More consequential than these frontier skirmishes was le grand derangement, the deportation of the Acadians in the summer and fall of 1755. For Colonel Charles Fawrence, the acting Governor of Nova Scotia who initiated the deportation, this was simply a military act. His country was at war, in fact if not by declaration, and French forces along its borders and coasts threatened his colony. When Acadian spokesmen hedged over an unconditional oath of allegiance, Fawrence saw the removal of a potentially disloyal element from his colony as no more than a prudent precaution.
The deportation was done with astonishing speed. Once the decision had been passed—unanimously—by Nova Scotia’s governing council in July 1755, Fawrence made full use of the forces Britain had amassed in Nova Scotia. A fleet of merchant ships was quickly hired and provisioned. Fawrence ordered his regiments to round up the Acadians and march them on to his ships with what baggage they could carry, and to burn the villages as soon as they were emptied. In a matter of months Acadia ceased to exist. Village by village, at Grand Pre, Minas, Beaubassin, all around the Fundy shore, at least seven thousand Acadians were seized and sent into exile before the end of 1755. Another few thousand would be exiled in the next few years. Perhaps two thousand fugitives and resisters would hold out in the woods.
The decision to deport the Acadians grew out of the changing circumstances of Nova Scotia. In 1713 Britain had left the Acadians in place through weakness as much as tolerance. In the peaceful 1720s and 1730s, British commanders, with scant resources and almost no non-French subjects, had to develop a delicate modus vivendi to secure their own position, even though it reinforced the Acadians’ inclination to neutrality. By the 1750s, however, the founding of Halifax had brought British troops and settlers to Nova Scotia. Governors and commanders no longer needed to reach an understanding with the French subjects who occupied the best land of the colony. For their part, the Acadians sought more than ever to remain neutral. They could not help but be aware of the increasing British power around them, and they had become cautious about giving support to the French troops on their borders. But they were a people rooted in the Acadian land, ten thousand or twelve thousand strong, settled for generations on ground they had recovered from the Fundy tides. Despite Britain’s growing power over them, they found the possibility of deportation unrealistic, inconceivable. Even under the guns of the gathering British forces, they felt able to bargain over the terms of their neutrality—until the day the deportation order was read.
For the Acadians, who saw themselves as powerless, unoffending, and unchallengeable in their right to their land and their way of life, the deportation meant the obliteration of their society, one established on lands they had tended for more than a century. Lawrence had ordered that they should be distributed “among the several colonies on the continent”—no American colony would have accepted them all— and so the ships discharged their passengers in seaports all along the Atlantic seaboard from New England to Georgia. Lawrence’s officers had made no direct effort to divide families as they were herded aboard ship, but since Acadian families were extended, interrelated networks, all the exiles lost most of the people they considered their family. And although there was no plan to starve or infect the prisoners, in the stress and movement as many as a third of the exiles may have died of contagious diseases. In the continuing campaign of deportation between 1756 and 1762, some Acadians were shipped as far as Europe. In 1758 seven hundred died in a shipwreck on the way, and the survivors became refugees in France.
Some of the Acadians who found themselves unloaded in small groups in the American ports would remain there, a small unpopular minority in the heart of an alien society. Others began to move as soon as they could—towards the French
Caribbean, to Louisiana, to the St. Lawrence valley. After the war ended in 1763, a few began to return, by land or sea, to Acadia, in a slow, piecemeal, astonishingly persistent process that would take decades to complete. But the Acadia they were returning to no longer existed. New settlers had quickly appropriated the old diked lands, the best in Nova Scotia. Acadian families who avoided deportation or returned from exile had to find new homes in areas hitherto neglected. The heart of Acadia shifted westward into New Brunswick, where the shared memory of deportation and loss was the basic element in the gradual shaping of a new Acadian society.
World History
