispersion through the English settlements. This event has been treated mainly from the stand-point of sentiment, the cruelty of the deportation strongly dwelt on, and the action of the English regarded as indefensible. A calmer and fuller review of the circumstances gives a new face to the situation, and shows that the English action, though it proved of little utility, had much warrant in the circumstances of the case. We extract an account of this deportation from Hannay's valuable "History of Acadia."

It was preceded by certain military events which need to be outlined. About the last of May, 1755, Colonel Monckton sailed from Boston, with three thousand troops, with the design of reducing the French settlements on the Bay of Fundy, which were considered as encroachments on the English province of Nova Scotia. This province, the Acadia of a former period, had been taken by the English in 1710, and was ceded to the English government by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The French, however, had steadily encroached upon the peninsula, and had strengthened themselves by forts on its New Brunswick border, from which a hostile influence disseminated itself through the French population of the peninsula. Monckton's expedition was successful in reducing these forts. A block-house on Chignecto Bay was first carried by assault, and then Fort Beausejour, a strong post on the neck of the peninsula, was invested, and taken after a four days' siege. Fort Gaspereau, on Green Bay, was next captured, after which the French abandoned their post on the St. John's River. As the hostility of the Acadians to British rule continued unabated, and as their presence endangered the security of the province, it was resolved to remove them and endeavor to replace them by settlers loyal to the British government. The circumstances of this removal we append in the words of Mr. Hannay.]

THE English, after a possession of Acadia which lasted nearly forty years, had not succeeded in founding a single English settlement or adding to the English-speaking population of the province. The French Acadians, on the other hand, had gone on increasing and spreading themselves over the land. They were strong and formidable, not only by reason of their number, but because of their knowledge of wood-craft, of the management of canoes, and of many other accomplishments which are essential to those who would live in a forest country, and which were almost indispensable qualifications for soldiers in such a land as Acadia. All that the English had to show for their thirty-nine years' occupation of the country were the fortifications of Annapolis and a ruined fishing-station at Canso. All the substantial gains of that time belonged to France, for the Acadians were nearly three times as numerous as when Port Royal fell, and they were quite as devoted to the interests of France as their fathers had been. Acadia in 1749 was as much a French colony as it had been forty years before. The only difference was that the English were at the expense of maintaining a garrison instead of the French, and that they sometimes issued orders to the inhabitants, which the latter very seldom chose to obey.

Of the various schemes to give Acadia an English population all proved failures, except that of 1749, in which a large colony was established at a point hitherto unoccupied, where a town rapidly arose from which has sprung the present city of Halifax. The Acadians, however, steadily refused to take the oath of allegiance to Great Britain, and, while professing to be neutral between the English and the French, secretly abetted the latter. Three hundred of them were found in Fort Beausejour when captured, and their hostility to the English was pronounced.