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Great Upheaval
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The Great Upheaval, also known as the Great Expulsion, The Deportation, the Acadian Expulsion, or to the deportees, Le Grand Dérangement, was the forced population transfer of the Acadian population from Nova Scotia between 1755 and 1763, ordered by British governor Charles Lawrence and the Nova Scotia Council.
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Encyclopedia
The Great Upheaval, also known as the Great Expulsion, The Deportation, the Acadian Expulsion, or to the deportees, Le Grand Dérangement, was the forced population transfer of the Acadian population from Nova Scotia between 1755 and 1763, ordered by British governor Charles Lawrence and the Nova Scotia Council. The policy was extremely controversial, and was attacked in London by opponents of the British government.
History
The Acadian deportation occurred at the culmination of tensions between the French and the English that had existed in Acadia since the territory was ceded to the British by the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. The British, nervous about the loyalties of the French-speaking inhabitants of the newly created colony of Nova Scotia, demanded that the Acadians swear an oath of loyalty to the British. The Acadians offered to swear their neutrality. In 1730, the British agreed and the Acadians became the "neutral French." In 1749, Governor Cornwallis again asked the Acadians to take the oath. Although unsuccessful, he took no drastic action, and the following governor, Peregrine Hopson, continued the policy of appeasement that was in place for the Acadians. When Charles Lawrence took over the post following Hopson’s return to England, he took a stronger stance. When fighting between the French and the English broke out in the Ohio river valley in 1754, signalling the beginning the French and Indian War, the increased tensions led Charles Lawrence to the conclusion that he must apply more pressure on the Acadians to accept the oath in British terms. Following the discovery of 300 Acadians at the French Fort Beauséjour when the English captured it in 1755, Charles Lawrence made one last attempt to convince the Acadians to accept the oath. They again refused to accept Lawrence’s terms, and the Lieutenant Governor decided that the Acadians were to be deported to various locations throughout the thirteen British North American colonies, France, Louisiana, and Britain.
Their Mi'kmaq hosts, who never agreed to cede any of their land, were not so lucky as to be deported (except for some of mixed French descent, who were deported to Massachusetts as indentured servants). Instead, to dispossess them of their homeland, successive British governors issued proclamations offering bounties to bloodthirsty colonial rangers, for hunting, killing, and scalping Mi'kmaqs. Such proclamations were issued by Governors Paul Mascarene (and William Shirley of Massachusetts Bay) in 1744, by Edward Cornwallis in 1749, and by Charles Lawrence in 1756. By the time a lasting peace was concluded between the Mi'kmaq and British in 1761, the Mi'kmaq had been greatly reduced in numbers and most of their territory had been seized by the wave of British immigration that began in 1749. The Mi'kmaq who managed to elude the British provided crucial support to many refugee Acadians, who were their relatives, even though the British colonial authorities had made laws forbidding Acadians and Mi'kmaqs to speak to one another soon after they began to claim them as their subjects in 1713.
Charles Lawrence's expulsion orders
After the expulsion
Not all Acadians were deported by the British. A large number of Acadians fled overland, aided by their Mi'kmaq allies, and resettled in the colonies of New France, present-day Québec and New Brunswick. There was also a small guerilla resistance led by Joseph Broussard dit "Beausoleil". Others returned and settled in the region of Fort Sainte-Anne, now Fredericton, and were displaced again by the arrival of the Loyalists. In 1785 they created the first colony in the Upper Saint John River valley, near what is now Edmundston.
Over the next several decades, many Acadians moved down the North American east coast, landing temporarily in New England, the Carolinas and other ports, with a large number eventually settling in Louisiana, then controlled by Spain. Spanish authorities welcomed the Catholic Acadians as settlers, first in areas along the Mississippi River, then later in the Atchafalaya Basin and in the prairie lands to the west, a region later renamed Acadiana. During the 19th century, as Acadians reestablished their culture, "Acadian" was elided locally into "Cajun."
The homes and farms around the Bay of Fundy were burned or given to English-speaking Protestant colonists. For example, on 4 June 1760 New England planters arrived to claim land in Nova Scotia taken from the Acadians. However the significant repopulation in Nova Scotia came from the Highland Scots emigrating as a result of the Highland Clearances beginning in the late 18th century. In time some of the Acadian population returned, and today there remain islands of largely French-speaking towns such as Chéticamp intermingled with the Scots.
The following table lists the destinations to which Acadians were deported, together with estimates of how many arrived at each port:
Table source: R.A. LEBLANC. Les migrations acadiennes, in Cahiers de géographie du Québec, vol. 23, no 58, April 1979, p. 99-124.
Acadians in Literature and Culture
American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a long, narrative poem about the plight of the Acadians called Evangeline in 1847. The Evangeline Oak is a tourist attraction in Louisiana.
The song "Acadian Driftwood", recorded in 1975 by The Band, portrays the Great Upheaval and the displacement of the Acadian people.
Modern recognition
Grand-Pré Park, situated in present-day Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, is now a National Historic Site of Canada and has been preserved as a living monument to the Expulsion, complete with a memorial church and a statue of Evangeline, the subject of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's stirring poem on the experience entitled Evangeline.
In December 2003, Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, representing Canada's Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, declared the Crown's acknowledgement of (but did not apologise for) the Expulsion, and designated July 28 as "A Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval." This proclamation, often referred to as the Royal Proclamation of 2003, closed one of the longest open cases in the history of the British courts, initiated when the Acadian representatives first presented their grievances of forced dispossession of land, property and livestock in 1760.
In English
- Faragher, John Mack (2005). A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland, New York: W.W. Norton, 562 pages ISBN 0-393-05135-8 ()
- Jobb, Dean (2005). The Acadians: A people's story of exile and triumph, Mississauga (Ont.): John Wiley & Sons Canada, 296 p. ISBN 0-470-83610-5
- Moody, Barry (1981). The Acadians, Toronto: Grolier. 96 pages ISBN 0717218104
- Rosemary Neering, Stan Garrod (1976). Life in Acadia, Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside. ISBN 0889021805
- Belliveau, Pierre (1972). French neutrals in Massachusetts; the story of Acadians rounded up by soldiers from Massachusetts and their captivity in the Bay Province, 1755-1766, Boston : Kirk S. Giffen, 259 p.
- Griffiths, N.E.S. (1969). The Acadian deportation: deliberate perfidy or cruel necessity?, Toronto: Copp Clark Pub. Co., 165 p.
- Doughty, Arthur G. (1916). The Acadian Exiles. A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline, Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. 178 pages ()
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- Text of Charles Lawrence's orders to Captain John Handfield
In French
- LeBlanc, Ronnie-Gilles, ed. (2005). Du Grand dérangement à la Déportation : nouvelles perspectives historiques, Moncton: Chaire d'études acadiennes, Université de Moncton, 465 p.
- Arsenault, Bona and Pascal Alain (2004). Histoire des Acadiens, Saint-Laurent, Québec: Éditions Fides, 502 p.
- Sauvageau, Robert (1987). Acadie : La guerre de Cent Ans des français d'Amérique aux Maritimes et en Louisiane 1670-1769 Paris: Berger-Levrault
- Gaudet, Placide (1922). Le Grand Dérangement : sur qui retombe la responsabilité de l'expulsion des Acadiens, Ottawa: Impr. de l'Ottawa Printing Co.
- d'Arles, Henri (1918). La déportation des Acadiens, Québec: Imprimerie de l'Action sociale
External links
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- on a memorial to the Acadians in Georgia
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