America's forgotten atrocity

A unique hybrid people, the Acadians offered a wiser, kinder vision of settling the continent. Instead, they became the victims of North America's first ethnic cleansing campaign.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Mar 1, 2005 | In August of 1755 an extraordinary plan went into action along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, in what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. In village after village, all male householders were summoned to mandatory meetings with British authorities, where they were captured and imprisoned as hostages against the surrender of their homes and families. Houses were burned to the ground, livestock indiscriminately slaughtered, fields of crops laid waste. Those who resisted were beaten, and sometimes shot, while those who fled into the forests were hunted down like rabid animals.

Nonetheless, many people escaped into the trackless wilderness, where some had friends and even cousins among the Míkmaq, the Native Americans who had lived there for generations. Those who were captured or surrendered were jammed onto transport ships, pell-mell, without regard for family unity. Brothers were sundered from sisters, parents from children, sometimes husbands from wives.

Perhaps 7,000 people were rounded up and shipped off to points south that summer and fall, while another 11,000 were driven out of the villages and farms their families had occupied for three or four or five generations. A thousand or more would die in transit, while several thousand more would die in strange lands in the years to come, of disease, of starvation, arguably of heartbreak and homesickness. Their ancient settlements were obliterated, their property destroyed, their rights abolished; their land was given away to newcomers who spoke a different language and professed a different religion. Within four months, Acadian culture was ripped out by the roots and cast to the winds.

Yes, these were not the Irish or the Scots or the Basques of the Old World, although such things had happened to them already, nor were they the Cherokee or the Lakota or the Pomo or any of numerous other peoples of North America, for such things would happen to them in the years to come. These were the Acadians, a French-speaking hybrid people long cut off from their European origins who occupied a strange position on the margins of American history and in between the imperial ambitions of Britain and France. For 150 years they lived along the coastline of what are now the Maritime Provinces, forging extraordinarily warm relationships with their Indian neighbors and insisting on their own neutrality as sovereignty of the region swung back and forth between the great powers.

Ultimately, the Acadians' oddness and specialness would lead to their destruction. But while their culture lasted they seemed to represent an alternative vision of North American settlement, one based more on friendship, accommodation and cultural exchange than on conquest, war and extermination. As Yale historian John Mack Faragher documents in his major new history of the Acadians and their downfall, "A Great and Noble Scheme," this semi-literate fishing and farming people forged a prosperous, autonomous and nearly idyllic society that was unique in the Western world.

If the Acadians didn't officially declare themselves an independent nation -- independent from the imperial struggle between Britain and France, independent from the conflict between whites and Indians -- it was only because that idea didn't exist yet. As Faragher puts it, they were "premature republicans" who saw themselves as a distinctive people with distinctive political rights. While pretending to follow the dictates of whoever was officially governing them, they essentially governed themselves, expertly manipulating the outer fringe of imperial authority. Sadly, it was their cherished independence of spirit that doomed them in the end. Eighteenth century America had no way to understand a people who were not exactly French or British or Indian, and in a season of impending war and worsening ethnic tension, the Acadians became easy scapegoats.

After the British took control of Nova Scotia in 1710, the Acadians repeatedly declared themselves willing to swear loyalty to the English king, but only on their own terms (which included the proviso that they would never take up arms, either for him or against him). Puritan preachers railed against these "neutral French," who seemed disturbingly intimate with the "savages" who bedeviled New England villagers -- but Boston merchants loved the fact that the canny Acadians would trade with all comers, and that they offered a back door around tariffs and other mercantilist restrictions. Acadian territory functioned as a kind of free market, where English, French and Indians traded furs, guns, crops, finished goods from Europe, rum from the West Indies and dozens of other desirables.

Even the Acadians' name for themselves is ambiguous, murky in origin, plagued with double meanings. Faragher explains that the bountiful North American coast was christened "Arcadia" by the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524; the French may have borrowed and corrupted that name as "l'Acadie." On the other hand, the suffix "-akadie" means "place of abundance" in Míkmawísimk, the language of the Míkmaq, who became the Acadians' kinsmen and closest allies. As Faragher writes, "These explanations are most compelling in combination," and the accidental collision of alien languages reflects something essential about the peculiar Acadian experience.

Several different British governors came to the remote garrison town of Annapolis Royal with the ambition of forcing the Acadians to become normal subjects of the Crown, but most saw this ambition whittled away by expediency. The skeleton crew of British soldiers in Nova Scotia needed the Acadian abundance of meat, fish and vegetables in order to survive. And as anomalous as these people were -- by the middle of the 18th century, the Acadians spoke a comically antiquated version of French, with ample sprinklings of English and Míkmawísimk -- they posed no real threat to British authority.

But as the century ground on toward an inevitable global war between France and Britain -- the Seven Years' War, known in North America as the French and Indian War -- the Acadians became less and less tolerable to British authorities. New England villages came under increasing attack from Native Americans, who sought bloody revenge for the numerous atrocities inflicted on them by English settlers. Colonial authorities feared a broad alliance between French Canadians and the Indian resistance, and despite their profession of neutrality (which Faragher believes was entirely genuine) the Acadians seemed to symbolize this potential enemy.

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