America's forgotten atrocity

Beginning in about 1749 or 1750, British policy toward the Acadians began to take a decisive and ominous shift, first under Col. Edward Cornwallis (uncle of the Cornwallis who would surrender the British Army to George Washington at Yorktown) and later under Lt. Col. Charles Lawrence, who would actually carry out the traumatic expulsion. These were military men who saw the Acadians as a military problem, and over the course of four or five years they developed a military solution.

Since the Acadians could not be trusted to become loyal British subjects, they were to be driven out by fire and sword, and their lands resettled by English-speaking Protestants. And since driving them into French territory would only turn them into implacable enemies, they were to be scattered widely throughout the colonies. Faragher draws the title of his book from an anonymous letter written to Boston by an inhabitant of Halifax, the newly settled English town of Nova Scotia. "We are now upon a great and noble Scheme of sending the neutral French out of this Province," the unknown correspondent wrote, "who have always been our secret Enemies, and have encouraged our Savages to cut our Throats. If we effect their Expulsion, it will be one of the greatest things that ever the English did in America; for by all Accounts, that Part of the Country they possess, is as good Land as any in the World."

As momentous as the expulsion of the Acadians looks now, it should be said that no colonial authority ever suggested genocide, and in the event very few Acadians were deliberately killed (although many died as a result of the expulsion). To state the obvious, the Indian nations of North America would not be treated so generously. Nonetheless, Acadian culture was to be completely extirpated; in the language of the 20th century, this was North America's first episode of "ethnic cleansing."

Some Acadians would return to Nova Scotia years later, after the British had won the Seven Years' War decisively and the world was not anxious to dwell on the traumatic events of 1755. There is a remnant Acadian culture in the province to this day. But those who came back had to build new settlements and new lives; what their ancestors had built, beginning in 1604 (that's right -- the first French settlers arrived in Nova Scotia 16 years before the Mayflower glimpsed Plymouth Rock), was gone forever.

Although "le grand dérangement," as the Acadians called it, has been almost forgotten in American history, the people themselves are still known to us. Many of the surviving Acadians and their children made their way over the years to the French colony of Louisiana, where their name went through another mutation and they became the Cajuns. Transplanted 2,000 miles into a drastically different climate, the Louisiana Cajun culture seems strikingly similar to the maritime Acadian life described in Faragher's book: a tightly knit clan society based on fishing and agriculture, ample food and drink, and a boisterous tradition of storytelling and music.

"A Great and Noble Scheme" is an important book, one that should engender considerable debate and alter the contours of American history, albeit subtly. In it, Faragher argues that the long-overlooked Acadian episode deserves a special black mark in the history of Anglo-American settlement, both because it was the first example of an especially unsavory pattern and because the culture that was wiped out represented such a promising potential example of how Europeans and Native Americans might have coexisted, in peace and (quite literally) brotherhood.

Faragher is a leading and sometimes contentious scholar of Western history and the American frontier; his previous books include "The American West: A New Interpretive History" (as co-author) and a major biography of Daniel Boone. He does not mince words in describing the tragic history of Anglo-Native relations in North America, which is characterized, he writes, by episodes of "despicable brutality," a cycle of vicious white atrocities answered by violent Indian revenge and then by military reprisal.

But nothing about the way North American history unfolded was inevitable, he believes. Manifest destiny and the near-extermination of the Indians were not ordained by God. A different path, or many different paths, were always possible, and the tragic story of the Acadians illuminates one of them. John Mack Faragher spoke to Salon from his office in New Haven, Conn., where he heads the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale.

A lot of people will be wondering why we should care about something that, while very sad, happened 250 years ago to a relatively small number of people. I mean, in the last hundred years or so we have so many glamorous atrocities to choose from -- what makes the Acadians worth our attention?

First of all, let me take up that question of the number, because these numbers can be deceptive. Back in the 18th century, an operation to remove 18,000 people was about as big an operation as any state could have mounted. At that time, 18,000 people in one location would have been a reasonably large city. So the numbers question really has to be put into perspective.

But that's in addition to the reflection that this is really not about numbers. It's about policy. For me, the whole project was an experiment in the limits of "presentism." I got very interested in the Seven Years' War because so many of the issues it raises seem to engage the same dilemmas that have preoccupied the late 20th century. Post-colonial problems. The questions of settlements and settler societies; the response of native people, which at the time was characterized as terrorism. Military cum political operations, like the one against the Acadians, or even more dramatic ones, like the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets [among the Indians] by Lord Jeffrey Amherst, that might have genocidal implications.

All these are late 20th century concepts, of course, or at least 20th century concepts. So the project for me was to try to use those concepts and see what is revealed about historical actions 200 years ago, when they would not have recognized those concepts. It's not an exercise in classification nor, I hope, an exercise in trying to make moral judgments. Rather, if a historian uses these concepts to look back at this story, does it suggest something more than it would have otherwise?

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