What judgment may fairly be passed upon this measure of expulsion? The traditional view has been that the removal of the Acadians from Acadia was an injustice and a crime—an arbitrary and cruel act, parallel on a smaller scale to the earlier expulsion of the Huguenots from France. According to this view the English were oppressors, rooting out and carrying captive a harmless and innocent peasantry—
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth but reflecting an image of heaven.
Longfellow has given us this picture in Evangeline, and it has been drawn in similar outlines by various hands. In the foreground are bands of terror-stricken peasants, driven on board ship amid mourning and lamentation. In the background are burning homesteads, emptiness where there had been plenty, desolation where yesterday the children played.
A different view is given by later writers who have more closely tested the facts. Their conclusion is that the expulsion of the Acadians, stern and even cruel as it was, was more or less a political necessity; that the Acadians themselves were sinners as well as sinned against; and that they were sinned against more by men of their own race and religion than by the English.
This latter view is probably nearer the truth. There is always, especially in England, a tendency to sympathize unreasonably with the weak against the strong, and, when severe measures are taken, to condemn those measures almost unheard. The Acadians, in their primitive agricultural life, in their farms gathered round the village church, were picturesque objects of sympathy; and, whenever a fine or a punishment is inflicted on a whole district or on a whole community, the innocent no doubt suffer with the guilty. But there are conditions under which no lasting effect can be produced without collective dealing, and the Acadians were not transported beyond the sea until for many years half-measures had been tried, and tried in vain. These farmers had been gently treated under English rule; many of them had been born and brought up under it; a large proportion of their number had requited the treatment by actively abetting or tacitly conniving at the unceasing petty warfare, by which French borderers and Indian savages year after year took English lives and pillaged English homes. Was it unreasonable that, if they would not be loyal subjects in Acadia, they should be moved elsewhere, and that, instead of being sent to increase the hostile population of Canada, they should be dispersed among the British colonies on the North American coast?
It must be remembered that the tale of their sufferings has probably not been minimized. French writers would naturally exaggerate what actually occurred, and American accounts, until recent years, would not be likely to be unduly friendly to England. It must be remembered, too, that half as many as were transported by the English had already been induced or forced by the French to emigrate to their possessions; and we have it on French evidence that those who, when the sentence of expatriation was passed, took refuge in Canada, suffered as much as or more than their compatriots suffered in the English colonies.
| True causes of the catastrophe. |
It is difficult to blame Colonel Lawrence for the step which he took under the conditions of the time and place. On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that the Acadians fully deserved their doom. The responsibility for the wholesale misery, in which a small community was involved, must be shared between the French Government and its agents on the one hand, notably the priests, and on the other the British Government in earlier years. Had the French been loyal to the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, had they ceased to instil the spirit of disaffection into the minds of men who were no longer their subjects, had they discountenanced instead of encouraging acts of barbarity, had they not made religion a cloak for maliciousness, and used the ministers of religion as political agitators of the worst and most unscrupulous type, Acadia and the Acadians would have prospered under the British Government as Canada and the Canadians prospered in after years. Again if, when Acadia was ceded by the treaty, Great Britain had recognized her responsibilities, had given adequate protection and enforced the law, loyalty and obedience would have brought happiness in its train, and a generation would have grown up not attempting the impossible task of serving two masters. The true verdict of history on the melancholy episode is this. The misery which befell the Acadians was the result of not using force at the right time, and of the evil potency of priestcraft.
| French forts established on the route from the great lakes to the Ohio. |
Before Acadia had been depopulated, much had happened in the west. Always unready, the English colonies let slip the opportunity of occupying the upper valley of the Ohio, and the French seized the opening which their rivals might have closed. Early in 1753, the Canadian Governor, Duquesne, sent a force of considerable strength under an old and tried officer, Marin, to establish communication between the great lakes and the Ohio, and to hold the route by a chain of forts. Launched upon Lake Erie, Marin and his men held their way past the point where Celeron had landed; and, instead of taking the portage to Chautauqua, disembarked further along the southern shore of the lake at Presque Île, where the town of Erie now stands. Here a fort was built, and a road cut southwards through the woods for about 21 miles to the Rivière aux Boeufs. This stream, now known as French Creek, flows into the Alleghany river, and is navigable for canoes when the water is high. Where the road struck the river a second fort was built, called Fort Le Boeuf. Thus the way was cleared from the lakes to the sources of the Ohio, and either end of the portage was guarded by a blockhouse.