GEN. JOHN WINSLOW.
After an original formerly in the gallery of the Mass. Hist. Soc., but now in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth. Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xx. 192, and Mem. Hist. Boston, ii. 123. The sword of General Winslow, shown in the cut (Vol. III. p. 274), has also been transferred to Plymouth, as well as the portraits of Governor Edward and Governor Josiah Winslow. (Ibid., pp. 277, 282.) Other engravings of General Winslow are given in Raikes’ Hon. Artillery Co. of London (1878), i. p. 348, and in Gay’s Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. 276.
Writers of the compassionate school have naturally sought to heighten the enormity of the measure by pictures of the guilelessness of the people, who were the sufferers. It was not long after the event when the Abbé Raynal played upon such sympathetic responses in his description[983] of the Acadians, setting forth an ideal simplicity and content to which Longfellow in his Evangeline has added the unbounded charms of his verse. That the Acadians were a prolific people might argue content, but Hannay (Acadia, ch. xvi.), who best traces their mutations and growth, shows evidences that this fruitfulness had not been without some admixture, at least, with the Micmacs.[984] Though it is the usual assertion that bastardy was almost unknown among them, Hannay adduces testimony to their licentiousness which he deems sufficient.[985] We may pick out the most opposite views regarding the comforts of their daily life. A French authority describes their houses as “wretched wooden boxes, without ornament or convenience;”[986] but George Bancroft[987] and many others tell us, after the Raynal ideal, that these same houses were “neatly constructed and comfortably furnished.”
A simple people usually find it easy to vary the monotony of their existence by bickerings and litigations; and if we may believe the French authorities whom Hannay quotes, the Acadians were no exception to the rule, which makes up for the absence of excitements in a diversified life by a counterbalance of such evils as mix and obscure the affections of society.
Their religious training prompted them to place their priests in the same scale of infallibility with their Maker, while the machinations of Le Loutre[988] ensnared them and became, quite as much as that “scrupulous sense of the indissoluble nature of their ancient obligation to their king,”[989] a great cause of their misfortunes. To glimpses of the character of the Acadians which we get in the published documents, French and English, of their own day, we can add but few estimates of observers who were certainly writing for the eye of the public. There is a rather whimsical, but, as Parkman thinks, a faithful description of them, earlier in the century, to be found in the Relation of Diéreville.
Let us now observe some of the mutations of opinion to which allusion has been made. Gov. Lawrence, in his circular letter to the other colonies, naturally set forth the necessity of the case in justification. Edmund Burke, not long after, judged the act a most inhumane one, and “we did,” he says, “upon pretences not worth a farthing, root out this poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern or to reconcile gave us no sort of right to extirpate.” But this was in the guise of a running commentary from a party point of view, and in ignorance of much now known. The French, English, and American historians nearest the event take divergent positions. Raynal started the poetic ideal, to which reference has been made. It must not be forgotten, however, that the Abbé had a purpose in his picture, aiming as he did to set off by a foil the condition of the French peasantry at a period preceding the French Revolution.[990] Entick[991] commends the measure, but not the method of its execution. A pamphlet published in London in 1765, setting forth the sacrifices of the province during the French and Indian wars, referring to the deportation, says: “This was a most wise step,” but the exiles “have been and still remain a heavy bill of charge to this province.”[992] Hutchinson[993] simply allows that the authors of the movement supposed that self-preservation was its sufficient excuse. When Minot[994] surveyed the subject, he was quite as chary of an opinion. He probably felt, as indeed was the case, that no one at that time had access to the documents on which a safe judgment could be based. The first distinct defence of the English came when Raynal’s views were printed, in translation, in Nova Scotia in 1791. Secretary Bulkely and Judge Deschamps now published a vindication of the English government, but it was necessarily inadequate in the absence of proof. It served not much purpose, however, in diverting the general opinion from the channels of compassion. In 1787, the Rev. Andrew Brown, a Scotchman, was called to settle over a church in Halifax. He remained till 1795, when he returned to Scotland, where he lived till 1834, a part of the time occupying the chair of rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh, which had been previously filled by Dr. Blair. During his sojourn in Nova Scotia, and down to so late a period as 1815, he collected materials for a history of the province. His papers, including original documents, were discovered serving ignoble purposes in a grocer’s shop in Scotland, and bought for the collections of the British Museum. Transcripts from the most interesting of them relating to the expulsion of the Acadians have been made at the instance of the Nova Scotia Record Commission, and have been printed in the second volume of the Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society. They consist of letters and statements from people whom Brown had known, and who had taken part in the expulsion, with other contemporary papers regarding the condition of the Acadians just previous to their removal. Brown’s own opinion of the act classed it, for atrocity, with the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Robert Walsh, in his Appeal from the Judgment of Great Britain (2d ed. 1819, p. 86), says: “It has always appeared to me that the reason of state was never more cheaply urged or more odiously triumphant than on this occasion.” He follows Minot in his account.
Judge Thomas C. Haliburton approached the subject when he might have known, among the very old people of the province, some whose earliest recollections went back to the event, or to its train of succeeding incidents. Haliburton’s sympathy is unmistakably aroused, and failing to find in the records of the secretary’s office at Halifax any traces of the deportation, his deduction is that the particulars were carefully concealed. For such an act he finds no reason, save that the parties were, “as in truth they well might be,” ashamed of the transaction. “I have therefore,” he adds, “had much difficulty in ascertaining the facts.” He seems to have depended almost wholly upon Hutchinson, Raynal, and Minot, and through the latter he got track of the journal of Winslow. Haliburton’s Nova Scotia was published in 1829,[995] and Hutchinson’s third volume had only the year before (1828) been printed in England from his manuscript. Of Winslow’s journal he seems to have made but restricted use.[996] Haliburton’s allegations in respect to the archives of Halifax were founded on a misconception. The papers which he sought in vain in fact existed, but were stored away in boxes, and the archive-keepers of Haliburton’s day apparently had little idea of their importance. A recent writer (Smith’s Acadia, p. 164) hastily infers that this careless disposition of them was intentional. Parkman says that copies of the council records were sent at the time to England and are now in the Public Record Office; but it does not appear that Haliburton sought them; and had he done so, if we may judge from the printed copy which we now have of them, he would have discovered no essential help between July, 1755, and January, 1756. It was not till 1857 that the legislative assembly of Nova Scotia initiated a movement for completing and arranging the archives at Halifax, and for securing in addition copies of documents at London and Quebec,—the latter being in fact other copies from papers in the archives at Paris.
Between 1857 and 1864, Thomas B. Akins, Esq., acting as record commissioner of the province, bound and arranged, as appears by his Report of Feb. 24, 1864, and deposited in the legislative library of the province, over 200 volumes of historical papers. The most important of these volumes for other than the local historian, and covering the period of the present volume appear to be the following:—