Royal instructions to the governors, 1720-1841.
Royal proclamations, 1748-1807.
Orders of the Privy Council, 1753-1827.
Indians, 1751-1848.
But before this arranging of the Halifax Archives was undertaken, Bancroft in his United States[998] had used language which he has allowed to stand during successive revisions: “I know not if the annals of the human race keep the records of sorrows so wantonly inflicted, so bitter and so perennial, as fell upon the French inhabitants of Acadia.” About the same time the Canadian historian, Garneau,[999] simply quotes the effusions of Raynal. The publication of the Neutral French, by Catharine R. Williams, in 1841, a story in which the writer’s interest in the sad tale had grown with her study of the subject on the spot,[1000] followed by the Evangeline of Longfellow in 1847, which readily compelled attention, drew many eyes upon the records which had been the basis of these works of fiction. The most significant judgment, in consequence, made in America was that of the late President Felton, of Harvard University, in the North American Review (Jan., 1848, p. 231), wherein he called the deportation “a most tyrannical exercise of superior force, resting for its justification not upon sufficient proofs, but upon an alleged inevitable state necessity.” This gave direction to current belief.[1001] Barry (Massachusetts, ii. 200) wrote as if Raynal had compassed the truth. Chambers’ Journal (xxii. 342, or Living Age, xliv. 51) called an article on the subject “The American Glencoe.” In 1862, Mr. Robert Grant Haliburton, a son of Judge Haliburton, gave token of a new conception in the outline of a defence for the British government, which he drew in an address, The Past and the Future of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1862). A more thorough exposition was at hand. Mr. Akins had been empowered to prepare for publication a selection of the more important papers among those which he had been arranging. In 1869 a volume of Selections, etc., appeared. In his preface Mr. Akins says: “Although much has been written on the subject, yet until lately it has undergone little actual investigation, and in consequence the necessity for their removal has not been clearly perceived, and the motives which led to its enforcement have been often misunderstood.” The views which he enforces are in accord with this remark. Mr. W. J. Anderson followed up this judgment in the Transactions[1002] of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, and termed the act “a dreadful necessity.” The old view still lingered. It was enforced by Célestin Moreau in his Histoire de l’Acadie Françoise de 1598 à 1755 (Paris, 1873), and Palfrey, in the Compendious Hist. of New England (1873), which carried on the story of his larger volumes, leaves his adhesion to a view adverse to the English to be inferred. As to the character of the Acadians, while he allows for “a dash of poetry” in the language of Raynal, he mainly adopts it.[1003]
In 1879 Mr. James Hannay, perceiving the necessity of a well-ordered history, to embody in more readable shape the vast amount of material which Beamish Murdoch in his History of Nova Scotia[1004] had thrown into the form of annals, published his History of Acadia from its first discovery to its surrender to England by the Treaty of Paris (St. John, N. B., 1879). Hannay embodied in this book the most elaborate account which had yet been written of the deportation, and referring to it in his preface he says: “Very few people who follow the story to the end will be prepared to say that it was not a necessary measure of self-preservation on the part of the English authorities in Nova Scotia.”
Still the old sympathies were powerful. Henry Cabot Lodge in his Short History of the English Colonies[1005] (1881) finds the Acadians “harmless.” Hannay’s investigations were not lost, however, on Dr. George E. Ellis, who in his Red Man and White Man in North America (Boston, 1882) prefigured the results which two years later were to be adduced by Parkman.
Meanwhile, Mr. Philip H. Smith published at Pawling, N. Y., a book, doubly his own, for he inserted in it rude wood-cuts of his own graving. The book, which was coarsely printed on an old Liberty job press, was called Acadia, a lost chapter in American history,—why lost is not apparent, in view of the extensive literature of the subject. He refers vaguely to fifty authorities, but without giving us the means to track him among them, as he in an uncompromising way condemns the course of the British government. He is found, however, to draw largely from Judge Haliburton, and to adopt that writer’s assertion of the loss or abstraction of records. A few months later Mr. Parkman published the first volume of his Montcalm and Wolfe, using some material, particularly from the French Archives, which his predecessors had not possessed.[1006] In referring to the deportation, he says that its causes have not been understood[1007] by those who follow or abet the popular belief. Though he does not suggest any alternative action, he sets forth abundantly the reasons which palliate and explain a measure “too harsh and indiscriminate to be wholly justified.”[1008]
